Brice
6:12 PM. The sun has just fallen below the horizon. Six cars, eight to nine people in each. Our driver has finally announced our arrival in Cincinnati, bringing back and amplifying the anxiety that had no doubt been present among the whole crew, Graham and Skyler particularly.
From what we could see through the window to the front of the car, it looked like about any other city in America, only with every surface covered in either half a foot of snow or a layer of salt. The roads weren’t much to see either; it had to be the same asphalt that was put down during the Eisenhower presidency. It’s understandable for a busy city, but it doesn’t seem like all the tax money they collect is going anywhere. A city has to be run like a business to stay afloat, and the state’s restriction on borrowing any meaningful amount of money doesn’t help with that.
The cars we took were just renovated prison transport trucks, only with chairs against the walls instead of a single metal plank, and a larger window to the front. Six of us fit in the back, two or three in the front seats. I sat in the back next to Skyler and our armsdealer Lennox, while Graham sat on the other side in the corner next to two of my personnel. The one closest to him, Jae Hamilton, had been dusting off her revolver with a dryer sheet. Skyler took notice of it when the announcement from the driver woke her up.
“You’re bringing a magnum to a rescue mission?”
Jae looked up at her. “Not every revolver is a magnum. This is a Taurus Judge.” She resumed wiping it down.
“Is there much of a difference between the two?”
“There’s more than one type of magnum, and I don’t think you want me to go into the specifics of how each of them compares to a Judge.”
“Well… is it at least better?”
Both Jae and Graham responded “No.”
“I got a .44 Magnum in college,” Graham recalled. “I blew up a fucking pumpkin with that shit. It was a tiny one, but still. Those… weren’t exactly my most nuanced years.”
“No, they fucking weren’t,” Skyler said with a hint of condescension.
“That’s why I never got one,” Jae continued. “Having the best and biggest of everything has never been appealing to me. I’ve had my Judge since it was released 15 years ago, and I would always go out to shoot random shit with my brother.”
The other guy next to Jae, Karan Bhatta, jumped into the conversation. “You went out shooting with a 15-year-old when you were nine?”
“I didn’t ever get injured, did I? And Graham just said that he would go out shooting pumpkins with his friends in college, so none of us are exactly towering over the others on the moral high ground here.”
“Sure, but at least Graham was out of high school before he went out playing with weapons of mass murder. I fired my first gun when I was 12, but at least my parents were there to guide me.”
“My brother was just as much a parent to me as yours were to you, he just wasn’t quite of age yet.”
“‘Wasn’t quite of age.’ He was a high school freshman who took a third grader out shooting. There’s no getting around that.”
“We’re a minute away from the hotel,” Lennox interrupted while looking at his phone. “We’ll go there, the rest of the trucks will drive to a parking garage. Xander already contacted the Cincinnati Police, they should have the cell towers nearby shut down in a few minutes.”
With that temporary distraction from the current circumstances at its end, the rest of the drive shifted back to silence. Graham watched out the front window the entire time, so right as the truck crept up into the hotel parking garage, he shot up and burst out the back door.
Jae put her revolver back in her pocket, and after another moment of silence, Lennox spoke up. “The Judge isn’t known for being a good offensive gun, so why do you use it instead of a magnum or pistol?”
Jae thought about it for a second. “I don’t know, I guess it’s just an attachment thing. It won’t do as much damage as a magnum, but it hurts. And I’m not one to kill people either, so a gun that shoots big without much penetration is pretty perfect for me.”
“Which kind of ammo do you use for it?”
“The handgun shit, .45 Colt. I don’t like the idea of using shotgun ammo at all, much less with a revolver.”
“Hm. I’ve never known shotgun pellets to be any more lethal than a bullet.”
“That’s because you don’t shoot the guns you import at anything other than wooden targets.”
“Yeah, we’ll see about that.”
The door into the trailer flew open. Graham was on the other side holding up a piece of paper. “He didn’t fucking listen!” he shouted while stepping inside. “I told his fucking ass repeatedly not to do anything and he just—didn’t—fucking—listen!”
Skyler jumped out of her seat. “Adrian went to Eclipse?”
“He’s at fucking Eclipse! The motherfucker is—” he sat back in his seat and buried his face in his hands. “GOD! FUCK!”
Skyler fell back in her seat. “Oh god.”
“Dammit.” I pulled out my radio from my pocket. “This is Lambert, we have a problem here. Graham found a note Adrian left at the hotel. He’s already at the Eclipse HQ.”
I imagine multiple people tried to radio in at the same time, but only one beat them to it. “Did I hear that right? Adrian is already at Eclipse?”
“Yes.”
“Shit. So what’s next, do we go straight to them?”
Bloody fucking hell. We were not prepared for this. But… what other option do we have? We can’t wait any longer if Adrian is in danger as well.
I slowly lifted the radio back up. “Everybody, change of plans. Ditch the parking garages, we’re going straight to Eclipse. I repeat; we are going straight to Eclipse HQ.”
---
The road leading to Eclipse breaks off right on the outskirts of the city in a rural spot that nobody drives past. There’s one tiny sign that indicates where it leads, and it goes past a bridge over Little Miami River, through a small forest, and into an area that must have been farmland however many years ago. And let’s not set aside the irony of that road being next to a billboard with a phone number so you can anonymously tip “crime stoppers.”
The road travels for almost half a mile—most of which is through frozen dirt before gradually changing to asphalt. It’s an extremely off-putting feature for such a massive tech company, but at least the view is nice. But what’s most surprising is that there’s no security checkpoint to be found. Nobody is checking who drives or walks towards the HQ. They probably have security cameras somewhere, but none that can be seen.
Where in the city we had driven on different roads to stay separate and avoid suspicion, this time all six cars drove back to back towards Eclipse. As the building came into view through the trees, Graham jumped up and stared through the window.
“Where do you think they are in there?” he asked nobody in particular.
