by Dana Fraser
Turning on one heel, Hannah started toward the door. She needed to return to her lab. A shower and a change of clothes would have to wait a while longer.
“I’m leaving,” Emily announced. “I don’t care if they fire me.”
“Okay,” Hannah responded without looking back. It was too late to start a dialogue. Whatever Emily’s problems were, she would just have to talk it out with someone else.
Entering the big, empty hall, Hannah started toward her lab. The building was concrete and glass. Her corner lab faced both east and west and, except for a few feet at the corner, was all floor to ceiling windows.
The view was enviable. When she wasn’t staring at her computer or buttering organometallic compounds onto thin, flexible film to form a solar module, she could look out onto the mighty Mississippi River from one window and the lights of St. Louis from the other.
Entering her lab, she frowned as she reached for the light switch. Her finger flipped the switch before her brain could stop it and bright light flooded the room.
She slapped at the switch again, plunging everything into near darkness except the blue and green glow of connected power cords. By their light, she navigated her way to the corner and stared at the southeastern sky.
It was past midnight and she couldn’t see a single light beyond the research compound. St. Louis and its suburbs, a population of over two million people, were invisible.
Pivoting and standing on tiptoe, she was able to see a sliver of the facility’s parking lot. In a row with thirty spaces, twenty-seven spots were empty. Her Aegean blue Honda CR-Z was one of the three cars present.
She shook her head. That was not right. This time of year, even at so late an hour, the row should have been ninety percent filled, not ninety percent empty.
Her hand patted absently at the pocket of her lab coat. The gesture was pointless. Smartphones weren’t allowed in the building and she kept forgetting to buy some low-tech cell phone that she could get past security.
Reaching her desk, she picked up the landline and tried to dial out.
Nothing.
She flipped the desk lamp on and dialed again. Getting the same dead silence, she hit the call button for the front desk security officer.
Philip had been on when she’d entered the building two-point-three days before. That was Thursday. It was now Sunday and the weekend night shift was on.
“Front Desk,” an unfamiliar male answered. “How may I help you?”
“This is Dr. Carter, lab 2D,” she answered. “I can’t get an outside line.”
The man chuckled. She’d heard his kind of laugh before. Lots of scientists had heard his kind of laugh. He probably liked to joke that eggheads like Hannah could make a car run on sunlight, but couldn’t change their own tire or tie their own shoes.
“When was the last time you looked out a window, Dr. Carter?”
She huffed, embarrassed to admit how deep her nose had been buried in her computer the last two-plus days. Of course, she’d looked out the window, but she’d stared at the changing color of the trees lining the river.
“I came in Thursday,” she admitted.
“Lights and phones have been down since Thursday night.”
“All of St. Louis?”
The amusement crept out of his voice as he answered. “Yes, Dr. Carter. All of St. Louis, all of L.A., all of Miami…Seattle. They’re out from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from north to south.”
Face growing hot, she slammed the phone down and turned back to the window.
Damn, she wasn’t as bad as her mother when it came to living in intellectual isolation — she was a thousand times worse!
Grabbing her backpack, she dumped its contents onto her desk. Very little was allowed past security and everything went through an x-ray machine. Weapons weren’t allowed, not even locked up in the vehicles following a new security directive from SHWG’s parent company. Smartphones and tablets were prohibited — anything that could take a picture. So her bag was filled with a few notebooks, writing instruments, some cosmetics she always forgot to bother with, a hairbrush, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a lot of loose change, mostly quarters.
She corralled the loose change into a pile then scooped it into the palm of her hand to dump into the pocket of her lab coat. Next she opened the bottom right drawer of her desk where she kept snacks and bottles of water.
After a marathon two days, her supply was running pretty low.
Growling, she added the toothbrush and toothpaste back into the bag, along with lip balm, a mirrored compact, three small cans of Green Apple Perrier, a granola bar and two snack sized bags of Fritos.
The way her stomach was rumbling, she had enough food to last her to the parking lot.
Turning off the light, she headed toward the stairwell near the elevator banks. Instinct made her stop as she passed the ladies’ bathroom.
In she went, pausing at the threshold.
Emily hadn’t left. Hannah could hear her sobbing.
She walked to the stall Emily had emerged from earlier. Such creatures of habits, her colleagues. So was Hannah. Her preferred stall was halfway down the left side, directly across from the last sink on the right.
Stopping in front of Emily’s stall, she hesitated to say anything. She was likely wasting her time and had no idea how precious that time might be.
“They can’t fire everyone for leaving,” she said, keeping her voice low and, she hoped, comforting. “Do you have family in the city?”
“No,” Emily hiccupped. “My dad is in Quincy. He has dialysis on Mondays.”
Emily corrected herself with another sob rattling inside her throat. “He HAD dialysis on Mondays.”
Was the woman saying there were hospitals without power?
“They’ll use generators…” Hannah started, her words trailing off as Emily broke into a wail.
“Look,” Hannah bit out. “If you really want to leave, leave. A lot of cars are already gone from the lot. I’m going now. The more time you spend crying in here, the harder it will be for you to reach your dad.”
