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spookyspaghettisundae · 3 months

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The Three Horsemen in the Boardroom

The thunder of spinning rotor blades slowed to a crawl. Artificial thunder deafened the world to Chloe Grant, drowning out any shouting on radio comms, and the shouting of U.S. military operatives as they coordinated all around her like she wasn’t there. It even drowned out her own heartbeat.

“It’s your mess to clean up, Future Proof. We were never here.”

Every word he said pounded her skull like a jackhammer in slow motion. Captain Dariel Rose pulled up his ski mask, slipped his goggles back on, and joined his forces in their controlled retreat.

Metal cables screeched in the pulleys as they dragged the tremendous weight of the T-Rex carcass into its designated black container. Heavy doors slammed shut.

And Max Carter stayed on the ground. Destined for a depth six feet under. His blood had drenched the dust and dirt beneath his lifeless corpse, besides which Grant now sat.

Though her own blood still pumped, kept inside her body without a single injury to note, she sat there, almost as lifeless as Carter. The statue of a sitting, thinking woman, garbed in a black jumpsuit and body armor, and peppered with dust. But she was not thinking a single thought.

The unmarked helicopters gained altitude as soon as all black ops had clambered back inside them. Two soldiers rode inside the container with the dinosaur carcass.

Dust in the artificial windstorm devoured the bright blue sky.

This was the darkest sunny day Grant had seen in years.

Looking back, she wished for it to stay the last.

People’s panicked words shot from her helmet’s headset, but they all fell upon deaf ears. Grant recognized the voices, registered the chorus of upset tones, and wallowed in a confusion which she only fed by not responding.

She always thought before she spoke, so she had nothing to say for now.

Without a sense of how many queries went unanswered, Grant turned her radio off.

Dust settled around her in silence. The clouds of loose dirt kicked up by helicopter rotors finally descended upon the abandoned oil rig where she sat, in the middle of nowhere, thoughtless and speechless in some Midland desert, unable to locate without some map.

The dust settled on everything, layers of it, turning even the T-Rex’s pools of blood a brackish brown.

Grant waited without knowing what for.

A nagging voice in the back of her mind said she needed to be professional. That internal voice told her she needed to be cool, to get her shit together, switch that radio back on, and do what Future Proof expected her to do.

Damage control.

The U.S. soldiers had just absconded with the specimen’s carcass. Carter was dead. And Stantz had pretty much offered up Singh on a chopping block for the government to hang out to dry for hacking their comms.

Grant’s weary head bobbed once, then twice, then she peered over to the unconscious boy, who lay lost, sleeping uncomfortably in the brush nearby.

She had shot him in the back with her EMD rifle. Just thinking back to her snap decision, her impulse to pull the trigger and stop him from running away—the one step of damage control she had contributed for the day—it all elicited a sigh from the deepest and most depressed depths of her lungs.

The kid would survive. Grant herself had once volunteered to take a shot from the EMD rifle back in Future Proof’s headquarters, just to see what it felt like. To know for sure.

To guarantee to herself that it worked. Carter had claimed it could take down a mammoth with sufficient shots, and it had worked on the T-Rex.

Tested on herself, it hurt like hell. Grant had spent a day in agony, wracked with muscle spasms whenever she wasn’t trying to sleep it off in a delirious haze brought upon by painkillers.

The kid, Aiden, was going to get to know that same world of hurt like she had, though he hadn’t signed up for it.

Aiden was still caked in the blood of his family and the dirt of Midland’s desert. The stains upon him would never be washed off in his life. Filthy, miserable, and bound for a future filled with therapy. Over the course of a day, this young boy had witnessed a T-Rex kill his mother and brother, destroy his home, and chase him through the wasteland. To add insult to injury, the people who had just promised to protect him ended up shooting him in the back.

Literally.

On top of it all, Captain Rose’s grim expression still lingered in Grant’s memory, haunting her thoughts like a cruel ghost. Would things have turned to the same disaster if the soldiers hadn’t showed up?

