The Complex (The Omega Protocol Chronicles Book 3)

by Courtney McPhail

  “We don’t want any trouble,” Banks said, holding up his hands and showing his finger wasn’t on the trigger of his gun. “If we stepped in the wrong place, we’ll turn around and head in the opposite direction. Consider us helping you just a kind gesture from strangers passing through.”

  “We’re not looking for any trouble either,” the man in the back of the truck said. He lowered his own gun and stepped to the side of the truck and hopped down. Jackson saw the tattoos on the man’s arms, recognizing the work for what it was. He got those tattoos on the inside.

  Jackson holstered his gun and pushed up the sleeve of his shirt and held out his hand to shake the man’s. As they shook hands, the man glanced at the tattoos Jackson had exposed.

  “Where’d you do time?” the man asked. He was a perceptive one.

  “Did a dime in West Virginia, grand theft auto.”

  “What brought you up here?”

  “Chop shop I worked for got shut down. Had a friend who said they were lookin’ for men up in Chicago. Came up here after my parole was done. Only there two months before the world went to shit. Got outta the city as soon as I could. Headed north and ended up here.”

  “They come outta Chicago too?” he asked, gesturing to the others.

  “Met ‘em on the way out.”

  Jackson didn’t like the way the man’s eyes crawled over Mendez and Claudia but he wasn’t about to say anything while the guy still had a gun in his hand.

  “You all running with a bigger group?”

  Jackson shook his head. “Met some from time to time on the road. The good ones didn’t trust us and the bad ones weren’t much use to us. We hooked up with a few bikers and their old ladies in Indiana, ran with them for a bit.”

  “What happened?”

  “Infightin’,” Jackson said. “Buttin’ heads over who was in charge. We saw the way the wind was blowin’ and didn’t feel like throwin’ down with either side so we split from them ‘bout a week back.”

  The man gave them another once over and then relaxed, dropping his gun to his side. Jackson relaxed himself. He bought them some good graces with the story.

  “You see what happened here?” the man asked, looking back at the flames that were licking out of the windows and up to the roof.

  “No idea,” Jackson said. “We ran outta gas just outside of town. Came in to see if we could find any. We saw the smoke and wanted to check it out and found y’all in need of some help.”

  “We’re you looking to earn yourselves some brownie points?”

  “Maybe,” Jackson said with a shrug of his shoulder. “Ya got any gas to spare? Food would be nice too.”

  The man glanced back at his companions. “We might be able to offer you a place to stay. My name’s Eddie, by the way.”

  “Jackson. Do you got food at this place? We’re starving.”

  “Might be we can help with that,” Eddie said. “Thing is, we’re a secure facility. We don’t let just anyone in but someone like you, with experience boosting cars, that’s a skill we might be able to use.”

  “I ain’t the only one with skills,” Jackson said. “We’ve all got our own talents. We wouldn’t have made it this far if we didn’t.”

  Eddie’s eyes made another pass over the group, this time no creepy leer at Claudia or Mendez but an appraising one instead.

  “That’s good but it isn’t my call to make. You’ll have to get the go ahead from the man in charge but I don’t think you have to worry. At our place, things are done fair. A man earns his place there. Jacob, he’s the man in charge, he calls it a meritocracy.”

  “Sounds like a good place,” Banks said.

  “It is, if you work with us,” Eddie replied, “But make no mistake, you do anything to put this group in jeopardy, there will be harsh consequences. We don’t take well to stealing or hoarding. Whatever is there belongs to everyone. If you join us, there are no personal possessions. Everything that is yours belongs to all of us. We’re a true community.”

  Jackson wasn’t exactly sure he liked the sound of that but he didn’t really have much choice in the matter. They needed to go with them. These were the people who had Veronica and the others, he just knew it.

  “Sounds alright to me,” Jackson said. “Guess we’re throwin’ in with ya.”

