Execution Plan

by Patrick Thompson

‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Into the depths of the base.’

  I pressed the button for the twelfth floor. Nothing happened.

  ‘It’s not working,’ I said.

  ‘Use the pass cards,’ said Dermot. ‘No fucking wonder you’ve never got out of the first level of Doom.’

  There was a slot next to the button pad. I put in the red pass and the first five buttons lit up. I put in the blue keycard and the rest lit up. I pressed the button for the twelfth floor again.

  The doors closed and the lift began to descend.

  We watched the numbers flicking down on the number pad. They were in reverse order, with one at the top. The lift was descending slowly and carefully, like a pensioner getting into a bath. As the digit for the fifth floor lit, a female voice said: ‘Routine scanning in progress.’

  Narrow beams of green light shone out of small reflective pads, covering us both in a lattice of green lines. They traced our outlines, and then homed in on Dermot’s waist. They lit him up. They crawled over him.

  They traced the outline of the gun I’d given him.

  They lit that up, very brightly.

  ‘Weapon detected,’ said the female voice. ‘Lift will now stop at the eighth level for cleansing. Security notified.’

  ‘What’s your plan now?’ asked Dermot. ‘Only this sounds like a bad sort of cleansing, like ethnic fucking cleansing.’

  ‘Out of the lift,’ I said

  ‘What?’

  ‘Up there.’

  Dermot looked at the small hatch set into the top of the lift.

  ‘Who the fuck do you think I am, Bruce fucking Willis? You go up there. I’m staying here.’

  The slowly advancing digits lit up one by one: six, seven.

  I jumped up and pushed the hatch. Of course, it opened. I jumped again and grabbed the edges.

  I didn’t have enough strength in my arms to pull myself up. The next time I had a career change, I told myself, I’d choose something that involved some form of physical exertion. From below, Dermot grabbed my shins and shoved me aloft. I went up, onto the top of the lift, and then I was in a surprisingly clean and unsurprisingly featureless lift shaft. There were no cables. Dermot jumped up after me. I helped him up.

  ‘There’s been a change of plan,’ he said. ‘I’m not staying in there.’

  ‘Eighth floor,’ said the female voice. ‘Cleansing begins.’

  We heard the doors open below us. The lift filled with flames, which were squirted in in liquid waves. There were a few bursts of automatic weapon fire. The flames began to recede.

  ‘Cleansing complete,’ said the voice. White spray filled the lift, instantly killing the remaining flames.

  A pair of soldiers rushed in. They wore combat fatigues and gas masks. They carried short but evil-looking guns.

  ‘Area secure. Suspects missing,’ said one. ‘Commencing combat sweep of this floor. All units on red alert until further notice.’

  There was a crackling radio message, too faint for us to make out.

  ‘Roger that,’ said the soldier. ‘Engaging all automatic security measures. Closing all bulkheads. Access to everything below ten now locked down.’

  There was another crackling radio message. He put his head on one side.

  ‘Roger that,’ he said when it finished. He turned to the other soldier.

  ‘Fall back,’ he said. ‘They’re going to gas the lift shafts. Set up positions at the end of the corridor. Shoot anything that comes through here.’

  They left the lift. The doors slid shut.

  I looked up. The shaft was almost featureless, except for a small rectangular opening leading into darkness at about head height. It would be an air vent or something like one.

  We could crawl in there. We didn’t have much choice. Hopefully the gas wouldn’t come out that way.

  ‘We can get in there,’ I said. Dermot looked at me.

  ‘In there? It’s fucking tiny. We’ll get wedged in there.’

  ‘That’s the only way to go.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’d far rather we were wedged in a fucking hole when we get gassed to death. That’ll make it much easier to bear.’

  ‘We’re supposed to go in there. There’s always a way through. You know video games.’

  ‘Too fucking right. There’s always a way through but sometimes you lose a life finding it,’ he said. ‘You can go first. If there’s a hidden blade in the wall, you can find it. You put the fucking place together. We’d have got in easier if you’d just left everything alone. Your subconscious must be in a right fucking state.’

