She walked through the door and down a corridor, her white lab coat floating on the cool, sanitized air. At the end of the corridor she came to another door, this one requiring her NAU Identification card, her voice, and a retinal scan.
“Welcome, Doctor Strauss,” a pleasant synthetic voice stated. She walked through and into the lab. There was a loud click and a beep as the door shut and locked behind her.
“Where’d all the security go?” Joe Theissen asked, looking up from a microscope and peeking over the top of his glasses. His fifty-six year old face was weather-beaten and serious, but his eyes glowed with a purpose that was known to be infectious—as they were now. Though relatively stern, his casual lop-sided grin continually blew his cover, revealing to be true the rumored light-heartedness he enjoyed away from the work. He was also employed by what was formerly known as the US Department of Agriculture, and he knew Melissa very well from past projects.
Dr. Strauss looked around, suddenly aware of the military’s bizarre absence. “I didn’t see them on my way in. They just left?”
Joe shrugged, returning his attention back to whatever foreign artifact was under the lens. “You’d think they’d at least tell us they were leaving.” He squinted, a free hand focusing the lens. “You see that guy Mark or Thomas?”
“No.”
“Janice?”
Again she shook her head, making her way to a closet. “I’m sure they’ll be back soon.”
“They should have been back ten minutes ago with my dinner.” He stood, watched her as she hung up her coat. “Speaking of dinner…” He was always trying to talk her into a date.
After walking over to him, and ignoring the suggestion, she placed a hand on his shoulder and leaned over the high-tech microscope, pretending to be interested in whatever it was he was observing. “We’re supposed to be studying something else, you know.”
“Blah, blah…” He waved his hand, dismissing her comment. “I don’t care about that stupid thing. I was on the brink of a legendary discovery before they packed me up and sent me here to meet you.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I bet.”
“Besides,” he continued, “I sent the diagnostics three hours ago. It’s done.”
A look of concern washed over her face. “Joe, what about the others?”
He gently nudged her away from his work, bending back down into the eyepiece. “Don’t worry, I didn’t cut any corners. I just didn’t feel the need to sit around for another week trying to persuade those atheist chimpanzees of its obvious spiritual implication.”
“Chimpanzees?”
“With an emphasis on the last two syllables.”
She left his side and walked over to a glass case, her mind grappling with what Joe had just told her. The other “chimpanzees” were actually brought in from the recently internationalized NASA program, and they would not be happy. When they found out that Joe cut all their individual research short by finalizing their findings and sending a report without their consent or knowledge, there would be fireworks.
She looked through the glass case, at the object she had escorted half way around the world. For some unknown reason, it seemed to be of major importance to the military. But she and Joe learned rather quickly not to ask questions, and the amount of money they were promised for both their work and their discretion made it easy to ignore the soldiers, the high-tech equipment, and this super-secret government lab beneath some building in Washington DC.
Joe looked up from his work again. “Oh, they said the power might go out tonight.”
Melissa looked around the lab again, the bright light glowing off all the equipment. “What do you mean?” she asked, confused.
Joe stretched again, spoke his words through a yawn. “He just said they were doing some kind of drill or something. Said the power might go out for a little bit. Said it’s no big deal. Light a candle or something.” He winked at her.
She rolled her eyes. “It’d take more than a candle, Joe.” But a subtle voice whispered in the back of her mind, telling her that something was off. From the time she had taken the object into her possession, she’d been escorted by a soldier. And from the time they’d arrived at this place, guards had covered their shadows with automatic weapons. Complete and total secrecy was demanded of them, every move they made watched, all their communications to the outside world strictly monitored. Every day, NAU military personnel rotated in and out of the project, supposedly protecting them—though from what they couldn’t imagine. And now, without any warning, they were just
gone
, at a time the power was expected to go out? “I haven’t been allowed near a phone since I’ve been back, haven’t been allowed out of their sight. And now they just disappear, leaving us completely unguarded in a power outage?”
