A/N: Story's written. Just posting ahead now.
Burying Dirt
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Facts of Hard Record
Graham.
ooOoo
Gun deposited on the floor, gun light still shining. Carina's down too, shining.
Zero. Nothing, less than zero. Nothing, minus. Negative numbers.
Sarah and Chuck. Two. Dead flies.
Sarah. One. Dead moth.
The assassin. Zero. Ice Queen.
The assassin felt her heart plummet, over a ledge. Tumble into the abyss.
ooOoo
Graham.
He waved. The men moved Chuck, Ellie, Carina across the room, right beside Graham. Left the assassin alone.
So alone.
The distance from her to Chuck long, so long. Between them, in the empty space, a cylinder on the floor. An incendiary, an explosive, detonator in place. And Graham.
So she would lose, lose him. Chuck. Her Chuck. A few days with a good man.
Done.
Over.
Could not let Graham have him. Chuck looked at her, the assassin. The love, a light in his eyes, bright, stable, no flicker. Shining despite his fear.
Steadied Sarah — a breath, a deep breath. Breathed. Sarah did.
Vertigo — the panic — passed. Plummet stopped. Feet again solid on the below-ground ground.
ooOoo
"Where's Morgan?" Chuck, demanding. Graham shrugged, amused. "Up top. Bleeding, restrained. Alive, like you, for now." Graham rotated, faced Sarah.
Sarah faced Graham. Sarah did. Graham looked at her, cocking his head, then shaking it. Slow shake.
"I'm disappointed," Graham said, his soft tone threatening and avuncular simultaneously. "All the work that went into making you, Agent Walker. The Farm, the training, the years. All the success we have had. Making the world safe for Democracy. Securing the Greater Good." He swung his arms, parade posture.
"And you toss it all away…" Graham made a throwing-away gesture, glanced at Chuck, then Carina, "...for him. For a Bartowski." He turned his hands palm-upward, supplicant to the Inscrutable Fates. "I suppose there is a fitting irony in it, and perhaps I will chuckle about it in a few weeks or months. But it is too soon, now."
Graham sighed, his tone then business-like but all-the-more threatening. "Oh, well. I should have killed these two long ago, as I threatened to do." He gave Chuck and Ellie a dismissive frown
"You see, that's how I forced Stephen back into Omaha. Mary too. It had to be done. Omaha was potentially too important. To the country. To me. Once I got them here, they were, effectively, my prisoners. Guards and the threat to you two were enough to keep them down here, keep them working."
A handkerchief from an interior pocket of his blazer. Wiped his hands slowly, ceremoniously. Pontius Pilate in Giorgio Armani.
Shook his head at Chuck. Kept talking, wiping.
"But your father was too...kind-hearted. Wouldn't push. And Frost, your mother, made him stronger. I thought about just killing her, but I knew that would cost me him. He'd never have made it through, never have been able to keep working.
"Having Frost down here was like having a pissed wasp trapped under a glass, but I kept making sure she knew how close my people were to you two. Students with you. Co-workers with you. Nearby neighbors. Constant access. She kept her stinger to herself."
Glanced at Sarah. Back to Chuck. "So my buddy, Houghton," a third glance, at Carina, "Agent Miller's boss, gifted me a DEA scientist, a pharmacology expert. He was sleeping with her, but she meant nothing to him, of course. Luckily, he meant something to her.
"He talked her into joining the project, roused her to it. You see, Stephen had once admitted to me that drugs might speed the downloading, prolong its retention, but he refused to do it. He would continue the AI work but not start down that new path. Kept muttering about MKUltra.
"Jesus! I gave him no choice. I brought her in, Houghton's mistress. Trina Jerrod. I kept her name out of it all as a favor to Houghton. At first, she was gung-ho..." Another sneer, headshake. "...Love. — She took care of the pharmacology, Stephen of the AI, and the results were promising. Until they weren't. The patients who retained the programming lost their minds, died or became...monsters. A guard was killed. The incinerator became a de facto crematorium.
At that point, shutting Omaha down was not going to be enough. It had become a debacle. A career-killer. So, I ended it. Locked the place down. Eliminated the remaining patients, the guards. Wiped it away.
"But an unpredictable thing happened. Jerrod had a crisis of conscience, I suppose. Regret. She dosed herself and downloaded the programming. The enhancements allowed her to defeat the guards, with Frost's help, get your parents out. Evade elimination.
"She was stable for a while. Got them all to Russia somehow. They took...certain notebooks with them or claimed they did, documents recording what had happened here, and your parents made it clear that if anything happened to you or your sister, the notebooks would go public. Stalemate.
"Or it was until Trina Jerrod started to destabilize. She was calling herself Tina Justice. She had put that name among the Omaha patient names when she began experimenting on herself. Strange, like carving initials in a tree. Of course, maybe she was unstable from the beginning." Another business-like shrug. Bemused by incompetence.
"She slipped up in Moscow, left a trail, and, using it, I found Stephen and Mary. My then-terminator, Agent Walker's forerunner, Agent Osgood, eliminated them both."
Graham folded his handkerchief, returned it to his pocket.
"It was painless, quick. Osgood, like our Agent Walker here, was an inspired artist of death, able to deliver it in countless ways, quick or slow, painless or painful. So hard to find artistry like that. Our Sarah here was like Picasso, except she had a red period, a long one, not a blue one."
