A Question of Will (2 page)

Mark worked in what his security team referred to as the Guard Station, a ground-level building which enforced the various security processes allowing residents and non-residents to enter inside the enormous walls. Without Mark, the massive gate would remain above ground, and prevent vehicles from entering the premises. Without Mark, those looking to enter the community on foot, through a smaller double-door system known as a man-trap, would be thwarted in their efforts, even if they were a known resident of the community. Mark’s team maintained a list of non-residents expected to request access during a given time period, and tracked the comings and goings of residents. Mark knew that, at this time, only two residents were outside the premises — Myra VanderPoole and Will Stark. There were no expected visits from non-residents on the schedule this day.

He thus watched the three men with great interest.

Each man wore black, the expensive-looking shirts sporting a golden emblem with a circle and an upside-down letter V. One man wore a top hat and wire-rimmed glasses, a second wore what appeared to be a dark cape with a hood — was that a cloak? The third man wore no accessories, but his handsome face was marred by a thick scar running horizontally across his right cheek, just under his eye.

The purposeful look, devoid of any humor, gave Mark a very bad feeling.

The men passed the Guard Station, and then turned left, heading up the driveway, passed the window with a sign reading “Guests Check In Here First,” and proceeded to the outer door of the man-trap.

Mark tapped a button on his control panel. “Deron, are you seeing our uninvited guests?”

After a brief pause, Deron replied. “Got them. Is that guy wearing a top hat?”

“Yeah, and his friend’s got a cloak. They went straight to the door without stopping here first to check in.”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about these guys.”

“Yeah. Same here.”

“I’ll call our friends in the Dome.”

“Thanks.”

That was their procedure for dealing with unapproved guests. Mark, at ground level, would attempt to speak with anyone seeking unauthorized entry. Deron, his partner on this shift, worked in the Guard Tower, and he’d notify the police, stationed inside the massive Dome covering the nearby corporate city of Pleasanton, Ohio, of the potential trespassers. Located on the opposite side of the driveway and concrete gate from the Guard Station, the Tower enabled a guard, located forty feet off the ground, to survey the surrounding territory and perform visual scans of the neighborhood. In the nearly impossible event that someone would breach the walls, the roles would be reversed. Deron would track the perpetrators, and Mark would notify the police.

They’d never had to execute that procedure. No one had ever bothered to try scaling these walls. Several people would try to break in by ramming the gate each year, which generally resulted in a totaled vehicle and, if the foolish driver was lucky, nothing more than whiplash for injuries.

These men clearly desired entry, and his gut told him it wasn’t a case of a resident forgetting to phone in the access authorization. The guidelines required him to proceed as if such a mistake had occurred until evidence proved otherwise. He left the speaker on, maintaining contact with Deron, and moved to the window the men had passed. Pressing a button, he activated a speaker on the exterior of the building. “Excuse me, gentlemen. Access to this community is available only to those authorized by current residents, and at present we have no standing authorizations for today. Please step away from the door, and contact the resident you wish to visit to initiate your access requests.”

The men ignored him. Not one of them even turned to acknowledge hearing his statement.

Mark sighed. The arrogant guests of one of the wealthy residents of this fortress, no doubt too deluded with self-importance to worry about such trivial matters. He knew the type. These men would expect him to eventually give in and allow them entry. Mark recalled an approved dinner guest of Myra VanderPoole several years prior. The man, who was severely obese, had entered the first door of the man-trap, and could not close the door behind him. That left the circuit open, and the system was, in such a circumstance, coded to assume a second person was attempting entry at the same time. The man had demanded that they open the doors, and threatened to sue if Mark did not come to manually open the inner door. Mark refused. Myra VanderPoole had come to the front gate herself and they had agreed to open the concrete gate so that the man could walk in. The man had complained loudly about the horrific treatment he’d received at Mark’s hands. Myra had apparently set her guest straight on that matter, for he’d apologized for his behavior with great fervor later upon his exit from the community.

Mark began to repeat his statement to the men, but paused. He’d heard something odd from the open communication link with Deron. It had almost sounded like a gasp, an inhalation of breath so sudden that it sounded like a noise of terror. He walked back to the control panel in order to listen more closely. “Deron? Everything all right up there?”

There was no reply. Mark was suddenly overwhelmed by a powerful sensation of pure evil, an effect so strong that he nearly lost his footing. “Deron—?”

A thunderous crash sounded from outside, resembling the noise of shattering glass. Mark whirled back toward the driveway, and saw what looked like small pieces of ice fall briefly from the sky. He’d just had time to register this oddity when a second, far louder crash sounded above and behind him. Mark whirled toward the center of the Station and looked up, just as a hole exploded in the ceiling and a large mass fell through. The mass landed in a heap on the floor.

Still feeling the overwhelming sensation of evil, Mark took one step toward the mass of debris, and then stopped, reeling in horror.

The mass that had crashed through the ceiling was Deron. The man looked to be dead. His throat had been slashed away with vicious power, the wound so gaping that the man had already bled out. Deron’s eyes were wide and lifeless, his mouth open as if to protest this cruelty. He lay on top of a pile of wood and shingles from the roof and ceiling that he’d crashed through, pieces of timber impaling him, his arms and legs bent at impossible angles.

Mark was numb with shock. He turned back to his control panel, prepared to phone the police and ambulance, when the sensation of evil and foreboding ratcheted up to such a degree that his limbs seemed incapable of moving. When he heard a third thumping noise behind him, it took every bit of effort remaining in him to merely turn around.