  “Well, like I said, it’s not up to me. You’ll still have to get the go ahead from the boss but we can at least feed you and give you a place to sleep,” Eddie told him. “Hop on in and we’ll take you to the Complex.”

  Subject File #750

  Administrator: So in our first session, you spoke of the men from Marysville with a lot of anger. It’s been a week since then, are you still as angry as you were?

  Subject: Yeah I still am. I think I always will be. They tried to kill me and the people I love.

  Administrator: It’s not healthy to nurture that kind of anger. I can help you work past it.

  Subject: I don’t want to. That anger is what’s going to keep me alive out there.

  Veronica didn’t envy the people living in the Complex. She’d hate to have to walk all these stairs every day. Then again maybe that’s why no one had moved up to the fourteenth floor yet. The climb had been exhausting, her body low on energy from their night down in the cell, but Marsh hadn’t let them stop to rest when they’d reached the top.

  He’d unlocked the first apartment on the floor and set them to work clearing out the two bedroom unit. There were personal touches all over the apartment, left behind by the people who had lived here. A jacket over the armrest of the couch, dropped there the last time the person had come home. A post-it note on the fridge about a dentist appointment. Framed pictures on the wall showing a smiling girl at her third birthday party and that same little girl a few years later standing with a woman who could only be her mother.

  The pictures had been the first thing Veronica had packed away, carefully placing the frames in cardboard boxes. The last thing she wanted was their eyes watching her as she rifled through their stuff.

  Crawley and Travis had gone to work carrying out the mattresses from the bedrooms while Marsh and Aaron had hauled the couch out of the apartment and down the stairs.

  She and Ben had been put in the kitchen to sort through the drawers and cupboards for anything useful. Marsh had run off a list of things that should be put in the boxes for keeps and those that would be thrown out. Cooking utensils, silverware, cleaning supplies, clothing and any tools were for keeps. Everything else was marked for the trash.

  She moved to the opposite end of the kitchen from Ben and opened up the cupboards over the stove. A stack of pots, one of the things on Marsh’s list. As she took the pots down from the shelf, she stole glances at Ben.

  The man was in his forties, his dark blonde hair thinning on the back of his head. He was slender but his clothes hung off him, too big for him. She wasn’t sure if it was because he’d ended up in somebody else’s clothes or he had been heftier when he had first bought the clothes. Judging by the dark smudges under his eyes and the hollowed look of his cheekbones, she had the feeling it was the latter.

  “You’ve been here two weeks now?” she asked him.

  His hands bobbled on the salad spinner he was pulling down from the top shelf and his eyes darted towards the living room before he replied. “Yes.”

  “Two weeks and you’re still in chains?” she asked, rattling her own chains that bound her ankles.

  “I thought this place would be better than the alternative,” Ben said. “Aaron and I were with a bigger group back in our home town but then we were overrun by sickos. We made it out together but things weren’t good on the road. Neither of us were built for that.”

  “So you want to be a part of this but they still don’t trust you.”

  Ben shrugged as he took down a blender and put it in the discard box. “I get it. We’d only been here a day when Sam ran off.”

  “Sam?” she asked.

  “From what I heard, Sam had
been here from the start. He was basically a partner with Jacob in running this place. When he stole from them and snuck out in the middle of the night, it set everybody on edge.”

  “What did he steal?”

  “Food and diesel for the generators,” Ben told her, “And he wasn’t alone.”

  “Someone went with him?”

  “Twelve someones to be exact,” Ben said. “Really pissed everybody off.”

  That was a hell of a lot of people to decide to up and run off. “Why did they leave?”

  “No idea. I never met Sam. When Aaron and I were brought in, we spoke to Jacob and I only saw the women who left with Sam in passing when they fed us.”

  Veronica frowned. “It was only women who left with him?”

  Ben didn’t get a chance to answer as Crawley walked back into the apartment, pausing in the kitchen doorway that led to the foyer.

  “Hey, less talking, more working. Jacob wants us to have this entire floor cleared out by the end of the day.”