Sensing she wasn’t getting through and wouldn’t any time soon, if ever, Hannah spun around and marched from the restroom.
Opening the door to the stairwell, she could hear the elevators running behind the shared wall. A smile flicked across her face. She was in one of the few buildings that would never go dark. The facility’s roofs were covered with solar panels. Part of the river had been diverted to power underground water turbines. And who the hell knew what was going on in the lower levels that didn’t officially exist beyond the shafts for the water turbines.
Some kind of government black ops research, she suspected. Had to be energy related or why else have it at the facility. She just knew she’d seen Army and Navy brass go through a door marked “private” a few months back on another early Sunday morning and there had been nothing visible in the room they entered except elevator doors. That side of the building was only one story at ground level. The high-ranking officers weren’t going up.
So, yeah — the whole world could lose power and the lights would still be on at SHWG.
Picking up speed, Hannah trotted down the stairs. She emerged on the first floor of the secured side of the building. Ducking into the break room used mostly by the guards, her mouth collapsed into a grim frown.
The vending machines had been cleared out.
She should have gone up to the fourth floor first. Mostly administrative, the staff wouldn’t have lingered at work with the power out at home. Their break room was likely still stocked.
“Dr. Carter?” a voice asked as she stepped into the hall and closed the breakroom door.
She recognized the voice as belonging to the same guard who had answered her call to the security desk.
“Yes,” she confirmed as she turned to face him.
She hadn’t recognized his voice on the phone, but he wasn’t new. At least not shiny new. His last name was Clary, first initial D.
, and he had started maybe three months ago. He creeped her out every time she was working during one of his shifts. He didn’t talk much when he was checking her in and out, just stared with shadows dancing in his gaze.
She was pretty sure he knew who she was and hadn’t needed to ask.
“Director Green would like everyone to remain in their labs. We’re trying to get some food supplies in and we’ll deliver them to each lab when we do.”
“I’m leaving,” she said, straightening her spine to its full length, trying to make her five-foot-three bigger than it was.
“Really not advisable, Miss — I mean Dr. Carter.”
“Not advisable or prohibited?”
His mouth danced at her challenge, the amusement his tone had displayed on the phone evident on his face.
“I don’t have any orders to stop you.” He tilted his head, eyeing her from head to toe. “At least not yet. You’re organic solar cells, yes?”
Her mouth opened in a shocked circle.
“Double doctorate, MIT…”
He let the words hang there in front of her, his gaze cold and calculating.
“I’ll need to call downstairs to clear your leaving.”
Her bladder felt like it had ballooned to twice it size, the need to pee urgent and painful.
He had just admitted to there being levels below the one they were on and that some shadowy power with the authority to detain her resided in its subterranean lair.
And that authority knew who she was.
Worse than that, it was looking to protect its human resources — whether or not the resource wanted protection.
“Really, Hannah,” he said, his gaze sliding down her short, slim frame. “This is where you want to be. Everything fell apart sooner than expected.”
Letting her shoulders slump forward, she sighed. “I need to use the restroom.”
“There’s a ladies’ room on the second floor, on the way back to your office.”
“And Acid Emily is probably still in there crying,” Hannah answered with an eye roll.
“Acid Emily…” His face went from momentarily furrowed to smirking. “Doctor Bankirk, you mean. Yeah, I can see where she’d get a nickname like that.”
“Isn’t there a ladies room off the guards’ break room?” she asked, knowing there was but that the door wasn’t marked.
Cogs turned inside the guard’s brain, their movement manifested by the calculating glitter of his dark eyes.
“That way, when they clear me to leave—”
His nose twitched. Her gut tightened with a sick, familiar feeling. Clearly he was humoring her. For some reason, someone wanted her to stay. Maybe it was someone with real power; maybe it was just Clary. She had brushed off all the hard stares from the man in prior months as female paranoia after life had given her good reason to turn paranoid. Maybe “downstairs” really was no big deal and someone didn’t have her resume in the “detain” pile. Maybe it was just this one man taking advantage of the situation. If she let him, he would become increasingly bold.
Either way — she was leaving the facility tonight.
“Please,” she repeated, the vulnerability in her voice real even if she didn’t need to urinate and had only felt the urge because of the momentary fear that had washed through her.
“Fine,” he smirked and opened the door to the break room. “You take care of business while I make the call.”
“Great, thank you,” she enthused, her hand wrapping around the bathroom door’s handle.
“Slow down, Hannah.” Grabbing hold of her bag, he took it and slung it over his shoulder before stepping in close. Reaching toward her chest, he unhooked her key card and slid it into his shirt pocket before he patted her down.
“Wh-what are you doing?” she asked as his fingers dipped into her lab coat to sift through the loose change.
“Checking for car keys,” he answered, his gaze sharp on her face.
Her eyes glanced off her backpack then skittered away.
She wasn’t going to tell him her car had a biometric lock. He’d done his homework on her, but he’d missed a few things, clearly.
“Alright, in you go,” he said, pulling out his own set of keys as a smirk grew on his face.
“You’re locking me in?” she blurted.
