The room behind them exploded.
11:09 AM
The place was huge. Much larger than Frazier had ever imagined it would be. Once through the main security door, he'd faced stacks of boxes, stretching into the distance. The tunnel still lent its curvature to the storage room he was now inside of, but the original brickwork had been replaced with a new gleaming white surface. Air vents above him and spaced at regular intervals across the ceiling helped keep the space colder than he'd expected.
Looking back, it's a miracle he ever found this place. The remnant vaults were some of OsMiTech's most sensitive locations, and they'd spent a lot of effort in misdirection, letting people think everything was stored at OsMiTech headquarters itself. For a moment, he thought he could hear sirens, then realised it was wishful thinking.
Taking eyes from the dead. What kind of fucked-up society did that? Frazier knew that they were the only telepath country to have begun such a scheme. Would they have done this without the remnant keeper technology? Probably not. No, absolutely not. So, the remnant keepers were as much at fault as Oster and Milton in their ivory tower.
He walked gingerly to the end of the first rack. Labels lit up on his approach and a series of reference numbers scrolled past. No way of taking one of those references and turning it into anything meaningful. Not unless you had access to the main OsMiTech database and a contact who promised all the inside data you could manage. He looked forward to meeting the latest addition to his cause. So far, they'd only communicated over text message and he had no idea who they were nor what position they held, but it had to be someone on the inside of OsMiTech. No one could hack the systems from the outside.
The first rack's label didn't have the numbers he wanted, so he proceeded to the next. There were five aisles along the tunnel and each side of the aisle had its own shelving. These reached about ten foot high with shelves about a foot wide. And on those shelves?
Thousands of memory boxes. This was the result of Booth Maguire's endeavours. The ATL had considered that people were likely involved in the preparation of the dead's eyes for long-term storage in the memory boxes and once they'd determined to locate the people who did that, it helped lead them to the remnant vault. The room stretched out into the distance, following the curve of the tunnel. But this couldn't be the only one in existence, the first maybe, but not the only one. Each district had its own unit and the contents of theirs would fill out as much as this one. Walking into an aisle, he saw the memory boxes three deep, one behind the other, and this continued along the run of the shelf. Each shelf rack took ten boxes, so that was thirty per shelf. The racks were ten shelves high and five aisles along. Frazier did the maths. And then he did them again to be sure. Three thousand for every metre along this tunnel. And how long did this tunnel go on for?
A lot of eyes.
He returned to his device and checked the references. The shelf racking had a series of numbers on it, and after checking a couple, he worked out the system and headed off into the unit, inspecting the numbers at the ends of each rack and at intervals along the way. He wondered how a telepath would fare in here, with this many remnants to contend with. He knew that the remnants were sometimes experienced as 'voices' in the moments before a recall was attempted. Would the presence of a telepath trigger activity in this room? It was a good idea he hadn't brought Indira with him. She was much better placed working at distracting the police officers.
And amongst all of this, somewhere hidden in the shelving, was a single box with the eyes of his brother. Wesley Growden. A bastard to grow up with, a bastard to work with, but he’d been his brother, and it was Frazier’s decision what was to happen to Wesley’s body. All of it.
As kids, Wesley had never been easy to get along with. Fights were common and often left Frazier with bruises and cuts to show for it. Dad thought this was character building and left them to get on it with it. How did they end up working together? It just sort of happened. As the younger, Frazier always had to look up to his brother, or he’d get nothing. Dad was a lazy slob and their mum had left years ago. Money was tight and Frazier wasn’t about to enter a government scheme to earn his way. Not after he’d seen what happened to his friends, and later the money he’d seen Wesley bring home.
Drugs were common. Anyone with half a brain could get their hands on a little Ketra 12 if they knew where to go. In the depths of the habitat blocks, all it took was knocking on a few doors. God that place was the pits.
The man with the bald head lived on the sixteenth floor. Or that’s what he wanted people to believe. He needed a place to direct unwanted attention from the police and that’s the address he liked to share. He actually spent his time living between three different apartments in that habitat block alone. And that was just for the one block. Baldy lived in at least three blocks, and who knew where else beside?
Wesley started working for him. He was eight.
Baldy liked having the kids around. He wasn’t a kiddy fiddler. No, that wouldn’t have done his credibility any favours. The kids in that building and on the streets were cheap and could travel enough distance on their bikes to form a solid distribution network. Wesley came home that first night, ducked a punch from Dad, took the second to his shoulder, then stumbled into the room they shared, stuffed something in his hidey hole under the broken floorboard and collapsed on the bed. Frazier couldn’t sleep. He’d been on tenterhooks since he’d seen the half-opened bottle of vodka on the kitchen table, and now, after seeing Wesley, his mind was racing. He hadn’t told them where he was going. He should have been in school, but the truant officer had long since stopped house-calling. A couple of months ago, Dad had threatened to stab him with the edge of his broken beer bottle.
But, in the cold of night, with his blankets pulled up to his chin, Frazier wanted to know what was in the hidey hole.
