Tag: murder

Short Story: Think Deeply

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The bomb threat at the Oakton Memorial Hospital had been called in by an anonymous tip. Whether or not it was credible, the two-thousand odd doctors, nurses, M-As and other people inside were evacuated. A whole city block was cordoned off. Police blockades re-directed traffic or otherwise halted it whole for two blocks further on all sides. Someone had estimated, if the building went, its parking garages at either side and a few of emptied businesses might go too.

The chaos was already well under way when the Emergency Response Squad arrived. The new-age SWAT team was more an army than a police force, privately funded by many of Oakton’s large corporations to relieve the local, municipal government’s pressures. In truth they were free-agents, authorized to use any and all force necessary to eliminate threats. Unlike police, they were not a government agency, and were free to do any of a number of sordid things– like kill without the petty worries of justice, due process, or the pesky amendments protecting the obviously guilty from being presumed as such.

In short, ERS was everything American Police wished to be with none of the obligations that kept them in check.

ERS was rarely called in, though. OPD didn’t like having its toes stepped on, neither as an entity nor as as individuals comprising that entity. Even so, they couldn’t handle a threat of this nature alone. Recent years of poor press and tension between citzens and the department had festered a growing resentment. Among other things, it kept many would-be peace officers from joining.

OPD gracefully bowed to ERS, this time. In request for aid, containing the situation and keeping panic from spreading, ERS’ crack-squad were sent in. Their ingress across Oakton from its outskirts was unmistakable. They rolled in like an army in freshly armored sleek, blackened APCs with angry looking cannons. The vehicles were all thick, steel-plated angles and cylinders with tires enough to crush even the largest of vehicles that got in their way. Enough of the pseudo-tanks were able to form an impassable wall around the hospital’s entire city-block.

Captain Abraham Logan stepped from an APC. As acting leader of the ERS battalion, he had complete autonomy. His ultra-thin, kevlar and graphene-woven, black uniform and tac-vest gave him all the menace of SWAT combined with the next-gen tech of an army more advanced than the US’s own. The comm-link in his ear was satellite-guided, good for up to a thousand meters under water, or a mile of concrete on all sides. It connected him with ERS dispatch that had twenty-four hour access to public and corporate satellites to monitor situations in real-time.

Equipped with thermographic and night-vision, A-R glasses, Logan could see in the dark while overlaying his GPS-tracked location on a map of the hospital to one side of his vision. In combination with the Explosive Ordinance sniffers embedded in small, microscopic points around his clothing, he was almost singularly useful. His own stubborn will and battlefield experience would keep him and his people alive so long as they listened.

He led his group to the doors, their hi-tech gadgetry enabled and their comm-links active. Their AR glasses even had small cameras to keep ERS-dispatch aware of the teams’ surroundings. They presently showed Logan and his team breaching the facility with expert movements, their voices short, punctual.

“Cut the lights,” Logan ordered through his comm.

An ERS dispatcher, linked to the city’s power grid and the Hospital’s auxiliary generators, did as instructed. The lights went out. Gleaming, sterile white and warm wood paneling turned to dark silhouettes and blackness underfoot. It was almost blinding. The team’s AR glasses faded up their night-vision, and the way ahead was clear– albeit a little more gray-toned than usual. The active sniffers on Logan’s suit tracked scents of plastique and something most certainly lethal, but unidentifiable.

The team moved in sweeping caution, to a stairwell. They burst through its entrance to follow the stairs downward for a basement boiler room. Silence beneath their collective boot-steps sent a chill down their spines. Even Logan, war-hardened as he was, shuddered from the cold. He hid it from his team, led them further down in silence. The E-O trail was hot, as a faint, green line on the AR at their eyes.

They slipped into the bowels of the hospital beyond the stairs, angled for a morgue spanning half the basement. This was where they kept their dead. Everything said it. It was cold, morbid, and overpoweringly sterile smelling. A slightest scent of death though, still remained– as if it could never be scrubbed for its eternally continued presence.

Once more they readied to breach and entered the morgue. The team’s chill shudder returned in full force, caused a pause to their advance. Night-vision revealed steel surfaces of counters, tables, and gurneys both empty and filled across the morgue. Bodies atop them tainted the air further, the stench increasing each second the air warmed from lack of cooling. Even if Logan had given the order to engage the back-up power for the room, he doubted it would undo the odor around them.

He fanned the team out across the room. Behind them the door swung closed with a click. They advanced through the long, wide morgue and autopsy area. Logan followed the AR sniffer trail toward small doors equally spaced along the back wall. Body storage was six high, twenty wide, and according to the faint-outlines on thermal-vision, mostly full.

Logan was too preoccupied with the sniffer trail. It led to a door in the center of the storage unit. He pressed a pair of fingers against a panel there that was still active, likely powered by a back-up battery. Over the course of a minute, the door swung open. An empty tray inched outward. In its center sat a curious looking bomb; tall, wide, but hollow with a glass protrusion atop it. Through it, there was the undeniable stir of vapor mist.

Logan set his rifle aside, reached for the bomb.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” an old-man’s voice echoed over the room. The men and women rubbernecked. “Don’t fret. I’ve been gone a while now. You on the other hand…”

The door they entered from hissed, locked. Ventilation covers snapped shut across the room. All at once, the other hundred-and-nineteen doors on the storage wall opened. The scent of over a hundred bodies doubled the team over, Logan included. A few people passed out, overwhelmed by a mix of Methane and Vomit.

