Shadows (Ultrahumans Book 2) (7 page)

‘It looks dead,’ Twilight commented as she reached for the door.

‘We’d better take a look anyway.’

‘Uh-huh.’ She pushed open the door and stepped out, slipping her sword into place on her back before closing up the car. ‘I’m just not hopeful,’ she added.

Together they walked up to the main doors, finding them locked, which was what they expected, but…

‘Some of these tyre marks on the concrete look new,’ Jacob said, frowning at the black marks running under the large doors. ‘We could do with getting inside…’

‘I can handle that,’ Twilight replied, ‘as long as you’re willing to say we had just cause for entry.’

‘I think we’re covered,’ he replied as she started around the side of the building. ‘How are you going to get in…?’ He rounded the corner after her, and she was not there. He frowned. The girl seemed able to get into his house without any trouble, even when he was sure all the doors and windows were locked.

There was a click from somewhere just up ahead and Twilight’s head appeared through a doorway. ‘Come on. Can’t really see anything in here, but there are rooms at the back and some on the second floor.’

Pulling his Glock, Jacob shook his head and hurried to join her, adding his flashlight when he got inside since the interior was in pitch-darkness. Twilight’s thin penlight beam lanced through the darkness as well, giving two thin patches of illumination in the black. Neither light showed anything moving, or out of place, but there was more to the warehouse than the main loading room, as Twilight had indicated.

‘You want to check upstairs?’ he suggested. ‘I can take the back rooms.’

‘Are you sure it’s a good idea to split up?’

His gaze, and torch, scanned the room again. ‘You were probably right; it looks dead. Those tyre prints are probably from when they took the stock away.’

His beam turned back toward her in time to see her shrug. ‘Okay. Meet you back here in… five minutes.’

‘Okay,’ he said, flicking his light toward the rear of the building. ‘I’m not sure whether that lift is going to work. I think there were stairs–’ He stopped when he realised she was gone, vanished into the shadows. She was good at that.

Turning again, he started for the rear of the room. From what he remembered, there were several, very large walk-in freezer rooms along the back wall, along with a couple of offices and the elevator which had looked as though it could carry freight to the upper level, but was actually mainly there to give access to the base beneath. That had been locked down; it was pretty unlikely that anyone could have gained access to it. No, if there was anyone in the place, they were going to be upstairs or in the offices back here.

His light hit the doors of the lift, wide open and unmoving. There seemed to be no power so that confirmed what he had suspected and probably indicated that Twilight was going to find nothing on the upper floor. No one was going to move heavy drug crates up stairs when they could put them in storage on the ground floor.

He turned left, the beam scanning over a frosted glass window and office door, and then alighting on a heavy, insulated freezer door near it. Jacob frowned and walked over to the freezer. It was faint, but he was sure he had seen it. There was a light glowing beside the door, and someone had gone to the trouble of covering it with duct tape. The metal door was cool to the touch as well. Someone was running at least one of the freezers and this place was supposed to be shut down.

There was a click and a sharp crack, and the sensation of something hitting his jacket. Jacob blinked at the thin wires extending from his chest to a gap in the office door and had a fraction of a second to realise what was about to happen to him before every nerve in his body started misfiring and he collapsed to the floor.

~~~

‘Are you still with me?’ Cygnus asked as she pushed a block of concrete aside which was at least as big as she was.

‘I think so,’ Heather replied, looking up through the gap. The problem was that the block Cygnus had moved was far from the only one above them. Most of the upper part of the stairwell had collapsed in on them. Someone had known what they were doing when they rigged the explosives. ‘We are not getting out that way,’ she added.

‘We’re lucky the stairwell wedged some of the larger blocks. Otherwise I doubt I could’ve held that up.’ The tall blonde peered around and then pointed to her right. ‘There’s a door there. Maybe a way out.’

Heather turned her, miraculously intact, flashlight on the door and immediately noticed the biohazard symbol on it. ‘This place is supposed to be disused. I, uh, I doubt that has any meaning now.’

‘Better hope so,’ Cygnus replied as she started to pull fallen debris away from the door. ‘As far as I can see, it’s through here or wait to be rescued, which could take days.’

‘What’s a little plague between friends?’ Heather replied.