“Either at the very top or the very bottom,” I replied. “There are still regular people who work here, and they wouldn’t be stupid enough to hold hostages in between unsuspecting employees.”
“Or they’re exactly stupid enough to do that because the top floor is the first place anybody would look.”
“I guess we’ll have to see for ourselves.”
The building grew taller the closer we pulled up to it. Compared to other HQs of major companies, Eclipse’s didn’t look very unique. It was shaped like a giant block almost entirely outlined with windows, not unlike any other skyscraper that was in Cincinnati, only this one was sitting in a field. It’s supposed to be about 62,000 square feet and 35 stories high, but it looks much bigger. They must have made the ceilings higher to give the building a taller appearance. It’s hard to tell from this angle or to count the number of stories at all since the frames separating the windows are nearly invisible.
The scale of the parking lot also grew clearer as we approached it, but despite the hundreds of available spaces, we all instead drove straight up to the front entrance like it was a grocery store. As our car pulled to a stop, I felt the anxiety that had previously filled the car start to evolve into adrenaline. Some of it may have been a byproduct of that anxiety, but the main driver of it was anger. Graham was the angriest of us all and was the first one out the door, kicking it open dramatically and smacking the side of the trailer on his way out. Lennox, Jae, and Karan followed him out.
As I was standing up to go with them, Skyler stopped me. “Hey. Thank you for doing this, man. You could have just stayed in Columbus and nothing would have changed for you, but you dropped everything to help us out anyway. I know it wasn’t an easy choice.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’d have done the same if one of us was trapped in there. Let’s just finish this shit and make sure Eclipse doesn’t fuck with us ever again.” She nodded and hopped out of the trailer.
Most of the militia was already waiting outside, armored and armed with their variety of assault rifles, leaning against their cars or lined up on the sidewalk against the wall, which appeared to be one giant window. Graham had his face up against the glass door while Skyler stood next to him.
The lobby had fairly little decoration for how expansive it was. There was a minibar against a diagonal–facing wall ahead and a fireplace with a few couches in the far right corner with one hallway left of it. There was nobody to be found in the whole lobby, which was strange considering how many cars were in the parking lot and the fact that it was 6:25. Most employees should be leaving by now.
I stood against the window in front of everybody and one by one, their conversations stopped and their heads gradually turned in my direction.
“Alright! I hope you’re all ready for this. Spur-of-the-moment offensive operations may not be ideal but it is what you all signed up for. There are 35 floors in this place, and we need to fan out and clear them all as fast as possible. That means instead of the usual eight teams of six, we will need twelve teams of four. You should already know what your group number is.
“Team 1 clears floors 4 through 6, Team 2 is floors 7 through 9, Team 3 is 10 through 12, so on and so on. Just multiply your team number by 3 and search the three floors above that. Team 11 will be accompanied by me, Skyler, and Graham for the top two floors, where we believe the three hostages are being kept. Team 12 will stand guard down here to make sure nobody gets out. We don’t know what the first two floors look like, but we know where to find the stairs on the third, so all of us will clear out the first three stories. If any people are there, we lead them up to the fourth floor.
“As you search your floors, make sure that none of the employees reach the stairs or the elevator. Nobody outside of the building needs to know what’s happening inside of it, especially not the media. When you’re finished with one floor, one of you will stay and guard the exits while the rest of your team searches the floor above. On your last assigned floor, the remaining two of you will each stand guard there. You should have two radios with you: one that is set to the frequency of your team number, and one that is set on the universal frequency.
“If you encounter security, do not shoot them unless they are armed or somebody’s life is being threatened. If you do have to shoot them, make sure that it’s a gun with a silencer. Only use an unsilenced gun as an absolute last resort. However, the chance of a situation like that should still be slim—if Finn could fend off one of their guards bare-handed, any of you can. Your overall objective here is crowd control. Keep the people from panicking, and keep them and yourselves from getting hurt. If all goes according to plan, we’ll be in and out of this building without any chaos or gunplay.
“But still, we don’t know what to expect. We don’t know what to look for. A lot of this is going to take improvising, but it should not be difficult. We will reach the other side of this. Just remember to stay collected, radio us in whenever you need support, and do not take the elevator. Now, without further ado,” I glanced at the members of Team 1. “Are you ready to make some fucking noise?!”
All 48 of their voices cheered out as five assault rifles pointed at the window behind me. The moment I threw my fist in the air, they fired off. With less than a dozen bullets bursting through the 20x8’ windows, the entire glass wall collectively fell to pieces and initiated the intruder alarm. Graham, who had been standing at my side for the whole speech, was nearly trampled as the 12 teams charged into the lobby. He and Skyler followed me inside behind them.
One man sprinted ahead of the others, leading a group of them towards the hallway. Six people followed him through it. One of the men who stayed back searched around the bar and noticed a security camera sitting above it. As he drew his pistol towards it, I rushed over and held his arm down.
“No. Let them see what they brought on themselves.” He nodded and joined the others around the hallway, just as the six who went searching came running back.
“There’s nothing down there, just bathrooms,” one of them yelled out.
“What about the door to your left?” another yelled back.
He turned around. “Goddammit, the stairs are right here!”
I started walking towards them, closely followed by Graham and Skyler. “Team 1! Get your C-4 ready! It’s time to let everyone know that we’re here!”
The hallway cleared out, and everybody backed out further into the lobby. The four members of Team 1 pushed through them, each carrying a block of C-4 the size of their hand that they smacked against the door. Eliza, who was carrying the detonator, melded the blocks together and stuck the explosive charge inside them. They dragged the wire 15 feet back, pushing the crowd back with them.
They raised the detonator button in the air. “Cover your ears, bitches! Three, two, one…” In just a millisecond after releasing the charge, that entire section of the hallway blew apart, shooting out chunks of drywall and a thick cloud of dust. The force of it knocked everybody back and flung their hands back from over their ears. As the militia either fell backward or planted their feet behind them, the smoke alarm began ringing out in tandem with the intruder alarm. The sound of loud creaking also came from the floors above. That explosion must have rocked the entire building.
