The Primary Protocol: A Cyberpunk Espionage Tale of Eldritch Horror (The Dossiers of Asset 108 Book 2) Read online

  “I hope I do.” She sighed. “I think that perhaps we should step down this way. There is a side passage here.”

  I couldn’t see her eyes.

  “You know where it leads?” The passageway offered only inky darkness and silence.

  “No. I have no idea. I’m just trying to avoid getting caught.”

  I frowned. She had been awfully certain when choosing our path before, as if she had spent a lot of time in these tunnels.

  No. I couldn’t second-guess her here. Caprice had never been anything but caring toward me. Instead I assured her, “Not getting caught sounds good to me.”

  She clutched my hand as we crept down the passageway, silently stepping through silken shadows. In the distance, I heard yelling but no specific words.

  “If we encounter them again, don’t hesitate.” She stopped for a second, and I heard her rustling around in the duffel bag again. “I don’t know much about them, but I know they won’t hesitate if given the chance. Here.”

  For a moment, I didn’t realize what she pushed into my grasp. Then, as I wrapped my hand around the cool metal, her intention became apparent.

  “A gun?” I chuckled. “Caprice, I may have fired a gun once my life. I don’t know how helpful I’ll be.”

  “You don’t have a choice.” She took my hand again, continuing to creep forward. “I don’t know why those men want us, Michael, but they brought us here.” She paused. “I don’t think they’ll let us leave alive.”

  As we ran through the murky darkness, the buzzing in my mind faded a touch, bringing my thought into sharper focus. Caprice stopped at one door, cautiously opened it, and peered inside. A soft, green light flickered across her face.

  “It’s empty.” She motioned to me. “Let’s step through here.”

  Inside, I found the room strange to say the least, almost alien. Rather than a standard flat ceiling, this room was rounded at the top, with very faint light flickering in from windows that were far too high for me to see through. The ceiling glowed with a pallid, lime-colored light, and vine-like tendrils lined the walls, jutting through the broken windows before trailing into wet, organic pods that seemingly grew from the walls.

  It was positively surreal.

  “What are those things?” I peered at the lumpy, organic shapes. They were vaguely dome-like and pulsed slightly, almost as if they were chambers in a gigantic, beating heart.

  “I don’t know. We don’t have time to care.” She took my hand again. “Come on, Michael. No questions now.”

  I heard her, but something whispered in my mind. I knew something about these things. Something I was forgetting.

  As I looked at the alien tendrils creeping down the walls, a piece of my memory broke loose, an almost physical sensation, like pulling a splinter from my flesh.

  They were stronger than me. Wild panic surged through me as I realized that I could not possibly resist.

  Once I was trapped inside the metallic container, I screamed.

  It was…it was one of the cylinders that I had seen in the first room.

  A thick appendage snaked down my throat, and I retched, choking on its thick, rubbery texture. The taste was foul, and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream.

  I absolutely knew that someone would find me, but my rescue would come too late.

  Caprice and I ran through the room as the memory tumbled through my mind. It was so horrifying, so foreign that I doubted it was even mine. Once it began, though, more memories fell like an avalanche.

  “You need to wake up, Michael.” I could hear a voice, but it seemed impossibly far away.

  “Wha—?” I forced my eyes open, a herculean task of will. I sat in liquid, a warm bath of thick, foul-smelling goo inside a brass and silver cylinder. I was naked.

  “Oh… AH!” I gagged, vomiting up clear, thick liquid. It smelled horrific, like some foul mix of bile, cheap whiskey, and the organic rot of low tide.

  “Relax.” It was a woman’s voice. “I need you to breathe.”

  “Maybe this way.” Caprice stopped for a moment. “I don’t know—”

  “I don’t know either, Michael.” She wiped thick, visceral slime from my face. “But the people who did this are coming. We need to get out of here as soon as possible.”

