Ntshona (25 page)

She ran to the entrance to examine the door’s security panel, which she noticed to be more elaborate than the one adjacent to the man trap’s other door; not just a simple keycard scanner, but a control panel in the form of a flat screen, which glowed red and presented the words “
Security Lockdown
”.

In a hurry Eve pressed hard on the screen with her fingertip.

“
Present level 3 security clearance to continue to lockdown management
”.

She responded by hitting the panel with the keycard Lin gave her.

“
Level 5 clearance confirmed. Tap screen to continue to lockdown management
”.

“Level 5?” Although this presented certain questions, she had not the time to dwell. She forced the message into the back of her consciousness to be addressed at a later time, and continued trying to deactivate the lockdown system. She pressed the screen again.

A floor plan of the server room appeared on screen. Most of the space was illuminated in red, likely depicting the areas in lockdown.

Not being entirely certain of what to do next, she tapped a red area on the display. A mechanical sound in the room somewhere induced an obvious flinch from Eve and she whipped her head around to see one of the colocation suites in her field of vision was now open.

All the while the shots continued from the room beyond the man-trap.

In a fit of panic and cluelessness as to which area of the screen represented Lon’s cage, Eve frantically swiped her fingertips all over the display. Mechanical
sounds came from all around her as the display’s red lights turned to blue. “I hope this is working,” tears streamed down her face.

“Eve!”

She stepped back and turned towards Lon’s colocation suite. “Lon, are you okay?!” she yelled.

He had already left the now open room and ran to meet her by the control panel. “I don’t know what happened, but we didn’t get the data!”

“Tell me later, we’re in trouble!” Eve cried.

Lon now heard the shots from the main room. “What’s going on in there?!”

“Just get your gun ready”.

The threatening sounds of muffled ballistics increased in volume after Eve opened the first door with her Level 5 keycard.

“Who are they shooting at?!”

“Lin”.

“Why is Lin here?”

“I don’t know”.

They both pressed their bodies against the man-trap’s left wall, close to the door.

The gunshots sounded in bursts.

“Are you ready?”

Lon’s gun clicked into its correct form. “Ready”.

Eve leant forwards to swipe her keycard to remove the remaining door, and quickly pressed herself back against the cold wall.

The sounds again got louder.

Although Lon was at the behind, he was the first to enter the main room. Somewhat recklessly, he ran to the door’s edge opposite to where Eve anxiously stood in order to get the full view of what was happening, gun raised in awful anticipation.

Blood was disgorged across the floor by the main entrance to the room, and several bodies lay limp.

Lin, after a quick burst of gunfire aimed down the outside corridor, whipped herself back into the room to face Lon. “Did you get the data?”

“No, there was a problem”.

“That was to be expected,” she said almost passively, and fired another volley down the corridor.

The fresh, bloody corpses on the ground were a little hard to take in for Lon, and even more so for Eve.

“Fucking hell, did you have to kill them?!” she yelled, the colour draining from her face.

“If I didn’t, we’d be dead by now”.

Lon could not help but notice the once unconscious scientist on the ground lay in a different position and was pouring blood from the chest.

“What about him?!” the severity of the situation just dawned on him.

“He woke up,” Lin coolly replied.

“You could’ve taken him hostage!”

“Don’t be stupid, that won’t work here”.

“I can’t believe this!”

“Believe it, because it’s gonna get a lot worse”.

Chapter 13

The shots from the corridor ceased, and the sound of a canister hitting the floor and rolling echoed into the room.

Lon and Eve both went cold.

“Was that a grenade?” Lon panicked a whisper.

“No, that would be too stupid in a place like this,” posited Lin, “It’s probably a -”

Her words were cut short by a fierce explosion and a rush of hot air and smoke into their garrison.

All three were blown to the ground, cupping their deafened ears.

Blood from the charred security guard remnants on the floor covered a larger area of the room than earlier, and stained the lab coats of Lon, Eve and Lin.

Dazed and, trying hard not to be, confused, Eve forced her head from the ground and tried to exclaim a strong expletive, however found it initially too unmanageable to muster the breath.

Lin was the first to her feet, with her gun, seemingly unaffected by the violent release of energy outside the door, and again shot the same direction down the corridor, this time through a dense cloud of fumes, purposely remnant from the grenade.

Lon, who was the most directly in front of the room’s entrance, apparently suffered the most. He quickly stood, but stumbled immediately backwards, covered in blood more so than the other two, including over a substantial area of his face.

Seeing he was not dead, and swiftly taking advantage of the concealing smoke, Lin distinctly mouthed an order to them both, “Move that way,” she pointed to the right where it was apparent there were no live guards, “and fucking shoot that way,” she gestured with her gun to the left, from where the grenade had come. Surely the gunmen, too, were making haste in the obstructing fog.

