The Collective Protocol

by Brian Parker

  “Hit,” Thom stated simply as he continued to look through his strange device.

  Joe tapped a lever on the rifle and the cable stopped feeding through the weapon. He wrapped the wire around a geared wheel and manually cranked backwards on the handle. Paige saw the slack pull out of the line until it stretched across the way at a slight downward angle. Joe grunted as he cranked hard, one more time, to remove every last bit of slack from the line and Scott inserted several metal pins into the side of the gear, locking it in place.

  “We’re as tight as we can get, Greg,” Joe grunted to his commander.

  “Ryan, get us inside.”

  The agent snapped his belt onto the cable with two heavy snap links and swung out over the edge. Reagan watched in terror as he pulled himself hand-over-hand towards the far building. She expected the thin cable to snap and send him plummeting to his death in the traffic underneath them.

  To her surprise he made it all the way across and splayed against the glass like a spider. She couldn’t tell what he was doing, but she saw the next pane of glass over from where he held on fall gently inside the building. He disappeared inside and reappeared thirty seconds later.

  “Clear,” Ryan’s voice over the in-ear transmitter that she’d been given startled her. “Beginning the cable switch, give me some slack.”

  Joe and Scott worked in tandem to loosen the gear and Scott fed the cable through his gloved hands into the weapon as slack appeared in the line. Reagan looked back across to where Ryan had somehow separated the cable from the window and stretched it inside the opening that he’d created.

  When he returned to the window and waved, Joe once again cranked on the gear to remove the slack. It was obvious that the agents had rehearsed this type of entry until it became mechanical to them. The way they moved and worked together as a team was amazing to watch and Reagan knew that most people would never get to see anything like it in their entire lives.

  “Set,” Joe stated and picked himself up off the ground.

  “Go,” Greg ordered as Scott hooked himself up and slid across.

  “Juan and Janice, you’re next,” Greg said when Scott confirmed that he was across. “Help the guys over there establish security and then I’ll send Reagan over.”

  Reagan knew that the FBI agents weren’t experts at this sort of stuff either and she took comfort in the fact that they both found the courage to snap themselves in and slide across the wire. Finally, it was her turn.

  “Reagan, let’s go,” Greg said.

  She walked stiffly towards the end of the pneumatic rifle and Greg grabbed both of her snap links. He pulled her closer to the wire with them and snapped her in. “The hardest part is getting over the ledge of the building here; after that, gravity will take care of the rest.” His face softened and for a second, she thought she saw a smile peek through his beard. “You can do this. I have faith in you,” he said in a rare moment of compassion.

  She nodded and slid along the cable until her hip hit the building’s ledge, and then she peered down at the traffic below. Cars whizzed by intermittently on the street at about 40 miles per hour. If she survived the fall, but got hit by a car, she’d be done for anyways. What if the glue gives out? It obviously wasn’t permanent. How had Ryan so easily removed it from the glass and reattached it inside?

  Something inside her hardened. These men and Janice were here because of her. They were here to support her so she could stop her sister. Paige had orchestrated the death of millions of people and there was no telling how badly things had gotten since the war with the police under her control had been raging all day.

  She let her mind drift for a moment and she once again saw the hotel where her mother and sister were staying. She traveled directly to them through the multiple floors and saw them there, still huddled in the darkness together. The sounds of gunfire echoed through the windows as the citizens who’d found weapons fought desperately against the police officers.

  Her mind snapped back to the here and now. Her family needed her; these men needed her. Who was she to put her personal fears in front of the lives of millions? Reagan swung one leg over, then the other. And then she fell.

  At least that’s what it felt like to her. The cable was at a perfect angle to slide her slowly across the expanse towards the Collective Protocol’s building. The wind blew strongly between the two structures as it followed the street below, but it wasn’t enough to concern her.

  She felt hands grasp her arms and haul her inside the window. Reagan knew that there was no stopping this mission now that she was inside.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Paige eased down into the seat of the Neuroactuator and Lillian strapped all the wires to her. The prime minister was extremely satisfied with the progress of Phase Five and wanted to move quickly into Phase Six while the American people were still reeling from the police attacks.

  She’d argued against trying to run both operations at the same time, but she was quickly beginning to see that she was only a tool to the Protocol. In the beginning, she’d thought that she and Gavin ran the Protocol, but as time wore on and her objections were continually overruled by Patel, she realized that they were no longer in charge.

  Paige had been against the mass suicide phase since the beginning. In fact, she’d been able to justify to herself that she wasn’t personally responsible for killing anyone besides her birth mother. However, things had changed drastically since those early days. The memory of what she did to the cult members in New York jumped to the forefront of her thoughts. She didn’t’ regret her actions there; she’d actually enjoyed performing those grisly acts of murder and dismemberment.

