by Logan Jacobs
“Just bodies in the chopper,” I reported. “Looks like a few men and a woman, but it’s hard to tell with all the wreckage.”
I didn’t know if the Skalle Furia had seen the pilot’s body fall out of the helicopter, or if he’d just been obliterated entirely by the rocket-propelled grenade that had hit the helicopter, or how they were trying to track our progress through the building, but I knew that if I reported a specific number of bodies, and it didn’t match up with the Skalle body count, it would blow our cover one way or the other. The Skalle would either assume that one of us had escaped the helicopter crash, or they’d suspect that we’d managed to blend in with them.
The Skalle in front of me nodded. “Noted,” he reported. He held a walkie-talkie to his mouth. “We have body confirmation. Repeat, we have body confirmation.” He holstered the walkie-talkie and turned to address the other Skalle. “Go in and secure the room. Let’s see if we can identify the bodies. Remember, one of them could still be hiding in there.”
I led Thomas and Olivia up the stairs as more Skalle tramped into the room. Even if the Skalle Furia figured out the lie in the next few seconds, we’d still be lost among the other identically dressed and masked Skalle Furia. Now the only thing we had to do was make it to the thirty-fifth floor.
Chapter Fifteen
The helicopter had crashed on the twenty-eighth floor. It was just two floors below the Christmas party in Die Hard. I was sort of tempted to try to take a quick peek in the window of the 30th floor, but I’d found out on Reddit a few years ago that it was the only scene not filmed in the actual building.
Our progress up the stairs was a lot faster this time, even though I kept the pace casual so we wouldn’t arouse any suspicion from the other Skalle. Hurrying meant there was something to hurry to.
A few Skalle soldiers congregated on each landing and held their guns at the ready. Their eyes flicked back and forth from the window in the doors to their stairwells above and below, but they stayed at their positions. A few more Skalle prowled up and down each flight of stairs. They stayed close to the rails in order to keep a watch on the center of the stairwells. More Skalle soldiers leaned or sat against the walls, hands on their guns but otherwise more relaxed than their comrades on patrol.
It was easy for us to integrate into the parade of Skalle who patrolled the stairwells. The soldiers on the landing nodded at us as we passed by. A team of three Skalle going up a few stairwells didn’t seem out of place, and I guessed that they’d had small teams traveling up and down floors for most of the time that they’d been able to occupy the building.
We finally rounded the thirty-fourth floor landing and started up the last stairwell to the thirty-fifth. The open stairwell cut off and was replaced with a blank white wall.
My mouth went a little dry with excitement. That was where they were holding the president’s daughter, and I was finally going to get to walk on the same floor as Bruce Willis had. At least, I was going to get to rescue the President’s daughter in John McClane style if we didn’t arouse any suspicion from the other Skalle while trying to get in.
We climbed up to the landing, and I gave the Skalle in front of me a casual nod and turned to face the door. I grasped the handle and pushed the door in, only to meet with rattling metal resistance.
I heard a raspy snicker from the Skalle next to me. I was fine with that, because if he’d actually suspected anything was off he would have just shot me instead.
I turned my head and angled my neck so I that peered into his face. Hopefully that would get the idea of “I heard you laugh at me and I’m glaring at you through my mask” across without being confrontational enough to spark any actual conflict.
The Skalle’s hand went to his pocket. I could feel my muscles tensing, ready to grab a gun and shoot if things had just gone south.
He took a silvery remote control out of his pocket and jabbed at its buttons with one gloved finger. The metal mesh of the security grate began to roll slowly up.
I nodded at him and turned my face back to the door, with just enough room from my eyehole to keep the Skalle in my vision if he made a move before we got into the room.
The security grate finally reached the top, and I went in. Thomas and Olivia followed me, and I heard the door shut behind us.
Some part of me had expected the thirty-fifth floor of Nakatomi Plaza to still be under construction, forever preserved as it had been in 1988, but of course they’d actually done something with the floor since then.
