by Aman Gupta
He stood outside looking at them, through the window, eating their takeaway food. They were happy, smiling and joking around. He decided not to go in, and drove out of Morrow.
Driving close to 200 miles due west, he reached Clarence Penitentiary in the morning. Sam had already been processed in, but wasn’t expecting any visitors. Vik went inside the prison to visit Sam.
The guards brought Sam, dressed in orange jumpsuit, sitting across Vik, separated by a glass wall.
Vik picked up the phone, but Sam didn’t pick up hers. She kept starting at him, in rage.
“Pick up the phone,” said Vik.
Sam picked up the phone after a minute and said, “What?”
“How are you?” asked Vik.
“Splendid. Orange’s my favorite color,” said Sam.
“How’s your roommate?” asked Vik.
“She looks like a serial killer,” said Sam.
Vik attempted to make more small talk but Sam wasn’t in the mood.
“Why?” asked Sam.
“You know why,” said Vik.
“I don’t. I helped you in West Gate. I helped you in New Bay. Then I helped you in Atlantis,” said Sam. “Yet, you sold me out.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m one of them,” said Vik.
“One of who?” asked Sam.
“Idiots you have conned in your life,” said Vik.
“I don’t understand,” said Sam, before being interrupted.
“I checked the computer, Sam. The one at the hospital in West Gate,” said Vik.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Sam.
“You installed Night Sparrow in their system, to deactivate the cameras. I saw the files. Only see them if you know about them, isn’t that how you used to describe it?” said Vik.
Sam looked straight at Vik, who was looking at her. After a few seconds, she smiled with pride.
“Why didn’t you say anything at the time?” asked Sam.
“Like you said, I needed your help, but I didn’t realize that you were in on it until later,” said Vik.
“When?” asked Sam.
“When I realized you weren’t really a prisoner at Atlantis. You know what they say, appearances can be deceiving. Until they aren’t,” said Vik.
“I didn’t know about the girls, if that makes it any better,” said Sam.
“Liar,” said Vik. “There was no client, was there? All you.”
Sam smirked.
“Is that why I’m in here?” asked Sam.
“One of the reasons, yes,” said Vik. “What was in the laptops?”
“Something related to Sierra. No idea what that is. But maybe they were just a bait set for you. You got caught in the trap,” said Sam.
“What’s Sierra, Sam?” asked Vik.
“No idea. Maybe a project in Atlantis. It doesn’t matter now, does it?” said Sam.
“Oh, and I don’t feel trapped. You, on the other hand,” said Vik.
“Why here? You could’ve sent me to Stanton. Don’t pretend you don’t know what this place does to people like me,” said Sam.
“You’ll survive. You’re hard as a stone. It’s in your blood. You just haven’t realized that. Once you figure that out, you’ll rule in here,” said Vik.
“I never should’ve covered your tracks. I wonder if you could’ve survived a place like this,” said Sam.
Vik put down the phone. Sam knocked on the glass, and told him to pick it up again.
“Will I ever see you again?” asked Sam.
“If it’s meant to be, in the grand scheme of things, yes,” said Vik.
“What am I supposed to do here?” said Sam.
“Make friends. Who knows, maybe you’ll find someone interesting to put things into perspective. Isn’t that what prisons are about?” said Vik.
“I gave your friends the access codes to your precious little cloud,” retaliated Sam.
“I know. They aren’t exactly good at covering their tracks,” said Vik. “And I set up the entire infrastructure at Morrow, so I know who’s accessing what, if I want to.”
“Did you check it out? It’s some compelling stuff. So much research. Even found a town as dead as Old River in the files. What weird woman, huh?” said Sam.
“Not much,” said Vik. “I guess Emma, Eric and Joey would be doing it for me.”
“Speaking of the red. Didn’t she introduce herself as Walker?” said Sam.
Vik stared at Sam. Neither of them blinked. After a few seconds, Sam grinned again.