After a few moments of retching, Logan regained his feet, “You sick bastard!”

“Death is a funny thing, Captain,” the man’s voice replied over the PA speakers. “It does interesting things to a man. For instance, it causes a reaction of decomposition that, when mixed with bloating, makes one able to literally explode their guts around the room. The problem of course, is that we are dead when we gain this lovely ability.”

“You sick fuck, these are people!” One woman shouted. She sprinted for the door, breath held, tried to pry open it.

“Ah, ah, ah,” the voice said. “You’re locked away, you see. Were I in your position, I’d make peace with that.”

“Fuck you!” Logan shouted. He suppressed a dry-heave.

The man sighed as though a teacher disappointed with his pupil, “Now, now, Captain, we all have to die sometime. As I said, the body does interesting things. One which I have discovered, and which no one else knows but I.”

“Let us out of here you bastard!” The woman screamed as she booted the door.

“No,” the man replied simply. “No, you are to be the statement which reveals my discovery.”

“What the hell are you talking about, psycho?” A man shouted upward at the room.

“You see, I’ve discovered something many men don’t realize they already know about a dead body,” he paused dramatically, as if it meant all the world to his phrasing. “What I’ve discovered, dear friends, is that a body can create a powerful statement after the consciousness inhabiting it leaves.”

“You son of a–”

“And many dead bodies, Captain,” he said without interruption. “Can create a very powerful message.”

“You son of a–”

A sound came from behind Logan. A buzzing that shot up a thousand Hertz to scream with a high-pitch. Two blocks away, the earth jolted and trembled with a nearby explosion. Dirt and debris filled the air. A cloud of smoke and dust covered the distance between ground-zero and the furthest cordoned areas. The shock-wave blew out glass from every window for a mile. Shards rained through Oakton as precipitous drops that fell from the heavens.

When the dust settled, it took two weeks for ERS and OPD to count the dead and injured– most from the effects of the shock-wave. The crater where the hospital had been was kept roped off for months. Various crews worked day and night to restore power, water, and sewage to the effected areas.

Through it all, ERS and the various news outlets worked to locate the man responsible. When the team’s final moments, recorded by ERS’ dispatchers, finally leaked to the web, the world began to speculate. His statement, it seemed, was lost in the tragedy of the moment. That was, until a few amateur sleuths discovered a single phrase whispered in the final half-second of audio.

Buried beneath sounds of methane igniting, bodies being torn asunder, and cement cracking was the man’s voice; “Think Deeply.”

The Collective: Part 10 (Conclusion)

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

10.

Retribution

Rachel had been right, the streets were total chaos. The diamond-formation the group took up as they walked was the only thing approaching order in all of Tokyo. Everywhere people rampaged back and forth, lingered on street corners, in building alcoves, each of them groggy, confused. Most were emaciated, death-camp refugees who’d only just escaped. It seemed too, every one bore at least some symptom of mania from addiction. They craved the ‘net like a junkie craved a fix, but there wasn’t a scrap of electro-dope to be found in all of Tokyo anymore.

The first armored transports they found were empty. Evidently the GSS had deployed before the pulse took out the city’s systems. Whomever had been en-route was no doubt now foot-bound, likely on the way to whatever rendezvous they’d been given. If Lex knew anything about the Collective’s two, remaining members, she knew the American head of GSS would be in-country to keep order.

James Hobbs’ cruelty was unmatched, by the Collective or otherwise. He’d been established the prisons and protocols for dealing with those that refused to sleep. He’d also ensured anyone whom survived those protocols lost a piece of themselves. More importantly, he personally saw to the interrogation and brutalization of Alexis Thorne.

He’d given her more than a few injuries himself. His own, bare hands, had intimidated and threatened her with every form of violence, and made good on some. Hobbs was a sadistic bastard Lex would ensure paid for his cruelties.

Finding him wasn’t nearly as hard as Lex thought it would be. Arrogance and over-confidence could be added to the list of the scumbag’s traits. He and his men had broadcast their location with gun-fire and explosions from a park-square near the city’s center. Lex and the others arrived at its perimeter through the herds that stampeded away like rats from a tidal-wave. What vehicles still worked formed a full barricade around the large square.

Marble statues gleamed like porcelain under flood-lights, powered by generators inside. The white-marble matched concrete walkways. Equally tinted, extra-wide planters were arranged around the flat square beside benches. Japanese Maples, Cherry and Plum Blossoms loomed beautifully over colorful hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, and morning glories. The palette of color on white was warmth against the black steel of vehicles and armed soldiers assembled or patrolling inside.

Lex had gathered her people for this. She’d sent runners to round everyone up. The ever-awakened made their way through the crowd on all sides of the square, marching as Lex was, Rachel beside her. In a moment, Lex and the others would strike with the fury of oppressed millions.

The crowd did its best to unwittingly thwart their advance, but each side reported through ear-comms. The city seemed to take a breath. Then, with the scream of APC guns, exhaled to fan flames of chaos and revolution.

The barricade of vehicles had turned on its owners. Twenty-five millimeter cannons diverted the tides of chaos from the crowd outside to the one inside. Generators exploded. Fuel lines spilled. Columns of fire sprayed in all directions. Ammunition caches were immolated. Stray bullets fired randomly, caused bodies to fall with those from the vehicles’ fire.

