by Nick Thacker
The problem was that he didn’t have anything close to ‘forever’ to figure this out. It was only a matter of time before the man who had killed Angela Stokes regrouped with whatever remained of the security force, overcame whatever remained of the Chinese force, and then came for them down here.
Or the Chinese force eliminated the security guards, and then came for them down here.
Either way, Colson wasn’t liking the odds.
He turned to the others. “This is going to take awhile if we have to hack in,” he said. “You have a better —“
Reggie and Mrs. E suddenly burst into the room from the stairs, only a few yards away from their location. “Guns up! Get down!” Reggie shouted. He dove behind a the computer terminal Colson was working at and crawled down the row of servers behind it. Mrs. E sprang the other direction, but also crouched behind one of the rows of computers.
“Wha —“
“Shut up and get down!” Reggie yelled again. “They’re coming!”
Colson reacted on instinct, no longer doubting anything this group told him. They had kept him alive so far, and he intended to do his part and stay that way. He fell to the floor, hoping that simply getting lower, whomever was about to come down the stairs would miss him.
But it wasn’t whomever, but whatever.
The drones, two-by-two, flew down the stairs and out onto the level, shooting at anything that moved. Colson’s eyes widened, but his body bolted into action and he crab-walked backwards away from the computer and down his row. He bumped into one of the dead guards and found the man’s weapon, grabbing it with an outstretched hand as he navigated around the fallen soldier.
He had no idea how to check the magazine to see how much ammunition was left, but the gun felt heavy. In movies, that meant the gun was loaded. But he wasn’t sure how much a gun weighed in the first place, so he decided to chance it. He lifted the submachine gun and fired.
Click.
CHAPTER SIXTY-one
The two men who had left the room came back within minutes, each carrying a set of straps and cables that looked like a jumbled mess to Ben’s blurry good eye. He groaned, the noise bouncing through the hard metal walls formed by the rows of racks on the level. His throat hurt, as if being outside in the frigid temperature had given him an immediate cold, but it was the least of his pain. His face was swollen, covered with cuts and bruises, and there was blood pooling on his right pant leg from a wound that was dripping off his chin.
“Mr. Valére will be joining the rest of your group upstairs,” the first man said, “but he has requested that you stay down here, with us.”
Ben tried to focus on what the men were working on, but all he could identify was that they were unwinding and straightening the coils of rope and leather straps.
“Need more rope to tie me down?” Ben said, forming the words as best he could, but hearing most of them tumble out of his numb mouth as just a stream of random syllables.
“I apologize,” the man said, “I can’t understand what you are saying.” He grinned, then slugged Ben across the face, cracking his nose. “Let’s see if that shakes things loose a bit.”
Ben spat as the other man walked behind his chair and starting untying his arms. He felt his wrists and hands fall free, and immediately the stinging bite of paralysis spread down them. He felt like he had slept an entire night with someone sitting on them, and they were refusing to wake.
He groaned again as the man lifted him straight up from the chair by his arms, his shoulders — unfortunately not asleep — feeling the entire burden of the motion. He stood for a moment, trying desperately to keep his head straight, his single open eye still tearing and blurry.
“Mr. Bennett,” the other man said. “I hope you have enjoyed your stay here at our station. In fact, we are excited to offer you an opportunity of a lifetime. Please, this way.”
Ben felt himself propelled forward by the man pushing his dead arms, and he walked next to the guard to the back wall of the level, then turned right. The area was familiar; this was the same spot they had entered the station, via the air duct. They passed the ground they had rappelled down on to and turned right once more at the very corner of the room.
Jonathan Colson’s cabinet.
Ben realized suddenly what they were intending to do with him, and he nearly choked when he saw the open, waiting drawer, the green lights on the outside of it flickering and blinking as it eagerly awaited its captive.
Stay calm, Ben willed himself. Had he tried to escape now, he knew, the guards would easily incapacitate him and possibly knock him out. His legs were stiff, but otherwise fine, but he needed to pretend that they were as sore and useless as the rest of his body. He did his best to examine the outside of the drawer with what little his eye could see.
The guards placed the leather strap around his head, sliding it down over his shoulders as well to bundle his arms against his sides, right above the elbow. They began to cinch it as tightly as they could, and Ben sucked in a huge puff of breath slowly, trying not to call attention to what he was doing. He also flexed his biceps and chest, making himself grow a few inches.
He held the breath in as one guard pulled the strap while the other fed the end to a clasp at his back. It was a perfect way to keep a man from the use of his arms and hands, and unless he could dislocate his shoulders and reach up behind him to unclasp the strap, Ben would be stuck.
“They said they didn’t need one of these for your new friend Colson,” the guard said. “But then again, before our team arrived, the security on the station was a little less than ideal. I’m surprised they got as many as they did into the system.”
The other guard chuckled, but didn’t speak. When they had finished their work, the guard who had worked the strap over Ben’s head kicked him, hard, behind the knees. Ben felt the vertigo of falling backwards, his hands completely useless at his sides, and he hoped the second man was behind him to catch him.
