HK…yeah that was what the mercs used in the game. When you killed them, you could take their gun and use it.
For an instant he almost forgot about the Russians, the cutting (still loud enough to be heard through the walls and closed door), the police cruiser, all of it. He was mesmerized by the killing machine in his hands.
There was a short burst of static from inside the bag, enough of a distraction to jolt him back to reality.
But when he reached into the bag, the radio wasn’t the first thing his fingers brushed against. There was something much smaller. He grabbed it, withdrew, and opened his hand to see a red-and-black thumb drive. Multiple thoughts streamed through his mind at once: What was on it? Why did they need it? Did it have something to do with TechniCom? A few ideas took shape, one in particular that seemed most plausible given what little he knew. He filed these away for now, stuffed the thumb drive in his front jeans pocket, and reached back in for the walkie-talkie.
It was in the corner, a shiny black handheld device roughly the size of an iPhone but a good bit thicker. There were several buttons, a dial on top, a display screen…Jimmy had never used one before, and the whole thing looked intimidating at first glance. Still, how hard could it be?
He was all set to try using it when he smelled the smoke.
Cigarette smoke, coming from the stairwell. Jimmy’s blood ran cold. He wasn’t alone. What if someone’s coming up? One of them? Jimmy set the radio down and lifted the gun. Shit, how do you cock this thing? He thought about Cold War…There was some metal piece on the side of the gun that his player character’s hand would pull on and then slap down…There! He found the short handle and pulled. Nothing happened. If one of them comes up now, you’re dead. He pulled harder and managed to move the handle back until it could go no farther.
He pushed the handle down, cringing at the sharp clicking noise. Praying the other person or persons hadn’t heard it, he swung the weapon to his left, where the landing ended at a wall and a set of stairs lead down.
Nothing.
Whoever was down there either took off or was staying put. What if it’s just a janitor? Yeah, how would the Russians have gotten into the stairwell? Because the security guard unlocked the exit door for them, dummy.
Jimmy maneuvered to his left side, to his knees, and slowly pulled himself up to peek over the short wall and down onto the first and then second turn of carpeted steps. Nobody on the stairs, but there was a foot poking out from the landing at the bottom, one floor below. Smoke puffed out and wafted up into Jimmy’s face and for a split second he thought he might cough and give himself away, but he held it in.
Jimmy couldn’t use the radio with that guy hanging out down there. He’d have to talk loud to be heard over the saw. What if that guy just stays down there, watching the door? Jimmy couldn’t go back the way he came. Who knew how far away that cop was by now.
You have to do something! Three bad guys in the office, possibly one downstairs, and another outside. Okay…so I point the gun at him, and tell him to…put his hands on his head and walk downstairs. If it’s just a janitor, we both get the hell out of here. If it’s one of them, we go out to the bottom of the stairs and I hold the gun on him while I radio for help. That could work, right?
What choice do you have? Maybe just sit here and hope no one comes? If that thumb drive is what you think it is, they’ll know it’s missing soon. And they’ll come looking. You’re running out of time.
Jimmy’s heart drummed against his chest. He left the bag behind, crouch-walking to the corner of the short wall, peeking around to look at the first, empty set of stairs. He positioned himself against the stair wall, his back against the handrail, and began descending one step at a time.
The weapon was suddenly slick in his hands as he reached the next turn. The smoker was at the bottom of these next stairs, just around this corner.
Okay, look tough, authoritative. Go!
Jimmy’s knees were quaking as he turned the corner. The smoker wore a blue Windbreaker over a black T-shirt. His hair was shaved close to his head and he had eyes like a bloodhound. He was in the midst of coming up the stairs, was about halfway when he looked up to see Jimmy, three steps away. Those bloodhound eyes widened.
“Hands on your head! Now!” Jimmy blurted. His voice broke. The smoker mumbled something in Russian, tossed his cigarette down, and reached behind his back…
Shoot!