The lights that weren’t blown out by the explosion were rapidly flickering. The dust cloud from the hallway was slowly encompassing the lobby, with even more dust falling from the ceiling. Everyone but Team 12 pulled up their masks and started up the stairs.
Skyler tapped on my shoulder. “Hey! We don’t have walkie-talkies!”
“Take mine,” said Robyn, standing behind them. “Team 12 isn’t separating, so we don’t need these as much.” She handed Skyler and Graham each one of her radios. “Make sure they’re set to frequency 13 if you’re talking to everybody.” Robyn winked at Skyler and joined the rest of her team at the bar.
Once everyone was on the second floor, I made my way towards the stairs, motioning for Skyler and Graham to follow. The dust failed to make its way up the stairs and was thinning out where it was, granting a clear path ahead.
Everyone had already fanned out across the second floor, running in and out of rooms that took less than a few seconds to search. The hallway in front of me was already cleared when I made it up the stairs. The hall to the left only led to an office, which appeared to be empty. I marched down the hallway ahead and followed it to the left. It just led to the same office as before. What the hell kind of floor design is this? It’s no bloody wonder they don’t have a map of this floor.
Somebody screamed from inside the office. I ran into it from my end of the hallway before stopping at another left turn. The elevator was ahead just through the office, with one panicked employee in front of it. He was collapsed on his knees, begging for us to let him leave.
Dakota approached him. “Hey, calm down. We’re not here to hurt anybody. This doesn’t have anything to do with you or any of your colleagues. But until we’re done here, we can’t let you leave yet. Just take the stairs back to the floor you were on and let everyone know not to panic.”
He slowly stood back up, almost shaking himself to the point of falling again. “Th-the stairs aren’t on this fl-floor, y-y-you’d need to t-take the elevator.”
Dakota turned his head towards me, and then back to the man. “Then… we’ll take the elevator. Team 1, you go first.”
Team 1 pushed past everyone and into the elevator. Dakota shoved the man in with them. They pushed the button for the third floor and began their ascension of a single story. Team 2 followed after, then Team 3, then Team 4, and then after eight minutes of waiting, it was finally down to Team 11. As Graham, Karan, Skyler, Lennox, Jae, Roman, and then me all crammed into the elevator, Graham said from the corner, “This is the most anticlimactic shit I think I have ever experienced.”
“No shit,” muttered Jae, buried underneath the team of men surrounding her.
“The building had to be designed this way on purpose,” I said as the elevator started. “It confuses intruders and buys everyone else plenty of time.”
“Now I understand why Finn took so long to get here,” Graham sighed.
I popped out of the elevator first once the door opened. The floor was full of even more goddamn hallways, some without any lights on, giving the area a horror movie feel.
Sinclair was waiting ahead. “The stairs are this way, guys. This floor is almost completely empty, and some of the doors here are fake. It’s like the set of a cheap theater production here.”
“Finally,” I shouted. “Now we can get some shit done.”
The sound of people shouting from above grew louder as Sinclair led us to the stairwell. The gunshots and the explosion must have made it obvious to everyone that there were armed intruders in the building, and that guy from the elevator was the only one that was stupid enough to try to escape. The others may have barricaded their offices, which could help with crowd control but be an issue if they blocked the stairs as well. Upon entering the stairwell and looking up, it didn’t appear that they did.
I turned around to the rest of Team 11. “I hope you all are ready to run up 31 flights of stairs, along with facing whatever lies at the top of them.” I stepped aside, motioned them forward, and one by one all six of them charged into the cracked stairwell up to floor 34. Except for Graham, who lightly jogged. I walked up last, trailing behind to keep an eye on the other teams.
If the maps Skyler pulled from the apartment are correct, the main work floors start at the eighth story and go up to the 28th. Everything outside of them is for business, storage, or food supplies. No security area showed up on the maps though, so it must be somewhere in the top two floors where we have no information or any idea of what to expect.
The sound of hundreds of voices yelling over each other became increasingly louder with each step I took, drowning out the two blaring alarms. But it wasn’t coming from the fourth floor. I kept thinking I was on the verge of walking up to a mob of people ready to storm downstairs, only for the sound to become distant again as I reached the next story. Floors four, five, and six were all empty aside from Team 1 searching them. I guess only the richest people in the building were allowed to take the day off.
Team 2 was waiting in the stairwell on the 7th floor. The shouting from above was almost deafening, like standing below a packed concert. Only this time, their footsteps were audible too. We all looked up and lightly nodded at each other. Reis stayed behind while Kacey, Kadie, and Nadia followed me up to the eighth floor.
Most of the work floors follow a similar layout: one large main corridor that runs a U-shape around the area with varying rooms around the outside of it and a sprawling coworking space on the inside, the far end of which faces the field/forest outside. The more tech-centered floors follow a more complicated pattern based on what they have, but in general, the design is quite simple. You walk in, the office is sitting right in front of you, lunch is down the corridor to the right, and everything else you could need is on the left.
But the double doors to the office on the 8th floor were sealed shut. We stepped into the corridor. Two employees were standing at the end of the hall to the left talking to each other before noticing us and running out of view. Within seconds, the voices in the office in front of us sharply died down, leaving only the sound of the two alarms. Whatever entrance to the office the two employees went through, they were now loudly piling furniture in front of it.
“They aren’t going anywhere,” Nadia whispered to me. “Do we still try to talk to them?”
I stepped up to the office doors. “We aren’t terrorists, if that’s what you thought this was about,” I yelled over the alarms.
After a few seconds of internal murmuring, one of them responded. “Then what are you?”
“We’re no one you need to worry about. This is about your bosses, not any of your colleagues. We’ll be in and out of here fairly quickly, the cell towers will go back online, and you all will go home and never speak of this again. Stay put until then, we’ll let you know when we’re done.”
