The Perfect Soldier

by B D Grant

  “Back this way,” Flea calls, sounding much closer. I turn around and see that he’s strolling towards me slowing as I face him. I pace my steps bringing a knee up to my chest with each step similar to what the woman had done earlier to stretch my hamstrings. It’s enough that Flea stops walking toward me as the woman passes him exchanging nods with him, and it gives me time to process what I saw between the buildings.

  The skyscraper is connected to the building I am on. It’s not entire levels that connect just what looked like random corridors stretching between the buildings on more than one floor. The corridors between the buildings weren’t windowed walkways. They were completely closed off from being able to see in or out. It explains why parts of some of the corridors I walked through didn’t have any doors when it felt like we should have ran out of building to walk through.

  I think back to what Sidney had showed us in the group connection and why I hadn’t noticed on the two buildings connecting. There was fencing blocking the views on either side of the shorter building while keeping anyone from accessing the breezeways. The fencing consists of some kind of welded steel panels; one panel stacked on top of a second, the height of which making it impossible for even the tallest person to see over. The people who worked or lived in the buildings across the street would have to have noticed the beautiful skyscraper that reflects the skyline over the thousands of windows that run top to bottom is linked to the mediocre, and much shorter, building next to it. Would no one question such an unusual coupling?

  “Tricky,” I say to myself. It doesn’t make sense, and yet it does. If I had any doubt about these people being Rogues it’s gone now. Rogues had constructed an entire underground facility below a school full of children, why wouldn’t they take two buildings in close proximity and link them to allow for triple the space.

  I stop on the track when I get next to Flea. He and I wait in silence as the woman finishes her second lap. I glance over at the skyscraper as we wait wondering if I’d be able to tell if anyone were watching us from any of the windows facing this rooftop. As the sun gets higher in the sky, the sunlight reflecting in the windows hurts my eyes just looking in their direction.

  As I line up next to the woman for what I hope is my last run of the day, a thought strikes me. With this kind of square footage, they could be housing a whole lot more than just Rogues who got away from the raid. Could the kidnapped Seraphim from the hospital be here too? Could they have the captives from the basement who were evacuated in the early morning hours before the raid?

  With the drop of Flea’s hand, we take off. My legs propel me; I can’t stop thinking about the captives, my friends. Uncle Will had managed to get a couple of the patients back but it was a willingly hand-over; we hadn’t actually saved them. This woman running next to me could easily be one of the Rogues who took them.

  I glance over at her at the expense of my speed, and she breaks out ahead of me. I lean in.

  I manage to catch up and try to push past her. I catch a faint snorting noise from her as I push forward like she were saying, ‘as if’ without forming the words and then increases her stride to match mine. I give it everything I’ve got, but she matches my pace. It doesn’t even look like she’s trying. For this race, Flea’s marked the finish line by bringing a chair from the sitting area over to the side of the track. As we round the curve of the track I see him already standing by the chair looking bored as he watches us crossing his arms over his chest.

  I can fix that.

  She leans her head forward as we get near the chair. I veer in, elbowing her in the shoulder. It throws her off balance. Flea’s face comes to life as he sees what I’m doing. His arms fly up in a useless attempt to help her as she stumbles forward. I finish the run well ahead of her. I turn back to see Flea helping her up from where she fell. He doesn’t look happy.

  I throw my hands up victoriously, catching my breath.

  “Good job,” the woman says, still hunched over. “That’s the only way you could have won.”

  “I thought it wasn’t a race,” I say breathlessly, keeping my arms elevated above my head to help regulate my breathing.

  She straightens letting go of Flea’s hand. Her knees are scuffed but there’s no blood. “Then why’d you shove me?”

  I drop my hands to my hips. She deserves far worse for working for people known for the death and destruction they leave in their wake. “You wanted me to give it my all.”

  She looks over at Flea, impressed. “Kid’s got a chip on her shoulder,” she tells him with a grin.

