Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  Behind her, leaning against the wall of the task room that lines the left side of EDPA’s “foxhole,” the central operations center, is Rupert Murrough. Head of EDPA Security, which, as I’ve learned, doesn’t just mean the men and women who protect the building. Every EDPA combat agent not involved in echo field works in “Security,” including the strike teams, undercovers, and beefed-up crowd control guys.

  Both Dynara and Murrough are decked out in long white coats, each one bearing a symbol of their station on the left shoulder. Dynara’s patch reads FAC Commissioner (FAC meaning Field Agents Corps). Murrough’s reads Security Captain.

  And like the identical coats, they both wear identical expressions of rage.

  The rest of the task room is filled with colorful characters, all in shades of blue. Frederick, the paunchy, gray-haired General Researcher, is seated two chairs down from Dynara, his face buried in his Ocom as he reads through dozens of messages and reports every minute. A woman named Delilah May, a strike team captain, is next to Frederick, her face pensive and muscles tense, gaze directed at the wall, while she tries to work through some difficult thoughts and emotions.

  On the opposite side of the table is a tragedy in vivid 3D: Donovan and the only other Day Team Four member, a young woman, who survived the level three mostly intact. The two of them are both injured, faces scraped and bruised, hunched in the back from pain. The dark-skinned woman has one arm in a sling and the opposite hand wrapped in a thick wad of gauze. Donovan himself has a makeshift eye patch bandage; a set of crutches are propped against the wall behind him. Their expressions are vacant, shock worn into empty defeat once the adrenaline settled.

  Lance and I shuffle into the task room, wary of the atmosphere, and the second the double doors slide shut, every eye in the room assaults us. Dynara, being Dynara, is the first one to speak. “Nice of you slow-ass dolts to join us. Sit down.” She points at two available chairs beside May, and we slink into them without defiance. It’s stupid to challenge Dynara on a good day. Challenging her when she’s pissed off is basically signing your own death warrant.

  The second my ass hits the chair cushion, Dynara snaps, “I’m guessing you got a good look at our problem, Adem.”

  “A much better look than I ever could have wanted,” I mumble in return.

  “Toughen up.” She scrapes her nails against the tabletop, shredding the edges of her polish. “This is far from the only nightmare you’ll see inside these halls. Though I will admit it was a bit bloodier than the usual defeat.”

  Donovan and his teammate wince when Dynara says “bloodier.” I don’t blame them.

  “What exactly happened?” I ask. “How’d someone get the drop on Day Team Four like that?” The question is directed at Dynara—I don’t want to put the weight of that answer on Donovan, who’s reeling from what he must consider an unforgivable personal failure—but Dynara nods toward the traumatized man anyway, a silent order.

  The man rubs his palm over his stubble-covered chin and sighs. “If only there was a simple answer, Adamend. But the honest-to-gods truth is that I don’t really know. One second, we were entering the dreamscape, some sort of desert scene, hot and dry and bright. The next second, we were surrounded by a sandstorm with eighty mile per hour winds, pinned down, and…there were things in the storm. Some kind of hulking, deformed monsters. One of them grabbed Geller, another snatched Wallis, and they…” Donovan bites down hard on the center joint in his middle finger, breaking skin. “I don’t think I can describe that. I apologize, Commissioner.”

  Dynara stares at him, and I swear I spot a fleeting glint of sympathy in her eyes. But it’s gone by the time she replies, “No apologies necessary. We know what happened to Geller and Wallis based on the cam footage from the Nexus chamber. What we need is what else happened while your teammates were being attacked. In the moments leading up to the breach.”

  The dark-skinned woman inhales and unfurls in her chair, revealing the name Janis McLeod stitched into a front pocket on her EDPA training sweats. (Her field uniform must have been ruined in the echo.) She clears her scratchy throat and says, “I can probably tell you more about that than the Captain, ma’am. He was trying to help Geller and Wallis get free, so he didn’t see much else. Me, on the other hand”—she snorts, bitter—“I got my ass handed to me by the wind. Slung me across the desert about twenty feet. On top of a dune. Irony is it gave me a great vantage point. Saw some kind of structure, maybe a fortress or a castle, in the distance. If I was to guess, I’d say it was our maker’s base. And it was the last thing to go when the breach hit.”

