Mark arrived at 21:45, the parking lot gate opening as he approached. Jeremy must have been looking out for him. Light reflected off dozens of cars in the parking lot. How big was the night crew? Pulling into one of the several spaces reserved for security, he stepped out of the truck into the brisk air. He would have to do a couple patrols around the building later in the night, and as they got deeper into fall and winter that would mean heavier clothing. He had brought a thick jacket tonight, to keep in the locker.
Light spilled out of the lobby windows into the darkness, but it was muted by the heavily tinted glass, giving an eerie, half-real feel to it.The front door beeped to his electronic key fob, but the beep sounded just a little bit off. Pulling the door he felt a rush of warm wind and entered the building. His shoes clacked and echoed as he crossed the empty lobby and Mark suddenly felt very exposed.
Fighting down his anxiety, calming his nerves, was easy. He did it almost automatically. Twenty three missions he had been under intense gunfire, he could handle an echoey lobby. The door with “Security” on it opened as he approached and the warm smile of Jeremy calmed him even more. “Evening.”
“How are you, Mark?”
Mark nodded and smiled. “Rested. Ready for round two.”
“Glad to hear it. Let’s go over the monitors again real quick, you drive.”
Mark sat in the chair at the big desk and pointed to scenes as they flashed by, naming the rooms by their corresponding route number. “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but that was perfect. Never had a newbie get it their first try.”
They spoke a few more minutes to each other, mostly about the increasingly colder weather up here in the range. Would it be a heavy winter this year? Did Jeremy ski? He didn’t think so, and no, though he used to snowboard. They said a brief goodbye, “I’ll be back in twelve. Don’t forget to unlock the front doors at oh-six-hundred.”
Tap, tap, tap, tap… Mark was alone. “Oh good, you’re here.” He spun, hand reaching instinctively for his holster. Luckily the man in the sweaty t-shirt didn’t seem to notice as he passed through the metal detectors, lights flashing green momentarily, but then he gave Mark a real look. “Another new guy, eh?” He chuckled. “Hey, man, I just got the munchies real bad, I’ll only be a minute.” Squeek, squeek, squeek, went his tennis shoes across the lobby, then the loud screeching cry of the door to the break room.
Mark’s heart was running, he could feel the adrenaline he had counted on so often pouring through his veins. Closing his eyes, he rubbed his face. What was with him? Lab. Scientists. Nerds. Geeks. Harmless machines. This was not a combat zone. Was this PTSD? Sighing he shook his head and followed after the man.
“That door is totally killer, am I right?” Was this guy high?
“It’s something else all right. Name’s Mark, sorry about the staring contest in the lobby, you caught me off guard.”
The man with shaggy hair laughed out loud. “Dude, it’s no biggie. Call me Dan,” he extended a hand and Mark shook it. It was wet.
“Must get hot in those clean-suits.”
Laughing again, Dan wiped his hand on his sweaty shirt, probably making it worse, “Bro, I am so sorry! Those things are totally killer! I swear I sweat out a bajillion calories every night. It’s why I get the munchies.” Of course it was. Dan was back to focusing on one of the vending machines, a particularly junk-food filled one.
“How long have you worked here?”
“Feels like a lifetime, bro, but I guess,” he punched some buttons and swiped a card, “Oh, I guess about three years.” Mark suddenly felt old. This kid didn’t look like he could have been working anywhere for three years unless he dropped out of high school.
“You like it?”
“Hell yeah, man! It’s the best job.”
Mark felt himself turning before he even registered the sound of the door, only barely keeping himself from reaching for the gun on his hip.
“Again, Daniel?” The lady was incredulous. “Break time is in two hours, can’t you wait?”
“No way. I was about to pass out.”
“You’re such a wimp. Get back in there, or I’ll have to write you up.”
Laughing, Dan passed the woman, saying in an endearing tone, “Darling, you are such a bitch.”
“Only to assholes,” she returned with a sarcastically flirtatious tone. The age difference made the scene that much more entertaining, but Mark didn’t find himself amused. He was still on edge. She looked at him and he nodded in return. “Sorry, they’re not supposed to leave the lab until break time.”
“Troublemaker?” Mark asked honestly.
