I held my breath in the stunned silence that followed his statement.
Then, it was as if a tide of anger slammed into us all at once, and the warehouse erupted in shouting.
“MARTY? What the HELL is this?” Zion’s furious voice rose above the din.
“If you quiet down,” Marty’s voice crackled back, “then I can explain.”
“Just open the doors, you son of a bitch!” Jackie yelled from about ten feet behind me.
“I will,” Marty replied, his voice eerily calm. “The moment you agree to get out of those suits and line them all up in a neat row by the wall, along with all your weapons. Then you can all walk out of here.”
The blood rushed to my face, my head tilting automatically to scan the ceiling for cameras, even though it was too dark for me to spy them now.
This wasn’t happening. Couldn’t be.
And yet, I couldn’t think of another explanation. He was turning us over. Disarming us, and then handing us to the enforcers, who were probably careening through the air and streets right now, heading directly for us. I imagined his bald face, his eyes burning with what I’d thought was vengeance at the time—the desire, no, the need for change. Clearly, he was burning with something, but it wasn’t anything in our favor.
“To hell with this!” Jace resumed his attack on the door while my eyes snapped toward the pile of guns. I raced over to grab one of the larger ones and was about to rush back to try to blow the door open when a peppering of bullets sounded by the main entrance, followed by a sharp cry of pain.
Panic surged in me as I whipped my head toward the sound. The door was still closed, but a man was on the ground, gripping his right thigh and writhing in agony in the pale light of several phone screens.
“Don’t try to blow the doors!” a woman shouted from that end. “The bullets bounce!”
I cursed, my grip on the gun I’d picked up instantly slackening. What the hell kind of doors were these?! Marty had to have been prepared for this. Heck, for all I knew, this very warehouse was government-owned, the doors reinforced to military standards.
“Don’t try to get out,” Marty’s voice boomed down again. “It is futile. Set aside the suits and the weapons, and then the doors will open.”
Icy fear slipped down my spine. We had to get out of here. Now.
My eyes desperately searched the cavernous room for another solution. Jace had now been joined by two others in suits, Jackie and Kory, and they were working together to try to get through the door. But if bullets couldn’t put a dent in the doors, I feared their efforts would be in vain too.
I scanned the room frantically, willing there to be another way out of here… and then a thought struck me. Where had Marty gone? We had all been distracted by the suits, yes, but the doors of this warehouse were noisy. And none of us would have let our guard down enough to be oblivious to them opening and closing. I, for one, would have noticed, in spite of how far away I’d drifted from them.
So where was he?
I moved closer to the edge of the room, holding my phone out in front of me to cast light on the walls. There were only three external doors—that I was sure of. But could there be something else? Something I’d missed during my initial sweep?
A memory sparked in me, and I sped up to a run until I reached one corner of the rectangular room, on the right side of the main entrance. I remembered noticing a metal beam there, during my initial sweep, that rose up through the ceiling. I hadn’t thought anything of it, but desperation had a way of making my brain remember little details that had seemed unimportant at the time, and when I got close to the metal beam, I realized that its interior was hollow, one of its edges comprised of horizontal slats, and there was a gap just large enough for a person to fit through and enter the space within.
It could be climbed. And even if this wasn’t how he’d escaped, maybe it would lead to the roof, or give us some other way to flee this building.
I whipped out my phone and dialed Jackie’s number, knowing it was a faster way of communicating than racing back over, and the noise in the room had reached a feverish pitch that was far too loud to shout above. I heard her phone ring out across the room, where she was still helping Jace and Kory attempt to open the door, and saw the flash of her screen as she picked up, and then her voice was loud in my right ear.
“Robin, wha—”
“To your left, there’s a metal beam. It’s actually a ladder if you look closely. There are beams on each side of the room. Grab guns and get people to start climbing. I think it’s how Marty left the room.” And if he was still up there, and hadn’t escaped via some hatch leading outside, then it could be dangerous, which was why we needed to be plenty armed.
I made hurried calls to Nelson and the twins, telling them to do the same, and soon the crowd was dispersing, sweeping up weapons and racing for the chutes, including the one I was about to climb.
My limbs jerked to life, and I began swinging myself up the ladder, not wanting to slow anyone down.
The ceiling was high, but it took less than a minute for me to reach the top, adrenaline lending fantastical strength to my body. I poked my head up through the hole in the ceiling where the ladder connected, to find that it led to a dimly lit loft, and I clambered out onto one of the large metal beams that crisscrossed the loft’s floor.
I couldn’t see any signs of exit hatches from here, and it was as empty as the level below. Except in the center, where I saw a small, square structure. A control room?
My heart pounding, I raced toward it, the soles of my boots clanging over the metal and making more noise than I would’ve liked. I heard people following me, their legs pumping just as quickly, and then spotted more flooding up through the other three openings. We all had our sights on the small structure in the center, and it became a race along the crisscrossing beams to reach it.
