Chapter Eighty-One: A Fresh Breath of XEGOST-H Sulfide
The armed men's faces were covered to the point that you couldn't tell anything about them except that they were lethal.
“I'm not making entry until I know for certain that my men will be safe,” their Commander said to Nancy Cartwright. “As far as I'm concerned, we could just block the doors and knock this building down. Trap everyone down there even your pet Mercers.”
Nancy glared at the man. “I assure you that will not be necessary. We are prepared to take drastic action to both protect the scenario and your men. I just hope they are as skilled as I have been told. This isn't the kind of enemy that your firearms will be much help for.”
“We know how to handle your little ghost,” the Commander said.
She waved her hands and two of the heavily armed men carried a large silver canister over to where Nancy and the Commander were standing. An open hatch in the wall revealed a strange array of pipes. There were many knobs and handles spread around the pipes, controlling various unknown functions. There was a prominent attachment sticking out of the hatch, a nozzle of some kind.
The men connected the silver canister to the nozzle and fastened it in.
“What even happened here?” The man with the Commander asked. “I thought this was a stable scenario.”
“It was,” Nancy answered. “We have never seen the entity behave this way. Perhaps Mentes botched something. Maybe the Mercers themselves have become immune to the drug regimen that has worked in the past.”
As the two armed men finished installing the silver bottle, Nancy leaned over and pulled a yellow handle. As she did a hissing sound could be heard as whatever was inside that canister started to move into the facility’s system.
One of the armed men pulled a few more handles and dialed a knob. He held some blueprints in his hands as he worked.
“This will flood all rooms and hallways below,” he said. “We should be able to start our descent in thirty minutes.”
“For whatever reason,” Nancy said looking down at a red canister on the ground. “The old standby failed to stop the rampage last night. We pumped it into the Mercer's rooms, and it didn't appear to have any effect on the Distortion. Yet another question that needs to be answered.”
The leader of the armed men watched as some dials and the gauges started to go crazy in response to the influx of whatever gas was contained inside of the canister.
“This will stop it?” he asked. “My men will be safe?”
“Oh yes,” Nancy answered. “XEGOST-H Sulfide will bring anything with cognitive function to their knees. Years ago, we tested it on one of the Mercers, who is no longer with us. It will undoubtedly work. Make sure your men don't breathe it, of course.”
“Why didn’t you use this stuff originally?” the man asked.
“XEGOST-H Sulfide can be lethal with repeated doses,” Nancy explained. “The Mercers are very valuable. We wanted to keep them alive and continue the experiment as long as we could. Had that fool not cut off our override, we would never resort to this extreme measure.”
That was a dig against me. I was the fool who shut off the override. Still, I wasn't certain that it was a bad decision. It was chilling to hear Carousel calling me out in that way.
Most of the otherworldly systems in Carousel seemed like a computer program. A player does X, the system does Y. But this remark sounded like banter from a living thing.
Whatever the case, things did not sound good for my friends. Was this Carousel sealing our fate?
The Mercers crept through the halls of the facility in pursuit of the knocking sound.
“Do you think it will lead us out?” one of the twins asked.
“I don’t even know what it is,” the other twin responded.
They continued following.
“What killed all of those people back there?” the youngest woman asked with a sniffle. “They were torn apart… I can’t…”
“The thing they keep us here to study,” the old lady, Sherry, answered. “The monster. I’ve never seen it, but I have heard them talking about it when they thought I was asleep.”
They continued to talk in hushed tones as the camera zoomed out, revealing that the entity was guiding them toward the area just under the gathering of armed security personnel upstairs.
Soon, I knew, the entity would be in range to tether to the top floor and butcher the armed guards.
A hissing sound could be heard. There was a shot of one of the air vents on the ceiling. A barely visible gas started to fall down into the hallway.
“I feel funny,” the teenage Mercer said.
He grabbed his head.
Soon, the other Mercers started to do the same.
“No!” Sherry cried out. “We were almost there!”
She started breathing deeply, hyperventilating.
Above them, ceiling tiles started to crack and fall down to the ground as the entity clawed and pulled its way upward, hoping beyond hope to be able to jump to one of the armed men upstairs. It was no good. It was in its weakest form.
If it had gotten them just a little further, it might have been able to tether to one of the armed guards upstairs. If it had more time, perhaps it could have simply manifested upstairs, an act that appeared to have a longer range. Alas, it was unable.
Soon, the Mercers were unconscious and the evidence of the Poltergeist died down too.
Whatever that gas was, it put the Mercers out so quickly that they didn’t even close their eyes all the way. Their breaths were shallow, and their pupils were dilated.
The scene changed.
I was watching Dina and her family as they slowly made their way through a darkened hallway. I had no idea what floor they were on or how close they were to getting upstairs.
“Wait a second,” Dina said.
Her eyes darted directly to the air vent above them. She paused and listened. Then she took a sniff of the air. Her Outsider’s Perspective trope had apparently alerted her to something unusual about the air coming from the vent. She was able to put two and two together.
“They're gassing us!” She quickly looked around for some refuge, something they could use to prevent their impending capture.
She saw a small door, the kind that I recognized was used for utility closets and similar in the facility. She threw herself at it, unable to walk there on her own. Catching herself against the wall, she opened up the door. It was a supply closet with cleaning materials inside.
“Quickly get inside,” she said. “Find things to block out the doorway and look for any vents.”
“What is going on?” Dina's husband asked. “I don't smell anything.”
