"No good." Tedros rose up to a stand from his position down on one knee. He'd been examining the cell door for some time. "Mechanism is entirely electronic." He rolled his sleeves back down to cover his biceps which were now slick with a thin layer of sweat. "If I had to take a guess I'd say each of the doors is controlled by the console attached."
He wiped the sweat from his brow taking his helmet off into one hand. A heavy exhale went out into the clammy air of the bunker. "Benji, you'd best take care of the generator, I'm roasting in this gear." Beads of liquid splashed against the ground as the ebony soldier made his way back over towards the center of the hallway.
His dark brown eyes glanced from one holding cell to the next as he put his helmet back on. "Hot damn." He took a drag from his cigarette. "Must be a dozen people down here." His eyes locked on the yellowish green skinned hulking figure laying strapped to his bed. He was struggling against the metal binds but couldn't seem to break free. "I knew the FEV was serious business but I guess I didn't realize exactly what it could do."
"Yeah, I heard about the protests when they started, people worried about the government playing god." Ben made his way over to the wall of cells setting down his briefcase against the wall. "Monsters made in government labs like this to start up a new era of warfare."
He dialed in the combination sliding open the briefcase. Inside he pulled a small screwdriver kit from the depths and unrolled it out on the metal ground.
"New era of nightmares if you ask me." Ted placed his hand against the glass of a dimly lit room. In the center stood a large bat like creature with goat horns. Its wings were a pitch black leather with streaks of white across the veins, it stood twelve feet tall with legs of a man covered in rippling muscles. Six rows of razor sharp teeth filled its mouth jagged as the blades of a chainsaw.
Ted felt a chill run down his spine just looking at the thing. "God damn demons." He muttered to himself as Ben took his time unscrewing the vent cover on the nearby wall. "Starting to think those commies were right when they said science was going too far."
"Ted." Ben called over as he pulled the grate from the vent and lowered it down to one side. "When I get the generator running those turrets are going to go right back on." He looked down the metal shaft into the darkness for a long moment before grabbing a simple flashlight from his briefcase. "You're not going to want to be here when the power comes on."
"We're not leaving these people down here Benji" Ted spoke looking away from his own reflection in the glass. "They've already been through enough."
"What in sam hill are we going to do with a dozen muties and a child?" It was an honest question, and Ben laughed as he asked it looking over incredulously as the musclebound soldier. "You planning on re-integrating them into society yourself?" He held his hand against the entrance to the vent. "Oh don't mind my green friend here officer he's just got a glandular condition."
"Aint funny Benji" Ted looked back up to the ceiling his eyes locking on the turrets. Twelve in all spread across the room. Security was tight in here, about as tight as anything he'd seen working for the military. MKVI laser turrets on the floor, and twin heavy plasma turrets practically covering the ceiling.
Just one glance told him all he needed to know about this place. They were ready to fight off an army. Breaking in or breaking out it didn't really matter when you had this much firepower.
So he pulled his pistol and started shooting the turrets with AP rounds one after another. Ben turned his head to look back at the man, his hand still gripping onto the lip of the vent. "Ted, I..." He trailed off with a bit of a low sigh. "Alright, we'll do things your way." He drew his rifle and fired off a few shots of his own into the ceiling mounted turrets. "But I'm going on record as this being one of the dumbest ideas you've drug me along for."
"Doesn't matter if it's stupid Benji, it's the right thing to do." The men cut their way through the depowered turrets with ease, no challenge that could be provided without a source of power.
"Never pinned you for the moral type." Ben commented putting one last round into the last standing MKVI laser turret. "Pinned you more the anything goes long as it's for number one type."
"Yeah, yeah." Ted holstered his pistol back into place clicking it down securely. "My momma may have raised a thief but she sure as hell didn't raise no asshole." He spat down onto the ground. "Even if we can't help these folks get back to normal I aint about to leave them to die."
"Knew there was a good man somewhere in there." Ben ducked his head down crawling into the ventilation duct. Each step banged and echoed out as he crawled on his hands and knees the only light of his way that small flashlight of his.
He crawled for a long time thudding and thunking his way along. Through grates he could see more robots paroling the halls, trying to get inside of rooms, to keep the place clean. "Whole damn building's run by robots." He muttered to himself as he came to a vertical vent.
He spent a minute looking up thinking to himself. First he placed one hand on either side of the grate and then he began to apply pressure. It was a cramped space to be sure but he could just barely get a grip on it. Steadily he climbed his way up, and up.
"Hey." Ted tapped on the glass of the girls holding cell. Wrapped his knuckles for a few moments till he saw her look up from her toys. He went down onto one knee looking into the cell.
She didn't say a word, just looked over at him in silence.
"My names Tedros Contee, what's yours?" He gave her a friendly smile setting his helmet onto the ground beside him. He leaned down onto that knee looking her direction but she still didn't say a word.
He let out a bit of a sigh nodding his head. "Quiet type huh?" She nodded her head still holding onto her giddyup buttercup doll. "You know, when I was your age I was the quiet type too." He chuckled to himself. "My brothers always picked on me for my voice so I never really wanted to talk with anyone."
