Linkin Park WiP
So for the longest time, I let this piece sit and gather dust on my hard drive. Tonight I pulled it back out again and got rid of a big chunk of the story cause it didn't make sense, and there was no way salvaging those parts. It's a work in progress, and it's slow going, but I did change things around a bit (and I changed the title) and wanted some feedback. Be honest: would you ever read this kind of story? Regardless that it's Linkin Park - if it were any other fandom, would you read it? Should I just put this back on the shelf to gather dust?
2012
Sixteen floors underneath the sidewalk wound a staircase of steel, spiraling up to the surface like a double-helix, the zenith a white circle of light that promised life like the goodly dead were promised the light of heaven. Chester’s worn boots crunched on shards of glass and scraps of tin foil, waste that gathered on the cold floor from the population above, and grinned sardonically. How ironic such a comparison it was.
Chester knew for a fact that if there was a God, he would’ve stopped things from spiraling out of control long ago. How could he not? Humanity was nothing more now than the detritus left over from too long a struggle with powers beyond its control. Chester, like the rest of the few who were still free and fighting, was alone.
He had gotten used to the cold and isolated feeling years ago, but it still didn’t make things any easier. Every day he was tempted to climb up those stairs and surrender, to stop fighting and struggling and give himself over to a life where he didn’t have to think, where all the thinking would be done for him and he’d only feel a white void of calm. But he couldn’t, no matter how many times or hard he tried, he failed to make it up past the first few rungs of the staircase.
Secretly, he was grateful for the impediment.
He felt like a hollowed out husk, a corpse walking for the sole purpose of feeling alive again. Pretend was fifty percent of it. Hope seemed to be like that north star, pointing to him the way home, but he never could quite follow it, unsure if where he was going was true north because the universe was so vast and he was so incredibly alone and lost.
That’s why I’m fighting, he reminded himself, a twinge of anger needling him back to rational thinking and away from despair. Fighting for my freedom is the only true direction that I know to take.
Being down there, in the cold and the grit and the dank dark, was a decision that he had made and will not abandon. He hadn’t been fighting for years for nothing. Quitting was something he shied away from, but it was also such a sweet temptation. No more blood, no more dirt under his nails from crawling with his belly to the floor. But you’re not like the people up there, he thought, and it reined him back in again, brought air back into his brain. You stopped considering yourself a part of humanity when the clones were first revealed nationwide. You couldn’t end up like the subjects; you refused to be used like a lab rat.
Besides, Chester thought, they took Mike. Isn’t that enough reason to fight?
Chester remembered the shock and immediate terror that had made bile rise in the back of his throat, meaty and thick and sour at the same time, when Mike’s clone had stared him in the eye and raised a gun to Chester’s head.
* * *
2008
It was smoke and mirrors – everything – and Chester had finally understood that Mike was a stranger to him. More like accepted. If he were honest with himself, he’d admit that he had known Mike was lost for some time already.
Rain pelted California’s sidewalks and smothered the buildings that had just exploded, leaving trails of black smoke to billow in the slight breeze. Chester had never seen anything like it, as if the whole world had caught on fire and the apocalypse had come, like Nostradamus was actually more than just far-fetched prophecies for the New Age.
In any other life, at any other time, Chester might’ve laughed at the absurdity of it all. It wasn’t too amusing at the moment, though. Not even on his wide-screen TV.
Then several things happened in rapid succession.
Helicopters flew in overhead, the whirring of their propellers entirely too loud, and Chester scrambled outside to catch a glimpse of the mayhem. At this point his thoughts weren’t anywhere near thinking about Mike, his mind faceted on the war that seemed to have erupted in front of his eyes. He ran down the street, zipping past local news vans already parked on the curb, dodging microphones and shoving foreign bodies out of his way, all the while feeling like he should be pleading insanity. What he hell was going on?
He stopped abruptly a safe distance away from the debris that used to be a bank and a small shopping outlet, and tried to catch his breath. His heart was pumping in sporadic little bursts, and if he wasn't careful, he’d end up passing out, he was sure. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing as a sudden lurching of terror wrapped an icy grip around his stomach.
Before, the idea of mass destruction was just a thing he witnessed on television with third world countries, or epic war movies that were based on events that had happened way before his time.
Crumbling before him now were buildings razed from fire dropped out of the sky, but for what purpose, Chester had no clue.
He turned, only slightly, unaware that he had been followed, and Mike’s face stared back at him, entirely too close.
“Mike?”