At first, it looked like Dina didn't know how to explain it. “I do. The air changed.”
She ushered them forward into the closet. Her children were quick to follow and obey her words. They started looking around the walls of the small closet for ventilation. Her son found a vent pretty quickly.
“Here,” Dina said as she reached down and closed the vent.
She continued looking around the closet and spied a box of trash bags.
“We need to cover all the cracks,” Dina said.
So, they started opening trash bags and poking them around to insulate the door undercover the vent, just to be sure.
The question was, was Dina's Savvy high enough for her plan to work?
Time passed.
A small group of armed security personnel entered the control room on floor 3B. I wasn't sure how they had even gotten down there. That was not shown.
They wore gas masks.
“Tell Cartwright the troublemaker is dead,” one of the men said over the radio.
He was looking at my corpse. Freaky.
“She'll be happy to hear that. Can you confirm that Dr. Mentes is deceased,” the head security officer asked.
The squad spread out, looking around the bodies and the room to find one that belonged to Dr. Mentes. It didn't take them long to find it.
“Mentes is down,” they said.
“Heard. Reinitiate our connection.”
“Yes Sir,” one of the men said as he moved to the server and started working on some switches off-screen.
“Do you see the other test subjects or the Mercers on the surveillance screens?” Nancy asked into the radio.
One of the squad members walked over to the monitors and started scanning around for signs of life.
“There are a lot of bodies. It’s difficult to tell if any of them are the test subjects. They were dressed as KRSL employees, correct?”
“Affirmative.”
That was good news. If they weren't actively looking for my friends, having assumed that they were among the dead, we might just have a fighting chance.
But the question remained, where were my friends? Shouldn't they be passed out near the elevator door that Antoine had entered to climb upward?
The man continued scanning the monitors.
“The Mercers are almost directly below you,” he said. “They appear to have succumbed to the gas. One appears to be dead or unconscious on the floor below the others. Three are missing.”
The Mercers were probably easier to separate from the dead employees because they were wearing white patient gowns.
The camera panned slowly over the monitors and stopped on the screen that had a view of a closet door. It was the closet Dina and her family were hiding in. Looking closely, I could see the subtle shine of the black plastic trash bags that Dina had used to seal the door.
The man looking at the monitors didn't notice.
“We'll send a recovery unit. Keep looking for the missing Mercers.” the Commander said. “Do you have eyes on the Distortion?”
“No.”
“Stay there until the override is reinitiated. Then I want you to get your asses out of there.”
“Yes Sir.”
“Recovery!” yelled the Commander. “The Mercers are unconscious on the floor below us. Recover them. Sedate them for transport.”
Another group of five armed men broke off and started making their way through the hallways. I wasn't sure where they were going until they got near the elevator. At first, I thought they somehow weren't aware that the elevator was broken, but as they approached it they stopped short and turned to what appeared to be a blank wall with nothing but a light switch.
One of the men produced a badge and moved it over the light switch. As they did, a seam appeared and the wall that had been blank now opened up with a small passage leading to a set of spiral stairs barely large enough for the men to walk down as they turned and twisted.
I wasn't sure how they were supposed to get the Mercers back up if that was the plan.
It dawned on me that when they got to the bottom of those stairs, they would open the secret door and immediately be looking at where my friends had been the last time I saw them.
The men twisted and turned down the spiral staircase. It seemed like it was going to take forever.
As they got to the bottom and waved a badge over a little white box on the inside of the wall, the door opened onto the floor.
I could see the elevator doors.
To my surprise, my friends weren't there. The elevator doors were shut instead of being propped open like they had been before. There was no evidence that they had even been there. They had disposed of the red reel that had held the firehose.
I was relieved to see that they were not lying on the ground unconscious.
But where were they?
The recovery unit made quick work of tying up the Mercers and injecting them with yet another sedative. They would then carry them individually back up the small staircase and into the hallway on the ground floor level. Despite how valuable the Mercers allegedly were, their bodies were jerked around and stowed away like luggage.
“Who are we missing?” The Commander asked.
“Two kids. One of the adults,” one of the men on the recovery squad said.
The leader spoke into his radio and asked, “How's that override coming?”
“Nearly there. I’ll advise you if we need Cartwright.”
“Do you have eyes on the three missing Mercers?”
“Negative.”
Nancy Cartwright was standing nearby. “Well, it's not like they could have escaped. They may have found a hiding spot. Will we be able to get footage of where they went?”
“The system wasn't recording after the reboot,” the Commander said.
“And how about the mother, the intruder?” Nancy asked. “Has she been found?
“Not yet. My men have instructions to terminate her as soon as they find her. Same with your test subjects. I hope you can find more.”
“Yes, we should be able to when we move to the new facility,” she answered.
After she said that, the camera started to move past her until it gave a full view of the elevator. It continued to zoom in until the view moved right through the elevator doors and revealed what was on the other side.
My friends.
They had gotten into the elevator shaft. All of them had made it up to ground level and were hanging from support beams, listening to the conversation outside. The gas did not affect them. They have been outside of its range. While it had been pumped into the floors below, they were hiding right next to all of the armed men.
Antoine must have heard their plans to gas the facility.
“Headquarters is going to be very upset that one of the Mercers was killed,” the leader of the security forces could be heard saying outside the elevator door.
My friends listened intently. How much had they heard?
I could only hope it would be enough to give them the information they needed to escape.
They were so close and so far away.
The needle on the plot cycle told me the final battle was nearly there.
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