  “To go?” Lance says.

  Dynara eyes him. “You didn’t read the code stream?”

  Lance blanches. “Sorry, I…”

  “I told him to have Frederick send it to our Nexus,” I throw in. “Trying to work in those conditions is futile. You can’t concentrate. You’re liable to miss important details. I’d rather Lance take more time and get it right on the first shot than give us bad info by accident and lead us astray. Waste of time and resources. Don’t you agree, Commissioner?”

  A perfectly plucked white eyebrow twitches, and my future as a training gym floor wipe flashes before my eyes. Yup, I’m going to pay for that big time. Dynara laces her fingers together and fakes a smile. “Good point, Adem. We don’t want to risk sabotaging ourselves with pathetically weak stomachs, now do we?”

  Lance murmurs, “Sorry.”

  Frederick says, “I got Lovecraft’s request in a few minutes ago. I already started that data transfer between the Nexus setups. It should be ready for analysis by four o’clock.”

  Dynara nods at Lance. “I want your report by six.”

  “You’ll have it.”

  “Good.” Dynara checks the time on her Ocom. “We need to get rolling on this. Crowd control’s already on scene, right?”

  Murrough makes a noncommittal noise from his brooding corner, which Dynara takes as a full explanation that her expectations are being fulfilled. Those two have a long working history together, and I often get the sense there’s something more going on there, something romantic or sexual or both that ends up on the backburner in the confines of the EDPA office. I’ve been meaning to ask Lance whether or not Dynara and Murrough are involved, but I always stop short. It’s one of those things I want to know but also don’t want to know because of how awkward it’ll make me feel when I’m in the room with both of them.

  I shake the thought away and ask, “What scene? The breach scene?”

  It’s May that answers. “Breach happened at George Mason Polytechnic. Computer Science Building. Lab room 420. One casualty: Mark DuPont. Age twenty-one. Senior.”

  A sense of unease crawls across my skin like an army of red ants with prickly legs threatening to sting me. “The massive desert dream only breached into a single room?”

  “One room and an adjoining hallway.” May cracks her knuckles.

  McLeod shakes her head. “Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. The level two was a work of art, a flawless desert painting, down to the smell of wicked heat radiating off the sand. And then, in the seconds before the breach, the maker stripped it down to nothing. Nothing but the sandstorm itself and the monsters hiding inside. We went from standing in the middle of the goddamn Sahara to standing on a clear platform of pure will hanging over the empty abyss of the echoverse. So when the dream breached, nothing came along for the ride except the weapons the maker needed to kill.”

  Dynara whispers a string of swears. Frederick fidgets in his seat, uncomfortable. Lance stares at the tabletop, horror growing in his eyes. May’s hands curl into fists. Donovan and McLeod—they relive their worst nightmare, the flashbacks taking them for a ride through mental hell. The haunted looks on their faces are too much to watch for long.

  So instead I watch the jagged puzzle pieces in my mind begin to form a coherent shape of the issues we’re dealing with. A monstrous shape. A dangerous shape. A deadly shape.

  “It was a trap,�
� I say. “The level two was a trap, created to lure any intruders into a false sense of security, of normality. The maker made us believe the dream was a typical landscape number, like the hundreds of traveling and adventure dreams that other, oblivious makers think up all the time. And the second you let your guard down, they attacked, trying to wipe you out as quickly and efficiently as possible. So you didn’t even have the chance to attempt to stop them from achieving their real goal: the murder of Mark DuPont.”

  Lance stiffens. “But that level of preparation could only mean…”

  Commissioner Chamberlain, dressed in white, hair and coat and fury, rises from her throne-chair and smacks her palms on the scuffed-up table. “It means we have an echo killer on the loose, and they know all about EDPA.”