“Does she know about Hattie?” asked Sam.
“No,” said Vik.
“Keeping so many secrets and yet you couldn’t keep mine. You just had to throw me in here. Makes me wonder why,” said Sam.
“Take care, Sam,” said Vik.
“If anything happens to me, then you got another death on your conscience. Knowing that you could’ve done something to stop it. Just like before,” said Sam.
She pretended to be serious, but was visibly amused while taunting Vik.
Vik got upset, but somehow confined his emotions.
“If it makes you feel any better, you’ll probably die last in our group,” said Vik.
Sam and Vik got up simultaneously.
Sam blew a kiss, grinning. Vik waved his fingers, smiling, while Sam was being taken away.
He went back towards Morrow, and went to his home. He saw that a vehicle that he didn’t recognize was parked near his house. He tried to get a better look but limited street lights at 8 PM wasn’t doing him much favor. He went to the precinct, hoping that everyone would be long gone, parking his car many blocks away. He ran into Adam, as he was leaving. They had a quick chat, and Vik wished him luck. Adam asked if he could assist Vik with whatever’s going on with him. Vik just smiled and told him to take care of the town, and use whatever he’s learnt from Vik for the greater good.
Vik went inside his lab. There was a reason that the mining company had setup their headquarters at this location. Beneath the building, almost ten feet below the surface, was the door to an entire maze of tunnels spread across the city. During the day, the tunnels would be well lit, thanks to the strategically placed openings near the pavements, as well as the drains, both of which also solved the problem of fresh oxygen for the excavators. Most of them were neither used nor completed before the company had to abandon their work in the nearby area. Vik himself had only discovered only three of those tunnel networks. One of them led to the cemetery. One led to Nucleus. The last one led to an abandoned house, which Vik had made his home. They all met at a central hub underneath the square.
The central hub was a gigantic room, almost 50 feet long and wide. Vik could find hundreds of tunnels that led to and from the central hub, but would often get lost in the maze while finding an exit route. He found the one at Nucleus, while he was setting up underground cables for communication. He tried hard to protect this secret from Anthony. The last thing he wanted at that time, was to give a way for Anthony to disappear.
Vik started moving the table to open the secret cupboard. Eric was sitting in his office next door. On hearing the commotion, he put down the information that Emma had printed from Vik’s server, came out and entered Vik’s lab. Vik had closed the secret closet, few seconds ago.
Eric looked under the table but saw the closet door was closed. Vik went down the incline and entered the secret room. Vik pressed his right hand on the scanner. This time, the wall on the left moved as well as the front one. The screen read, ‘Access Granted: Admin’. He looked inside the front room and saw that his cache of weapons had already been cleared out by Eric and the rest. He went into the tunnel on the left. It closed behind him.
Vik took out a torch and travelled through the maze. He headed for the Central Hub under the Square. He had imagined that room as a personal surveillance center and a temporary housing. However, it had become something more in the past year. Anthony Arnold had been secretly collecting, creating and hoardi
ng sophisticated, technology weapons as small as a pen and as big as a water bottle. Most of them were invented during his tenure at Verati. Vik was secretly stealing them from the storage at Nucleus. He hadn’t seen half of them in his life before, and didn’t know how to use them. He knew one though, the one which Victor Daulton referred to as ‘Liquid Death’.
Vik began by disrupting further access to his private cloud, to anyone but himself. He spent the next two days researching all 76 types of weapons that he had stolen from Anthony. The night that Anthony died, Vik had made sure that he transported them out of Nucleus, before the police got there, including Anthony’s private safe. Since someone had already trashed the place, Vik was able to access the main storage by destroying the entrance to the secret room inside Anthony’s office. Some of the weapons were incomplete as per the schematic diagrams found in Anthony’s notes. Some were too lethal to be tried anywhere within hundred mile radius of civilian population. He had found twelve different weapons, which when used cohesively, could bring Atlantis and its army to their knees, as well as help in counter-surveillance measures.
