In the Afterlight - Bracken Alexandra (онлайн книги бесплатно полные TXT) 📗
“We’re in—prepare for action,” I said. “Two PSFs positioned at your door, two more coming around the back.”
“Silent and fast,” Cole reminded us. “Ten minutes starts now.”
A fifth approached the driver’s window, calling out a, “Mornin’ Frank!”
I pushed the image of Frank rolling down the window into his mind, leaned over him, and, before the PSF’s eyes could so much as widen, had my gun pointed directly at his face. He was young, around Cate’s age, maybe. At the sight of me, he lost the easy smile on his face. His whole body pulled back in alarm, and he reached for his rifle.
“What the fu—”
“Hands where I can see them.” I couldn’t control Frank and the PSF at the same time, and Gonzo and Ollie eliminated my need to. One of them cracked him on the back of his skull with the butt of his own rifle, and the other had him facedown in the dirt, gagged and secured with zip ties. He was hauled behind the truck, where four other limp forms were already propped up.
I knew some of the kids hadn’t understood why we’d run through this so many times, but I think, now that we were here, they saw the answer in how smoothly we assembled into formation. The real benefit of simulations was to train your nerves to behave, to make something like this feel as normal as waking up and walking to the showers each morning. It seemed to have worked—even as we approached the door the PSFs had left open and quietly stepped inside of the building, the group felt as steady as stone to me. We certainly looked menacing enough, dressed in all black and wearing ski masks.
The hall was dark, but a stream of light spilled out of one of the rooms—the third one down on the right. I felt myself pause. The smell of bleach tinged with lemon, shoe polish, and human odor gripped me in a stranglehold. Some part of me recognized that it made sense for this camp to smell almost exactly like the Infirmary in Thurmond. Why wouldn’t they use the same military-ordered cleaning supplies? But more than anything, it rubbed up against my nerves.
Gav stepped into place, kneeling down and aiming as the others crept forward. Voices trickled down the tile from the open door I’d spotted before. I waved the kids forward and crept along the wall with them until Zach grabbed my arm and pointed to the door marked CR. Control Room. That was our cue.
As we ducked out of formation, I cast one look back into the open room—four PSFs were sitting around the table, uniform jackets slung onto a nearby couch and the backs of their chairs as they laughed and smoked, dealing cards around a cramped table. As Gav and Gonzo filled the doorway I saw one look up and then look again, diving for a weapon he never reached. The Blues upended their table, threw the PSFs against the wall, and silenced them before they could gasp out a warning over their radios.
That made nine. Nico had reviewed the footage from Pat and Tommy repeatedly, counting the different faces in uniform he saw. Two camp controllers, thirteen PSFs. Fifteen targets total.
Zach and I pressed ourselves against the wall, and I reached out and knocked against the Control Room door.
“Enter,” a voice called. It was a good thing we hadn’t tried to charge it—the thing was locked from the inside. I heard a buzz and then a click, and Zach didn’t waste a moment before pushing it open with his shoulder.
Inside there were two young women, both in black button-down shirts and slacks. The room was a wall of monitors that kissed up against a row of computers. Most of the screens were set on a series of bunks and the children sleeping in them, but they switched over to the hall, to the outside area, the recreational room across the way as we stepped inside. The one who was monitoring the screens dropped her mug of coffee down her front when she spotted what was happening across the wall. The other, standing in front of some kind of panel of switches and dials, turned and let out a small scream when she saw us. Zach had her pressed up against the ceiling with his abilities a full second after I was already in the other camp controller’s mind.
An avalanche of faces, sounds, colors, landscapes streamed through my mind, thundering down over me. I searched for the relevant ones, information about how they reported in statuses, the timing of it, as Zach brought the other screaming woman down, gagged her with cloth, and zip-tied her safely away from the controls to one of the pipes running along the far-right wall.
“Done!” he called. “We have eight minutes. Erasing camera footage.” Nico had shown him how to set the footage back, to loop through already recorded images, making an educated guess about the programs they used. It must have been close to reality, because Zach punched a fist in the air when he was done.
“Get the rooms unlocked upstairs,” I told him, pointing to the nearest computer. “Password is capital P, capital S, capital F, one, three, nine, three, eight, exclamation mark, asterisk. Did you get that?”
“Affirmative.” He relayed the next part to the rest of the team who were, hopefully, already heading up the stairs. “Unlocking doors.”
I brought up the memory of the woman sitting at one of the computers, the message she’d relayed to the PSF system—exactly how I wanted her to do it now, and then again in another two hours. When I pulled back, I took away her memories of Zach and I entering. She simply nodded and went about her business, standing in front of the monitors, her eyes unseeing, her face a blank slate.
“Control is out of play, over,” I said.
“Roger that,” came Cole’s relieved reply. “Proceed upstairs with the others.”
Zach hit the button beside the door, unlocking it, and stepped out. I was right behind him when he jumped back, raised his gun and aimed—
“It’s me,” came a familiar voice. “It’s me, don’t shoot—”
Disbelief, dumb and mute disbelief, stole over me as I confirmed who was standing at the other end of Zach’s rifle.
Liam.
“What the hell, man?” Zach shouted, throwing a furious punch toward him. “Jesus, I almost shot you!”
I hadn’t moved. It didn’t make sense—it wasn’t him, he had gone to find Olivia. He wouldn’t have come in after us, he couldn’t have been so stupid, not Liam, not Liam—
I was so fixated on his face as I yanked my ski mask up and over mine that I didn’t see the red-haired woman behind him, wild curls tumbling around her long-sleeved black shirt. She wore black jeans and boots, but I didn’t get a clear image of her face until she lowered the camera that was clicking wildly, capturing everything around her.
“Who,” I heard myself say in a low, furious voice, “the hell is this?”
“Status?” Cole asked. “Gem—status?”
Liam matched my stony look with one of his own. “This is Alice, from Amplify.”
“Dude,” Zach said, shaking his head. “Dude, this is crazy—”
Alice looked young, late twenties, maybe, but a clean face free of makeup made her appear only a few years older than the rest of us. She was taller than Liam, slender, but strong enough to haul a backpack that looked like it weighed twice as much as she did.
“Nice to meet you,” she said. “Wow, this is...wild.”
Liam wasn’t looking at me for my approval, just my reaction. All at once, adrenaline kicked back into my system, throwing me into action. Accept, adapt, act. I pressed a finger to my earpiece, cutting off Cole’s request for status, and turned toward the staircase at the end of the hall.
“Liam is here,” I told him. “With a reporter from Amplify.”
Static trickled over the line. Zach shot me an uncomfortable look as we hit the stairs, as if he, too, were picturing Cole’s reaction to this.
Finally, he answered, “Say again.”
I repeated the information to him again as we rounded the corner of the stairs and came through the door that the team had left propped open.
The strange, familiar smell I’d breathed in on the way up finally had an explanation as we burst through the doors: the gagged and bound soldiers were secured against the same wall they’d been using to stencil and paint a message: OBEDIENCE CORRECTS DEVIANCE.