Jimmy pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
Idiot! Safety!
He remembered seeing a lever on the left side, above the trigger. As Jimmy turned the rifle and flipped the lever down to “F,” Smoker pulled a silencer-equipped pistol from the small of his back.
Jimmy pointed the weapon, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger.
The rifle roared and bolted, kicking upward into Jimmy’s chin. The impact knocked him back and into the wall, putting a nice crack in it with his skull. His ears were ringing. He shook his head to try to stop the world from spinning. He had barely held on to the gun, but lifted it now and held it out, repositioning himself to see down the stairs…
Smoker was lying in an awkward position at the landing for floor five. His handgun was lying on the stairs by the dropped cigarette, where the guy had been before Jimmy had…
Shot him.
Holy shit, I shot somebody.
Jimmy descended the stairs quickly, concerns over whether the others heard the gunfire set aside for the moment, because all he could think about was the human being whose existence he might have just ended.
The man was breathing, which was good, but he was also breathing so fast Jimmy thought he might hyperventilate…if he didn’t bleed out first.
There was blood, a lot of it. Jimmy laid down his weapon on the stairs and got the larger man into a better position. It looked like there were three wounds: one high in the chest on the right side, one that punctured the muscle at the top of the shoulder, and one that clipped an almost perfect half circle shape out of his right ear. There were a couple more holes at the top of the entry door to floor five, and the wall just above.
Jimmy looked back down at the man and did the only thing he could think of: he removed his own T-shirt and pushed it against the hole in the man’s chest.
“You’re gonna be okay. Keep pressure on this.”
The man’s eyes were wide, and though he was looking at Jimmy, it didn’t seem like he was seeing him.
Dude’s in shock.
A Russian voice sounded over the radio. Jimmy could hear it both from his walkie-talkie and from the one on Smoker’s belt. He couldn’t understand what was being said but he could tell a question was being asked.
They heard it. They must have.
Jimmy took the man’s radio and attached it next to the first on his own belt.
Hurry.
He grabbed the pistol, switched it to his left hand, and swept up the HK in his right. “I’m going to call for help. I’ll make sure an ambulance gets here, okay?”
The man didn’t respond, but Jimmy had no time to wait. He stepped over Smoker’s waist and rushed down the next set of stairs, and the next…
He was breathing heavy, racing down the steps to floor three when he heard a door open somewhere below, followed by a voice. Russian.
Think, think…
Jimmy tried the access door to floor three. Locked. The voice was coming up the stairs. Heart pounding, he scrunched his shoulders and fired a burst point-blank at the door’s lock. With a kick, the door flew open and Jimmy was inside, sprinting down a short hallway. Voices continued coming through the radios on his belt, and he could have sworn one said “Jimmy,” but he was too freaked out to pay it much attention. He turned left into a much longer hallway with offices to either side, which came to a T. He turned right, fled down another short hall.
Dead end.
After a quick survey of his surroundings, Jimmy ran into a large office on one side. He slammed the pistol on the desk, ripped both radios fr
om his belt and tossed them into the reclining office chair, then snatched the pistol back up and ran across to the room on the other side of the hall.
A conference room. One large table dominated the center of the space, surrounded by several chairs. The far wall was a series of floor-to-ceiling windows. Jimmy put his back to one of these and slid down, keeping the barrels of both weapons pointed at the office across from him, trying his best to slow his breathing, sweat running from his head down onto his neck and bare chest.
The last thing he wanted to do was shoot anyone else. In fact, his mind kept drifting back to the wide, unseeing, bloodhound eyes of the man he’d shot. Jimmy found himself wondering if the man would survive.
Right now you need to worry about your own ass.
There were no sounds coming from the hall, or beyond. Jimmy looked up at the conference table, where a cord trailed down to a jack in the wall. There was a phone up there. He set down the pistol, got to his knees, shuffled over, and looked. The display on the phone was lit. He grabbed it from the tabletop and as quietly as possible sat back where he had an unobstructed view of the hallway, setting the phone on the floor beside him. While keeping the HK pointed in that direction he flipped the receiver off onto the carpet, happy to hear a dial tone, and with his pointer finger he hit 9, 1—
“Jimmy.”