He spent another day researching the archives of Atlantis found in the data, specifically looking for some sort of underground network, be it sewage pipes, water pipelines or any other pipelines wide enough to fit a man that originated or terminated outside the boundary wall of Atlantis. He found something that was so much better.
Most of the research archives were locked by a password, which Vik couldn’t crack via random guesses. Only basic or incomplete research papers were accessible, which weren’t worth anything as far as Vik understood by studying them. Most of them were farfetched hypothesis, without any scientific backing.
He prepared his bag and left at midnight. As soon as he got to the wall of the secret tunnel, he heard Emma, Eric and Joey talking on the other side.
They were talking about rebuilding the entire weapons cache slowly, for future. Vik was forced to wait for them to leave the room as well as the precinct. He didn’t want anyone to follow him to Atlantis.
After an hour, he came out of the tunnel into the secret room. He went up towards his lab on all fours, wearing his back pack. As he was sneaking out of the precinct, Eric stopped him near the stairs.
“Few days ago, when I heard someone, that was you, wasn’t it?” asked Eric.
“How would I know what you’ve been hearing?” said Vik.
“Where were you hiding?” asked Eric. “Got another secret room?”
“For a police station, it’s actually easier to break in. I came here few hours ago, while you were busy doing god knows what,” said Vik.
“Okay. Where are you going?” asked Eric.
“Hopefully, where I belong,” said Vik.
“I’ve known you for a long time. That look on your face, that’s terror. What are you afraid of?” asked Eric.
“That I might not like the place where I belong,” said Vik.
“Let me come with you. Just me. No one else has to know,” said Eric.
“They’ll come to look for you. I can’t take that risk. For you. For them,” said Vik.
“I can take care of myself,” said Eric. “I survived you, didn’t I?”
“This is different,” said Vik.
“Not to me,” said Eric.
“People in this town need someone like you,” said Vik.
“Then I better come back alive,” said Eric.
“I’ve come a long way for this. It has been my mission for too many years. If I’ll have to choose between you and my mission, I’ll choose my mission. You get that, right?” asked Vik.
“I know you’ve felt alone for so many years. I might’ve played a part in that. Definitely played a part in that. But at this moment, you’re not alone. If it helps you sleep at night, then know that I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing this because Sarah and Katie deserved better than the hand they were dealt. This time, the house can’t win,” said Eric.
“Blackjack jokes? Are you alright? But, okay. You want to stay around for saying goodbyes?” asked Vik.
“Never been good at them,” said Eric. “I’ll just leave a note for them. From both of us.”
Vik brought around his car, while Eric went to his office to write a note. They left towards Atlantis via Old River.
“What did you write?” asked Vik in the car.
“Not much. Just my resignation and that if I don’t come back alive, you’re responsible,” said Eric.
“As if anyone else can be responsible,” smiled Vik.
“Said your goodbyes too,” said Eric. “Want to hear?”
“It might be the last thing I’ve said to them, so sure, why not,” said Vik.
“Now I feel bad for not writing anything with your name on it,” said Eric.
“I suppose silence is appropriate as well,” said Vik, after a few seconds of pause.
They talked about the plan, from the moment they manage to enter Atlantis to their safe words if they ever get caught or were in immediate danger. Vik told him that he might be able to get Eric out but Eric would have to leave, no questions asked. Eric didn’t disagree.
Eric asked Vik about his history with Morgan, which he had overheard earlier. Initially, Vik tried to brush it off as his past, but Eric insisted. Vik told him that he met Morgan around a year after Sarah died. Vik was chasing the ghosts of Sarah’s enemies, when he ran into Morgan.
