Tag: audition

It’s the little things.

Norm had been expecting another long walk, but this passageway was much shorter. And soon, wider. Also, it had… well. They were cages, set in the wall, and there was no getting around it. Twenty on a side, big enough for a man, and thankfully empty of anything, either living or dead. But they smelled. They smelled so rank, Norm wondered why the stink hadn’t reached as far as the antechamber behind them.

There were also lights in here; modern ones, that could glow indefinitely. They pushed back the gloom far enough that the two could see that they were now in a large, rectangular room, with another, formidable door on the other side. The room itself was all concrete walls and floors, with large drains in the floor and more of that rank smell. 

It all looked horribly… familiar. “I didn’t think the seccys went in for mental readjustment centers,” Ashelyn said with obviously false bravado. “All the reports said they just stripped their weakest reeds naked, and sent them out to die in the cold.”

“They were guerrillas,” Norm pointed out, distantly wondering if this room had anything that was flammable. Burning down a Peep internal security facility had been one of his life goals ever since two weeks into his original conscription. “They wouldn’t have had the time or the space to break down and re-educate their problem recruits. I guess here they had both. Check the cabinets?”

So, all the books that might have told them what a bad idea this was were… sequestered. Old Man Lewis’s, ah, irregular Presidency had a history of similar bad policies.

FSB heavy gear smelled ridiculously good. And it wasn’t because the stuff was new, either. The kit he had signed out from the supply shack had clearly seen some use. There just wasn’t any of the faint reek of socks, sweat, and seared blood Peep body armor always seemed to have, no matter how hard you scrubbed.

It had been easy to get, too. He and Ashelyn had just signed in, selected standard riot collection kits, and been automatically issued them. The only restriction there was ‘no gun you’re not qualified on,’ which was why Norm had a punch-gun and Ashelyn was carrying just a carbine. It really wasn’t like the old days at all. In fact… the Old Man would be having a fit right now, he mused, and even now it was an effort not to wash the no-longer-forbidden thought away before it showed up on his face.

Nobody stopped them in the passageway, either. In fact, nobody was in the passageway, which was a stroke of careful luck. The video feeds had shown that the grotto cleanup was happening during regular hours, so the best time to sneak around in an underground passage built by violent fanatics would clearly be in the dead of night.

Ashelyn had laughed when Norm pointed that out.

Trying to keep it from too unreasonable.

Instead of talking right away, Ashlyn started fiddling with a salt shaker, long enough for Norm to wonder whether he’d have to needle her a little again. He liked her well enough, but… well, she was a former Coexister, and he used to be a Peep. That was always going to be a thing, no matter how much they were both supposed to pretend now how all of that old competitive crap was also in a mass grave.

She got to the point eventually, though. “They’re not checking out that door,” Ashelyn told him. “You remember? The one with all the locks on it? From the tunnel?”

“Sure, I do.” Norm frowned. “That doesn’t sound like procedure. They sent in a reaction squad, right?”

“Oh, yeah, they went in twenty minutes after we got back aboveground. Full squad, heavy weapons, hardwired comms. The F-SOBs don’t mess around with their gear.”

“It’d be nice if more of that trickled down to us,” Norm muttered. “I’m qualified on all that stuff. — Anyway, what happened then?”

Doors!

Norm blinked. He had noticed that the ceiling was getting higher — it hadn’t been designed for midgets, but he was a little tall for just casually walking through the tunnel — but he hadn’t realized that they were now in an actual circular chamber. One with two more doors, evenly spaced around the circumference. It was also furnished, after a fashion. There were three tables, all along the side, and a central chandelier which looked odd…

“Are those candles?” asked Ashelyn.

Madole reached up, but stopped from touching them at the last moment. “Yes. Looks like real beeswax, too.” She snorted laughter. “Well, we already knew they were running contraband.”

“I hear they’re gonna take that off the regulated items list, Elena.” He threw up his hands at her sharp look. “Don’t look at me, I didn’t tell them to do it. The Old Man’s dead, remember? Nobody has to care anymore about the stuff he had a hate-on for.”

“Dammit,” Madole muttered. “Sometimes that was handy. Cadets!” Norm and Ashelyn straightened at her sudden sharpness. “You just heard something above your pay grade. Ignore it. Now, tell us what door we should go through first?”

Passageways!

There was a choice of weird things.

The passageway was carved out of bedrock, which was surprising. What was even more surprising was how it primitive it looked. There were lights at regular intervals, and those were modern; but the wood support beams and reinforcements were old. And not just regular old; Norm wasn’t an expert on wood, but some of these posts looked like they’d been there forever. They’d have to be, he thought. We’ve been using eternaplas since No Contact. So… decades, I guess?

Beltran hadn’t sounded worried when Norm pointed this out. “Nothing’s creaking, so it’s not going to collapse on us,” he noted. “If you’re worried about it, don’t lean on the wood.”

“Sure,” admitted Norm. “But this is weird, right?”

“Yeah, it is,” Ashelyn agreed as she stopped a moment to look at one beam. “Especially since… is that tar?” she asked. “Since when did people put tar on wood?”

“A long time ago,” Beltran told them. “It’s good for keeping wood from rotting in wet conditions.” He sniffed the air. “Mind you, it’s dry as a bone down here. Maybe it wasn’t when they built the tunnel.”

Note: any errors about clearing rooms or investigating facilities are my own, and will not be subject to later review.

It felt complicated to have a scattergun slung over his shoulder again. Norm had qualified on authority-class weapons when in the Peeps, and he wasn’t a bad shot with them. But he’d hadn’t yet had to shoot a person, and getting transferred to the FSB had been a quiet relief. You could kill somebody with a sticky round, but only if everybody involved was having a bad day.

Yet here he was, sliding down a ladder and into the silent gloom, a lethal weapon on his back. At least there was an IR flare down there already, so it wasn’t silent blackness. That would have well and truly sucked.

Norm’s training kicked in at the bottom as he skipped sideways away from the ladder, readying his scattergun as his IR lenses came fully online. At first glance he was in a square room, bare of everything except two mattresses against one wall. No lights, no outlets, nothing except a door to his left. He didn’t touch a single thing as he yelled “Clear!” to the three waiting above.

Ashelyn came down less gracefully than Norm had, and her own step-and-ready wasn’t as practiced. Clearly the Coexisters hadn’t gone in for as much training in room-clearing. No, they did all their dirty work behind a desk, Norm told himself snidely, before catching himself. The Department of Coexistence had been tossed in the same mass grave as the People’s Liberty Corps. There was no sense in holding a grudge against the dead.

Okay. I know how this story goes, now.

Most of the homes in Churchill were either two-story townhouses, or single-story double-wide trailers. This one was a bit more solid, if you ignored the plywood covering one window. “This was one of the ones where they used flash-bangs,” Beltran explained as they entered the house. “Sticky rounds, too. Hola, Elena.”

“Talk anglo, Carlos,” the other Agent smilingly chided back at him as they shook hands. She was yet another hispanic, maybe in her late thirties, and Norm thought she’d be pretty in a spare way if she didn’t look so tired.  “It makes them feel better. This is your charge?”

“He is. Norm Baker. Ex-Peep. Yours is… Ashelyn Mullin-Clark. Used to be a Coexister, right?”

“Yeah. She’s watching the door,” Agent Madole told Beltran while shaking hands with Norm (which surprised him, actually). “You know. Just in case.”

“You haven’t cleared it? Good. Must have been tempting, though,” Beltran observed as they entered the house. Norman’s nose twitched at the combination of ozone, pepper, and vomit he subconsciously associated with sticky rounds, and he hastened to put on a mask. The other two ignored the reek.