The Bloodless Page 16

  “God sounds a lot like love,” I said. By then we had passed beyond Abiyah’s city limits. We came to a fork in the road; one way led to the first substation, a place we definitely didn’t want to revisit. We took the alternate route that kept us moving towards our destination. I could see Burns and Pillar off in the distance, north of our current position as we traveled east.

  “God IS love, the embodiment of love and all things good,” Crowder explained. “My youth pastor always told me that all things are possible through God because He gives us the strength we need to be who we are.”

  “I don’t know man,” I said still in disagreement. To be fair though, there was as much of a chance proving to me the existence of the Christian god as there was getting Alexander Jefferson to believe money isn’t everything. “It just all seems so farfetched, especially given all the advancements in science the human race has made. I mean, we know for a fact that there are other forms of life beyond our solar system, did your god create those beings as well?”

  “Look, Daniel,” Crowder said as he stopped and turned to me, “I don’t have all the answers and I’ll never claim to. All I know is that what I’ve believed in up to this point in my life has made me who I am today, and I believe it has made me a better person.”

  “That’s bullshit man,” I retorted. I could feel a twinge of annoyance creeping up in me. “That argument has been debunked for years! The belief in god doesn’t make you a good person, being a good person makes you a good person. Human beings are inherently imbued with a sense of what’s right and wrong, it doesn’t come from some ancient tablets of stone that may or may not have ever existed. In fact, studies that were done decades ago showed that people who belonged to a monotheistic religion were more likely to commit horrific human rights atrocities in the name of their god. Let’s keep moving,” I added after realizing how long we had stopped to talk.

  “It’s like I said,” Crowder said as we resumed walking along our path, “it’s what’s worked for me and I’m not ashamed of it.”

  “Oh hey,” I said, “I’m not saying don’t believe in what you believe in. If it works for you, more power to you. I’m just saying that it has never made sense to me and there’s a reason religion has been phased out of society.”

  “I guess it’s a good thing that non-believers are more tolerant of us than we were of them.”

  I nodded in agreement and we continued towards our destination and I pointed out a few more points of interest but the remainder of the journey was mostly spent in silence. Even though we were fairly certain we wouldn’t hit any Bloodless on our way to the substation, it was still a good idea to keep as low a profile as possible. We took a different route than usual this time which took us through the outskirts of town I had either never been through or didn’t recall.

  For a place that had already been dismantled, it was a pretty run down area of Abiyah. There wasn’t a whole lot going on in this part of town. A couple high capacity, low income apartments towered over the street. Large chunks of their facades were strewn about the asphalt creating obstacles we were forced to negotiate. When I say low income here, I mean low income compared to the executive team but still WELL above the national average.

  It was largely an urban landscape, not much nature to look at during our march but the whole town was basically an architectural experiment and featured some of the strangest buildings anyone had seen at that point. Unconventional would be a word you could use to start describing them, but it wouldn’t do the deed properly.

  The apartment buildings in particular had very peculiar design choices. Oddly placed overhanging balconies, high-rise pools that were suspended in mid-air, and decorations placed in random locations. They were very abstract.

  “There it is,” I said as we approached the station. This was a towering complex, definitely the biggest of the substations with lots of square footage, more for us to get lost or killed in.

  “Damn, that’s a big building,” Crowder said in awe as we got closer. “Do you actually know your way around inside?”

  “I hope so.” Crowder stared at me uncertainly. “Look,” I said, thinking quickly to assuage his fears, “these buildings have similar set ups. Granted, this one has a few more rooms than the other, but the control room, the only room we’re interested in, is in the center. So as long as we head directly for the center of the building, we’ll be fine. This is why science invented the compass.” He looked less apprehensive but not fully reassured. Unfortunately there wasn’t much else I could do for him at this point. He was going to have to suck it up and get through it.

  We moved closer to the building and once we were within about a half mile, I got on my communicator to relay our position. “Okay team, where are we at? Falcon Alpha is in position, come back.”

  “Burns and Pillar reporting. We’re in position, over.” Pillar and Burns were always a formidable pairing.

  “Fox here. In position, over.”

  “Saturn here, moving into position,” which meant she was at her elevated vantage point.

  “Buggs.” Yeah, that was it from him.

  “How do we look Fox?”

  “Scared shitless.”

  I had to laugh at that one. Fox doesn’t make a habit of cracking jokes. “I mean the surroundings, are things as they should be?”

  “It does appear to be that way. Yes. We are all clear to commence.” That’s all I needed.

  “Ok, we’re moving. Out.” I motioned Crowder to follow me as we slowly made our way towards the building. We pulled up two hundred meters shy of the service entrance.

  “The service entrance is the closest to main inner corridors, the ones that give us the easiest path to the control room. We have to wait here until Fox is able to interrupt the surveillance,” I said to Crowder to make sure he knew where we were with the plan.

  “I know man, I was listening! But MY question is: if we interrupt their surveillance, won’t that trigger some kind of alarm somewhere?”