She sat the doll down onto the ground, hopping up onto the side of her bed. "I figured if people didn't like my voice I'd just work on anything else." He smiled a moment. "So I started lifting weights, turned from a little dough boy into someone who could stand up for himself." He flexed his arm the thudding sounds of Ben crawling through the vents growing more feint.
"As you can tell I went a bit overboard." She let out a stifled chuckle smiling slightly. "Alright, a lot overboard." He over emphasized his words shrugging down his shoulders. "Point is, folks stopped talking so much about how I sounded after that."
"Had more respect for myself, and other people had more respect for me too." He nodded his head slightly. "And these days I aint got any trouble talking my mind." He smiled her direction.
"How'd you like to go topside little one?" He asked after a long moments silence his hand resting down on his helmet. "This place aint any sort of place for a girl like you to grow up."
She hopped off the bed and made her way closer to the glass of the holding cell. She was looking him up and down for a fair amount of time before moving over to the little dresser in the corner of her cell.
She started pulling open drawers and grabbing her things together. Toys mostly, a little rocket ship, a nuka cola truck, and a jangles the moonmonkey to name a few. She also pulled out some changes of clothing and sat them down onto the ground.
"We just gotta wait a bit for Benji to work his magic with the generator." Ted explained tapping his fingers on the top of the helmet. "Then we can head on out of here." He smiled her direction.
"You know, I got a son who's about your age." He pointed her direction. "Haven't seen him in a long, long time." He lowered his hand back down. "He and his mom moved out to Reno to try and start fresh after... well that's not too important."
Ben crawled his way out of the ventilation shaft into a pitch black room. In the center stood a large collection of generators filling the brunt of the room. The air was stale in here, and the thin layer of dust said no one had been in here for some time. On the wall hung pictures of cars, and women, and motorcycles.
On the desk a lone terminal provided the only light outside of Ben's flashlight. He pulled out the swivel chair and sat down looking over the screen. He couldn't help but notice an open pack of smokes just left beside the keyboard, and being a practical man he of course took them and tossed them into a pocket.
"Alright let's see why you didn't turn on when the power went out." Benjamin cracked out his knuckles and got to work. The encryption was serious the terminal locked out behind hexadecimal pass code, it was lucky for him that all the rob co terminals had a handy back door into the admin account for maintenance.
"If you want, maybe you could meet him one of these days" Tedros ran his hand through the back of his slicked down hair. It'd been a long time since he'd even spoken to a kid. Still it was nice talking to her even as a one way conversation. "Could make a playdate out of it."
The fact she was locked up in here was still enough to make his blood boil. How could anyone do this to a child? With the men in the other cages he could at least reason away that they might have been volunteers, or criminals, maybe some twisted mix of the two. But her? No, there was no excuse to run any experiments on a child.
Ben lowered his cigarette down into the ashtray tapping off the excess as he finally broke through security. Gone were the walls of numbers and symbols that covered the screen scrolling their way past, and in its place was an ASCII American flag the words God Bless The USA, and Nowhere Else printed beneath.
Past the main screen were a small collection of files mostly journal entries from maintenance.
He checked over the most recent report for some idea of what had gone wrong with the automated activation procedures.
"To say I'm pissed off would be an understatement. After 11 years, you low lifes let my wife go. I would really like to know why and anyone who knows me these days, knows that I WILL find out. Their half assed excuse was that she wasn't working out. After 11 YEARS? Come on. This old boy is STORMING! You can't even get people to work 40 hours these days and her AVERAGE week was 50 to 60. Needless to say, we WILL be seeing an attorney soon. Thank you. I'd better quit now before I go too far. By the way. The low life who fired her was Alexander Kent. Have fun trying to get the generator running Kent.-Brad"
Ben raised his brow at the journal entry. His hand rose up to his face and rubbed against his forehead. "Great, no really this is great." He went through the other options and one after another kicked back only errors. From the looks the maintenance tech had done a real number on the systems deleting the majority of the safety protocols and encrypting basic functions of the operating system.
Ben could hardly believe it his hand moving down to rest his chin against and dragging his face a bit with it. "No easy way to get this thing running stable again without reprogramming it" Sweat was still running down his face. The whole place was getting hotter by the moment and he didn't have time to reprogram the whole thing.
He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth before opening up a new file. "Might not get it running perfect but I've got an idea." He went about writing a simplistic program, unlike the old one it wouldn't provide any sort of regulation for temperature or maintenance reports, but he didn't need any of that, he only needed the generator to turn on.
So he wrote the program to turn the generator on at 50% capacity and send in hourly tickets to maintenance bots to manually adjust things like coolant and turbine speed. It was a round about method but it was something that could get the thing up and running at least.
As he entered the last line of code into the command prompt and set it to run the generators which filled the room whirred and churned to life. Lights shone down bright as day flickering for a few moments before stabilizing.
The humm of the base filled the air fresh once more. Ben breathed a sigh of relief pushing himself back up from the chair. He took in a deep breath of the cool air, "Alright, something goes right for once." He made his way over to the door, and out into the hallway.