  “I can’t move.” I blinked rapidly, trying not to panic. The scent of… What was that? It was sour and noxious and made me want to retch again. It was overwhelming, whatever it was, and sent panic circling the primitive parts of my brain.

  “Don’t worry.” Her voice became soft. “One thing at a time.”

  “It’s locked.” Caprice pulled at a metal door and muttered unladylike words beneath her breath. For a long moment, I could only stare at her, the memories like a tapestry of confused horror in my mind.

  What had happened to me? To us?

  “I don’t want to make a lot of noise, but—” She pulled the Beretta, aiming at the door.

  “Don’t.” I leaped for her arm, trying to calm myself. I hoped I didn’t look as panicked as I felt. I placed one hand on her arm. “That only works in movies. You’re going to make a racket for no reason at all.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” She practically hissed the words, looking behind us. “I don’t want to be trapped in here when they come up behind us.”

  “Well…” I peered at the old but well-maintained door. “Unless there is a bar on the far side, I should be able to kick it in.”

  My words were far more certain than I was on the subject. After all, within the hour my legs had been so wobbly I had been unable to stand. However, as I assessed the door, I felt confident I could do it.

  I eyed the area just below the door handle, took a breath, and then gave the door a solid kick.

  It gave some but then held.

  Still, I knew what that give meant: a weak spot. I leaned back and launched another kick, grinning as I heard it splinter in its frame.

  One more was enough. We were through.

  “Where did you learn to kick in a door?” Caprice stepped forward, but I pushed her back, my hand in the center of her chest, and slowly opened the door.

  From the same place you learned to fire a Berretta? I grinned at the thought but did not give it voice.

  “I couldn’t say.” I turned toward her, giving her a soft smile. “It looks clear.”

  The door opened into a rounded tunnel that slanted down. The faint sound of trickling water echoed ahead. The only light was the sickly, verdant glow that seeped in from our current room. After a single meter, the room faded to pitch black.

  “This goes deeper.” I frowned, even though I knew she wasn’t looking. “Escaping dangerous men might work better if we could get outside, preferably somewhere sunny.” I didn’t like this. Some dim intuition nagged at me.

  “I told you I don’t know where we are.” Caprice’s voice sounded worried. “My goal was to get away from those men and find my friends.”

  “Do you know who’s chasing us?” Had I already asked that? For a moment, I thought perhaps I could piece something together. If those men had been responsible for placing me in that horrific metal coffin…

  But why? Why would anyone…?

  There must be reasonable answers to these questions, but my mind couldn’t quite grasp them.

  I was still forgetting something.

  “I don’t know a lot myself.” Caprice took my hand and edged into the passage. “I don’t know who they are exactly.” Her whisper came softly in the darkness. “You vanished the night we went on our last date. We had planned to get together the next day. When you didn’t show, I went to your apartment.”

  “Wait.” Caprice had only seen my apartment from the outside; we usually ended up at her place. The thought of her at my place made me unreasonably nervous. “You stopped by?”

  “Yes.” I could feel her nod more than see it in the dim light. “These assholes were there, at your place. They surprised me when I knocked.” Her voice grew softer and her I
talian accent curled gently. “When I came to, I was here. It has been awful. I did not even know you were here for several days.”

  The darkness swiftly overwhelmed my vision, forcing me to reach for the curved wall, slowing our progress. We walked forward in silence as I processed her words.

  Caprice clutched my hand tightly and stopped.

  “I think there’s another door.” I heard her hand ghosting along a smooth surface. “There’s something round on the surface, like a wheel.”

  “Round?” I reached forward myself and found a rather large and smooth handle. It felt like a submarine hatch, or perhaps the kind of door installed on an old bank vault in a cheesy movie involving gangsters from the twenties.

  “It’s stuck.” Caprice had two hands on the wheel, and she grunted as she tried to turn it.

  “Let me.” I added my strength to hers, and we both twisted. For a moment it held, then there was a loud clunk as the latch broke free.