“Morgan used to work for Verati and handle their complications. Anthony. Victor. Anyone who Verati considered important. For a while, he was shadowing me and Sarah as well, he told me. After Verati collapsed, he became a gun for hire. He helped me track down the man who was the previous owner of the gun which Jenna had used. We learnt he had sold the gun to a third party who had given it to Jenna. I hoped that it would lead me to Jenna and her accomplices. When we arrived, we saw that the guy was a black market arms dealer. Morgan said that I lacked the strength and callousness to do what was necessary. He kept yelling that my training will never be complete without it. I had never intentionally killed anyone before. So he handed me the gun, tied the guy’s family, his wife and two teen daughters, in front of his eyes, and told me to shoot the guy or he’ll kill the family. The guy pleaded with me to kill him. But I couldn’t kill someone in cold blood. So I waited for a few extra seconds. Morgan looked at me, and shot the younger daughter. I shot the guy as he turned around to grab his daughter. The bullet pierced his body and hit his wife in the neck. Morgan laughed and congratulated me for ‘killing two idiots with one bullet’. The elder daughter fell to the ground, holding the bodies of her family. Morgan went outside, and told me to clean up in the next five minutes or he’ll kill her too. There I stood, cleaning the blood on my shoes, removing the prints and setting up the scene to look like invasion. The daughter just kept looking at me. As I started to leave, she grabbed my weapon. She said something, and shot herself on the side of her head,” said Vik.
“What did she say?” asked Eric.
“Congratulations, your training is complete,” said Vik, with a hint of tears in his eyes.
“I spent the entire ride looking at my hand soaked in their blood. Morgan told me that I did well, and I was ready. He said it was Christmas and played a song on the radio. The same song that Katie and Sarah sang in one of their recitals at school. And here I was, tarnishing their memory for a revenge they didn’t ask for,” completed Vik.
“What happened after that?” asked Eric.
“I got out the next day,” said Vik. “I could’ve killed him. But I wasn’t ready to kill anyone again then.”
“How about now?” asked Eric.
Vik stayed silent. Eric never expected an answer either.
They drove past Old River. Eric admired how silent this town was, at night. Vik loved it too.
They reached the south side of Atlantis in a hazy atmosphere. They ditched their car three miles from the gate. Vik had made a copy of the schematics. He reviewed it with Eric from time to time, to gau
ge their direction based on the points marked in the blueprints. They needed to go couple of miles in the south west direction, deep into the woods. They walked for over a mile, where the forest ended and they entered a huge field of seven feet high dense green bushes.
“What are we looking for?” asked Eric.
“An entrance,” said Vik.
“Entrance to what? Freeway?” laughed Eric.
“Something like that,” said Vik.
Eric grabbed Vik’s hand to stop him.
“Explain,” said Eric.
Vik put the schematic on the ground, and took out another one from his bag. He put it on top of the one on the ground, and flattened it out.
“This is a scan that was uploaded separately on the server. What do you see?” asked Vik, as they sat down.
“Each of these lines are supposed to be 15 feet wide, around 30 feet below the surface, as per these scales on the side. Wait, is that a road network?” asked Eric.
“Yes. An underground road network, connecting all the buildings in Atlantis. But look here at the corner. That’s Olivia’s handwriting, I’d recognize it anywhere. See that date?” said Vik.
“That’s like four months ago,” said Eric.
“Yes. And just below that, she’s written ‘90%. A for 12m’. That’s how she used to mark her projects at Verati too. That means 90% completed or successful, Awaiting results or abandoned for 12 months,” said Vik.
“See these color markings. Some are marked in green, some are red. Maybe it’s not completed yet,” said Eric.
“We don’t need it to be,” said Vik.
“We just need to get us somewhere inside Atlantis,” smiled Eric.
“Exactly,” said Vik.
“Why would they need an underground road network for Atlantis?” asked Eric.
“I don’t think it’s just for Atlantis. Whatever they are planning, surely they had a bigger plan than commandeering a small town in a smaller county, that’s buried in the middle of nowhere,” said Vik. “But that’s for another day.”
“Looks that way. So how far is the entrance?” asked Eric.