Everything just changed.
“Man, wish I could’ve gone,” Mr. Coffee said, taking a sip. “Anything to get out of this shithole.”
The guard at the monitors finally spoke. “Screw that noise. This job is a cak walk. Steady pay, free housing, and we don’t actually do any work. I don’t know what you vaginas are whining about.”
I casually made my way over to the bank of screens, to see what he could see. The facility didn’t have a huge number of cameras, but it had enough that Ling and her people wouldn’t make it to the building undetected unless I did something.
Facebook Guy disagreed. “Dude, this place blows! It snows half the year, there’s nothing to do in town, and we don’t get any action!”
“Action? To hell with that,” the monitor-watcher rebutted. “I was in the operations division for a while, until I got shot . . .” I recognized him from the files. Frost. Former Army, drummed out for criminal misconduct, then recruited by Majestic.
I studied the screens. Several of them showed prisoners in their cells. Most of them were sitting on their beds or on the floor, not doing anything interesting. The fourth cell was different. Unlike the others, it was dark, and the camera was on IR mode. The prisoner was sitting up in bed. It looked like he was talking to someone that wasn’t there.
“What’re you doing?” Frost asked.
“Valentine?” I nodded toward the bank.
Frost looked at the monitor I suspected, confirming I had the right man. “Yep. Your buddy. How’s the knee, by the way?” he laughed.
I smiled like that was hilarious. “What’s he doing?”
“Talking to himself,” Frost suggested. “I don’t know. Silvers made your boy down there her pet project. I don’t know what she’s doing to him, but he’s fucked up.”
“Who cares?” Mr. Coffee whined. “I’m sick of sitting up here, freezing my dick off, watching Silvers play head games with the prisoners. I want to get out there and get some action. Maybe get laid once in a while.” I casually made my way over to him, as if I was going to get a cup of coffee.
“You say that like it’s fun and all until command screws up and you get your asses shot off,” Frost said.
Mr. Coffee rebutted. “Frosty, nobody wants to hear your war stories again.” Frost gave him a dirty look and went back to watching the screens. Mr. Coffee then popped me in the shoulder. “Now this guy, he’s got a way with the ladies.” He laughed. “They should have sent you to Arizona, dawg. You’d probably get that FBI guy’s old lady to talk.” He guffawed at his own humor.
My pulse was racing. I struggled to stay in character. “Booyah! You know it, dawg!” Smoot habitually said ‘booyah.’ In general, he talked like a douchebag, and anybody who said booyah and dawg, I had no problem sawing their thumbs off. “When are they doing it?”
“What?” Facebook guy finally looked up from his monitor. “Geezus, Smoot, you look like shit. You got gonorrhea again?”
“When are they raiding the house in Arizona?”
“Randy said tomorrow night. Why, you wanna beg Silvers and try and get in on it?” He took another sip from his mug. “You really itching to get out of here that bad?”
I started to laugh, laugh like Mr. Coffee had said the funniest goddamn thing in the world. Then I hit him, palm-struck him in the face. I smashed his coffee mug into his teeth and up his nose. His head snapped back in a splash of coffee, blood, spittle, and broken porcelain. Before he could react, I grabbed the back of his head and smashed his face into the desk.
“What the fuck!” Frost shouted, jumping up from his row of monitors, stunned that one of his friends had just brutalized the other.
Facebook Guy was staring at me, wide-eyed, from his chair. He was in shock, stammering for words. I didn’t give him a chance to speak. I grabbed the pot of hot coffee and lobbed it at him as hard as I could. The pot shattered on his face, sending scalding hot coffee and broken glass into his eyes. He let out a blood-curdling, high-pitched scream, fell out of his chair, and clawed at his eyes.
Frost fumbled for his gun.
I was faster.
BLAM
The .40 round entered just below Frost’s left eye and took the back of his head off.
