Chapter 13: Chapter twelve

Present day

 

Fredrich was on monitor duty that evening, which he hated. It involved sitting down for hours on end and trying to remain focused on the scenes before him. He watched Sully pass through one of the monitors showing a feed from the third floor, and envied him the patrol round. Then at least Fredrich could move, have his thoughts to himself. He’d never been much good at sitting still. Always wanted to be on to the next thing. When he was at school that had been the military. When he had been in the military, that had been private security. Now that he was in private security, he wasn’t sure where he wanted to be, but he sure this wasn’t it. Working in the private industry wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The pay was good, and MegaSat had an excellent benefits package, but the security was good enough that nobody ever bothered to break in, so his job felt more than a little pointless.

Fredrich leaned back in his chair and stretched, his joints popping as he did so. He wasn’t a particularly large man, but the chair still felt too small. Stifling, constraining him. He wanted to get up and move.

On one of the monitors, a fixed-position camera on the fifth floor, a shadow seemed to detach itself from the wall and slide across the screen.

Fredrich blinked. That couldn’t be right. Shadows didn’t move by themselves, and no one could get all the way to the fifth floor without being spotted on the cameras, not to mention getting past a dozen iris and fingerprint scanners and half a hundred motion sensors. Even so, he was paid to be paranoid, to not ignore anything regardless of how likely it was that his eyes were just tired from staring at a computer screens for too long.

He pressed a button that opened a line to the earpiece of every guard in the building. “Might have seen something on floor five. Jenkins, Parsons, go check it out.”

The confirmation from both men came back, and Fredrich switched more of the feeds to show floor five, rather than cycling through as normal. He kept about half cycling through, just in case what he had seen was some kind of diversionary tactic.

He saw nothing. There was no movement on any of the screens in front of him. Which meant there was almost certainly no one on the fifth floor. Even if someone knew the positions of the cameras, which was unlikely, they would still be near impossible to avoid as they covered almost every inch of the place.

Jenkins, his round taking him through the fourth floor, reached the fifth first, and held position at one entrance. Parsons came in the only other entrance and, as they had been trained, they began their sweep, clearing room by room and leaving any intruders with no place to hide. The only option, if indeed there was an intruder, would be for them to fight their way out, and MegaSat hired only ex-military types to be their security and outfitted them with guns and body armour. That wasn’t a fight anyone would want to have.

Jenkins disappeared for a moment from Fredrich’s monitors as he stepped into one of the cameras’ few blind spots. He should reappear in about two seconds.

He didn’t reappear. The seconds ticked by, and Fredrich still couldn’t see him.

Something heavy and cold settled into Fredrich’s stomach.

“Jenkins. Respond,” Fredrich said, patching into only Jenkins’ earpiece.

Jenkins did not respond.

You are reading story Oblivion at novel35.com

“Parsons,” Fredrich said, his voice sounding higher than it should have. “I can’t see Jenkins. He disappeared in the blind spot by data hub B.”

“Going there now,” Parsons responded. He seemed to move more warily now, no longer thinking this was just the paranoia of a bored guard on monitor duty.

“Possible situation on floor five,” Fredrich said to all the guards. “Converge on data hub B.”

Confirmations came from all remaining guards and Fredrich turned his attention back to Parsons, dialling nine-one-one as he did so. Parsons came down the hall to the datahub, then stopped and spoke into his com. “I see Jenkins, he is down but looks to be breathing. No sign of an intruder.”

“Confirmed,” Fredrich said absently as he spoke to a police dispatcher on his phone. “Hold position. Reinforcements incoming.”

“Confirmed,” Parsons said. Then something else moved on the monitor with him. It was shaped like a man, but Fredrich couldn’t believe a man could move so swiftly, so smoothly. The thing didn’t move like a living thing with joints that ached and feet that slipped. It moved like the edge of a knife, like a bullet, like something made for deadly efficiency. The thing-that-couldn’t-be-a-man hit Parsons and kept moving. Parsons barely had time to register that the thing existed, let alone aim his weapon at it. Then he was down and he gave no response.

The thing flashed through several of the other monitors. Not as many as it should, not by half, but some. Fredrich rewound the feed on one of them and played it through frame by frame, getting a better look at the thing.

It was a man after all, for what else could it be. A man wearing all black. But still Fredrich had trouble believing what he was seeing was a human. The expression was too blank, the movements too precise. Fredrich had never been a superstitious man, though his mother believed in all sorts of baloney from alien abductions to bigfoot. Looking at the frozen image of that man on one of his monitors, Fredrich began to wonder if she might be onto something. If perhaps there was something not human living among them. Something greater and far more terrible.

Fredrich resolved then to quit his job.

 

 

The man in black left MegaSat disappointed. He had the information he came for, but he had been forced to incapacitate two security guards who were just doing their job and been spotted on several cameras. It was, all things considered, a poor performance. If he had had a proper support team, he would have known when the monitor feeds were cycled away from his position and been able to move from blind spot to blind spot with ease. As it was he had to rely on guesswork and luck to get through the places where he was forced to move through a camera feed. Still, that was no excuse. Mistakes like that would draw the attention of Smythe eventually, and he couldn’t afford that.

Not yet anyway.

You can find story with these keywords: Oblivion, Read Oblivion, Oblivion novel, Oblivion book, Oblivion story, Oblivion full, Oblivion Latest Chapter