  Her playfulness adds to my growing anger. “Well, my dad was nearly killed by you people. You tortured him.”

  She looks to Flea. “Did you hurt her father?” she asks with an edge to her voice like she might have more to say if he admits to hurting my dad.

  He shakes his head.

  She turns back to me. “Well, me neither.” She rubs her shoulder where my elbow made contact a bit too dramatically for my liking.

  “I didn’t mean you two specifically. Rogues took him and tortured him in the underground facility that you people used to kill anyone who opposed you.”

  She shrugs, dismissive. “Then you’re mad at those people, not me.”

  I pinch my lips shut. I take a deep breath and close my eyes. I focus on the breeze cooling my cheeks before opening my eyes again. “Does this mean that we have to run again?”

  She stares at me a minute, brushing the dirt off her hands. “Nah, she’s good,” she says to Flea. “I’ll turn in my report for you to give the big guy by tonight.”

  There’s banging on my door early the next morning. It rouses me out of deep sleep. The pounding continued until I sat up in bed, at which time Flea walked in wearing a black ensemble, long sleeves and cargo pants, a handgun in its holder on the right side of his pant’s waistband. There was no point for him to knock like he did since the door was locked from the outside, but when he pauses upon seeing me still in bed I’m guessing his knocking was so that he didn’t have to get me out of bed.

  “Hurry up,” he had said, before heading back out into the hallway.

  The room I was given for the night looks a lot like a hotel room. I was allowed to take a shower in the attached bathroom, which was nice, but after I was dressed, Flea came in and locked the bathroom door with an unnecessarily large padlock so that I couldn’t go back freely like maybe it was a fear that I would drown myself in the toilet or something.

  I had asked him, “What if I have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night?”

  “Wait until morning.”

  Flea says nothing when I emerge from the room. He shuts the door checking to make sure it locks and then heads down the hall expecting me to follow.

  “What are we doing today?” I finally ask as his finger plugs away at the keypad next to the elevator.

  “Hydrate and nutrients.”

  “And after breakfast?”

  “We wait for instructions.”

  He refuses to talk to me once we’ve entered the cafeteria. There’s seating for less than fifty and a bar full of breakfast food that runs along the back of the cafeteria and wraps around to the right side of the cafeteria. There is no way a cafeteria this small would be connected to the industrial sized kitchen Gradney and I had been in when we ate that jambalaya, but since my time on the roof I know that Flea and I may not even be in the same building now.

  It’s pretty empty, with only a few early risers. Most are huddled around the omelet station on the left side of the bar. They keep their backs to us as we walk in, too busy constructing their breakfast. A man and woman are standing at the back of the room facing us behind the bar both wearing black aprons over white, long sleeve shirts. The man standing quietly on the left side of the bar watching those making omelets while the woman is on the far right staring off into space. A man wearing slacks and a button down shirt is sitting at the table near the part of the bar that runs down the right side of the cafeteria. He’s drinki
ng a coffee and reading what looks like the morning’s paper. I grab a bowl, a tiny box of cereal, and a small carton containing one cup of whole milk from the bar closest to the man reading the newspaper, glad that at least I’m continuing to be allowed food. After my incident with the woman on the roof, I’d gotten nervous.

  Flea makes himself a bowl of oatmeal as I gather my cereal at the next breakfast station in front of the woman who perks up when he walks over. We eat breakfast silently, interrupted only by the occasional chuckle coming from the man with the paper who we sit one table over from. Other than that, my chewing on the crunchy pieces of cereal is the noisiest it gets, even the people from the omelet station who sit together don’t speak. They all seem to have somewhere to go, eating quickly and then hurrying off; all except for us and the man with the newspaper.

  We are halfway done with our food when Flea quickly drops his spoon midway to his mouth. He rises from his chair, and for a moment, I think he’s about to attack me by the glare he gives me. He grabs my bowl right out from under my hand.