“Done with what?”
I looked behind me to the team, then back to the door. “I would suggest you all start job-searching soon.” I motioned for Nadia to stay and the rest of us went back to the stairwell. Kadie and Kacey broke off to floor 9 while I continued up.
The people on the eighth floor seemed to be the only ones making enough noise to drown out the alarms. The rest of the employees within earshot all followed the same procedure of hiding in the office, blocking the doorways, and staying quiet. I passed by a mostly silent floor 10 with Javier lounging by the double doors with his rifle on his lap, looking like he was having a conversation with someone inside the office. Floor 11 was being guarded by Ahmad, who waved at me as I passed him going up the stairs.
All seemed to be running smoothly up until I reached floor 19, where all of Team 6 burst into the stairwell and shut the door behind them. The sound of people screaming started to approach the door.
“Those fucking people,” Aiden said, gasping for air. “They are fucking chaos incarnate and nothing else.”
“It doesn’t matter what you look like, who you are, or what goddamn insignia you have on your shoulder,” Eren yelled, “if you hold a big gun around white people, they will still think that you’re fucking ISIS!”
“And you’re going to let a bunch of panicked tech nerds overpower ISIS?” I scoffed. “Move out of the way.” I took Eren’s rifle, and once the crowd of people was close, rammed it against the door. “Shut your fucking mouths already, you goddamn rats! There’s a block of C-4 in my pocket and I won’t fucking hesitate to use it!” Their mob-mentality screaming was now in terror and the hallway quickly emptied. I handed Eren her rifle back. “Just guard the door for now. I doubt there’s anything to find inside. Rest of you, upstairs.”
We entered the stairwell to find another employee on the steps directly in front of us, frozen in place. There were another dozen of them waiting above us. The guy yelled to the rest of his colleagues and they all scattered back up the stairs.
Juno pulled out one of her radios and changed the frequency. “Team 7, you guys have about a dozen runaways heading up the stairs in your direction. Try not to terrify them too much.”
Within seconds, two people from Team 7 jumped out into the stairwell in front of the runaways, while the rest of Team 6 and I moved up to corner them. One of them panicked and ran down into the 20th-floor hallway in front of us. Juno, Aiden, and J.J. broke off to follow them. Eliot and Tyrell herded the rest of the employees into floor 22.
Tyrell followed them inside, but Eliot peaked his head over the railing. “Brice? There’s a bit of a problem on the 23rd, and we could use a little… verbal support."
I jogged up the stairs, scaring away another employee about to run away from floor 21. I stopped in front of Eliot, but he pointed his eyes towards the hallway. I looked inside to see a sprawling pile of desks, tables, and office chairs blocking the entire entrance to the hall. The number of square feet in walking space had to be in triple digits. Perry and Bax were pulling at the barricade, trying to find some loose chair somewhere to pull out, to no avail.
“A guy got injured in there when the building shook,” Perry said. “He’s bleeding out with a broken leg right now and these fucking idiots won’t get rid of their makeshift table barricade so we can help him.”
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The barricade had just enough gaps to get a general view of the other side, and the double doors to the office were wide open just past it. A few dozen people were sitting at their desks or huddled around the injured man in the middle of the room. I assume the rest were somewhere in the corridor.
I crept up to the barricade as Perry and Bax moved away. “Hey!” I yelled. “What the hell is all this about?” A few of them turned their heads to me, only to ignore me and look away a second later. “We’re trying to help you, you morons! Are you willing to let a man die because you’re too bloody stubborn to allow any medical support?”
A woman stood from her chair and walked up to her side of the barricade. The others watched her. “Come back with a doctor. Then we’ll talk.”
“I got First Aid supplies right bloody here!” I took the small kit out of my side pouch and opened it up to them. “Look here: we got bandages, gauze, stitches, antibiotic ointment—everything you need. At least let one of us in so we can fix this goddamn mess because you’re clearly not solving anything on your own.”
She glared at me antagonistically. “We’ll remove the barrier a little bit, then you give me the First Aid kit.”
I looked around at the part of the office I could see. Nobody there looked older than 28. “Do any of you even know how to use this?”
Nobody in the office responded. “We’ll figure it out.”
I put the kit back in its pouch. “That’s not gonna do it, ma’am. You either let one of us in or that man’s death will be on you.”
“You’re not coming in here. Give me the First Aid kit.”
“For Christ’s sake.” I turned around to Team 7. “Throw away your ammo. All of it.” They nodded and emptied their assault rifle clips, including the extras wrapped around their shoulder, and tossed all their guns into the stairwell. I held my pistol up to them and took it apart, dropping all the pieces on the ground. “We are not ISIS. Let us in.”
The woman glared at me even more dramatically than before. “If I let you in, you’re just gonna set off some bomb in your pocket. Fuck off.”
One of the women attending to the injured man shot up. “Jesus Christ, Janice! Just let them in! David doesn’t have that much time left!”
“They’re the reason he’s injured in the first place! Why would they suddenly want to help now?”
A group of people came from out of view and faced up to Janice. “Get out of the way.”
“Make me.” They easily pushed her out of the way and started taking apart the first layer of the barricade, throwing every piece of it into a corner of the office. “You idiots! You’re going to regret this!”
They took nearly two minutes to expand their hole all the way through to us. After kicking out one last office chair on our end, there was finally a path inside. The four of us squeezed through it one by one, trying not to make contact with the rest of the barricade to keep it from collapsing on top of us.
The maps don’t do justice to the size of the office. This room alone looks like it belongs in the HQ for Facebook. The area was split into separate wings based on direction, each with different color schemes. There had to be enough room for at least a few hundred people, and that many people across 20 stories would amount to several thousands of employees, putting Eclipse on par with some of the largest tech companies in the country. And yet, even after years of development and a massive HQ, whatever project it is they’ve been working on hasn’t been finished.
