F3: ‘The Landsberger Vats’
More from Stockholm Syndrome, following immediately from Welcome to the Umweltzone. There’s one more chunk from Red’s perspective to come, one from Simon’s, and then a couple of sections from the perspective of their “quarry”. Unless I get distracted. Either way, I’m really getting into the characters here, despite the fact that my writing pace has been glacial. There’s probably too much swearing, and the cuts between stories are less intentional than a matter of me running out of time. And because it’s supposed to be quite tightly structured, I’ve had to go back and edit some of the previous segments. Still, at least it’s here … and, as ever, crit and comments encouraged;
THE LANDSBERGER VATS
Muttering into my collar, I urge Simon to keep the mark distracted.
In the wake of relay delay, my eyes are slowly pulled skyward. The vats stand in defiance; attempting to dwarf me beneath its towers and buttresses. I’m having none of it.
“I’m trying to kick out the cameras.” I add, turning my attentions to the building.
Cloaked in an ugly green-grey moss and sodden with rainwater, the sodden ziggurat teeters in the wind and rain. A crumbling heap of shipping crate, canvas, and reclaimed aluminium. The original structure is long dead – its skeletal frame buried beneath the tide of impromptu additions.
“It shouldn’t take long.”
Someone saw the need for surveillance: a hundred orange dots in the rapidly fading twilight. My left hand is closed tight on the custom incendiary. Swallowing a shudder, I second guess myself – thieving a glance at the bitch’s simple grey plastic; tasting the latent saline of her binary incantations.
I pull the pin.
A moment of majesty and unfolding exuberance, then I’m struggling for light and oxygen in a torrent of data. For the first time, I panic; swiping desperately at the flickering images that pass before me.
One hundred and five cameras, seventy-two of which are dummies. “Now, that’s interesting,” I think, stumbling backwards. Even so, she could have … scratch that, she should have warned me. But there’d been no hints, just bitter lemon and inexpertly applied mascara. Three hours of stilted conversation beneath a charcoal sky, and this was her repayment.
Synapses firing, my stomach abandons me to the imagined gravity of a chasm of burnt copper. My ears decompress.
“Remind me why we’re doing this, Red.”
The lunchbox bounces Simon’s disembodied words into the depths of my skull.
“A pile of cash?” I ask, managing a grimace as I sweep the overclocked image of a well-dressed woman leftward, out of my line of sight. Then my mind turns to our client; the quarry’s sister. Rising nausea meets the pink blush of guilt in an awkward melange.
“A way of ensuring the long-term mental health of a deeply unstable woman?”
My words sound hollow. Simon gets the text, but the guilt will linger. As the bitch’s trojan overwhelms the ziggurat’s compound eye, I’m distracting myself with the light show; watching the algorithms relinquishing our quarry’s data as they commit my irises to memory.
Grace Diaz. Spanish software developer. Suite 121-B.
For a second time, I swallow.
“You tell me?” Somewhere in the translation from brain to voice, cutting comment becomes half-hearted question. The choices are Simon’s, and his alone. My role in this situation is strictly professional.
Right?
Its task complete, the incendiary is burning itself out – a vortex of flame dissolving back into the velvet cover of dusk. The remaining orange lights flicker and die. Pulling myself up from the damp concrete, I shake the raindrops from my jacket. Composure regained, I begin to trace the boundary of the premises, searching for an entrance.
“Deeply unstable.”
Initially, I take the words for an echo.
“She doesn’t seem unstable.”
Well, shit.
- – - – -
I’m running. In recent years, and in my line of work, this has been something of a recurring motif.
In the background, seeping into my awareness from the edges inward, I’m eavesdropping on the continuing stand-off.
“Unstable? Who’s unstable?” There’s something in Grace’s line of questioning … something in her tone of voice. Something familiar, with a shape I can feel forming in the back of my throat. Something that I realise just before Simon.
“Damn it!”
My yell echoes off the concrete. Pigeons scatter, soaring sideways into the darkness.
I glance behind, but the plaza – if that’s what it is – is abandoned.
“Simon, can you hold her a little longer?” Sod the whispering; my voice is loud, urgent. But, of course, he knows what he’s doing. It’s his fucking vocation, after all, and God only knows how I’m supposed to spur him to new heights of bullshit by asking nicely.
“It’s okay, Perry, I know why you’re here.” Grace seems calm, measured. These are the words of someone who knows a lot more than they’ve been letting on. Which means I have a lot less time than I’d anticipated. So, while “Perry” is doing a double-take, I’m killing the two-way. He’ll probably do better without me on the other side of a teleprompt, meddling inexpertly.
I all but rub my face against the biometric scanners. A pneumatic hiss signals the opening of doors, and – chest thumping – I fling myself into the lobby.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.