The square became a smoke-filled slaughter-house. The only light left was that of the vehicles’ muzzle flashes and growing flames. Men and women flashed through it. They tossed aside arms, fled, died, or huddled in terror. The APC’s guns beat a constant war-rhythm. Dying screams syncopated with splattering blood. The mayhem turned the newly-awakened into gawking statues.

All at once the guns went quiet. No-one on either side moved. All were still. Only a few cries from the dying broke the silence. They settled, soothed or dead, into nothingness. The last of the guns’ smoke rolled across the square, and a silhouette appeared. Blades pointed downward at its sides. A leather coat swirled behind it. Confident steps propelled it forward.

In the square’s center, a man rose from behind a planter, pistol in hand. The aged, graying features of the American hardened. His sweat-lined, dirt-covered face pulled taught defiantly. He emerged, outgunned and outnumbered, but with his weapon trained on the figure. A lean to his posture said he was ready to duck back if need be, but he sensed Lex’s presence was more a challenge than anything. She continued forward. Hobbs shouted throw down her weapons, warned of impending fire.

Rachel watched from atop an APC beside Ryo and Kaz. Another shout. Then, a three-count. A shot rang out. Both sides saw the silhouette hit. Blood sprayed shadows. Lex didn’t flinch. Ryo readied to radio for fire.

Rachel stopped him. “No,” she said, her voice pained, airy. “She has to do this herself.”

Hobbs yelled something Lex ignored. To either side she was merely a faceless warrior, a silhouette, as symbolic as anyone could hope for. No bullet could stop her now.

Another shout. A second bullet sprayed blood near Lex’s hip. She took the hit, fueled by adrenaline, warmed by leaking blood and vengeance. She marched in stance, blades hungry for their bounty. Awakened and soldier alike watched, afraid to breathe.

A grunt and a growl. Five more rounds littered Lex’s torso. Anyone else would have been dead. She should have been, but her body was no longer her own. It was fueled by revenge, justice for countless lost and aimless souls. An almost a collective gasp sounded when Hobbs emptied his magazine into Lex.

She kept walking. He was terrified.

In thirty years of special forces work, running GSS and its prison camps, and breaking its prisoners, he’d never once seen someone so wholly refuse to die. Her face emerged from smoke, stained orange and red from the fires at her sides. Her leather coat shined wet with blood while her clothing clung to her body, obvious even at-range. Fifteen holes leaked the last of her life from her, poor kill-shots each of them.

Hobbs cast the gun away, Lex at arm’s-length. He threw a punch. It was caught in her left arm. Her right sword’s hilt slammed his face. She twisted his arm until it crunched, dislocated. The right blade stab his left thigh, forced him to a half-kneel. His left hand grasped her left sword, managed to clench it. In a single move, the swords plunged through opposing flesh.

Lex didn’t budge. Hobbs’ eyes went wide. Blood began dribbled down his chin. With one, final rip, Lex tore the sword from her own abdomen. It thrust downward beside the other in Hobbs’ chest. His eyes rolled back. He slipped backward, dead.

Rachel bolted. Lex fell to her knees, slumped sideways, caught before she hit the ground.

“Lex!?” Rachel said, her composure cracking. She felt Lex’s blood coat her lower-half, “Lex? C’mon. No! No!”

A glimmer beside Rachel’s face twinkled in Lex’s vision, “Stars over Tokyo…” Lex met Rachel’s eyes. The last of the color drained from her face, “F-finish it.”

Ryo and the others approached slowly. Lex’s eyes shut with a final exhale. Rachel couldn’t help but nod, caress her hair while her eyes leaked tears. Her chest fluttered with sharp breaths.

She eased from beneath Lex, “I will, Lex. I p-promise.”

She laid Lex flat. The city eased into motion again. They closed-in somberly, soldier and awakened alike, to see the woman who’d defied death– even if for an instant. Rachel choked down tears, oblivious to the encroaching presence. She rose to her feet, legs strong as she stepped to Hobbs’ dead body.

With a resounding rip, she tore Lex’s swords from the body, “There is one member of the Collective left alive. We finish this– for Lex.”

***

It was a little over a month later. The awakened had only just begun to adjust to the world. Tokyo was already largely rebuilt from the chaos but the global economy was still in shambles. Most places were back to the barter system. Others were in full-blown civil war. A few however, like Monte Carlo were still civilized. There, most everything came on credit from fear or respect. It was only logical then, that the last member of the Collective had sought refuge in its coastal embrace.

He was a man older than time itself nowadays; Wei Zhou, former-chemist and researcher turned entrepreneur and billionaire mogul. He’d stumbled onto a formula to slow the aging process. He was the eldest, highest ranking member of the Collective. It had been his brain-child decades ago, before it could even be enacted. The man was cunningly clever, difficult as wet eel to pin down, and just as snake-like. The local mafioso protected him like their own, but even they feared the incise of dual blades.

Zhou sipped from a wine glass on a balcony that overlooked the Mediterranean sea. He wore a white sport-coat and slacks that blew in a mild wind above his tucked-in, black shirt. Between his sunglasses, panama hat, and the Gardenia in his lapel, he exuded all the intimidation and class of mafia Don himself.

He swirled the Cabarnet Sovignon in his glass, looked through it to check its color and consistency. The whole of the world around him was reflected in a deformed caricature, including a shadow.

He spoke french, “I said I was not to be disturbed.”

A hand whirled him around. His face met Rachel’s. The shock bucked the glass away. It shattered red wine across the balcony’s paver-stones.