  “Hey!” The man who had been enjoying whatever it was he was reading is suddenly folding his paper up hastily while downing the remainder of his coffee.

  “Kian’s here. We have to go,” Flea tells me, stacking his bowl on top of mine.

  “What?” Of course, he ignores me.

  The man with the newspaper pops up from his seat looking in our direction. “That bird got them here fast,” he says to Flea. He returns the newspaper to the woman behind the bar. As we’re walking out I turn back to see her stashing the newspaper under the bar. She must only take it out for certain Seraphim.

  I follow close behind Flea as we turn down a windowless corridor our footsteps sounding hollow as we walk down it. There are no doors besides the one on either end of the hall.

  I look up at the back of Flea’s head. “We’re between buildings, aren’t we?” It’s no surprise when he doesn’t respond, so I move to the wall closest to me and give it a firm tap with my knuckles. The thump it makes is equally hollow to the sound that our footsteps are making. Yup, he’s taking me to a different building.

  I was on an elevated walkway only one other time that I can remember. It was three years ago at the hospital when Jake got his tonsils taken out. There were complications, excessive blood loss or something like that, so he had to stay overnight for observation. Mom and I had dropped off a bag for Aunt Beth since Uncle Chuck was out of town for work. The walkway we’d taken between the parking garage and the hospital had see-through paneling on each side of the walkway so we could see the people and cars outside. It was cool to see the daily grind from that viewpoint. It made me feel powerful, simply being up so high. This walkway, though, makes me feel like a caged rat.

  I try to distract myself from the growing claustrophobia. “Who’s Kian?” I ask, moving away from the walls.

  “The CEO,” he says, looking straight ahead as a man crosses our path several feet ahead of Flea where a hallway intersects ours. The man is pulling a navy blue blazer up his arms and over his shoulders as he’s walking. He gives Flea a double. He slows down, eyes widening to glance around him. He sees me and almost immediately loses whatever interest he’d just had in us continuing on his path.

  “What does the CEO want with me?”

  “Not my business,” Flea says coolly, picking up his pace.

  We get to an elevator in what feels like should be the middle of the building, but it’s disorienting roaming from hall to hall with Flea not taking me down any that have windows. This elevator requires both a card and a keypad entry. When the doors open, it is empty. A creeping feeling begins to pull at my stomach as I step on. He could be taking me to be tortured, and there’s nothing I can do to stop him. I don’t doubt that Flea could snap my neck in an instant if I tried to fight back.

  My anxiety slowly subsides when the elevator doors opens to yet another hallway and the sound of friendly chatter reaches us. Surely torture wouldn’t take place in such a boisterous environment.

  He checks to make sure I’m following him as he steps out of the elevator. I focus on the sounds of people enjoying themselves somewhere close by as I fall in step behind Flea as he takes a right. Two Dyna are talking in the hallway as we emerge. Flea nods at the one facing us. “Mase.”

  The Dyna’s posture tightens, his eyes locking onto Flea’s face. “Flea.”

  Mase looks to be close to my age. He isn’t too bad on the eyes either. His long sleeve shirt identical to Flea’s pulls across his biceps and shoulders with a strong jawline and sharp eyes that show no interest in me.

  We pass Mase and a taller Dyna who he was talking with, and two sets of footsteps fall in line behind me. I look back over my right shoulder, and there is Mase, eyes straight ahead as he walks behind me, as if I’m not there. I turn back, feeling very certain that, despite his good looks, I am not going to like him anymore than I like Flea. Mase and the other Dyna walk in sync behind me like we’re in some sort of a marching band. I attempt to replicate what I’ve seen in marching bands taking each step with knees high, but I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who finds it funny. I go back to walking normally.

  I resolve to staring straight ahead like my escorts. The farther we go, the more adults I see, certainly a change from some of the other floors. Some of them are younger, closer to my age like Mase but most are adults.

  I get some sideways, nasty looks from the few who bother to see who it is being escorted by three Dynamar. I don’t waste my breath trying to speak to them.

