Monroe wasn’t kidding when he mentioned he had found some serious gems. After they loaded up the truck bed with all the metal it could handle, he had taken a few minutes to show Trace a couple of pieces. One of them was from one of the old military bases, but the other one was a buried shipping container. All the crap piled on top of it had kept it from decaying and rusting away with time.

It was completely sealed off, with no way of gaining entry unless they wanted to cut their way in. Which Monroe didn’t want to do for one specific reason. While the doors were blocked, he had gotten close enough to see that the original lock and tag were still on it. A tag marked from over a hundred years earlier during one of the World Wars.

Whatever was inside it was bound to be interesting.

All of those interesting goodies could wait until later. Right now, they had to get back to the warehouse and get it secured against intrusion.

Trace finally bit into his burrito as he started driving back home. The slightly sour-smelling item had been cooking in the cab of his truck all day and hadn’t done its smell any favors.

As soon as he bit into it and swallowed, the notifications in the corner of his vision began scrolling down. They were slightly distracting, but he managed to keep the truck steady and in his lane. A minor miracle, considering how everyone else was driving.

More or less, the little buggers were letting him know that the burrito was not fit for consumption and that he was an idiot. Despite that, he took another bite. Old habits died hard, and it was too ingrained in him not to waste food. It didn’t matter that it had spoiled or that it tasted weird. The worst that would happen is he would spend a day or two feeling terrible, possibly hugging the toilet. At least that would have been the case before.

Now the nanites were taking it all for fuel, so it didn’t matter. As long as his tongue didn’t rebel against something, then it seemed as though he could eat whatever he wanted. Not that he was particularly interested in trying to test that theory out.

The tongue and your sense of smell had more control over your body than people tended to give them credit for. By the time the burrito was gone, his stomach had started to cramp. Physically, he wasn’t suffering from the food. Mentally, the smell and taste had been too much.

He rolled down his window and enjoyed some mostly fresh, though hot air, while he drove back.

By the time he reached the warehouse, he had started to feel a little better and found Monroe already working on the roof.

He parked it on the elevator and sent it on down into the darkness. At some point in the near future, he would need to get some new lights for the basement installed. First though, he needed to clean all the dirt and grime and get rid of the acid-eaten concrete.

Well, actually, first he needed to look through the items they had left in the back of the personnel carrier. There had been so much going on before, and he had been so tired that he had barely registered what a lot of the items were.

He drove the truck over to the hole they had temporarily plugged with the table and the other vehicle and parked it.

Opening the back of the carrier, he saw a mess of items and immediately felt his enthusiasm for the project drop. They had just tossed everything in the night before, and it now made it seem more daunting than it actually was.

After staring for a couple of moments, Trace reached in and got to work.

The black unmarked uniforms all went on the hood of his truck. Each one spread out and stacked on top of the other. They all had areas that were damaged, but if you took apart the worst ones, then you would be able to fix most of them.

Consequently, he noticed that the armor they had been wearing was somewhat different from person to person. Each piece had been slightly customized, not a lot, but in ways that mattered. They would have fit better and had better protection over certain areas. Two people had also been wearing armor meant for medium-weight arms fire. They were both full-body protective suits, not power armor, of course, those were far more expensive.

Unfortunately, they had apparently arrived in the personnel carrier, as the suits both had large holes blasted through their chests. In fact, all eight of the people who had arrived that way had been eliminated in more or less the same manner. Save for the ones that were missing their heads.

Monroe’s rifle was an absolute beast.

Still, he had more armor that he could now wear than before. The medium-weight suits were nice, but they were also too heavy for his liking. Both of those would be sold unless Monroe thought he could squeeze into one. None of the lightweight armor came in a complete suit, but he now had enough pieces to cover all of his body if he wished, save for the head. None of them had been wearing helmets.

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He moved onto the weapons.

There was a dearth of knives, and swords spread across the back of the personnel carrier. Each and every one of them was ceramic coated, instead of the cheaper plasteel crap that everyone else bought. Not that these were much better, but they were definitely a step up. A couple of them were vibro-blades, which he set to the side, but all the rest were normal. There were no plasma-edged knives or swords.

As far as he was concerned, all of those could be sold as well.

Then there were the guns. This was where things got interesting. They were all unknown to him, and none of them had any markings that he could use to search for their information on the net.

He had to physically pick each one up, and after interfacing with it, pull up its information. Finally, and from such an unlikely place, it seemed as though he might have gained a clue as to who had attacked them.