He was disappointed to see the small roll of credit notes. He had hoped Wesley had remembered his upcoming birthday and stashed that last toy from the set he wanted. But then, it occurred to the six-year old Frazier, that money could buy the things he wanted. They’d be no risk of getting caught in the shop because for the first time, they wouldn't be doing anything wrong.
He took a note, a single note.
The morning, he was woken with a slap to the cheek.
“No, Dad, I’m getting up.”
But it wasn’t Dad. It was Wesley. His brother wasn’t exactly overweight, but compared to Frazier’s thin stature, his weight, sitting on top of his chest, was enough to make him struggle for breath.
“Give it back, runt,” he said. Wesley had a look about him. A different look to normal. His eyes betrayed his short childhood. Until that morning, Frazier had always seen his mother looking back out of him through his mother’s eyes. That morning, it was all his father.
“Here, I only wanted to look.” Frazier reached under the pillow and took out the note he’d secreted there the previous night. “I’m sorry.”
Wesley had got off him and stashed the credits with the rest of his money. “Don’t tell Dad.”
That much didn’t need saying. If Dad found money in the house, it would soon get spent.
Frazier had pulled the covers up over his face. Hiding his tears. Eventually, his brother sat on the edge of the bed, mindful of not sitting on Frazier’s legs. He rested a hand on his chest and patted Frazier. “Don’t. Dad will come.”
Eventually, after a minute of crying, he lifted the cover off his face and looked at his brother. “Where did you get it?”
“I’ll show you.”
And so, Wesley had introduced his six-year old brother, the boy who stayed hiding under the covers so his tears wouldn’t betray him, to Baldy.
Rolling on ten years and came the day when Wesley decided it was time to take charge of the operation himself. Tired of running drugs, he’d brought himself into the fold, closer to Baldy. Too close for Baldy.
Frazier crossed over into the next aisle. The reference numbers matc
hed what he had on his datapad. His brother’s eyes were down here somewhere. The air was heavy with the smell of the tree of the dead. The memory boxes were made from the wood of the black pines and this concentration of them, tinged the air with the scent. He found it unsettling.
And there it was. He’d expected it to be harder to find. Until now, he didn’t believe that the information he’d paid for would be accurate. But, there it was. A small wooden box. A tiny bronze plaque screwed to the front in the centre. Letters inscribed.
Wesley Growden
And then a reference number burnt into the side: matched the one on the datapad.
“Hello, Bro,” he said.
Then, carefully, as if he were handling something volatile, something that could go off at the wrong word, the wrong look, he picked up the box.
When his brother had the opportunity to kill Baldy and take over his business empire, he’d done do without hesitation. He told him later that it had seemed the obvious thing to do. No thinking had gone into the decision. It just had to be that way.
Frazier was making a stand against the regime. He would first save his brother from confinement, then he would take care of the rest, give them the sending off they so desperately deserved.
“It just has to be this way,” he whispered.
He held the box in front of him. Felt the curves and lines cut into the surface. Felt its warmth.
Frazier Growden opened his brother’s final resting place.
And screamed.
12:10 PM
From the moment they’d arrived, there’d been confusion. Adam had warned they might have a difficult time seeing it due to the lack of conditioning. He’d told them security was everything. The door was hidden in plain sight but with enough technology to prevent unnecessary attention.
Edward had been the first to see what they were looking for, and then, only because he approached the stretch of brickwork and ran his hands over the surface, feeling for any change in texture.
And once he’d found it, he’d encouraged Jack to do the same.
Once you’d seen it, it was impossible to unsee it.
A plain door, painted green, possibly made of wood, sitting flush to the wall. With its peeling paint, it wouldn’t have looked out of place in a squat. There was no door furniture, numbers, signs, or identifying marks of any kind. Dozens of people walked straight past it without giving it a second glance. Edward concentrated on a few of them, and noticed they would often turn away on the approach, as if repelled by an invisible force.
Edward pointed out the small camera-like devices a foot above the door frame.
“Blitzers,” he explained. “Helps to deflect attention.”
“We’re in the right place then,” Jack replied.
“I guess so.”
They’d brought the smallest of teams with them, only Lina and Bryson from uniform. With the explosion at OsMiTech, a lot of the emergency units were tied up, but Edward had other reasons. If Indira was inside, and could do what Anna could, he wanted as few of his people exposed to her influence as possible. He’d worked with both Lina and Bryson and knew they were bloody minded. Perhaps that would be an advantage.
“Alice has been checking the building plans,” Edward said, “It used to be part of the city’s underground railway. It was closed when they created the new overhead transport network.”
Edward approached the door and tried to push it open. It was sturdier than it looked and didn’t yield under force. Instead he tried to find a finger hold, anything he could use to pry the entrance open. The wood was rough under his fingers and he pressed hard into the thin gaps between door and doorjamb but there was nothing he could grip onto. Edward gestured for the policemen to step forward. “Open it,” he instructed Lina Howard, the senior of the pair. A nod, and then Lina opened the holdall she’d been carrying.