But he just shrugged, his mind elsewhere. “Maybe the thing isn’t what they thought. Feels nice though, not having them breathing down our necks. Gives us some privacy.” He winked at her again.
She smiled, but it wasn’t genuine. “Don’t forget the cameras,” she said, while waving at the small dark spheres hanging from the ceiling. But despite the attempt at humor, her heart rate began to quicken, her eyes falling to the object that lay suspended within the glass case. Whether she was turning to it as a means of escape, engaging her mind on a different matter, or whether she was subconsciously drawn to it as a suspected answer to her unvoiced concerns, she didn’t know.
And then the power went out, plunging them into total darkness.
Joe swore out loud.
Melissa held her breath.
“No telling how long this
drill
is going to last. You wanna get comfortable?” Joe’s voice came from across the room.
“Joe,” her voice was shaky, worried. “I don’t like this.”
He had spent enough time with her in the past to know when she was scared, and the tone she had just used didn’t attempt to hide her fear now. “We’re fine, Melissa. No one even knows this place exists. And even if they did, they’d never be able to get down here.” But he was trying to reassure himself with his own words, his subconscious whispering warnings of its own. “It’ll probably be just a few minutes.”
“All this high-tech equipment, all the blast doors, the cameras, the retinal scans…it doesn’t make sense for them to just pick up and leave and then shut the power off on us, Joe. And no one else is back from dinner yet…”
Joe tried to calm her down. “Maybe they were stopped topside, told not to come down because of the drill.”
There was silence in the darkness as she contemplated the probability of this, but before she could reject his consoling, they heard footsteps coming down the corridor.
Joe quickly shed his unconcerned act and ran through the darkness to a giant stainless steel counter that contained two large, empty cabinets underneath. “Melissa, over here,” he urged.
She followed his voice, and they climbed into the cabinet just as someone pushed open the heavy door and entered the room.
They held their breath, unable to see anything in the darkness.
And then a beam of light split the darkness in half.
“Joe? Melissa?”
It was Mark.
Melissa let out a sigh of relief and began to move, but Joe put a firm hand on her shoulder, keeping her still.
The beam of light swept across the room, bringing to sight whatever it fell on.
“Dr. Theissen? Are you here?” Mark asked again. “Dr. Strauss?” He began walking forward, through the lab, the flashlight continuing to sweep the room. Finally, he seemed content that he was alone because the ray of light no longer surveyed his surroundings, but focused instead on just one thing. The classified object resting within the glass case.
They listened as Mark’s footsteps echoed off the hard floor, the length of the beam shortening as he came up to the case. They watched through the crack in the open cabinet door as the light suddenly went berserk, Mark using the flashlight’s bottom to smash the glass case. Had the power been on, alarms would have sounded so loud that cars would have begun pulling over on the streets above. But now…nothing.
“What’s he doing?” Melissa whispered in Joe’s ear.
Joe’s legs were beginning to cramp up, and he had to concentrate extra hard to ignore them. He ground his teeth, softly nudging Melissa into silence.
Mark grabbed the object, shining the light on it. He stood there for a few seconds, mesmerized by what was in his hands as if he actually knew what it was that he held. Then he turned on the broken glass and headed out the way he had come in.
“What do you have there?” a new voice suddenly asked.
Neither Joe nor Melissa could see what was going on because Mark’s flashlight was pointed at only an empty spot on the floor, hanging uselessly at his side.
“What are you doing here? They sent you—” It was Mark’s voice, and it lasted only as long as the new arrival let it.
“Where are they?” the new voice asked, cutting him off.
“They’re not here.”
“They have to be here, they weren’t picked up leaving the lab,” the strange voice objected.
“What difference does it make?” Mark asked. “I have it.”
“They’re here somewhere. Spread out and look for them.” It was an order issued to more unseen figures, the sound of their hastened steps filling the lab.
“Who sent you?” demanded Mark.