  Chapter Three

  It’s 11:14 AM, and Mark DuPont sits at a corner computer in Lab 420 of GM Poly’s Allison Morris Computer Science Building. He’s typing away at the digital keypad projected onto the black plastic desk and reading through lines upon lines of code he’s written over the past semester. In three weeks’ time, he’ll submit his senior honors project to the faculty board for approval, and if he’s to win that coveted mark, WITH HONORS, appended to his diploma, every comma, semi-colon, and parenthesis must be correct.

  There’s no one else in the lab with Mark. Not a soul. Half the GM Poly campus is a ghost town this weekend, most of its students and staff heading home for the Thankfulness holiday break. But Mark is too dedicated a student, too obsessed with straight A’s, too bent on achieving his goals no matter the cost, that he lingers alone in the lab for hours on end with nothing but a soda and a bag of corn chips to keep him company.

  While his code compiles for the ten thousandth time in three weeks, he digs a hand around in his corn chip bag, pulls out a mound, and shovels them into his mouth, the crunch, crunch, crunch emanating throughout the empty room. He uncaps his soda and drinks a fourth of it down in two gulps, sighing at the delightful junk food combination that keeps him sated between his cold pizza breakfasts and lunches. He runs a hand over his hair, raking chip dust through his dark, shaggy locks, and screws the cap back on his bottle as his code signals the start of the last routine.

  Mark pushes the food aside and claps his hands together, green eyes ringed with insomniac violet widening in anticipation. “This time,” he mutters to no one. “This time it’ll work. This time I’ve got it. Get the honors. Get the scholarship. Go to grad school. Get that job. You can do it, Mark. You can do it. You can do it.” He repeats the last line as a mantra, over and over, and at some point, it morphs from self-reassurance to a quiet, pitiful plea—as if the computer has sympathy for him, will correct his errors for him, perfect his imperfections for him, hide his failures and produce only the successes he wants to see.

  But Lab 420 doesn’t have AI computers, not even so basic as the auto-drive AIs installed in cars. All the effort to write a flawless code is up to Mark himself, and for the ten thousandth time in three weeks, he’s made a mistake somewhere in the eighteen hundred lines. The code errors out on the last (and largest) routine, and the IDE window flashes a red warning in Mark’s face.

  Mark stares in disbelief for two-tenths of a moment. Then he sweeps one hand to the left, knocking his precious snacks to the floor, kicks his chair out from underneath his body, and storms across the room toward the door, swearing all the way. “Fuck this. I need a blunt,” he huffs. “Stupid piece of shit program can’t even tell me what I did wrong! What’s the point of error messages if they don’t explain the actual error? Huh? Enlighten me, you crappy, pathetic, underdeveloped, out-of-date, garbage bin—!“

  The second Mark’s fingers touch the doorknob, he hears it.

  A breeze whispering through the hallway outside the lab, and within that breeze, the subtle sound of scraping. Not scraping like a knife on slate or that horrid, spine-tingling sound of fingernails on polyester. But scraping like the undulating, back and forth of…sandpaper on wood? Confused, Mark backs up a couple of steps and glances down at the gap beneath the door, wondering if a pipe for the nearby Geology Building busted underneath the floor, or if some sand-like material in the walls collapsed and got caught in the ventilation.

  But as he watches the gap, he spots them: tiny granules of bronzed orange sand swirling atop the tile, pushed by a wind that should not be. There’s no air conditioning this time of year, and the heating system is almost never turned on in a building with a basement full of servers. So either something has gone wrong in the mechanics of the Computer Science Center, or someone is screwing around in the hallway, potentially damaging expensive equipment the school cannot afford to replace.

  Mark may hate the outdated tech GM Poly collects like scrap, but he loathes people who abuse technology for no defensible reason. So, ready to play the hero, he rolls up his sleeves, grabs the doorknob firmly, and yanks it open, expecting to see a group of frat boys or drunken freshman playing pranks outside the lab.

  Instead, Mark DuPont finds himself standing in the face of an indoor sandstorm. Filling every square inch, tall as the ceiling and low as the floor, scraping every visible surface with billions upon billions of fine, sharp-edged grains. A wall of sand moving so fast, it wears the finish off the walls, strips plastic accents off the fixtures, demolishes paint like sidewalk chalk, and peels glass from light covers and windows and painting frames. A storm the likes of which Mark DuPont has never seen, nor could have possibly seen anywhere but on TV.