  I had to laugh, because clearly he WASN’T listening. “No, Crowder, if you WERE listening you would’ve heard the part about how all of these substations are self-contained. Everything is automated. When we interrupt their surveillance, everything goes down, there are no back-ups. It’ll be down for a couple minutes. Long enough for us to breach the service entrance.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. Pay attention, man. I need you on your game today. WE need you on your game.” He still didn’t look like he had his game face on, he looked almost as if he was on auto-pilot. “What is that?” I said as we approached the entrance.

  The building was even more massive close up. Even though it was a relatively old building, it had been erected 10 years prior to The Invasion, it looked very modern, but somewhat plain in its execution. It was boxy with a couple square towers at the corners, almost like an ancient castle, or a LEGO block. It stuck out like a sore thumb against the barren and desolate backdrop of Abiyah as it was very clean and anal-retentively kempt. A large panoramic floor-to-ceiling window wrapped around the front and side of the substation. But oddly enough, there weren’t many more windows to speak of. A few at the top but very little anywhere else. If you didn’t know what its purpose was, you would never guess it was an industrial building.

  “It looks like a motorcycle?” Crowder said/asked. As we made our way closer to it, sure enough, it was a motorcycle resting up against the side of the building next to the service entrance. This was a rare sight that was made even rarer by the fact it was sporting a combustion engine. Definitely not a lot of those types of vehicles around. “Whoa. I wonder if it works.”

  “No time to find out,” I said as I ran a hand over the leather seat. It wasn’t a large one, definitely not a street cruiser. It was smaller, a little larger than a dirt bike. The seat read “Honda” and further up along the side, stylized monograming read, “Dominator.” The bike was covered with dust but it looked to have been well maintained. “It looks like it might, t
hough,” I said as we slipped in through the doors.

  Once we crossed the threshold we knew we were in for a challenge. This substation was massive and very hospital-like. Sterilized from top to bottom. “Something else is going on here,” I murmured to Crowder as the door slid shut behind us.

  “What do you mean?” This definitely put Crowder on edge. He gripped his rifle a little tighter.

  “This wasn’t just a power substation. This used to be an auxiliary laboratory. “

  “What did they do here?”

  “This is where the most experimental projects took place. It’s a place that was barely known by the public and indeed most of the GoD staff. I’m not really sure what took place here towards the end because I spent all of my time at the main lab.”

  We walked through a couple sets of double doors into a very industrial looking hallway. I signaled Crowder to make a turn into a smaller hallway. “I thought you helped build all these substations,” he said as he held a door open for me.

  “First off, I’m glad you’re paying some attention,” I said as I stopped to read a directory sign. “Second, I said I helped design them. I wasn’t a part of the final construction. This way, we’re on the right path but this place is expansive.”

  We continued on for what seemed like ages, making turns and we even had to pick a couple locks on the doors. We did make a few wrong turns as the place was set up tantamount to a labyrinth. It was about as creepy as one too. The halls were clean but they didn’t give off that feeling. There was this underlying feeling of foreboding. I could sense, even though this place was seemingly empty, something or someone still roamed the halls.

  At one point I thought we had somehow stumbled into the hallway leading to the control room but that was not the case. Instead we found ourselves staring at the entrances of a few labs. My scientific curiosity got the better of me and I decided that we ought to check it out, “We may find something useful to help us gain an upper hand at some point,” was my justification to Crowder.

  He didn’t look very confident in my decision but he did follow me into the first lab. The door had a plate on it that read, “Observations.” The room was exactly that, bare and sterile with a one-way mirror spanning the length of the wall that separated it from the room next door. Perfect for observing while not being observed. There was a very ominous feel to the room, almost as if we shouldn’t be in there but more like some sketchy activity went down inside this room.

  I was sure something close to unethical went on in the room on the other side of the mirror, but a fair share of ethics were ignored in this room as well. I looked around and noticed a small console against the wall. “That looks like something worth checking out,” I said aloud, not necessarily at Crowder, but he was the only other one there.

  “What?” He was preoccupied with the room on the other side. It wasn’t a friendly looking room. The bare concrete walls were pockmarked, as if they were struck numerous times, and something dark stained the walls and the floors.

  “This console over here, I’m sure there’s more information on it.”

  “Do we have time to check it?” Crowder asked absent-minded.

  “Not really, but we can’t leave without finding out more about this place. I have a feeling something questionable went on in these rooms.” Crowder nodded his head and continued looking into the room next door. I walked over to the console and to my surprise it started right up, as if someone had left it in a hibernation. I started keying through the interface and was shocked when I wasn’t met with any encrypted pages or secured files.

  “Holy shit,” I said as I opened study after study.

  “What is it?” Crowder asked turning away from the mirror.

  “These aren’t exactly new files, they’ve been accessed recently, but these were created when this lab was run by GoD employees. By the looks of these studies it appears as though…“ I stopped mid-sentence as I came across the most unbelievable information I had seen in my life.