Melissa craned her neck to peer further to the right, to try and see what was going on. As soon as she saw Mark, he was raising the flashlight and pulling out what appeared to be a gun. There was a scream from one of the armed men that the light exposed, causing him to jerk the night-vision from his head while Mark shot him in the chest.
The loud gunshot sent Melissa back against Joe. She didn’t know what happened next; the room just seemed to explode.
“We can’t stay here,” Joe whispered into her ear.
Melissa threw the cabinet door open just as the beam from Mark’s flashlight swept across the room and revealed two men in black shooting at him. He was hiding behind some metal crates, firing aimlessly over their tops while trying to focus the light on a glimmering object resting on the floor. The artifact. He had dropped it in his haste to find cover.
She lunged for the object, grabbing it in her hand and running toward the corridor, skirting the room’s perimeter and going around the gunfight. She heard Mark scream out in pain and knew he was either dead or dying. She hoped Joe was right behind her.
But once the firing stopped, her movement could clearly be heard clamoring through the darkness, toward the exit.
The two remaining men turned, raising their weapons and searching for the person trying to escape. Their triggers were almost pressed when a voice came at them from another direction.
“Hey, you pieces of—” Joe never finished. The automatic fire threw him awkwardly across a countertop, his blood spraying across the wall behind him. “Melissa…” he rasped, eyes frozen wide with shock.
Melissa made it into the corridor, running as fast as she could, tears flowing freely from her eyes. A shot rang out and sparks flew off the walls around her, but she made it through the other door and to the elevator.
With the power out, the elevator showed no sign of being operational, so she threw herself into the door next to it, entering the stairwell instead. Her heart was racing out of control, her feet trying desperately to move her body up the stairs, the knowledge that guns behind her could sound at any moment and end her life pushing her even faster. And before she knew it, she was leaning into the panic bar of a large steel door, throwing herself into a hallway within the main building. She was topside.
As the door closed behind her, she could hear footsteps echoing through the stairwell. She took off running again, looking for someone who could help, but there was no one around. It was a restricted level, only personnel with top security clearance were allowed on the floor. She needed to go up one more level to get to the main doors and the steps that led down to the street. Once there, she would find a way to lose her pursuers in the crowd. But even with the emergency lights shining above her, she was having a hard time figuring out which way to go. She saw nothing but doors lining both sides of the hallway before it dead-ended a hundred feet in front of her.
There was no time.
She picked a random door just as the stairwell burst open behind her.
Hoping she closed the door fast enough, she made her way through the emergency-lit office, going around a big oak desk and crawling underneath it. She pulled her knees to her chest and tried to keep from convulsing. Her mind was racing through a million incomplete thoughts, her heart a drumbeat threatening to give away her location. She held her breath, praying the men would just walk past the room.
They did.
She heard them open another door, not too far away from the office she was hiding in, and start walking up some other steps.
As salty tears ran down her face, she fought the urge to go back to the secret laboratory and check on Joe. She wanted to believe that he was still alive but knew that going back there would only guarantee her death.
She had the relic they wanted in her hand, and she wasn’t about to make it easy for them to get. She realized that her whole team had been set up from the beginning, and it infuriated her. Crawling out from beneath the desk, she quickly set about searching for an envelope. She found one in the second side drawer, a pen already lying on the top of the desk. Hoping she had enough time, she scribbled a name and address onto the front of the envelope, then wrote a quick note on the underside of the flap by the crease in the paper. There was a tissue box on the desk that she borrowed from in order to wrap the object. She dropped it in, licked the envelope, and sealed it.
Without allowing herself time to think, she rummaged through the desk looking for stamps. But, of course, there were none. Hardly anyone used stamps anymore.
She swore, ran to the door, and made her way into the hallway. The stairs were just two doors down. She climbed them as silently as she could, at one point stepping over a black mask. The main floor was empty, the big glass doors that led to the street within sight.