Mike didn’t look pleased; Chester wasn’t sure how to describe his expression. Perhaps cold was the fitting word. Detached.
“I’m sorry it had to come to this,” Mike said, and Chester really did feel like he was in a Hitchcock film when his best friend raised a gun to his head, barrel aimed right between Chester’s eyes. In a fit of panic, he imagined the bullet shattering the bridge of his glasses, cracking the lenses into spider-like webs, and the clear, white void that would come after. He imagined it all too easily.
Maybe it was just dumb luck that the next bomb to hit smashed into the nearest news van. The van exploded into a fire-eaten carcass, flames and heat dancing dangerously close to Chester’s skin.
Chester took the advantage of a moment’s distraction and swung his fist blindly, taking Mike by surprise as his former friend went sprawling down into the ground. He was running on pure adrenaline, pumping through his veins like molten-hot lava, and it felt good. Liberating, almost, although he didn’t know why.
Chester shook off the sudden, throbbing pain in his hand – and vaguely somewhere in his chest – and ran like hell through the maze of cars, vans, and journalists’ voices that blurred into one constant pounding that reverberated inside his head.
Get out, it said. Get away.
* * *
2012
“I wasn’t gone long, was I?” Chester asked as he turned a sharp, dark corner and spotted two of his men crouching in the darkness, machine guns held to their chests like life preservers, as if they might drown in a pool of their own blood at any moment. Chester didn’t think such a thing was impossible.
Brad pushed his cap back and wiped his arm over his forehead, the silver bands of a life long gone on his wrists clinking in the quiet of the underground. “Ten minutes or so. I’ll scout the area again in a little while.”
“No need. It’s like a ghost today—so quiet. We should be glad Hahn’s clones aren’t popping out of the woodwork.” Chester sighed and leaned against the opposite wall, adjusting his thigh holster. It was shabby and starting to unravel at the seams. Four years of wear and tear will do that.
“Where’s that supply of ammo you promised we’d get?” Phoenix had an unhealthy amount of paranoia, and Chester discovered that keeping his men well-armed and full of ammunition served as a security blanket for the uneasy and skitter-ish man.
“Have patience. They should be in by tomorrow, or they’re gonna have to give us a free box next time.” Chester reassured him with a grin, and Phoenix visibly relaxed, sitting his weight down fully on the chilly floor and giving his legs the luxury to stretch out before him.
Boxes full of various munitions had been delivered every five days or so from other subterranean networks. Lately, they were down to one box every time until the next shipment would arrive, so that had to mean something, though Chester wasn’t sure if that meant their enemies were multiplying or if the good guys were using more ammo and winning. Maybe a little bit of both.
And he thought, yeah, the former might be a little scary. A lot scary.
He didn’t care to die a martyr, because to be frank, Chester could care less whether the rest of the world revered or reviled him. He just wanted to make certain Joseph Hahn, leader of the so-called Cloning Revolution, got to see Chester’s smiling face before he died. It was one of those sick things Chester liked to play over and over in his head at 3 o’clock in the morning, the time when most people die, as he slept on the cold, dirty floor while listening to the rodents scurry on small, clicking feet.
Sometimes, he subconsciously replaced Hahn with Mike in his head, Mike for betraying him, for volunteering to become a test subject, and he dreamed of splitting that pretty face in two, or shooting bullets that ripped through his chest and spiraled out the other side trailing blood like debris. And those times, Chester always woke up with cold sweat matting his shirt to his skin, adrenaline pounding in him, pouring out of him in waves.
The dreams were always profound and vivid. Scary as hell, but it kept him sane. It kept him on his toes, the reminder that one day, if he succeeded, if his men survived and they resurfaced again, he might meet Mike one last time, and he might be able to pull the trigger if everything else failed. If their relationship couldn’t be salvaged, and Mike couldn’t be saved. He would rather Mike die than see him live caged in his own mind, helpless, where he knew the real Mike was being forced to stay. Locked away.
Selfish of him to think only of Mike and himself, but being in the circle of Mike’s arms was the only time he could honestly recall feeling a sense of peace. Peace was such an unfathomable concept, now. The world was lost, anyway. If he could save Mike, it would be enough for Chester to die happy.
Because death was inevitable, wasn’t it? Their resources were diminishing, and the instances of hunger were increasing in length. They had to save as much food as possible, deal out meager rations. It was the only way to make it last. War made even the most sated people hungry, running on tired legs and crawling on scratched up hands, made them want to fill themselves with something because it felt like a part of them had been torn away so that they always carried a hole inside.