  “Got it, Crawley,” Ben said with a wave of his hand and went back to work on the cupboards. He ignored her eyes on him, keeping his gaze straight ahead as he worked. So that was the end of the conversation.

  She wanted to know more. There had to be a reason that a dozen women had left this place. Twelve women and one man wasn’t a coincidence. If they were running from something, she wanted to know what it was.

  Too bad Ben had taken Crawley’s order to heart and kept silent as they cleared out the rest of the kitchen. Even when Crawley and Aaron had carried out the kitchen table and headed downstairs, Ben had rebuffed her attempt at conversation. When they had finished packing up the boxes, Crawley ordered Ben to clear out the bathroom while he’d tasked her with boxing up the personal effects from the living room.

  It wasn’t a hard job by any means, dumping most of what she had found into discard boxes. The collection of DVDs and the electronic equipment to run them, though she saved the batteries from the remote controls. She did put the collection of books from the bookcase into keep boxes, even though they were mostly fiction and children’s books. There was something to be said for having the chance to escape to a fictional world.

  “You can toss the books,” Crawley said when he eyed the box she had filled as he came back upstairs from hauling down the television. “We can use the bookcase. Aaron, take it down to the cook tent.”

  Aaron moved to obey but Veronica grabbed the box of books carefully. “It can’t hurt to keep the books. You need some entertainment here.”

  “Oh, we’ve got our own entertainment here, honey, don’t worry,” Crawley drawled with a grin, “But maybe we should keep them. They’ll probably burn good in the winter when we need to keep warm.”

  The teacher in her bristled at the thought of burning any books. She knew that sacrifices had to be made in the name of practicality but there were plenty of useless things that could burn before books.

  Except it wasn’t her place to argue. This wasn’t her home. She was just manual labour, earning her way to freedom so she could go home. She had two little girls waiting on her return, one of them possibly dying if she stayed here any longer than necessary. If she was smart, she’d keep her mouth shut and just do the work. The sooner this was done, the sooner they’d have the meds and she could get home.

  They all worked in a steady stream, Veronica and Ben staying in the apartment to box up the smaller things while the others moved the furniture out and then began carrying down the boxes. After an hour, the place didn’t resemble the home it had been when they walked in, only boxes and the curtains still left in the empty apartment.

  “Crawley, take Ben and Veronica, start in on the next apartment,” Marsh ordered as Aaron and Travis picked up the last of the boxes. “We’ll take down the last loads and join you.”

  Crawley led them to the apartment across the hall, this one another two bedroom but it faced out to the street instead of the courtyard. Veronica went to the windows and looked out over the view of the town. It looked the same as any other town, reminding her of the view from her own apartment back in Virginia. The black, grey and brown shingles of the houses dotted among the green of the surrounding trees, the black lines of the streets cutting through them all. She frowned when she spotted a thin black line streaking up through the sky in the distance. The way it plumed into the sky, it could only be smoke from something big burning.

  “There’s a fire out there,” Veronica said to Crawley, who joined her at the window.

  “It’s miles off, nothing to worry about,” he said. “Come on, let’s clear out the bedroom. Ben, work on the kitchen.”

  She followed Crawley down the short hallway off the living room to the bedroom. The large queen sized bed took up most of the room, the bed frame one of the heavy wooden ones straight from the 1980s with cupboards and shelves in the headboard. There was a matching dresser facing the end of the bed with nine heavy oak drawers in front and large vanity mirror mounted above it. A small television sat on top the dresser next to bottles of men’s cologne and a bowl with loose change in it.

  “No way in hell we’re getting this beast out of here without taking it all apart,” Crawley said, pushing at the headboard and not moving the bed even a bit. “We can leave it for now. Pack up whatever clothes you can find. They’ll sort through them later.”

  She pulled open the top drawer, wrinkling her nose at the sight of some man’s underwear inside. Well, no reason to get weird now. She’d seen grosser things than a man’s underwear. At least these seemed clean.

