Notes:
Not nearly as brutal as some of my previous Halloween stories, but it’s a Halloween one.
My thanks to Sineater, JMount and Chris Bishop for the encouragement, ideas and writer’s block busting.
“Alouette, gentille alouette / Alouette, je te plumerai.” – Lark, sweet lark / Lark, I will pluck you.
The old song, familiar to anyone who’d ever had to learn school-room French, bounced and rebounded off the dirty concrete walls, the echoes confusing and distorting the words.
The sinister delight in the singer’s voice only added to the eeriness.
Hiding in the shadows of a massive pillar, Rhapsody Angel held very, very still, keeping her breathing under tight control. With the size of this chamber, the slightest noise could betray her.
“Ohhh, alouette, gentille alouette / Alouette, je te plumerai.” The singer started up again. “Je te plumerai la tête / Je te plumerai la tête.” – I will come and pluck your head. She paused and Dianne could hear the smile when she gleefully sang the next line: “Et la tête!” – And your head!
“Don’t let her get to you!” Dianne harshly ordered herself. “The singing is mind games, that’s all. Think, Simms, think! Options! Okay, weapons: two knives, me, and whatever else I can find. Enemies: so far, just one Mysteron murderer who likes her job. Backup: nil, unless I can get rid of this jamming. There might be backup from base after we miss check in, but that’s not for another...” She checked her watch, “... Thirty minutes. And they have to find us first.” Dianne swallowed hard as the ‘we’ and ‘us’ brought someone else back to the fore of her mind. “Complication: Scarlet is currently being held hostage, he’s out cold and chained to a device wired to deliver fifty thousand volts into him, and I’ve got twenty-eight minutes before it goes off.” She shoved her last glimpse of him – blood on his face, eyes closed, soaking wet and laid out on a metal table like a corpse awaiting the embalmers – out of her mind. “Location: Tokyo Underground Storm Drain.”
Properly called the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, in its day, it had been the largest storm drain and anti flooding system in the world, designed for dealing with typhoons. As per the tourist information, it was built 50 metres underneath Kasukabe City, made up of five silos 65 metres high and 32 metres wide, and a 177 metre long water tank that was 25.4 metres high and 78 metres wide, all connected by 6.4 kilometres of tunnels. Kept dry between uses, it was a fascinating place to visit, and when they entered the large tank with its massive pillars and equally massive proportions, they could only agree that the appellation of ‘Tokyo’s Underground Temple’ was certainly appropriate.
As to how they’d gotten here... Well...
Completed in 2006, The Temple was well over the line where it could be considered ‘ageing’ and a new system was being built east of here with almost double the capacity. But there’d been delays on the construction, so the government was hastily putting in upgrades to let The Temple cope with the coming typhoon season while its successor was being finished. The needs at both sites had necessitated splitting up the local team and a cohort of engineers and specialists were brought in from across the world to make up the shortfall.
Evidently, the importance of the project had drawn the Mysterons’ attention and a threat had been issued last night: ‘The place of the kiri tree will drown under its own pride. The pillars of the temple will rot from within’.
The vagueness of the threat meant that multiple teams had been dispatched and she and Scarlet were sent here. Apparently, their arrival was what the replicant had been waiting for.
The inspection of the above ground control room had gone fine, but as soon as they’d left the control centre and gone into the large ‘pressure control tank’ – the rectangular chamber with a forest of pillars that gave The Temple its name – the trap was sprung.
Unbeknownst to them, a lockdown protocol had been triggered to seal off the entire facility, above ground and below, and the control centre’s fire fighting system – halogen gas to protect the electronics – had smothered everyone inside. They’d been inspecting the area around the massive pumps that fed collected water into the Edo river, when a brave soul got onto the Temple radio they’d been given and gasped out the warning before they succumbed.
She and Scarlet had immediately tried to contact Cloudbase, only for the squeal of a jamming signal to answer them. It was while they were slinking towards one of the emergency exits that part two of the trap was executed: at the same time most of the lights died, a hand reached out from atop the scaffolding surrounding one of the pumps and dropped a hammer square onto Scarlet’s head.
Scarlet’s hardened ‘Cap had saved his life, but he still dropped like a rock, knocked out by the impact. Rhapsody had gone to drag him to safety, only to be chased off by a blistering fusillade from a machine gun. She’d lost her pistol when she tripped over some scaffolding in her mad dash for cover and came back just in time to see their attacker – a dark haired, broad-shouldered woman in blue overalls and a tool belt – dump a bucket of water over Scarlet after placing him on the device. She’d then announced its purpose, grinned broadly, and declared that they were going to play a game of hide and seek, winner gets to live, with a thirty minute timer on the device to keep Rhapsody from trying to get out of playing her game.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” the woman sang out, her voice now showing a faint German accent, then she giggled as the chamber rang with the distinctive click of a safety being flicked off first one, then two Spectrum-issue pistols – confirming Rhapsody’s suspicion that she’d picked up both of their sidearms.