War was something real, had been for years, and it flowed in his veins like blood. Chester had forgotten what it felt like not to be hunted, or to be hunting. He knew that he wasn’t all that important in the grand scheme of the Rebellion, that his men were merely field operatives who set things into action, but he also knew it was one of the most dangerous positions to be in.
Their strategy team was a different story. A three-man work crew up in level 2 beneath the heart of old downtown, composed of two blond-haired men named Timberlake and Lance and a brunette named J.C. The three would send an errand boy down occasionally to Chester with information and tactical maps of the latest major cloning activities aboveground. Chester would then pass the information on to a handful of men higher up in rank who would make the decision as to whether or not people like Chester and his men should be sent out into the field to attempt to take over certain facilities. This was usually not the case, since two of three times, the men dismissed the information as useless and a take-over impossible.
Chester’s microscopic group worked best when seizing and destroying places of significance to cloning technology and advancement labs, storage buildings that had Joseph Hahn’s sticky fingerprints all over them. It was a difficult task, like all field-work, but made even more so because Chester had only Brad and Phoenix to watch his back. The tactical and strategists had it easy, staying relatively out of the line of fire.
He saw them once when they first went underground. They’d been dragging in two prisoners to the lab for alteration and reversal of the drone-process, and they had looked a little too young and a little too pretty to survive. Even so, it was evident then that Timberlake had spirit, that J.C. had promise in his eyes. Chester had assumed from the get-go that Lance was the brains of the operation by his stern countenance and business-like demeanor.
But Chester was still too wary to trust them completely, despite all the help they had provided his crew in the past.
In fact, he found it hard to trust anyone outside of his immediate family, who were essentially Brad and Phoenix, and his 9-millimeter Beretta 92F, tucked inside his boot. It had saved his life more times than he cared to admit.
“Hey,” Phoenix cast him a worried look, “I heard some shit went down today with our level 2 guys.”
Chester frowned, focused his eyes and collected his thoughts once more. He switched his assault rifle to his other shoulder to keep the left one from cramping up any worse than it already had. “What do you mean?” he asked.
Phoenix looked slightly green, but it might’ve been a trick of the—non-light. Things were always so dark, it was hard to recall what real, vibrant colors looked like anymore, and the sewers were fairly close to them, so it could’ve been just that. Still, it wasn’t especially comforting.
“I’m not sure.” said Phoenix as he took in a deep breath, and Chester could practically see him figuring things out, hypothesizing what might’ve happened with Timberlake, Lance, and J.C. “This is all word-of-mouth, but I heard they went up and foraged some surveillance footage of Hahn’s lab facilities. They lifted it from Hahn’s computer terminals.”
Chester’s head snapped up and he moved toward him with curiosity.
“Do they still have it in their possession?”
Four years, and they had only been able to uncover a relatively small amount of information that could serve to destroy and infiltrate Hahn’s empire. The building where his headquarters was located was impossible to penetrate; no one had ever tried, because no one was that insane. This could be their biggest chance yet to somehow find a way in and take him down.
But even if they could take down headquarters, Chester rationalized, there were still Hahn’s cloning facilities to deal with. They were airtight and infallible, impenetrable. There would always be innocent people suffering in those dark places—where they were turned into drones and duplicated, cloned. Robbed of their free-will and freedom, copied, as if they were shareware. All for Hahn’s clone generation.
To think that Mike went and did it willingly….
What a bleak future it turned out to be.
“I think so,” said Phoenix, looking more and more as if the blood was completely draining out of his face. Chester broke from his thoughts and tampered down a sudden irrational flare of anger at his man’s doubt. There was no room for doubt, he wanted to say, but direct, decisive action. He knew though that it wouldn’t have made a difference had he voiced his annoyance, so he kept his mouth tightly shut.
Instead, Chester forced a small smile and squatted down in front of Phoenix, patting his shoulder appreciatively, “Good job, Phi. We’ll pay our strategists a little visit tomorrow, but tonight—” he looked to Brad then and stood, “You guys should get some rest. We’ll have to jump-start that old computer in storage tomorrow morning, see if we can dig up a little more dirt. And find some disks so we can copy the footage, just in case.”
* * *
The levels underground were divided into subdivisions which covered two miles for every division. Chester and his men had to travel six miles, a quarter mile up vertically, to reach level 2.
