David came out of the back office, shrugging his jacket on. “What?”
“Killed an eight-legged thing.”
“So? We get spiders here all the time.” Sighing, David crouched down and picked the squashed spider up with a tissue from his pocket and looked inside. “Ugh! You really don’t like spiders, do you? That’s a tiddler compared to some,” he said, serious expression not faltering for a moment. “I’ll bin it on my way out.”
“I thought about shooting it,” Johnny told him. “Have you ever shot anyone?”
“No,” David replied as he headed out of the door. “Against my principles.”
“Not against mine.” Johnny felt powerful when he had a weapon.
Johnny glanced down at his watched in the middle of the film and yawned, more from being bored than tired. He wondered if there was that much point in staying wide awake through the whole shift – it didn’t seem very likely that anyone would try to get in. As he took another quick look at the monitor, Johnny reached down to scratch his ankle where his new shoes had been rubbing him. The film was still playing quietly in the background, and the light given off by it cast eerie shadows in the air. Bored, Johnny took his notebook from the shelf and opened it.
The book was half-filled with drawings and random thoughts. Many of the drawings were of comic book heroes he had made up. Taking his thin, black pen from his shirt pocket, Johnny turned to a new page, set the book on the desk and put pen to paper. He came up with his best creations when he didn’t think about what he was drawing too much, and let his pen take control.
FOUR
Robyn turned the steering wheel to the side and the car rounded a corner. “Are you okay, now?”
“Better.” He reached behind him and felt around for the cap-sleeved, button-down shirt he kept on the back seat. It was more torn and bloody that the t-shirt he was wearing, so Mika screwed it up and threw it back. “Are you sure you know the way.” He didn’t expect an answer, so he wasn’t surprised when he didn’t get one.
Robyn sighed and kept driving. It shouldn’t take them long now, and she shifted up a gear. They were now a little over the speed limit but she doubted the police would even care enough to pull her over. “This is just the beginning,” she repeated.
“What?” asked Mika. “The beginning of what?”
“The beginning of the end.”
“Robyn, baby.” Mika put a hand over the one on the gear stick and gave it a quick squeeze. “I won’t –“ He didn’t have time to finish the sentence as Robyn revved the car and smashed through the wooden barrier in front of them. The car screeched to a halt in the middle of the car-park and Mika realised seatbelts weren’t just ugly car accessories. He still wasn’t going to wear it, though. Car safety wasn’t really a priority for him and Robyn, anyway. “Nothing’s going to end.”
“Everything’s ending.” Robyn’s eyes began to roll in their sockets and Mika shook her out of her trance. “I’ve seen it.”
Mika shook his head and, not for the first time, wished that he had left the doom-laden Robyn at home. But she was useful, and Mika knew exactly how to snap her out of it. “We won’t let it end. If we work this together, we’ll stop it.”
“Promise?” she asked him, looking up at Mika through big, wide eyes.
“Promise. I won’t let anything hurt my little bird.”
Carly was hanging limply from her chains, resigned to the fact that there was no way she could loosen them. Her entire body was dotted with bruises, cuts and burns from the hot pokers, and her muscles ached beyond belief….She turned her head to one side and then to the other as she tried to keep her muscles working. She’d learnt that it wasn’t always a good idea to let your body rest if it is tired – sometimes you have to make it work because it is tired. Her eyes fell away to a flash of movement on the floor near the ashy fireplace.
“Hello, mouse.”
The small white rodent looked up at her through pink eyes and stopped in its’ hurry from one corner of the room to the other.
“Were you somebody’s pet?”
The mouse squeaked up at her in answer.
“I used to have someone who loved me and looked after me. A bit like you.”
The mouse stared up at her with its curious, beady eyes. Carly liked to think that the mouse was cleverer that he was letting on, and was sure he understood everything she said.
“It’s scary, isn’t it? Being in the big wide world all on your own. You never know when the next bad thing’s gonna happen. Trust me, things are about to get a lot tougher.”
The mouse squeaked and ran away, disappearing into the shadows at the corner of the room. Carly sighed and closed her eyes in mild frustration at not being able to move around. The white mouse crept back out and twitched his nose at her.
“I wish I had some cheese or something to give you, but… I’m locked up. Don’t look at me like that – I’m in the same boat as you. I’m tired, cold, hungry and I’ve got no-one to protect me. But, this has got to be better than whatever’s going on out there.”
The mouse started scratching at the wooden floorboards with his tiny claws as if he were searching for a way out of the house. Carly snorted at the rodent and the mouse ran back to the relative safety of his corner.