“No, he does good work, when he’s not stoned.”
“You let him in the lab like that?”
She took a moment now to look Mark up and down. She was around forty, about his age, but she had likely never been very attractive. Being married made the look she gave him that much more awkward. “Unfortunately,” she continued slowly, then seemed to remember Mark’s question, “he is a genius.” She rolled her eyes as if she only half believed it. “Sorry, I’m Wanda, head of neuro.” She extended a hand. It didn’t look slimy.
“Mark,” he responded, shaking her hand. In fact, she didn’t seem sweaty at all.
“I’d better follow the golden child back in, we can talk some more at break time.” She turned and let the door close behind her. A second after it closed Mark found himself jumping to the banshee scream once again as she reopened it. “You coming to let us in?” She looked at him curiously. Was it obvious he had been surprised?
“Right, sorry.” He followed her back to the lab entrance. Dan was waiting by the door, dumping the rest of his Skittles into his mouth. The light on the metal detector went green as Wanda passed through. Mark stopped short of it. “Sorry, Dan. It’s my first real day, mind stepping back through the detector?”
The boy’s jaw actually dropped, a skittle falling out. “Are you..” he rolled his eyes, dropped the empty wrapper where he was and pranced, actually pranced, back to the metal detector, and made a big show of going in and out of it a few times, even twirling. The light was green the whole time. “Happy now?” His rainbow grin was unbearable. Wanda had buried her face in her hands.
Mark stared at Dan, arms down. The punk just stared right back, not even blinking. He was such a hotshot. He screamed like a little girl and fell to his knees, covering his head. Mark held the pistol in his hand casually, pulling back the slide to check the chamber, then dropping the clip, inspecting it, before making a show of slamming it back into place, and holstering the weapon. “Dude! What is wrong with you?!” Dan’s voice was high pitched. Wanda was covering her mouth now, though her laughter was still visible.
“Just double checking to make sure it’s operational. Never know when you might need to use it.”
“What kinda wild-ass western quick-draw action was that?!” He was still covering his head but was now smiling at Mark. He knew he’d been beaten and was being a rather good sport about it.
The metal detector beeped loudly and a red light poured down on him as Mark walked through, stepped over the kneeling Dan, and made his way to the door. The smaller beep of the key fob and Mark pulled the door open. Wanda was grinning and still chuckling as she winked at him and passed through. Dan finally got up and turned around. He had a sly smile on his face, and gave Mark a friendly punch to the shoulder, “You’re alright, bro.”
Mark watched them walk down the corridor and go through the next door into the room where they’d put on their clean suits. The silence was suddenly overbearing. The door snicked shut, the metal detector beeped loudly, shoes clack-clacked, then he was back in the Security Office, looking at the monitors.
There were Wanda and Dan, putting on their clean suits. The monitor switched to one of the lab rooms. It was fourteen on the patrol route, “Respiratory”. Two lab technicians were visible in their clean suits. A chill ran up his spine and he swallowed hard. The screen had gone black, suddenly, too quickly. Grabbing a pen and a sticky-note pad he wrote: 14-black 22:04:32, midstream.
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The monitor was showing a different room now, twenty-one. Who had set these up? Mark watched intently. There was the changing room again. Wanda and Dan, mostly dressed, seemed to be talking. Dan was nodding. Fourteen popped back on screen. It wasn’t black, but his unease worsened. Where were the technicians? There had been two of them, hadn’t there?
Scanning the other monitors he saw room fifteen, what was it called? Well, there were the technicians, at least he assumed so. There were four in this room, and they were all gathered together chatting about something. They had certainly left their lab in a hurry. Mark only thought for a second before acting.
He opened the door to the security corridor and ran down it, bursting into the changing room. Wanda and Dan were just about to exit. “Wait!” They turned. “Could you help me out real quick? I need to get this suit on fast.”
“Something wrong?” asked Wanda, at the same time Dan jumped into action, helping Mark get the blue security suit out of its locker. Maybe the kid wasn’t totally useless after all.
“I don’t think so, but I need to check on a camera.”
“Dude, did one go black again?”
“Yeah, midstream, I saw it turn black.”
“No shit, man, that’s awesome!”
