city of anarchy
chapter ten
The Electric Man stepped out of the box, smoothing back his blond hair not quite successfully with the raked fingers of one hand.
'Who is it?' he demanded.
Dan looked triumphantly from one of his comrades to the next. Then he said, 'He calls himself Henry. I found him in Turnfly's room.'
Hermes remained expressionless as the Electric Man stepped up to him. 'Where did he come from?' he ordered, his eyes locked on the boy. 'How did he get in here?'
'No idea, sir,' Dan replied. 'He says he was brought in 'cos we were a man short.'
Hermes braced himself for a declaration of his heinous lies. Instead, the Electric Man looked puzzled. 'I...don't remember that,' he said carefully, as if treading in an especially precarious part of his memory. His eyes suddenly moved repeatedly in and out of focus. It was bizarre, visibly pulsating, and made Hermes feel uncomfortable and alarmed. He forced a step back and found just about everyone else in the room doing the same, including the Electric Man, who moaned and clutched at his head.
Then Hermes felt the slightest of forces, something like a shift in the air, that sent an unpleasant prickling sensation down the hairs of his arms.
The Electric Man cowered; then his arm swung out and was pointing at Dan with crooked anguish, shaking with terrible judgement. 'You!' he said. 'What's your name? Tell me now!'
'Er...Dan, sir,' said Dan.
'Destroy this impostor!' he screamed to the others. 'I know no Dan! Where's my trident? I'll stab him! Stab him in three, I will!' He lurched like a vile thing at Dan, who cried out and fell back.
'Wait, sir!' he exclaimed, fending off the Electric Man's angry swipes. 'You've got the wrong man! It's Henry! Henry is the impostor!'
Despite the danger, Hermes had not yet recovered from his reckless mood. 'Madness!' he exclaimed. 'I'm standing in for Kingbald!'
'You said you didn't know who you were standing in for!' objected Dan. 'Your story is inconsistent!'
'So what are you saying?' challenged Hermes, building up a confident nonchalance. 'That I just picked that name out of the air?'
The Electric Man turned his way. Hermes stood to attention as he felt the tiniest crackling about his ears. Even the other men now seemed unsure of the situation. The secretive nature of the operation seemed to have confused everyone.
'Yeah, where is Kingbald?' said someone.
'He was in the van with us,' said someone else, who Hermes recognised as the driver. 'Unless...' The driver's eyes narrowed. 'Hey, that was you in the van!'
'But Kingbald definitely came with us,' said the other. 'I saw him just before we set off!'
The driver gasped in revelation and pointed at Hermes. 'He must have got on at the Tower! He's from the Agency!'
'What did he do with Kingbald?'
The Electric Man was still watching Hermes. 'Dan,' he muttered. 'Dan, Dan, Dan. Of course I know Dan!' He drew himself up. 'D'you really think you can deceive me? Just because my mind's a bit...exhausted at the moment. Fragile.'
Frazzled, thought Hermes.
'My apologies, Dan,' said the Electric Man.
Dan nodded graciously.
'But we will not let everything we've worked so hard to protect lay to waste at the hands of an amateurish Agent! The world will be saved. Kill him!'
Holly wished she had her scooter. Running on foot after over a day of being sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair and receiving little food, as well as the excitement of the events in the kitchen, had left her legs feeling like ghosts of jelly. She hoped she had enough time before Droz and Russ were able to escape.
It took her some time to get her bearings; she had not, after all, been in a very attentive state when they had carried her away. Soon, however, she stumbled onto streets she knew, and it was almost a straight line to police headquarters. When she finally arrived at the building and pushed open the heavy glass doors to the black-marbled lobby, she felt dizzy.
'Commander Brutt,' she managed. Some of the black-clad officers present looked up. 'Get me Commander Brutt!' she said, a little more loudly. 'It's about the Facility! Eugene is innocent!'
Most of the officers continued to survey her critically, but one or two sensed urgency enough to go and find him. Commander Brutt strode out into the lobby looking a little irritated. 'What is it?' he demanded.
'There are two men,' Holly said, breathlessly, 'tied to tables in a small house in...' -- she tried to recall the sign she had passed -- 'Dagger Road. I can't remember which number. They're sedated, but it won't be long before they'll wake up and try to escape. You need to send men there now!'
'On what grounds?' said Brutt.