  Brigadier Patel told her that the PM insisted that the random mass suicides were the way to finally bring the nation to their knees, so she did as she was ordered. She hated the Americans and wanted to see their government collapse, but she wondered if it wouldn’t have better served the Canadian cause to wipe out the men and women who were actually a part of that government instead of innocent women and children in towns far removed from the politics that their leaders endorsed.

  “Where should I go?” Paige asked the small audience on the balcony. Both Gavin Dartmouth and Mark Patel were here to witness the beginning of what they considered to be the straw that would break the camel’s back.

  “Somewhere in South Carolina,” Patel stated. “We lost an amplifier there, so we don’t know if the police have received your message to attack the civilian population.”

  “That’s fine,” she said and closed her eyes. As her aura drifted from her body she felt that something was wrong. She couldn’t quite place it, but there was something out of the ordinary and that was not a good thing in a facility that was exactly the same every day.

  She paused in her ascent towards the heavens and refocused on the building. It was something about the building. There was—“Paige, what are you doing? I can see you staring at the building,” Patel’s voice shattered her concentration.

  “Sorry. I was just looking at something,” she replied.

  “Well, hurry up. The prime minister wants a report of what happens in the first town.”

  “Yes… sir.” It was beginning to feel like a noose was around her neck to do his bidding. She suppressed the image of Patel strangling her while she lay in the Neuroactuator and sped skyward. When her aura was ten miles from the surface of the earth, she shot eastward over the United States.

  The superimposed state and local boundaries helped her identify the state and then she randomly selected a small town in the middle nowhere. Johnsonville, South Carolina is about forty miles from the resort town of Myrtle Beach and looked sufficiently isolated that Paige believed she’d be able to snare the entire population.

  As she began to descend upon the town, Patel’s voice once again interrupted her thoughts. “Good choice. It’s close enough to a few big towns for the news to get out, but far enough away that people will believe every rumor that they don’t witness for t
hemselves.”

  Paige seethed inwardly. Exactly how much did the Neuroactuator allow the others to see? This was her world. She was the manipulator of minds. How dare they invade her sanctuary? Was it time to end this relationship with the Protocol and set out on her own to destroy America? She could easily do it; she’d just have to travel from place to place since her reach wouldn’t be as great. She grinned beneath the machine’s headband as she thought of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the bible. Call me Pestilence.

  Brigadier Patel mistook her facial expression and said, “That’s right, Paige. You selected an excellent first target and we’re ready to destroy this town!” The general looked across the lab’s floor at the assembled technicians and a few guards. “The Americans will begin to turn on one another soon enough, even without our help. This begins the final stage of the end of the United States!”

  A small cheer erupted from everyone and then they went back to their duties. Paige chose to ignore his comment and slowly let the air out of her lungs to relax herself. She’d allowed herself to get too worked up over the fact that her every move was displayed for view and recorded by the Neuroactuator. As she relaxed, she could see and feel her aura expanding like a giant blanket over the town of Johnsonville.

  She slowly entered the minds of the 1,500 residents of the small town and told them to go to the high school gymnasium. She’d surveyed the area from afar and the gym was likely the only place that could hold all of them. The people began their walk towards the school. It didn’t matter that there was currently a light drizzle, they wouldn’t feel it.

  Her presence roved over the town until she found the two places that she needed. She had the owner of the auto parts store turn around and go back inside where she assigned him the task of methodically taking the jugs of antifreeze to his car. As she surveyed the shelf it was clear that there wouldn’t be enough to go around, but she had a couple of employees at the grocery store performing directed tasks as well.

  The Johnsonville Piggly Wiggly would have the remaining supplies that she needed. The two store employees that she held back stood by the registers staring blankly towards the interior of the store. Paige prodded them into action. Each of them got a grocery cart and followed each other until he turned down the household cleaner’s aisle and she continued for another few feet until she came to the aisle with the pest control products.

  Within minutes, the boy’s cart was full of bleach and she had all the rat poison pellets that the store had on the shelf. The antifreeze, bleach and poison should make for an extremely deadly cocktail that could be handed out at the high school for everyone to drink. It would likely be a painful death, but she could disengage her presence once the effects took hold, there’d be no saving them at that point.

  Paige sent the two grocery store employees towards the parking lot, but when they got there she discovered that neither of them had a car; they’d been dropped off for work by their parents. She cursed at her choice and briefly considered having them walk the mile to the high school, but discarded the idea. She angrily searched the mass of people moving north from the store for someone who had a car at the Piggly Wiggly. Finally, she found someone and she turned them back towards the grocery store.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Most of the team moved slowly down the stairwell from the 6th floor towards the basement. The team expected no less than thirty-one personnel inside the building on the floors below them. It broke down to the six employees that they believed were the facility support staff who lived inside the building, the twenty-two guards and Paige, the general and the commissioner. Leclerc had not been seen arriving, so it was assumed that he wasn’t on site.

  They’d split up and sent Ryan to conduct site exploitation on Paige’s 24th floor apartment. He was to get video of everything and hack into all electronics and make copies of every file. The evidence would be analyzed later. After he collected everything, he would be responsible for rescuing the hostage. The rest of the team had the mission to clear the building and stop Paige. From here on out, deadly force was the only means authorized.

