Objekt 221 Page 14

  “We go left,” he said to his team.

  The corridor was still bathed in green from the emergency lighting system. As well as the echo of “Afternoon Delight” masking their footsteps. There was a small star highlighting the office location on their wire-frame map.

  Britta Vragi’s office was a fortress with one feature—an enormous desk, centrally located. Two of Scott’s soldiers breached the door and were immediately pummeled with withering submachine gun fire. The rest of the men backed up to the cover of the hallway. Alex pulled a small cylinder from a Velcro pocket on his thigh. He held it up to his remaining team, activated it, and rolled it into the office.

  Britta had anticipated the appearance of the flash-bang grenade and had hidden under her desk, shielding her eyes.

  The desk was specially designed from a siege mentality perspective. A combination of heavy steel and reinforced concrete was hiding under the polished adornments and gaudy details. It took Britta weeks to decide what office was going to be hers because she was sure she’d never be able to move it.

  Under the desk, she was protected on three sides, and she faced the only opening—which faced the back wall of her office. In the moments while her ears were ringing from the flash grenade, she ejected the two empty clips and reloaded her twin SMGs.

  Alex glanced quickly into the office, illuminated by the dull thud of green emergency lighting. He was able to grab the boot of one of his downed Wraiths. He pulled the corpse out of the office.

  “She’s barricaded under the desk,” Alex said to his team. “It looks to be fortified.” He paused, thinking. “Three guesses,” he said to his men.

  “We wait her out,” the first soldier said. “Draw her fire. Expend her ammo.”

  Alex shook his head.

  “She could have a crate of mags under there.”

  “Smoke her out,” a second man said. “Lob in two or three smoke grenades. Gas the whole room.”

  Alex nodded.

  “Not bad,” he replied. “I can’t imagine she has a tactical mask under her desk. But I kind of want to end this quickly. Her office is what we’re after.”

  A third Wraith had been pulling the second lifeless body out of Britta’s office.

  “Bouncing Betty,” he said without turning around.

  “Bingo,” Alex said, motioning to his grenadier to hand him the item.

  Based on the German shrapnel mine of the same name, the Bouncing Betty grenade was ringed with tiny springs. It was designed to hit the ground and launch itself three feet into the air before detonation.

  “Half pocket, off the rail,” Alex said as he tossed the grenade into the office. He overshot the huge desk in an arc. The grenade hit the back wall and the spring liner ejected the explosive back into the room—right toward the one weakness in Britta’s desk, the back opening.

  “Aw, fuck me…” Britta said, closing her eyes.

  Boom.

  “Clear out what you can,” Alex said, standing. “Continue to sweep. I’m going to rendezvous with Ahab and locate our remaining HVTs.”

  “Copy that,” the soldiers responded before piling into the smoking office.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Escape in the Dead of Morning

  THEY HEARD gunshots. There was an echo of the shots themselves, the ricochet off metal, and, occasionally, a groan. Damon and Cadey both looked up from their silent reverie at the same time. “Afternoon Delight” had looped three or four times and the two were content with sitting in their moderately comfortable conference room chairs. As the previous night had worn on, they both became increasingly emotional about their predicament. First, after seeing Miles Lofton gunned down right in front of them, they were depressed at what seemed like a similar fate. As the hours drug on, though, they became mad. Resentful. Angered that the company had not only made this horrifying decision, but was now content with making them wait.

  And not wait in their own assigned residences, but a secret conference room that obviously pulled double-duty as a hidden meeting room and a space to stash potentially unruly prisoners.

  Eventually, their fatigue overwhelmed them.

  They were rudely awoken with most of the rest of the facility with the initial CO2 alarm. It was only compounded with the hazard lighting and, now, the hypnotic, if unpleasant, melodies of the Starland Vocal Band.

  They looked up and then stood up in unison.

  “Gunshots,” Damon said.

  “Seriously?” Cadey asked. She had escaped North Korea in her youth, but had never been shot at outside a videogame. Damon, however, had spent many years in the Marines, retiring as a force recon commando. “Are you sure?”

  He cocked an eyebrow, looking at the HVAC system as if that would somehow focus his hearing, where the echoes were coming from.

  “Pretty sure.”

  He started to pace around the room.

  “I think this facility is under attack,” he finally said, turning back to Cadey, who still stood listening to the sounds. She turned to him.

  “From who?”

  Damon shrugged.

  “I’m not sure I want to find out,” he said. “It feels like our fates are sealed, and I doubt these people care much about us. We might be going from the frying pan into the fire with a hostile takeover.”

  Cadey paused, pursing her eyebrows.

  “What could be worse than being shot by that asshole Beale?”

  Damon was looking around the room. He walked to the section of wall that framed the door.

  “Torture, maybe,” he said. “Watching our friends and family being tortured. Forced servitude. Information extraction. Scientific experiments.”

  “Okay, okay, fine,” she said, and paused. “What are you doing?”

  He was knocking on the wall around the door.

  “What do you think?” he said. “Concrete? Or drywall? It sounds like drywall.”

  There was a three-foot section of wall between the door and where the glass partition took over.