Having had the head start, I arrived first, and was about to press my ear to the door when it shot open suddenly and Marty staggered out, a gun clasped in one hand. He yelped in alarm as those of us who had reached him raised our guns toward his head, and then I was being pushed aside, a tall man darting past me and knocking the gun from Marty’s frozen hands with a sharp chop of his forearm. I grabbed the gun from where it fell, then moved into the room after the man, who was forcing Marty back in.
It was some sort of small control room, as I’d prayed it might be. Two counters lined the edges of the space, one holding several switchboards, another holding screens that showed night-vision views of the dark warehouse below. Marty must have been watching us via the cameras, and realized we were closing in on him… but why on Earth had he locked himself in here with us in the first place? There appeared to be no way to escape the building via the roof, so this seemed incredibly shortsighted on his part.
The tall man slamming Marty down against the floor drew my attention, and I watched as he locked him in place until the shorter man whimpered in pain.
“P-Please! Don’t hurt me!”
“You’d better tell me now how to unlock those damn doors!” the tall man growled, and I realized it was Zion.
“Th-The green one! S-Second panel from the door.”
I stared at him in confusion, surprised that he’d give up so easily. Then Zion cast a glance back at me, and I hurried to the panel, seeking out the green button and slamming it down.
“Don’t shoot me!” Marty gasped.
“You deserve it, you rat bastard!” Zion hissed. “How long till the cops are here?”
“I didn’t call the cops!” Marty wheezed, as Zion pressed the butt of his gun harder against his neck.
“The doors are open!” a voice shouted from behind us, distracting us all for a moment from Marty’s statement.
We paused to listen, and sure enough, I could hear the sound of the doors being yanked open. I let out a small sigh of relief, then turned back to stare at the man. Zion, and everyone else who’d piled into the room to see what was going on, gazed at h
im too.
“You’re lying,” Zion spat.
“Go see for yourself,” Marty rasped. “I swear, no cops are on their way. Go outside. Nobody’s coming!”
“Then what the hell were you playing at?” A growl came from behind me, and I realized it was Jace—now out of his metal suit. His chest heaved as he glared at the shorter man, who was still struggling beneath Zion’s weight.
“If you want the truth, I’ll tell it to ya: I was going to call the cops, but you didn’t give me a chance.” Marty gave a weak, bitter cough. “Got into a nasty bit of debt recently, and the opportunity was too tempting to pass up. You know the kind of bounties enforcers dole out these days for dissidents? That, combined with all those suits downstairs, could have cleared my debt. I figured I could scare the lot of you outta them, then call the enforcers.”
“You son of a bitch,” Zion spat, giving Marty’s head another slam against the floor.
My pulse spiked. He probably was lying about having called the cops, and was now just trying to keep us here as long as possible so we’d get caught. In which case we had to get out while we still had the chance.
But then again… another part of me believed that he really was just that incompetent and hadn’t gotten around to calling them yet. I mean, this whole plan had been pulled off piss-poorly, and the guy was a pathetic mess now. Sure, he had some fancy doors downstairs, but locking himself inside the building with us? It was laughably bad. It had only been a matter of time before one of us spotted those chutes and climbed up here, like I had. It stank of the act of a desperate man, and desperate people didn’t make for good planners.
But still, we couldn’t be sure.
“Well, if what you say is true, you’re a real moron, aren’t you?” Zion muttered, lifting the butt of his gun and driving it down hard against Marty’s temple.
The shorter man’s body went limp instantly, and Zion shot to his feet, a deep scowl darkening his eyes.
“We need to get out of this building and check the area,” he grated out. “Now.”
29
We piled downstairs and out of the warehouse, crouching down in the shadows and listening, waiting, watching for any indication of enforcers approaching. But it turned out Marty had been telling the truth, and we’d just managed to prevent him from calling them. They never came, and after an hour, we mustered the courage to go back into the building.
Well, most of us.
The guy who got injured left with his two friends, along with a handful of others who’d been spooked by the whole incident. But the bulk of us decided to stay.
Going home would be admitting defeat. Throwing in the towel with the entire OH+ project. Because if we couldn’t even come together for a meeting, how were we ever going to pull off a mission together? How were we going to start pushing back against the system that had torn apart so many lives, or apply pressure for the changes our country so desperately needed?
And if we didn’t, who would? The CRAS had been going for over two decades already, and it stood to reason that it would only continue if nobody took action to stop it. Granted, I didn’t know how any action we took was actually ever going to change anything. It seemed like an insanely behemoth task, and I probably needed my head examined for even dreaming that we could ever have any kind of effect on the course of our nation.
All I knew was that someone had to try. That I had to try. Pushing back against the system that had wrecked my life was the only thing that gave me true purpose, the only thing that kept me sane. And given that I didn’t see many others stepping up to the plate, it might as well be us, even if it meant starting with baby steps. Or even fetus steps.
What had just happened with Marty had been scary. Terrifying, in fact. He’d been one phone call away from ending us all. But he hadn’t accomplished it, and we were still here, all in one place. I simply couldn’t bring myself to leave, and I was glad to see that plenty of others felt the same way.