“She’s completely insane!” Rhapsody realised, slowly slipping her boot knife out of concealment and holding it tightly as she stood with her back to one of the massive pillars. “Going by what we know about replication, she had to have started that way... I wonder if that’s why the Mysterons picked her? I doubt she has combat experience, that spray and pray she chased me off with must have emptied her machine gun.” For a brief moment, she wished she had Scarlet and Ochre’s ability to hear gunfire and identify almost exactly what was shooting at them; knowing how many rounds were in the magazine would be very useful right now. “And she’s got our pistols too, that’s another 36 rounds in her arsenal.”
“All around the mulberry bush / The monkey chased the weasel,” the replicant started singing again. “The monkey thought it was all in fun...”
“SHIT!” Rhapsody lunged out of her hiding spot as the woman stepped into the open, Scarlet’s pistol in her hand and hers tucked into her tool belt.
“POP! Goes the weasel!”
Grinning broadly, she opened fire.
It was the replicant’s inexperience with Spectrum pistols – and specifically the high powered ‘hot load’ rounds in Scarlet’s clip – that saved Rhapsody’s skin, the surprising power of the muzzle jump kicking it out of her hand and giving Rhapsody the split second she needed to sprint to the next pillar and lose herself in the equipment and supplies stacked around it.
“How did she find me so easily...” Rhapsody started, then looked down at herself and grimaced. “White and gold. Of course. Doesn’t matter how dark it is, I’ll stand out. Well that’s just perfect.” She cast about in the hopes of finding an abandoned jacket or something to camouflage herself with... then something else caught her attention: the ripe smell of decomposing meat.
Keeping low, she followed the stink, half sure of what she’d find. Slipping around a tangled mess of light-weight scaff-planks, Dianne found a woman’s corpse, dark hair spilling from under the cracked hard hat. It had been here for some time, the body mottled and starting to bloat despite how cool it was down here.
“Oh, this is how you died,” Dianne realised, looking up at the broken chain above the corpse and the jumble of scaff-planks around and on top of it. A closer look and she could make out ‘van Dijk’ embroidered on the right side of the chest. “That’s a Dutch name... Makes sense.” Dianne crouched to get a better look at the body. “The Netherlands have been keeping back the sea for generations, they’re world experts on this sort of work. You were brought onto the project... then the Mysterons decided to select you for this.”
“Ah! You found me!” The still hidden van Dijk sang out the words. This time her accent reflected her homeland. “Once I was told what my mission was, I was so glad! Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s world?”
“I certainly do,” was Rhapsody’s thought, but she kept that to herself, her head on a proverbial swivel as she backed away from the corpse, trying to use the echoes to triangulate the Mysteron’s location.
“I thought it was bad in Europe, but here?” The sneer was clearly audible. “I would say something and be ignored, Gerrit would say the same thing and he’d be listened to.” She sighed regretfully. “I am sorry I had to include Gerrit. He tried his best to have me front and centre and listened to, but I know what I must do.” A pause, then she giggled again, a chilling girlish one. “I’ve shown them all, I’ve out-thought each and every one of those men, and now I’m about to out-think you too!”
“Fat chance of that,” Rhapsody smirked to herself – she’d just identified van Dijk’s approach vector. “Now then, let’s see if I can’t remove your ace in the hole...” Rhapsody carefully measured the distance and waited. The replicant had two pistols and she had two knives, trying to sneak up on her for a hand to hand fight was too chancy and would eat up precious time that she couldn’t afford to waste, but if she could slow the replicant long enough to free Scarlet, that would shift the game in her favour. “Wait for it... Wait for it...” Shadows shifted, the echoes of a scrape of metal against concrete rattled through The Temple, then... “There!” Sure of her target, Dianne sent the knife flying through the air to slice through cotton and sink into flesh. She was already turning as van Dijk shrieked and fired again, wild shots that filled the room with noise but didn’t do any damage.
Rhapsody darted across the intervening space, zig-zagging from cover to cover just in case she was spotted, and she was at Scarlet’s side moments later. He was still out cold, but a quick glance didn’t reveal any obvious new injuries.
Relatively sure that she’d bought herself a minute or two, Rhapsody quickly studied the arrangement.
van Dijk had taken Scarlet’s boots and socks off so she could wrap a chain with links as thick as her forefinger around his ankles. The chain was so tight it was biting into his skin and it was padlocked into place with a sturdy-looking hunk of brass and steel. His arms had been stretched out and his wrists were similarly secured, and the ends of the three chains had been welded to the frame of the table. The electrocution device and timer were attached to the head of the table and thick wires were welded to either side of the table to conduct the electricity and complete the circuit.