  “I think it’s drywall and they’re too busy upstairs to pay any attention to us.” He paused for a moment. “Reinforced drywall? Sheetrock?”

  He turned and grabbed one of the chairs. Damon grunted as he whipped the chair through the air and smashed it into the section of wall near the door. It was a dull sound, but encouraging. He smiled at Cadey, who smiled back.

  Again, again, again.

  He smashed the chair into the wall half a dozen times, until the armrest was bent and two of the rollers had broken off. The wall, though, was severely damaged.

  “Yes,” Cadey said, smiling.

  They started pulling chunks out, punching and kicking the wall. Soon, they had broken off enough to not only see the studs that supported this section of wall and door frame, but the back side of the security panel.

  “Bingo,” Damon said.

  “Do you think shorting it out will get us out of here?”

  Damon looked over at her and smiled.

  “I suppose,” he said. “I was planning on kicking my way through the other side.”

  * *

  They stood in the hallway—free in the micro, but not the macro. They had made a mess and didn’t bother to clean it up. The green glow of the emergency lighting lit their way down the corridor. The LED bulbs were spaced every 10 yards or so and offered enough illumination to keep them going. The magnetic locks on the stairwell doors had automatically disengaged when the main power was shut down.

  “This way,” Cadey said, turning right and running down the corridor.

  * *

  Madness.

  The sign above the door said Stair 3C, but neither of them actually knew what that meant. They soon found out that the conference room floor was only one level beneath the main area of O221. They exited the stairs slowly, pushing open the door with no sudden movements. The gunfire in this area of the facility had stopped.

  “Shit,” Cadey said, under her breath, but loud enough for Damon to hear it.

&nb
sp; Open just six inches, they could see that the main corridor—the big vertical in the capital K that was their floorplan—was abandoned, save for three dead security agents that they could immediately see. Two were dressed in standard-issue khaki pants and dark blue polo shirts, emblazoned with the Allied Genetics logo over the left chest. The third, however, was dressed more like a soldier. He wore the black combat gear that Beale and his men had worn just hours ago when apprehending Damon and the other researchers.

  The two snuck out into the corridor and pulled whatever gear they could off the dead men.

  “Gross,” Cadey said, taking a pistol and a cell phone off the least-disgusting of the two security men. Damon showed no remorse or fear in rifling through the dead soldier’s gear. He had a neat bullet hole through the center of his forehead, and his eyes stared at the ceiling.

  Damon wrestled with the corpse for a tense moment as he pulled the combat vest off and then wrenched the Glock 19 pistol from the man’s right hand. Damon put on the vest and checked the chamber of the weapon. He had three spare magazines along the sides of his new gear.

  He stood and peered down one end of the hall, turned, and looked down the other side.

  “Is there anything in your room…?” he started.

  Cadey shook her head.

  “Nothing that can’t be replaced,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Damon nodded. They turned toward the main entrance of the facility and jogged away from the 3C door.

  * *

  Just outside the building, they saw two more dead men. It looked like they were the first line of defense. Their corpses were draped over two concrete barriers that were at once decorative and destructive. Damon remembered them from first coming to the Anvil Canyon facility. They reminded him of a relic of the Cold War—huge, thick, sturdy, and built to stop a tank. The Allied Genetics logo had been artfully carved into them with a year that probably represented the company’s incorporation. Even with all of this decoration, the tank traps remained imposing.

  Cadey and Damon skirted the two and jogged outside into the cool morning air.

  “Hey, hold up,” came a voice from behind them.

  They stopped, guns up.

  “Hey, whoa, that’s not necessary,” the man said.

  Damon squinted. Cadey quietly snarled, clearly lumping him in amongst the group of people who wanted her dead.

  “Marcus Osborne,” she said under her breath to Damon.

  “Head of Personnel,” Damon finished for her.

  Marcus had come out the same door they had just exited. He stood in the middle of no-man’s land—20 meters from the door, and 20 meters from the two researchers.

  “I’m unarmed,” Marcus said, raising his hands. He turned his hands forward and backward to further solidify that he wasn’t a threat. Damon saw the black smudge that he recognized as a tattoo on the man’s right hand. While he couldn’t see it in any great detail from that distance, Damon remembered it to be a black scorpion.

  “The darker the color, the more dangerous the venom,” Damon said to himself. He started to lower his Glock, and Cadey did the same with hers.

  “What happened in there, Marcus?” Cadey called in a neutral tone, purely on a fact-finding mission.

  Marcus began lowering his hands also. He started walking toward the two researchers, but something was wrong. It was a halted gait. He looked, to Damon, as if he was doing math in his head while attempting to walk normally.

  “I don’t know,” he called across the shortening expanse. “I was going to ask you guys.”

  Marcus had slowly cut the distance in half and now stopped.

  “My God,” he said. “What time is it?”

  He made a big show of putting his hands on his hips and stretching his back. Marcus scratched his side with his right hand and continued the scratch around his back. Damon thumbed off the safety catch on his pistol. With a jerk, Marcus brought his right hand back out around his side, holding a black pistol.

