Man on the Inside

Man on the Inside - Part 2

It had been a hospital once, but as part of the Freewill compound it was demoted to a lab for the criminally insane and negligent. William could imagine nurses in scrubs walking down the hallways with clipboards and blankets, people dazed but healing as they were carted about in their wheelchairs. But this wasn't a place of healing anymore.

The first two floors were quiet, most of the rooms empty of everything, even the shades, allowing the sun to bleach everything to bone. People under the employ of Freewill were few and far between, working diligently in their rooms on floor three, four, and five, not noticing a sound. William recognized some of the components they tinkered with. Explosives. The bottom three floors were a full out bomb factory.

At least they aren't manufacturing E.M.P.s, he thought.

Louis gestured to him and William snapped his thoughts back on track. They needed to find a computer terminal connected to Retten's lab mainframe, and they could only be found upstairs, on the top two floors.

One floor from the top they found the computer lab, a mishmash of wires and computer screens they couldn't tell heads or tails of. It took William fifteen minutes to find the correct server, and all the while Louis was glaring at him, as if it was his fault the room was a mess. He was finishing up attaching the freeze disc to the servers when Louis went still as a statue. The blonde agent held his gun tighter and went flat against the wall. William twisted off the last wire and followed suit. Someone was in the other room.

True, when he thought of his job the first thing that came to mind were the Bond films he had watch as a kid. He liked the style, the adventure, and intrigue. But he never liked the aspect of fear. He felt as if his spine had become and elevator shaft and the lift was plummeting down to crash. However, fear did not stop him from keeping a straight face, taking out his own gun, and nodding to Louis. They stood on either side of the doorway, waiting for whoever was in the next room to come in.

There was the sound of a small motor behind them and then a pair of clicks.

A dart punctured William's neck. His arms became too heavy to lift the gun, and then everything blacked out.

In dazed flashes, where he couldn't tell minutes from hours, William thought he saw Louis being dragged into a room buzzing with mechanical equipment. As the door shut he heard the blonde shouting his head off with obscenities. What where they going to do to him? Torture? William's hand twitched and he jerked against the men that held him and rifled through his pockets. One of them jabbed something like a needle into his leg, but he soon slipped back into darkness.

---

Massaru Devi watched from around the corner of the hallway as the brown haired man's possessions were stripped from him and thrown into a corner. The young man was then dragged into the room across from Retten's lab. Massaru could already hear screaming and the whirring of motors. He fingered the thumb drive in his hand, and then walked towards the discarded objects. One of them was a small tin of mints.

---

The first thing William noticed as he awoke was that his mouth was held open by a wire brace, making it dry and stale. His jaw felt numb, as if it had been shot with a dozen needles of Novocain. The second was his body was strapped down to a medical gurney. His vision was fuzzy. Something was shoved into his mouth. It felt like a hand and he wanted to bite down on it. He shifted on the gurney, mentally checking what he had on him. They had stripped him of his guns and knives, but left his clothes on. Big mistake. His fingers brushed the cuff of his jacket, feeling around for the small wire kept in the lining.

Louis, where was he? Still in that room? Had they killed him?

No, don't think of that. Just get free.