~~~

Twilight stepped out of the shadows near the door she had let Jacob in through and saw no sign of his light in the darkness. She had been fairly quick checking the upper floor; there had been nothing up there to get excited about. On the other hand, she had expected him to be waiting for her since there was little to check down here.

Her penlight beam flicked out into the darkness, but there was no sign of him walking back toward the door. Frowning, she set off toward the back where he would have been going. That was when she saw the light. It was dim, shielded, and coming through one of the freezer hatches. She edged closer, her night vision picking out more than one shape in the faint glow. Two men standing, another on a chair, tied there from his position.

‘They were supposed to be looking out on Kent Island,’ one voice said. ‘You
said
you’d given them reason to go look–’

‘And they did,’ a second voice stated. ‘The charges blew a few minutes ago. Looks like he decided to check out some other leads. Wonder where his partner is? Doesn’t matter. We leave him in here and he turns into a Popsicle. Come back tomorrow and tidy things up and his buddies’ll find him eventually. Tragic accident.’

Twilight’s eyes narrowed and she slipped her sword free of its scabbard. There was no way she was going to let someone freeze her new boyfriend.

There was a sound, something someone else might have missed, but she heard and turned toward it. And then there was a rush of air in her face and a slightly bitter taste in her mouth. Coughing, she backed away from the man who had come up behind her.

‘What’ve we got here?’ the man said, a cocky grin on his face. ‘Looks like the two freaks split up.’ His grin left him as she smacked her left fist into it, and he backed away quickly as his two friends emerged from the freezer, one of them holding a gun. ‘No!’ he said quickly as the pistol was raised. ‘I got her with some X. We can dump her in the freezer with her boyfriend.’

Twilight looked at him, ready to point out the error of his ways, and then the pain hit her. Over her right eye it seemed to blossom the way some headaches began, but this was almost instantly painful enough to make her stagger and close her eye. He had got her with ‘X’? What was…? The thought hit her and she panicked. He had given her a dose of Excelsior and that stuff killed Ultras, or worse.

‘It’s working,’ the second speaker commented. ‘Give her a few seconds for it to sink in and then toss her in there. I doubt she’ll survive to freeze, but it’ll look better if they’re found together.’

Twilight staggered away from them, trying to get to the door, trying to gather enough concentration through the pain to make a jump. She had no idea where she was planning to jump to, but… She clutched her sword, holding it to her like a lifeline and it seemed, somehow, to bring her comfort. Yōgo-sha the sword was called, ‘Defender,’ though that seemed an odd name for an offensive weapon. The pain flared brighter and she almost curled up around her weapon, screaming in agony.

There was the sensation of being carried. They were carrying her to the freezer where she would die alongside Jacob. Except that he might just survive if Heather brought Cygnus back here… There had been a trap set for them too. There was no surviving… Her brain was on fire and there was nothing she could… The floor of the room was icy-cold and now there was nothing but darkness, and the darkness had always been her friend, and now the darkness was there to take the pain away. The thudding of her heart in her ears finally dimmed to nothing, and Andrea Morgan died in the cold and the dark.

25
^th
March.

There was the sound of grinding metal followed by a loud clang, and Cygnus slammed open another door, granting her and Heather access to yet another room in the complex of laboratories some nameless corporation had built under Kent Island.

‘This is going to take time,’ Cygnus said, ‘but I think we’re going to make it out of here, even if we have to crawl up an air duct. We should have died under the rubble in the stairwell.’

‘I’m not sure I’d classify this as lucky, but I’ve always had better than average odds of… Well, luck has a habit of smiling on me. I don’t often get surprised, by anything much. My friends gave up trying to organise surprise parties for me and I just… kind of react when there’s a fight starting. And sometimes the building falls
just right
so I don’t end up a pizza.’