Graham turned to Sarah, a rueful smile, kept talking to Chuck. "In fact, you, Chuck, were to have been Agent Walker's fiftieth kill, the golden anniversary, so to speak, of my golden girl."
Saw Chuck swallow hard. Ellie's brow contracted. Shame covered Sarah. Chuck!
Graham went on. "But you weren't, you aren't, my golden girl anymore, are you, Agent Walker? Not all that glitters remains gold."
He turned to Chuck again. "You see, she's...changed. It started before she got shot outside of Porto Alegre. My Ice Queen would never have made that mistake, allowed her target to get a shot off. That slip was the first sign. But then, after she…" Graham turned to Sarah again, "after you came to, you were different. Pensive. Almost dreamy. Lost in thought.
"I have to say, rumination does not become you, Agent Walker, and it proved to be...counterproductive. You were sluggish, distracted. After a while, you seemed to be returning to your old self, but the...the drive...the speed...the old fever...did not seem to be there.
"And so I sent you to finish Chuck, but I am sure Agent Miller's supplied those details. — By the way, Chuck, it turns out, did me a service in doing me a disservice.
"You see, Osgood could not find those notebooks. We assumed Jerrod — Justice — had them, and of course, you were the Agent of Record for that kill, weren't you, Agent Walker." Graham turned only his head toward Chuck. "How does that grab you, Chuck, your assassin lover stood by and watched the woman who saved your parents die, watched her take a bullet to the head? Your own Agent of Record."
Stop it, Graham. Stop. I never kept count. Never. Perfect record, but never kept score. I don't want you to be the one who tells Chuck that. Fifty kills. Fifty.
Chuck had paled in the flickering lights.
"But Justice did not have the notebooks either. So, for a long time, I worried that you had them, or your sister, but neither of you ever did anything to suggest that you did. And then you, the Piranha, went after Omaha, and I was sure that you did not have the notebooks.
"I now am sure they did not exist or have been lost forever if they did. Of course, I also thought this place had been turned to cinders." He gestured to the incendiary. "I am going to be sure this time. And we will search you after we get out of here. You will give me any copy of the Omaha files. I have the drugs necessary to make sure you cooperate.
"But I want to say goodbye to Agent Walker. She will not be accompanying us. I find it fitting that she will die here, be buried here, cremated, for her betrayal, — of her country," Graham's eyes narrowed, "of me."
Sarah made a glancing eye-contact with Carina as Graham looked toward the incendiary on the floor. Carina and Chuck and Ellie were standing by the door that Devon used the pick to force open. The stairs were not far away, just across the antechamber.
Sarah nodded toward the stairs, the movement of her chin minute.
Carina blinked deliberately. She knows. She understands. Carina's mouth turned down, her eyes as soft, sympathetic as Sarah had ever known them to be. Bye, Carina. Maybe we would have become real friends, not just spy friends.
This was how it was always going to end.
Not Sarah with Chuck. But Sarah saving Chuck.
And that was enough. Enough is enough; it's not everything. Sarah's heart was heavy, impossibly heavy, but her head was clear, her thoughts crystalline.
Her gun was on the floor. The gun light shining, the beam of light a yellow parabola on concrete.
She dove for it, her dive supple and perfect. Gun in hand, light and sights up, Graham's face bathed in the beam, trigger squeeze, headshot, but another shot rang out, one of the men, bullet gouged Sarah's lower leg. Jerked in response. Spoiled her aim.
Missed Graham.
Another shot, one of the men. Missed her. Concrete spray. Crawled. Saw Carina shoulder the nearest man out of the way, scoop up her gun, shout, "Run!"Chuck and Ellie and Devon sprinting with her to the stairs.
The lights went out again. Blackness. Carina's gun light bouncing up the stairs.
Sarah leaped to her feet, leg burning.
She ran back to the stairs behind her. The stairs down. Down to the lab. She aimed for the incendiary as she ran, encircling it in light, and she fired.
Turned as she did, heard the explosion, felt the instant magma heat, — blown forward, down the stairs. Rolling, bouncing, concrete biting into her, legs, arms, back, chest. Sound of cracking glass.
Bottom. Hard. Scrambled up, nothing broken but hurting everywhere. Scraped and cut. Looked up. A massive fireball rolling down the steps toward her, as if the sun itself was trying to squeeze into the stairway. To chase her. Burn her.
Burned spy. Burnt offering.
—"Where is the lamb?"
—"My daughter, God himself will provide the sacrifice."
Felt the earth shake, the ceiling above her begin to fall.
The sky falling. Skynet.
Judgment Day. The second T-800. Melted. Molten steel. No place in that world.
Sarah, no place in Chuck's. No place above ground. Judgment Day.
It will end here, in this hell. Buried. But I have taken Graham and his men with me.
She ran, the fireball consuming the stairs, the ceiling collapsing around her. The ground shaking.
I saved Chuck, Ellie, Devon, Morgan, and Carina.
It was enough. I fell in love and was loved.
She would die as Sarah, not as the assassin.
Ran.
So long, Chuck. — How I love you!
Enough.
A/N: Um...right.
I've had lots of music on my mind as I wrote this, lots of poetry (Sandburg's "Cool Tombs") but for the most part, I've kept it all out of view. But here I will bring one song into view, the song of this chapter. From Joy Division's unbearable classic, Closer, the song "Passover". Give it a listen.
Thoughts?