“Just while I make the call.”
She watched him disappear as the door closed then heard the lock engage. When it did, a smile she had been fighting to contain for the last two minutes blossomed across her face.
She was in a windowless, locked bathroom on the first floor of a building that, while wrapped round with glass windows on the upper floors, was mostly concrete at ground level. Only a few rooms had windows at this level. The break room was one of them. The head of security’s office was another.
She was not in either of those rooms, could not open the door to get to them, but the guard had slipped up.
Speed walking toward the last stall, she opened the door with a prayer on her lips that nothing had changed since she’d been hired on two years ago, straight out of MIT.
“Thank you, Lord,” she whispered, seeing the old fashioned toilet with its tank instead of the low profile, tankless toilets that populated the other stalls.
Putting the lid down, she climbed onto the tank.
And wanted to cry.
She was a good foot away from reaching the tiled ceiling. Pushing down her disappointment, she edged to the side of the tank, grabbed hold of the top of the stall with both hands and lifted one leg up, hooking the edge with her heel. The coins cascaded out of her pocket, a metallic waterfall clattering against the floor.
Muscles straining, she got on top of the stall’s thin wall then disappeared up into the ceiling. Not only was she pretty sure there were cameras in the break room, but its ceiling was solid instead of tiled. The head of security’s office was just a few feet away with the same tiled structure as the ladies’ room and she was equally certain that there were no cameras there.
She slid down the other side of the wall, her toes brushing against a bookcase. From there, she scurried to the window and checked for any wiring. Seeing nothing, she drew a deep breath, opened the window and slipped into the night.
Army Specialist Mark Owens rolled the body off the gurney and onto the incinerator table, his mind absently cataloging the violence that had resulted in death. There was no face left, just an exit wound from the bullet that had been fired into the back of the head execution style.
A male, the subject’s body rippled with muscles beneath the imposing black uniform the facility’s soldiers wore when they were posing as SHWG guards topside.
Owens leaned forward, nostrils flattening at the coppery smell of dried blood and the almost fatty smell of exploded brain matter. His fingers worked the pin securing the name badge in place.
D. Clary
One of the project’s newer transfers, Owens remembered him as egotistical, cocky, and often talking over his superiors.
He wasn’t surprised to see Clary on the incinerator table, just curious as to the mechanics of fate that had brought him there.
“What did he do?” he asked the two privates who had delivered the body.
“Let Dr. Carter escape.”
Owens nodded. That was a shame. He had never encountered her in person, wasn’t allowed to show his face topside. But he had watched her almost religiously on the security monitors during his downtime. Hell, Hannah Carter’s lab was the most popular channel on the internal feed except for the stalls in the female lavatories. Owens didn’t watch her there. He liked to watch her sleep, whether that was in her lab curled under a desk, her head on her bag, or when she was jammed into one of the club chairs in the relaxation room attached to the lavatory on the second floor.
“From the Old Man’s office,” the other private added, removing Clary’s boots and adding them to the redistribution pile. “Locked her in the first floor bathroom because she said she had to go pee. She climbed out
through the ceiling tiles.”
Owens lifted thick, dark brows, mild surprise settling over his features. Although he masqueraded topside as Chief of Security and wore expensive civilian suits, Stephen Billows was a full bird colonel in the U.S. Army. More than anything, he was a cold, sadistic bastard. Having the young woman trick one of his guards and escape through his own office would be just the kind of thing to trigger the Old Man’s most violent tendencies.
With a nod at the missing face, Owens chuckled. “Looks like he got off easy then.”
Chapter Two
A creak in the hallway drew Ellis Sand’s attention from the chemistry textbook he was reading. A harsh whisper followed the creak, alerting Ellis that another attempt to recruit him was underway.
That, or Martin’s gang intended to kill him this time.
He stood, his movements silent as he unlocked the room’s single window and eased it open. The door was barricaded and it would take them a few minutes to bust through. Then, if they were too stupid to watch where they were going, a few nasty surprises at ankle level waited ready to maim whoever was charged with entering first.
By then, Ellis would be gone, out one window and into another, the building’s ceramic tiled roof and its steep pitch too daunting for the cloven hoofs of his fellow students at the Bonnie Lad Academy for Wayward Boys, as he liked to call the military reform school his dad had stuck him in for senior year.
Grabbing his pack, Ellis threaded his arms through the straps then stuck one leg out the window.
Hearing the twangy release of a bowstring, he yanked his leg back half a second before a broadhead arrow embedded itself in the wooden frame a few centimeters from where the fleshy meat of his calf had been.
“That was a courtesy miss, Sand,” a voice boomed from down below. “You won’t get a second one.”
“He knows!” someone shouted out in the hall. “He’s trying to get away!”
Ellis took a quick, darting look through the window to see a young black male holding a simple recurve bow. The weapon wasn’t as powerful as a compound bow, at least not with the same physical effort, but it didn’t matter at such a short distance. And Dion, the teen wielding the weapon, was a perfect marksman and fast on the draw, which was probably why Martin thought he could position him alone on the ground to guard the window exit.