Floor 21- Dark Angel

by Jason Luthor

  And for a time, it was good. My brother became sweet. Caring, even if his aggression and pride never faded. He simply channeled that fire into what he loved. The military, and the theatre. A warrior poet, Yousef became a fighting prodigy at the same time he became known for his skill on the stage. Of course, I also carried the pride of my father, though I was never plagued by it as Yousef was. Still, my pride drove me to become a relentless fighter all my own. And, in place of the arts, I pursued science.

  I studied with my father, whose knowledge of the science behind military weaponry was beyond compare. Perhaps he was never as skilled at researching crop growth or Pocket Space fields, but his intimate acquaintance with military research was never surpassed. Together, he and I imagined a dozen scenarios and the military responses that would be required to meet them. We dove into all the records from the Old World we could find, exploring both Apeiron and Carthaginian databases for knowledge about military weaponry.

  Our research into those old databases is what led us to first create the system that Yousef wears today, the Advanced Reaction Core system. However, it was also how we discovered Apeiron’s military cache network spread throughout the Deadlands. Troves of military equipment from the furthest northern reaches of the city to the southern tips. And that is how the strength of Fort Silence grew so rapidly. From a respectable military outpost to the dominant power of the region, Fort Silence grew as we unlocked more and more cache outposts.

  This was also how my father, secretly, continued to pursue the two weapons Dravic had always desired most. The Dynamis, and the Panzer. Discovering the Dynamis was my father’s crowning achievement, a moment when all of Fort Silence believed, if only for that one moment in time, that we could fight back against the Creep. However, my father continued to pursue the Panzer without letting anyone else know. Not even I. He knew that the one weapon truly capable of fighting the Creep was yet to be uncovered. So, for some time, I toiled alongside him, not realizing that the caches were not our final goal. We spent days and nights together, trying to pry information from computer systems and databases that had long been corrupted in the hope of saving mankind.

  And then came the day that my mother died.

  Dodger’s Recording 18

  It’s past midnight when I see Yasmine walking up to me in the back alley. Even in the low light, her silhouette’s impossible to miss, with those huge tangles of her hair falling down around her head. When she sees me, she stops for a second, checking me out to make sure it’s, well, me. “Tiffany Anne,” she whispers as she reaches out and wraps her arms around me. For a second, she holds onto me before stepping back. “Um, I mean lieutenant. Sorry.”

  “Yasmine,” I whisper back. “Tiff’s fine. I mean, we are friends. Though I’m not going to lie, I do prefer Dodger.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, obviously, Dodger.”

  “Did you have trouble getting here?”

  She huffs at the tangles of hair falling across her face. “No. Well, almost no trouble. The maps are great as long as I’m in the back streets. Getting across the wider roads is still . . . Well, ‘harrowing’ seems like the sort of word you’d use for it.”

  “That bad?”

  “Still lots of patrols on the streets. It’s a big city though. They can’t be everywhere. How are you getting around though?”

  “Underground tunnels. There are secret entrances everywhere around the city. Which, by the way, whenever you talk to the other building leaders, tell them to go over their maps again. I literally didn’t realize that Colonel Martin had laid out a whole way of getting around the city using the underground network. Everyone needs to memorize where the entrances are. It’s the most important part of the plan, got it? When everything goes down, we’re going to need to be able to move people above and below ground. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Got it. Do you actually know when that’s going to be? When we’re going to make a move, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. We move when Jackie moves.”

  “Is she . . . Are you sure she’s alive?”

  “She took a pretty bad shot. I’m sure she’s still recovering.”

  “What if she’s not?”

  “She is.” I look her dead in the eyes. “Do you understand?”

  “I don’t doubt it. But if she wasn’t. What then?”

  There’s this second when she’s looking at me, and I see something I haven’t ever seen in Yasmine’s eyes. Real fear. I struggle to respond, my chest tightening before I shake my head at her. “Then I’d make another plan. Okay? I’m thinking up everything I can right now. Me and Colonel Martin are working on this together.”

  “I believe you. I trust you, Dodger.”

  “Well, I trust you too. That’s why I came out here. I’m guessing you brought the stuff?”

  “Yeah. It’ll take a few minutes to pull it all out of my Pocket Space window and move it to yours though. Wish we could just tune into each other’s frequencies from farther away.”

  “If we could move stuff across the city without needing to be close to each other’s Pocket Space generators, we wouldn’t have any problems moving guns around town to get everyone armed. That’d probably make life a little too easy though.”

  “What’d you need all this tech stuff for, anyway?”

  It makes me frown a second as I look away, my eyes going down the alley for a second. “You know that I think I suck at this leading thing.”

  “I couldn’t have told from your last year of moping.”

  “Shut your gob,” I say while trying to hold back my smile. “I just, I felt like if I am going to lead, then I have to do it my way. I’m not some great general or tactician but . . . but I’m really good with tech, you know?”

  “Yeah, obviously. I mean, you made gauntlets that can swing you through the air from building to building. I’m pretty sure everyone knows just how good you are with gadgets and electronics and stuff.”