'My associate,' Holly replied importantly, 'is in possession of evidence which proves that something else happened inside the Facility that night. It's a video recording. He's just gone to make a few copies in case it falls into the wrong hands.' And in case you try anything, she added mentally, heeding Droz's words and her own prior experience.
Brutt clenched his stubbled jaw. 'Go and find them,' he said to his officers, and to her, 'Come with me.' Holly followed him as he walked back through the door from which he had emerged. It was another heavy glass thing, but this one was frosted and had his name on it in black letters.
Beyond was his office. It was fairly big, carpeted with -- not surprisingly -- black, and had shelves lined with big, shiny, expensive-looking ornaments. Brutt sat himself down behind a high mahogany desk and signalled for her to use one of the much smaller chairs set before it.
He folded his hands and examined her closely. 'These men that you tied up for us,' he said. 'You're saying they did it?'
Holly felt a pang of guilt for Droz. She believed what he had told her-- but whatever else was going on, that was their fight and it wasn't right that they had involved herself, Angus or Eugene in trying to cover their own backsides.
'I'm not saying that,' she replied. 'I'm just saying they were there that night, inside the building. They kidnapped me and Angus -- er, my associate -- because they were afraid that somehow we'd find out. I don't think they did it... but I do think they know enough to clear Eugene Quirkor's name.'
Brutt leaned back in his chair. His face was usually a leer or a mask of indifference, but there was a definite frown there. He had pounced unquestioningly on Holly and Eugene as suspects, it had seemed, with the usual greedy maliciousness that seemed to go with his trade-- but here he was almost holding back, as if something about this revelation troubled him. Commander Brutt was never troubled.
He probably doesn't want to have to admit his mistake, Holly thought. But he hadn't even seen the evidence yet.
'Is your associate going to be long?' he asked, after some silence.
'I don't know,' said Holly. 'I told him to be as fast as he could.'
'Then we'll wait,' Brutt decided. 'But you'd better not be wasting my time.'
Holly shook her head. 'I'm not.'
'Don't take this personally or anything, Henry,' Dan said, idly pushing bullets into his gun. 'It's just the way things have to be these days, until we've sorted everything out. You Agents are an obstacle, you see. Not prepared to do things the way they need to be done.'
They had taken him down into some kind of basement. A naked lightbulb hovered above them, jolted into a swing whenever there was movement.
The driver and his friend pushed Hermes up against a mouldy wall and held him there. Hermes tried unsuccessfully to shrug them off.
'What are you even trying to sort out?' he said. 'Who's Turnfly, and why is she strapped up to that life support machine? Can't you tell me that? You're going to kill me anyway, so it'd make me feel a bit better if I knew what I was dying for.'
Dan's upper lip curled in some unpleasant form of amusement. 'Nice try,' he said. 'But we take no chances. Hold him steady, boys. I want this to be nice and clean.'
Hermes struggled some more in vain, then went loose and submissive as Dan pulled back the hammer of the gun. He pondered the events that had led him to this point and strangely felt no regret.
Dan closed one eye and aimed the gun. 'So long, Henry.'
The whole room seemed to tilt sideways as an ear-splitting noise rocked it from above. Dan pulled the trigger, but the bullet's course was knocked off-kilter and the driver's shoulder exploded instead. He was screaming, but Dan could not hear him; he could only see the pained mask of his face as the lightbulb above swung frenetically to and fro.
Hermes dropped to the floor and scrambled away as the three boilersuited men looked frantically around. Dan rushed up the wooden steps to the ground floor to see what had happened. Agent Avgi put a bullet in his head and he fell back down.
Avgi pointed her pistol down into the swinging light of the basement and slowly descended. She saw the driver moaning in the corner, but let him hold on to his pain and swept the rest of the room. Two others were attempting to crawl away.
Hermes' pursuer grabbed onto his ankle, but his grip went limp as Avgi fired again. Her finger was still on the trigger when Hermes cried out, 'Agent Avgi! It's me!'
Avgi glared through the intermittent light. 'Hermes?' Her expression, however, did not soften and she kept the gun pointed at his head. She dragged him to his feet and pinned him against the wall. 'What the hell are you doing?' she said.
Hermes opened and closed his mouth. 'I...I don't know, I...I thought...if I...if I went with them and, and I'd been stuck in that white room for so long and...'