  We come up to a large, open lobby that has been converted into a living area complete with couches surrounding the multiple flat screen televisions lining the left and right sides of the room. Each television has two to three couches facing it with different colored rugs between the couches and televisions. Black soundproofing squares are mounted to the wall running from ceiling to floor between the televisions on both sides of the room. It’s a mix of brown and black leather couches. None of them look like they had been cheap to purchase, but only some of them look brand new while the armrests on others have been so worn from heavy use that the patches of rubbed away leather stick out like a sore thumb in an otherwise up to date space.

  There seems to be an invisible divide in the room where adults are seated on the couches on the left and kids and teens are on the right. More of the televisions on the right have video games playing with split screen optics. Some of the younger gamers are sitting on the rugs closer to the televisions while others are on the couches directly in front of the screens with their friends, or kids waiting their turn to play, seated on the other couches watching the game. There are gaming consoles on the left side as well, but only one is being used. The adults playing Mario Cart catch my attention when the woman, in her late fifties, holding a wireless controller grabs at her opponent’s controller seated next to her. He clutches it to his chest continuing to press to play shouting, “Cheater! She cheating,” as the woman cracks up wildly.

  Looking away from them, I spot the young couple who I’d caught making out in the kitchen. They’re sitting close together on one of the couches on the far right of the room, watching sports highlights. Jessica lays her head back on the top of the couch looking rather bored. Her eyes flick over in our direction as Flea, walking in the middle of the room ahead of me, passes the first set of televisions. Then, our eyes meet, and hers widen. She sits up, nudging the guy next to her. He squints in my direction for a second, and then slowly, he rises from the couch.

  As we cross the room, I realize that he isn’t actually gawking at me, but rather behind me.

  In disbelief, his mouth opens. “Kelly?”

  At first, I think I’ve misheard. I know he must be talking about someone else, but I can’t help making the connection. I slow to a halt, my stomach tightening. The Dynas behind me have no choice but to stop also. I turn around to face the only Dynamar I didn’t paid any attention to, the one standing next to Mase.

  My Kelly doesn�
��t have hair that is trimmed so close to his scalp that you can barely make out the auburn color in it. My Kelly doesn’t have big freckles splattered across his nose, cheeks, and forehead like he has spent too much time in the sun. My Kelly is muscular like this Dyna, but not like this; he isn’t so ripped that you can see the veins running down his neck and arms. My Kelly would never dress in the same dark wardrobe that all of the Dynamar here are wearing.

  This guy does have burn scars on the same arm as Kelly, but they’re barely visible. Kelly’s were still purple and red when I saw him last. This Dyna’s expression is hard, completely void of the warmth my Kelly always carried. A muscle in his jaw contracts as I continue to stare up at him.

  Peeved over my impromptu stop, Mase gets in my face. “Did Flea tell you to stop?” he asks. There’s no point in answering.

  Next to us, Jessica pulls her boyfriend back onto the couch. She turns back to the television, but her boyfriend keeps watching Kelly over his shoulder.

  “I thought I saw someone I knew,” I tell Mase, looking at his partner out of the corner of my eye.

  “You don’t stop unless we tell you to do so.” He goes to grab my arm, but his hand is blocked by the intimidating Kelly look-alike standing next to him.

  He looks down his tanned, freckled nose at me. “Shall we?” he asks. There is no trace of humor in this Kelly’s eyes. On his hip is a handgun strapped in its holder attached to his belt. If they’ve given him a gun and he hasn’t used it to get out here than what chance do I have?

  Feeling defeated, I turn and continue after Flea, who has continued forward as if there was no disruption. The Dyna’s voice, with his soft southern accent though stiff from the lack of feeling, is undeniably Kelly’s.

  As I walk past the couch, my head held lower than before, Jessica leans in to tell her boyfriend, “He’s an Elite, Mick.” I barely hear her above the din of the room.