  I put my head inside the shaft. It was dark in there. There was a faint beating, a regular thud, somewhere in the distance. I slid in with Dermot’s help.

  It wasn’t too tight. There was room enough to crawl. The surface of the vent was hard and shiny, and not too comfortable on my knees. I began to shuffle into the gloom.

  I heard Dermot get in behind me.

  ‘There’d better not be anything in here with us,’ he said.

  I hadn’t thought of that. The whole purpose of air vents in computer games was to get the hero into a place where something could spring out and grab him by the face. Then you’d reload and try something else.

  I’d just thrown a video game over the world. I didn’t think we’d get to reload if we got killed.

  Of course there would be something in there with us. That was the custom of the land. There might be a lot of somethings.

  The sound of that slow beating continued, somewhere ahead of us.

  ‘Ten minutes until gas is released,’ said the female voice, this time with a hint of echo.

  I crawled faster. Whatever was ahead of us couldn’t be as bad as the gas.

  It didn’t get any darker, after the first fifteen feet. The gloom remained constant. I could see perhaps ten feet ahead of me. Behind me, I could hear Dermot swearing and complaining. The vent went around a corner ahead of me.

  I put a hand out in front of me and waved it around the corner.

  Nothing bit it off or grabbed it. I looked around.

  The vent led on to another corner another few feet ahead.

  I used the same method to approach it. Again, nothing bit my hand. I couldn’t hear the scrabbling of claws. There was only me and the relentless beating and Dermot’s inventive and constant whingeing. The beating was a steady pulse, somewhere not all that far ahead of us. I went around another corner and saw what was causing it.

  The vent widened to a huge cylinder. Small lights glowed in the upper reaches. A large horizontal fan was slowly spinning in the middle of the wider chamber, circulating the air. On the far side of the fan, another opening led into further gloom. To get to it, we’d need to pass the blades of the fan.

  ‘Five minutes until gassing,’ said that female voice. I was beginning to dislike it.

  ‘Closing all vents,’ it added.

  Beyond the blades of the giant fan, a pair of doors bracketing the vent began – very slowly – to close.

  SEVENTEEN

  I

  Dermot pulled himself out of the vent behind me and stood up. He looked at the fan. He saw the vent. He saw that the pair of metal doors were slowly closing over it.

  ‘Don’t fucking tell me,’ he said. ‘Let’s see if I can guess. We just have to dodge that thing and get over there before the doors close. As long as we don’t get diced on the way we can stop worrying about the gas. Is that it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘After you,’ he said. ‘If you can get past it, I’m fucking sure I can.’

  I looked at the fan. It had three large blades, and it was moving slowly. It wasn’t moving slowly enough. I’d need to jump through at the right time. I’d have to jump in a crouch.

  I braced myself. The opening continued to close.

  I counted sweeps of the fan, and when I got the timing right I jumped forward.

  The blades missed me. I landed on the far side. Dermot got ready and jumped after me.

&nb
sp; Something hit the floor. I thought he’d lost a hand or foot until I saw that it was the gun. We were on one side of the fan and the gun was on the other.

  ‘We might need that,’ said Dermot. ‘Hold on.’

  I tried to stop him, but he was too fast. Then he had his hand between the blades, touching the gun.

  Either the blades weren’t as slow as he thought, or the gun was further away. There was a sound like a blunt knife chopping celery. The gun bounced away, accompanied by something new.

  He pulled his hand back. He didn’t pull all of it back. He’d lost the ends of all four fingers, from just above the first joint. He looked at the damage.

  The vent continued to close. In another few seconds, we’d have trouble getting through it.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘If we get stuck here we’re dead.’

  He looked at his mutilated hand. He looked at his fingertips, which were scattered on the far side of the fan. He was bleeding at a steady rate. Nothing else about him was steady.

