by Arthur Slade
Then the cables and the whole car rattled, and so did the rest of the world. An explosion! The machine gun fire had stopped. The car also jerked to a stop.
I stood up slowly beside Dermot. There was a big, black hole where the cable ran into the fortress. Much of the brick and stone had been blasted away along with most of the docking station.
“Someone bombed the fortress,” I said.
“Yeah,” Dermot said. “And they weren’t messing around. That was more than just a few grenades.”
“It must be the Returns.”
I scanned the sky, which was easy to do now that the car had no windows and the walls were perforated. I didn’t see anything flying through the air. No helicopter. Jet. Or drone.
“The blast came from inside,” Dermot said. “Judging by the blast marks.”
“Then the Returns are already inside,” I said. “We’d better get in there, too. We don’t want to miss any of the fun.”
I climbed out through the window and up to the cable, then scurried hand over hand toward the castle. Dermot did the same, his metallic hands clinging much better than my fleshly ones. We worked our way toward the smoking hole. I expected gunfire at any moment.
I didn’t mean to look down, but my eyes couldn’t help themselves. It was a hell of a long fall. There’d be plenty of time for my life to flash in front of my eyes before I watermeloned on the ground.
“Faster,” Dermot said. “We have to get there before the guards get back into position.”
So we went through the smoke and climbed into the blast hole. There were drones zipping along the exterior of the castle, but we got inside before we were spotted.
I dropped down onto a platform. The area was full of smoke. But there was no sign of any guards. We were standing in Castle ZARC proper.
“What the hell do we do now?” Dermot asked.
“We find my Mom and Agnes and get the hell out of here.”
I certainly made it sound simple.
19
What the Hell We Did
“Agnes told us the number to her cell,” I said. “Look on the map and find the dungeons. Or some equivalent.”
He pulled out his phone. “Oh, that’s not good.”
“What?” I asked.
He turned the phone toward me. A bullet had gone right through it. “It looks like it needs to see an Apple genius.”
“Well, we’ll just have to go by memory. Can you recall the layout?”
He tapped his skull with a metal finger, which made him wince. “All here. Most of it, that is. Though they don’t have a cable car room in the original castle. And I did only look at the schematics for about three seconds. Anyway, my memory tells me there should be a set of stairs through that door and down a hallway. As we work our way in and downwards, I’m sure I’ll see more familiar landmarks.”
We picked our way over broken brick to a large metal door that was partly off its hinges. The blast had blackened it, yet the lock still held, so I yanked the door open—well, right off its hinges. I’m sure I’d impressed Dermot with that feat of strength.
“Remind me not to make you angry,” he said.
I held the door in front of me like a shield and peeked around it to stare down the hall. Not a single guard. Again, that was extremely odd—I’d expect there to be security personnel of all types running toward us with their weapons cocked. Maybe there was another distraction somewhere else in the castle. The Returns were certainly moving quickly and efficiently through the building.
We dashed along the hall, came to the set of spiral stairs that Dermot had said would be there, and followed them down to the next level. The door at the bottom of the stairs opened into a long hallway with royal red carpets. Fancy faux torch lights ran along the wall, giving the area both a medieval and modern air at the same time.
This hall wasn’t empty. There was a doctor-type running along, hugging a smart device like it was his greatest love. When he saw us, his eyes grew even bigger behind his glasses and he paled. Then he whispered something in another language and turned tail and ran.
I caught up to him in two strides, smacked him in the side of the head, and he collapsed, but didn’t let go of his device. I grabbed him by the lapels and lifted him up, shaking him hard enough that his face blurred. “How do we get to the dungeon?” I nearly shouted. “Tell me!”
“Uh, you knocked him out, Amber,” Dermot said.
“Damn!” I dropped the doctor. “You humans have such soft skulls. Well—we’ll have to keep on running blindly towards the bottom.”