Mr. Coffee was still dazed, trying to get off the desk. No need to make extra noise, Smoot’s knife came out in a flash. I plunged it into his throat and slashed my arm outward. Mr. Coffee’s eyes were wide with shock as he gurgled and choked on his own blood. He slid down the desk in a red smear as his life poured out, but I’d already turned my attention to Facebook Guy. He couldn’t see and had panicked, ineffectually slapping at my hands until I stabbed him in the throat. His screams turned into a sickening gurgle. Warm blood spilled out of the wound, and he went limp. I stepped back, trying not to get too much of it on me.
I stood up, surveying the carnage in the control room. These motherfuckers were going after Bob’s family. My family. A radio on Frost’s desk beeped. “Control room! Report in! We heard a gunshot! Report!”
I snatched it up. “This is Smoot. Frost had a negligent discharge.”
“Frost did? You guys okay?”
I looked around at the bodies on the floor. “Uh, yeah. Scared the shit out of us. He was trying to teach us how to quick draw a pistol and he put a round into the floor.” I paused for effect and moved the radio away from my mouth. “Yeah, Frost, I’m telling on you. You almost shot me.”
“Put him on.”
“Uh, he’s kind of shaken up right now. He won’t take the radio.”
“For Christ’s sake. I’ll be there in a minute. Take his gun away.”
I reholstered the Glock. The security camera feed showed a man on the first floor running for the stairs. I only had a moment. I flipped the radio to the channel I knew Ling would be listening to.
“I have control of video and comms. Execute, execute!”
VALENTINE
A gunshot echoed through the quiet building. It was muffled, as if it had come from above, but there was no mistaking that sound. Something was happening. I didn’t know what, but this might be the only chance I was going to get. With the onset of the Calm, my thoughts were clear and rational. The dark, bubbling anger from before was pushed to the background. They might be distracted. I’m not going to get a better chance than this. I swung my feet over the edge of the bed and stood up.
I nearly fell. My legs were weak and quivering. It took me a moment to steady myself. At last my head stopped spinning and I felt . . . not good, exactly, but better than I could recall. The Calm, with its clarity and sense of purpose, steadied me. I smiled in the darkness. I’d missed this feeling.
I was getting out, and I was going to kill as many of my captors as I could in the attempt. They might kill me, but the fear was pushed aside by the single-minded, determined focus the Calm brought with it.
I went for the door. Locked. No surprise there. There was also a camera. It was up in the corner, bolted to the ceiling so it could see the entire room. A red light glowed by the lens, as if to let me know I was being watched. I didn’t know if the camera had a night vision mode, but I assumed it did.
There was a cable leading from the camera, across the ceiling, through a small hole drilled in the wall, and out into the hallway. The rooms of this building were made of cinder blocks and concrete. They’d made no effort to hide the camera’s power and feed cable, just bolted it onto the textured ceiling. I could barely make out the black line in the darkness, but it was there, just too high for me to reach.
Stepping back across the room, I pulled my bed into place beneath the camera. This was easy, because my bed was basically a gurney with wheels. Shakily, unsteadily, I climbed up and carefully stood. I smiled for the camera as I grabbed onto the coaxial cable and tugged.
Nothing happened. Shit. I tugged harder. Still nothing. It was on there really solidly. They could see me on camera. I didn’t have time for this. I grabbed the cable with both hands and put my body weight into it. The cable ri
pped out of the camera. The fasteners holding it to the ceiling gave way. My bed rolled out from underneath me and toppled over with a crash. I landed hard on the floor.
Well. That probably got their attention. I didn’t have a lot of time. They’d be coming for me. I needed a weapon. I looked down at the cable in my hands, and smiled. A pair of boots stomped down the hall. Gathering up the cable in my hands, I pressed myself against the wall behind where the door swung when it opened, and waited. The heater kicked on, filling the entire hallway with an obnoxious rumbling sound.
Keys jingled, then hit the lock. I could hear voices on his radio. The volume was up too high and the tinny noise echoed in the hallway, intermixed with static.
The door swung open.
It was now or never. Stepping around the door, I looped the heavy-gauge coaxial cable around the guard’s neck and yanked it as hard as I could. I let myself fall. The thrashing guard went down with me. He was panicking, kicking, twisting, desperate for air. His hands clawed as his throat, but I held on for dear life. He tried to reach me, but I was underneath him. There was nothing he could do. His gurgles and gasps grew more desperate, his thrashing wilder. He kicked the door and the wall, tried to bash my face with the back of his head, but I didn’t let go.