Avgi raised an eyebrow. 'We can sort that out later,' she decided, dropping him back to the floor. 'Tell me what you know.' She crossed the basement to peer up the steps, knocking out the driver with the butt of her pistol en route.
'He calls himself the Electric Man,' Hermes said, propping himself up against the wall. 'The guy who's in charge. He was in a box that they took into the Tower. I saw them take it out. They all keep saying they're saving the world, but I haven't been able to get anything more specific from them. Oh,' he added, after a pause, 'and there's a girl with severed hair in the, er, room on the right at the end of the second floor, all hooked up to life support. They call her Turnfly.'
Avgi looked at him. Gunfire continued in the background.
'Agent Yvonne, if you have a spare moment,' she spoke into her watch, 'make your way to the room on the right at the end of the second floor. Apparently Turnfly is in there. I have the intern.'
She turned back to Hermes. 'We need to find that Electric Man,' she said.
Angus pushed through the door and stepped into the building, taking a moment to catch his breath. The officers were already waiting for him.
'You Angus?' one of them said, approaching him.
'Yes,' he replied.
'You got the evidence?'
Angus brought the camcorder into view.
The officer nodded. 'Take it through to the Commander,' he said, gesturing in the direction of his office. Angus' eyes followed his arm and saw the door, which he began to walk towards.
Holly had been trying to avoid Brutt's gaze. She was in the middle of working along the shelves in a deep scrutiny of the items that lined them when Angus' knock came at the door.
'Enter,' said Brutt.
Angus' straw-blond head entered looking quite sheepish, tentatively holding out the camcorder like some kind of peace offering. Holly couldn't help but smile as his freckled face broke into an uneasy grin.
'Nice black eye you've got there,' Brutt said, holding out his hand to receive. Angus gave the camcorder to him and he turned it over in his hands, finding the appropriate button and viewing the proposed evidence with a grim expression.
Angus quietly sat himself down in a seat beside Holly. They exchanged nervous glances.
'There's sound as well,' Holly offered, after a while. Brutt retrieved a pair of earphones from his desk drawer without looking up and plugged them in.
They were still sitting there long after Holly thought the video ought to have finished. Commander Brutt remained poised in concentration, his dark eyes fixed on the tiny screen. When eventually he stood, Holly found herself feeling tense.
'I need to take this evidence,' said Brutt, making his way over to the door, 'to be processed.'
Holly and Angus rose to their feet. 'What about Eugene?' asked Holly.
Brutt paused and glanced distractedly back at them. 'Yes,' he said. 'Mr Quirkor can go.'
Holly gaped. Then she turned and hugged Angus in an act of disposing her excess thrill before composing herself once again in a business-like manner. 'When?' she said.
Commander Brutt was still frowning. He opened the door and called out for the nearest officer. 'Release Quirkor,' he said. 'He's free to go.'
The officer looked almost as astonished as Holly and Angus, but nodded and lumbered off to fulfil his task.
Holly and Angus followed Brutt back out of the office and into the lobby. Holly stepped with a bounce; Angus dragged his feet exhaustedly, once again feeling very lost.
Avgi peered around the entrance to the stairwell and along the fourth floor corridor, the pistol still in her hands. She spun a spare around her finger and passed it to Hermes, who stood backed against the other side of the entrance.
'You're going to continue making yourself useful,' she said, glancing sidelong as him. 'You've done a good enough job of it so far, even if that skull of yours seems to have suffered a few too many dents from that fall.'
Hermes took the gun and looked up as the lightbulb above his head fizzled and flickered.
'Avgi,' came the voice of Agent Yvonne. 'Turnfly's location has been confirmed. Looks like she's in some kind of coma.'
'Lucky girl,' muttered Avgi, recalling her collision with the railway track.
'Third floor clear, Avgi,' said Sofia, emerging in the stairwell with a few other Agents. 'Still no sign of him.'
'He has to be in one of these rooms,' said Avgi. 'There's no way he could have left the building. We have Agents guarding the perimeter.' She glanced down the corridor again. 'Remember, we're looking for a man of medium height with blond hair. Hermes says he's in a boilersuit like the rest. Follow my lead.'
She slipped into the corridor. The other Agents followed; Hermes took up the rear. They systematically began to check each room. Hermes assumed they had dealt with most of the other boilersuits by now, and the building took up a deathly quiet, disturbed only by the soft shuffling of the Agents' feet.