She grit her teeth, “Alexis Thorne sends her regards.”

Lex’s blades pierced Zhou’s chest together. He fell to his knees, hat blown to the wind. He stared up, his white suit stained red. Rachel pulled the blades out. Zhou fell, dead. Rachel’s teeth ground with satisfaction. Lex’s blades whirled to fling blood away.

She turned to march away, comm active as she re-sheathed the blades, “It’s done.”

The Collective: Part 9

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

9.

Rude Awakening

The group returned to Tokyo unscathed. Nothing had changed; either the Collective wasn’t sure of the damage done yet, or they were expertly keeping it quiet. Lex guessed the latter. Rachel agreed; it was doubtful anyone in the Collective was willing to admit defeat, let alone when it spelled disaster for the world’s economy. Credits were still good for the moment, despite not being backed by anything hard, but the news would eventually get out.

Containment was one of the few things the Collective hadn’t been able to exert over the Sleepers. Their lives in the virtual worlds were all connected by RSS-feeds, news blotters, chat-logs, forums; information flowed freely through them all. The Collective had learned the hard way long ago that the more one attempted to manipulate its flow, the more pressurized it became. All the same, contingencies would be enacted to keep people from waking, rioting once the news got out. Lex aimed to make any countermeasures pointless.

She and the others were ready to move almost as soon as they reached Tokyo’s limits. The deaths of Steinsson and Andersson would ensure that the final, few members of the Collective were even more heavily-guarded than the last. Without a doubt there’d be whole GSS contingents between the remaining four members of the Collective and Lex’s group.

They were secondary targets now though. The main targets were already sighted, and their last asset was ready to take the playing field. He’d been informed of his duties on return from Switzerland, all relevant information transferred to him. His allegiance had been assured by the murders of Li and Kay before him, the continued deaths of the Collective further ensured he would honor their deal. Regardless, it wouldn’t be long before the Sleepers woke, with or without him.

Lex and the others piled out of the van long enough to eat, rest, and await nightfall. They vacated a hideaway beneath Tokyo’s streets as the last rays of sunshine were snuffed out, gave way to Tokyo’s neon, light-polluted glow.

Lex led the way through alleys toward their destination. Vehicles were too easy to track given their sore-thumbed obviousness on empty streets. They were easily concealed along the surface all the way to the target building; a giant, server-storage site that stole most of the nearby real-estate with an impressive expanse. It looked about as futuristic as it was; all angles with windows that formed an upward curve along two-thirds of its front, ended with the lowest third’s roof. The rest of the building rose like a giant, crystal chrysalis into the sky. If Lex had to guess, she’d have said there were roughly a hundred and twenty floors between the lobby and the roof. At its very top would be her targets.

She split off from Rachel and the others at the rear-entrance. There was an almost mournful look in the latter’s eyes, but both women knew there was nothing to be done about it. Rachel was needed elsewhere and Lex’s assignment was something she needed to do herself.

She stealthed her way through empty, service hallways. The narrow paths cut through the building’s interior to a grand lobby. Granite floors and marble-topped half-circle reception-desk sat beneath a quarter-wall that split the lobby in half, extended sky ward to the crest of the curved windows. The Global Entertainment logo of a wire-frame globe with solid continents stared down.

Lex passed it, careful not to be caught on any of the dozens of cameras around, and skirted the walls for the elevators at the back of the lobby. She stepped inside an elevator to await the signal, watched a small LED screen glow with an animated version of the globe-logo. It flashed to a face and Lex’s eyes narrowed on the man she’d ordered to speak for the Collective.

His Japanese features were obvious, pristine, but he hadn’t been glitzed with make-up– the sweat that gleamed off his face said as much. In fact, Lex knew for certain he was hiding in a hole, broadcasting through a remote up-link the team maintained from a server-room.

He cleared his throat, “On behalf of Global Entertainment, I would like to speak with you, our loyal audience, for a moment.” Japanese subtitles repeated his words in character script as Lex’s jaw tightened. “Two days ago, the final reserves of Platinum and Gold bullion that back our digital currency were destroyed. For those that do not know, it is these reserves that all money is based off. In effect, our entire economy has been eradicated.”

Lex quit listening. By now there would be chaos across the ‘net. The two Collective’s members on-site, heads of tech Kazue Matsuoka and her lover Maja Stroman, would be scrambling to shut down the link, confused as to why they couldn’t. Lex hit a button for the top-floor penthouse. The elevator lurched upward. She was the distraction, meant to buy time to finish the broadcast, enact the final part of their plan.

Lex touched a communicator in her ear, “I’m moving up.”

Rachel looked back at Ryo as he hunched over a keyboard on the edge of a floor-full of servers. He pressed his ear as he worked, “The broadcast is thirty seconds out. I’m hacking the system now. You’ll be the only functioning elevator. There’s a whole contingent in the penthouse. Be ready.”

Lex’s hands clenched into fists, “Just get it done.”

Rachel cast a look between Yang-Lee and Kaz, racked the bolt on a GSS rifle, “Here we go.”

The elevator-doors opened at the penthouse floor. Twelve rifles lit up the insides. For a moment there was nothing but the sounds of sustained fire. Someone shouted something in Japanese, and it stopped. The squad leader pointed to two of his team, sent them in to scour the elevator with a pair of gestures. They inched forward, leaned into their rifles, with rigid bodies. The rifles swept left and right inside, up and down, found nothing. They relaxed in confusion, turned back to face the rest of the squad.