“Nice try, but there’s no way out of this hell-hole. Neither us are getting out of here alive,” she told the retreating figure. Her eyes were, once again, drawn to the dead body lying on the floor near the locked door. A few hours earlier, when she had watched the man be killed, she had felt nothing – now she felt only disgust. Not at Mika and Robyn for killing him in front of her and in cold blood, nor at herself, guilty of not even warning him of what was to happen. No, her disgust was directed at the corpse for making her look at it all night – Carly didn’t enjoy the thought of even being under the same roof as the body, let alone in such close quarters as it. She remembered every detail of the murder, could see it in her minds’ eye, vivid as a lightning strike. She could see the look of fear in his eyes as he tried to distract Robyn, could recall the look of resigned acceptance when Robyn had known he had no family. She still heard the sound of his neck breaking, almost a crunch of bone on bone rather than the snap she had expected. Vaguely, Carly knew that it was wrong to be angry at the dead man but she couldn’t help how she was feeling. It was as if she was been taken over and was controlling her barely-there emotions.
She let out a high-pitched, animalistic scream and kicked out at the body; not a person, or even a person that was, just a corpse, an empty shell. Like her, like the monsters, like everyone – no-one was their own person anymore, just puppets playing somebody else’s game.
“I hate you!” she shrieked to the world in general. “For making me look at a dead man, for keeping me here like a caged animal.” She took a deep, shuddering breath between her tears and lowered her voice. “And I hate you for leaving me.” The tears kept coming, more freely than ever, even though she thought she had no more tears left each time she cried.
It was silent in the Crash Room but for the humming of running computers. The room was white and chrome, showing just how sterile and protected this environment really was. Only three people were authorised to use this room, but no-one had been in for a couple of days. The main computer in the middle of the room was linked to the other computers that lined the walls. The high screens on the island were black with tiny green writing appearing every few seconds as it was continuously updated with new information. The far wall was given over to a large hexagonal automatic doorway and metal detectors in case anyone tried to sneak out with the disks or in with a machine to copy them.
The wall at the other end of the room had a built in cabinet above the computer and a set of sliding drawers underneath. They weren’t locked; no-one had seen the point of installing locks because no-one should even be in the Crash Room. Each computer had a swivel chair in front of it. There were twice as
many computers as there ever were people in the room, but they often used more than one computer at a time and pushed themselves around the room.
At the beginning of this project, Gareth Jordan-Smyth had been wary about putting everything onto computer and leaving hooked up to the internet all the time. It would be far too easy for a computer virus to find its’ way into the system, or for a civilian to hack into their files. For over a week that had been a source of great worry for him – until the Information Officer had started encrypting everything and putting all kinds of firewalls up. Each time any new information came to them and was put onto the network, it was immediately encased in the totally illogical and virtually uncrackable code. Every precautionary measure had to be taken to ensure that none of the protected material was seen or tampered with. If it somehow fell into the wrong hands…
Mika wrapped his arm, tight, around Robyn’s shoulders and grinned. Robyn smiled back, pleased at what they had just accomplished, and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, much too excited about their impending adventure to stand still.
“Playtime?”
The glass doors at the end of the spacious corridor crashed open, prevented from shattering only by a metal fire bar. Johnny didn’t even look up from his sketch pad, where he was adding the final touches to a mutant called Radia, and called out, “Hey Dave. Love this place that much, eh?”
At his lack of response, Johnny glanced up, his pen dangling from his mouth, unnoticed, at what he saw. David Lander had indeed re-entered the building, but not of his own free will – nor was he alone. Barely conscious due to the vice-like grip around his neck cutting off his air supply, David gasped audibly for oxygen and looked right at Johnny, communicating nothing but fear. Some deep, unknown part of his brain knew what the pair wanted, but try as he might, that knowledge wouldn’t come to the front of his mind. “What do you want?” he rasped, kicking his feet, the toes of which barely dragged along the floor
“You know what we want,” said a female voice which sounded very close to him and very far away at the same time. “And we always get what we want.”
“Always,” agreed a tall, dark-haired man. Mika had lost his shades in the confusion of the crash but didn’t care about them. It didn’t seem very important any more to blend in and pretend to be like everyone else.
Johnny let the rollerball pen fall from his lips and set his open sketch book on the smooth desk in front of him. He bent down to pick his pen up from the floor and looked up just in time to see David fly the last few feet through the air, smash into a metal pillar and fall to the ground, deeply unconscious. “That was uncalled for.” Carefully, Johnny set his uncapped pen next to the book and leant back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “Is he dead?”
“Not quite.”
The woman who had spoken a minute earlier was now nowhere in sight, but the man walked up to the desk and rested his elbows on the desk. “What’re you drawing?”
“Just doodling,” replied Johnny, drumming his pen on the top of the desk, nonchalantly. “Stops the quiet getting to me.”
“Really?” Mika picked up the sketch book and flipped through the pages. He chuckled to himself as he recalled the real versions of the demons and heroes Johnny had created. Real demons sometimes had the capability of invading human dreams, making them think that they had just dreamed up the most wondrous being, when in fact it was taken, in part, from reality – a part of reality beyond their grasp. “They hit hard. Have special powers. Try to hide away ‘cos they’re different,” Mika said, remembering. He closed the pad and dropped it back onto the desk, glancing briefly at the front cover which was covered with yet more doodles and writing. ”It’s not their fault they’re different… bad. It’s everybody else’s problem for not being able to accept that.”