Then the lights dimmed again, all along the corridor, with that same fizzling drone like someone was playing with the electricals. For a few seconds they were plunged into darkness before the light gradually restored again. The Agents in the dull light of the early morning outside glanced up at the streetlamps as they surged and faded to the same pattern.
Avgi continued to move forward cautiously but unhaltingly. Agent Sofia skirted the wall and tried the next door. Somebody inside the room cried out and Agent Avgi spun around just in time to see a sharp flare of blue and Sofia getting thrown against the wall.
The Agents fired miscellaneously. Hermes held back, his heart pumping wildly. One of the Agents shrieked as his gun became hot in his hands; the others collectively fell back as something in one of the other weapons ignited and caused a crippled explosion, enough to sear its owner's arms and face.
Avgi cut in and fired before anything else could happen. She caught a glimpse of the Electric Man as he retreated into the shadows, electricity visibly crackling like half-tamed lightning around him. In his hands was a three-pronged metal thing that seemed to give him some control over his improbable powers, which he pointed at the door in a slashing motion. Avgi and the other Agents fell back.
Hermes squeezed past the others and knelt down beside Sofia. Her clothes and skin were scorched and she showed no signs of consciousness.
'Thank you, Angus,' Holly said.
The two of them were waiting in the lobby with a few of the officers, craning their necks to see if Eugene was about to emerge.
'For what?' said Angus.
'For helping me. I couldn't have done it without you.'
'What?' Angus laughed. 'Holly, all I did was get beaten up, knocked out and stuck in a chair for a few hours.'
'I know,' said Holly. 'But if you hadn't done all those things for me -- for us -- we would never have been able to get Eugene out.'
'Stroke of luck that they decided to kidnap us and lead us straight to them, eh?' Angus said, grinning.
'I asked a lot of you,' Holly continued, ignoring his attempt to deflect her words. It was not often she gushed, and she would not have herself interrupted. 'But you came through for us. For Impassionate Deliveries. You're not as useless as I thought.'
'I'm not used to you being so nice,' Angus told her. 'Actually, it's quite creepy.'
'You have no idea,' Holly replied, scowling. 'The amount of sucking up I had to do to those two idiots was sickening.'
Angus grunted. 'You did have me worried for a while there. Wait, is that him?'
Holly looked. Striding drawn-looking but happily from the back was the springy mop of black, curly hair that belonged to Eugene Quirko.
The Agents began to file into the room.
'Wait,' said Avgi. 'Go in all at once and you're fried.' She watched with concern as Hermes attended to the injured Agents. 'Is Agent Sofia alright?' she said.
'I don't know,' Hermes replied. 'She isn't responding. It doesn't look good.'
The lightbulbs above pulsed again. Agent Yvonne and her team appeared at the stairwell, proceeding cautiously. 'What's going on?' she asked.
'He's in there,' Hermes said, nodding to where the Agent lingered at the door. 'We have a couple of Agents down.'
Yvonne appeared to be wondering what Hermes was doing with a gun, but stooped to examine their injuries.
Avgi attempted to peer into the dark room again. There was a click and her eyes were drawn to a door in the far wall.
'He's gone into another room,' Avgi told the others. 'Sofia's team, I want you to make sure he doesn't come out the other side.' Sofia's team moved off. 'The rest of you, we will advance with caution.'
Avgi sidestepped into the room with her gun pointed, just in case he had not, in fact, gone through the door; and then the Agents moved in after her. One placed his hand on the door handle, but drew back as it burned. 'He's in there,' he whispered.
The Agents repositioned, ready to move in and overwhelm quickly. The Agent in front kicked in the door. It swung open with a crash and the Agents pushed forward.
Then all the lights went out, like they had been sucked from every bulb; and in half a dozen successive blasts of bright blue, the same number of scorched corpses was mercilessly thrown back. When the lights restored once again, the sight was not pleasant, and the room smelt nauseatingly of cooked meat.
The door clicked shut again. Nobody moved.
Then Agent Avgi lifted her pistol and aimed it at the wall. Her knuckles were white and her hand was shaking; and with a scream she fired at the wall and kept on firing until the gun was empty. Then she threw it on the floor, grabbed two more out of the hands of stunned Agents, and continued to unload the magazines into the plaster, tearing it apart and splintering the door. She cried out again and began to stride towards the wall, her unsteady aim riddling it with pockmarks and holes until her weapons were once again clicking with emptied magazines.