The squad’s arms lowered. A near-silent of metal on fabric swished. Lex’s boots slammed a vent cover atop the elevator. She plunged through, landed blades-out. The swords angled up, stabbed in at the spines of both men. Blood sprayed from punctures as the blades pierced their fronts. Rifles rose again, chattered against Lex’s double-wide meat-shield.

Holes riddled the dead men. The blades propelled them forward. Lex growled, burst from the elevator with a flying leap, flipped up, over the line of armed men and women, landed behind the squad leader. Fire lagged behind, followed, went silent before it killed the commander.

One blade went left, the other right. A pivot turned to a pirouette. A hand followed through. Lex mentally counted down; Eight.

A wide leg sleep, low gravity. Two bodies tumbled, stunned. One more fell from a dual slice across the belly. Seven.

The sweep turned acrobatic. A flying round-house staggered another man. A blade sliced a second’s throat beside him. Six.

She began another landing; a blade cut the calf of a woman. The other plunged up, in, and out her sternum. Five.

A wide, uplifted sweep, lacerated another woman’s torso. Four.

Lex’s legs drew nearer, body upright. The three staggered men began to recover. She whirled with a spin, made circles to aim. A stab inward through the heart of the last man standing, and one on the ground. Two.

With another sweep, and a fluid shift, she kept the last men down. The blades whirled, plunged down through soft bodies. Zero.

She hesitated a moment to control her breath, then ripped the blades out to survey the carnage.

Tell-tale abstracts of blood were painted across the penthouse’s beige walls. Corpses lay where they’d fallen; some atop one other, others sequestered, alone. All were covered in blood. The penthouse’s hardwood-floor was a crimson pool of still-warm blood beneath Lex’s boots. She straightened with a whirl of her blades. Blood flung from the tips as she marched forward along the wide hallway, into a massive, main room that looked out on Tokyo with a bird’s -eye view.

The sight was breathtaking. Tokyo was a glowing jewel of prosperity in an otherwise blackened sea. Lex was compelled toward the windows. She took a few steps to the large, six-person dining table atop a platform. It shined from a lacquer finished that mixed the faint neon of Tokyo with the room’s low sconces on its supports and walls. For a moment, Lex almost regretted what was about to happen. The click of a pistol’s hammer reminded her of its necessity. From the sound, she guessed something German.

“Miss Stroman. Nice of you to join me.” Only the faintest of feet scuffed wood from a corner of the room, “Tell your wife to stay or I kill her before she reaches the elevator.”

The German woman’s hard-angled face sneered, pulled high-lighted hair tighter around her round forehead. Lex didn’t move. Stroman shot a glance sideways, froze her wife with a look, “Your reckoning has arrived, Alexis.”

Lex ignored her, “It really is a beautiful view here at the top.” The German took a few steps forward, angled wide around Lex with the gun on her. “Join us, won’t you Kazue?” The Japanese woman remained frozen. “Very well then.”

Stroman took the platform’s steps one-by-one, settled even with Lex. The gun’s aim was firm, “Whatever you intended to prove ends here.”

Lex’s body remained steadfast. Her eyes swept the multi-colored beauty ahead, “Maybe.” Stroman’s left hand gripped the pistol beneath the right, further steadied her aim. Lex sensed the shift, waited, her eyes on the horizon, “Then again, perhaps I’ve already completed what I set out to do.”

As if flicked by switches, Tokyo’s city-blocks went dark one-by-one. Stroman didn’t notice until the lights went out above her. Kazue spoke from the corner of the room, “Maja!”

She glanced sideways to see the emerging darkness. Lex struck. In one move, she had Stroman by a wrist, gun pointed outward, away. Stroman eyed the blade hilt-deep in her gut. She grit her teeth, bucked back and forth. Kazue gasped, began to sob in the corner.

Maja’s mouth leaked blood, “You… Bitch…”

“The Sleepers are awakening,” Lex said coldly. “In two minutes power will return across the city long enough for an EMP to detonate.” Stroman fought with her last ounces of life against the grip on her wrist. Lex’s hand was firm, “In two and a half minutes, your world will be ours again.”

She ripped the blade from Stroman’s torso. Her body tumbled down the platform’s stairs to the floor. Kazue launched herself across the room, fell into howls beside Maja. Lex dislodged the gun’s magazine, tossed it across the penthouse. She turned, blade pointed downward, for Kazue.

“You’re a monster!” The woman screamed at Lex. She repeated the phrase, shoved her face against Maja’s chest to weep.

Lex stared down while the words echoed through her head. She didn’t doubt their truth, but couldn’t deny it was the Collective that had made them such. All she’d done was set out to right the world’s balance. There was never a choice for her but to ensure the Collective’s debts were repaid in blood. There was no system left to punish them. No courts to hold them accountable. No police to arrest them. They’d seen to that. With it, they’d as much signed their own death-warrants as formed the monster bound to slaughter them one and two at a time.

“You know what has to happen, Kazue,” Lex said. She ignored her, but her cries went silent. “The Sleepers must awaken. The debt must be repaid.”

Kazue sniffled. She kissed Maja softly on the lips and cheek, rose with a final breath. Her eyes were hard, tearful, but accepting. They met Lex’s. Kazue swallowed hard, stiffened her neck and spine with a small pair of nods.