‘Probably a minor mutation,’ Cygnus replied. ‘Hugh, uh, Doctor Ultimate, told me that there are far more people around who exhibit powers than we’re led to believe. Invisible teenage boys in locker rooms…’

‘Invisible teenage girls with persecution complexes, seven-stone weaklings who suddenly deck the bully; random cases of super-strength aren’t even uncommon, but they’re put down to “hysterical strength.” If I have something, it’s
really
minor, but… I don’t like to mention it. The Division is kind of… They get concerned when their agents exhibit powers. I don’t think they’d kick me out for being a little luckier than most, but…’

‘I’m not saying anything. What about Twilight and Jacob? I mean, surely that kind of thing is frowned upon?’ There was a metal bench in front of the next door and Cygnus hefted it aside as if it were made of paper before reaching for the locking wheel behind it.

‘Kind of weird, actually. The policy is that
secret
relationships with Ultras are a sacking offence. He’ll need to inform our boss soon or he’ll have problems. One of the early directors recognised that Ultras have a habit of being attractive, charismatic, hard to resist, and UID staff tend to be around them more than most so banning interaction was going to be a sure-fire way to end up with blackmailed agents.’

‘That’s… remarkably enlightened,’ Cygnus grunted. The wheel gave and she pulled the door open. Across the room was another one; sighing, she started across to that one. ‘I don’t suppose you want to open this one?’

‘You’re doing fine,’ Heather replied. ‘Keep up the good work.’

‘How long’ve we been down here?’

‘Uh… thirty minutes. Maybe forty.’

‘We need to get out of here. I have a bad feeling about Twilight and Jacob.’

‘Yeah,’ Heather said, ‘I know how you feel.’

~~~

The cold finally cut through the endorphins and Jacob managed to get his eyes open. He was freezing; his teeth would have been chattering if it were not for the gag which had been stuffed in his mouth and he was tied to a wooden, upright chair, probably by cable ties. He was in a shirt and jacket, clothing for early spring, not arctic conditions, and whatever they had given him had sapped a lot of his strength already. He felt like he was going to pass out any minute, and turning to check his surroundings just made things worse.

To his right he saw the twisted, curled up form of Twilight lying on the icy floor. Her face was contorted, her mouth wide open, and there was no sign of breathing; she had died in agony from the looks of it. The bastards who had tasered him and fed him Excelsior had done the same to her and she obviously had enough Ultrahuman in her for her body to react badly.

Jacob pulled at his bonds and got nothing but pain to show for it. He was screwed, unless Heather realised something was up. He might not survive that long, and it looked a lot like he would never need to tell his boss about Twilight…

~~~

There was darkness, nothing but darkness, but Andrea knew she was not alone. Something was out there in the inky blackness surrounding her, something…

‘Can you feel it?’ An arm gripped hers, lifting her. The voice… The voice had been hers, but she had not spoken. ‘There’s something here with us.’

‘Who…?’

‘Am I? Come on, you know.’

There was light. Something like light anyway; a glow which seemed to come from nowhere and went nowhere, but it managed to illuminate the roughly hewn surface they were standing on. Obsidian rocks, a surface that glittered slightly. And the other woman.

‘T-Twilight?’ Andrea whispered.

‘You know it, babe,’ the other Andrea said, grinning.

‘Then who’s…?’

They both looked out across the expanse of blackness at the third figure standing silently in the distance. There were no features, just darkness, but it spread its arms and there was a cracking sound. The ground between them creaked and shuddered, and then it split, a seam appearing in a single, sudden burst.

‘No!’ Twilight said. The crack split wider.

~~~

A surface access hatch fifty yards from the buildings, almost to the perimeter fence, exploded upward with more force than was probably required and a grimy, annoyed Cygnus rose out of the shaft beneath it to land on the grass where she could fume silently and wait for Heather to join her.

‘See if you can raise Jacob,’ she said as soon as the brunette was clear of the hole in the ground. ‘We probably need a team of Maryland cops out here to go over this site too.’

Heather already had her phone in hand; apparently the same thought had occurred to her. She was frowning at the face of the thing, and Cygnus was worried by that frown.

‘He’s not picking up,’ Heather said. Then she let out a gasp as Cygnus swept her up and took off.