So after locking Marty’s unconscious body up in the back of the empty truck, we finished doing a tally of our equipment, then reseated ourselves around the tables and tried to continue the meeting as if nothing had happened. Zion said he’d take responsibility for wiping the rat’s pad and figuring out what to do with him, and in the meantime, we just needed to keep him from running away or eavesdropping.
Although everyone was clearly shaken, the rest of the evening proved to be surprisingly productive. We hashed out the finer details of our plan, and by the end of the meeting, I found myself feeling much closer to the members of the group than I had before Marty had switched off the lights, even though I still didn’t know any of their faces. I guessed it was because we’d all just been thrust into a majorly stressful situation, and we’d cooperated and pulled through it together. It was a good drill, I supposed, as far as team-building was concerned, even if our nerves could have done without it. I also realized, as we sat around the table talking, that it had inadvertently distilled our group. The flakier people had chosen to leave, which I hoped had left us only with serious, genuine action-takers.
So perhaps we had something to thank Marty for after all. I was just grateful that he had shown his true colors quickly, leaving us with what was hopefully now a solid team we could rely on.
I really hoped so. Because I didn’t know that we could survive another disappointment. We were determined, but we also liked being alive.
And because, by the end of the meeting, we’d set a date: this Sunday. Four days. No delays, no dropping out. It wasn’t a lot of time, but that was because we didn’t want to leave a large gap in between the meeting and the big day. The plan and schematics were fresh in our minds after this evening, and now that we had all the equipment we needed, we had to get it over with ASAP.
So all I could do was cross my fingers and hope for the best. We might not be confronting the government directly with our first project, but there were still any number of things that could go wrong on the day.
Because if I’d learned anything during my months of going out with Nelson’s team, it was that no plan survived first contact.
Over the course of the rest of the week, I found myself wishing that we had set the date earlier—heck, even Thursday. Because with each day that passed, the knot in my stomach grew tighter.
The worst thing was that I had nothing with which to distract myself. No evenings with Jace. Nor any work from Nelson (our next kidnapping had been pushed back at least another two weeks, to give us time to work on the mission with OH+). And everything that needed to be done in preparation for the mission had basically been done already. I found myself hanging around on the private forum thread ZombieBrainz had set up just for the ground team, but that ended up making me feel worse. I could practically feel the nerves of my fellow group members seeping through the screen, from the tone of their responses to the types of last-minute questions they were asking. So I eventually stopped looking at that, too, and resigned myself to browsing the web and trying to distract myself with TV.
Until, on Saturday afternoon, the sound of a text coming through broke the monotony. I padded over to the other side of my living room to get my phone, expecting it to be Nelson or someone else from my group wanting to discuss some last-minute issue. I widened my eyes when I saw it was from Jace.
It was... a pleasant surprise, given that we hadn’t spoken to each other since the meeting on Wednesday. We hadn’t been talking much via PM or text in general, recently, since I stopped going out on visitations with him.
Drawing in a quiet breath, I tapped the message open.
“Hey. I asked Nelson if I could get access to a suit today. Want to get some final practice before the mission. I’m headed to the Roundhouse this evening. Wondered if you felt like joining me.”
I raised an eyebrow, finding the idea instantly appealing. I knew that tonight was going to be the worst in terms of stress, as the night before the big day, and this seemed like the perfect distraction. Not to mention, it would als
o be useful; I definitely wasn’t as proficient with the suits as I could be, and considering the fact that they were a key part of our strategy for tomorrow, more practice could only make me feel more confident about the whole thing.
Plus… I wanted to get over this Jace thing. Like, completely over it. I was getting better around him, I figured, though there were definitely still moments of awkwardness. And I had to admit that the thought of being alone with him again made me feel apprehensive. Which was why I needed to overcome it. And the only way I was going to do that was to face it head-on. Neither he nor I was going anywhere, so we were going to be colleagues and members of the same group for the foreseeable future. I had to practice not feeling awkward around him, until I didn’t feel awkward around him at all. Because it was too much of a professional distraction.
Practice makes perfect, right?
“Sure, I’ll come,” I replied a moment later, with a firm nod of my head. “What time will you be there?”
“8 p.m. Apparently there’s a park just nearby. I figured we could practice there.”
“Ah, yeah, okay,” I replied, picturing that park in my mind. It had a vast grassy area and would most likely be deserted at that time of evening.
“Cool. See you then.”
I put the phone down, narrowing my eyes at myself in the mirror. I can do this.
I spent the remaining hours of the afternoon outside, trying to enjoy a brisk walk in the woods surrounding my home. The fresh air always did have a way of calming me, though my nerves were tight with thoughts about tomorrow as soon as I stepped back into the cabin. I indulged in a long shower to wash the sweat of the walk away, wanting to feel fresh for the evening, and then left the cabin again and made the journey to the Roundhouse on my motorcycle. It was definitely one of the closer locations Jace had asked me to meet him at in recent weeks, and the journey didn’t take long.
On arrival, I parked some distance away and headed straight for the back of the pub’s building. The door leading to the hidden parking area had been left slightly ajar, and I stepped through, spotting Jace instantly. He was standing on the ground in front of the aircraft’s open side door, in the middle of taking one of the suits from Marco.