Wanda was helping Mark with the arms, and Dan was putting the helmet over his head. This was much faster with two people helping. Mark wasn’t really doing anything at this point. “Oh wait!” he had almost forgotten to move the pistol to the outer holster of the suit. Pulling a hand back out, he quickly made the transfer, then put the arm back in the suit. Could he even fire the pistol with these gloves on? He heard the zip and felt a pat on his back.
“Go get ‘em, Captain America!”
“You’re so weird, Dan,” was Wanda blushing in that helmet? Mark didn’t take any time to look closer but headed for the door.
“Thanks, guys, really appreciate it.” He jogged into the “Nexus”, a fairly large room, almost as big as the lobby, that acted as a hub for all the labs. There were various hallways and airlocks that connected the labs in other ways that Mark didn’t understand at all, but from here it was a fairly straight shot to fourteen.
Taking the third door from the left, he practically leapt across the small chamber and remembered just in time to slow down and let the chemicals in the air do their job. He forced himself to count to twenty before opening the next door. He could feel the pressure change when it opened, and he moved quickly into the next room.
Containers and pods filled the room, along with mobile trays with various instruments on them. Mark tried not to pay much attention to anything, but walking as fast as he was still attracted the attention of the technician in this room. “Something wrong?” came a muffled question, with a bit of static.
The comms in the suit worked on a proximity basis, automatically connecting with nearby suits to assist in not having to yell through the helmets at each other. The quality was not amazing, but it worked well enough.
“Nothing to worry about.” Mark paused a moment and looked at the two doors at the back of this room. He started to try and go through the route Jeremy had taken him on but thought better and asked, “Which way to fourteen?” There was something along the lines of an “uuuh” and Mark realized his mistake, “Respiratory, sorry.”
“Take the right.”
Giving the tech a marshmallowy thumbs-up Mark jogged to the right door and went through it. The hallway was barely navigable for all the pipes and conduit going through it, so he made slower progress to the next door, only a couple dozen feet away. He came out into a round room with low plastic-shielded tables, heavy robotic arms extending down to them from the ceiling. Cables ran all over the place in here, overhead and underfoot, though the latter were carefully placed and well covered.
Again, he tried not to look too closely at anything. The two techs in this room didn’t notice him, each at a different table using the giant arms to manipulate whatever was inside those plastic shells. There was only one door at the back of this room, and Mark made his way quickly to it. Upon opening the door, however, he found a short hallway that went to the left and right, a door at each end. This place was ridiculous. He was going to ask for a map first thing in the morning.
“Which way to Respiratory?” Both techs looked up and around the room, surprised. They seemed to notice him at the same time.
“Som--ing --ong?”
“--at are --oking ---” The responses came on top of each other and got garbled in the comms. Mark tried again.
“Which way to Respiratory?”
They both pointed right. He waved, and entered the hall, taking the right path. Before he even opened the next door he heard staticky whispers. Pausing only a moment to see if he could understand anything being said, he decided it wouldn’t be worth the effort and pulled the door open. Four techs turned to him as one, going silent.
They had moved here, to Respiratory. For at least a full ten seconds they all stood, staring at each other. “Don’t let me interrupt,” Mark prompted.
The four looked at each other, then back at Mark. “New guy?” asked one of them with a rather deep, yet feminine voice.
“Mark,” he offered with a little wave. No one waved back.
“What do you want, Mark?” This voice came from the one on the right, short, and nasally. The man was short too.
“Just coming to check on things. I saw the camera in here go black.”
Again, they looked at each other, but then the one on the left made a dismissive hand gesture, “Oh, that. It’s nothing. IT says it’s just a bug in the software.” The man was utterly unconvincing, and the response had come too late, practiced but not remembered quick enough to be effective. He seemed to know it as he glanced back at the other techs. Two of them shook their heads and turned, walking to a door at the back of the room. They exited silently.
The deep-voiced woman said, “We should get back to work, but let us know if you need anything.” She turned to walk away, but then turned back to slap the man lightly on the arm, getting his attention, and pointing to a tube of.. Mark looked away. They moved together back to a mobile tray and began their work.