  “It always feels dirty going through people’s personal things,” Crawley said. She glanced up at his reflection in the mirror as he opened a shoe box he’d taken down from the closet. “They’re likely dead and we might need whatever they have hiding in here but it still makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong.”

  He had a point but as she looked into the reflection of his eyes, she felt like he wasn’t appropriately creeped out by the idea. In fact, it looked like he was enjoying it.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” she replied, moving on to the next drawer. This one was socks, which she cleared out, and found two boxes at the back of the drawer. One was square jewelry box, the other a thin white rectangle. She opened the jewellery box and found a sterling silver pocket watch nestled inside. There was a folded piece of yellowed paper beneath it, the corners a bit curled with age. From Grandpa. The other box contained a fountain pen done in the same sterling silver, engraved with the initials P.T. on the side. Pretty but both of them useless. She set them in the discard box and moved on to the next drawer full of shirts.

  “So, you and Travis married or something?”

  “No, he’s just a friend.”

  “You with one of those coloured guys?” he asked, his face twisting up in disgust.

  She closed the drawer a little too hard, his casual racism raising her hackles but she knew she had to tread carefully here. Whatever her feelings, she was still very much a prisoner.

  “I’m not with anyone, not that it matters.”

  “Just trying to make conversation,” he said, raising up his hands in defence.

  “I thought you wanted working, not talking,” she said, throwing his words back at him.

  “We can do both,” Crawley said. “I was just being hard on ol’ Ben there, he gets distracted easily. He likes to take it easy when he can. He hates being stuck with manual labour but he doesn’t have a choice. He’s got no other skills to offer us, same with the kid. At least he doesn’t complain as much.”

  She made a noncommittal noise as she moved on to the last drawer, pulling out thick wool sweaters that stank of mothballs. They’d definitely need to air these ones out before they wore them.

  “So what did you do before all of this?” he asked.

  “I was a teacher. You?”

  “Owned an auto repair shop,” he said. “That’s the special skill I bring here. I know how to fix machines and I know how to supervise work
ers.”

  She smiled and nodded, setting the sweaters down on the dresser and leaning down to check there wasn’t anything stuffed in the back of the drawer.

  “I bet you have plenty of skills you could put to good use here,” Crawley said and the hair on the back of her neck stood up. She straightened up, seeing that he had moved over to the door to close it.

  The sound of the lock sliding home turned her blood to ice in her veins.

  “If you touch me, I’ll kill you,” she hissed out as she whirled around putting the dresser at her back.

  He laughed, stepping towards her, his hand dropping to the gun on his belt. “I don’t think you will.”

  She grabbed the television set and swung with all her strength, hitting him in the shoulder hard enough to send him toppling over. She tried to dart around him for the door but he grabbed her ankle, sending her sprawling to the floor. She slammed into the parquet floor with bone rattling impact, knocking the wind out of her. It gave Crawley enough time to crawl on top of her, fisting a hand in her hair and wrapping an arm around her throat.

  He squeezed hard, cutting off her air supply and her fingers dug into his thick forearm, trying to claw it away. He didn’t flinch and he didn’t let up his hold, black spots forming in her vision until she lost consciousness.

  The next thing she knew she was on the bed, gasping for breath as she tried to get in enough oxygen. Her throat burned as she coughed, trying to get her limbs to respond to her brain’s commands but she only flopped around on the mattress, her lungs demanding all her focus as she tried to breathe.

  “You stupid bitch,” Crawley growled from behind her. She felt her shirt yanked up over her head, leaving her exposed.

  She tried to kick but the chains around her legs stopped her.

  She grabbed at the edge of the mattress and tried to pull herself away from Crawley but he grabbed her shoulder and held her down. She tried to kick him off of her but the chains on her ankles got in the way and Crawley backhanded for the attempt. Pain exploded in her jaw and brought back the black spots as her ears rang.