  Sandstorms are not native to the eastern coast of North America.

  Real sandstorms anyway.

  But in a dream, anything is possible.

  Anything—including murder.

  So the second the college boy opens his mouth to scream in abject horror, the echo maker pulling the strings on the level three in progress…attacks his intended prey.

  Mark doesn’t have a chance.

  The storm barrels into the room at eighty-five miles per hour, tossing Mark’s body like a ragdoll. He slams into the far wall with enough force to kill a man, but poor Mark isn’t that lucky. His skull cracks, his spine snaps, his legs and arms and ribcage shatter, but he doesn’t die instantly. Instead, he languishes, moaning in agony, frothing up blood, while the storm surrounds him. Sand shreds his eyes, chokes his throat, rips his lungs to bloody bits, eats away at his exposed, bruising skin. He tries to shriek, to cry, to plead, but all that comes out is wet, bloody sand, falling to the floor in sticky, red globs.

  Mark weakly swats at the sand around him, a billion tiny missiles, as the energy drains from his broken body, as his battered brain runs out of oxygen. Please, please, please, he thinks. Stop, stop, stop.

  But the maker isn’t done with him yet.

  Oh, no…

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  In the storm, it comes. Almost too broad and tall to fit through the doorway. It squeezes underneath the frame, and its bent, rusty armor gouges a deep groove into the wood, a calling card. It’s something hulking and deformed, its shape uncertain, asymmetric, hard to understand with a human eye that enjoys defined shapes. It’s a sand-born monster, ruthless, mindless, strong as an ox. Exactly as described by Donovan and McLeod in the EDPA task room.

  It stomps across the lab floor, tossing tables and desks out of its path like paperweights. Computers crash to the floor, screens cracked. Chair legs fragment, tabletops splinter, cushions degrade to dust in the sand and wind. And finally, after half a minute of pure, senseless carnage, the beast comes to stand in front of the cowering, dying, crying Mark DuPont. It growls a word no more coherent than a vicious snarl, reaches down with an arm too long for its body, wraps its massive hand around Mark’s busted torso, and hauls him up. With its other, gnarled hand that sports at least eight fingers, it takes hold of the head of its quivering prey.

  Mark manages one final, terrified wail.

  Before the monster rips his head from his body and throws it aside like a piece of trash.

  And then it’s gone—every
thing. Sand. Wind. Monster hidden in the murk.

  All that’s left is a room destroyed, every object worn to nothing, every piece of furniture and equipment trashed by a ruthless beast. All that’s left is Mark’s crumpled body and his severed head resting next to his computer. A computer damaged but still working. A computer with a scratched, spider-webbed screen displaying an outdated IDE window. A window with an output box that blinks, blinks vibrant red—

  ERROR. ERROR. ERROR.

  * * *

  I replay my reconstruction of Mark DuPont’s death twelve times before I’m satisfied all the details are as correct as possible given the clues littered throughout the lab. It was difficult at first, putting it all together. Everything touched by the sandstorm is broken and shredded and scraped and scuffed to hell. Furniture looks like formless plastic scraps and wood chips, computer screens like half-recycled billboards, a wash of frantic color on the fritz. And DuPont’s blood coats the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the ruin of it all; the violent wind ensured the room was painted.

  It’s just like Nexus 4, only Mark DuPont had no idea death was a possibility today. At least Geller knew he was in danger, jumping into an echo. These civilians in the breach zones, they’re helpless, doomed to die.

  Ten feet from the damaged table where I’m seated, EDPA’s version of a CSI team is finishing its walkthrough. Samples collected for forensic analysis. Holographs recorded for later study. DuPont’s headless body has been zipped into a black bag, his head wrapped up in a sheet and placed atop his chest. When I arrived fifteen minutes ago, his lifeless form still lounged in the corner, limbs twisted like a broken doll. His head was pointed at the ceiling, bloody, glazed eyes staring up in shock.