The office in its present state however was a disaster. It looked like it was hit by an 8.0 earthquake and a tornado at the same time. For how much empty space they left while forming the barricade, there was still shit scattered everywhere you could look. A lot of the desks must have fallen over as the building shook since most of the stuff that would normally be sitting on them is either on the floor, broken, or strewn across the desks that were still upright. PC screens were shattered, lamps were broken in half, picture frames were cracked, and now a man is bleeding on the ground on the verge of dying at his job. The C-4 bombing may not have been a good idea.
Janice had disappeared from the office. David was laying in the east wing, surrounded by his colleagues. He looked like he was passed out. They already wrapped a makeshift bandage out of a T-shirt around the wound on his left leg, but it didn’t appear to be working.
“What’s the damage?” Eliot asked a man putting pressure on his wound.
“He nearly fell back in his chair once the building started rocking, so he tried to pull himself up by his desk. It went down with him instead.”
Eliot knelt beside David and the other man scooted away next to all the other employees. He started to slowly unravel the T-shirt bandage, which was soaked with blood and sticking to his legs.
“You have to wrap the cloth above the wound,” Eliot told them. “That way his circulation is cut off and he doesn’t bleed everywhere.” He pealed the rest of the bandage off, revealing the raw wound. The desk had to have left an inch-deep gash in his leg, presumably breaking through his shin bone as well, or at least cracking it. “Does somebody have a water bottle I can use? I need to clean this thing off.” How Eliot was able to stay focused in the midst of two alarms still blaring out was beyond me.
Speaking of… why is the fire alarm still going off? Shouldn’t the dust have cleared out by now? I walked further down the east wing to the window and looked outside. There was no dust, but there was a strange light coming from around the bottom floor that didn’t match the lighting of the rest of the building. I took out my radio and set it to frequency 12. “This is Lambert checking in, is there any dust or smoke down there that could keep the fire alarm going for this long?”
“Not that we can see,” Connor replied. “All the dust in the lobby has settled or is outside. We even fanned the smoke detector just so we were sure. I’ll look around though, see if something’s up.”
“Thank you.” I turned around and leaned against the window. Even as Eliot poured water on his open wound, David barely twitched in reaction to it. He was still breathing, but he lost a lot of blood and was tinkering at the edge of consciousness.
I checked my watch. 6:42. I set my radio back to frequency 11. “This is Lambert, have you all reached floor 34 yet?”
Graham picked up first. “No, we’ve just been spending the last 20 minutes playing tag in the stairwell. It turns out Jae used to run cross-country in high school, so it’s a little unfair for the rest of us.” There was a brief pause like he was expecting me to react to that. “Yes, we reached floor 34. We’ve been here for 10 minutes. Our hopes of exploring it have seemed to have hit a dead-end though, because there’s one locked metal door here blocking the rest of the fucking area, and we can’t figure out a way past it. There isn’t a keypad or a fingerprint scanner or anything.”
“Have you checked the 35th floor?”
“The stairs end here and the elevator has to be behind this door.”
“That’s… a problem.”
“Really? Is it a problem, Brice? I honestly never thought of that. We really are lucky to have your verbal support in times like these.”
I groaned to myself while the mic was off. “Alright. Can you see what the door is locked with?”
“Uh… No. There’s just a door handle.”
“Door handle or doorknob?”
“Handle. I literally just said that.”
“Good. Look for something to hit it with, preferably a fire extinguisher. I’ll be up there soon.”
“Oh good, please hurry. The entire floor is painted black and it’s starting to give me claustrophobia.”
“Signing off.” The moment I said that, the intruder alarm finally stopped. I set the radio frequency to 12 again.
“Brice!” Connor screamed immediately after.
“I was out of frequency, what the hell is it?”
“Thank God. I think I found the source of your problem with the fire alarms.”
“And?”
“Uh… how do I say this... Well, the whole third floor appears to be on fire.”
“WHAT?!” I screamed out, turning everybody’s attention in the room to me. “How?!”
“That is a very good, very important question. One that may have to be answered a little later.”
I took another look out the window. “Jaysus fuck, alert Team 1 to get the hell out of there! We’re on our way.”
“No! No, no, don’t do that. We can handle this, we came to rescue your friends and that’s what you need to do. There’s still time before this gets out of control. Although the window for doing that may be closing. Rapidly.”
I set the frequency to 13 and started speedwalking toward the stairs. “All teams, the third floor of the building is on bloody fire right now. I don’t know how it started, how bad it is, or if there’s even still a goddamn way out, but all of you have to listen close. I need every single one of you to shoot out any and all windows facing the outside so we don’t suffocate in the smoke. If you’re on a work floor and the entrances to the main office are blocked, you will get the fuck through them by any means necessary. Team 1, if you have nobody to look after, run down to the third floor and try to clear a path out of the building. Once there is one, we’ll start evacuating the employees. Everybody else, stay put until Team 1 gives the go-ahead or I say otherwise. It looks like the operation isn’t going to go as smoothly as we hoped.” I put away the radio and waved at Perry and Bax to follow me as I entered the stairwell. “Eliot, you’re staying here. Make sure that David gets out of this place alive.”
I grabbed my second pistol from under my left pant leg and shot the window on the other side of the office three times, shattering a large chunk of it, and charged up the stairs. Perry and Bax stopped at floor 24 while I continued towards 34. Floor after floor, one by one, the sound of a volley of silenced gunshots and the subsequent shattering glass echoed throughout the stairwell, only slightly dampened by the continuing fire alarm. It reminded me of hearing distant fireworks on the fourth of July, although this context made it significantly less celebratory. I guess there’s no hope in avoiding media attention now.
I covered the first 33 floors in just over a minute before reaching the stairs’ end. The area ahead looked like a miniature waiting room with two hallways on the sides. I guess Graham was right about the whole floor being painted black. The fire alarm was finally cut off as I approached the team. They were waiting ahead in front of the locked door.
Karan noticed me first. “You sure took your damn time down there. What kept you?”
