Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense

by Fynn Perry

  Suddenly, bored with the prospect of more hours of patrolling ahead, his long-standing curiosity got the better of him. He had an irresistible urge to see the areas his boss had expressly forbidden him to go near.

  He started walking back, well before break time, to the control room where George sat. Once inside, he would have access only to a small corridor containing a kitchenette and bathroom, but there was also, he’d noticed, a door they’d been told never to use.

  It had taken the truck driver just over an hour to complete the return journey to the fulfillment center. When the truck approached the security gate, John had left the truck, opting to possess a guard he had seen patrolling along the inside of the perimeter fence instead of staying with the vehicle. He figured that the easiest way to see what was going on inside was to possess a guard who was on patrol. With a facility this size, he assumed there would be a security control room, and sooner or later, the guard would have to return to it. Inside, John could take a look at the camera feeds from all around the building.

  John’s new host was a lot older than he had expected a security guard to be, but the man was very informative. John discovered this minutes after being inside the guard’s body when he stumbled upon another useful aspect of possessing a host: he could not only listen in on their thoughts, but if he agreed strongly enough with a deep-rooted desire within the person, he could amplify it, reinforce it—perhaps, he thought now, even turn it into an action. It probably varied from person to person, but with gullible Marty here—according to his name badge—it was looking like it might be quite easy.

  Just as John had hoped, after ten minutes, Marty opened an unmarked, thick metal door to the side of the building and walked into a dimly lit room with a smell indicative of nonstop male occupation: coffee, strong aftershave, greasy food, candy, and body odor.

  “Hey Marty, see anything suspicious?” George chuckled as he regarded John’s host over a set of monitors. John caught a glimpse of the screens––disappointed to see that they only showed external camera feeds.

  “Nope!” the host said as he headed for the corridor. “Just going to use the can.”

  But he didn’t. He made straight for the door at the end of the corridor, the forbidden door. He tried the handle. It was locked. Something in his head was willing him to knock. He extended out his hand, nervously. It was shaking, but he knocked anyway. Nothing. A few minutes passed, and then the door opened.

  “What?” A menacing face, at least a foot higher than his, glared down at him, along with the eyes from a hundred tattooed skulls wallpapering a thick neck. The guy’s black combat clothing had no identifying markings but Marty recognized him immediately as a member of the ‘other’ security team.

  Marty stood there, not knowing what to say. John was relieved to see that this tougher guard was unpossessed and he could give Marty a way out of the situation he’d help put the poor guy in.

  “This door is off-limits!” the guard with the inked neck growled in a Hispanic accent.

  Marty started to feel dizzy. He felt his courage leaving him and his knees weakening.

  John transferred from Marty to the other guard, leaving Marty to collapse from the exhaustion of the possession.

  The new host called for help and a second guard in black combat dress appeared. “Looks like he’s fainted,” he reported to his colleague. Together, they carried John’s former host to the battered couch in the control room.

  “Let me call an ambulance,” George offered.

  “No ambulances! You know the rules,” John’s host hissed at George. George didn’t have to be told twice.

  “Back to your screens, old-timer.”

  The second black-uniformed guard checked Marty’s breathing and pulse. “He’ll live,” he muttered.

  The host walked with purpose, a powerful body and a strong will. His mind was focused on routine and order; John guessed he must have been in the military. He wasn’t going to be easy to influence, but it didn’t matter—John was just along for the ride and to see what he might find out about Vargas’s operations. On the other side of the forbidden door was another corridor with several doors to the sides, and one straight ahead which had a keypad.

  This door opened out onto a warehouse. They were in a long, narrow area behind yellow metal-framed racking which, John estimated, extended upward for at least forty feet. The sound of big diesel engines turning over, hydraulics in action, and electronic warning beeps seemed to echo off all the hard surfaces around them. Various consumer goods were stored on the shelves: washing machines, dishwashers, and ovens. The host walked to the end of the racking and turned the corner. Only then was John confronted by the cavernous size of the building and the scale of the operation inside: to his left, the ends of the rows of brightly lit racking seemed to stretch to infinity across a polished concrete floor. Interestingly, the color of the racks changed from yellow to orange halfway along.

  To his right was a line of trucks in separate docks, all with their side curtains hitched open. Forklifts busily picked at them, speeding away the contents or rushing goods to those waiting to be filled. John noticed that the incoming cargo was always placed on the racks painted yellow that he and his host were walking past. However, the packages leaving the warehouse and that the forklifts were loading onto the trucks were always collected from the orange racks ahead of them. John knew a little about fulfillment centers from doing some research for his father, who had considered investing in them. They were a byproduct of internet shopping, enabling e-commerce merchants to outsource warehousing and shipping. But what John was seeing didn’t exactly fit his understanding of their function. If a fulfillment center was a place where goods were received and simply stored for later dispatch, why would the goods be stored in one spot when they arrived and then be moved to another while they were waiting to be shipped? It was inefficient, and therefore made no sense. John looked again to make sure. There were indeed two distinct areas.

