by Jay Phillips
“Not five,” she replied. “There are six left.”
A look of confusion covered his suddenly tired face. “What?”
“There are six of us left.”
“Are you trying to say I can’t count?” he said in return. “Cause the last time I checked, seven minus two equals five. Of course, you guys changed the rules for everything else; maybe you changed the rules of math too.”
She sighed loudly. “Do you have to be stupid?”
He smirked. “More often than not, yeah. Helps pass the time. Now, I believe you were explaining?”
“Fire retired four years ago. The Agent’s ward, Adam, took her place in the government.”
“Never heard it on the news.”
“We didn’t announce it. We didn’t want anyone to view the government as being weaker due to one of the original Seven not being present.”
He shook his head, half out of confusion, the other half from the games these people played. “And Adam is?”
“He’s basically The Agent’s son. Adam was orphaned during the war, and Bruce took him in, raised him as his own.”
“Mighty kind of him,” The Detective said, his voice full of sarcasm. “What does Adam do to make him worthy of such a lofty position?”
“He’s a technokinetic.” Her beautiful face suddenly filled with worry.
“He can control machines with his mind?” The Detective asked impatiently. “Two dozen people were just killed by a rogue machine, and you’re just now telling me that the newest member of The Seven is an orphan who can control blenders and other household appliances with his mind?”
She frowned. “That about sums it up.”
“We have to go.” He grabbed her by the hand and pulled her to the pretty red sports car.
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RUN PROGRAM SYSTEM ANALYSIS
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OPERATION SYSTEM DAMAGED
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TELEPORTATION SYSTEM DAMAGED
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PRIMARY WEAPON SYSTEM DAMAGED
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RUN REPAIR PROGRAM
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REPAIR SEQUENCE COMMENCE
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TIME REMAINING UNTIL SYSTEM FULLY OPERATIONAL: 9H00M00S
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TIME REMAINING: 8H59M59S
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TIME REMAINING: 8H59M58S
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The drive to Adam’s apartment was short, but intense. Neither The Detective nor The Ice Queen said much on the way. Since neither of them were really sure what they were going to find when they got there, there really didn’t seem to be anything to discuss. Of course, the only question that continually popped into his mind was wondering how her breasts managed to stay in that top, but he refrained from asking. She probably wouldn’t have responded too well.
The car stopped in front a run down apartment building. “This it?” he asked, as they both stepped out of the car. “Not exactly in line with the penthouse Barren lived in, is it? Of course, it’s probably not in line with the places the rest of you live either.”
“Not exactly,” she said. “Adam recently decided to reject the idea of living above the people. He moved here to live with the normals.”
They walked through the front door into a decrepit lobby. Fluorescent lights blinked on and off. Surveillance cameras rested in each corner near the ceiling, aimed at the room below. They walked across the cracked tile to an elevator, and she pushed the button, calling the elevator down.
He turned and looked at her. “You say the word ‘normal’ like it’s some kind of a plague or something.”
She looked back at him. “I still have a hard time with what they tried to do to us, to all of us.”
“And what exactly was that?” he asked.
“If we hadn’t fought back, they would have had us all in their containment centers, and they wouldn’t have stopped until all super powered people were extinct.”
He sighed. “Or they might have given up on the whole idea of registration and just left us alone.”
“You really believe that?” she asked, her face filled with doubt.
“Not really. But now, after the war and all, we’ll never know, will we?”
The elevator arrived, and they stepped in. She pushed the button for the twentieth floor. The lights blinked in there as well. He pulled out his gun, placing it in position with his arms bent and ready to use. He pushed himself up against the side of the wall. She did the same on the opposite side.
“You think you’re going to need that?” she asked, nodding towards the gun.
He gave her a crooked smile. “To be perfectly honest, I have absolutely no idea what we’re walking into here. Just want to be ready for anything.”
The elevator door opened, and they slowly stepped out, taking in their surroundings as they moved. The hallway was dark and just as decrepit as the lobby. She gestured her head toward the end of the hall, and he took the hint, continually guiding them to the last apartment on the floor. Once at the door, they each stood on either side of the doorway and looked at each other.
“Knock?” she whispered.
The Detective held his forefinger in front of his mouth and mouthed the word, “No.”
Holding the gun in front of his chest, he moved in front of the door and kicked it in. The stench of death almost overwhelmed him. He walked into the dark one room apartment, and she followed. She flipped the light switch by the door, revealing the dead body of Adam Rogers sitting at a desk, his head laying on the desktop. His right hand, still clutching a pistol, had fallen into his lap.
“Goddamn it, Adam,” Ice said softly.
The Detective walked to the desk, staring at the single bullet hole in the head. The stench was almost too much for his enhanced sense of smell to take. He struggled through it. “He’s been dead about four days,” he said, trying to cover his mouth and nose as he spoke.
