The Blue Ridge Project: A Dark Suspense Novel (The Project Book 1) (20 page)

Robert gathered the three files and stood up. “Alright then, take us to where this is going on, and we'll see what's what.”

“Fine,” Andrea said, moving to the private bathroom off of Richardson's office, “just let me wash some of this blood off first.”

They moved out of Richardson’s office, down the hall and to the room with the elevator. The bodies of two guards were in small pools of blood on either side, and Andrea saw another body she recognized.

“Is that Michaels?”

Hynes nodded. “When he heard about what was happening to you, he strapped up and came with us. I guess it was his way of making up for not seeing Lyons for what he was. That, and being an asshole.”

She smiled at that, and knelt to close his eyes. Then she moved to one of the dead guards and began taking off his boots and pants. Robert nodded and did the same with the other guard. The men turned around as Andrea got changed. The pants were baggy but Hynes donated his belt so they would stay up, and she stuffed the dead guards socks into the boots so they would fit better. Robert lucked out, as the things he got were close to his size, although the tops of the pants were damp with blood in some spots. The pockets of both pants held spare magazines for their handguns, and Robert handed his over to Andrea without hesitation.

When they reached the elevator, they all piled in and Jimmy pressed a button. Robert and Andrea frowned at the set-up.

“Hey, I recognize this elevator,” Robert said.

Cap and Hynes looked at each other, then at Jimmy, then back to Andrea and Robert.

“I do too, that’s weird,” Andrea said.

They arrived at the ground floor and the door opened onto the lobby of the Regent. Andrea and Robert stood gape-mouthed.

“We were under the hotel the entire time?” Robert asked when he could finally speak.

Jimmy nodded. “How do you think they moved you down from your rooms without alerting anyone? They most likely own the hotel too.”

Andrea shook her head and they all walked out into the empty lobby. There was no one at the desk, and the Crowne bar looked dark and abandoned.

“We’ll take mine and Hynes’ car,” Cap said as they walked outside and down to the two parked cars on the curb, “Andrea, you can ride with me, Robert you can go—”

Gunshots rang out in the deserted street. All of them crouched down behind the second car. The files spilled from Robert's hands.

Jimmy groaned, and fell over sideways on top of the papers. A red stain bloomed from the middle of his chest. Andrea and Hynes pointed their guns over the car without looking and returned fire.

“Jimmy!” Robert said, and shuffled while hunched over towards his prone form. Blood was coming from Jimmy’s mouth and dribbling down his neck. Robert held Jimmy’s head in his hands.

“Just hold on, Jimmy,” he said, pushing down on the wound as blood spurted up between his fingers.

More shots were followed by broken glass raining down on them. Cap, Andrea and Hynes fired blind, Cap's revolver sounding like a cannon next to the others.

“…chair,” Jimmy said weakly.

“What?” Robert said, the gunshots from beside him deafening.

“The chair… your dad’s box… can find the site.”

Robert was about to ask what he meant when it came to him. His father’s storage unit, and the chair inside. Just like the ones in the sketches he had left in the cell beneath the hotel. He nodded.

Jimmy closed his eyes then, and his breathing slowed. When Robert thought he was dead, his eyes flew open again and his mouth worked, blood flowing out, covering his chin and jaw.

“
…earplugs
,” Robert made out, and then Jimmy died.

“Is he dead?” Andrea roared over sporadic gunfire. Cap shook out empty shells and reloaded with a moon clip he pulled from his pocket.

“Yeah,” Robert shouted back, “he's gone.”

“Fuck. Without him, we’ll never find that base.” More gunfire. “We’ve gotta get out of here!” she said, peeking out in time to see two black cars arrive and disgorge two groups of black-shirted men armed with automatic rifles.

The new arrivals took cover behind their vehicles. They fired in short bursts, and more glass disintegrated above Andrea and the rest of the group. Some fell on Jimmy's corpse and lay there, undisturbed. Andrea fired another two shots over her head without looking.

“We’ve got to go to my father’s storage unit,” Robert yelled. “There’s a way in there to find where the base is.”

Hynes managed to shoot one of the black-shirted men and crouched back down. There was a pause in the gunfire, then it started up again. Some of the bullets kicked up splinters of cement where they buried themselves in the concrete around them.

“You aren’t going anywhere alive with those guys out there,” he said, panting. “And soon enough, a couple of those bullets are going to go right through this car.”

Cap looked at Andrea for a second, then held out his revolver.

“Give me your gun.”

“Why?” Andrea said.

