Nine Swords

Wes scrunched his face at the odd texts. He knew he wasn't in on the latest developments, but he was pretty sure she shouldn't be going to daddy's shop. Wasn't that where the thingum was? Frowning as the pretty woman in red strolled past, Wes had the odd urge to sniff her.

"I will be so glad once the full moon is over..." he growled to himself.

Maybe Jenn had been right and he should lock himself in the lab for the remainder. Still, it wasn't like he was piddling in people's shoes, right? But...if Jenn was at the lab...
As an afterthought, he sent a message to Tom.
Wes dug thru his pockets trying to find her card. Where was that place again? He checked his trusty phone and pulled up Google maps. He found it easily enough though he was dubious about the shortest route taking him to Manchester first. On impulse he set off, waiting for a return text.

Jenn pressed her thumb to the pad by the door, stared into the optical scanner and murmured the voice code sequence quietly, as if anyone in this long, dark, completely empty hallway would hear her.

She didn't know why empty buildings gave her such nerves. It was like someone had come in and just whisked all the people away, leaving the place somehow fundamentally... wrong.

The door to her father's main lab hissed open, without filling the corridor with a solid block of anima-fueled lightning. She'd clearly gotten the security sequence right. The lights flashed on in the room, blinding her temporarily. It was very bright, and very white and metallic in there. As she stepped in, the door hissed shut behind her.

Things were exactly as she and Tom had left them when they'd staggered out weeks ago and tumbled into the car he'd called for them. The walls were still covered with racks carrying anima weapons of every sort. This was the only lab in Edwards where you could find blades as well as firearms. Her father worked with everything for his gifted clients, except the purely magical foci. He had an engineer's aversion to the purely magical. If he couldn't shove it in a circuit, he wasn't about to mess with it in his lab.

The metal workbenches that lined the walls held various scanning and calibration equipment, tools in neat racks and drawers, computer consoles, and one ancient, purportedly Egyptian, box. A small casket about a foot and a half long and a foot wide, a foot tall. Unprepossessing.... it just sat there... next to an abandoned pistol that had just been flung on the counter next to it.

Jenn glanced at the floor automatically. There was no blood left, of course. She'd used every drop in the room to try to keep herself alive... keep them both alive. She shook her head. “So not thinking about that.” She spoke to the empty room.

Without noticing the intercom light blinking to tell her she had a message, or in this case, a visitor, Jenn moved to pull a digital camera down on its swing-arm and position it near the box before firing up one of the terminals.

She stopped, looking around. She swore she'd heard whispers. Fecking empty buildings messed with your head. She went back to positioning the camera, only to jump out of her skin... really, she expected to look down and see a skin just laying on the floor... when her phone buzzed across the room in her bag.

“Going to break this one too... so help me.” She went and retrieved the phone and read Wes' text.
She stared at her phone and then whacked it against her hip a few times, on the grounds that if something doesn't work, you hit it a few times. The text read the same... with punctuation inserted randomly over words.

She texted back:
Shaking her head, she went back to move the box so she could start scans of the first side.

****************

In the dark hallway, some light from the single working lab now filtered out through the fogged plexiglass strip near the ceiling...the only 'window' to that one, most secure lab. With the light came whispers, slithering and echoing down the dim hallway, past windows into other labs containing rocket launchers, flame throwers, rifles, warheads...

Tom pulled out his phone after it buzzed in his pocket. He flipped down the text messaging app and read the message.
He stared at the phone for a minute. Clearly something was messed up. Well, he was underground, the security was probably messing with his reception or something. Still, Tom thought the text might be just a bit inappropriate. He stuffed the phone back in his pocket and continued down the hall, looking into each lab as he passed.

Light flooded the hallway from somewhere, and Tom briefly put a hand up to block the source and let his eyes adjust. "Jenn?" He called again, shifting the shotgun into a better spot on his back so that he could hustle down the hallway towards the light. He stopped dead at the keypad, staring at it for a while. "Fuck it," he muttered, instead just rearing back and kicking the door with a boot so that it gave a good hearty thump.

After receiving Jenn's text, one thing was clear. And it was this, nothing was clear. Given that, he made his best pace for Edwards Arms.

Upon arrival, and looking even more wretched than before, he stepped to the desk. After wiping the worst of the rain from his face, he asked the guard if Ms. Edwards was present.

"And who might you be sir?" the guard glanced at him with mild reproach.

"Wes. Wes Farnham. I am uh.. a friend of hers?" the statement sounded oddly like a question.

"Right. Well we shall see if Ms. Edwards is here, shall we?" the guard responded and tapped a few keys before speaking quietly into the phone.

Pat had just sat down in his office and fished his ham and cheese out of his lunchbox when his phone shrilled at him. It was usually so quiet at Edwards after most of the research staff went home. What had he done to deserve tonight?

He reached forward and hit the phone speaker, getting salad cream on the button. He set his sandwich down, barked, “What?” and started dabbing at the speaker button with his napkin... turning the speakers on and off and on and...

“Boss, there's... says... Farnham. …for Ms. Je... shoot him?”

