Someone mailed in last time and criticized the part in the previous chapter where I made a reference to the reader. I can’t agree more, and I don’t know what I was thinking when I did that. Making a reference to the reader just pulls them a bit out of the experience, makes them realize that it’s not real, you know? But it’s already posted, and I don’t want to change it now. Oh well.
Enjoy this next chapter anyway. It has some neato Matrix-style battles in it. Now all we need is Proppelerhead’s “Spybreak” playing in the background…
Jock sat in his cell. Probing his mind. Searching for questions and answers. Remembering all the bits and pieces of possible conspiracies he’d ever learned. Suddenly trying to fit them together, as though he now had the missing piece that would complete the Big Picture. Then he wandered to escape.
His mind fell blank.
Then the alarm sounded.
--- --- --- ---
“Jesus!” Jess yelled, backing against a wall, staring at the crumpled body on the floor. It oozed a growing red puddle. “Dom! Shit! You didn’t need to shoot him!”
Dominic still held the gun with both hands. Still pointed the smoking barrel at the fresh corpse. Then he swiveled around, looked at Jess... and winced. Some sudden look of struggle flashed through his eyes, and then his face blanked from all expression again.
The guard who had been sitting at the station just down the stairs and inside UNATCO HQ was the one sprawled across the floor, newly dead.
Just before he was shot he had said into his radio, “We might have a situation here.”
Somebody deeper in the compound heard the faint gunshot, put two and two together, and sounded the alarm.
The guard’s eyes stared up at the ceiling.
Dominic suddenly pounced forward, lifted the body, and pressed the guard’s face against the retinal scanner. It buzzed. The door slid open.
“Let’s go,” Dom said, in a deadpan voice.
--- --- --- ---
Manderley was sitting in his office. He jumped out of his chair and stormed out into the next room.
“What the hell is going on, Janis?” he bellowed at his secretary.
“I don’t know, sir,” she said, wide-eyed. “I think... something’s very wrong."
--- --- --- ---
“Let’s go!” the lead UNATCO troop shouted at the other three. “Let’s move!”
They bolted up the stairs and towards the single glass door leading to where the gunshot had sounded from, all of them locking and loading their weapons as they ran.
The lead trooper reached for the handle…
And before he knew what was going on, the glass exploded in front of him, shards of all sizes bursting all over the room, slicing his body. The floor hit him in the back of the head. Then there was the sound of thunder, and he didn’t draw another breath.
Dominic, splattered with fresh speckles of blood, did not hesitate to shoot at the other troops after diving through the door at the first one. He rose one arm - Pointed the 10mm pistol at the first guard he saw - And squeezed. As he dove to his right immediately after that - Feeling bullets fly so close past his head that his skull vibrated - he watched the soldier’s head cave in as the bullet tore through it.
Dom hit the floor - slid - and squeezed a second round at the guard who had just fired at him. The bullet hit him in the shoulder - He jolted backwards, stumbling into the guard behind him.
Dom fired again. The bullet pierced the man’s neck. He gurgled, spouted a stream of fluid as he attempted to say or yell something, and then stumbled against a banister, toppling over it, and fell.
The fourth remaining guard’s face burnt with anger. He furiously sprayed a line of bullets, but Dom was gone before a single one of them even hit the floor.
The guard bolted towards the staircase Dom had fled down - Tore around the corner - And stopped dead when his knee exploded.
He stood there for a moment, looked down at his splintered kneecap… Then back up at Dom, who stood at the bottom of the stairs, pointing his gun upwards.
Dom’s hands shook. He breathed heavily. He suddenly hated himself. Then he fired again, and the fourth guard went down.
Dom heard a door open to his right - He whirled to face it, and there was Joseph Manderley, leaning out of his office, staring down the hallway at him.
Then time slowed down. The image of Joseph Manderley’s face burned in Dom’s vision, pressed itself into Dom’s memory. Suddenly Bishop remembered something he once heard a bum say - A homeless man who thought himself as part of the NSF… “Now all I need’s a rifle,” he said, “and then it’s just me and Satan… Yes, Satan… One last look into the devil’s red eyes…”
“YOU!” Dominic screamed as time sped up again. He lurched toward’s Manderley, who quickly popped back into his office.
Another guard suddenly burst out of a conference room door right in front of Dom, spilling out into the narrow hallway.
Dom raised his gun -
And felt someone else’s barrel press against the back of his head.
“FREEZE!” the voice screamed. “PUT THE GOD DAMN GUN ON THE FLOO-”
The voice ended with a gunshot, a splatter, and a gurgle. Dominic took this signal to go ahead and shoot the guy in front of you, so he shot. Four times. The guard never had a chance. He crumpled.
Dom turned around. The soldier that was behind him was a mess on the floor. Bishop glanced up the stairs. Jess stood there, the barrel of her gun emitting a wisp of smoke.
She had a hurt look in her eyes. A very hurt look.
Dominic looked down at the dead rookie in front of him, and once again reflected on how much he currently hated himself.