It probably wouldn’t matter to the kid, and eventually, Grant would have to live with it all.

“I’ll pretend we didn’t tango like we did, and we go our separate ways,” Rose had told her.

Generous words, considering it felt like Grant had broken his nose in their struggle against each other on the ground. Then again, Rose’s team ended up shooting Carter and not her, likely because Rose had been Grant’s living shield amidst the chaos.

She understood why they shot Carter—he opened fire in a Mexican standoff. Though he had only taken shots at the waking T-Rex, to prevent disaster, they responded as anybody would in an armed negotiation.

The only difference was, they had been using live rounds, the kind that made human beings very dead, very quickly. Rose’s team had killed both Carter the dinosaur. They only took the latter.

Carter still lay on the ground with Grant, dead. Aiden lay crumpled in a bush, shoulders heaving with every breath. Rose’s team hadn’t given a damn about them.

It’s your mess to clean up, Future Proof. We were never here.

She gripped her helmeted head. Squeezed, as if it helped in any way. Grant had lost fellow soldiers before. Attended funerals of former colleagues. Her history in the military and the private sector was a path paved with corpses, the eternally resting bodies of allies and opponents alike.

“You’re the strongest person I know,” her mother had once told her. “Compartmentalize, meditate, mediate—you, girl, you’re Zen, Girl-Buddha, I sense it. You ain’t a bad person just ‘cause you keep your cool. You ain’t cold ‘cause you’re smart, y’know? Me, I can barely function when some ass-wipe cuts me off on the road, honey. What you got is a gift, not a curse.”

Grant sighed again. It was time to clean up the mess.

She clapped Carter’s shoulder twice, as if to motivate him, to get back up.

As expected, his body stayed lifeless on the ground while she groaned and rose to her feet.

She switched the radio back on.

A new chaos of chatter engulfed her already cloudy mind.

She found that Zen her mother had spoken of, compartmentalized, got to work. Barked sitreps, called in sitreps, pat the dust down. Cuffed the kid, carried him away. Rendezvoused with the others.

Hours later, the job was done. Mischchenko and Ruiz had performed a clean sweep elsewhere. They had somehow managed to herd the injured Hadrosaurus back to the Anomaly, sending it back to its rightful time and place. They even locked it before the glowing hole in the space-time continuum vanished again.

Spencer himself had shown up in the Midland deserts. He won whatever pissing contest there was to be won against Captain Rose’s superiors, and Future Proof laid claim to the other dead Hadrosaurs strewn around the farmstead where Aiden had lived.

The unconscious boy was sent to HQ, where he received better medical attention than his family could have probably afforded in a lifetime, though he would be barraged by incessant brainwashing for the ensuing days. Following Marcus Stantz’s guidelines for media control, Future Proof’s best HR agents would be schooling little Aiden not to tell the wider public about dinosaur incursions or mysterious glowing orbs that connected different eras of Earth’s history.

All the while, Chloe Grant avoided human contact as much as she could.

She filed her report, kept everything above deck, by the book. Checked in with communications, medical, therapy, accounting, Stantz, R&D, Solomon, Containment—the works.

One day, she caught herself frozen, paralyzed, as she stood outside Singh’s office, now empty. He was the first person to give her a tour in Future Proof after Spencer had hired her.

The door to his office now stood wide open. Nobody but cleaning personnel had been inside there since his arrest. Grant stood there frozen, till the sound of a phone ringing in the offices helped her snap out of her trance.

The last she had seen of Singh, he was staring at the floor, sneakered feet shuffling listlessly, while intelligence agents escorted him out of the Future Proof building—in handcuffs, with his designer varsity jacket draped over his wrists to conceal the shackles.

The days melted away without light. Sunny, each and every one of them, but darker than ever.

Grant accepted the invitation to Carter’s wake—least she could do for her colleague. Another name to add to her list of people she buried.

She filed more reports, studied more protocols, fell back into safe routines. She stared at her computer screens and phone and always let calls bounce to voicemail, which she answered in texts, and she answered all emails just timely enough to conform with company policy.