He stopped. That voice had come from the radio in the office across the hall.
“Jimmy,” the voice repeated. “I hope you are listening…” It was husky and thickly accented. “Your girlfriend was worried about you…”
Ice spread through Jimmy’s veins. The voice continued:
“One of my men was nice enough to let her in.”
No no no no no…
Jimmy turned and looked out the window. His Festiva was there, along with the white van…and Kim’s yellow VW. A long, defeated sigh gushed from Jimmy’s lungs as he thumped his head against the glass.
Dammit, Kim.
“She is on her way here now. Why don’t you join us? We monitor police channels, so we’ll know if you call.”
A kaleidoscope of emotions swirled within Jimmy: anger, frustration, hopelessness, and most especially fear. But there was something else as well, something indistinct and just barely taking shape…
The beginnings of a crazy, desperate plan.
—
When Jimmy opened the rear door and walked back into the Full Metal office space, he was holding the thumb drive in a death grip with his left hand. The pistol was tucked into his pants behind his back, and the HK was slung over his right shoulder. There was no one on the floor. Jimmy stepped out of the short hall and turned left, passed two offices, and came to the doorway of the server room. As he stepped to the threshold the noise of the saw ceased.
The walls of the room were lined with tall server racks. Red Jacket was there, to the far right, aiming his pistol at Jimmy. Next to him was the driver of the van. The spiky-haired Russian was pulling the wet saw from the floor, where he had cut a two-foot square block. The metal legs Jimmy had seen poking out of one of the bags earlier belonged to a tripod, positioned above the block. From the tripod’s top, a chain hoist descended, hooked to a bracket anchored in the block’s center. Spiky Hair set the saw down, removed a pair of safety goggles, and stared at Jimmy with small, close-set eyes.
Standing directly in front of Jimmy was the leader. He was dressed sharply, in a dark gray suit with a blue button-up. His left hand was on Kim’s shoulder, and with his right he held a gun to her head, the same gun he had used to kill the security guard who was lying at his feet, head propped against the bottom row of server blades. The leader’s eyes were cold, soulless. He looked down at Jimmy’s scrawny bare chest and smirked.
Kim looked scared out of her mind, not that anyone could blame her. Her dark eyes were wide and glistening in the overhead lights, and the entirety of her five-foot three-inch frame was shaking, from her brown hair to her pink, laceless sneakers. She wore a T-shirt and sweats, clothes obviously thrown on hastily to come and retrieve Jimmy.
“Good choice,” Husky Voice said. He nodded at the driver, who started to approach, then stopped as Jimmy revealed the torch lighter he had been concealing in his right hand, the one he had taken from Smoker on the way back up. He ignited it and held it just below the thumb drive in his outstretched left hand.
“This is important to you, right? I’m guessing it has some kind of decryption, for whatever it is you’re going after down below.”
Husky Voice smiled, revealing a row of uneven teeth. “Exciting new technology. Lots of security measures down there. Easier to get through this way.” He nodded toward the tripod and block. “North Koreans will pay handsomely.”
I was right about the thumb drive. Thank God.
“It’s brave, what you’re doing,” Husky Voice continued. “But not very bright. By the time you heat up the drive enough to cause damage, I will put a bullet through your head…” He nodded toward Kim. “And hers.”
Kim made an almost-squealing noise low in her throat. Jimmy swallowed. “I know,” he said. “I just needed an excuse to have the lighter out.” Now! He tossed the thumb drive high into the air, where it hit the far wall and fell behind a rack of servers.