“You two will need someone to cover your escape, and I need more bullets for that. Here,” Cap said, holding out his car keys.

Andrea looked at Hynes, who nodded, and then back to Cap. Then she gave him the pistol and the two magazines from her pocket. Taking the revolver, she held on to Cap's hand for a few seconds.

“It’s all right, Annie. I gotta make up for what I’ve done somehow. Just promise me, if you make it, find Marcy and Karen and tell them I love them.”

Andrea nodded, and let go, her eyes dry but stinging. She looked to Robert.

“You ready?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking one last time at Jimmy’s body, the blood-soaked files underneath, then back to Cap and Hynes. “Thank you.”

“Just get the bastards,” Hynes said, reaching up with his gun to fire in the general direction of their attackers.

Andrea and Robert ran crouched to Cap’s car and got in, Andrea already driving off before Robert had shut the passenger door behind him. They stayed low in their seats as bullets tore through the back window of the car, until they were out of range and speeding towards the route out of town. They could see a dwindling image in the rearview of Cap and Hynes firing over the car that disappeared when they turned a corner.

*****

“I’m sorry about your friends back there. They seem like good people,” Robert said after they had driven in silence for a while.

Andrea nodded, her throat working as she choked back tears. They drove for another wordless few minutes, Robert looking out his window at empty sidewalks and the other equally empty lanes. Suddenly Andrea pulled over to the side of the road.

Robert looked at her and said nothing. Her jaw was clenched, her fingers like claws wrapped around the steering wheel. In a sudden and violent instant, she was beating full force on the wheel, the dashboard and the windscreen, grunting every time she connected.

“Fucking fuck!” she screamed, and then slumped back in the seat, her hands falling into her lap. Robert stared, mute and unwilling to be otherwise. After a few minutes, Andrea took a deep breath, let it out with a rattling sigh and started the car again.

They stared out the window in front of them as she drove. They were the only cars moving on the road in any direction.

“Where is everybody?” Andrea asked quietly.

“I have no idea. It's weird, I feel like I haven't seen anyone around in days, come to think of it. Just the people at the hotel.”

“Do you believe it all?”

Robert looked at her wordlessly for a minute before answering.

“It’s like the guy said, it’s all subjective.” She glanced sideways at him, waiting for him to continue.

“I mean, how can I really know that I’m not just in a mental asylum or a coma somewhere, imagining all this? How do you?”

“I don’t know,” she said after a while, “but I’ve got to trust in something. If it’s real, we’re going to stop some very bad shit, and get payback for what they’ve already done.” She paused, the muscles in her face twitching as she clenched her jaw. “And if it’s not, what’s the difference?”

Robert sighed. “You make a good point.”

Ten minutes later, they came to the lot where Thomas Duncan’s storage unit was held. The security box was empty, and they both clambered over the locked fence into the lot.

They made their way up the path between the boxes that loomed on either side of them in the growing darkness, and Robert put a hand out to stop her at his unit. The night air was chilly, the temperature falling rapidly, and wind whistled through the steel structures of the yard. Andrea looked around and found a heavy rock that she used to smash the lock off, and they pulled up the sliding door. Robert turned on the light and they stepped inside.

“Is the address in here, in one of these folders?” Andrea asked. “We could be here all night.”

Robert shook his head and stepped towards the chair.

“We’re going to use this,” he said.

Andrea frowned at him.

“How? And why?”

“I don’t know, but Jimmy said I could find the way using this chair. Have a look for something with a label like 'instructions,' or 'manual.'”

Andrea scanned the shelves on one side while Robert looked on the other. After a few minutes she called him over.

“This looks like something.,” She said, lifting down a box labeled
Operating Procedure
. There was an injector kit with three vials of clear liquid, numbered one to three, and a slim journal.

Robert flipped through the pages of the journal and read for a while. Then he closed the book and sat in the chair.

“All right,” he said, “you shoot me up with these, in order, and then flip the switch at the back of this chair.”

Andrea looked at the injector and frowned.

“Are you sure about this?” she said. “It surely can't be as simple as that.”

“We don’t have much choice. Besides, it’s like you said. If it’s not real, what difference will it make?”

She nodded and loaded up the injector. After she had completed all three injections, she helped Robert to put the metal band on his head.

“You feeling okay?”

Robert’s vision was starting to warp and shift, the light pulsing in sync with his heartbeat.

“I think I might be high, ” he said, “but other than that, I’m fine.”

“Okay, then. Ready?” she asked.

Robert nodded.

She flipped the switch.

