Page 80 of Night in a Waste Land

“Holy shit,” Gavin breathed, joining them.

The chain slithered through the door handles and hit the ground. Beck gripped one handle, andtugged– Rose heard the lock give with a grind, and a squeal, and the door opened, a steamy, botanical scent rolling out to greet them.

Beck opened the door wide with a gallant motion. “Ladies first.”

Lance barred her way with a hand – Beck grinned in amusement – and swept in first. Rose followed.

The ground floor housed generators and servers: the electrical and mechanical guts of the hydroponic greenhouses above.

“Should we take the stairs?” Gallo asked.

“No.” The door crashed shut behind Beck. “The elevator is more practical.”

“They’ll know we’re coming, then,” Lance pointed out.

“They already know. Why tire yourselves climbing twelve stories?”

They piled in the elevator, Beck’s wings carefully folded, though it was still a tight squeeze.

Rose leaned forward and ran her hand down the button panel, lighting all of them up. “They won’t know which floor we get off on,” she reasoned.

Beck chuckled. “Clever as ever.”

Lance muttered something she couldn’t make out.

The glided up smoothly, the elevator as well-maintained as everything else in the building. It came to a polite halt on floor two, on three, on four…Each time, the doors slid apart to reveal wide, open spaces bathed in blue and purple UV light, the air swirling with mist, plants hanging from the ceiling, white roots trailing down toward the floor like balloon strings at a party. Row after row after row.

When they stopped on the eighth floor, Beck said, “Let’s get off here.”

The misters were actively going, angled jets spraying the exposed roots of the bean and squash and lettuce plants dangling from racks attached to the ceiling. Visibility was low. The drone of the UV bulbs and the hiss of the misters beat down all other sound. Rose couldn’t hear her own footfalls, or the creak of her gear as she advanced slowly down a row, knives drawn, already beading with moisture. She didn’t want to start firing rounds like crazy in here: for the noise, yes, but also because she didn’t know where the pressurized tanks were for the misters, and hitting one with a stray round would be a very bad idea.

Lance was behind her, crowding her, really. She didn’t see Beck. Glimpsed Tris as only a shadow on the next row.

“Why are we here?” Lance hissed behind her. “Why this floor?”

The answer came boiling out of the mist in front of them: a thick-necked guard all in black, gun catching the light as it fell toward them.

Rose lunged forward, low and fast, and surged up, quicker than the guard had expected. She got inside his guard, inside the reach of his big arms, and she saw a fast, white flash of startled eyes before she drove her knife up to the hilt into the soft flesh below his chin.

She had to twist her wrist to pull it out as he toppled backward, spluttering and dying. His gun clattered to the floor.

Around her, she heard grunts and impacts. A shout somewhere farther ahead.

She turned to find Lance grappling with another guard, just in time to see Lance get a grip on his jaw and snap his neck. He let go, and the body fell with a heavy thud. When Lance turned, her eyes went straight to the shiny patch down low on his jacket, below the reach of his Kevlar.

The dead man held a knife dark with blood.

“You got stabbed,” she said, reaching for him, flooded with horror.

“Bastard got the drop on me. I’m fine, it’s fine.” He gripped her shoulders and spun her back around, but not before she saw the lines of pain etched in his face. “Keep moving.”

She swallowed down a surge of fear-sickness – fear for him, for the damage, fear she couldn’t allow herself right now, in the thick of things – and pressed onward, knives at the ready.

She expected to encounter more guards, all down the long length of the row, roots catching at their elbows, trailing over their shoulders. But they didn’t, and when they reached the end of the row, and the open lab space there, she realized why.

Beck stood amid a tableau of bodies. Seven, she counted quickly, all heavy, black-clad hired muscle. All dead. One’s head looked to be on backward, and a black tide of blood was rapidly spreading from beneath the twist of limbs and newly-slack faces. Eyes stared sightless; fingers twitched open around unused weapons.

He turned to them, flicked blood delicately off one claw – it landed in a scatter of droplets on the pale tile – and said, “Well, that takes care of at least most of our welcoming committee, I imagine.”

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