“Some guy broke his leg after the explosion and his colleagues didn’t make him better. He’s getting patched up by Eliot right now.”
Skyler wound up the fire extinguisher she was holding and struck down at the door handle. It didn’t budge. “This fucking thing isn’t moving,” she said, tossing it aside. “I’m damaging the extinguisher more than the handle.”
“Would you perchance enjoy the privilege of taking a crack at it yourself, dear leader?” Graham said, stepping aside as if presenting it to me.
I walked up and grabbed the fire extinguisher off the ground. I took a step back, wound it up in the air behind me, and leaped at it with all the strength in my body. The extinguisher crashed down on the center of the handle, snapping the whole thing out of place and bursting the extinguisher open. It dropped and slammed on the floor, and the spraying gas rolled it away against a wall.
“I will become stronger than you one of these days,” Jae audibly muttered.
I shook the handle loose and tore it out, causing the handle on the other side of the door to drop to the ground. I tore out the deadlatch and pulled the door open.
The room ahead had a line of lockers stretching almost 40 feet on the wall in front of us. Two hallways on each end of the room. I motioned to Lennox, Karan, and Roman to check the left hallway once they walked inside. Graham froze at the doorway unsure of where to go, so he followed behind everyone going with me. I held my pistol ready in case anyone was waiting to jump us. The hall led to a left turn and then ended in another lobby where the other half of the team walked out on the opposite side. We each had a set of double doors on the wall beside us with yet another metal door on the front wall.
The double doors on my side were left creaked open. I backed up and kicked it open, standing to the side of the doorway. Nobody was there. I quickly stepped inside to find a small but brightly lit room. The walls were lined from top to bottom with military-grade weaponry; fully automatic assault rifles, snipers, shotguns, automatic pistols, and even an RPG. A lot of spaces for the guns were empty. If nobody encountered security on the lower floors, then…
“Well. Now we know how ready they are for us to show up,” Graham said trying to disguise his panic.
“They must have been in a hurry,” Jae added. “The guards just grabbed whatever they could and rushed upstairs, leaving the door open and all the lights on.”
The wall spaces near ground level were reserved for various explosives and gun attachments. There was a line of C-4 blocks in front of us, even bigger than the ones we brought. They all had a charge pre-planted on them with a timer attached. Two of the spaces on the side were empty.
“Brice?” someone called in from my frequency 11 radio.
“What is it?”
“It’s Eliza. Team 1 and 12 are on the third floor right now, and we are not seeing any way out. The fire had to have started somewhere in here, but now the whole damned hallway by the elevator is in flames. It is spreading very quickly but not burning itself out nearly as fast. We will try to look for a ladder or something so we can climb out the windows, but right now it does not look like we are gonna be walking out of here.”
“Alright. Just figure something out, we’re almost done here.”
“Will do. Gates out.”
I had forgotten to move for over ten seconds. The gravity of the situation was still struggling to catch up with me. Eclipse’s security was heavily armed with military-grade weapons and was packed likely right above us, and if by some miracle we get Percy, Adrian, and Finn out of here without anyone getting hurt, we don’t have any clear way to get out of the building. Just focus on the objective at hand. We will figure out an exit strategy later.
“Hey!” Lennox yelled from outside. We rushed out of the weapons room to find him pulling somebody out of another room in the center of the lobby. “Meet the goddamn weasel who’s been spying on us through the security cameras this whole time.” Lennox shoved him onto the ground.
“I was just doing my job, man! I don’t get paid enough to deal with this shit.”
“Where are the hostages being kept?” I asked him.
“They’re fucking upstairs, man! Feel free to shoot however many of those lunatics you want, I don’t fucking care at this point. The elevator is past those doors over there.” He pointed to the far right corner of the lobby, directly in front of where we entered. “All of Jax’s goons were so panicked after the explosion that they left all the doors unlocked. I’ve barely told Jax what you guys were doing, and I even disabled the intruder alarms on the top floors, so just let me out of here and I will never come back to this fucking place!”
Lennox and I looked at each other. “You can leave. Just not right now.” Lennox pushed him back into his security room and shut the door. “We have people watching every floor, so don’t think you have any chance of escaping!”
“Wait!” he shouted from inside. “At least take my walkie-talkie! They have a shitload of guns up there in the hands of trigger-happy morons, and I don’t think you want to just show up there unannounced in the elevator.”
I opened the door back up. He turned around and rummaged through his desk before pulling out his radio. “Take it. I clearly don’t need that shit anymore.”
I grabbed it out of his hand and walked up to the door in the corner. Not only was it unlocked, but it also wasn’t shut all the way. I stepped through it to find another waiting room identical to the one that the stairs led to. The elevator sat in the center of the back wall.
“Here it is, folks,” Skyler said. “The final step.”
I turned on the security guy’s radio and pushed the PTT button. “Jax, was it?”
A few seconds passed before someone responded. “Huh. I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t expecting this. I thought that weird military guy was the best you could throw at us; it was a good idea for a distraction. You definitely got the jump on us this time, I will give you that much.”
“Are the hostages still okay?”
“We haven’t tortured them if that’s what you’re implying.”
“We aren’t looking for any trouble. All we want is the hostages and we will leave you alone for good. End of story.”
“End of story, huh? Few have offered that to us before, I may just take you up on that. Why don’t you ride the elevator up here so we can negotiate this face-to-face?”
I snorted. “How stupid do you think I am, mate? I know exactly why you waited for us to show up, and it’s not going to work.”
“But you did show up, didn’t you? So technically I’ve already won in that arena.”
“For Christ’s sake mate, do you have any fucking idea of what you’re dealing with here? I have a goddamn army that will follow me to the ends of the bloody earth, no matter what. You have a ragtag band of dopey security guards that even a 28-year-old from Cleveland could fight off. You don’t stand a fucking chance against us. Just send Percy, Finn, and Adrian down the elevator and we’ll be on our way out of here. No more trouble for you, and no more trouble with us.”