“Oh for the love of. No, don't shoot him. Ask him what labels he wants on the bar for the suite we're setting up for him. I'll page Miss Jennison.”

Pat pushed his sandwich away, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and keyed the intercom button to the main lab.

“Jenn, did Jackson make it down to you? Farnham's on the way now. Odd place for a party. Want me to have the bar sent down to you instead?”

____________________________________________________________

Jenn was walking slowly toward the door when the intercom went off.

“Jenn, did Jackson....”

She spun toward it and squeezed, without thinking. HsssssssssssTHWAM. The remains of the speaker crackled in protest, spitting out violet sparks.

The fact that she'd just murdered her own communication system sunk in fairly quickly. “Oh for feckin'...” She lowered the rifle. “He said Jackson...”

She walked to the lab door and hit the release button. The door hissed back and she peered out into the darkness, framed in a square of brilliant light from the lab...rifle aimed out at about chest level. “Tom?”

______________________________________________________________________________________

Pat jumped when the feedback squealed back through his phone speaker. He reached for his service pistol impulsively, landing his other elbow in his sandwich with a dull squish.

A glance at his monitor told him that the intercom was offline in the main lab. Security was strictly cautioned not to go to sub-level three now, except in a confirmed emergency. So... confirm it... There -was- a list of people who could go down to sub-level three. Pat pulled the list up and checked the picture for Wesley Farnham before he went out quickly to the front desk.

“Mr. Farnham, sir? Jennison's intercom just went offline. If you're going down there, could you check on her and Mr. Jackson?” He reached into the front desk man's pocket and handed Wes his closed comm unit. Just pop it over your ear there and you'll be able to get us.

“Get -you-,” the desk guard muttered as his equipment was handed off to the 'civilian'.

Pat shot him a quelling look. “Sub-level three, sir. Elevator just down the hall there. I'll unlock it for you. Did you have a favorite Scotch, by the by?”

Wes popped the earpiece into place, feeling like a very moist Secret Service Agent...or MI 5 in this case. As he was ushered to the elevator and finally looked around at Jenn's father's place, he shrugged adding, "Glenfiddich, 30? No need to fuss. Just the bottle without the oak cask is fine..."

Wes boarded the elevator and blinked as the sound system played a Muzak version of Fade to Black by Metallica. Sometimes he wondered if he was just a character in some video game and people were purposely messing with him. Shaking his head he snapped out of that bit of non-sense.

When the door opened with a faint 'ting' sound. He glanced out into the dimly lit hallway.

"Uh, this is agen...er... Wes. Um, over?" he spoke into the microphone. "I have arrived on sub floor three. I don't see Je...er.. Ms. Edwards or Mr. Jackson, but there is some light ahead...going to investigate, uh... over and out."

Tom frowned, bringing up a finger to lightly push the barrel of the rifle to the side. "As much as you want to shoot me sometimes, I don't think now is the time." He said, sidling to the side of the rifle and stepping around Jenn into the room. "I got your note, everything looks pretty fine here." He looked around the room, then pointed to the intercom. "Except maybe that, looks like it's been tampered with pretty heavily. Not sure why thieves would tamper with an intercom though."

Tom set his hand on Jenn's upper arm, "You alright? I wasn't sure from the note you left, and you seem a bit... jumpy." He shifted the shotgun strap again on his shoulder. Clearly he was uneasy himself. Then again, guns hadn't seemed to be much use against the thing anyway, so maybe he should just take them off. He slipped the shotgun off his shoulder and slid it across the room, pistols shortly following suit.

Jenn relaxed as the familiar figure eased by her into the lab and gave his assessment. Tom never let on that much of anything ruffled his feathers, and that tended to have a reassuring, calming effect on her. Much needed at this point, since she had just...

“I shot the intercom.” She was about to explain more, as she watched him disarm and went to set her own rifle down, when something caught her attention. Just before the door hissed shut...she'd been sure she'd heard something moving down the hall.

“Did you hear that?” She tugged the rifle back up and and headed back to the door access panel.

The box lay on its side on the workbench.

In the corridor outside, voices whispered at Wes, just faint enough to be unintelligible.

Wes glanced around and headed for the light. Something dimly told him it was -bad- to go into the light, but then again standing about in a dim corridor wasn't his idea of a nice evening either. He had played too much DOOM and F.E.A.R. in his day to stand idly by in the dark in an abandoned super weapon facility.

"Jenn? Tom? Big monster with ichor dripping from hideous fangs? Anyone?" Wes called out.

He cautiously stepped through the doorway in front of him...

The hairs on the back of Tom's neck stood up again as he stared at the busted intercom. It seems Jenn's luck with phones translated to all forms of long distance communication. He wasn't worried about that though, he had heard the whispers as well, and being in the same room with the box was making him feel really antsy. He tried to rationalize it away. "It's probably some residual effect of you busting the intercom. One of the boxes is probably squawking away in one of the other rooms down the hall."

Tom was glad he had disarmed, or he probably would have pointed a gun at Wes as he stepped through. "Oh hay, you're not a little black-haired girl in a red dress at all. That's strangely comforting." He turned back to where the box lay on the bench. "Seems like a party, but at least the box looks to be undisturbed."