  We pulled open the door, and wan, verdant light broke into the room. For a long moment, Caprice and I stared into the passage beyond with more than a slight amount of disbelief.

  I looked to her. “This just gets stranger and stranger.”

  She nodded but said nothing.

  We stepped inside the subway station.

  3

  The room was not a station per se, at least, not anymore. Yes, right in front of us, four sections of track ran side by side through a large, rounded tunnel. On each side of the track stood a passenger platform, complete with concrete pillars, dilapidated steel seats, and antiquated trash cans. The whole construction, probably built sometime in the seventies, seemed old, worn in a way beyond mere abandonment.

  “Oh!” Caprice jerked when one of the lights flickered, startling us both. Each platform was lit well enough, but rather than the cold, florescent light that one might expect in an actual subway station, the lights were tinged with that same unearthly green. Every few moments, another flickered.

  The effect was unsettling.

  Down the passage I heard an odd rumble, quite different than the explosions from earlier, but I couldn’t place the low, thrumming sound.

  “What’s that?” I stopped in place, putting one hand on Caprice’s shoulder.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Let’s just keep close.”

  We abandoned the dark tunnel and slipped into the subway station.

  Nothing like the stations I used frequently, it had no advertisements or posters or even notices from MUNI transit. Quite a bit of graffiti covered the white tile though, and one of the supportive pillars had a significant crack down the middle. The air that came out of the tunnels smelled old and stale and held more than a hint of urine and rot within it.

  For the most part the place was simply empty, void. The desolation unnerved me.

  The rumbling sound continued. Was it getting closer?

  “This is eerily familiar.” I looked around and felt like I was in a room of ghosts. I had used the subway system in San Francisco hundreds of times, where the layout seemed quite similar. This was like a haunted reflection of that place.

  “Have you been here before? Where are we?” Caprice edged forward, her hand on the Beretta. She scanned right and then left but apparently saw no one.

  “No, I haven’t been here.”

  I furrowed my brow at the question as I trailed behind her. It struck me as funny that for all the questions I had and for all the improbability of our situation, she was just as clueless as I was.

  And there I was, following her.

  “It just reminds me of somewhere else.” I grimaced and put my hand to my head. “Although my headache is coming back.”

  “Headache?” She turned to inspect me, her skin tinged green in the ghastly light. “You didn’t tell me you had a headache.”

  “It’s like there’s…” I wasn’t exactly certain how to describe it. “It’s like a buzz or a vibration in my head. It was really bad earlier, but I thought that I had finally gotten rid of it.”

  “And now it’s back?” Concern drifted across her face.

  “I’m fine.” I gave her a tight smile, the closest I could manage to reassuring. “Let’s keep moving.”

  Together, we crept through the eerily lit room. I’d admit that I was pleased that she had given me a pistol. I glanced down at it and realized that I was making certain that the safety was off and it was loaded.

  At the same moment I realized how ridiculous that was.

  “I know nothing about guns,” I muttered as I turned the pistol over in my hands.

  It’s a Glock 17C. My thoughts seemed to run counter to my ignorance. I looked at the pistol appreciatively, even though my mind spun. There was no way I should know what this gun was, any more than I should know what kind of gun Caprice held.

  Yet I did. I knew them as certainly as I knew my own name.

  “Michael,” Caprice whispered low and cautious. She looked up at an old loudspeaker in the ceiling. “Did you hear—?”

  “Michael Bishop.” The speaker system for the subway crackled to life, startling both of us. “Override code initiating. Clearance level Alpha, code zero, two, zero, seven, nine, eight, three—”

  I froze in place. Something about the random sequence of numbers calmed me. They didn’t seem odd, instead, whatever they were, they seemed perfect, somehow right.

  “No!” Caprice spun her pistol toward the speaker and shot it. Her quick burst of bullets destroyed that one, but the calm voice continued from a second speaker on the far wall. Before I could react, she shot that one as well. It sputtered into silence.

