Fantasia Paranoia

Chapter 3

Kumail fit the Nerdy hacker stereotype pretty well. He wasn't particularly fond of exercise and he could never have been described as athletic. He had always, since puberty, been known as a lanky potato faced half-Pakistani dude, and he had never found the description to be that far from the truth. But Kumail had always loved to climb things and he had been pretty decent at it during his younger years.

Much to the dismay of his teachers, in high school, he had crawled over the protective enclosure of the ladder which led up to the school theatres cat walk and slowly jumped down, from one piece of thin metal to the next, solely for his own amusement. While he was no longer a spry youth, he was still fairly stringy, and the years of practice had served him well in scaling the safety enclosure which was supposed to prevent him from using the ladder that lead to the roof of the building across the street from the Church facility holding his son.

Brother had sent him the location of the place within half an hour of their conversation and since the place was only a few hours' drive upstate Kumail had gotten into Marie's car and headed there immediately. With the location Brother had also included the useful factoid that passcodes were changed with every shift, and so, Kumail had quietly set himself up on this roof across the street, waiting for someone to enter the facility so he could capture their keypad input on his phones camera. The shift change would be happening any minute, and so all Kumail had to do was grab the code of the first entrant and wait till most of the employees had come and gone and then sneak himself in, unnoticed.

The facility was oddly designed. It looked like a modern concrete high school built as a prison in the 1800's. Not that there had ever been such a thing. What he was looking at was almost a single solid square chunk of brutalist concrete stitch together by cold metal bracing beams and walkways.

The facility was just a few squat buildings connected by covered cement sidewalks around a utilitarianly miniscule square of a courtyard in the center with one building on each side. The buildings to either side of the thing were long and rectangular, almost barracks like, which is probably what they were. The building at the back of the square had a similar design to the barracks but it had more windows and was two stories tall, likely the classrooms. Which made the building out front the main office. It was a squat square construcion allowing entrance via a broken concrete sidewalk which led to the fence and the keypad he was looking for the code too.

The whole thing was made even stranger in that there was nothing else around it. The four buildings were placed in a kempt field at the edge of the business district of the small town it was located in. There was a fence separating it from the road that went for at least a mile in each direction and enclosed the facility and the field it was in. Behind all of this was a patch of woods, which extended away from the facility and the town for as far as the eye could see. Weird. At least Kumail thought it was weird. But then he often found LDC layouts and designs to be strange.

And at last his time had come. A fourty something Church person had gone up to the fence shortly after he had set up and he had nabbed the code. 6 hours later after all the day staff had had a chance to leave and the night was well underway and he was in. But where was his son?

After sneaking inside and around the perimeter, Kumail had made his way to the barracks like building on the right. Now inside, he found himself in long hall like room full of sleeping children. His son must be close by. But not here. Theodore clearly wouldn't have been placed in here. This room was full of slightly older children, all the kids between the toddlers and preteens from the looks of it. So Kumail turned to leave, intending to check the room on the other side of the hallway. But as he did so, now standing no more than a foot away from the door, he heard the double doors he had entered the building through swing wide, and he froze in place.