We found another door at the end of this hallway and followed another spiral stairway downwards. It was beginning to feel like we were living and reliving Groundhog Day. Dermot was clunking along beside me like the Tin Man, his exoskeleton sounded like it needed several squeezes of oil. About halfway down the stairs a security guard in a black uniform popped up and fired at us through the curved balustrade, the gun sounding like it was barking thunder. Bullets smacked through the wooden balusters and chipped the stone wall behind us.
Dermot ducked.
I jumped. Straight down the circular opening in the balustrade. I saw the guard’s face take on a look of utmost consternation as I meteored toward him. That moment of hesitation was his undoing—though he did begin to bring his gun up. Before he could press the trigger, my feet hit his head and he fell backwards and crunched into the wall. He was either dead or knocked out. I punched him once more to be sure he was incapacitated, then paused long enough to see if his chest was still going up and down. Yep! Mom would be proud—she always hated unnecessary deaths.
“You can come out of your hiding place now,” I said to Dermot.
“I wasn’t hiding,” he said as he clumped down the stairs. “It’s called finding cover. I’m trained to do that.”
“The lady doth protest too much.”
“The lady dothn’t have any holes in his head.” His voice was not as ragged as before. “That was a nice move. You’ve been practicing.”
“Your compliments are going to go to my head.”
We had reached the bottom of the stairwell. I tried to slow my heart to listen on the other side of the door, but my little cardiac organ was beating too fast and it would take several minutes to get my biorhythms down to a state where I could listen properly.
So I yanked open the door.
This was the first hallway that didn’t look like the interior of a medieval castle. It opened into a large room, jam packed with doctor-and scientist-types in white lab jackets. The majority of them were standing at terminals. There were no chairs, I guess because their master didn’t want them to sit down on the job. Or maybe Anthony Zarc was concerned about their health as they designed mass destruction weapons and manipulated genes to make black ops mercenaries more dangerous.
The gaggle of scientists were certainly shocked to see us.
“Where’s the basement?” I shouted. “The dungeons! I’m looking for room 9000.”
No one made a peep. Or a motion. Maybe they didn’t speak English—I had to stop being so America-centric. We were in Switzerland, after all. Someone in that flock must have pressed a button because alarms began to sound. Still no one moved from their positions.
Then two security guards emerged from a set of elevators, raised their snub-nosed machine guns, and began firing towards Dermot and me. They didn’t seem to care that they were hitting a few of the scientists between us.
I took cover behind a terminal, running left. Dermot went right. I went from terminal to terminal, crouched down to avoid their line of fire. I knew I was getting closer from the sound of the guns and the smell of smoke. I leapt up a moment later, just avoiding their bullets, and came down between the guards, using my elbows as battering rams on their heads. They collapsed and did not get up again.
Dermot rushed up. “You really need to give me more time to help out. Or maybe we could discuss your plans, then engage in action.”
“I don’t want t
o strike a committee. We have to get to that prison cell or experimental cell or whatever it is as quickly as possible.” Though in the back of my head a warning voice—Mom’s?—was saying not so fast. Not so fast. Slow down. Think.
“You’re right, Dermot,” I said. “The adrenaline is getting to me.”
But I was getting closer and closer to Mom. And I didn’t want to fail her this time. Once I found Agnes then rescued Mom, all would be normal again. Assuming we could somehow get off this rock.
The shooting had stopped, so the employees, rightfully fearing for their lives, began to run like white rats escaping a lab test. I latched onto one, then let her go because she was weeping. I sifted through the ones I could catch until I found a man who had a big badge that said: Laborleiter Schmid.
“You have the lab leader there,” Dermot said, pointing at the man’s badge. “Good grab. His last name is Schmid just in case you didn’t figure that out.”
“I knew that,” I said. I hadn’t figured it out. I turned to the balding, middle-aged man. His glasses were perfectly round and took up most of his face. “Show us the way to the dungeon.”