It took him a minute to find the camera. It blended well into the tubes and cables running across the ceiling. He suddenly felt a bit sheepish as he realized there was nothing more he could do. There wasn’t a ladder handy to climb up and get a close look at the thing, and supposedly the IT team had already done so. Then again, the camera seemed a lot less interesting now that he had seen the behavior of the lab technicians.
A quick glance showed them involved in their work. The woman was talking again, but it was all directions. “There, that one. Uh huh… good. Now the scalpel. Yes, just like that, nice cut. Do you know what’s next?” He must be a new guy. Or maybe just new to this particular task.
Looking at the door in the back he considered, then thought better. That nasally man was not going to say a word. Should he question these two? What would he ask? Did a camera going black for a few seconds matter? Then another thought: Had the camera gone black or just the monitor? He turned and made his way back through the maze of rooms.
After a few minutes of fighting with the suit, he was back in the Security Office. He pulled up the monitoring software on the PC screen and navigated to the time and camera where it had gone black. The recording was intact. This made a tingling splash in his chest which spread in a wave out through his arms. He watched as the two technicians suddenly paused, looked up in the direction of the camera, then quickly shuffled out of the room towards fifteen. The tingling got worse. He counted. Thirty-three seconds later the four of them entered the room again, two of them pointing at the camera. Then they were talking, arms gesturing angrily. One was making calming gestures to the others. It was the short one. That surprised Mark. Maybe the nasally man would be the right person to talk to after all?
They had stopped suddenly, looking at what must be Mark in the doorway. He continued watching another minute after he left the room, but the techs were still working. He switched to fifteen, rewound, and watched the scene play out in there. The two techs from fourteen rushing in, talking for a few seconds with the other two, then they all rushed out together. He sped up the recording until the two returned. They didn’t seem to talk at all, going back to their work.
Sitting back, closing his eyes, forcing himself to relax, he replayed the reactions of the lab techs in his mind. It was weird. It didn’t make any sense to him. There was something strange going on here, and every fiber of his body was uncomfortable with it. He would have to chat with Jeremy about it. Certainly, the man knew more than he had let on so far. Mark didn’t think this kind of behavior would have been missed by him.
Sighing he rubbed his face. This was ridiculous. Was he going mad? Had he imagined the black screen? The recording didn’t show it, but there was the reactions of the techs at just the same moment, and then their odd behavior when he mentioned it to them.
He stood up, picked up the patrol wand, and left the office to make his first official round. Doing his job would have to be enough for now, and he had not been hired to be a detective. There was a number of points throughout the building that had button-like activators that he touched with the wand, which then lit up a small LED to show it had made contact. This would be how they would track that he was making the rounds regularly throughout his shift. Proof that he wasn’t napping in the office. As if that would be possible now.
As his shoes echoed through the lobby, the elevator caught his eye. When Jeremy had first told him that the upper floors were off limits for them, it had seemed odd, but he’d brushed it off. The execs and computer nerds didn’t want people poking around up there, and all the really expensive equipment was on this floor. He got it. Now it seemed even more strange to him.
Holding up the patrol wand to the small button above the break-room door, he watched the light on the wand flicker on and off. He put his hand on the handle of the door, glanced back at the elevators, pulled the door-SCREEEEE!
He heard himself cry out involuntarily as he jumped back. Breathing hard and fast, his heart racing, he found himself holding the gun out at the door. Mark made an angry sound and kicked the door. “Piece of shit!” Taking a deep breath he holstered the pistol and reached out and yanked the door open.
This was getting out of hand. He had to stop scaring himself. It was buggy software, awkward nerds, execs who liked their privacy, and a door in need of some fucking oil. Nothing more. For the rest of his shift, he forced himself to think about movies, books, games, his family, anything at all except the stupid black monitor.
“How did it go?” she asked after she had finished hugging and kissing him.
“It was… different than I expected.”
“Oh yeah?”
Mark nodded. “I’m exhausted.”
“Well, kids are at school, I reminded them to be silent when they got home, and I’m headed to the office, so you get some sleep.”
“Thanks, babe, have a good one.” He kissed her again and she headed out the door.
He climbed the stairs, peeled off his uniform, got in bed, closed his eyes. It was just buggy software. He hadn’t even mentioned it to Jeremy.