  “Well, that’s my point, you know? I’ve been thinking . . . All the weapons we use are old school. Bullets, gas, that kind of thing. Sometimes energy weapons, but the militia doesn’t have a lot of those. All the tech Fort Silence uses, or at least most of it, runs on Pocket Space energy flow.”

  “I’m following you. So, what about Pocket Space energy?”

  “I’m thinking I can use the tech in our repulsion poles to emit bursts that will interrupt those flows. Not forever, but long enough that we could fight back. Just, imagine if we could shut down a street full of those powered armor suits, even if it was only for a minute or two. We’d be able to wreck them.”

  Yasmine looks concerned, but she’s smiling at the same time. “I’ll be honest. I don’t have any idea about how that would work, but if you could get it to work, then we’d probably have a better chance of surviving this whole thing.”

  “I learned a lot about Pocket Space when I was working on the gauntlets with Doc Watson. The tethers in the gauntlets are fired out of Pocket Space, like an endless supply of rope to swing from. Almost endless.”

  “That’s genius.”

  My eyes go wide. “He is a genius. You don’t even understand. I can only hope I’m half as good with tech as he is one day.”

  “Dodger, if this plan works, you’re going to save a lot of lives. No one’s going to care about which one of you is smarter.”

  I chuckle as she’s hauling out equipment to transfer between our Pocket Space windows. “How’s Patel?”

  “He’s got his block ready to move when you give the signal. We’ve been coordinating with other people from our company. People we can trust. This is really scary though. We’re depending on people scattered all across Central to get hundreds of thousands of people moving to the Green Zone when the call goes out.”

  “It’s disorganized now, but once this all starts, I’ll be coordinating it. It’s not like it’s going to all be chaos. We’re just having to keep things quiet for now so Dravic doesn’t pick up on our plans.”

  “Like I said, I trust y
ou. It’s just a scary time to be in the city right now.”

  “Well, I’m the one living out of a subway tunnel, so believe me. I get it.”

  Tommy’s Recording 34

  It’s impossible to tell what time it is when Yousef walks in the door. I just look up from the bench I’m lying on and see him glaring at me. He’s wearing that tight-fitting olive uniform, his closely shaved head forming a silhouette in the light. “You know the rules,” he says as he adjusts the black glove covering his left hand. “You can go on one of two conditions. You tell me where Jackie Coleman went, or you beat me in a fight.”

  “I told you that I don’t know where she went,” I bark back at him as I slide off the bench. “Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “Then you know what you have to do,” he says calmly back to me. “Defeat me.”

  “Do you get some sort of kick out of this?”

  The edge of his lips curve upward just a little at the mention of it. “Actually, I do. Enemies of the purity are enemies of humanity’s future. Of course I enjoy defeating my enemies.”

  “Yousef, what the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing,” he says as walks quickly across the room. “I’m the only person trying to save this world from the monsters that would destroy it. The only person trying to avenge my mother and my sister while the rest of you sell us out to literal monsters.”

  The words are barely out of his mouth before he takes a swing at me. His punch is slow. Purposely slow, like an animal playing with its food. Still, I duck underneath it and swing up at him, only to feel his other hand crack me in the ribs. It doubles me over before he grabs the back of my head and drives me into his knee, my vision going black as I go flying backward, blood streaming out of my nose. Before I’ve tilted back too far, he grabs me behind my head, by my hair, and throws me sideways into the wall. The second I hit, my ear bursts with a ringing as I slide to the floor, my lips dripping blood onto the floor.

  Yousef stares down at me with this cold, blank stare. “Get up.”

  “Why? I can’t . . .” I pause for a second to spit the blood out that’s pooling in my mouth. “I can’t beat you. Especially not with that thing you’ve got strapped to your back.”

  “You’re right,” he says as his golden arm grabs me by the collar and lifts me up. His other arm reels back and punches me right in the face, my head rocketing back when he connects. “You’re completely sure you don’t want to tell me where Jackie is?”

  “I don’t know where she is!” I scream at him, only to feel his fist driving back into my jaw. For a second the world fades to black before my vision comes rushing back in. “Why . . . why are you doing any of this?”

  “You know why. You were there, in the war room, when the councils were killed,” he says as he winds back up and drives his fist into my face again. The black at the edges of my vision close in on me again when he hits. A second later, he twists and sends me flying to the ground, my body rolling along the floor before I feel his foot connecting into my stomach. It sends another shot of blood firing from my mouth as I struggle to stay on my hands and knees. “At best, the leaders of Central were too weak to take the actions necessary to save mankind. At worst, they were betrayers of the species, handing our future over to people like Jackie and Mike. Mike had the strength to tear apart city block after city block. Jackie? She could tear apart armies. But you called them friends.”