“They are laboratory experimental rooms,” Schmid said. He didn’t have the hint of an accent. “Not dungeons. The difference between them is—”
“Don’t mansplain to me or I’ll tear your head off. Just tell me how to get there.”
My threat hadn’t cowed him at all. He pointed to a pair of silver doors. “The elevator is how you reach the labs. An elevator is a small rectangular room that travels downward.”
Great, I’d picked up a scientist who thought he was clever. I dragged him toward the elevator doors, not caring that he bumped into several desks and a wall along the way. I was aware that more security personnel could arrive at any moment.
Which is when Anthony Zarc walked out from an interior office. He was still a medium-sized white man in a black business suit and still bald. In fact, he seemed to be dressed exactly the same as the last time I saw him. His arms were crossed. He turned his blue, all-knowing eyes towards me. They measured me from behind round-rimmed glasses. “Amber Fang,” he said. “Please put down my chief of armaments operations. He is extremely valuable to my operation. The attacks on my compound have been contained. In moments you will be surrounded.”
I threw Schmid at Zarc and the former went right through the latter. “I thought so!” I said. There was no way Zarc would waltz into the same room as me without a thousand guns on his side. “You’re nothing but a hologram.”
“I had to try,” Zarc said then he faded away.
I picked up Schmid. He had cut his scalp and bent his glasses, but none of his wounds looked life-threatening. When I imagined him experimenting on vampires and maybe even librarians, I found I didn’t feel an iota of pity about his condition.
When we were about ten feet from the elevators, my mother walked out of another nearby office. She was dressed in a white dress and her hair was done up with in two odd bun-like shapes. “Daughter dearest, don’t act out. It’s bad manners.”
She looked strange—she was familiar, but seemed younger.
“Now put down the good doctor Schmid,” she added. “And eat your vegetables.”
“Uh, your mom doesn’t talk that way, does she?” Dermot was scratching his head with a metal finger. Obviously he was getting better at controlling his exoskeleton.
“Not at all,” I said. “Especially the vegetable part.” Of course this had to be another projection, but it still made me pause. Then I recognized her dress and her odd donut-shaped hair.
She was dressed like Princess Leia.
“What game are you playing, Hector?” I asked.
The hologram changed to a young man with a monocle. He was in a black SS uniform. Is this how Hector saw himself? Then I recognized the uniform as the same one Colonel Von Hapen, the Gestapo officer, wore in Where Eagles Dare. Did Hector somehow know about my obsession with that movie?
“I must admit that I have so very much missed having discussions with you, Amber Fang,” he said. I recognized his slightly high-pitched voice immediately. “And the more time I spend with you, the more my algorithms understand you.”
“So I’m not outside your algorithms anymore?”
He held up two fingers and squeezed them closer to each other. “Just a little. A pinch. A titch. Not much more than that. But pretty soon, I’ll have your number, Dear. Remember, I’m the boy in the box and I love games. For example, I’m a big fan of pin the tail on the vampire.”
“Good luck with that,” I said. “You’ll find it hard to tail me.” Wait, that sounded awful and vaguely sexual. I really did need to work on my repartee.
“Well, this news will curl your tail.” Hector removed his monocle and began to clean it with a handkerchief he’d produced from his pocket. “The attack by your librarian friends has been thwarted. And your little vampire posse is hot on your trail, but will soon be in our experimental eggs. Well, the ones who live that is. What a glorious, glorious treasure trove of genes they will be.”
“Are the librarians dead?” I asked.
“They live on in books.” Hector placed his monocle so it was sitting perfectly over his eye. He squinted at me. “What more glorious ending could there be for a librarian?”
There was no point in talking any longer. “Get out of my way,” I said.
“I’m just the interference pattern between several beams of coherent laser light. So that means, because I know I’m using words above your intellectual capabilities, that you could have waltzed through me at any time. My object, all sublime, was to delay you. That’s all.”