Lex made it quick; a lone thrust through the heart. Kazue went limp against the blade, fell beside her lover as it retracted. The power faded back for a brief moment, then the sound of something like metal grating shook the building. A wave rolled out across Tokyo. The penthouse lights flared brightly, then died out. A door opened near the elevators, a shielded flashlight attachment on a rifle blinding Lex even at the distance. It lowered to reveal Rachel’s face, the others behind her.

Rachel jogged forward, met Lex halfway up the hall with a pant, “We’re ready to move. We’ll have to take the tunnels, the streets are already turning into chaos.”

“No,” Lex said defiantly. “No-one hides anymore. Hold your own, but don’t harm anyone. The GSS will be inbound. We need to ensure the people are protected.”
Rachel gave a nod, leaned to look past at the two bodies beside one another, “Stroman and Matsuoka?” Lex gave a sole nod. Rachel huffed from exertion, “Good. Come on.”

The rest of the group turned for the stairwell. Lex hesitated, mind caught in Kazue’s willing sacrifice. She hadn’t begged, or pled, merely accepted her fate. Lex sympathized, started forward to follow the others down the thousands of steps to the lobby.

The Collective: Part 8

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

8.

Heist

Lex stamped a boot on a rear bench-seat of a cargo van. Her body seemed gyroscopically stable against the Alps’ rough roads. She tightened her laces while Rachel jostled absently beside her. Her eyes had been empty since they’d left Japan. Full-days of boat and car-rides had gotten them across the Asian continent and upward into central Europe, but in all that time, neither she nor Lex had said much. They merely ate, stopped occasionally to rest, resupply, or sleep.

Now the journey was almost over. After they took the vault, they would rocket back to Japan, finish what had been started. The way forward however, would be no easy task.

The Collective housed their vault in the basement of a castle once belonging to a Swiss Baron– a literal dungeon dated to the late fourteenth century. The Baron had been murdered in his sleep by Hitler’s Schutzstaffel while his other forces made their French push. The insurgency however, was thwarted by the Baron’s security forces before it could become a full-blown Casus Belli and drag the country into war. Switzerland remained neutral but the castle changed hands more times than Lex cared to count– all of them greased by dirty money.

She sank beside Rachel whom hunched over in her coat against cold that leaked in. The engine and transmission strained beneath them, urged onward by a heavy foot. Yang-Lee’s scarred face peered back from the passenger-seat, “We’re close.”

Lex readied herself at the rear-doors, “Pull off the road. We’ll walk from here.”

Minutes later Lex and her team, Rachel included, began to hike the final, long twist of road that led to the castle. They emerged on the far-side of a wide curve. Mountains loomed with an ubiquitous boldness to their right and in the background, but the spectacle ahead was curiously level given its craggy surroundings. Jagged, tooth-like ramparts and walls formed a wide barrier between a courtyard and the road with turrets every hundred meters. Gray and white patchwork prevailed through-out the weathered stone-walls. Off-center, but even with the road, stood the gate in all its impenetrable stubbornness.

A man with a rifle patrolled along the wall, security lighter here than it would be inside. The place would be filled with armed GSS Emergency Response Squads– the most elite of the elite not deployed to external security teams. They would bleed all the same.

“Kaz,” Lex said to the Japanese woman. “Go.”

She needed no further instruction. The man had yet to spot them, his mind fatigued to complacency by boredom. Kaz was behind him in a flash, her feet silent. The only sound was that of the blade as it pierced his back, cracked his sternum, and emerged from his chest. He fell face-first into the snow, dead and bleeding.

Lex and Yang-Lee were at Kaz’s side as she stooped to rifle through his pockets. Rachel and Ryo approached, their heads swiveling. The former was more paranoid than the strategic latter. Kaz rose, a key-card and radio in-hand, passed them to Lex. She stuck the radio’s ear-piece in to monitor the GSS frequency, moved them up to an arched, wooden door in the wall beside the massive gate.

The key-card touched a panel beside the door, scanned a magnetic stripe. The door eased open on a small, quiet hydraulic. Lex stepped in, nearly blind from the relative darkness.

She kept her senses honed, whispered at the others, “The rampart will lead into a tunnel. From there, we follow passages to the vault. Stay sharp.”

Rachel was silent, unsure why she was even there. Though Lex assured her she would be safe, there were more than a few doubts to her sincerity. More than likely, she would be looked to for any unforeseen developments that might arise. The only explanation Rachel could surmise verged on wafer-thin; she might know how the Collective think.

Whatever the real reason for her presence, she kept dead-center in the line of bodies that stalked the shadows beneath the ramparts. Centuries ago, this place would have been filled with the stinking bodies of medieval soldiers ready to fight and die for their home or Monarch. Now, it was desolate, empty. Its wide, arched passageways were more a curious, historical oddity than anything. Most certainly they were no longer necessary as secondary pathways to the turrets above.

They managed to find the cross-chamber that led to the vault unimpeded. The retro-fits became more obvious as the group dodged the sweeping gazes of security cameras. Old, crumbled stone transformed to restored brick work, finally morphed into steel plating that covered the walls, ceiling, and floor, reinforced them against whatever intrusion had been thought of. Evidently the Collective didn’t expect anyone walk through the side door, much less with minimal force.

They found another, circular cross-chamber with a pillar in its center. It led around to three, other pathways. From the database Andersson had given her, Lex knew two passages led to the upper-levels and the castle’s Great Hall. The third then, led to the vault and the first of its security measures. Casual footsteps echoed over the sound of voices. Lex and the others hurried to back up, out of sight.