Ted looked up as the lights brightened up overhead, and sparks rain down from the destroyed turrets. The light show was something to see as it started several small fires. He tossed his helmet back on covering over his matted hair once more and made his way over to the control panel.
At this moment the 's rose up from their charging stations and began to hover about the area. It was strange to watch them hovering about with syringe attachments and other medical equipment rolling from one cell to the next. Thinking himself clever Tedros did the logical thing. He followed one of the orderly's around and jammed shut each door they went to forcing them to reopen.
"Beats trying to hack em." He muttered to himself entering into the first room. Strapped to the table the mutated man looked with one eye over at Ted. "Come to laugh at me?"
"No." Ted moved closer undoing one latch at a time as he looked down to the hulking figure.
"I'm getting you out of here." He undid a few more straps the hulking figure slowly setting up on his bed. "All of you." He undid a few more latches and the green giant flung his legs over the side of the bed rising to a stand.
The mutant flexed his hand slowly in and out looking down at himself. "I take it you're not with the military."
"One upon a time I was a Lieutenant colonel, but I was thrown out after a minor... disagreement"
"What kind?" The mutant was dressed in simple rags but he had superhuman muscles that made him look like perhaps one of the worlds strongest men. He walked out of the room and back into the hallway.
"Well see they thought their excess munitions belonged to them" Tedros stepped out of the room and moved into the next cell to release the mutant from his confines. "And I was convinced they belonged on the black market"
"So you're a thief."
"A thief who's currently saving the lives of everyone here." Tedros corrected as he undid the last of the latches on the next mutant. "But if you want you could just stick with thief, aint gonna hurt my feelings none" Spoken with a smile.
By the time Ben made it back down to the FEV vats Ted had already managed to release 12 green skinned mutants from their cells who now stood in the center of the room taking in their surroundings.
"So, we're really doing this huh?" Ben looked from one hulking green giant to the next nodding his head. "You know if the military finds out we let lose." He counted heads. "Thirteen of their little experiments we'll have every agent in the country gunning for us."
"Then we don't let the government find out." Tedros walked forward holding the hand of the little girl, who had a pink backpack filled with her toys and a few changes of clothing hiked up onto her back.
"At the end of this mess when we're rotting in prison I want a different cell." Ben pointed at Ted as he moved back over to the vent, grabbing his briefcase from the wall. "I'm a computer programmer not an abolitionist."
"Face it Benji, we're going to end up in prison eventually, might as well do some good before they lock us up." He paused a moment. "Besides if things go well maybe we'll have the papers on our side."
"I think it's time to leave." One of the mutants spoke up stepping forward. Beneath his feet he crushed the skull of an assaultron grinding it beneath his girth.
The group now fifteen strong made their way through the facility. It was slow going but eventually they made their way back into the upper floors, the papermill.
Everything was deathly silent save for the slap of the mutants bare feet on the tiled floors of the mill. A cold wind blew its way through the group chilling them to the bone.
A plane had managed to crash its way into the side of the mill revealing the blinding light of day through the hole it had made. Rubble fell slowly crumbling to the floor the pilots dead on impact. One thrown clear through the windshield now laying spread eagle across a broken desk.
As they look through the windows of the first floor the devastation began to sink in. Many of the buildings had been completely reduced to little more then rubble. The wings carried with them a harsh dust that coated their surroundings.
"Son of a bitch." Ted started looking out across the carnage. "With everything that's been going on I almost forgot about the bombing."
Ben walked over to the fallen pilot and patted him down collecting a few bullets and his revolver. He tossed the gun over to one of the nearby mutants. "In case any of them are still around we'd do best to arm ourselves." He took one last drag from his cigarette before dropping it to the ground stomping it out with his feet.
"Might not be the worst idea for some of us to go back down and grab what we can from the armory." Ted added looking over towards the mutants behind him. "Go down the stairs to the server room and at the end of the hall you should find a red door labled armory, grab what you can." Five of the men walked right back down the hall towards the stairs heading themselves down into the depths.
"You know Ted, be a bit hard to explain a group of twelve burly men with rifles if we run into any cops."
"I'd rather explain to the cops then be put against a wall by the reds."
One of the mutants took time to climb partially up the side of the crashed plane. He held one hand to his forehead to block out some of the light. "The devastation goes on for miles." He looked back down towards the group. "Do you think anyone survived?"
"That's a harder question then it looks on the surface." Ted made his way into the main lobby of the building. The little girl clung to his waste close her eyes closed. He took the time to pull a few bills from his vest and slide them into the machine. "Hey, how'd you like something to drink?"
A smile crossed his face as he matted down her hair with his hand. "I'm feeling like a sass." He slid the bill into the machine making his selection.
Ben pulled his pack out from his pocket and offered smokes around to the mutants. To his surprise everyone took one for themselves. He brought out the lighter and lit up for each of the burly... men? Women? It was honestly real hard to tell what gender any of them were with all the mutations.
"Well fuck." He muttered to himself as he walked over to the main doors which had been blown off their hinges. "This is worse then I thought it'd be." He took a drag from his cigarette, looking down at his boots as his hand gripped tight onto the briefcase.
"Jenny." He looked up to the blue skies. "Please be out there." He paused. "Please be safe."