  “They . . . they are my . . .” I don’t have the time to finish before his foot connects with me again, sending me rolling onto my side

  “Don’t say it,” he growls as he starts kicking me over and over, his foot driving into me until I feel like my guts are going to explode all over the ground. Finally, he stops, his feet taking him in small circles inside my cell. “You’ve seen what people like them become. I’ve heard the stories about Judge and Sally, but you still want to give our future over to people like them. They’re not the only monsters out there, Thomas. I’ve seen them, seen what they could do. You think Jackie and Mike are the only ones with powers? Are you really so naïve that you think Jackie, of all the people in all the world, is the only person who managed to adapt to the Creep?”

  “She saved us.”

  “She would have killed us in the end!” he screams as he drops to a knee, his hands clutching at my collar again. “Mankind inherited the earth, then lost the earth because it tried to play God. The only solution is for us to erase our mistakes. Remove the cancer. Do you understand? They must all be wiped out. The Angels who play god with our lives, harassing us from the shadows. Every monster that Apeiron created. The Creep, but also its children, like Jackie and Mike. Because if even one of them survives, we risk losing the people we love to those monstrosities.”

  It takes me a long time to open my eyes and stare back at him. When I finally mange it, it’s like I’m staring at him through a halo light. I can make out his eyes though. That one, golden ring in his pupil that keeps spinning as he looks at me. When he finally comes into focus, I manage to get just a few words out. “You know . . . you’re worse than Judge ever was.”

  He shakes his head as he looks at me. “Thank you, Thomas, for proving I was right. You’ve become misguided and lost sight of who the enemy really is. I’ll have to keep coming back until you realize your mistake in judgement.” I’m about to protest when he reaches back. The last thing I see is his golden fist crashing down into my face. In the next instant, I’ve blacked out.

  Personal Recording of Devleena Kumar 06

  “Torres.”

  She throws a look my way, her face looking too small for that giant suit she’s wearing. It just doesn’t look right without a helmet. “Yeah, Sarge?”

  “Is everyone still with me?”

  “Explain.”

  I shrug my suit’s giant shoulders while I slap my rifle to the magnetic plate on my back. “They’re all still going to follow me. They get what’s about to go down.”

  “Oh, that’s what you’re talking about. Look, you don’t have anything to worry about. The Metal Heads have your back, nobody else’s.”

  “Not even Yousef’s.”

  “They didn’t rat on you about Heavy Metal, did they?”

  “No. I guess they didn’t.”

  “What’s up? It’s not like you to be nervous.”

  I’m not going to lie. That does make me smile. “Don’t let the rest of the guys know.”

  “Never. I’m just a little surprised.”

  “I’m asking people to leave their posts. Of course that’s got me nervous. We’re traitors after this.”

  She turns to face me more directly. “Is that all that’s bothering you?”

  “No. No, I guess not. Everything that went down with Roberts . . .”

  Torres nods. “Yeah. That’s tough. We’ve all known each other since we were kids. You remember when we all first met?”

  “How could I forget? My family had been living around Fort Silence for maybe a couple of months. Omar Suliman had helped us and about a hundred other people get settled, then asked for recruits to join the military. Including kids.”

  “Including kids. I’d lived in the area since I was a baby, so things were scary after the fort broke off from Central. But, the old general kept things running. Kept everyone safe. When he started offering a chance to enlist, with all the perks that came along with it, my parents really thought I should get enrolled. The minute I was old enough to, I did.”

  “So, your family wanted the extra food rations too, huh?”

  “And the extra learning. Best scientists north of Central were inside the walls of the fort.”

  “I remember my parents wanted the same thing, too.”

  “And that’s how we met. Training camp. Me, you, everyone who’d eventually become part of the DEC.”

  “Including Roberts.”

  “Including Roberts. So, you’re talking twelve years of living together, learning together, fighting together.”

  I ta
ke in a deep breath. “Only difference was his family’d been military too, fighting under the old general when he was still allied with Central.”

  “And that’s why I’m not surprised he believed in the purity more than almost anyone else. His whole family history was tied up in the idea that Fort Silence is the good guy and anything that disagrees with the general is the bad guy.” She hesitates a second as she looks down at her hand. “The three of us all started our training together. We were all friends. I think I did was the right thing but . . . I’m not proud of it.”

  My eyes go over to hers as I place a giant, armored hand on her shoulder. “He was going to kill the Angel. She hasn’t sent us back any proof of anything yet, but . . .”

  “But we both see what’s happening here in Central.” She looks away, to the group of troopers standing in the distance. “They’ll follow you anywhere if you make the call because they’ve known you almost as long as I have. They’re committed to you more than the general.”

  “And what about you, Torres? You said you ‘think’ you did the right thing. You won’t resent me if I take us deeper into all this mess and get us involved in a rebellion we might not win?”

  “You know, when I shot Roberts, it’s because I’d just seen what the Angel had done for us. Actions, Kali. That’s all I’ve ever respected. You can come down here and bust our asses, but you’ll also do everything you can to make sure we all come back alive.” Her hand flexes a few times as she tries to work through her words. “And if what everyone’s saying about the councils getting killed off . . . If the general really did that . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  She looks up at me. “What do I go back and tell my parents when they ask if I’m proud about what I’m doing? I can’t defend a man who’d just shoot down anyone he disagreed with. Even if that’s the general.”