  I gaped at her, stunned.

  “It’s… It’s like some kind of hypnosis or something.” Her eyes went wide, wild. “Maybe that’s why you can’t remember anything. It’s something they’ve done.”

  “What?” I frowned. Something seemed off, desperate about Caprice’s explanation. Hypnosis? Honestly?

  “Michael.” A calm voice came from the opposite side of the tracks. “I need you to put the gun down.”

  I turned and searched for the owner of the voice, trying to place the sound before I ever saw his face. The moment I did, it felt as if my head had been stretched apart like warm taffy.

  That was impossible.

  “Gideon?” I peered across the tracks, unbelieving. There, in the most unlikely place imaginable, was Gideon Du’Marque, one of my oldest friends. He had apparently stepped through one of the doors behind him.

  Yet, he was not the Gideon I remembered.

  I had met the man almost ten years before, when I was fresh out of high school. A quite wealthy man, he had taken me under his wing and taught me to invest. Gideon’s tutelage was largely responsible for my lifestyle today. We’d had more wild adventures together than I could count. He had left an imprint on me as a mentor and a friend.

  However, the Gideon who stood on the other side of the tracks had little resemblance to my mentor. This Gideon was a hard man, a man with eyes of steel and a stern mien.

  This Gideon looked dangerous.

  Just like the armed man earlier, he wore a tactical vest swathed with bandoliers and heavy packs hung at his belt. He might have reminded me of a soldier or a member of a SWAT team, if it hadn’t been for the rest of his gear. His chest and right arm had been covered in what could only be described as an exoskeleton of silver-blue metal, which ended with two wickedly curved blades that extended out beyond his right hand.

  “Yes, Michael.” He nodded slowly. “You remember me?”

  “I do.” I put my hands to my temples where the buzzing sound had suddenly grown quite catastrophic. “How did you—?”

  Then things exploded.

  Caprice raised her Beretta and fired several shots at Gideon. In the enclosed space of the subway station, the echoes boomed.

  I watched in awe as the shots burst into multicolored ripples around Gideon’s head. The bullets dissolved into singing, shimmering light and vanished with a low, thrumming
sound.

  Gideon did not move but stared intently at me the entire time, as if he were willing me to do something.

  “You have to fight this, Bishop.” His voice was a low growl. “It’s—”

  “Michael!” Caprice screamed my name as if she were afraid I couldn’t hear her. Quick as a snake, she lunged for the Glock, which hung limply between my fingers and brought both pistols to bear against Gideon.

  “No!” I leapt at her as she aimed and spun us both behind one of the cracked columns. Now neither of us could see Gideon.

  I held her tightly as she squirmed.

  “Michael!” Frustration burned through her tone. “You have to listen—!”

  “I know him!” I clung to her as confusion warred with awe in my mind. “I’ve known him for years!”

  “No, you don’t!” She glanced away from the men to give me an irritated scowl. “It has something to do with the code that was coming over the speakers. You aren’t seeing things straight.”

  I peered around the edge of the column. In the distance, I heard that rumbling sound again.

  It grew closer.

  More men streamed onto the platform behind Gideon. Each of them bore odd equipment that appeared just as out of place as Gideon himself. For a long moment, I couldn’t help but gape, but then Caprice darted around the edge of the column and fired at them.

  “We have your location.” The voice, a tinny sound from the walkie-talkie in Caprice’s pocket, came across with quite a bit of static. “Hold there.”

  “Get down!” Caprice grabbed my arm and pulled me into a crouch as she continued to fire at the men behind Gideon. “We should have help soon!”

  “Help?” I noted that Gideon stood in front of his men and none of Caprice’s bullets had gotten past him. The bullets continued to dissolve into beautiful, mesmerizing colors.

  “I told you I’ve been down here a while.” She glanced at me before firing off a few more rounds. “Well, we aren’t alone.”

  She had told me that we had friends here.