The lights went out and the room became pitch dark. Even the computer monitors all went black. Then the firing began.
I turned toward the flaring guns. There was a squad of heat signatures behind us—men with machine guns and night vision goggles.
Hector was glowing still. “It worked!” He clapped his hands with glee. “It worked! Oh, you must be feeling several levels of stupid right now.”
I grabbed Schmid with one hand and Dermot with the other and pulled them both to the elevator.
“Ugh!” Dermot said. A bullet pinged off of his skeleton. “Ouch!”
“Are you hit?”
“Yes, but the vest stopped the bullet. Let’s keep moving.”
We dove to the ground and used a trolley for cover, rolling it along until we were at the elevator. “It must have some sort of security code on it,” I said.
“It only works with a retinal scan,” Schmid replied. “And you don’t have the right eyes.”
“But you do, I bet,” I said. “So do I have to pluck out one of your eyes? Or will you volunteer?”
“I—I volunteer.”
He punched in a code, then put his eye up to a hole. A bullet hit the wall beside him and at the same time the metal doors opened. I yanked Shmid inside. “Dermot,” I shouted. “Time to go!”
Dermot jumped up from behind the cart and fired at the guards—I assumed he was aiming at their muzzle flashes. He leaped backwards and landed on the floor of the elevator, still firing.
“Why aren’t the doors closing?” I asked.
“Code. Must enter the code,” Schmid said.
I lengthened my arm enough so that he could punch the buttons. The doors started to move together. “There,” he said. “Now we—”
A bullet caught him in the chest.
The door closed.
“Crap,” I said, gently lowering Schmid’s body to the floor. “Don’t tell Mom about this. Too many people are dying under my watch.”
The elevator began to descend. Down and down and down. Forever. I worried we’d stepped into a trap.
“Why do you think Hector hasn’t stopped the elevator?” Dermot asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe he can’t.”
“He’s the brains of this place. He has to be able to override it. Yet, he hasn’t, so…”
“That means something worse is wai
ting for us when the doors open,” I said.
I pressed the buttons, hoping to stop our little ride to hell, but nothing responded. “Shit.” Then a thought occurred to me. “Maybe we can surprise them.”
“How?” Dermot asked.
“By not being here when the doors open.” I leapt up to try and open the hatch at the top of the elevator, but it was made of metal so thick that I couldn’t even budge it. Dermot did his best to pound on it, his metal hands creating sparks. But it was all to no avail.
Then the elevator stopped. Dermot pushed me behind him in a manly gesture of protection. I shoved him out of the way. “I’m not hiding behind you.”
He shrugged. “Like I said, I’m the one wearing the bulletproof vest.”
The doors opened.
20
A Door Opens, A Door Closes
It was not a dungeon.
There was a bubble of glass blocking our way into the hall—an airlock. Beyond that the walls were white, the floors white, and the lights in the ceiling cast an LED brightness that was dazzling to the eyes. It was as if whoever had designed this section of the castle wanted to be sure that every speck of dirt, every misplaced hair would be easily spotted and cleaned up. I put my hand up to guard my eyes.
I stuck my neck out of the elevator and peeked about. The hallway was long and curved into the distance, meaning that the center of this level was one big circular room. The doors all along the other side of the hall had to be the prison or experimental cells.
I stepped fully into the airlock. Dermot followed, his clanking sounding extra loud. The elevator door closed. Another door clanged down behind us and I nearly jumped to the ceiling.
Then a spray began to mist from every corner of the glass bubble. “Hold your breath!” Dermot shouted. “It might be gas!”
The yellow mist quickly coated us. I covered my eyes and reached around, trying to blindly break the nozzles off. It didn’t matter, anyway. They were set too deeply in the glass.
“Actually, don’t worry, Amber,” Dermot said a moment later. “You can uncover your eyes. And breathe.” I did so. We were dripping with a yellow substance, but the spraying had stopped.