We’d stepped into a small room that was painted a much softer white than the walls of the back stairwells, but was empty of anything except for three more Skalle. There was a door in front of us and one door past the other Skalle to the right of us. Both were unlabeled, and I had no real clue which door might hold the path to the president’s daughter or which might hold more Skalle.
I took a chance and pointed to the door in front of me.
One of the Skalle nodded and fiddled with another of the silvery remote control devices. The metal mesh of the security grate rolled up, and we went on in.
The door opened into the kitchen of what I assumed was the penthouse. The room was paneled with glossy white stone. A white granite bar surface ran all around the two walls that were otherwise made of floor-to-ceiling windows, and a bar with the same surface sat in the middle of the kitchen along with several square islands. Cylindrical blue lamp shades hung from the ceiling on white bars, each component in varying lengths but all in the same size.
Nearly every surface was littered with plates full of food, crumpled napkins, bottles and cups in various states of emptiness, and plastic silverware. Skalle Furia sat on low-backed vintage white metal barstools, masks pulled up to expose their mouths as they ate and drank.
I strode past the eating Skalle Furia to the window. The wall ended several yards from the window, so I went through the gap and stepped into a huge living room area. The far wall was paneled in a craggy rock face that matched the material of the front desk downstairs. There was a huge unlit fireplace underneath a TV screen set to a twenty-four-hour news channel, where some talking head’s mouth moved silently as subtitled text scrolled across the bottom of the image. Several Skalle sat on the semicircular black leather sofa and laughed as they shoved crackers and cubes of cheese into their mouths.
The rest of the room was littered with more Skalle who lounged on black leather couches and chairs, and with more plates and cans littered over the glass-topped coffee tables. A few of the coffee tables had broken surfaces. The Skalle had turned the penthouse into their terrorist break room, and they must have been playing a little rough. Closed elevator doors sat between two black vases full of flowers on the other wall.
I scanned the room for the President’s daughter, but I didn’t see her anywhere, nor did I see any sign of increased security that might indicate her presence. There was an opening in the rocky wall that suggested a hallway with more rooms, so I headed toward it.
The hallway was lined in more glossy white stone and sported five closed doors, two on each side and one on the end. The closest door on the right opened, and a Skalle came out followed by a flushing sound. He walked past us without so much as a nod, and I wondered if he’d washed his hands.
I went into the bathroom. It was big and white and had a gigantic empty square tub on one side, but no Skalle Furia and no President’s daughter. “Nothing but a floater,” I reported.
Olivia knocked on the closest door to the left. The first knock moved the door open a few inches, then it stopped. When no reply came, she opened the door. “This one’s also empty, unless she’s in the shower.”
I checked the other bathroom. This one had a huge shower with a frosted glass door. I opened it just in case. It was the biggest and most complicated shower that I had ever seen in my life. I whistled.
“Who needs six showerheads?” Olivia asked rhetorically. “How many people are going to be taking a shower in here at one time?”
; “That is actually a great idea, and I need to get one of these for my apartment,” I said, and moved out of the bathroom.
Thomas headed for the door at the end of the hall and motioned for us to join him. “Let’s check out the master bedroom first.”
I positioned myself in front of the door. “I’m coming in like nothing’s wrong, but get behind me and be ready just in case.”
Thomas and Olivia lined up behind me.
I raised my fist and knocked on the door twice, then waited for a response. When nobody answered, I turned the handle and went in, my hand as near to the trigger of my gun as I dared.
The room was dark inside, but the slice of light from the hallway revealed dark red carpeting, a bed with a teal coverlet and a huge mirrored headboard, and wallpaper in a complicated pattern of white and teal stripes.
I opened the door all the way. The lights flicked on, and I saw that the room was empty of everything except for its furniture. Everything matched in teal and matte white surfaces. There was one door across the room.
I moved over to the door, waited until Oliva and Thomas were ready behind me, and went on in.
