Ghost guard, p.12
Ghost Guard, page 12
“Hey!” she pushed her skirt back down. Rev had it hiked up past her thighs. “What the hell are you doing! Get away from me! Get back over there!”
“Calm down, calm down. Don’t get excited.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” she didn’t care if the whole world was watching. She just wanted that jerk of a ghost away from her. “You don’t know when to stop, do you? Now get over there!”
He drifted to the other side of the table.
“Abby. I don’t get you. You ask me out on a date, and you get like this. I just wish you’d make up your mind.”
“Listen, buster. This isn’t a date. This is a meeting, a strategy session. That’s all.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Hey, sister. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.”
She was fuming. For the hundredth time this week she wanted to kill him. But she couldn’t. He was already dead.
“Your smell is intoxicating,” he told her, moving nearer again.
“Oh, please,” she rolled her eyes.
“No, really. Abby, have I ever told you how beautiful you are?”
“Only about a million times.”
He smiled.
“Okay, then here goes number one million and one,” he became partial mist, getting so close he nearly merged with her. She felt that cold rush again. Then a hand on her leg.
“Stop it!” she got up from the seat and folded her coat over her arm. “You can take care of the check,” she told him before striding to the exit.
He cleared his throat and smiled at the woman staring at him. He didn’t dematerialize quite yet. He had an audience, and wanted to make his exit as dramatic as possible for them. After a few moments, he allowed his physical body to shift to its natural state, a cloud of amorphous energy. One particle at a time, he disintegrated, falling apart like a sandcastle eroding in the wind, dusty powder dropping and disappearing before it hit the table.
TEN
TREY MCCOLLUM DIDN’T USUALLY feel the need to smuggle personal items past security at The Tower. Not that the biggest government data center west of the Mississippi didn’t allow an occasional pocket Rubik’s Cube or Magic 8-Ball past its gates. Still, there were no guarantees. He knew the guys at the gate—Mick, Rico and Wendell—were notorious for stealing stuff from analysts. And this was special. This was a genuine Koosh Ball, given to him by his three-year-old son.
“Have a good day, Mr. McCollum,” Rico waved. Trey waved back and, as soon as he was around the corner, flipped the bird while slipping the Koosh from his cuff.
“Not getting this one!” he flicked the ball up and caught it. Cameras were watching him, but the people watching those weren’t at the security gate. They were upstairs, and the men upstairs could care less about Koosh balls.
He tossed the bundle of stringy rubber again, this time high above his head, gathering it skillfully behind his back. If he wanted, he could have quit his job as an intelligence analyst and played Koosh ball professionally. Easily.
When he got in sight of Room Eleven, he saw the woman he was there to relieve, Deeanne Snow, or Dee. She was hunched over a computer screen, cheeks resting on her palms, thick reading glasses catching the light in such a way as to shroud her eyes, hiding the fact that she was fast asleep.
Trey, knowing he had her dead to rights, snuck to the lock control pad, tapped the entry code quietly, then tiptoed in after the door clicked open.
“Wake up!” he tossed the Koosh. Dee flinched to an upright position, and at that moment, watching the ball on its arched trajectory, Trey’s skin tingled at a sudden, electrified gust. A small snap of what Trey could only describe as a current of energy enveloped the Koosh. Just before landing on Dee’s shoulder, it vanished from sight.
Dee saw none of this. Her heart was racing. For a second there she thought she’d been caught sleeping again by someone who mattered. When she saw who it was, and that he didn’t matter, she only shook her head.
“Late again? What’s the excuse this—” she forgot all about that idiot Trey when her main screen lit up like a Christmas tree. Activity all over the board. “What the hell is this shit?” she banged on the back of the flatscreen. The figures kept coming.
Trey saw none of this. His heart was jumping from his chest. The Koosh ball. It was gone. Not under Dee’s chair. Not under the table. Not anywhere it should have been.