  A few minutes later, his host changed direction, turning into one of the many aisles created between the rows of now-orange-colored racks, and John saw a missing part of the puzzle. A foot-wide rail was submerged beneath the floor. It appeared to run the entire length of the passage despite the aisle being dead ended, two-thirds of the way along, by a tall wire-mesh partition. Through the partition John could see something he had only read about. A bright-green, driverless, wheeled cargo platform, laden with boxes, stood parked with its warning lights strobing. Towering above it and riding the rail was a gigantic, robotic arm painted in red. Its hydraulics whined and servo motors whirled and clicked as it carried out precise movements, taking boxes from the wheeled platform and stacking them on the orange shelves with a huge claw-like gripper that John imagined had the power to squeeze a man into two pieces. John’s host stood for a moment as the massive arm flexed its joints and rotated its tapering sections to pick up and stack the last package.

  The empty platform whizzed away from them, between two rows of shelving, flashing its beacons and making electronic chirping sounds to alert all employees of its approach. After placing the last package on the rack, the arm folded itself away into a rest position, and then something even more impressive happened. The robotic arm slid away on its fat rail, followed by the entire wire-mesh partition on its own separate rails towards the distant end of the racks with a cacophony of strobes and warning sounds.

  Minutes later, the guard caught up with the moving partition, which had come to a stop at the end of the aisle, preventing access to the area of the warehouse beyond. A doorway was inset in the center of it, with signs that read: DANGER! DO NOT ENTER! ROBOT OPERATING AREA!

  The host approached a retina scanner next to the door and for a moment John was concerned it wouldn’t work because of the possession. A beam of light flashed over his host’s eyes, followed by a series of low-pitched, countdown beeps. John was getting ready to leave his host when, to his relief, the door clicked open and the guard stepped through and past th
e giant robotic arm, inactive but buzzing with readiness as it sat at the end of its rail.

  With the rows of racks behind them, John and his host had now entered another open area. It was populated solely by green robot platforms like the one John had just seen, all moving in different directions yet avoiding each other with only a minimum reduction in speed. It reminded him of the roundabout surrounding the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which he’d seen at rush hour once during a school field trip. It, too, had looked like some form of barely controlled chaos.

  John regarded a large opening in the wall to the back of the area. It was the mouth of a two-lane tunnel with robotic platforms moving boxed goods in and out of it. He tracked their movements and quickly noticed that they all followed the same predetermined route. Loaded platforms coming out of the tunnel would take goods to the orange-colored racking for dispatch; empty platforms traveled only from orange to yellow racking and they only returned to the tunnel after being loaded with incoming goods that had been stored in the yellow section. The movable partitions and robot arms in each aisle, just like the ones he had seen up close in operation, ensured that the boxed items were stacked and collected without any human intervention. When their work was finished, the protective screens and robotic arms retreated to the end of the aisles, allowing the human workforce on their forklifts to safely access the racks. It was, in addition to the safety aspect, a neat and effective way of preventing prying eyes from seeing what was happening to the packaged goods after the robot platforms had taken them away. The answers lay at the end of that tunnel.

  Luckily for John, his host was heading in that direction. The guard didn’t hesitate to walk straight into the path of the moving platforms coming at him from different directions. In the same way that they avoided each other, the platforms moved around him as if he had some kind of invisible, protective force field. As they did so, their flashing yellow beacons turned red and emitted high-pitched warning sounds. He reached a steel access door set into the wall to one side of the tunnel. On the door were more warning signs: DANGER! DO NOT ENTER! AUTHORIZED MAINTENANCE PERSONNEL ONLY! and POWER DOWN ENTIRE SYSTEM BEFORE ENTRY!

  John’s host walked to the door and offered his eyes to the reader for scanning. The door clicked open, revealing a corridor about twenty yards long. A wire mesh fence on the left separated his host from the robotic units that rushed past, each causing an onslaught of hot, dusty air mixed with vaporized grease.

  They moved the length of the pedestrian stretch of walkway to the end of the tunnel, where it ballooned out into an area where a number of green robot platforms were docked into what John could only assume were charging stations. There were wire-fenced enclosures containing packaged spare parts, and one of the massive, red robotic stacking arms was suspended in a hoist for maintenance. Two guards were present, dressed the same as John’s host except these guys were toting compact automatic weapons like the one he had seen in the pill-packing room back at the club. The guards’ focus was on what stood in the middle of the space, and it clearly needed protecting.