Then he went limp.
I held on for a few moments longer, making sure he was done, before pushing the heavy man off and sitting up. I was panting. My arms felt like lead and my hands were raw where the coaxial cable had dug into them. Luckily my grip had lasted longer than his air.
There had only been one of them. They usually sent two or more. Something was happening, maybe related to that gunshot. I didn’t have time to sort it out. I had to move.
In the light coming from the hallway, I could see the dead man’s face. It was Reilly. His eyes were grotesquely rolled up into his head and his crushed throat was purple. I smiled viciously at the corpse and began to strip the equipment off of his duty belt.
No gun. Of course Dr. Silvers didn’t let them carry guns down here anymore. But he had other goodies for me: an aluminum side-handle baton, keys, handcuffs, and a radio. There was too much of it for me to carry in my hands. Unbuckling his duty belt, I rolled Reilly over and took it off of him. He was a fat man, and I’d lost quite a bit of weight during my stay. His belt was way too big for me. I looped it over my shoulder like a bandolier and stood up.
It was time to go.
LORENZO
Ling acknowledged she was on her way. I lunged across the control room for the weapons locker. It had an electronic lock with a keypad. I had no idea what the combination was. This was why I hated rush jobs. Given time to think I would have remembered to beat that combo out of Smoot too. I swore and futilely slammed a fist into the metal door. More guards would be here in seconds and it would be nice to have something bigger than a pistol. At least I could take everyone else’s ammo.
There was movement on one of the screens as I looted Frost’s corpse. Valentine was standing on his bed, smiling at the camera. It was almost as if he was looking right at me. His face was green and white, his eyes shining creepily in the camera’s night vision mode. He messed with the camera, and then the feed was cut.
What the hell was he doing? But I didn’t have time to worry about it. The door opened and another man in black fatigues appeared in the stairwell. It was the guard that had checked me at the door. He strode in purposefully, loudly cursing as he moved. “Jesus tap-dancing Christ, Frost, I’ll have your ass for this. Silvers is going to blow a gasket when she . . . when she . . .” He trailed off when he saw the puddle of blood and coffee coagulating around the desks.
I came from his periphery, so fast he couldn’t react, and brutally smashed Frost’s baton onto his shoulder. He bellowed in pain and stumbled back against the wall. Spinning the baton so that the short end was forward, I punched it into his sternum. He made a noise like a cat trying to cough up a hairball, and for a moment I was afraid he was going to puke on me. I whipped the baton around and cracked him in forehead. He fell to the floor after that, blood pouring down his face. I removed his pistol and shoved it into the back of my waistband, then I stood over him, with the baton pushed against his top lip. He was too dazed to do anything.
“S . . . Smoot!” he stammered. “What are you doing?”
“Smoot’s dead.” It had to be strange to hear an alien voice coming out of a coworker’s face.
“Who are you? What’s going on?”
I cracked him in the shoulder with the baton. He cried out.
“What’s your name?”
“What?”
“Did I fucking stutter? Your name! What. Is. Your. Name.” I jabbed the nightstick into his side.
“Greg!” he blurted out, wincing with pain. “Greg Spanner!”
Spanner . . . I seemed to remember bribery, stealing from evidence rooms, and witness intimidation, so no wonder he was a supervisor here. “Okay, Greg. Listen to me very carefully. How do you check in with your command?” The longer that Majestic didn’t know that we had been here, the greater our chances of getting away.
“I can’t tell you that.” It looked like Greg was trying to find his backbone.
“That’s what those assholes said.” I gestured to the corpses. “See how that turned out? I’m not going to ask you again, Greg. You’re either an asset or a liability.”
“It’s Silvers . . . Silvers!” I jabbed him again, just to keep him talking. It wasn’t surprising that he was less than eager to lay down his life for a super-loyal organization like Majestic. “She sends in a status report every day!”
“How?”