“Step back,” Edward muttered at Jack.
Lina pulled a small gun from her bag, two cylinders attached, one on each side then stood close to the door and fired several pellets at it. On impact, the pellets dispersed into a thin blue coating.
“What is that?” Jack asked.
“Bolt cutter,” Edward replied.
Jack looked confused but Lina fired the gun again and red pellets landed onto the blue crust. The reaction began as the red pellets popped, spreading a red dusting over the surface, flipping blue to red, then came a burning small as whatever the material was composed of, got to work dissolving the door. Holes appeared in its surface. Smoke and vapour rose from the reaction sites. Edward looked around him. If anyone else could see this, they weren’t responding.
Then the material dissolved to nothing, and the door was no longer there. “Thank you,” Edward said to Lina, then he walked up to the doorway and shone his now illuminated HALO into the darkness beyond.
Jack stood by him and removed his sunglasses.
The light from Edward’s HALO caught a brickwork tunnel; a broken light bulb hanging down from the centre of the curved roof. No immediate threats. Edward wondered if it would really be this simple. The men crossed the threshold, and a blast of cold air struck them.
“Boss, we’re losing signals.” The younger of the uniforms, Bryson, was checking his datapad. “There’s a blocking field in operation.”
“Shouldn’t surprise us,” Edward said. “Send a message to Alice. Let her know we’re going in, then follow.”
The uniform paused by the door to make the call.
“Any of this familiar?” Edward asked Jack.
Jack shook his head. “Why would it be?”
They stepped along the concrete floor, footsteps echoed. “Booth Maguire had been here. I wondered whether you had as well.”
“I’d have mentioned it.”
Edward wasn’t so sure. There was a lot he had yet to learn about his new colleague, and the setup they were walking into now reminded him how little he knew about the inner workings of the telepath world. If these adjusters had worked on Booth, who's to say they hadn’t done the same to Jack to make him forget coming here?
Ahead, the corridor ended with a row of five doors, each marked with a number. Number four was ajar, a sliver of light shining through the opening.
Reassured by the presence of the two armed uniforms behind him, Edward indicated that they should stay silent on the approach. He reached into his jacket, unholstered his gun, then approached the door. Blood pounded in his ears and as he lifted a hand to push the door open, he realised it was shaking.
He stalled.
“What’s wrong?” Jack whispered.
“I don’t… she’s inside my head.” The realisation came quickly. The gun in his hand drifted and he was pulling the trigger before he could shout a warning. The shot thundered in the confined chamber and the younger uniform fell to the floor, clutching his leg.
“Bryson!” Lina yelled and ran to her fallen colleague.
His gun hand spun around to his next target and he saw Jack, an incredulous stare on his face.
“Move,” Edward hissed, fighting against the voice in his head. Jack didn’t need telling twice. He fell away to his right even as Edward pulled the trigger again. A shot blasted into the brickwork across the tunnel, inches away from where Jack’s head had been a moment before.
But, Jack wasn’t running away. He charged into Edward’s shoulder crashing him against the wall. Edward’s head cracked against the brickwork and he stumbled then fell to the floor. The pain was sudden and intense, but his hand stayed tight on his weapon. “Stop me,” Edward pleaded.
Indira’s voice in his head was insidious, and his grip on the gun was tight. Edward swung his arm to push away the telepath, then as Jack fell backw
ards, Edward followed up with a fist to the side of the man’s head. Jack fell to the concrete, giving Edward the chance to kick him in the ribs.
No. That was the intruder in his mind.
“Help,” he said again to Jack. “Stop her.”
Even as Jack was scrambling to his feet, Edward’s attention shifted to Lina, pressing hard on her comrade’s wound, her hands dark with blood. He raised his gun to fire: her eyes wide.
“Please don’t kill me.”
Edward focused, and he felt the intrusion in his mind. Indira was brutal as she tugged away at his thoughts. The more he resisted, the greater the pain behind his eyes.
“I won’t do this,” he snarled, then pointed the gun down to the floor and shot himself in the foot.
Edward collapsed, the gun falling on the concrete. The pain behind his eyes vanished, but a new agony tore up through his body from his wound.
Jack hurried to him. “We need to get you to a hospital.”
“I can make it outside; I can call for help. But, you need to get down there, stop them from destroying the unit.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“And you’re wasting time. If Growden is going to blow this place up he’ll bring down the streets above him. Hundreds will die.”
Jack got to his feet.
“You’re wasting time,” Edward insisted, “You need to go. He’s got over an hour’s head start. Take the bolt cutter in case there are more locked doors.”
Jack hurried to the holdall Lina had been carrying and took the small device. Bryson looked in bad shape but Lina was already pulling out some field dressings from her bag. “We’ll be OK, sir. Go and get the bastards.”
Jack hesitated as he passed Edward, and bent to his level. “I won’t be long,” he said.
It was only as Jack ran out through the door marked four that Edward noticed his gun was missing from its place on the floor where he’d dropped it.
The Remnant Vault (Tombs Rising Book 2) Page 16