Robert opened his eyes and saw a plain white ceiling bisected in the middle by a fluorescent bulb. He smelled some kind of antiseptic, and there was a low, almost pleasant beeping sound. His head hurt, not from a headache, but as if he had been beaten up badly. His left eye felt swollen, as did his forehead, and he raised a hand to touch and inspect the damage.

The hand that came into his line of sight was not his own. It was that of an older man, the hairs on the forearm nearly white. The veins were thicker, as was indeed the hand itself, and he saw an IV needle poking out of the back. He felt his heart rate jump, and the faint beeping sped up to keep time with it.

There was a curious sensation, as if he was shifting forwards and backwards in his head. Then, he somehow
felt
his memories going past the back of his mind, spinning from his youth to his most recent memories and back again, along with a curious sense of being inspected.

Robert?

The voice in his head was not his own, and he hadn’t thought the words. He looked around from his vantage point, a hospital bed by his reckoning, but saw no one.

Who are you?
he thought.

Is it really you, Robert?

Yes. Who are you?

It’s Thomas. It’s your father,
the voice replied.

He felt a rush of emotions then, all tangled up with each other. Sorrow, joy, regret, relief, sweeping over him like objects carried in a tidal wave. He recognized some of it as his own, but the rest came from somewhere else inside him.

Dad?

Yes, it’s me.
The feelings turned to fear and dread.
What are you doing here? How did you get into my mind?

Your chair. It was in your storage unit.

Robert, you must leave. It’s too dangerous, the people who I worked with to make that—

I know, I’ve met them. They locked me up, but I escaped. We tried to find their base, but the people who freed us are probably dead. We have to stop them, and I need your help.

The beeping sound intensified, and Robert felt the pain in his head increase. He also started to feel numb on one side.

Dad, what happened to you?

Someone else was here.
Someone sick, a test subject they’ve been using. I had to do this to myself to get him out.

A nurse appeared in Robert’s vision, looked into his eyes with a small penlight, and then disappeared again.

We don’t have much time,
Robert thought.

I know. I wish things had been different, Robert.

Images of his youth began to play in a rapid slide show. He recognized most of them, but they were from a different perspective. He realized that he was remembering from his father’s viewpoint, and he felt a tear roll down his cheek.

One memory that stood out was both of them sitting on the roof of the house. It had been coming towards the end of summer. Robert had always thought that time of year was beautiful and bittersweet. The sun still shining late into the evening but a little less so every day. The growing reality of the return to school, to normal routines, and hiding a little further down the road like a thief in a doorway, ready to attack you as you walked past, was cold winter. Next summer would be a lifetime away to the mind of a child.

They had brought fireworks to set off, and let the first one off as the sun was dipping behind the many trees that lined the perimeter of the property. It bled dark orange into the sky in front of them, made black silhouettes of the trees and a palette of dark blues and purples stretching east to where the stars would soon be visible. When the first firework had exploded, whistling and shooting colors into the sky, a flock of birds that had roosted in the trees burst out, filling the air with noise. Robert had thought it was a perfect scene, the synchronized movements of the birds with the sunset and fireworks as their backdrop.

Not long after, his father had left.

I understand why you had to leave. To protect us.

I tried. It was all I could do, but I was wrong. Wrong about so many things, but not about bringing you home. Your mother, is she...?

Robert thought of the funeral, and felt a sadness that wasn't entirely his own.

He felt pain shooting up and down his side, and drool began to pour from one side of his mouth.

I can’t hold on much longer.

New images came now. What looked like a country road, twists and turns that finished at a worn down looking warehouse building.

The beeping came faster now, and Robert found that he couldn’t move. A doctor appeared above him, a worried look on his face. The doctor began shouting orders to someone Robert couldn’t see.

I’m sorry, Robert. I love you, son.

I love—

*****

“—you, too,” Robert said. He opened his eyes and sat up, seeing the inside of the storage unit.

Andrea was standing beside him, looking at him with a mixture of worry and confusion.

“You okay?” she asked.

Robert put a hand over his eyes and nodded.

“I think my father just died,” he said.

“What the fuck?”

“This machine, it let me into my father's mind. That's what these people are using. He knew them, I guess he worked with them.” He stood up. “He was in the hospital, dying.”

“I'm sorry, I can't imagine.”

Robert nodded, sluggish, and held his head in his hands.

After some time, he looked up at Andrea, his eyes only a little red.

“I know where we have to go. You drive, I can direct you there.”

“Sure thing. Let's move.”

They both walked out of the unit and back to their car. The rain started to fall just as they pulled away from the lot.