A man stood in the room, straddling Deron’s body. He was dressed in black, with a logo similar to that worn by the three men outside. He was of an average height and build. The man’s head was clean-shaven, with dozens of scars of various sizes marring his otherwise handsome face. His eyes, though, turned Mark’s legs to jelly, and the guard fell to the ground, suddenly unable to stand. They were completely blood-red, both cornea and iris, and he found himself morbidly fascinated by them. The eyes were devoid of any type of human emotion, full only of malice. He held in his right hand a short sword, the blade dripping blood. This man exuded the aura of a cold-blooded killer, borne out by his execution of Deron.

He needed to get away, he needed to tell somebody, anybody, to help him avoid death at this man’s hands. The killer walked toward Mark, a predator who had cornered its weakened prey, and the tip of the sword was suddenly at Mark’s throat, the blood — Deron’s blood — dripping into Mark’s lap.

“Cooperation means Gena Adams lives.” The voice was almost a whisper, the tone having the effect of fingernails scratching a chalkboard. Mark’s insides chilled at the sound. This man knew about Gena. They were due to be married in a month, but Mark knew this man meant to kill him too, just as he’d killed Deron, and therefore that wedding would never happen. He was a security guard in name only, his job that of processing access requests, but as per current law in the country he did not carry a gun. He doubted that it would matter against this man; his hands would fail to steady enough to pull the trigger.

Mark vowed to spend his remaining moments of life ensuring that Gena would live. Over the past few weeks, he’d been starting to think he wasn’t good enough for her, because she was simply that sweet and generous a soul. She would hear nothing of such concerns, laughing them off as simple cold feet for a young man of twenty-three. It was a moot concern now.

Mark forced himself to look directly into the eyes of Death and nod once.

The killer backed away, giving Mark room to climb back to his feet. Mark never took his eyes from the man. If he was going to die, he wouldn’t be a coward and look away.

The killer pointed at the three men standing at the outer door of the man-trap. “Let them in.”

Full realization hit Mark. The four men had worked together; three had distracted the guards while the fourth eliminated the first and then subdued the second. How had he missed seeing this man? Had he been hiding in the Tower all this time? Guilt tore at him, and then morphed into steely resolve. He was going to save as many people as possible this day.

He forced himself to look directly into those blood-red eyes and took a deep breath. “No.”

The tip of the sword lashed across his face, and he felt the warm blood trickle down both cheeks out of the two lacerations now marking his skin. He had enough time to register this before he found himself on his back, the edge of the sword against his throat. The man had speed Mark could not hope to match.

“Wrong answer,” the killer hissed. He rose to his feet, the sword never breaking contact with Mark. At his full height, he used the sword to gesture toward control panel, where the man-trap authorization buttons were located. The killer had done his homework. The buttons were fingerprint-activated and sensed blood pressure and pulse rate, and only the on-duty guards could activate them. Each guard had his pulse rate and blood pressure measured upon starting his shift. If the measurements at the time they tried to open the man-trap were significantly higher or lower than the baseline, the interior door wouldn’t open. Mark had asked why it wouldn’t open if the numbers were lower than the baseline, since that would likely represent someone calm and relaxed. “They could also be dead or dying,” the security expert had noted. With that memory, Mark was glad his fingers would be of no use to the killer unless they were still attached to Mark.

He climbed to his feet again, trying to calm himself from the violent attack. “The buttons won’t work if I’m highly stressed,” Mark told the killer. “Leave me alone so I can calm down.”

The killer walked to the opposite side of the room and turned his back to Mark. He was clearly unconcerned that Mark would try to flee. Both men knew Mark couldn’t outrun him.

Mark took several deep breaths and exhaled slowly. I am not confined in a room with a superman ninja with a bloody sword. Deron is not lying dead ten feet away. I am going to see Gena again soon.

He somehow calmed himself, and then pressed the man-trap button. The man with the scar on his right cheek entered the community after the inner door opened in front of him. Mark winced. He could relate to the scar.

The second man, the one wearing a top hat, entered the man-trap, the outer door locking behind him. Mark paused for a moment before he opened the inner door. “What are they going to do?” He glanced behind him at the killer, who had not moved from his spot.

“One of the residents has something he should not possess. We will remedy the situation.”

A simple robbery?
That’s
what this was about? Surely there were better ways to make money. Will Stark and his wife, for example, tended to be rather generous souls; they’d provided Mark and Gena gifts sufficient to cover the cost of their honeymoon. You could get money without resorting to robbery. Or murder.

Still, he needed to be sure. “So...you aren’t going to hurt anyone else?”

There was a pause. “No.”

Mark wondered if he’d asked the correct question. He elected not to press the matter against the skilled killer, convincing himself that he had the assurances he needed. He pushed the man-trap button again, allowing the second man inside. The third man, the man wearing the cloak, gave a bow with a bit of a flourish, and then entered the man-trap before being admitted into the neighborhood by Mark.

He glanced at the section of the control panel nearest the man-trap section. It contained a panic button, which would alert the police to a problem at De Gray Estates for which telephone communication was impossible. He could click on that button, and perhaps the police would arrive quickly enough to apprehend these men. That meant Gena would no longer be at any risk. He shifted slightly to the left.

The killer seized him and threw him to the floor, the malevolent blood-red eyes alternately searing a hole through him and freezing every cell of his being. The man’s sword pointed at him, unerring, the finger on his left hand waving as he tsked at Mark. He then waved at Mark with the sword, motioning him away from the man-trap and panic buttons, and to the opposite side of the Station, facing the community rather than the street.

He watched the three men he’d just allowed into the community. Three men who were going to rob one of the residents of something these men believed they shouldn’t possess. Men willing to kill to accomplish their goals. He glanced at Deron again, a graphic reminder of that fact. Deron would never again return home to his wife and young son. As he looked outside, he saw smoke. The half-dozen covered golf carts residents and guests could use to cover the distance from the front gate to their homes were all in flames. Anyone entering the community on foot would have a longer journey home than they’d expected.