All eyes had followed it, except for Kim’s. She took advantage of the situation to knock the leader’s hand away and run for the door. Jimmy grabbed onto the top of the nearest server rack, pulled himself up, and held the lighter beneath the ceiling sprinkler. For the first agonizing seconds nothing happened. Then a recorded voice, female, issued: “Warning: fire detected. Suppression system will activate in ten seconds…”
Jimmy dropped behind the rack and grabbed the door handle. “Please exit the room immediately,” the voice continued. As Jimmy pedaled backward, pulling the door closed, he heard a sound like a small, keening insect and felt a sharp impact to the upper left side of his forehead. He slammed the door closed…
And was now standing on the other side, on the main floor. The world was spinning beneath him. He could hear Kim sobbing somewhere in the open space behind him. Sidestepping toward the wall, he pulled the HK from his shoulder. The door handle jostled but did not open. Right about now Husky Voice would be going for the key card…
Jimmy pointed the HK at the badge reader next to the door as three bullets tore through it from the other side and into the floor space. Kim yelped. He risked a quick glance over his shoulder and saw that she was unhurt, huddling somewhere out of sight behind the cubicles. Jimmy unloaded a burst into the badge reader. From the other side of the door he heard a whooshing sound. That would be the fire-suppression system engaging. Jimmy’s dad had explained gaseous fire-suppression systems to him once—the kind used in server rooms, where water would cause damage to the electrical equipment. The gas being released into the server room now would push most of the oxygen out of the space, and the mercs inside would soon pass out.
The world teetered. Jimmy’s head was swimming and darkness crept in. The voices on the other side of the door became frantic. There was coughing and shouting, but Jimmy thought the Russians would live. The fire department would get the alarm and be on their way shortly.
They’ll live. Kim will live. But things aren’t looking so good for me, he thought as the floor rushed up to meet him.
—
Jimmy awoke to bright lights, in a reclining chair. The circular room was a nest of holo-monitors and multi-touch interface stations. Where the hell…? He attempted to draw his left hand up to feel his injured head and found that he was unable to move it. Same with the right.
“The restraints are for your own safety,” a thin, bald man in a white coat said as he leaned over Jimmy and began fiddling with the straps. Standing a few feet away from the chair was a man in military uniform…A Faction uniform. From…the game?
No, not a game. Slowly, memories returned. At first it was difficult to sort what was real from what he had just experienced, like the confusion that lingers after waking up
in the middle of a dream. The thin man removed the arm restraints, then he reached up and took something off Jimmy’s head—a relatively simple-looking device with a few connection points. A single word on one side of it read TECHNICOM.
Jimmy lifted his right hand and felt his shaved head. No blood. No injury. The man in the military uniform was eyeing Jimmy, his expression unreadable.
The simulation. Before joining a Faction, all soldiers went through a simulation…to determine what camp they would fall into: Peacekeepers or Enforcers. It was all coming back to him now. Jimmy marveled at the direct neural interface technology, but he was most impressed with how it melded reality and his own subconscious. The Factions and subordinate Peacekeeper/Enforcer groups were reflected in the “game”: RECOIL! TechniCom itself was integrated into the scenario as a kind of plot device. Even his girlfriend, Kim, was used to raise the stakes. On the subconscious side, Jimmy’s fascination with the early years of the twenty-first century and his love of video games were baked into the simulation. Much of it even mirrored his favorite ’80s action movie. It was all pretty amazing. However…
“I failed,” he said.
“What’s that, son?”
The officer approached as the thin man walked away. “I failed,” Jimmy repeated. “I died.”
The older man inclined his head. “The simulation is designed to push you to your limits; to approximate a test subject with zero military training and gauge response to violence and the threat of death, the ability to overcome fear. You saved your girlfriend’s life. You demonstrated tactical aptitude, courage, and clear thinking under extreme duress. You proved capable of using deadly force and knowing when to do so, but, most important of all, you felt something when you pulled the trigger…something more than just the recoil.”
The officer held out his hand. “Congratulations, son. And welcome to the Peacekeepers.”