Underlings (Not being updated at this time)

Underlings - 4. The red meal

The man in the cell groaned as he came to. The room waltzed as he swam in it, then adjusted to it finally and it became still. 

In front of him sat a woman, half his age, well-dressed in the fashion that he remembered from this time and attractive, despite her harsh features.

She waited for him patiently, unlike the man that had last dealt with him, who he imagined -correctly - would be watching from a room beyond the mirror.

His face ached from a new swelling that he couldn’t remember receiving. He longed to touch it but his hands were still chained to the table, which made his skin itch in an imagined reaction to it; the mind being a bastard as usual.

“Would you like some water, Mr Sethwi?” The woman spoke in English with an accent he couldn’t quite place; maybe Cheshire, Chester, Cheltenham? Somewhere posh... it didn’t matter.

He nodded, she stood up, took a bottle that was already in front of her and approached him, without fists clenched, electrodes or needles, but he still flinched. He watched her as she poured the water into his mouth and fed him like a mother, a Samaritan, a good cop.  This was no housewife or homemaker. This was an old fashioned British ball-breaker, he hadn’t seen one of those in a long time, but he’d seen things far scarier.  Her breasts were next to his face, he noticed them then, bit his bottom lip and the water spilled down his chin and onto the trousers which he’d been given to wear. She stopped pouring, disgusted yet not fazed by his behaviour and sat down.

“I am Agent Landry. I work for MI7, which doesn’t exist. That man behind the glass works for a Chinese agency that you have never heard of. It doesn’t exist. You are a British Citizen, but as you are effectively still in a Chinese airport terminal, I can’t do anything for you, until you answer some questions. You’re in limbo.”

“If you don’t exist and you’re not here, then my answers to your questions mean nothing. There’s a lot of truth in that, Agent Landry. More truth than you will ever know. My answers, they mean nothing...”

The prisoner chuckled to himself and smiled into the two-way mirror next to them, waving a chained hand.

“We have good relations with the Chinese, but they will not even entertain releasing you until you have disclosed certain pieces of information. If you do not answer my questions, I’m afraid I do not know what will happen to you. You may simply, disappear. But not in the way you did last week...The Chinese don’t have scruples.”

The prisoner considered this, laughed some more, but Landry could see his uncertainty. His face became serious, earnest and for a moment, the veil of age was lifted and he was just an afraid human being.

“It may not matter what I say. Or what they do to me, but I want to go home.”

“Then please, Mr Sethwi, if that is who you are, please let me try to help you.” The prisoner thought about it in the silence they created then nodded consent.

“You are Faisal Farooq Sethwi, born in Whitechapel, England... current address 172 Cartwright Lane in Forest Gate, London, E7... Junior Insurance Broker for Lloyds of London, no children, no spouse, parents deceased… and you were staying at the Oriental Residence in Shanghai in China?”

“Current address? Broker? I suppose it still is. Yes. Yes. Yes, Agent Landry. That’s me.” He laughed once more as he remembered something from a life long forgotten.

“This image taken last week at this airport, can you confirm that it is you?” She held a photo which was a still from the video she’d watched in the room behind the mirror. The prisoner smiled at it.

“Yes. I was handsome wasn’t I? These last few days have taken their toll on me. I suppose I could say, it has been the longest week of my life…”

“In the image you are going into the restrooms in the terminal. You did not come out. You did not board your flight or retrieve your luggage. Where did you go?”

The prisoner paused, as if picking his words from the air around him. Looking at the answers on the ceiling tiles, or in the skies above them?

“I got sucked into a black hole to another place and there I stayed. I didn’t know where I was until I was there. I didn’t know when I was. I wasn’t alone.”

“What do you mean, you weren’t  alone?”

“There were a lot of us. We all got sucked there…a few from this place and that. I was the only one that went sitting on a toilet in an airport terminal. That was a good one.  Quite a few of us have come back. We are a test...a signal. That’s why they let us come back. But I just want to go home, for what little time I have left. There are enough of us here to do it. They don’t need me. I just want to go home.”

Landry took a glance at the mirror, then leant towards the prisoner.

“Do what, Mr Sethwi? What test? What signal?” as a sudden crack from the glass announced itself as prelude to the spray which met her face, Landry ducked for cover beneath the table as a second shot was fired at the prisoner from the adjacent room. Landry knew the first had killed the old man in an instant, but the second was sent anyway; having its job description changed from Killshot to Horrormaker, hurling shrapnel pieces of skull and skin to the ceiling tiles above where it hung, in place of the words Mr Sethwi had been looking for. His face was a crescent moon, where once it had been full. The crescent moon gazed up at the rest of it; red stars and distant planets with a fluorescent bulb sun.

Landry had no weapon, security had taken it from her when she’d arrived. No shots came to pin her, the killer succeeding in his task, Landry was of no concern.

She ran towards to the shattered glass screen and using a chair, she leapt onto the console of the room which had been a badly kept secret.

Erik Wang was lying on the floor, bleeding from his forehead, but not dead, just injured, not Mr-Sethwi-injured, Erik Wang would live to see another day on Earth. Landry knelt beside him, frisked him for his gun and took it.

Landry looked once more into the room she had escaped. In the cell, a red meal had been taken at a red table; The old man hung backwards in an unnatural position, held upright in his chair, only by his cuffed hands. The Chinese had no scruples…

In the hallway lay two dead uniformed police,  Landry took stock of the situation, followed the winding corridors back the way she’d been escorted from less than an hour previous, then caught a glimpse of the killer turning a corner ahead of her. It was Robot Yao; her escort into the building.

She yelled for him to stop and he responded by firing at her. As he made for the door to the terminal, Landry hit him in the ankle and he fell to the floor, crawling to cover.

As Robot reloaded, Landry made up the distance between them, but a shot resounded before she got there and echoed down the hall. She knew what it meant…

Slumped against a fire extinguisher, the killer Robot had taken his own life by firing his pistol through the roof of his mouth. He sat in a way which mimicked that of the man he had murdered in the cell moments before; an imitation of his own art.

Landry was out breath, soaked in blood and pissed off. She took the handle of her gun and used it to pummel what was left of his face. She hated Shanghai, but she had a feeling she wasn’t done with it.