Keenly aware of the minutes slipping past, the machine drew her attention first. “Can I break it or shut it down...?” Rhapsody quickly considered the apparatus and shook her head to discard the idea. It was humming with electricity and she knew enough to recognise the anti-tampering mercury switches on it. “Only if I had more time, tools, and a link to Melody or Chief Engineer Onyx to talk me through. Bolt cutters...?” She cast around for some, but came up blank. “Lockpicking it is.”
She examined the padlock securing the nearer of Scarlet’s wrists. While she didn’t recognise the brand, a glance at the keyway showed it wasn’t a disc detainer but a standard key – and theoretically a much easier pick – which was a relief; time was quickly slipping away. She unzipped her flight jacket to get at the concealed pocket with her lockpicks, selected a hook pick and a tension tool from her small collection and slipped both into the keyway. “Scarlet!” Rhapsody hissed as she worked the picks, hoping that he was healed enough to wake. To her relief – and her surprise – the padlock shackle popped open after just a little fiddling. “Thank heavens for terrible padlock makers!”
“... Nnrg...” A flicker of blue followed the weak groan as Scarlet turned his head towards her, his eyes cracking open.
“S.I.R!” Rhapsody muttered the warning. She was about to go to his feet to start on the second padlock when she caught a movement in the shadows. “Play dead, then get yourself out!” She slid the lockpicks into his sleeve and was reassured when he immediately shut his eyes and relaxed again.
“THAT’S CHEATING!”
Rhapsody hit the deck a split second before the first shot rang out as van Dijk leaned around a stack of equipment, a dark patch on her leg showing where the knife had tagged her. Bullets ricocheted off the scaffolding and blew chunks out of the walls as Rhapsody crawled to the cover of a stack of steel drums. A quick peep between the 240 gallon drums of silicone told her that Scarlet was still lying limp and apparently lifeless on the table despite the gunfire cracking overhead.
“... That’s... twenty-five shots so far... Twenty-six, seven, eight...” Rhapsody gasped and flinched when a sliver of hot lead sliced the shoulder of her jacket, scanned the area for more cover, spotted a forklift and made for it. Being an enclosed space, it was battery-powered, which meant lithium, so the risk of an explosion if it got hit was non-zero, but she had to draw van Dijk away from Scarlet and give him time to pick the last two padlocks. More shots cut the air, one clipping the body of the forklift but not hitting anything important. “Twenty-nine, thirty, one, two... Okay, think Simms. Did I see that machine pistol on her? No. And she has nowhere to hide it in her coveralls. Odds of her having her hands on Scarlet’s spare clip?” Dianne carefully peered around the front end of the forklift, spied the massive trunk of a nearby pillar draped in three layers of scaffolding and made for it. “... Low odds, his tunic was still zipped up... but I’ll find out soon enough, she’s almost at thirty-six.”
Four more bullets splattered against galvanised steel or pocked craters into concrete, and Rhapsody smiled thinly as The Temple rang with the clicks of triggers being pulled on empty clips, an explosion of swearing and the clatter of the pistols being tossed away. “Two can play at mind games, Mysteron, I have your number now,” was her thought as she stood up. “You want me, come and get me!” Rhapsody taunted, then sang out Scarlet’s favourite hooligan chant. “Come on if you think you’re hard enough!”
“Oh, I will!” van Dijk snarled, the sound of her fury bouncing off the walls in time with the sound of her feet pounding on the floor.
Moving as quickly as she could, Rhapsody hoisted herself up onto a corner pole of the scaffolding and started climbing. She wasn’t quite as nimble as she’d have liked to have been, the Angel flight suit wasn’t built for free-climbing, but it had grippy, soft-soled boots and that was the more important part right now. She risked a glance down to see that Scarlet was sitting up now, working on the padlock holding his feet, then she reached up to pull herself higher.
A clanging was van Dijk. The replicant had found a pipe wrench, tucked it into the back of her tool belt and she was rapidly climbing the ladders, her greater experience with scaffolding showing as she started to catch up.
Reaching the top of the unfinished tower, Rhapsody hoisted herself up onto the platform. There was no fencing to keep her in, just the uprights for where it would go. Risking another glance down, a flash of red below was Scarlet rolling off the table. Dianne caught the movement of his head as he looked up at them to get a read of the situation. He immediately connected the dots and went for the base of the scaffolding tower, moving as quickly as his lingering grogginess would let him.
Turning her attention back to her immediate surroundings, she looked around to gauge how much space she had, drawing her second knife from the small sheath at the small of her back as she did so. “I don’t have much room, but I’ve worked with worse.” She took a couple of steps away from the edge just as van Dijk pulled herself up, huffing and puffing from the effort, but sheer murder etched in every line of her face.