A Skalle Furia sat on a toilet with a cell phone in his hands. “Dude, knock,” he rasped.
“Sorry!” I closed the door and backed away.
We left the bedroom and went to check the other two doors. I had a feeling it was pointless, but I knew we needed to be thorough.
The bedroom that went with the hot tub was decorated in a similar color scheme and style to the master bedroom, but it had fewer chairs and two smaller beds instead of one big bed. I knocked on the bathroom door before I opened it this time and got a gruff “I’ll be out in a minute” in response.
I backed away again, and we went to check the other bedroom. Nobody answered my knock, so we went in.
The lamps were off in that room too, but the light from the hallway revealed a Skalle lying prone in bed. He was on his back, and his hands were folded over his stomach, and he raised his head slowly as the light hit his eyes. I closed the door and raised my index finger to my lips. “Shh, he’s taking a nap,” I whispered.
“Smart man,” Thomas said. “You catch sleep when you can in the field.”
“I thought our contact said they were holding her on the top floor,” Olivia said. “Marc, you know this building best. Is there anything else up here?”
“I didn’t see any other doors,” I replied. “Wait, no, there was a door in that little room where we came in. That has to be it.”
We went back through the living room and the kitchen, then out through the back door.
The group of Skalle on the landing glanced up as we piled out. I pointed at the other door at the end of the room.
“You need to get into the utility room?” the Skalle with the remote control asked skeptically.
“Utility room, that’s right,” I said. “The water stopped running, and we have a lot of men using the facilities in there. Going to check to see if there’s anyone tampering with the water or if it’s just a pipe break.”
“All right, call if you need backup,” the Skalle said.
He pressed his buttons on the remote control. In a few seconds, the metal mesh of the security grate disappeared from the window in the door, and we were clear to go in.
I stepped into a very familiar utility room. My breath caught in my lungs for just a second. It looked exactly like it did in the movie, except for the three Skalle guards leaning against the wall. The hissing pipes were even in the same place, and the roof access staircase was right where I knew it would be. I felt like I’d stepped right into one of my favorite movies. It was a truly heady feeling.
I nodded at the Skalle guards and then pointed to the red metal ladder that hung from the ceiling at the other end of the room. One of the Skalle waved us through.
My heart pounded as I climbed up the ladder. This was the only place on the top floor left that we hadn’t checked. If the President’s daughter wasn’t there, she could be anywhere in the building, or already dead.
The first thing I saw once I got past the concrete floor were Skalle boots. A guard looked down at me, the barrel of his rifle pointed at my face. I realized that he didn’t have his hand on the trigger, he was just holding it steady against his body. “Shift change already?” the guard asked.
“Yeah, shift change,” I agreed.
The guard’s skull eyes bored into mine. The barrel of the rifle pointed at my face was an enormous yawning void, and beyond that void was eternity.
“Sweet, shift change,” the guard rasped, and stood up. The tip of his boot whipped around, and the heel nearly caught me in the nose.
I knew his movement had been an accident, but at least two of my mods yelled at me to grab his boot and flip him over. My hand ended up right behind his calf, ready to flip him over and possibly fuck up his ankle bone or Achilles tendon as badly as I could in the process, but I successfully suppressed the urge to blow my cover as I watched him walk towards his buddies at the other end of the platform.
One of the other Skalle faced the elevator shaft, and the other stood facing us with his hand on his gun.
“C’mon guys,” I heard the Skalle say to his friends. “Let’s go get at that deli tray we have been hearing so much about before the shit really starts to hit the fan.”
I pulled myself up the ladder and entertained the possibility that the Skalle recruits were not necessarily screened for intelligence.
“Bring your men up,” a different Skalle rasped. “Get into position.” He spoke very slowly and precisely. “Then, and only then, for the very specific benefit of those of us who can’t stop talking about what he thinks the snacks on Earth are going to be like, of all things…” He stopped and took a long, theatrical breath that ended in a dramatic sigh. I realized that he was taking the scenic route through his sentence just to fuck with the deli tray guy, whose simple desire for cheese cubes and spiced meats I could wholly understand. “...will our team begin to move into position to descend the ladder.”