“Oh, please. I already know everything I need to know about you. You blew up our front door, invaded our building, set it on fire, injured a bunch of people, and now you want to just leave here in absolute peace with three of your friends and a fucking parade in your heroic honor? Spare me the dick-measuring bullshit, we both know there are only two ways this is going to end.”
“Bloody fucking hell mate, what’s the goddamn point of all this? Why is a fucking shootout the only solution you’re willing to resort to?”
“You fired the first shot mate, and you fired twice. And I can only imagine how deep the rest of your history of empty vigilantism goes. Don’t pretend that something like this was inevitable, whether it be with us or with the police.”
“You’re a goddamn lunatic. Alright, let’s say we do come up there. There’s a big, dramatic shootout, and you end up winning. Then what? How are you going to explain to the media or to your employees why there was a goddamn shootout inside of your HQ following a fucking explosion?”
Jax turned on the mic briefly but fell silent before cutting it off. The team exchanged nervous looks at each other before his voice cut back in. “Alright. You make a good point. We don’t want the media, and we are not going to have a shootout. Just take the elevator up here so all of us can figure out some kind of compromise.” He cut out again.
I stepped up to the elevator before Jae grabbed my shoulder. “Brice, don’t.”
“Relax. I’m gonna try something.” I walked into the elevator and looked at the buttons. The numbers only went up to 34. The buttons below them were P1, P2, the open and close buttons, and… B. That had to be it. I pushed the B button and jumped out of the elevator before the door shut. I could hear it slowly traveling up, followed by the faint sound of it dinging from a few feet above.
The sound was almost immediately followed by a burst of automatic gunfire from above, startling the whole team. They continued shooting for almost five seconds before realizing the elevator was empty. Skyler quickly punched the wall button to call the elevator back. The door opened to reveal dozens of damaged bullets on the ground and even more holes in the wall.
“Are you fucking insane?!” I yelled into the radio.
“That was just a miscalculation. We wouldn’t shoot the real you.”
“You’re going to bring your whole goddamn company down, you fucking moron!”
“Oh, I think we already crossed that bridge when you blew up our front entrance and set the building on fire.”
“What in the bloody fucking hell is going to take to get through to you?!”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
Before I could respond, there was a crackling noise on the other side and the mic once again cut off. Somebody else’s voice came through the radio this time.
“We’ll let a small group of you come up here. Nobody will shoot at you this time. I know that there are more of you than can fit in that elevator and a shootout between us will not have any winners. Nobody needs to die today.”
“One of us would have been killed 30 seconds ago had we been in the elevator. I think you’re full of shit.”
“If we really wanted you dead, we would send our own men down in the elevator. How does waiting for you to come up so we can kill you all four at a time sound like a reasonable plan to you?”
“It sounds like a stupid plan. It also sounds like the perfect way to convince us we’re safe so we’ll go up there and you can finish the job in one go.”
He cut out. A couple seconds later, the elevator door shut and traveled back up to floor 35. We heard it start coming down, and all of us who had a gun pointed it at the door. It opened up to reveal one man on the other side.
“Get in.” The seven of us cautiously walked inside, making sure to stay behind him. “You won’t need the assault rifles,” he said while still facing the door.
That almost made me laugh. I plucked one of the bullets out of the wall behind me and flicked it in front of him.
The door opened. Whatever I was expecting the 35th floor to look like, what I saw wasn’t it. The entire room, or oversized lobby, had almost the same square footage as the whole building, and the ceiling was over 20 feet in the air. About a dozen lights were shining down from it like spotlights, choppily lighting up the room. That and the reflective marble flooring suggest that the room generally relies on natural sunlight through the back window. They must not be used to staying in the building this late at night.
A wall of a few dozen guards in military armor was standing in front of us, albeit with their weapons down. In front of them were three more regularly dressed people, presumably the ones in charge. The one in the middle was the biggest, so I assumed that was Jax.
The man who led us into the elevator walked out first and we closely followed. He stopped in the middle of the room and turned around.
“Where the hell are they?” Graham shouted. His question was met with silence from the entire room.
“You said we could negotiate our way out of this,” I said to the man who led us here. “So let’s negotiate.”
He turned and walked towards Jax and company, leaving us completely vulnerable to his firing squad. The team tensed up, scanning around the room for anybody to fire the first shot, but remarkably none of them raised their guns. The elevator guy walked past the wall of guards with Jax, leaving us with the two people he was standing next to.
“Where are you keeping the hostages?” I asked again.
The man on the left spoke first. “They’re in another room. Behind us. We’ll get to them later.”
“What are we getting to now?”
The man on the right spoke this time. “How about the several million dollars in damage you’ve done to us?”
“What the hell are you talking about? None of the damage we’ve done here could possibly be worth millions of dollars.”
“We aren’t talking about what you did here. You stole $2 million from our puppet charity Solaris, lost it another million and a half, and then you came here.”
I looked behind me to Graham and Skyler, neither of whom looked like they had an explanation. “Son of a bitch. So that’s what this is all about, huh? The multibillion-dollar tech company wants a couple million dollars back.”
“Don’t try to minimize this. You directly attacked us twice, did you expect us to not notice?”
“What the hell made you think there was some correlation between the two operations? Do you honestly believe that they somehow knew what was going on here, decided to start by robbing your charity that was miles away from them, and then immediately moved to storm your fucking HQ? What the hell kind of strategy would that be?”
“We don’t expect everyone to be smart,” the left guy said. “Not every strategy by a random vigilante group is a good one.”
“But their strategy to steal $2 million from Solaris worked perfectly, didn’t it?”
“If it worked perfectly, we wouldn’t have known about it.”
“But they didn’t fucking know there was an outside force that would see what happened! That’s the whole goddamn point! They didn’t spend months devising a plan on how to covertly steal millions from a pseudo-charity they live close to only to realize, ‘Oh shit, we forgot to account for the goddamn terrorist organization that was watching over it!’ Use your fucking heads here!”