  The steel- and glass-clad behemoths with conveyor belts jutting out at each end looked to John like they might be packing machines. It wasn’t that the four large machines looked strange in themselves. Machinery of some sort or another was to be expected in a warehouse. What was strange was the fact that two of them were elevated to about twelve feet in the air by hydraulic jacks built into the floor. Directly beneath each machine was a large opening in the floor with the top of a shaft visible—large enough for a panel van to disappear into. The robot platforms, emerging from the tunnel, joined one of two slow-moving queues leading to the openings. The automated procedure at each opening was identical: each driverless platform took turns to wait for an infill section of the floor––like an elevator without any walls or ceiling–– to appear from the depths of a shaft. It arrived carrying a robot platform and its cargo upward from what John assumed was a hidden basement, and stopped level with the floor, allowing the waiting and arriving platforms to exchange places, whereupon it immediately descended with its new load. The driverless platforms arriving from the basement headed, as John expected, straight for the tunnel.

  “Get me an empty elevator!” John’s host shouted at one of the guards who stood next to a podium-style table with a laptop on it about six feet away from one of the shafts. The guard nodded and started typing. A moment later, the line of waiting driverless platforms to one of the shafts stopped their slow crawl toward it. As soon as the arriving robot platform vacated the elevator floor, John’s host stepped onto it, signaled to one of the guards, and John and his host started their descent.

  There were lights inset into the walls of the pit, and, as John counted, they went down past six rows of lights, roughly three feet apart, before the pit walls suddenly changed to a steel cage, through which John could see they had now started a slower descent through a cavernous space.

  After traveling down the distance of three floors of a normal building, the elevator passed a free-standing mezzanine level, comprising a line of what looked like modular office units with an external balcony like a walkway running along their length. Ventilation equipment and large ducts ran across the roof of each the units. As the platform descended alongside them, John could see through their glass walls that they were all connected to form what looked like a central laboratory. Inside this inner sanctum there was an abundance of white finishes and furniture contrasting strongly with the blue coats, hygiene hats, and masks of a number of personnel. They sat in front of screens or attended to equipment that included many huge stainless-steel receptacles similar to the brewing vats John had seen in a microbrewery.

  Next to the vats, there was more equipment, and at one end of a bench covered in laboratory hardware, several trays of white powder were carried along a conveyor belt and then automatically tipped into a funnel leading to another set of machines. He caught a glimpse of pills cascading out of these machines before his view of the mezzanine level was cut off by the elevator platform starting to descend again.

  These had to be the same pills John had seen in the beer kegs. In all the movies he had seen, drugs like meth or fentanyl were ‘cooked’ into powder or crystals by people wearing gas masks. This setup was nothing like that, and if it wasn’t for the clandestine location, it could pass for a legitimate pharmaceutical operation.

  What he saw below the lab, as the elevator finally came to rest at the foot of the shaft, finally confirmed what he suspected. They’d arrived in an area dominated by ten slow-moving conveyor belts, some at floor level, some at waist level, all moving in the same direction. Around these belts there must have been around a hundred people working, heads down, not talking to each other, and bizarrely, dressed only in underwear and sandals. Sweat glistened on the sea of old and young bodies that ranged from scrawny to flabby, their faded and worn undergarments only adding to their indignity. When occasionally one of them looked his host’s way, John could see the fear and resignation in their faces. He figured that the dress policy was in place not only to demean and break these poor people but to prevent them from stealing the bags of pills they were handling.

  At one end of what looked like a set of production lines, boxes slid from the arriving robot platforms onto the conveyor belts. As the goods progressed, packaging was removed to reveal various electrical appliances like microwaves, washing machines, dishwashers, Hi-Fi units, and computer servers. Farther along the belts, another group of workers, all Hispanic, pulled the appliances onto side benches where they partly disassembled them to enable the insertion of bags of pills into voids within the casings. Re-assembled and restored in their original packaging, the white goods, now significantly more valuable, made their way back onto waiting robot transport units, which whisked them away, back up to the warehouse.

  Stepping out of the cage-like elevator enclosure, John’s host walked toward an armed guard in black combat gear guarding the entrance to a free-standing steel staircase. The guard
immediately moved aside, allowing the host to climb the stairs leading to the walkway on the mezzanine level John had seen earlier. As the host walked along the front of the glass-walled units, John could now see, up close, the quality of the pill production setup. His host stopped by the section containing the brewing vats that John had seen earlier. He watched a thin man in a lab coat carrying a clipboard and taking notes. Dark skin, glossy black hair, and a thick beard gave him a Middle Eastern appearance. His manner was fussy, like that of a scientist under pressure, and the others in the room regarded him with reverence. John’s host knocked on the glass wall and signaled to him that they should meet on the walkway. The scientist was clearly startled, if not frightened, at the sight of John’s host. He immediately stopped jotting notes on his clipboard and nervously nodded obediently before making his way to the exit.

  The guard kept watching him as he walked in parallel with the man to the nearest door. John could sense a feeling of hate toward the scientist emerging from within the guard. These were exactly the type of feelings that possessing spirits could amplify and manipulate if they wanted to, John realized.

  “My wife and children? Are they safe?” The man pleaded as soon as he stepped through a door and onto the walkway. He had a strong Middle Eastern accent but flawless elocution.