  Damon had been waiting for this and shot Marcus in the face. In fact, there were two shots.

  “Shit,” Cadey said.

  They looked around for where the second shot had come from.

  “The darker the what?” she said, still looking.

  “Homespun wisdom,” Damon said, turning to his right, gun still raised. “The color of a scorpion. The darker the color, the more venomous he is. I spent some time in the desert.”

  “That’s right,” came a new voice from behind Marcus.

  While similar, his gear was different, more streamlined, than the O221 soldiers. He walked toward them in an easy gait. He held his hands up, his own pistol—smoking barrel—was hung by the trigger finger of his right hand.

  “Damon Butcher, Cadey Park,” he said. “I’m Alex Scott. I represent Sergott Solutions. We were hired by Precision Robotics to rescue you.”

  “I wonder if they’re still hiring,” Cadey said, smiling.

  For his part, Damon simply smiled and exhaled.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Nuclear Option

  “BEST I can figure, that area was historically known to have strange properties.” Weeks later, Damon Butcher sat in the same Precision Robotics lunchroom where he had first been approached by Marcus Osborne. He was eating lunch with a recently hired Cadey Park. And they had worked to fill in the missing pieces of their Allied Genetics adventure. “There are accounts of people going missing dating back several hundred years. They probably hit a soft spot and got shot back into the Cretaceous Era. Only to get eaten by a dinosaur.”

  Cadey nodded. She was finishing up her lunch by working through a small bag of baby-cut carrots.

  “I know some of the data-miners here,” she said, chewing on one side of her mouth to speak freely. “Your buddy Jeff, for one. Allied was planning some pretty far-out stuff. Gene modification. Splices. Hybrids. Armor. Even the plants they were assigning us to bring back. They could be made into fairly toxic combinations.”

  Damon nodded in turn.

  He leaned in a bit closer to her and dropped his voice a bit.

  “That’s the problem, right?”

  Cadey cocked an eyebrow.

  “The next step. Escalation,” Damon said. “Presumably, Precision wanted to disrupt or shut down Allied’s operations—and they did—but, what do they do now?” He wadded up his napkin and tossed it into the brown paper bag that served as their trash can on the table. “Did they destroy all the facilities? Will they destroy all the research?”

  “Or will they find a nice insertion point and continue where Allied left off?” Cadey offered. “I don’t know of any competitors,” she continued. “Not directly, at least. Precision could start with the research that’s been done and make huge strides in many areas.”

  They were silent for a moment, swiftly clearing the small table of their respective lunches. Finally, Damon shrugged.

  “I guess we’ll just have to be ready to intervene,” he said.

  “Damn right,” Cadey said, smiling.

  The End

  Read on for a free sample of Primeval Valley

  Afterword

  The End of the End

  I FIND all elements of the creative process fascinating – from the initial planning stage to revising the final version. Every story has a story, completely unique from anything else a writer has worked on. This story is no different.

  It’s a 12-hour road trip from Toledo, Ohio, to Minneapolis, Minnesota. While making this trek in June of 2017, I let my mind wander and ended up plotting Pandemic (a story about a terrorist hacker group who figures out a way to program computer viruses that would also target humans) and Objekt 221. The plot for O221 felt the most complete so I decided to write it first.

  Here you go.

  I’m a huge fan of the television program “Mysteries of the Abandoned” where they find bizarre structures that seem to have no purpose and explore either in person or through data mining the structure’s origins. A
nd, of course, unravel the mystery of why it was abandoned. It seems like 9 times out of 10, the facility was originally built as a military installation. Even though it’s a fairly common “twist,” I’m endlessly entertained. So, it was fun to explore some of these locations on my own. Only one of the military locations in this story is a complete fabrication …

  Additionally, the idea of a super-ancient civilization has always been intriguing. Even though it only amounts to a footnote in this story, the existence of The Road and Building 5 were great fun to conceptualize and write about.

  What fun it was to blend all of these ideas together into the same story!

  I hope you had a good time flipping through this one, kind reader. It felt like a quick-moving story even with the intentionally slowed-down bits (discussion about the uncanny valley, for example, or the mysterious basement computer at Michigan State University).

  Objekt 221 (simply referred to as Dino during the writing process) was somewhat delayed because I paused in its writing to put together the second Event short story collection. But the story never strayed far from my fingertips, and I was happy to finally let it reach its conclusion.

  Enjoy the story … I certainly have. If you want to talk about it, you can find me at many of the finer social media outlets or at the website www.steve-metcalf.com.

  Keep reading. Keep writing.

  Steve Metcalf

  May 23rd, 2019

  New Hope, Minnesota

  1

  Tall evergreens creaked and swayed as a breeze redolent of pinecones and moisture pushed through the forest and up the river valley. Clouds of flies and gnats clogged the air, and the gentle sound of water falling over stones eased Gill’s nerves. Birds chirped, and squirrels and chipmunks bolted in and out of the woods, looking to take a drink from the river but fleeing upon discovering human intruders.

  “Look, da, a rainbow,” Brian said. The three-year-old’s pudgy little finger pointed at the sky.