Trent liked his his room. It was a small 3m by 4m by 2m box (not including a cramped bathroom) with a modern single bed in the corner, a desk and chair by the door and a small holoscreen attached to the wall with a large window overlooking the fifth tier cityscape, the highways swooping in and out of the tower blocks full of traffic.
The room had a musty smell to it as well, just like the Bunkhouse - the farm building he was staying in the day before.
He threw his suitcase onto the bed and opened it up; aside from the usual spare undies and a toothbrush, he had everything the modern urban explorer would need: an industrial strength flashlight, a nail gun, an electronics kit, a portable camera with multiple different lenses and a military-grade licensed handgun. All of this was necessary if you wanted to go and explore creepy, abandoned places for a living and come back alive and with photos. He took out his camera and put it in its own carry case and started preparing as he planned to go early the next morning.
His eyes snapped open. He read the face of his white digital clock: 1:30am. Half an hour before he was due to leave for his exploring. He washed the sleep from his face and changed into his gear, put his gun in its holster and grabbed his backpack. He then ran down to the buildings lobby and ate a quick breakfast at the hotel café. After that he bolted out the door and descended the gantry stairs from tier 2 to tier 1 and (more slowly this time) descended a set of older, more rickety steps into the bowels of the small metropolis.
The silence was deafening as he wondered the damp, cable-strewn passageways. The only sounds where that of his light footsteps tapping on the concrete floor as he walked and the steady drip of runoff from the seven main tiers of city far above.
A deep rumble rippled through the darkness and slammed into Trent's ear drums. The rumble increased until a roar could be heard as, past a chain link fence, a set of headlights followed by a seemingly endless row of yellow-lit windows raced by in the darkness at the end of the corridor, making Trent's hair stand on end. He didn't like this place, it had a different feeling to it.
His camera flashed as he took pictures of the various hazard signs on the crates littered around between the labyrinth of shipping containers and tunnels concealed under hundreds of meters of concrete and endocryte.
He froze when he heard muffled shouts and footsteps from a stairway to his left. A terrible feeling washed over him and adrenaline rushed through his body as he dived under a rail-container suspended on a set of cinder blocks, squirming under and cocking his head to see who it was. The footsteps finished climbing the stairs and shortly after he saw two pairs of black DCC security boots appear. This place is most definitely NOT abandoned, he thought.
The first pair of boots walked past but the second pair stopped three feet from his face. The faint buzz of a handheld scanner was heard.
"Someone's been here," the first pair of boots said matter-of-factly.
"Very recently," said the other.
As the footsteps walked away, he didn't realise he was holding his breath until he let out a sigh way too loud for what was healthy for him at his second
The soldiers stopped and went silent. He panicked, frantically looking for a way out. Trent spotted a small sheet of discarded metal within arms reach to his right. Might come in handy. He started slowly shuffling backwards, away from the halted feet. Then, a pair walked over to his hiding spot and he was momentarily blinded by the light on the scope of the soldier's gun. He almost instantly recognised it and thrusted the sheer of metal out from under the container, deflecting several shots and knocking the man over. Trent then shuffled back as quick as he possibly could and shot out from under the container into a completely different corridor. He didn't stop though as the lights of the security guards' scopes were right behind him. Turning every corner a split second after he did. Gunshots ricocheted off the walls as he ran, knowing that if he stopped- he didn't want to think about it.
He leaped down a large set of concrete stairs four-at-a-time and grabbed a vertical handrail, swinging around a corner of the stairway to maintain speed.
He reached the bottom of the stairs, banked right and ran down a wide and very straight corridor. The musty air blasted into his face as he ran, blind, through the darkness.
Trent turned off at a junction and saw an open pair of blast doors in the distance. Security was right behind him.
"CLOSE THE DOORS!" One of them yelled.
There was a short klaxon sound, then a hiss and the blast doors slowly started closing, the side doors starting to close over the vertical one.
Trent ran as fast as his worn out legs could carry him, not really thinking about what would happen if he didn't make it. He crouched, letting his feet slip from under him and he slid perfectly through the tiny, ever-closing square gap at the bottom of the closing doors. The doors closed behind him and he pulled the lever for the emergency lock before crumpling to the floor, exhausted. The locked light pulsing slightly as he slowly passed out on the floor.
♦️ ♦️ ♦️
It's raining now. The view of the rail yard can be seen with a Bi-Rail slowly crawling towards the edge of the screen. The fox-like creature is moving stealthily under the rim of a carriage on a stopped freight train. It then starts to run across an open area but gets spotted by a searchlight from a Dreig high above. The fox creature stops and looks paralysed by the light. The Dreig lowers so it is just visible on the screen. There are two BiCopters hovering around it, their rotors blurs slicing the cold, dry night like knives. It drops a containment unit straight on top of the creature and three armoured vehicles pull up with the letters WICED in stencilled white letters on the side. A forth armoured vehicle, a lorry, pulls up and the container is lifted onto the back of it via a mounted crane. All of the vehicles then leave and the rail yard is silent once again.
♦️ ♦️ ♦️
Trent wandered the dark hallways, his torch scanning walls as he moved. Dark stains oozed down the grey concrete walls from the ceiling.
He had so many questions about what he was meant to be retrieving; what was this place? What are those stains on the walls? The faint splatters on the floor?
His torch kept tracing the floor and walls, the light being swallowed by the ever mysterious gloom ahead of him. His feet kicked against something. It clinkered across the floor and hit the wall. He shone his torch at where it had hit. It was a shell... one of a small pile littering the hallway.
Slightly bewildered, he kept walking and later, as he came to a T-junction, his heart stalled as, at the end of the hallway, a scientist sat against the wall in a large puddle of blood. As Trent walked closer he saw where the bullets belonging to the shells had come from. The scientist had at least ten bullet wounds in his chest and beside him he had, what looked like, a sort of gun next to him that he had clearly failed to use in the fight between him and his attacker.
Trent looked through the dead scientists pockets and found just what he was looking for; a keycard.
YOU ARE READING
The F.O.X. Project
Ciencia FicciónIn the broken-up world of 2055, megacorporations rule the worlds of Vanet and Krenn. Urban explorer Trent Derrewick is tasked with investigating an abandoned facility of DCC when an unfortunate mishap leads to a Bounty Hunter being hired on a kill m...