Two guards were standing at the entrance to what looked like a tunnel leading to a larger sewage system when they arrived, each guards’ arms carrying a Mac10. Chester then eyed the Glocks in their thigh-holsters warily. He supposed such heavy weaponry was a precaution and a necessity.
He could feel Brad and Phoenix already starting to twitch with unease.
tbc...
2012
Sixteen floors underneath the sidewalk wound a staircase of steel, spiraling up to the surface like a double-helix, the zenith a white circle of light that promised life like the goodly dead were promised the light of heaven. Chester’s worn boots crunched on shards of glass and scraps of tin foil, waste that gathered on the cold floor from the population above, and grinned sardonically. How ironic such a comparison it was.
Chester knew for a fact that if there was a God, he would’ve stopped things from spiraling out of control long ago. How could he not? Humanity was nothing more now than the detritus left over from too long a struggle with powers beyond its control. Chester, like the rest of the few who were still free and fighting, was alone.
He had gotten used to the cold and isolated feeling years ago, but it still didn’t make things any easier. Every day he was tempted to climb up those stairs and surrender, to stop fighting and struggling and give himself over to a life where he didn’t have to think, where all the thinking would be done for him and he’d only feel a white void of calm. But he couldn’t, no matter how many times or hard he tried, he failed to make it up past the first few rungs of the staircase.
Secretly, he was grateful for the impediment.
He felt like a hollowed out husk, a corpse walking for the sole purpose of feeling alive again. Pretend was fifty percent of it. Hope seemed to be like that north star, pointing to him the way home, but he never could quite follow it, unsure if where he was going was true north because the universe was so vast and he was so incredibly alone and lost.
That’s why I’m fighting, he reminded himself, a twinge of anger needling him back to rational thinking and away from despair. Fighting for my freedom is the only true direction that I know to take.
Being down there, in the cold and the grit and the dank dark, was a decision that he had made and will not abandon. He hadn’t been fighting for years for nothing. Quitting was something he shied away from, but it was also such a sweet temptation. No more blood, no more dirt under his nails from crawling with his belly to the floor. But you’re not like the people up there, he thought, and it reined him back in again, brought air back into his brain. You stopped considering yourself a part of humanity when the clones were first revealed nationwide. You couldn’t end up like the subjects; you refused to be used like a lab rat.
Besides, Chester thought, they took Mike. Isn’t that enough reason to fight?
Chester remembered the shock and immediate terror that had made bile rise in the back of his throat, meaty and thick and sour at the same time, when Mike’s clone had stared him in the eye and raised a gun to Chester’s head.
2008
It was smoke and mirrors – everything – and Chester had finally understood that Mike was a stranger to him. More like accepted. If he were honest with himself, he’d admit that he had known Mike was lost for some time already.
Rain pelted California’s sidewalks and smothered the buildings that had just exploded, leaving trails of black smoke to billow in the slight breeze. Chester had never seen anything like it, as if the whole world had caught on fire and the apocalypse had come, like Nostradamus was actually more than just far-fetched prophecies for the New Age.
In any other life, at any other time, Chester might’ve laughed at the absurdity of it all. It wasn’t too amusing at the moment, though. Not even on his wide-screen TV.
Then several things happened in rapid succession.
Helicopters flew in overhead, the whirring of their propellers entirely too loud, and Chester scrambled outside to catch a glimpse of the mayhem. At this point his thoughts weren’t anywhere near thinking about Mike, his mind faceted on the war that seemed to have erupted in front of his eyes. He ran down the street, zipping past local news vans already parked on the curb, dodging microphones and shoving foreign bodies out of his way, all the while feeling like he should be pleading insanity. What he hell was going on?
He stopped abruptly a safe distance away from the debris that used to be a bank and a small shopping outlet, and tried to catch his breath. His heart was pumping in sporadic little bursts, and if he wasn't careful, he’d end up passing out, he was sure. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing as a sudden lurching of terror wrapped an icy grip around his stomach.
Before, the idea of mass destruction was just a thing he witnessed on television with third world countries, or epic war movies that were based on events that had happened way before his time.
Crumbling before him now were buildings razed from fire dropped out of the sky, but for what purpose, Chester had no clue.
He turned, only slightly, unaware that he had been followed, and Mike’s face stared back at him, entirely too close.
“Mike?”
Mike didn’t look pleased; Chester wasn’t sure how to describe his expression. Perhaps cold was the fitting word. Detached.