A German voice spoke patchwork English, “Herr Steinsson hat arrived.”

“Yeh?” An Irish man’s accent asked. “What’s ‘e want?”

“Der Kommandant sagt es ist about die monthly inspektion,” the German replied.

The Irish man said something as his voice curved around the inner-portion of the cross-chamber. It began to fade away, trail off down the second passage that led to the upper-levels. Lex stealthed forward, double-checked the chamber, then urged the others back into place.

The first of the security measures began just inside the passage to the vault. It wasn’t immediately obvious, and in fact, Lex wouldn’t have known were it not for Andersson’s intel. The steel-plated floor was randomly pressure-sensitive with no external indication of triggers; a singular height and shined to a high-gloss.

Thankfully, “random” actually meant patterned in a non-obvious way. Much like a musical phrase, there were obvious repetitions with only mild variation, then wild variations on either end of the phrases that led into one another. Together, they formed a mental picture in Lex’s mind that would zig-zag her across the floor-tiles.

“Step where I step and nowhere else,” Lex said quietly.

She planted her foot on the first plate, reassured herself by putting her other down and standing still for a moment. She admitted a small relief to herself, then closed her eyes to envision the layout. Left two, up one, right one, up two, left two, up two, right two. She stepped through the first series of tiles. The others followed carefully. Their eyes darted between their own feet and those of the person ahead. Each step was a vise around their hearts that tightened the further they progressed.

At the right, ninety-degree angle the hall formed, Lex stopped, stared ahead. She knew what lay unseen, between her and the massive, three foot-thick, circular-door. She also knew what would happen if she blundered forward; the castle would go on lock-down. The vault’s entry systems would be isolated, locked out of the castle’s security network until remotely reconnected. Meanwhile all GSS assets in-country would be diverted to neutralize the threat while panels in the ceiling opened, emitted hydroflouric acid and methoxyflurane gas. In other words, they’d be awake just long enough to go into shock, then die from cardiac arrest while unconscious– or else live disfigured the rest of their lives in prison.

Lex breathed, prepared. She pulled a small, cylindrical emitter from a pocket, the size of a D-Cell battery, but black with a hard shell. Its bottom-half twisted to engage it. Then, with another, careful motion, Lex followed the zig-zag of free-plates to the center of an invisible laser emitter. She stooped down, placed another cylindrical-device that misted the air every few seconds.

Rachel watched faint outlines of red-lasers bowed upward above Lex. The others engaged their countermeasures, followed after her. The mist caught the edges of the next set of emitted lasers. They bowed upward, reshaped by the static-discharger in Lex’s hand as she approached. Rachel held her discharger, heart in her throat as they made a start-stop progression while Lex placed the misting canisters. At the line’s rear, Ryo retrieved each one, then proceeded forward. As the last of the mist settled and Ryo moved from range, the lasers relaxed, ensured the group they would be forced to leave as they’d entered.

Lex’s goal was within reach now. No-one would stop her– not even the men in the security room that monitored the vault from the cameras at either side of it. With a final, calculated step, she passed from the mine-field of pressure plates and onto a wide, singular section of floor before the vault door. It spanned at least as much of the door’s sweeping gait, more even, it seemed.

The others followed, disengaged their countermeasures. Kaz and Yang-Lee split for the cameras, cut open their insulated wires to splice small, box-like devices to them that magnetically latched to the cameras’ bodies. They backed away from their respective cameras; Yang-Lee stood sentinel at the edge of the lone plate, faced the way they’d come.

Kaz returned to Lex’s side, “We’re ready.”

Lex nodded, “Ryo?”

He stepped past for a large panel beside the door. A hand-print scanner was housed in a touch screen below a retinal scanner and voice-print lock. In addition, numbered keys said a code was necessary to breach the state of the art security. Ryo had none of those things. Instead, he produced slam-bore from his pack, punched through the panel’s half-dozen screws, then pried it from the wall. The panel came loose, caught by Kaz’s hands. It jostled as he fished through the wires, spliced them to a bundle of cable connected to a hand-held tablet computer.

A full minute later hydraulics hissed over a series of loud clicks. Giant, steel bolts grated metal on metal as they slid back, in. The group stepped aside for the vault door to ease open, reveal its innards and their bounty. They stood in awe for a moment– even Rachel’s eyes gleamed dully at the hundreds of tons of gold and platinum bullion. A smug, knowing smile crept across Lex’s face.

This was the bulk of the world’s economy. It made Fort Knox look like chump-change. Despite the comparatively small vault, the bullion here was two and three times as valuable as Knox in its heyday. What was more, it was the Collective’s only physical measure of wealth. Long before the Sleep paper money had become useless, but even digital currency required physical assets to remain fiscally solvent, its value relative to what backed it. With a well-placed explosive, Lex planned to destroy– or at least nullify– the Collective’s stock-piled wealth.

“Take only what you can without being weighed down,” Lex said as she entered the vault. “Don’t get greedy.”

They entered the marble-floored vault. Lock-boxes formed mausoleum-like walls around the massive carts of gold and platinum. Kaz and Yang-Lee went to work to hack more cameras in the room’s corners then joined in ransacking the carts. They filled canvas packs with as much metal as they could carry.

Lex took a wide path around the vault, set small, thermos-like devices in its corners: they could never destroy the vault, or indeed even the metal in it. What they could do was turn the room into a super-powerful magnet so strong it– and everything inside it– would deform. The devices would create a singularity of unrivaled proportions by building to critical mass. The vault would contract, re-fuse until no larger than an SUV. The molten ball formed wouldn’t cool for weeks, months even. The repository would be eradicated in one, fell-swoop, its value gone.