Eve rose, as did Lon, and, after steadying himself, took the lead into the corridor, closely followed by Eve and covered by Lin. What was going on he could not make complete sense of in his stupefied state, yet he discerned that the guards to have come from the direction in which they were escaping must already be dead, which, after firing a protective barrage then turning to run, was confirmed as his eyes flickered over two, maybe three bodies towards the corridor’s end.

Even though they were able to hear nothing but intense, trauma-induced otoacoustic emissions, the three escapees were certain the bullets were still flying in their direction.

Knowing she was their best bet for an escape route, Eve took the initiative and directed them not back to the lift from which she and Lon had arrived on that floor, but to a different one farther away; to their luck, and Eve’s knowledge, this area of the Science Centre had far fewer corridors in which to cast orientation, wholly due to the spacious indoor nature replication area spanning floors one hundred and ninety-five to two hundred and five.

The lift was vacant before the three got in. “Floor one hundred and ninety-seven, now, go!” Eve yelled, struggling to hear herself.

Once at her decided floor, she launched herself out into the passageway, gun brandished in preparation to fight for her life. Curiously, the corridor’s only inhabitants, workers in lab coats, appeared unaware of the circumstances. Security
must have underestimated their luck and expected the incident to be terminated in isolation. She ran on, Lon and Lin remaining vigilant on her tail, to another lift that took them to the one hundred and ninety-fifth floor.

As soon as the door opened, without deviation from course, she ran towards the closest gathering of vegetation tall enough to mask themselves from abeyant onlookers, a lengthy, thinly wooded area, splashing through a shallow stream and hurdling over rugged rocks, Lin and Lon heel
ing as close as possible. She dived onto a thick bed of grass, wholly shielded from outside view, her companions as well.

Quickly they peeked through the spaces between plants to make note of who might have seen their thirty or so metre dash across the indoor park.

By bad luck there were several; the area was rarely empty of people.

Lin rose to her feet, commanded with gestures that other two do as well, and ran through the foliage swiftly, attempting to remain unseen. As soon as she stopped, they dropped onto the floor of thick grass one more time.

“I told you these coats made it difficult to run,” Lon tried to whisper a joke, but it went unregistered by the group’s still impaired hearing. Falling on deaf ears, as such.

“Good going,” Lin silently articulated to Eve along with a thumbs up.

Eve propped herself up against the trunk of a tree, and let beads of sweat run from her brow to her jaw. She responded to Lin with an unsettled facial expression.

They turned their attention to the lift from where they had entered, hoping it would remain inactive. From here, Lon and Lin saw for the first time an inkling of the scale of this nature replication area, from their point of hiding, it’s one vis
ible outer edge skirted with a stack of ten lengthy, glass-walled corridors, through which certain activity could be seen, including that of security staff on several of the higher floors. For now, it seemed, they were safe.

Eve, in an instant of anamnesis, whipped her head round to look more closely at Lon’s bloody face, “Are you alright?!”

He considered why she only asked him, “Um… yeah, I can hear a little better now”.

“I mean your face, is it your blood?!”

“What?” alarmed, he gently pressed the skin on the side of his face to test for pain. After sensing no physical disorders he said, “Fucking hell, I must’ve got a faceful when that grenade went off!” and he fervently wiped away as much as he could with his coat sleeve. “Is that why you two are bloody as well?”

Lin examined her crimson-spattered garment, “I’m not injured,” and, hesitantly, regarded Eve’s whole before asking “are you?”

“No, just my ears”.

“None of the blood is yours?”

“No, I think we were all fortunate enough not to get hit”.

“Right
… we need tidy ourselves up,” she quickly removed her lab coat and reversed it before redressing,” these coats are quite thick and the material is absorbent, I doubt the blood can leak through,” she tied her hair back.

Lon and Eve copied, and to their fortune the coats were still untarnished on the inside.

“What’s your plan?” Lon asked Lin.

She reverted her visual attention to the block of corridors at the park’s perimeter, “We need to find a place with far more people so we can blend in better
…” something caught her attention.

Nearly all the visible securi
ty personnel in the half-glass passageways slowed down or stopped in their tracks and turned to look through the panes into the naturesque region, before sprinting to their closest lifts.

“Shit, they know we’re in here”.

Eve gasped.

“How?” asked a panic stricken Lon.

“Virtual breadcrumbs”.

They recommenced running.

Shots fired somewhere relatively remote.

Once again the three sought botanic refuge.

“Did they see us?” asked Lon.

“It sounded far though,” noted Eve.

They took a moment to review, to visually analyse the changing situation.