“How can you tell?” she asked.
“The smell.” He placed the gun back inside his coat. “The body’s been here at least four days, if not five.”
He took a closer look at the head, noticing a white sheet of paper just underneath. He bent down, grabbed the paper by the corner, and slowly pulled it out.
“What’s that?” Ice asked.
“It appears to be a blood stained note,” he answered, holding the paper up and showing her the side with the writing. “More exact, it appears to be a blood stained suicide note.”
She jerked it out of his hand. “Give me that. I need to see it.”
He let her read it as he looked around the room, not that there was much to see. A bed against the wall, a desk and chair two feet from the bed, a framed picture of a pretty brunette girl on the desk, a mini refrigerator on the floor, a tiny room which appeared to be a bathroom, and that was it, nothing more, not even a closet.
He turned back towards her. “Well?” he asked. “Does that make sense to you?”
“Not really.”
When she answered, he heard the sound of her heartbeat speed up ever so slightly; she was lying about something. “Read it out loud,” he said.
“My dearest Emily---”
“Who is Emily?” he interrupted.
“Emily is Fire Maiden’s little sister,” she answered. “She and Adam are---were---best friends. Can I continue?”
“Please,” he said, still looking around the room. He knew there was something he was missing, and it was probably something simple, something he was completely overlooking.
She continued reading. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything I was and everything I wasn’t, but
I will not be a pawn again, never again. I love you.-Adam.” She stopped reading. “And there’s a line at the bottom of the page that says ‘They’re not the family you deserve.’”
When she read the final sentence, he heard her heartbeat speed up, ever so slightly, again. “And what‘s different about that last line?” he asked.
“It doesn’t seem to be in the same hand writing, almost as if someone else wrote that part later.”
“My thoughts exactly,” he said in return, all the while knowing she was keeping something from him.
She placed the note back on the desk. “I have to call The Agent,” she said, pulling a phone from her pocket. “He has to know.” She stopped for a second. “And Fire, I have to call her, so she can tell her sister.” She sighed. “Goddamn this shit.” She pressed a button on the phone, put it to her ear, and walked out of the room into the hallway.
The Detective heard her yell at someone to get back in their room before she had them arrested. Oh well, he thought, what she lacked in tact, she made up for in beauty. He looked at the body and the gun in its hand. He fought through the smell, lowering himself as close to the body as he could get. He touched the cold hand holding the gun. Gun powder residue covered the hand and most of the fingers. Adam Rogers had fired at least one shot from the gun he held, that much The Detective knew for sure.
But there remained something else, something he was still missing. He looked at the computer on the desk. It was still on; it was silently waiting in stand-by mode. A computer mouse sat a foot from the head. He pushed it, bringing up a screen filled with icons and options. They all seemed rather run of the mill, but one seemed to catch his attention. He clicked on the file marked “Security Cam.”
The screen split into four equal parts, showing four separate angles of the tiny room. The Detective saw himself from four different directions while standing over the body and looking at the computer screen. He looked up and around. Tiny cameras lenses stared at him from the walls, one camera on each of them. A thought occurred to him: maybe this thing had been recording the whole time.
He looked on the screen for a rewind button. He found it, clicked it, and watched as a set of date options came up. He typed in the date for five days ago.
“Well, that was easier than I expected it to be,” Ice said as she walked back into the room. “He seemed sort of shocked, but not really. You know what I me---what are you doing?” she asked, pushing herself next to him so she could see the monitor.
“Watch this,” he said, pointing at the screen. “I think he had the security cameras running all this time.”
The Detective clicked the play button, and they watched an alive Adam Rogers walking through his apartment. The Detective clicked the fast forward button, going past the mundane parts of the dead twenty-five year old’s former life.
“Slow down,” Ice snapped, as the recording showed Adam sitting at the desk.
The two of them watched as he sat down and put a gun, the same gun currently in his corpse’s hand, in his lap, and then placed pen to paper, writing out the note they’d found. After finishing the note, he placed his hands on the monitor, with his eyes closed, for almost ten seconds. He then pulled the gun up, put it to his head, and pulled the trigger, spraying blood and pieces of his brain across the room.
Ice shook her head slowly. “Goddamn you, Adam.” She turned and looked at The Detective. “I was really hoping he hadn’t done this to himself. I was hoping there had been something else.”
“There is, look,” The Detective said, pointing at the top-right display. “He didn’t land on the note. I pulled the note out from under his head. Here, it’s under the mouse, almost a foot away.”
“Fast forward,” she said.
She grabbed his hand and placed it back on the mouse. Even with all of the death around them, the touch of her hand made him smile like a giddy school girl. He restrained himself, wiping the smile from his face. Now wasn’t the time to be concerned with how attractive she was.