“Where’s my Koosh?” he muttered aloud, paying no attention to Dee. He was in a state of shock, probing with his feet at anywhere the ball could have rolled. Though he knew it didn’t roll anywhere. He would have seen it. It simply ceased to exist, right in midflight.
“To hell with your Koosh!” Dee snapped. “We’ve got a problem here!”
And as soon as she said it, the real troubles began. The IBM supercomputers began buzzing like angry hornets. Over two hundred and fifty thousand processors, all running at rates faster than 33 petaFLOPS, gathering, storing, and translating.
“Check the firewalls!” Trey shouted.
“Oh, really?” she glared at him. “Is that what I should do? For your information I already thought of that!”
Fingers fluttering on the keys, she navigated the encryption network until she found the firewall protocols. All present and accounted for. Pristine and clean.
“Nothing,” she said, and the buzzing, the ringing, the blinking LEDs gained strength and speed. “This breach, or whatever it is, isn’t coming from the outside.”
“My Koosh!” Trey spotted the red and orange and yellow toy between two racks of processors, wedged deep enough, and high enough, to raise suspicions as to how it got there. Kooshes don’t bounce. At least not that high. At that point, he didn’t care. He was just happy he didn’t have to explain to little Kelso how Daddy lost his birthday present.
He hustled to the stack, opened the glass case, and the second he touched the Koosh, everything fell silent. Processors. Screens. LEDs. All systems back to normal.
Only things weren’t normal.
Instead of being greeted by calm, Trey and Dee both had the jolt of their lives when a long and vigorous screech shattered the short-lived silence. The strangest, most happily gruesome laughter any human had ever uttered. Only it wasn’t human. The two data jockeys knew that much. They also knew, albeit obvious by now, that they were dealing with a supernatural entity. A ghost. But what they didn’t know was this ghost’s name was Ruby, and Ruby just loved Koosh balls.
“What the…HEY!” Trey felt a tug on the rubber toy as if someone was trying to take it from his hand. He clutched tight, but not tight enough. Peeled from his grasp, he watched in wide-eyed wonder as the ball levitated straight up, over his head, and out of reach. Dee was incapable at that moment to render any assistance or even emit a sound. The two were a pathetic pair. Teeth chattering. Eyes watering. One with nightmare scenarios of being fired or, worse, accused of spying for China or North Korea. The other with even scarier visions of his wife withholding sex for a year as punishment for misplacing their son’s gift.
Trey broke from his stupor at that thought, bent at the knees, and hoisted himself in the air, harkening back to his jock days when he ran track. Those days were over, as he discovered tragically. He felt it immediately in his hamstrings. It didn’t matter anyway. He didn’t have a chance. The ghastly laughter reverberated from multiple angles all at once as the ball danced a happy little jig. Then, just like that, the ball and the laughter were gone in a tiny fizzle of red static.
For at least eight full minutes, both analysts stood there, staring into space at the exact point where the ball had been dangling before it so simply and neatly ceased to be real. They would have been there much longer if not for the drool that spilled over Trey’s lower lip, hitting the floor with such a splat it forced them both back to their senses.
“You...you saw that, right?” Trey gulped, wiping the spittle from his chin.
“I don’t know what the hell I just saw,” Dee blinked hard several times in succession. Then her sights settled on the dozens of racks of processors, all sitting innocently as if nothing had happened. “We’d better check this out!”
She flew to the terminal and started entering commands, calling up the data that had been flashing across the screens minutes earlier. She had to search for a needle in a haystack, and it was even tougher because of the encryption. But once she found it, the evidence was clear.
“Well?” Trey waited for her assessment. “What files were penetrated?”
Dee made eye contact with him, indicating the seriousness of the matter.
“Something on a team called…Delta X.”
“DELTA X?” ABBY SCOFFED. Ruby, playing catch by herself with a colorful rubber ball, glanced at the monitor sporadically. Brutus hovered silently nearby. “That’s their name? That’s the specialized team Mahoney was talking about? They’re the ones who are going to deal with Elyxa—Delta X?”