“E-mail.” He cringed as I raised the stick, tears streaming down his cheeks. “No, really, she sends an e-mail! Every morning, really early! She works all night most of the time, and sends the SITREP in before she goes home!”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah!” He nodded rapidly. “It’s on the secure network, though!”
“Lackadaisical motherfuckers!” I spat.
VALENTINE
The hallway was dimly lit.
I crept past the other locked doors, my footsteps covered by the constant rumbling of the industrial heater. White light filled a spot on the floor further down the hall.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I wasn’t sure what was driving me. I didn’t have a plan. There was only the powerful impulse to get out and to kill anyone who got in my way. My thoughts were a whirlwind, too jumbled for me to even follow, but occasionally they’d slow down into a moment of pure clarity. I really wanted to see the sky again. The soles on my laceless shoes were soft and didn’t make much noise.
The next section of hallway went right past Dr. Silvers’ office. Her office had a window in it, to give her a nice view of the scenic hallway I guess. Venetian blinds were hung over the window, but they were open enough that I could see through. I darted across the hall so that I was next to the window. Through the slatted blinds, I could see Dr. Silvers at her desk, idly typing away on the computer on her desk.
Ducking under the window, I crept down the hallway toward the open door. I had to move very slowly. I was far enough away from the heater that it would no longer cover any inadvertent sounds I made. Reilly’s belt was still slung over my shoulder, and I had to be careful not to let any of his equipment scrape against the concrete floor. Past the window I stood up, back to the wall, and moved on as silently as I could to her office door. It was open.
A nasal voice came from inside. “Reilly’s been gone for an awfully long time. We haven’t heard anything else about the incident upstairs, either. Do you think everything is okay?”
Dr. Silvers let out a long sigh before responding. “I’m sure they’re doing paperwork, Neville. One of those cretins almost shot his foot off. I swear I’m going to ban guns in this facility completely, take all of their toys away. I’m surrounded by idiots.”
“But what about Reilly, Doctor? It shouldn’t take that long to just check on a noise. And should
n’t Smoot be on shift by now?” A noise? Didn’t they see me disable the camera? Wasn’t anyone monitoring the cameras?
“Smoot is probably upstairs too, gawking with the other idiots. Now quit gibbering. Go check on him yourself if you want. I’m trying to work.”
Very carefully, I peeked around the corner. The front part of her office had a countertop with a coffee machine on it. Neville was there, making a fresh pot. Seemingly unaware that Dr. Silvers didn’t want to talk to him, kept flapping his mouth at her. “Have you sent in the daily SITREP and report to higher, Doctor?”
Dr. Silvers muttered something to herself. “Yes, Neville, I have. Perhaps you’d also like to follow me to the restroom and remind me to wipe my ass?”
Neville laughed nervously again, even though it was pretty obvious Silvers wasn’t joking around with him. It made me happy that she found him just as insufferable as I did, but he persisted. The fool never did know when to shut his pie-hole. “Doctor, perhaps if you just called Reilly on the radio . . .” He trailed off as Dr. Silvers let out another long sigh.
“I’m sure he’s just dawdling, Neville, but if it will make you feel better. Soothing your paranoia is apparently the only way I’m going to be able to get any work done this morning.”
My eyes went wide as I remembered that Reilly’s radio was still in its pouch, on his belt, over my shoulder. Dr. Silvers hit the transmit button before I could turn his radio off. The radio squawked.
Oh shit.
I heard her stand up. “Reilly?” she asked, calling out into the hallway.
“I can’t see anything, Doctor,” Neville whined.
“Go look,” Silvers ordered.
I moved while Neville hesitated. Drawing Reilly’s baton from the belt, I lunged around the corner. Neville was so shocked he didn’t even have time to react. I held the baton by the side handle, with the short end pointing forward. I was on top of Neville before he could even step back. My hand on his shoulder, I slammed the blunt aluminum baton into his gut, over and over again. I shoved him back, flipped the baton around, and whacked him upside the head. Neville’s head snapped to the side and he flopped to the floor. I didn’t let up. I raised the baton over my head, clutching it in both hands, and savagely beat the little bastard’s skull in.
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