“There is no—”
In that very moment, in just that millisecond, every voice ceased. Every single sound was cut off. I thought I saw it as it happened, but I wasn’t sure at the moment. It all happened too quickly for me to process. In just one sliver of a second, I felt all of my senses exploding at the same time, and in the same moment they all abruptly shut down. The sound of a large boom followed by my head whipping back, and then nothing. My vision went black, my hearing shut down, and my whole body went completely numb. It was like every nerve in my body had frozen and was cut off from my brain.
I thought it was a gun at first—that maybe one of the guards had gotten sick of the discussion and decided to put an end to it all. But… I wasn’t dead. My body may have shut down, but I could still think. I don’t remember what I was thinking about though. Maybe my mind just retreated from reality and started replaying old memories. Maybe I actually was dead and my brain was running on its last fumes. Maybe….
I snapped back awake, gasping for air. My senses slowly came back one by one in their most timid forms until I could finally make out my body position. My vision was too blurry to see anything in front of me, but I could tell that something was blocking half my vision. My hearing came back next, but all I could hear was a loud ringing. The ability to move my arms and legs returned incrementally, but not enough to feel anything around me. The nerves on my face reactivated quicker though, and it felt like it was laying against something, probably the floor. I could feel my tongue again, but I didn’t feel my gums when I moved it around. When my taste came back, I realized why. The revoltingly bitter tang of dust was covering my tongue and most of my mouth, almost motivating me to cough it out, but not quite enough. My smell came back last, and I could finally sense what I was breathing in so heavily that plugged my nose. Shit. It’s fucking smoke.
My energy instantly came back. My arms barely lifted me off the ground and I faintly tried to cough the dust out of both my mouth and nose to the best ability that my body would allow. The dust in my mouth wasn’t leaving, so I tried rounding it up with my tongue and spitting it out. I started coughing more violently as I kept breathing in more smoke until I had no choice but to get out of that spot. My legs weren’t strong enough to stand, so I crawled away as fast as I could. It felt like I was shuffling through debris. I was almost out of the smoke, but as I reached my hand down the floor, it suddenly went through it. My upper body nearly fell over an edge. My vision was yet to fully return but I could vividly see how deep the expanse in front of me was. I turned my sight to my surroundings to figure out where the hell I was.
The edge was really a giant hole in the ground. I was still in the center of the room. Something must have exploded from right below us. And I was standing right next to it. I pushed away from the hole and tried to kick back into a standing position before the blood rushed to my head and I fell back on my ass. Wait… where are the others?
Where there were once over 50 guards standing, there was now just debris and smoke. They either fell into the pit or deserted the area. Jax and the man he was with seemed to have disappeared too. The area around me that I could make out was completely deserted. Fuck, how long was I out?
There was a gunshot on the other side of the room. My eyes were working enough to see where it was coming from, but not any faces. Someone with a rifle was standing over another, who was grasping somewhere around their torso. They got smacked across the head with the rifle. That has to be someone from the militia. None of those guards would have spared the opportunity to blindly kill one of their enemies. There was another fight happening to the far left of me. It must have been Skyler and Jae that were struggling with one of the guards, next to the unconscious bodies of three others.
I tried once again to push myself to stand up. I managed to maneuver both my feet under me, and slowly pushed up while trying not to lose balance. I almost made it up before I felt a sharp pain in my right leg, causing me to fall down again. There wasn’t any visible wound or broken bone anywhere on the leg. It must have bent the wrong way or hit something after that explosion.
I scooted back up to the hole in the ground. Four bodies were visible at the bottom of it, covered in dust and debris. One of them appeared to be one of Jax’s negotiators… the guy who was on the left, I think. The others were security. They looked like they got dragged out of the rubble before being abandoned almost immediately after. A couple of extra assault rifles were lying next to them. The survivors of the fall probably tried to rescue them, only to then panic and run away. Christ, dead bodies are the last damned thing that we need right now.
Lennox yelled out for help from the end of the lobby. Skyler instantly rushed towards him while Jae held down and choked the guard she was struggling with. Lennox was collapsed onto his knees while the other one of Jax’s negotiators was grabbing his hair. He was standing just a couple feet away from where the window was.
“You fucking bastards! Is this what you fucking wanted?!” he screamed, his voice tinged with insanity. “You all will die for this! All of you!” He grabbed a pistol from off the ground and pointed it at Lennox’s head.
“Put that down, man,” Skyler said calmly, stopped in place by the edge of the pit. “Don’t do something you’re going to regret.”
He didn’t listen. He cocked the pistol and pushed it against Lennox’s temple. “I’ll fucking do it! Nobody come near me!”
I searched around the room, but nobody else was around that could help. I switched to scanning the floor for anything to use, and sitting in a pile of rubble and dust in front of me was a silhouette of the Taurus Judge that Jae had been fixing in the transport truck. She noticed me looking at it and rushed to it first.
“You’ve ruined everything! I was supposed to lead the whole council and you fucking ruined it!” His finger tensed around the trigger, but he couldn’t move fast enough to pull it before the Judge was pointed directly at him. Jae fired it.
He didn’t react to it initially. He just stood frozen in place, unsure if he was hit or not. It wasn’t until the blood started pouring out from his right eyebrow that he began to realize what was happening. He staggered backward, firing his pistol into the floor before slipping back and falling out of the window.
Oh god.
I finally stood back up, limping all the way to the window to look down. The fire smoke covered the sight of his landing.
A door to my left carefully opened up. “Is it safe now?” Finn asked, walking out into the lobby.
I looked back out the window. The fire that started on the third floor had spread to several others. My cracked watch showed 7:09.
“Um… yeah. It is. For the most part.”
“You look like shit. This whole throne room looks like shit.”
“Yeah. Things didn’t go how they were supposed to. But that doesn’t matter now. The threat is gone. Let’s just… find a way to get you guys out of here.”
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