The crack of the back of his skull hitting the solid floor told him everything he needed to know about what the second guard was doing. The guard laughed at him, stepping next to him as Ben mumbled an incomprehensible set of expletives up at the man. The other guard stepped to his left side, and both men began lifting Ben up and over to the awaiting drawer.
Ben felt his blood run cold, and fear overtook him for a moment. He was being placed headfirst into a grave, only one meant to keep him alive forever instead of dead for eternity. He thought of Julie and Reggie and the others, and suddenly remembered the plan. He wriggled his arms a bit, testing the looseness of the leather strap now that he had exhaled. It was certainly looser, but he wasn’t sure if it would be enough to allow him a bit of dexterity in the box. Ben was also a large, thick man, and he wasn’t sure if the drawer itself would be large enough for maneuverability.
Only one way to find out, he thought. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but he certainly wasn’t a fan of small spaces that he was hogtied and thrown into headfirst. He closed his eyes, waiting for the men to finish their job. They were in a hurry, and roughly tossed him into the metal cabinet, sliding him down so his head was on the padded section at the back of the drawer, then one of them reached in and placed the swim cap-looking device on the top of his head.
At first, nothing happened, but one of the men pushed the drawer closed while the other began working the controls on its front.
“Have a nice nap, Benny,” the guard said through the metal wall of his new tomb.
Suddenly an electrifying pain shot through Ben’s body, growing to an intensity that rattled his teeth, then dropping to a gentle throb. There was energy running through his body that wasn’t his own, and he knew the electrodes in the cap must have been switched on by the guards.
A tiny red light through a crack in the ceiling of the drawer was his only light, and it wasn’t enough to see anything useful, especially considering that he had the use of only his left eye.
Okay, what’s next? He thought, trying t
o organize his mind and keep calm. They said this will keep me alive, which means…
The only theoretical way to keep a human being alive in a pseudo-stasis mode, he knew, was by dropping the temperature to just above freezing to slow blood flow, yet keep his internal temperature high enough to prevent death. Then, his bodily needs must be accounted for — food, water, waste disposal —
He felt something bump his side, and he jumped straight up in the air, nearly hitting the ceiling with his broken nose.
What the —
It was some sort of vacuum tube, and he could hear a gentle sucking against his side as the mechanically driven snake prodded him, feeling his sides and arm. It worked its way up his shoulder, reaching his neck.
“Okay, that is enough of that,” he mumbled loudly, twisting his head away from the snake’s open maw.
He understood now the intention of the ‘snake,’ and exactly how the system would keep him in stasis for whatever ungodly amount of time it had in mind, and he was not on board.
Ben writhed violently, trying to dissuade the pliable metal tube from lodging itself down his throat, wondering simultaneously how much time he had before the guards left their post outside the door. They had been in a hurry, no doubt hoping to leave and get to their next assigned objective. They likely wouldn’t hang around any longer than absolutely necessary, and Ben hoped they might even already be on their way out of the level.
The metal tube popped on and off the side of his head, opening up old wounds and barely coagulated scabs from the guards’ earlier attack, and he yelled in pain each time.
“Get… off… of me!” he shouted, finally bringing his head to the side with such force the side of the drawer shuddered and vibrated.
And a bit of dim light snuck in through the newly opened crack at his feet.
I slid it open, he realized. There was no locking mechanism on the drawers, as the people inside were not supposed to be conscious, or at least able to move if they were, and even then the electrode shock, the inexhaustible metal tube snake probing away, and the sheer terror of what was happening was probably more than enough to keep the prisoners sedated.
The crack at his feet wouldn’t get any larger no matter how hard he bucked and smashed his head against the side. But his feet themselves were not bound together, and he could raise them to the top of the drawer, and…
Ben pressed the toes of his boots against the ceiling, knowing that it was not connected to the sliding portion of his prison. He strained, tensing every muscle in his body as he worked against his own body weight to try to open the drawer. He wiggled his shoulders a bit to allow his arms to free themselves from his sides, then bit at the snake as it came back around to his mouth.
Finally, only after a minute of intense effort, did he get the crack to widen to an inch.
Enough to get my toes in between.
He pressed upwards with his legs, squeezing his boots into what little open space existed between the rack and the door of the cabinet.
His shoes moved up and out of the ever-widening crack at the same time the snake found purchase on his lower lip and pushed down, hard, forcing his mouth open.
He screamed in agony as the metal tube pressed down into his throat.
CHAPTER SIXTY-two
Not good.
“Safety, Colson!” Julie shouted. He looked up and saw her motioning with another of the submachine guns, pointing to a spot on the side of the gun.
He nodded, finding the mechanism on his own gun, and flicked it off. He tried again.
A spray of rounds flew up and outward, sprinkling the ceiling of the level with tiny pockmarks. He released the trigger, regrouping internally, the weight and the feel of the gun starting to become a bit more recognizable in his hands. He wasn’t expecting to be a dead shot, but he was hoping for a slight increase in accuracy.