He fast-forwarded through the recording. Four days ago…three days ago…two days ago…one day ago, nothing changed, just the dead body slowly decomposing. He kept going. Twelve hours ago…ten…eight…six…he slowed the speed down. A little over five hours ago, just after Anthony Barren had been murdered in his penthouse, an imposing figure appeared on the screen.
They watched in silence as The Iron Knight armor teleported into the room. It looked around, before noticing the dead body on the desk. The armor grabbed Adam’s corpse by the back of the hair, lifted the head up, and looked at the face, before slamming the decayed head hard against the desktop. It then walked to the other side of the desk and picked up the framed picture, staring at the pretty brunette in the photograph. It carefully placed the frame back in its place and picked up the pen next to the note, scrawling words onto the paper. The armor grabbed the head again, lifting it up and placing the note under it, and then, with a flash of light, the armor disappeared just as easily as it had arrived, teleporting out of the room.
“Well,” Ice said, a confused look covering her face, “that raises a shit load more questions than it answered.”
The Detective picked the note back up and stared at it. “At least we know who wrote this last line.”
“But why?” she asked. “It’s not as if he left any other cryptic clues anywhere else.”
“I’m more concerned with what he wrote than I am with why he wrote it.” He turned and looked her in the eyes. “Are you sure that last line means nothing to you?”
“No,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone, her crystal blue eyes staring into his and the sound of her heartbeat speeding up ever so slightly as she spoke.
“Okay then,” he said in return, placing the note back on the desk. “One other thing though.” He pointed at the computer monitor. “When our killer showed up, he didn’t exactly seemed prepared for a fight. You notice that?”
“Actually,” she answered, “I had. He just teleported into the room like he knew there wasn’t going to be anything of danger waiting on him here.”
“Exactly.” The Detective stood up straight and rubbed his forehead, then walked toward the door. “So now what?”
“The Agent has a special crew coming to…” She looked around the room, “…to clean up all of this.”
“And us?” The Detective asked, rubbing his wounded shoulder without thinking about it. “What’s the next step for us?”
“He wants us to go back to my place and wait until morning. He’s putting together some kind of an assault team for us to use, just in case the two of us can’t handle the Knight armor alone.” She pointed to The Detective’s shirt. “And I asked Fire to come by and bring you one of her husband’s shirts. You are a bloody mess.”
He looked down at his blood soaked shirt. The wound had apparently been leaking through the bandage; he hadn’t noticed. “Well, I guess I am.”
“Come on, 616” she said as she walked out the door. “There’s not a goddamn thing left for us to do here.”
He watched her walk out. Once he was sure she couldn’t see, he turned back to the desk and picked up the piece of paper. He folded the note in half, placing it inside his back pocket. He turned back towards the door and silently followed her out of the room.
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TIME REMAINING: 7H47M36S
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TIME REMAINING: 7H47M35S
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ACCESS FILE: SELF DEFENSE PROTOCOLS
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ERROR
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FILE SYSTEM DAMAGED
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FILE SYSTEM REPAIR INITIALIZED
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TIME REMAINING FOR ALL REPAIRS: 7H45M51S
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TIME REMAINING: 7H45M50S
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Arthur Grant opened the door to his office and walked into the room. All of the business with prisoner 616 and The Agent had been resolved, and as usual, he was left to finish the paperwork and clean up the mess. His office was on the lower end of the spectrum, small, crappy carpet, crappier furniture, but it at least had a nice row of large windows, giving him a brilliant view of the large building on the other side of the street.
Grant looked toward his desk. A woman stood in front of it, blond hair, unnatural light protruding from every fiber of her being, light that lit up the room like a bright summer day. As Grant stared in silence at the beautiful woman in front of him, all other light in the room besides her began to disappear; darkness overtook everything, covering the windows and turning every other source of light into shadows. The briefcase he held in his hand fell to his feet, spilling papers all over the worn out carpet.
“No.” he said, his voice quivering. “I’ve done everything The Agent has asked of me. Everything. Without question, every time.”
The woman who seemed to be made of light walked towards him.
“I have never told anyone,” Grant pleaded. “I’ve never said a word to any one about The Agent’s plans. Ever.”
The woman stood in front of him, her light filling his senses even as the room around them seemed to become gradually darker.
“Please,” he cried, tears flowing from his eyes. “Please, I won’t say a word, not a single word.”
She leaned in next to his ear and whispered. “I know you won’t,” she said, her voice almost as translucent as she was.
The blade of light she emitted from her left hand entered Grant just below his naval and cut upwards until it reached the top of his sternum. She pulled the blade back and watched in silence as Grant fell to his knees, his now external intestines held within his hands.
“Not a word,” he muttered to himself while he collapsed onto the ground, his blood and assorted organs creating a pool around him. “Not a word,” he said again as the pretty blond lady made of light disappeared along with the rest of the world into the darkness.
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