  ‘My fingers. My fucking fingers,’ he said. He was turning pale. I slapped him. I felt safe doing that. After all, he’d have a hard time hitting me back. He snapped to attention. His injured hand drizzled blood down his leg.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We can sort you out later.’

  I dragged him to the vent.

  ‘Follow me,’ I said, and then crawled in. I heard him slide in after me.

  At once, the metal plates met with a dull heavy clang. We were back in the dark.

  ‘Commencing gassing,’ said that female voice.

  Something clattered against the other side of the closed metal plates. There was a scratching sound.

  My parents used to have a small scruffy terrier. In the evenings it’d go out in the back garden, and they’d forget that it was out. It would scratch on the door late at night, trying to get their attention. That was what the sound against the panel sounded like. Something wanted to get in with us. Something had managed to follow us past the fan.

  It scrabbled and hissed. I imagined tendrils of gas gathering around something that was all claws and teeth.

  It howled. I moved along the vent. I didn’t want to know what I’d got us involved with. Dermot followed me, managing to keep up although he couldn’t use his right hand. The vent went around another two sharp bends and then ended. There was a grille set into the floor. Looking down, I could see a pair of beds in a dimly lit room. I put my face against the grille. Below us was a tiny room, with the two beds and a couple of small bedside tables. It was empty. I pushed the grille and it fell open.

  I dropped into the room. I landed like a computer programmer, without any grace or balance. As I picked myself up, Dermot dropped into the room and knocked me back down again. A few sluggish blobs of warmish blood landed on my face. He sat on one of the beds and looked at his hand.

  It wasn’t pretty. The edges of the wounds were very clean and straight, and the bones were good and white and intact. The blades of the fan had been real blades with keen edges. I tried not to think what it would have done if I’d mistimed my jump and fallen face-first against it.

  Only his middle and index fingers were still bleeding. The other two were semi-clotted. I looked in the drawers of the bedside tables and found a can of a fizzy drink with a red and white logo that only just failed to be a recognizable trademark. My imagination was only taking risks with our lives. I opened the can and offered it to Dermot. He looked at it.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he said without any real animation.

  ‘You need moisture,’ I said. ‘For the shock.’

  He had a sip and made a face.

  ‘Tastes like coke,’ he said.

  He had another sip.

  ‘I feel better,’ he said, surprised. ‘It doesn’t hurt as much.’

  He drank the rest of the contents of the can and put it on the bed. He looked at his injured hand.

  It was intact.

  He wiggled the newly complete fingers.

  ‘Video games,’ he said. ‘Extra health in soft drink cans. You knew that’d fix me.’

  A thought struck him.

  ‘Did you arrange all of that?’ he asked. ‘Me losing my fingers?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I didn’t mean to. I don’t know what that thing was that tried to get in after us, and I didn’t know they’d find the gun. It’s just that video-game logic applies in here. If you can do it in a game, we can do it here.’

  He knew that there was a downside to that. We could still die. Death was the central characteristic of video games. Sooner or later something took your last life or the last of your health.

  And in underground bases, there was always something much nastier than the guards after you.

  II

  While Dermot got used to being intact, I rested my ear against the closed door. I couldn’t hear anything outside. I remembered the soldiers being ordered to take up positions nearby. Were we still nearby? We hadn’t been in the vent long, and it had turned this way and that. We might only be a few feet away from the lift, with armed troops in the corridors with orders to gun us down on sight.

  There was another can of the virtually trademarked soda in the desk drawers, but I didn’t think its restorative powers would do much good if we were both shot in the head. I could flip us back to the real world if we were in real danger, of course, but we’d be inside a pharmaceutical company building without permission. Bright Harvest seemed to be very pally with the security forces in the real world. If we were caught there, we’d be off to the sort of imprisonment that you don’t get out of, where we’d be injected with turpentine and truth serums and then carted off to an institution for ever after.

  I couldn’t get us out until we got to Betts. After that, things could sort themselves out.