“I’m sorry it had to come to this,” Mike said, and Chester really did feel like he was in a Hitchcock film when his best friend raised a gun to his head, barrel aimed right between Chester’s eyes. In a fit of panic, he imagined the bullet shattering the bridge of his glasses, cracking the lenses into spider-like webs, and the clear, white void that would come after. He imagined it all too easily.
Maybe it was just dumb luck that the next bomb to hit smashed into the nearest news van. The van exploded into a fire-eaten carcass, flames and heat dancing dangerously close to Chester’s skin.
Chester took the advantage of a moment’s distraction and swung his fist blindly, taking Mike by surprise as his former friend went sprawling down into the ground. He was running on pure adrenaline, pumping through his veins like molten-hot lava, and it felt good. Liberating, almost, although he didn’t know why.
Chester shook off the sudden, throbbing pain in his hand – and vaguely somewhere in his chest – and ran like hell through the maze of cars, vans, and journalists’ voices that blurred into one constant pounding that reverberated inside his head.
Get out, it said. Get away.
2012
“I wasn’t gone long, was I?” Chester asked as he turned a sharp, dark corner and spotted two of his men crouching in the darkness, machine guns held to their chests like life preservers, as if they might drown in a pool of their own blood at any moment. Chester didn’t think such a thing was impossible.
Brad pushed his cap back and wiped his arm over his forehead, the silver bands of a life long gone on his wrists clinking in the quiet of the underground. “Ten minutes or so. I’ll scout the area again in a little while.”
“No need. It’s like a ghost today—so quiet. We should be glad Hahn’s clones aren’t popping out of the woodwork.” Chester sighed and leaned against the opposite wall, adjusting his thigh holster. It was shabby and starting to unravel at the seams. Four years of wear and tear will do that.
“Where’s that supply of ammo you promised we’d get?” Phoenix had an unhealthy amount of paranoia, and Chester discovered that keeping his men well-armed and full of ammunition served as a security blanket for the uneasy and skitter-ish man.
“Have patience. They should be in by tomorrow, or they’re gonna have to give us a free box next time.” Chester reassured him with a grin, and Phoenix visibly relaxed, sitting his weight down fully on the chilly floor and giving his legs the luxury to stretch out before him.
Boxes full of various munitions had been delivered every five days or so from other subterranean networks. Lately, they were down to one box every time until the next shipment would arrive, so that had to mean something, though Chester wasn’t sure if that meant their enemies were multiplying or if the good guys were using more ammo and winning. Maybe a little bit of both.
And he thought, yeah, the former might be a little scary. A lot scary.
He didn’t care to die a martyr, because to be frank, Chester could care less whether the rest of the world revered or reviled him. He just wanted to make certain Joseph Hahn, leader of the so-called Cloning Revolution, got to see Chester’s smiling face before he died. It was one of those sick things Chester liked to play over and over in his head at 3 o’clock in the morning, the time when most people die, as he slept on the cold, dirty floor while listening to the rodents scurry on small, clicking feet.
Sometimes, he subconsciously replaced Hahn with Mike in his head, Mike for betraying him, for volunteering to become a test subject, and he dreamed of splitting that pretty face in two, or shooting bullets that ripped through his chest and spiraled out the other side trailing blood like debris. And those times, Chester always woke up with cold sweat matting his shirt to his skin, adrenaline pounding in him, pouring out of him in waves.
The dreams were always profound and vivid. Scary as hell, but it kept him sane. It kept him on his toes, the reminder that one day, if he succeeded, if his men survived and they resurfaced again, he might meet Mike one last time, and he might be able to pull the trigger if everything else failed. If their relationship couldn’t be salvaged, and Mike couldn’t be saved. He would rather Mike die than see him live caged in his own mind, helpless, where he knew the real Mike was being forced to stay. Locked away.
Selfish of him to think only of Mike and himself, but being in the circle of Mike’s arms was the only time he could honestly recall feeling a sense of peace. Peace was such an unfathomable concept, now. The world was lost, anyway. If he could save Mike, it would be enough for Chester to die happy.
Because death was inevitable, wasn’t it? Their resources were diminishing, and the instances of hunger were increasing in length. They had to save as much food as possible, deal out meager rations. It was the only way to make it last. War made even the most sated people hungry, running on tired legs and crawling on scratched up hands, made them want to fill themselves with something because it felt like a part of them had been torn away so that they always carried a hole inside.
War was something real, had been for years, and it flowed in his veins like blood. Chester had forgotten what it felt like not to be hunted, or to be hunting. He knew that he wasn’t all that important in the grand scheme of the Rebellion, that his men were merely field operatives who set things into action, but he also knew it was one of the most dangerous positions to be in.