She dropped them and stepped back, breathing heavily. The room was filled with smoke and plaster dust.
There was a groan from the other side and a thump as the Electric Man hit the floor.
'Holly! Angus!' cried Eugene, flinging his arms around them both. 'Impassionate Deliveries lives on, its integrity intact!' He beamed in his crazy little way. 'We shall never forsake our customers, no we shall not! Your actions have demonstrated everything our company stands for!'
Angus stood there and took it, smiling vaguely. Holly returned his hug emphatically. 'Now we can go home, finally,' she said, 'and forget above that stupid Facility forever.'
'Indeed!' chirped Eugene. 'Leave it all behind! Bit of bad luck for us, but we got through it!'
'What was in that package, anyway?' asked Angus.
'What? Oh, paperclips,' replied Eugene. 'Paperclips, of course! It says so in our records! But they told me I was lying!'
'You can't do this! We didn't do anything!'
The reunited group turned to see the commotion at the entrance. Russ and Droz were being led in by officers.
'It wasn't us! Something else was going on at that Facility!' continued Droz, struggling to wrestle free. 'Something else was happening there! We heard it! We saw it!'
One of the officers yanked Droz harshly back in an effort to keep him under control. 'Shut it,' he said, 'or I'll beat you to a pulp.'
'We're innocent!' shouted Droz. 'Innocent! You have to believe me!'
Russ was oddly quiet. All he did was glower and glare loathingly when he saw Holly and Angus standing there. Then Droz saw them, stopped shouting and gave Holly a look that made clear her immense betrayal.
Holly opened her mouth. 'I'm sorry--'
'You idiot,' said Droz, as they dragged him past. 'You have no idea what you've just gone and done, do you?' He shook his head in disbelief and turned away.
Holly stared after him. She felt Eugene's hand on her shoulder. 'Don't worry about it,' he said comfortingly.
The Electric Man groaned some more. 'You fools,' he said weakly as Avgi pushed open the half-door that remained. 'You fools! I was trying to save the world!'
Agent Avgi looked down at him in disgust, kicking his trident out of reach. He was filled with holes and bleeding profusely. It was a miracle he was still alive at all.
'Save it from what, exactly?' Avgi said.
'From--' The Electric Man gasped in pain. 'From anarchy! From complete and total destruction! Everything, everything will fall apart if I don't stop it! Now you've gone and...and...you'll have to take over, continue my work--'
'Explain,' demanded Avgi, her expression stony.
The Electric Man paused and closed his eyes. His blond hair was slick with sweat. 'Would it surprise you, Agent,' he said, 'to know that this is all related to that building that blew up the other night? The Conceptual Realisation Facility, I think they were calling it.'
Avgi felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. 'What do you mean?' she asked, a little hoarsely, before she could stop herself.
'Well, it's a good job I can still talk so full of holes, isn't it?' the Electric Man sneered. 'There I was thinking you wouldn't be much one for coincidences, what with Turnfly showing up that very same night. So I was taking no chances--tried to take you out of the picture as soon as I knew you'd picked her up. You Agents can't be trusted--that's why I had entrusted the mission to myself...'
Avgi stared at him. She tried to stop her mind from reeling; tried to come up with a counter-explanation even as he spoke. He was rambling, she decided. His eyes had lost their focus and his head was lolling. From his injuries or from something else, he was delirious. Or he was confusing her on purpose.
'I mean, your incompetence nearly got Turnfly killed,' he continued. 'She would have died and all, had she not missed death so...well, literally.'
'What are you talking about?' she snapped, irritably.
The Electric Man sighed and spoke in very deliberately, as if to a particularly stupid child, 'Turnfly slowed herself down enough so that when she hit the track, she wasn't present enough to experience the full effects of what would otherwise have been an electrocution. It's how these things work. But reality, you see, has a habit of fighting back. So fuck knows where her mind is now.'
'What mission?' said Avgi, feeling ready to beat it out of him should be persist. 'You're not making much sense.'
But the Electric Man was bleeding fast. He swallowed and winced in pain. 'Get used to it,' he said. 'Turnfly is nothing. Not compared to the rest.' He groaned and shifted. 'The world is on the brink of chaos, Agent! It...it has to be stopped.' He breathed in sharply. 'Good luck with that,' he said.
And then he died.