“Was there something you came in for? A meeting, or something?”
“Actually, I need to see the person in charge. Mr Jordan-Smyth.”
Johnny turned back to his computer screen and scanned all the cameras. He wondered why the motion sensor above the car park barrier hadn’t sounded to inform him of the mans’ entrance. Aha! That was why. The car the man must have arrived in had crashed straight through the barrier, leaving it splintered at the edges. He raised his eyebrows at the monitor but said nothing. “He’s in his office in the next building. If you take a seat, I’ll see if I can get some-one to take you over to him.” But, when Johnny looked up half a second later, the man was nowhere to be seen. Nor was his sketch pad. Putting it to the back of his mind, Johnny looked over to the comatose David and shrugged. It was no use trying to wake him, it was best to leave him to come to on his own.
“Where’d he go?” he demanded of himself, flicking through the camera shots again, trying to get a sighting of him in one of the corridors.
“I could tell you,” came a female voice. Johnny whipped his head up and saw a stunningly beautiful woman looking striking in figure hugging hipsters and a floor length purple coat. “I could tell you,” she repeated. “But then it wouldn’t be much fun trying to find him.”
Johnny found himself smiling at her as she spoke but stopped himself as soon as he realised what he was doing. “I have to find him. No-one’s allowed to be in the building without an escort.”
“Why might that be then?”
“Because we keep some really important, top-secret information here. You can’t get to it, but we’re not taking any chances.”
She tapped her long, silver-painted nails on the plastic surface and leaned in close. “It’s all a game. And there can only be one winner.”
Johnny frowned at the woman. “A game? I don’t know anything about any game.”
Her eyes quickly flicked upwards to a tall shadow, tensed and ready for action, and then back down to Johnny. The movement was so quick that he didn’t even notice it, but she’d had plenty of practice at moving so fast that no-one could tell. “It’s all kept in the Crash Room, isn’t it?” she asked, looking at the front on which he had absently written ‘Crash Room’ repeatedly in loopy lettering.
“Even if I knew, why the hell would I tell you?” he uttered, understand that the woman wanted to get hold of the information there.
“It doesn’t matter – I already know that it is.” Bending down, she picked up the dropped sketch book and paged through it. “These are really good. You’ve got talent.”
Johnny snatched the book back from her and out it on the shelf, just aware of the tiny TV flickering away at the side of the desk. He reached over to switch it off and returned to his face-to-face with the pretty redhead. “What do you want?”
She smiled knowingly at Johnny. The woman licked her lips, running her tongue right over the stubborn scab on her lip. Johnny had been so caught up in her beauty and spirit that he hadn’t even noticed the quick fading bruises and healing cuts. “There are a lot of things I want. Like this necklace.” She showed him the silver and crystal heart pendant. “I’ll do anything to get what I want.” The shadow overhead shook a little, almost imperceptibly, and she realised that it was mean to leave him up there while she teased the other man.
When Johnny had turned away to check his computer, Mika had jumped straight up and clamped his hands on one of the metal bars that ran the inside length of the first floor. Using his impressive strength reserves, he had adopted a gymnasts pose of standing upside down, using his hands as feet. As well as making no noise this way, he had discovered it minimised the shadow which might give him away. From this vantage point he watched Robyn work her charms on the security guard, an exercise that was more fun than necessary. He had been there a good minute or so when Robyn looked up and decided to join him, covering the distance between them as easily and as gracefully as a bird.
“Finally.” They swung round and planted their feet on the metal grating that was used as a floor on this makeshift corridor. Mika straightened up and circled
his stiff shoulders; the fact that the hole in his abdomen could re-open at any moment didn’t help matters, although it didn’t hurt anymore. “Did he tell you anything?”
Robyn sucked in the end of one of the long, thin braids she had hanging at either side of her head and shook her head, sheepishly. “I’m sorry, Mika. I tried. I think he knows what we’re after.” She watched her fingers pick at the edge of her coat pocket and stared down at her feet.
Mika saw that she was upset because she thought she had failed in her task, and wrapped his arms around her and planted a kiss on her forehead. “Look at me, Robyn. You did your best and, anyway, if this is a game…”
“We can still win?” She raised her head and then, for a reason unbeknown to Mika, pushed him through the nearest door and into an empty office. The door had been locked, but now the lock was useless, having been broken when Mika had slammed into it. Robyn giggled as she landed on top of him in the office and leapt to his feet, one foot either side of his body. She looked down at him, false contempt in her eyes as she mocked a stand one of their previous – and now very dead – foes had taken, “You are nothing more than an animal. Death would be a release.” Her eyes softened to their usual look and she held out her hands to him.
He took hold of her hands and pulled himself, pulling her close to him by her waist when he had fully regained his balance. His skin was slightly warm due to the adrenaline already surging through his body and he kissed Robyn hungrily – every sense and nerve in his body somehow felt electrified and heightened. “Something about this place just turns me on,” he murmured in her ear.