The group procured their metal, then readied to make the trek back. The vault door swung shut as the super-magnets’ timers engaged. In a little less than five minutes, they would activate, begin to build up their polar charges, and the chaos would begin. Lex moved quickly back across the safe plates, through the lasers, and into the central passageway.

The timer was already down four-minutes when they reached the pillared cross-chamber. Lex shoved her bag of bullion into Rachel’s hands, “Go with them, I’ll meet you in Tokyo.”

Rachel was suddenly irate, “What? Are you crazy? Where are you going?”

“Steinsson is here,” Lex replied with a knowing look to the others. “Viktor Steinsson is a member of the Collective. He can not be allowed to live.”

“Forty-five seconds,” Kaz said with a look to her watch.

Rachel argued over her, “You’re crazy, Lex, you can’t–”

“Get out!” Lex ordered with a caustic hush.

“Come on,” Ryo said, pulling Rachel along.

Rachel watched Lex as the seconds ticked down. She suddenly drew her blades, disappeared around the pillar. Rachel swallowed acid; as much as she’d been against Lex, she was the closest thing left to a friend. Between what the Collective would do, and her weariness at the others like Lex, she didn’t want to be without even the minor rapport they’d built.

Rachel’s safety was admittedly nearer in Lex’s mind than her own as she sprinted through the maze of main-passageways that curved around, back, straightened out, and widened again. Her blades gleamed while her feet beat a gallop along plated floors toward a pair of men. They turned in time to be cut down, cast aside from the passage’s center. Lex followed through without a missed beat. Her blades dripped trails along the zig-zag of stairs that led up to the Great Hall.

She exploded onto the marble floors just as alarms screamed through the castle. The magneto-bomb had been detected. In moments it would reach critical mass, destroy the world’s last repository of hard currency. Nothing could stop that now, but Lex wouldn’t have let it anyhow.

Orders were shouted all around the Hall, echoed through its expanse over boots that marched down toward the vault. Lex saw the castle’s blue-prints in her mind, knew Steinsson would be in the security room just off the right side of the hall. Her feet danced poly-rhythms near a door over a melody of steel cutting skin. She severed the jugulars of a pair of guards there. More began to appear, their attention directed elsewhere form the chaos downstairs.

She shoved her way through a heavy, wooden door. The narrow hall beyond was long, filled with doorways of various non-importance. Her goal lay dead ahead, behind an open doorway with bodies that moved every which way around chromed-out tech.

She made the door in a few steps, bolted inside with a flurry of movement. She whirled round, blades cutting. The commotion inside barely registered the deaths of three security techs. Steinsson turned, the glaring eyes accented the white of his thinning hair. His recessed hair-line made jagged points of already-angled features.

Lex’s blades thrust and sliced, incised and slit their way across the room. Her body followed, the entities inseparable in their blurred motions. Before Viktor could react, Lex’s brought the katanas’ hilts together in a deep lunge. The blades sank into him, pierced clean-through with a splatter of blood that painted an abstract on the wall and tech behind him. The blades slid out in time to spin, catch two GSS guards on either side beneath their helmets.

Blood spilled from freshly cut throats as she came about, blades in their downward-point. Three GSS officers stood across the room with raised rifles. They shouted commands in various languages over the wail of klaxons. She refused to flinch. A man fingered his trigger.

A burst of fire riddled his body from the doorway. A second cut down the man beside him. The third turned as Lex’s right-hand blade sailed through the air, into his chest at an angle. A third burst cut him down simultaneously. He fell, dead. The smoke of the gunfire cleared in time for Lex to catch Rachel in the doorway.

For a moment both women were too shocked to move. Lex shook it off first, sprinted forward, retrieved her blade then made for the door. She drug Rachel with by the shoulder until she regained her wits.

“I wasn’t going to come back for you,” Rachel panted, in-step with Lex.

“Not now,” Lex said as they entered the Great Hall for the castle’s main door.

Sunlight beckoned them forward from the open doors, kissed them with its frosty presence. The courtyard was empty. Distant metal grated, ground as something behind them exploded. Neither woman paused to look back. Instead, they rushed for a door in the wall they’d entered through, took the rampart’s interior in a few steps, then shoved their way back into the day-light.

Their chests heaved, feet slipped on icy snow, caught traction on the road. Limbs pumped with aching muscles to launch them down the mountain, around the winding corner toward the awaiting van. Kaz had already angled it around, the back-doors open and the engine running.

Lex shoved Rachel inside as she climbed in, “Go! Go!”

The van started into a gallop, assisted by the road’s steep grade. The rear-doors slammed shut as Lex and Rachel pushed themselves up from the floor, fought opposing gravity to re-take their seats over a wheel.

Rachel swallowed hard with a look to Lex beside her, “We… actually made it.”

Lex gave a long sigh to recompose herself, “Yeah. We did.” She glanced at Ryo across from her, “The metal?”

He looked sideways at the pile of bags that clanked and clanged from the road’s twists and turns. Lex threw her head back, relieved, and leaned against the van’s wall. Her head rolled along her neck to meet Rachel’s eyes.

“Thank you.”

Rachel winced, grimaced. Then, with a small nod she replied, “You’re welcome.”

Missed Part 7? Read it here!