Power Play (Book 2)

Chapter 1: Catching Up

Author’s Note: This chapter is dedicated to everyone who supported me in the last book. Your input, votes, and patience are what drove me to finish the last one and start this one. Thank you!

Now, enough with the touchy-feely stuff… on with Power Play!

My name is Brandon Stamp, and I’m an angry librarian. Though at the moment I’m not in a library. I’m inside a high-security government building that probably doesn’t exist on any organizational chart you would have ever seen. Or that anyone below the President has probably ever seen.

But it’s not an org chart I’m looking at right now. I’m looking at faded office carpeting and walls covered in cheap paint. I’m looking at thick office doors protected with strong electronic locks. I’m looking at a lot of scared people feeling their way around in the darkness, scared that I’m coming for them. Which I am. Sort of.

See, those people aren’t wandering around in metaphorical darkness. They’re really in the dark because I cut off the power to the building before I broke in. Doesn’t bother me, though. I can see just fine in the dark.

See, being a librarian isn’t the only impressive thing about me. I also have super powers.

This place is part of a web of NSA and CIA and FBI and Homeland Security offshoots that I haven’t quite figured out yet, but their job is to snoop on just about everyone they can and roll that info up to their bosses. Their bosses are the ones I’m really after, but they haven’t surfaced yet so I’ve been paying visits to all the monitoring buildings I can find.

My little visits have apparently been putting them on edge, which is nice to see. Their security station was prepared for my visit, just not prepared enough. It had reinforced plating all across the walls, and an automatic turret that cut loose on me the moment I pummeled my way in. I don’t know what kind of gun it was, but I have to admit it stung a little. I’m going to need another new jacket. At least it didn’t tear up my pants like last time. It’s just about impossible to be intimidating when your pants are about to fall off.

Fortunately, even if my outfit gets ripped to shreds, I don’t. 

This floor is where all the regular intelligence workers pore over the massive amount of data this facility pulls in. They’re not hard core agents, and none of them are armed. The only thing they’re doing right now is  frantically stumbling about in the darkness trying to get somewhere safe. 

I guess in that respect, they’re not that different from me. I’m here looking for information. Information on what happened to me and who else might have powers like mine. I want to know what happened to Mandeville, one of the people who did this to me. I want information on what happened to my wife, Nicole. She was kidnapped shortly after I got these powers, and I’m not entirely sure who took her or why. And I want information on what happened to some friends of mine who disappeared in a fiery attack on an apartment building almost a month ago. So I’m doing a fair amount of stumbling around myself at the moment.

I’ve visited three of these facilities now, counting this one. I break in, steal whichever important looking computer systems I can, and destroy the rest. I leave quite a mess behind me, both in terms of people and gear, so I’m not surprised most people want out of my way. It helps, actually.

I speed past most of the researchers, a breeze in the blackness. Through many of the locked doors I hear people calling out in confusion and panic, wondering what is happening. 

These security paranoid nuts put electronic keycodes and fingerprint scanners on every door, and they’re learning that one of the drawbacks of that plan is when the power goes out the doors are all locked tight. Unless you have emergency generators to keep that from happening, which they do. Unless someone takes out those generators, which I did.