  Reagan hung back and used her powers to try and conceal the team’s presence. Greg had asked her to do it, but she really didn’t know what she was doing or if it even worked. In her mind, she tried to shroud the team in shadows and dampen the sound of their feet on the stairwell while attempting to project the feeling of calm across a wide area in front of the group. She’d never tried to use her newfound powers for anything other than defending herself—and she didn’t even know how she’d done that. But if it made the team feel more confident in the success of their mission, then she’d keep trying to use the powers.

  Greg led the way and from a full flight away she heard the rush of compressed air as two rounds rapidly exited the operator’s suppressed rifle. “Got two of the guards. They were coming up the stairs on their roving patrol,” he stated over the radio.

  She checked off a mental tally sheet. Twenty-nine remaining. The fact that she counted down the number of people that she helped to kill made her sad. Was this what she was becoming? Was she doomed to become someone comfortable with death and mayhem? She hoped not.

  When she stepped onto the landing, where Greg had been when he shot the guards, she nearly had a panic attack and dropped the team’s concealment. The men had both been expertly shot in the head. Their features were indistinguishable as the rounds had smashed their faces into a twisted mockery of what they’d once looked like and their blood and brain matter ran in thick lines down the wall where the force of the blasts had deposited it.

  Reagan couldn’t help herself as she turned and vomited into the corner. The sounds of her retching echoed throughout the stairwell. ”Get it together! We need your help to keep us hidden,” Greg hissed over the team’s earpieces.

  She wiped the spittle from her chin and rubbed the tears from her face. She tried to project the calm feeling once again, but her eyes continued to drift towards the bodies. Two minutes ago, those men had been walking around, probably joking with each other over some shared incident and now they were twitching hunks of flesh. All of their hopes and dreams for the future were ended instantly. They didn’t even have a chance to realize what had happened to them.

  It was almost too much for her to bear, but what did she expect? She was on a mission to wipe out the Collective Protocol and kill her sister. Death was a necessary part of the mission and she needed to accept it. So much for becoming comfortable with death, she thought.

  Scott and Joe cleared the 4th floor. It was just as empty as the ones above. Everyone wished that the Canadians weren’t so congested in one area. It would have been simpler to take them out two or three at a time, but they expected upwards of twenty to be in the cafeteria on the next floor down.

  Greg sent Janice and Dave to the landing below the cafeteria to keep the stairwell secure while the four CIA men stacked outside the door and Juan prepared to enter behind them. “We need that concealment,” Greg whispered to Reagan. She nodded and concentrated on her efforts to hide everyone as they entered the room.

  They burst through the door and began shooting immediately. Their cold precision unnerved Reagan. She’d never be like these men; they were the ones who were cold and calculating. They were the real gods of war.

  Before every person in the cafeteria was killed, the guards began to blindly return fire towards the doorway where it seemed the incoming rounds were coming from. They sprayed the wall with automatic weapons’ fire.

  From her position in the stairwell Reagan sensed the death of one of her teammates. She ran screaming into the room without thinking. When she did so, the concealment that she’d provided for her group fell away and they were revealed to the remaining Protocol personnel. All fire directed towards the screeching woman who entered the room.

  Reagan wasn’t sure which member of the team was dead. It was the sudden absence of their presence that she detected and she reacted foolishly. She stood silhouetted in the doo
rway and wailed her sorrow at the loss. Once again, the sound waves traveled outward from her lungs and time slowed to a crawl.

  The wall of bullets that traveled towards her hit the ripples created by her powers and deflected sideways. She “saw” them impact against the floors, ceiling and walls ineffectively. The waves continued forward into the men firing at her teammates.

  The raw power and emotions that Reagan channeled inadvertently into her attack shredded everything before her. The incremental increases that had occurred the last time she used her power was nonexistent. It hit the tables and chairs, the dead and the living and then continued through them and shattered the kitchen. The building shuddered as the force of her powers hit the central support structure and fires erupted from the gas lines in the kitchen.

  “Reagan, you’ve got to stop!” Juan yelled from beside her.

  She slowly reined in her power and the world around her returned to focus. Alarm blared and emergency strobe lighting cast ghostly lights and shadows across everything in sight. The power fluttered on and off; she must have severed a main power line that was still close enough to spark electricity. Reagan surveyed the damage that she’d wrought upon the building and the inhabitants. It was as if a massive steamroller had swept through the room and crushed everything before it. Body fluids and pieces of the defenders covered every surface towards the center of the building. Across the far side of the floor, the windows were shattered and had fallen away towards the ground below.

  She turned towards her team and saw Greg and Scott working frantically to save Thom. He’d taken several rounds to the chest. Reagan already knew that the team’s intelligence specialist was dead. She’d felt him die from the stairwell.

  “He’s dead,” she muttered to her teammates.