Bobby Hobbes swung the dish side to side, locating the strongest
signal. This was it. The cell phone was definitely in the parking
garage before him. A sign announced the garage was closed for
repairs, but there were lights on inside.
Orange cones blocked off the entrance, but one was out of line and
another knocked on its side, as if someone had driven over them already. He
glanced around to make sure he didn't attract too much unwanted
attention, and turned the Agency sedan into the dark opening, wishing
he had Golda. His van was better armored and more reliable than this
clunker, with a higher seat to view more ground while searching.
He tried the Agency radio, but the signals were still dead. The
explosion had taken out their communications, and things were still
chaotic back at the Harding building...he doubted he'd be able to
raise any backup.
He donned the thermal goggles and scanned the interior, creeping
forward slowly. There were too damn many pillars and turns, too many
stairwells and ramps. No way to secure an area; Fawkes could get
behind him a dozen different ways.
He paused as the ramp he was on led to a fork; from here, he could go
up or down.
He thought about Fawkes, about the state he was in. He'd brought
Claire here, he wasn't going to just kill her. He wouldn't want her
to escape, to be able to see a way out. He'd want...privacy.
Shuddering a little, Hobbes turned the van downwards.
On the next level, he noticed something leaning against the door of
the stairwell. He pulled closer. They were signs, arrows that would
normally mark the way in and out. Fawkes must have set this up
ahead of time. Or else someone else had. Hobbes ran through the list
of potential collaborators, of potential enemies setting a trap, until he
got bored. There were just too many possibilities. And face it, Fawkes
could have pulled this off alone, if he'd gone stage 5 nutso at the
start of the weekend...
A small sign, just a plain arrow, lay face-up on the floor, pointing
towards the stairwell. It could be accidental, or it could be leading
him into a trap. Either way, Hobbes didn't see much choice but to
check it out. He pulled the sedan close to the stairwell entrance and
drew his gun, eyes moving constantly, on guard for attack,
quicksilvered or visible.
That was what bothered him the most, was not *knowing* when or how it
had happened. Something bad must have gone down, and he wasn't there
to protect his partner.
Hobbes eased the door open, lifted one of the smaller dismantled signs
and placed it quietly against the door frame. When he'd eased
through, he gently closed the door against the little metal rectangle,
so that it held the door slightly open and off the latch.
He began creeping down the stairs, one at a time, gun at the ready.
Hoping to God he wouldn't have to use it. When he got to the bottom,
he could see a chain looped around the metal bar of the fire door,
running from there to the railing of the stairs. The door couldn't be
opened. His heart sank. The chained door told him that he was in the
right place. That things really were as bad as he'd feared.
Hobbes looked from the railing to the metal bar. The chain was
secured with a heavy-duty padlock, the railing looked thick and
strong. Attacking the weakest point, he aimed a well-placed kick at
the hinge of the bar.
"Crap!" he hissed as his foot took the impact of the blow. Something
rattled, but the bar held in place. He muttered quietly to himself as
he took aim again. "Pull a freakin' stunt like this, drag my ass down
here, you're more trouble than you're worth sometimes, Fawkes..." He
didn't mean it, but it let off steam.
Gritting his teeth, he kicked again, harder. This time it connected
just right, and the bar gave way, knocked out of its hinge. He
carefully slid the loop of chain off the broken end.
He pushed in the other end of the bar to release the latch and eased
the door open. He'd made a lot less noise than he would've shooting
the padlock, but there was still a good chance he'd been heard.
He crouched low and peeped through the small opening, gun at the ready
but not held out before him where it could be kicked away. The
parking garage was darker here, and he could see a couple of the
places where the signs had been removed. Bare electrical cords were
strung along the ceiling in a few places. The garage was supposed to
be closed for some repairs, maybe the workers had strung them for
their equipment.
There was no sign of Claire or Fawkes. At least, not until he looked
down, right in front of him. Caught under the edge of the door was a
little piece of cloth. He fished it out and lifted the goggles to
examine it, still glancing through them regularly. The cloth hadn't
been torn. It had that peculiar edge he'd become familiar with in the
last couple years, that happened when cloth was frozen and shattered.
Frozen with quicksilver. And he didn't think Fawkes was into lace,
so it must be Claire's.
There were more pieces outside the door. Bobby got a whole lot more
worried. He knew what Fawkes had wanted with the Keeper the last time
they'd been together while Fawkes was nutso, but then Claire hadn't
been putting up a fight, being nutso herself. How would Fawkes react
if she did fight back? He couldn't even think about what if she chose
not to fight; one of the famous Bobby Hobbes mental blocks.
Putting the goggles back on fully, he gripped his gun more tightly and
burst through the door, charging straight out until his shoulder hit
the first pillar, not lingering near the door long enough for any
ambush hiding around the corner of the stairwell to be able to get
ahold of him.
Cold concrete to his back, he didn't see any sign of Fawkes. Or
Claire. What he did see was the cell phone, on the ground near the
edge of the stairwell. More definitive proof he couldn't ask for.
They were here, or at least they had been here, before the call was
cut off.
The space down here was too big, the entrances and exits too unsecure
to make a slow search practical. Once he'd made certain no one was
lurking near the corner where the garage wall met the wall of the
stairwell, he dashed across the open space between them, scooping up
the cell phone on the way, and waited a moment to make sure no one was
coming around the corner at him. Then he called out quietly.
"Claire? Claire, can you hear me?"
Silence.
"Fawkes? You in here, partner?"