Their strategy team was a different story. A three-man work crew up in level 2 beneath the heart of old downtown, composed of two blond-haired men named Timberlake and Lance and a brunette named J.C. The three would send an errand boy down occasionally to Chester with information and tactical maps of the latest major cloning activities aboveground. Chester would then pass the information on to a handful of men higher up in rank who would make the decision as to whether or not people like Chester and his men should be sent out into the field to attempt to take over certain facilities. This was usually not the case, since two of three times, the men dismissed the information as useless and a take-over impossible.
Chester’s microscopic group worked best when seizing and destroying places of significance to cloning technology and advancement labs, storage buildings that had Joseph Hahn’s sticky fingerprints all over them. It was a difficult task, like all field-work, but made even more so because Chester had only Brad and Phoenix to watch his back. The tactical and strategists had it easy, staying relatively out of the line of fire.
He saw them once when they first went underground. They’d been dragging in two prisoners to the lab for alteration and reversal of the drone-process, and they had looked a little too young and a little too pretty to survive. Even so, it was evident then that Timberlake had spirit, that J.C. had promise in his eyes. Chester had assumed from the get-go that Lance was the brains of the operation by his stern countenance and business-like demeanor.
But Chester was still too wary to trust them completely, despite all the help they had provided his crew in the past.
In fact, he found it hard to trust anyone outside of his immediate family, who were essentially Brad and Phoenix, and his 9-millimeter Beretta 92F, tucked inside his boot. It had saved his life more times than he cared to admit.
“Hey,” Phoenix cast him a worried look, “I heard some shit went down today with our level 2 guys.”
Chester frowned, focused his eyes and collected his thoughts once more. He switched his assault rifle to his other shoulder to keep the left one from cramping up any worse than it already had. “What do you mean?” he asked.
Phoenix looked slightly green, but it might’ve been a trick of the—non-light. Things were always so dark, it was hard to recall what real, vibrant colors looked like anymore, and the sewers were fairly close to them, so it could’ve been just that. Still, it wasn’t especially comforting.
“I’m not sure.” said Phoenix as he took in a deep breath, and Chester could practically see him figuring things out, hypothesizing what might’ve happened with Timberlake, Lance, and J.C. “This is all word-of-mouth, but I heard they went up and foraged some surveillance footage of Hahn’s lab facilities. They lifted it from Hahn’s computer terminals.”
Chester’s head snapped up and he moved toward him with curiosity.
“Do they still have it in their possession?”
Four years, and they had only been able to uncover a relatively small amount of information that could serve to destroy and infiltrate Hahn’s empire. The building where his headquarters was located was impossible to penetrate; no one had ever tried, because no one was that insane. This could be their biggest chance yet to somehow find a way in and take him down.
But even if they could take down headquarters, Chester rationalized, there were still Hahn’s cloning facilities to deal with. They were airtight and infallible, impenetrable. There would always be innocent people suffering in those dark places—where they were turned into drones and duplicated, cloned. Robbed of their free-will and freedom, copied, as if they were shareware. All for Hahn’s clone generation.
To think that Mike went and did it willingly….
What a bleak future it turned out to be.
“I think so,” said Phoenix, looking more and more as if the blood was completely draining out of his face. Chester broke from his thoughts and tampered down a sudden irrational flare of anger at his man’s doubt. There was no room for doubt, he wanted to say, but direct, decisive action. He knew though that it wouldn’t have made a difference had he voiced his annoyance, so he kept his mouth tightly shut.
Instead, Chester forced a small smile and squatted down in front of Phoenix, patting his shoulder appreciatively, “Good job, Phi. We’ll pay our strategists a little visit tomorrow, but tonight—” he looked to Brad then and stood, “You guys should get some rest. We’ll have to jump-start that old computer in storage tomorrow morning, see if we can dig up a little more dirt. And find some disks so we can copy the footage, just in case.”
The levels underground were divided into subdivisions which covered two miles for every division. Chester and his men had to travel six miles, a quarter mile up vertically, to reach level 2.
Two guards were standing at the entrance to what looked like a tunnel leading to a larger sewage system when they arrived, each guards’ arms carrying a Mac10. Chester then eyed the Glocks in their thigh-holsters warily. He supposed such heavy weaponry was a precaution and a necessity.
He could feel Brad and Phoenix already starting to twitch with unease.
tbc...