Then, just as he was before - Driven by something alien, piloted, feeling like a puppet on strings, he forced himself down the corridor. Manderley stared at him in awe as Dom passed by his office. He turned to his secretary.
“Janis,” he said, mouth hanging slightly open. “Who, in all fiery hell, is that?”
“I don’t know, sir,” she said, wide-eyed.
--- --- --- ---
When a coalition’s four best agents are eliminated, things go wrong. Paul Denton defects. JC Denton defects. Anna Nevarre is blown up. Gunther Hermann loses his sanity. What is the coalition left with? Rookies and grunts. Security at UNATCO Headquarters had become a joke - A boy in third grade making good use of his imagination. “You can’t get into my base,” he would say, referring to his cardboard-box that he had scribbled “Home Base” on with a red crayon. “It’s mine. Go get your own base.”
Joseph Manderley clawed into his desk draw, and removed the .44 Magnum. He hastily loaded the weapon, hands trembling violently, and stormed out into the hall. “Don’t move, Janis,” he said as he went through.
The maimed and bleeding bodies in the hall made him gag. He felt as though he were going to vomit, but his rage kept him from faltering. Manderley jogged down the stairs, finding a few more similarly disfigured bodies along the way. He followed the sound of gunshots to the now dusty Agent Nevarre’s office, and then to the prison.
There he found the three culprits, standing around other bodies.
“This is ABSURD!” he screamed.
The three black-garbed figures turned and looked at him, two of them holding pointed guns. Manderley didn’t care. He was already well down the road Gunther had gone down.
“This is INSANE!” he shouted again. “How is this possible? How did this happen? Why does God find humor in watching me take it up the ass every chance something can possible go wrong? Look at you people. Three of you. Three of you destroy this. Everything. Three of you kill SO GOD DAMN MANY OF US! Three of you make this mess.”
He spontaneously laughed.
“And now you feel the need to point your guns at me. Oh. Oh, you’ve done enough damage. I don’t care. You’re here for the prisoners, right? Take them. TAKE THEM! They’re a nuisance. This company is a nuisance to me. Life is a nuisance to me. You don’t have to kill me. Let me do it.”
With that, Joseph Manderley swiftly turned his gun to his chin, and blew a good portion of his head halfway across the room.
Jess turned away from the sight.
Dominic and Brian stared. Dom slowly lowered his gun.
“That was… a little strange,” Brian mumbled.
The three of them became aware of how quiet the entire compound was. The only thing that disturbed the silence was the soft whirring of the fans.
The compound was painted. The compound was murdered.
Dominic dropped his gun. It hit the floor with an ominously loud thud.
He looked down at his hands.
They never looked so unclean.
--- --- --- ---
Minutes later a helicopter would arrive at UNATCO. Men in black suits would step out, and discover the first of the bodies.
The compound would be swarming with UNATCO soldiers who had been out on assignment within minutes. The mess would be exposed. The discord revealed. The prisoners gone. The culprits gone.
Word would be leaked. The story would be crawling all over every news station, channel, and show within minutes.
At that time Dominic, Jess, and Brian would be sitting in the warehouse they had originally come from, with their new friends, Jock, Alex, and Jaime.
They would be sitting in silence. Their occasional glances would pierce Dominic’s consciousness.
Dominic’s head would hang towards the floor. His mind would be furious and lost. His senses would be flooded as they digested everything that had gone so fast. All of the things he had just done.
Dominic had killed only one person before that night. One guilty person. One guilty person, and in self defense. Ten people. Ten innocent people. Young people. People who still had more than half of their lives in front of them. Dead, now. In a cold darkness that Dominic had placed them.
All the while, in the back of his head, he could hear something. Some distant voice, whispering, haunting him, saying, “This will do nicely. This will do very nicely.” He wanted to reach out and strangle that voice - To wring every last bit of life from it. To destroy it, and be himself again. He wanted to cleanse whatever devilry plagued his mind. But he couldn’t. He felt very helpless, sitting there and listening to the back of his mind, his conscious, and himself all at once.
Jess had lost the Dominic she knew.
Dominic had lost the Dominic he knew.
--- --- --- ---
“Earlier tonight,” the news reporter said, her voice faintly resonating from the television, “three unidentified assailants broke into UNATCO Headquarters on Liberty Island and mercilessly killed every guard in the complex. Also found was the body of Joseph Manderley - Head of UNATCO - who had apparently committed suicide. Others were found still alive, but shaken, like secretary Janis Reede, who said to reporters minutes ago, ‘I don’t understand what happened tonight. I don’t understand the destructive mood the entire planet is in. This is it, you know. This is as good as it gets for a long time. It only gets worse. So many people I knew are dead.” She refused any further comment.”
Bob Page turned off the television with the remote.
He turned away from the screen, new thoughts flurrying through his mind.
He couldn’t decide whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. UNATCO would be down for a long time, recovering from such a blow... But Joseph Manderley was dead, and the prisoners were gone. Page briefly wondered whether or not whoever did this was a threat to everything else in the bigger scheme, but then he chuckled to himself, because nothing was a threat to his plans.
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