He waited a long minute, barely breathing, straining to hear. A
sound, faint, over to his left. A sort of metallic bang. Could be
pipes, a door, could be a freakin' steamroller for all he could tell.
He eased that direction, straining his ears and eyes. He called out
again, just before crossing a gap between two rows of pillars, so that
he was away from the spot he'd given away as fast as possible.
"C'mon, guys, I'm not in the mood!"
"But I am..." came the all-too-familiar voice his partner used when
he was deep in the madness. The sound echoed within the concrete
cave, making it difficult to pin down where Fawkes was.
Bobby froze, looking around carefully. There, at the very edge of the
screen on the infrared goggles, was a flicker of movement.
"Fawkes? Are you okay, partner?" he asked, moving in the direction
he'd seen the movement, slipping from cover to cover, exposed as
briefly as possible and at unpredictable intervals.
"Oh, I'm great, Robert." He rolled the 'r' a little, reminiscent of
his Tony the Tiger joke the first time he'd hit stage 5.
Hobbes frowned. He was getting a feel for the echoes in here, and it
sounded more like Fawkes was behind him now. He caught another sound,
a scraping, coming from the direction he'd seen the flash of movement.
It was faint; maybe it had only carried as far as his ears, and not
as far as Fawkes'.
"And what about Claire," he asked, "is the Keeper okay?" As soon as
the last word left his lips, he began working his way ahead, silently.
If Fawkes was behind him, then the sounds up ahead might be Claire.
He had to somehow get to her before Fawkes did, and get her back to
the stairwell without being cut off from it.
A faint skittering sound, off to his right, like a small stone
accidentally knocked away by a shoe. Hobbes hesitated. Which of them
was it?
"Claire's just fine, partner." There was a nasty laugh in Fawkes'
voice. "We were just having a little fun. Would you care to join us?"
Hobbes kept silent, once again easing forward. He could see the outer
wall of the garage ahead. When he reached the last row of pillars
before it, he eased around slowly.
Claire was there, her back pressed against the third pillar down. He
breathed a sigh of relief. Her clothes and hair were in disarray,
smudged with dirt and grease, and cold sweat shone on her face. Her
eyes were squeezed closed, he mouth partway open, as though she were
listening with all her might.
"Claire!" he whispered, trying to be quiet enough that Fawkes wouldn't
hear him.
Her body jerked, she gave a little scream, and she disappeared around
the corner of the structural pillar, clearly frightened.
"Claire, it's me! It's Bobby Hobbes."
The corner of her face peeped around the pillar. He looked through
the thermal goggles, well aware that if Fawkes were setting a trap,
he'd just arrived at the bait. His head swiveling around to try to
catch some sign of Fawkes, he moved from his pillar to the next.
"Bobby?" she whispered uncertainly. She leaned around the pillar a
little more.
"C'mon, Keep, I'm getting you out of here." He held out his hand to
her. As she came around her pillar, he realized she was leaning
heavily against it, most of the weight off of her left ankle.
She closed the gap between them with a quick limping stride and took
his hand to support her the rest of the way. She threw her arms
around him, her shoulders shaking. It felt like she was sobbing,
silently.
"Bobby, thank God!"
Hobbes couldn't help a small rush of pleasure at being held in
Claire's arms, whatever the circumstances. She draped her arm around
his shoulders and leaned against him, her face turned away to scan
their surroundings.
"He's close. I could hear him." He could feel her trembling. She
had her eyes closed again, her mouth slightly open, listening hard.
"I *hate* not being able to see him coming at me," she whispered.
"Has he hurt you?" Hobbes asked, torn between watching out for attack,
and discretely checking her over for any other injuries.
Suddenly the display on his goggles flashed bright white. He flinched
away from it, squinting. As the circuits adjusted from low levels to
high, he realized some sort of bright lights, in a frequency the
goggles could pick up, must have been turned on. He loosened the
strap and slid them upwards a bit, looking around the room.
In normal light it looked just the same. Then he spotted it. A small
lighting fixture, glowing with a faint purple light. Like black
lights. He remembered what the Keeper had said once about Darien
seeing in higher spectrums of light while quicksilvered.
"Aw, crap." He urged the Keeper forward faster. He could see there
were dozens of these lights, strung up in the ceiling on those
unshielded electrical cables he'd noted earlier.
A low thunk, like a high-powered electrical switch being thrown, and
the room was plunged into darkness.
He reached up to pull the goggles back down, but his hand met only
empty air as the goggles were pulled back off of his head by unseen
hands. Claire's weight was suddenly gone, and he turned desperately,
one arm outstretched. "Claire?"
A brief, high-pitched exclamation, off to his left, away from the
exit. He feared the worst for a moment, and then heard something that
told him he really didn't know what the worst was.
"Ooh, Bobby, I like your toys! I could have a lot of fun with these."
It wasn't Darien's voice taunting him now, it was the Keeper's. The
Keeper's, as it had been in her lab when she was infected with the
quicksilver bacteria. When she'd been affected by the Beta-C.
"Oh, that was good! Bravo!" From his other side and ahead, between
Hobbes and the exit, came the sound of the voice that used to belong
to his partner, but was now inhabited by someone else, someone far
more dangerous.
It was pitch black. Hobbes was blind, and there were two lunatics who
could see, boxing him in. Hobbes slipped on the safety and holstered
his gun, knowing they could take it away from him far more easily in
his hand than in his holster.
"You wanna play games? Okay, mister quicksilver madness, I'm ready
for you."
Hobbes only wished he could believe that.