“Correct,” Morris nodded, pressing an icon to bring up the information. “I speculate Delta is analogous to Delta Force. And the X denotes the paranormal, or things of non-categorical nature.”
She gave him a deadpan glance.
“I got that. What else can you tell me?”
“Well,” his fingers danced on the command screen, summoning up more data. “Thanks to Ruby’s incredible work, we’ve tapped into their uplink, and I can tell you they’re well-equipped. They’ve got just about every black-ops secret weapon in the books. Directed energy, thermal lasers, and some things even I haven’t heard of. Impressive.”
“Okay, okay,” she said. “So what’s the status?”
“The op’s in preliminary startup phase right now.”
“You mean they’re just about ready? Perfect! Where are we on the radios? Do we have the signals yet?”
“Of course,” he reached for a rack-mounted modulator and turned up the volume.
“DX3, this is Sky Eye, do you read?”
“Sky Eye, this is DX3…copy.”
“DX3, copy that. Standby for green light.”
“That’s them?” Abby was nervous. She wanted to be there—bad.
“That’s them. Here,” he flicked a switch on another modulator and a row of small screens flickered on. Various angles of a towering, abandoned brick warehouse.
“The video feeds. Excellent work, Morris!” she patted his back so hard a piece of popcorn got lodged in his throat.
“It was Ruby’s work, really,” he coughed. Abby gave Ruby the thumbs up. Ruby just giggled as she played with her Koosh ball.
“What’re you guys doing?” wearing a tuxedo, Rev appeared from nowhere and hung over Morris’s shoulder, peering into the monitors. Abby had sensed him coming, but chose to pretend she hadn’t. “What’s this?”
“Mahoney said we can’t intervene. He didn’t say anything about watching,” she stared at the screens. “Did he, Morris?”
Morris looked at Rev sheepishly.
“I’m not getting in the middle of this,” Rev raised his hands. “You’re playing with fire.”
“Where are you going?” Abby watched him glide toward the outer wall.
“Out. I’ll be late, so don’t wait up.”
“Don’t you want to see this?”
“Nope,” he answered without looking. “I already know what’s going to happen.”
“You do, huh? Okay smartass, what’s going to happen, then?”
Before he passed through the wall, he sent her a serious look, one of the most serious she’d ever seen from Rev.
“Nothing good.”
With that, he drifted backward, staring at her, and disappeared into the bricks. She knew where he was going. Anywhere he could find the company of a young woman…or three. There were dozens of bars and clubs where he could spin his sexual magic. It made Abby boil inside.
“That son of a—”
“Abby, they’re ready to enter the building.”
She glued her eyes to anything and everything that moved, darting from one screen to the next, watching the images become more and more identifiable.
Morris explained, “These shots are from helmet cameras. They’re the main players, it looks like.”
“The big boys with the big toys, huh?” she shook her head.
“I suppose so. They’re each stationed in different sections of the building. This guy,” he gestured with a pencil to a specific screen. “He’s on the west side. Looks like he’s got a grappling hook and he’s going to scale the building.”
“A grappling hook? Are you serious? What is this, the Dirty Dozen?”
He chuckled. “This is a little more sophisticated. He can aim a rocket-propelled grapple with a laser.”
“Oh my. How high-tech,” she chuckled cynically.
“All teams, we have a green light. Repeat. We have a green light. That’s a Go! Go! Go!”
The footage began to shake like a bad movie when the so-called elite paranormal squad stormed the structure. From the looks on the cameras, it seemed the number of personnel was substantial. Three teams, each with ten men. And women. Abby could make out at least one female voice over the radio chatter. It became hard to watch the video while the operatives hurried up stairs and along dim corridors. The building was at about ten stories, and they didn’t use the elevators for obvious reasons. Since they needed to go all the way to the Penthouse on top, they had a lot of running to do.