They were all made by some corporation called Vinna-Kwoi. Granted, that wasn’t exactly any sort of proof, however, it was enough to make him suspicious. They weren’t even a weapons manufacturer that he had heard of before.

Which after looking up who the corporation even was, he soon discovered why that was. They weren’t a weapons manufacturer at all. There wasn’t a single mention of them creating pistols, rifles, or other guns anywhere.

As far as the world was concerned, Vinna-Kwoi was predominantly a pharmaceutical corporation. It had its hands in dozens of other industries, as most corporations did. However, weapons manufacturing was not one of them.

Which made the small arsenal he now held all the more strange. Perhaps it was common for corporations to create their own variations of weapons for their agents? That was a possibility that he might have to consider. After all, they hadn’t been afraid to put their name inside the weapon itself.

Still, he had no way of knowing if they were the ones who had shown up here, or merely the ones who had supplied the weapons. It was another piece of the puzzle, but that was it.

Setting that matter to the side for the moment, he continued inspecting the guns.

Outside of the ones that had been destroyed, they each seemed to be quality pieces. They had solid construction, a tad on the heavy side for his liking, but they were made to take a beating and then keep on going. It was the same with the mods, these ones at least he recognized as being taken from their original housings and put into more solid, rugged versions.

He would definitely be keeping the mods if for no other reason than so he could reuse those rugged housings at a later date. Most of the guns though… just didn’t seem like they were anything special for what he wanted. He would keep one of the assault rifles, and the same for the shotguns and pistols, but that was it. He didn’t need a gun that could be carried in the open and unprotected through a sewer and still keep working. That wasn’t the type of work he did, and if he ever did take that sort of job, then hopefully he would have the good sense to prepare the proper holster beforehand.

That really only left him with the broken gun he had put in his truck the night before.

Just as he was about to head over to it, Monroe called down from above. “Trace, you down there? Send the lift on up, man. I tried calling you a couple of times.”

He hurried over to the lift and received a couple of missed call alerts from Monroe, along with a message from Ko, when he got closer to it. That took a weight off his back. Anything not near the hole when the lift was down wasn’t getting a signal of any kind. This also meant that while it was up, the basement was a total blackout zone.

“Sorry about that. It seems like the walls are thick enough down here that they block the signal unless I’m almost right underneath the opening.”

“So, then last night?” Monroe asked once Black Betty was in position on the elevator.

“Can’t say anything for certain obviously, however, we might have gotten lucky. Hopefully, whatever they used to signal the second team was the only signal that got out.”

“Hmm, I still don’t like it, but it does make me feel a little better about everything,” Monroe muttered from behind the wheel of his van.

“I’m going to send the lift back on up. Why don’t you get moved into position?”

In the short time it took Trace to hit the lever, hop off the lift, and then walk over to the opening, Monroe had already parked his van and moved the personnel carrier.

As they lifted the table out of the way, both saw several fresh sets of gouges scratched into its surface.

“Huh, maybe Denver really does have crocodiles in its sewers.” The big man muttered to himself.

Trace flicked on his flashlight and jumped down into the sewer pipe, his suppressed CD-10 pistol at the ready. Jogging down the pipe, he reached the spot where they had left the bodies and found it empty. There wasn’t so much as a spot of blood left to be seen where they had been. Whoever had picked them all up had licked the disgusting place clean.

It was undoubtedly the cleanest location in the entire sewer at the moment.

Trace was a little tempted to spray some blood all over his basement and leave the door they were going to install open. Whatever did this should charge for its services.

Monroe stopped behind him with a huff and raised a brow at the spotless location. “I know cleaning services that would kill to get whatever did this on their payroll.”

Trace snorted and shook his head, slapping the other man’s shoulder as he turned. “They’d probably have to. Come on, let’s get that door installed before whatever did this comes back. What’s the plan there, anyway?”

“Every piece of bent rebar that is sticking outside of the concrete will get shortened and then get welded to a straight bar. That will provide some strength, but is more to keep someone from just pushing the door over and into the basement. From there, I’ll weld flat steel to the bar, hiding it from sight. The door will get welded to that steel. Then on this side, we’ll use this,” He held up a massive concrete drill. “To install as many welding anchor points as possible without weakening the wall.”

“And then once it’s all done, we fill in the gaps with wet cement?” Trace asked as they climbed back into the basement.

“That would be best, yeah. It’s your place, kind of, so it’s up to you. This is the bare minimum though, that needs to be done.”