  “What? What is it?”

  “It’s The Cloud.”

  “What about it?”

  “It was developed here.”

  “By who?”

  “By us.”

  Now, I was a fairly high level employee at GoD Laboratories and I wasn’t exactly the most ethical person there. I took part in my fair share of experiments that were strictly “behind closed doors.” That’s sort of the modus operandi for an experimental genetics laboratory. Even in a time when science was the standard, people still had a blurry sense of morality that forced us to keep certain projects out of the spotlight.

  Still, it was a jolt to my system to find out there were other experiments taking place that involved my work without my knowledge. As I browsed through all the information about The Cloud that I could find it turns out it was being developed as a potential weapon for the military.

  “A weapon for the military?” Crowder asked, astounded, after I divulged the information to him.

  “That’s what it looks like. Not a very good weapon for killing people.”

  “Are you serious? It kills people just fine!”

  “But they don’t stay dead, do they?” I reminded him as I continued reading through the reports. Unless, I thought to myself. “Wait a minute,” I said aloud, “what if they wanted it to be that way?”

  “What?”

  “Well, think about it. If you were able to keep it in a finite space, then you’d be able to set it off and just sit back while your enemy’s population dropped dead, came back to life and started destroying itself.”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing now?” Crowder was quick on the uptake if nothing else.

  “Basically. The weapon was in its final stages of development days before The Invasion.” I closed the reports and started snooping around the console for more information.

  “Hey! What are you guys doing in there?!” Saturn’s voice came booming in on the radio. Scared the shit out of us, almost literally. “You’re WAY behind schedule!”

  I looked down at my watch and my heart skipped a beat. Sure enough, we were behind schedule by nearly thirty minutes! “Shit, sorry,” I said as I downloaded the contents of the hard drive onto my wrist band and shut down the console.

  “What are you doing in there Daniel?” It was Fox, his voice carried a tone of quasi-concern.

  “We stumbled upon some information. You guys aren’t going to believe this, well, Buggs might, but the rest are gonna be floored.”

  “That’s great,” Saturn said, “now get your asses in gear before they send the entire swarm down on us!”

  “Got it, we’re heading for the control room, now. Out.” I lowered my communicator and hitched up my gun.

  “Do you even know where the control room is?” Crowder asked me as we exited the observation room.

  “Yeah, we took the wrong turn to get here, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well the control room is in the direction we should’ve turned.” And with that we made our way straight to the control room. Once in, it was exactly as I expected it, no surprises in there. I instructed Crowder to keep watch at the doors, a moot point, but it was just for safety sake because you never knew what could be crawling around in those buildings. “Okay, we’re in,” I radioed to the group as I sat down at the main console.

  “It is about time,” Fox was lurking in the shadows and again I nearly shat myself.

  “Fuck man, don’t do that,” I said after regaining my composure. “Trust me on this one Fox, the time was not wasted. You’re not going to believe what we discovered.” As I started navigating through the system I relayed the information I had gathered from the studies and reports I found.

  He didn’t respond right away, but he did nod a couple times during my relay. “And you didn’t know anything about this?” he asked skeptically.

  “No!” I said defiantly, turning around in my chair. “They stole our reanimation theory and weaponized it, I had nothing to d
o with it. I promise you that.” He didn’t respond so I assumed he was at least half-way convinced. I turned back to the console and resumed my work.

  As I was nearing the end of the process I couldn’t help but think how seamless this mission was and then Saturn came on over the radio again. She didn’t sound as agitated this time, quite the opposite, in fact. “Uh, guys. You might wanna get the fuck outta there.” I heard her gun cock in the background, “We’ve got some serious heat on our asses.”

  “Could you be a little more specific, please?” I said as the process completed and the power to the whole station cut off.

  “Remember that swarm I mentioned earlier? It’s on its way.”

  Just as she said that there were several audible *THUMPS* on the floors above us. “What the hell was that?” I asked Crowder and Fox. They both shook their heads. Those noises were followed by the unmistakable and gut wrenching sound of shuffling feet and heavy bodies moving across those floors.

  “Sounds like something’s moving around up there,” Crowder said, looking up at the ceiling.

  “What the hell could be up there?”

  “Didn’t you say they were doing experiments up in this place?” Crowder asked. At this we all looked at each other and understood exactly what was up there but we didn’t want to stick around to shake its hand. I grabbed my gun and joined Fox and Crowder at the door. “It just got really quiet.”

  “That is not good,” Fox said, unsheathing his swords. Crowder then snuck a peak around the corner and quickly brought his head back in. His face was whiter than a unicorn’s ass.

  “What is it?” I said. He didn’t respond with words, he just nodded his head, gesturing for me to have a look around the corner. I wasn’t sold on the idea but went ahead and did it anyway. I slowly moved the top portion of my head around the edge just enough to see down the corridor and for the third time that day, I nearly blew out my pants. I didn’t think my sphincter would be able to handle many more surprises.