Not far from the lift from where they had entered the indoor parkland were a small group of guards regarding on the ground raw, white-clothed corpses.

“Oh my God, they really do want to keep their secrets secret!” Lon alarmedly whispered.

Eve wildly shivered.

“I didn’t expect them to be so severe!” said Lin, “Talk about collateral damage! I told you hostages wouldn’t work!”

Lon’s insides turned to stone. “Remember earlier when I said we were going to die today?”

Lin, the most composed of the group, assessed potential escape routes, which were now mostly blocked by security personnel laying waste to anyone in a white coat. “Eve, what’s on the other side of this wood?”

“I think more corridors,” she hyperventilated.

“We should try to get there without having to fight our way out. Come, let’s go”.

Speedily and stealthily they tried once more to make distance.

More shots sounded, then a series of explosions which dislodged vegetation and kicked up dirt and stones among the trees, two or three quite close to the group’s position.

Another time they hit the deck.

“Can’t they give us a break?!” squeaked Eve.

“It looks like they’re expecting us to go that way,” said Lon.

Lin let out a frustrated groan. “Then let’s do the opposite, let’s go back from where we came”.

“What?” Eve yelped.

“They’re not expecting us to be so crazy, so let’s just be so crazy”.

“Bloody hell, how did we get into this situation?” asked Lon.

Seeing as the security gunmen were doing a sweep of the woodland area, chances were a grenade would not be thrown where another had already exploded, so Lin, Eve and Lon took that as an advantage and sought the closest patch of repositioned foliage.

By a dense cluster of trees they lay in wait. Soil particles could still be smelt in the air around the small crater left by a recent grenade.

With a temperate pace the security personnel canvassed the wooded region for signs of dispatched intruders. The particular individual who had launched the grenade that affected the group’s area was getting close.

Eve held her breath so as not to give evidence of her existence. She stood with her back against a tree, in view of Lin and Lon, who were farther from the oncoming gunman.

Holding his weapon high, he stepped carefully into the tree cluster and passed Eve’s location without awareness.

She caught Lin’s eye and signalled he was close to the tree behind which she was veiled.

Closer… closer… closer…

Within a second of registering a nod from Eve, Lin rapidly removed herself from hiding, and, while he was in a state of utter surprise, with the edge of her gun she crushed the man’s throat, easily silencing his attempted retaliation.

“How do you kill so easily?” whispered Lon.

“Fate would have it that way,” Lin replied.

Lon was sceptical of her unusual answer.

She removed the remaining two grenades from the man’s belt, passed one to Lon, and grabbed the gun he had dropped, “Let’s get going,” she pointed to a lift on the side of the park from which they entered, though it was quite far from their position.

Silently they ran, yet the volume of explosions was still notable behind them as the security personnel continued on their campaign of death. Soon they came to the perimeter of the wooded area.

“Stop,” commanded Lin, holding out her hand. “There are people watching”.

Up in the corridors, observing the nature area, were numerous other Science Centre workers, looking rather distressed. Had personal recording equipment been admitted into the building, surely they would have all been filming the rampage of the security personnel.

“They might report us,” said Lin.

“How do we get to the lift without them seeing?” asked Eve.

“Dammit, I was hoping to keep hold of this for much longer,” she lobbed her grenade as far to her left, yet in the direction of the stack of glass corridors, as she could.

“Wai-” Lon attempted to protest.

The explosion forced part of the bottom to shatter and collapse in the lowest corridor, impelling many of the bystanders to flee, and deflecting the attention of those who remained.

The intermittent explosions and gunshots from the wooded area ceased.

“Leg it,” instructed Lin, and the group made haste for their destination across the way.

Eve desperately hammered the button to call the lift.

“You could’ve warned us you were about to do that!” said Lon. “We could’ve formed a better plan”.

“There was no time,” Lin firmly responded.

“No time? We’re wasting time now by waiting for this lift! They’ll be out of the woods soon!”

“We’re quite far up,” said Eve, “the lift is coming from the ground floor; it could take more than a minute”.

“Dammit, you’re right,” admitted Lin, “are there any exits that aren’t lifts?”

“There’s a stairwell”.

“Where?”

Eve gulped, “where you threw the grenade”.

“Are you kidding me?! Is that the only exit that isn’t a lift?”

“As far as I know, yes”.

Voices could be heard from the wooded area. Security were getting close.

“If we go for the stairs, it would be a waste of a diversion; they’ll surely see us before we get there,” said Lon.

“All we can do is wait,” Eve panted.

They readied their guns in anticipation and spread themselves apart. There was nowhere to hide other than from where they had just run.

The first security guard emerged from the trees and began to run towards the spread of displaced glass.

“Don’t shoot until they see us,” Lin ordered.