He fired again, this time keeping the gun centered and tightening the pattern of rounds that danced out. He connected with the drone directly above him and sent it careering into one of the server racks. A flare of electrical pops and hisses blew out from the front of the machine it collided with, and two of the rotors on one corner of the quad’s fuselage flew off. The copter tried to recover, but it hit another server and this time crashed on the floor, right next to Colson.
“Good shot, Colson!” Joshua yelled. He felt a surge of energy and excitement from his successful attack, and came up on a knee to try again.
Mrs. E and Reggie were also firing away with pistols, apparently having run out of ammunition before they had even reached the level.
“I am out,” Mrs. E shouted. Colson couldn’t see her a row over through the tightly packed servers, but he thought he heard the clicking sound of an empty magazine.
“Same here,” Reggie yelled.
Julie, Joshua, and Colson still had ammunition, but not much. The soldiers they had stripped the guns from likely were carrying additional rounds, but he wasn’t sure how to find them, where they would be hidden, and he wasn’t about to scramble back toward the other drones to search.
“Three more coming in, 6 o’clock!” Joshua yelled.
Colson turned and saw one of them heading down his row. The other two split left and right in the center of the room and began flying down the rows Reggie and Mrs. E were in.
“I see more, farther down,” Colson said. “They’re — I can’t figure out where they’re coming from.”
“Elevator?”
“No, that’s closed, and the lock’s broken. They can’t open doors, as far as I know.”
“Then there must be another way down. I didn’t think there was anything like that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some hidden stairs or something.”
“Well we can find that after we get out of this mess,” Joshua replied, shooting up at two drones that drifted down a bit.
“Hey,” Reggie called out, “anyone else notice that these things aren’t really attacking?”
Colson had in fact noticed that. Since they had entered the level, firing away, the drones had stopped and were now just hovering a short distance away. With the addition of the drones that had appeared somewhere from the back of the room, the machines were now holding a large, wide circle around Colson and the group.
“They’re guarding the perimeter. Trying to keep us all corralled here,” Reggie said, answering his own question.
Colson knew he was right, but it was the implications of that fact that had him worried.
Why are they corralling us here?
“We are not ‘corralling’ you here,” a voice rang out from the stairwell. The man was old, weak, and leaning on a security guard as he stepped into the room. Colson immediately recognized the other man flanking the older one — it was the man who had murdered his boss, Stokes.
The older man continued. “In fact, I would prefer that you were not here at all. You chose to come here, and my intention is to ensure that you never leave. But I must know first: why? Who sent you here, and why did you come?”
Joshua looked at the man. “Valére. You’re Francis Valére.”
“Who’s that?” Reggie asked.
“The head of Draconis Industries. Well, now the head of the Draconis. Because he killed anyone else who got in his way, and marginalized the board and supporting contributors.”
Valére held up his free hand, then stepped closer to the group assembled in front of him. The sound from the drones nearly drowned out the man’s soft-spoken voice. “I have killed no one,” he said. “And my control of the company was inevitable, and quite necessary.”
“You weren’t powerful enough as it was?” Joshua asked.
Something flashed on the man’s face, and Colson watched in horror as the older man, Valére, grabbed the pistol from the man he was leaning against, stood straight, and marched up to Joshua. He stumbled once but regained his footing, coming to stop directly in front of the man.
“Monsieur Jefferson,” Valére said. “How many times I have whi
spered that name in anger. How many times your family has disappointed me.” He brought the gun to Joshua’s temple. “I have never pulled the trigger before on a weapon. But today, with you, I believe it is ever more fitting for there to be one final first in my life.”
Joshua clenched and unclenched his jaw, looking down at Valére. “You killed my father,” he said.
“I did not,” Valére said. “In fact, he is downstairs at this very moment. Being kept alive by the very system he helped us build. The only thing keeping him alive. You see, Mr. Jefferson, the difference between life and death is not as polarized as we wish. One trigger pull and you ‘die,’ but what really happens at that moment? What really transpires in the mind, just before death?
“You wonder this,” he continued. “You all do. You wish to know. And here — “ he waved his other hand around, motioning toward the racks and rows of servers. “You wonder what goes on in the mind, in the portions that have until now remained undiscovered by science. The moments of first life, then just before death, and certainly after — if there is an ‘after.’ You wonder this, yes?”
“I don’t really care what happens, Valére,” Joshua said, “but I want you to experience it.”
Valére smiled. “And I will. I most certainly will experience the throes of death, and then the long, endless expanse of quiet. But again,” he pressed the gun harder against Joshua’s head. “I want to know why you are here, Mr. Jefferson. How it was found, and who sent you.”
He turned to the guard behind him, the one he had used as a crutch, and the man sprang into action. He walked over to the computer terminal, seemingly noticing for the first time the three dead soldiers Colson and the others had attacked, and pushed one of them out of the way. He opened a large drawer just beneath the terminal and reached inside. He withdrew a helmet, attached to a winding set of cables, from the drawer.