I got to the top of the ladder and took a few steps forward to make room for Thomas and Olivia to line up behind me. I didn’t turn away from the Skalle soldiers in case the casual attitude was all a ruse, and they had discovered the Skalle bodies in the helicopter and come to all the correct conclusions about our progress through the building even without the walkie-talkies to track us. I wanted Olivia and my father to be behind me in case the Skalle started to shoot, so I didn’t start walking until I heard two steps of boots make their way up the ladder and move into position behind me.
We headed across the room to the red railing. I checked the fuse boxes out of the corner of my eye as we passed to see if they still had those pin-up pictures on them, but the only thing besides dull grey paint on those boxes were little bits of tape. I guessed that workers in the building had put some pictures on there and that they had been torn down.
The Ar’Gwyn reminded me that I could shoot the Skalle in front of me at any time. It was countered somewhat by the combat awareness mod, who poked into my brain to remind me that the soft sounds of metallic scrapes and thumps I could hear from the elevator shaft were the sounds of Skalle soldiers as they moved around in the vents. The combat awareness mod pointed out that if I unleashed a hail of bullets onto the hapless Skalle soldiers the way the Ar’Gwyn suggested, the ricocheting bullets and falling bodies would definitely alert the vent sentries that something was up, and we’d be overwhelmed in moments.
My belly hit the red railing that wrapped around the elevator shaft, and I nodded to the Skalle next to me. He’d had the enviable job of staring down into a dark pit for however long the Skalle’s shifts were, and his answering nod as he stepped away from the red railing had a distinct and familiar slump of relief.
One of my comrades stood next to me and faced out. I glanced back over my shoulder to see that the other one of my teammates waited by the ladder entryway, hand on their gun, as the three Skalle climbed down.
Cables hung over the red railing at the end of the room. I leaned over the railing and looked down into the elevator shaft. The cords were frayed and twisted where they had exploded. I didn’t see any Skalle in the elevator shaft, at least not for the first few floors where the light from the fluorescent bulb reached.
“...getting close to the deadline.” The faint sound of a familiar British voice reached my ears. “I know heroes are supposed to be quite accomplished at last-minute rescues, but he’s cutting it a bit thin, don’t you think?” I didn’t like how he sneered “heroes”, as though he thought trying to do the right thing and protect people was some sort of tragically naïve personality flaw.
“You keep pointing out every time the clock changes, so you should know that it’s not exactly the last minute yet.” It was the familiar voice of the President’s daughter. She sounded confident, and I felt my spirits lift.
I beckoned Thomas and Olivia over to the railing in time to hear the rest of the President’s daughter’s rant. “Just like this is not exactly the Penthouse,” she continued, “and your leftover chicken tikka masala is not exactly the charcuterie, cheese, and berry tray you said they were bringing me from the kitchen.”
“Well, it doesn’t tick, does it?” the British voice asked. He sounded mildly offended. “I fed you from my own plate, so at least you know the food’s safe.” I could hear his disgusted sigh even through the elevator shaft. “A good wench is so hard to find. I really ought to have kidnapped someone a little more cooperative.”
“Maybe you should have,” the President’s daughter said.
“Let’s change the subject to a more agreeable topic,” the British voice said. “How do you think we ought to execute you when the time comes? I thought perhaps we could cut your heart out with a spoon.” When nobody responded with the next line from the quote, he soldiered on. “Or we could throw you down the elevator shaft. That would be very thematically appropriate.”
“Why don’t you just forget about this killing me thing?” the President’s daughter asked. “You’ve been obsessed with it this whole time. Just tell them you blew my brains out all over the place, and we can go hide out in my safehouse in Phnom Penh for a while. Even my dad doesn’t know where it is.”