  I opened the door a little way and peeped through the opening. There was an empty corridor outside. I opened the door all the way and put my head out.

  There were no soldiers in sight. The corridor was short, with sets of double doors at each end. Apart from those doors and the one I was looking out of, it was featureless. Dermot joined me. He was holding the remaining can of soft drink.

  ‘What’s the plan now?’ he asked. ‘I take it we’re steering clear of the lifts, with them being full of gas and all. Correct me if I’m wrong.’

  ‘We find the stairs. There are bound to be stairs around here somewhere. Then we walk down to the twelfth floor and find the labs, find Betts, and see what he has to say.’

  ‘I hope he’s worth it.’

  ‘He might cure me.’

  ‘We might die on the way. After you, then.’

  ‘Left or right?’

  He shrugged. I picked left and went that way. I listened at the double doors and didn’t hear anything. I opened them cautiously. Another empty corridor waited on the other side. We walked along it, to another set of double doors.

  We repeated that five more times. I was getting complacent by then. I opened the next set of doors expecting to see another empty corridor.

  Instead, I saw a man dressed in combat fatigues and a gas mask, with one hand out to open the door I’d just opened. His round flat eyepieces aimed at me. So did his gun. He dropped into a crouch and said something I couldn’t hear. There was a bang.

  It was a can of absolutely non-copyright-infringing soda bouncing off the soldier’s face mask. He dropped his gun.

  Dermot grabbed it. The soldier grabbed my neck and began to squeeze. I watched the muzzle swing up next to me.

  There was a noise that was made up of about eight hundred short loud bangs joined together into a stream a couple of seconds long. There was a muzzle flash only slightly more showy than the Hiroshima explosion.

  Most of the soldier’s head made its way down the corridor in pieces. He let go of my neck and fell over backwards.

  ‘Well that’s one less of these bastards,’ said Dermot. He knelt by the body and began to ransack it.

  ‘He could be real.
’

  ‘Now he’s really fucking dead, which is what you’d have been if I hadn’t shot him. You can thank me later. I’ll keep the gun and you can try fighting them off with morals. How many guards do you think they have in this place? The real one? Bright fucking Harvest, England?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not many.’

  ‘Right. Not many. So these aren’t real. These are cannon fodder. This is where we get to have some fun. That’s what games are all about.’

  ‘This isn’t a game.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Well, I’ll shoot them and we’ll see if anyone fucking complains. You stay behind me and don’t get in the way when the fun starts. It’d be terrible if you had to enjoy any of this.’

  He prowled down the corridor and kicked open the doors at the far end.

  ‘Banzai!’ he shouted, opening fire on the two guards he found. They hit the ground in pieces. Another one rounded a corner and got off a few shots. Dermot dived and fired wildly. One of the guard’s ankles evaporated in a red spray. The guard howled and hopped. Dermot shot him through the eyeholes of his gas mask. The guard threw his hands to his face and dropped like a stone.

  ‘Grab yourself a gun,’ Dermot said to me, full of elation. ‘This is a fucking rush. Do these run out of ammo at all?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it,’ I said, stepping over the carnage. I took a short sub-machine gun. It had a trigger and no other controls. I also took a radio from one of the dead guards.

  ‘What’s that for? Hoping to pick up the football results?’

  ‘We can hear what they’re up to. It’ll stop us walking into any ambushes.’

  ‘Well that’s fair enough. How do you switch it on?’

  I pressed the only button on the radio.

  ‘Alert,’ a laid-back male voice said. ‘All troops fall back. There has been an incident in one of the laboratories. Several test subjects have escaped. These are highly hostile organisms. Do not engage. Fall back to safe positions. All levels below fourteen are considered dangerous. Repeat: the lower levels are infested by bio-hazardous organisms. Do not engage.’

  ‘What’s he fucking mean?’ asked Dermot, scandalized. We didn’t escape. We broke in. And we aren’t fucking bio-hazardous, either.’