“DX Teams, this is Sky Eye. We’ve got you all on thermal.”
Morris switched a button, and a screen showed the view from the air, hovering over the red neon letters: MONTGOMERY PARK.
“A helicopter,” she shook her head. “How subtle. Why am I not surprised?”
The camera angles became a little more discernible. Abby saw a hall, a stairway, and several other operatives in tactical gear, carrying all manner of weaponry. She stared a little closer and recognized something that had her shuddering in disgust.
“They’re fighting with the wrong weapons. You don’t use a gun against an immortal. Not without parapsychological help at least. Everyone knows that. What kind of team is this? Specialized my ass. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”
“You may be right about that,” said Morris.
“I am right!”
“Okay. You are right. But that doesn’t mean we have to interfere.”
“Morris, look at them! They’re walking into a trap! This is ridiculous…what amateurs!”
He nodded. “Try to relax, Abby. We’re only observing, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah, but—”
“But nothing,” Morris insisted. “Maybe Rev was right. We shouldn’t be doing this. All it’s doing is making you want to get involved.”
He reached to turn off the system. She stopped him.
“Wait, Morris, wait. I swear I’m just gonna watch.”
He squinted at her.
“Okay. But remember, we’re only observing.”
She nodded, chewing her thumbnail. The operatives inside the building held their positions, pointing their wholly inadequate weapons at a set of stairs.
“Let’s see if they can even get to the—”
Before Morris could finish his sentence, Sky Eye shouted.
“We’ve got a bogey! South stairwell! Whatever it is, it’s coming fast!”
“Roger!”
“Definitely not a friendly, I repeat NOT a friendly.”
“Where is it again?”
“Below you! It’s below you!”
Pandemonium broke out. The video screens became a chaotic mess. The team under attack scattered for survival as the other teams scrambled to help. Abby studied one monitor in particular. The camera of one of the team leaders. She recognized the voice, but wasn’t sure. Then someone called out his name, and the memories came flooding back.
“Riley!”
Thomas Riley, her ex-training partner from long ago. She hadn’t seen him in so long it felt like a different life, though she didn’t like to think about it. She hadn’t thought about it in years, and that was the way she wanted to keep it. But when she heard that voice, and then the name, she was forced to confront feelings she’d hoped would never resurface.
She felt Ruby’s beneficent touch on her shoulder. The old yet infantile ghost had a way about her. One of the sweetest souls in existence. Cooing and clicking, she asked if Abby was all right.
“I’m okay,” she shook it off. Didn’t have time for personal feelings. She had to keep up with the frenzy of activity, with operatives running for cover from a furious sneak attack. Then, after the burst of chaos, things went eerily quiet. All anyone could hear over the speakers was heavy breathing and the occasional Beep! of an electronic sensor.
“Sky Eye? We’ve got nothing here. Where did the bogey go?”
Sky Eye hesitated.
“You’re right. It’s gone. What the hell? Looks like there might have been some sort of glitch in the—WAIT! There it is again! This time it’s above you! It’s right on top of you!”
Mass confusion. The screams and commands were unintelligible, as well as most of the footage, bouncing and shaking like a horror movie. Abby and Morris and Ruby stared at the monitors without blinking. The only one who didn’t watch was Brutus. He didn’t need to watch. He’d already felt the full wrath of Elyxa, and knew that pitiful show of force wasn’t enough. An army wouldn’t have been enough.
Abby couldn’t look away from the screens, heart racing, forehead boiling. She watched Riley’s camera, the view from his tactical helmet. He spun in circles, scanning the narrow hallway.
“Come on, Riley,” she said out loud.
“Riley?” Morris asked. “You know him?”
Her gaze never left the fast-paced images coming in.
“We were friends a long time ago. He was-is a gifted operative. I just don’t know what he’s doing with these guys.”
More screams, shouts, calls to the mission commander for directions. Abby shook her head.
“They don’t know what they’re doing at all!”