Rhapsody bounced lightly on her toes, switching her back up fighting knife to a reverse hold. This would need exact timing and a little more goading. “What, no more songs or nursery rhymes?” she taunted with a broad and reckless grin.
van Dijk spat out something in Dutch that sounded like a swear word, jerked the pipe wrench from her belt and hefted it with clear skill as she advanced. Pulling back, she swung it at Rhapsody, a powerful overhead blow that would have crushed the Angel’s skull if it had connected.
It didn’t get a chance.
Dropping the knife to free up her hands, Rhapsody sideslipped. At the same time, she jammed one foot beside the replicant’s in a lock, grabbed the van Dijk’s overalls by the shoulders and used their combined momentum to throw her over the edge of the scaffolding.
“Aaaaiiii!”
Screaming as she fell, van Dijk landed shoulder-first on the table with an audible crunch. She might have survived, but in her awkward flailing to get up, her arm swung out, smacked against the apparatus and triggered it.
BBBBZZZZTCCRRAAACK!
The blue-white flash of discharging electricity briefly lit up the Temple like a miniature lightning bolt, the echoes of the crack covered any final cries from the replicant, and then all was eerily still.
Dianne didn’t look at the body as she climbed down. The smell wafting through the air was more than enough to tell her that the replicant was well and truly finished.
Scarlet was waiting for her at the base of the scaffolding, holding onto one of the upright poles for support. “Rhapsody!”
“Scarlet, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, are you?” Scarlet automatically offered his hand to help her over some cabling on the floor (and so he could start checking her over to make sure that she was indeed okay), but to both of their surprise his aim was somewhat off to the side.
Worried, Rhapsody stopped in front of him and held up two fingers. “How many?”
Scarlet frowned and blinked a couple of times. “Ah... at least one.” He shook his head as if that might make whatever had come loose settle back into place, blinked again, then squinted in the gloom. “... Three?”
“No, darling, not three.” Dianne briefly considered putting her jacket around his shoulders, he was soaked to the bone, but it wouldn’t do much good; he was so much bigger than she was. She settled for looping his arm around her shoulders instead and reached around his back to grab his belt to steady his wobbly steps. “Come on, let’s get you out of here and off to the good doctor.”
“Only if you tell me what the bloody hell happened,” Scarlet countered, letting her steer him towards the exit they’d been aiming for when everything kicked off. “Last thing I know, we’re on our way out, then all of a sudden I’m chained to a table and you’re giving me lock picks.”
“I’ll fill you in as soon as we’re safe,” Rhapsody promised as she pushed open the emergency door and they started the slow ascent of the stairs.
“S.I.G.” Scarlet nodded, most of his concentration on making his feet do what he wanted them to and not smashing his bare toes against something in the process.
About halfway up they must have cleared the jamming bubble, because Rhapsody’s communicator started bleeping for attention. She fished it out of her trouser pocket. “Rhapsody Angel receiving.”
There was a buzz of static, then Green’s voice came out of the small device: “Rhapsody, good to hear you. Status?”
“We’re both alive and mostly intact, as is The Temple. The Mysteron isn’t. We need back up here ASAP.”
“Understood.” A pause, then: “Ochre, Grey, Melody and Harmony are enroute to your location now, along with local law enforcement.”
“We’ll need fire with hazmat as well, the control centre was flooded with halogen,” Scarlet spoke up.
“S.I.G.” A pause then, “Captain Scarlet, Rhapsody Angel, Doctor Fawn is dispatching a medical team to collect you.”
Dianne resolutely did not giggle at the sour face Scarlet made at that. “S.I.G, we’ll be waiting. Rhapsody out,” she said, then pocketed the communicator so she could focus on the stairs. “I think adrenaline is the only thing keeping the two of us upright,” was her thought as she glanced at Scarlet. He was getting that pinched look that meant he was starting to run low. “It has been quite a day and I don’t think either of us have eaten since we left base.”
Neither of them said anything more as they climbed, but at the top, Paul stopped and turned towards her.
“Dianne,” he said, gently cupping her face with his free hand. “I might not be seeing straight, but back there, I could see enough to make out the timer on that thing. You saved my life. Thank you, Dianne.” He offered her a shy half-smile. “Those two words don’t really feel sufficient, but they’re all I have, and I’ll keep finding new ways to say them until it feels like they are enough.”
Deeply touched by his heartfelt words and the genuine gratitude they carried, Dianne rested her hands on his shoulders and went up on tiptoe to press a loving kiss to his lips, a gesture that he returned with equal passion and tenderness. “You are always welcome, darling,” she said as they parted, so pleased to see him smile that small, soft, gentle smile that was only for her. “Now, let’s get out of here.” She put his arm back around her shoulders.
Scarlet nodded, letting her steady him once again. “S.I.G.”