Showers took her longer than usual. She found herself staring into the drain every time, where water spiraled downward, and the steam and heat and the wet engulfed her, muting every other sense, and washing away the imagery of carnage and chaos in the Texan desert.

She skipped every nonessential meeting and only read the minutes that Danielle Bennett gathered in her absence. Grant scoured the notes that R&D had gathered, and frowned when she learned that something had been disrupting their Anomaly Detection System.

Had the government done this? Was that why Rose’s team was on-site so quickly?

She didn’t want to think about it. The likelihood was high, but Grant didn’t care to pull the trigger on that. Spencer and the rest were calling the shots, she would only speak up if she had anything important to add.

Eventually, all reports had been processed and evaluated. The CEO of Future Proof himself drummed up everybody, had them all gather in the glossy, windowed boardroom atop the towering skyscraper.

Debriefing.

He chewed everybody out. Made the T-Rex look like a kitten.

Malachi Spencer never swore. He never even came close to uttering a single syllable of profanity, yet every one of his words cut with a vicious sharpness to match his knife-like appearance. It felt like getting cut down to the bone, and having every pound of flesh carved away until he was done.

With everybody. He was done with everybody. Yet nobody was fired.

Nobody received compliments.

He had a whole plan of action mapped out for them. Next steps for every single person in the boardroom. Future Proof’s intel matched Grant’s hunch. The government was behind the ADS disruption. Someone was out to sabotage them.

Singh’s actions were under a microscope, nobody understood why he had hacked comms, or what the hell he had been thinking at the time. And the NSA was holding him in custody without offering Future Proof any means of contacting him. Rida Singh’s actions would remain a mystery for now.

Through the dreamy haze of those past days and all the detachment Chloe Grant felt throughout the lengthy debrief, she picked up on things she hadn’t picked up before.

Valentín Ruiz’s hand was shaking the entire time, not just when Spencer looked his way.

A subtle shaking. Like she had seen with other traumatized veterans. The type they usually suppressed with drugs or booze in their downtime.

She wondered if Ruiz and Carter had been close, friends, anything. Ruiz spent most of the meeting staring at the surface of the table, scanning monitor displays and briefs without paying much attention.

A subtle shake. The sharpshooter and tracker was a smoker—sure—but she had never noticed this about him in their past weeks of working together. He had gone hours without lighting up a cigarette and never displayed any such tics before.

And when Spencer wasn’t looking his way, Ruiz did something even weirder. A weird hand movement.

Didn’t fit.

Only Grant clocked it. Ruiz didn’t notice that she had.

It didn’t even really sink in until after the debriefing, after the whole main team shuffled back out of the meeting room.

It didn’t fit.

Outside, three new faces awaited. Grant had seen them on photos on the internet, but never in person before.

Three of the most important stakeholders in Future Proof’s business. The people representing the people who were footing the astronomic bills behind the mercenary company.

Roger Cole—a wispy little man with thick-rimmed glasses and a mop of curly hair, clad in an unseeming tweed suit. Looked like a nerd, but he was serious money, backed by weapons manufacturers worldwide. He offered Grant a faint and fake smile as she passed him by like the rest of the team.

Kim Jae—a liaison to the international telecom committee, sat on a leather couch as black as his leather attire, with his expensive shoes up on the coffee table like he owned the place. He was so buried in the screen of his tablet that he didn’t even spare anybody a glance while the crew filed out of the boardroom.

And last, but not least, Lena Romero stood by one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, with the grace of a stoic empress, gazing out into the skyline of Austin. The mature-looking woman in the dark blue suit and pencil skirt was a liaison to the FIP, the International Pharmaceutical Federation.

These three figures were just one head short of the corporate world’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, all gathered here on the top floor of Future Proof, ready to meet with Malachi Spencer.

The CEO stayed behind in the boardroom, folding his glasses and then steepling his fingers as he waited. The Future Proof team had all poured out, riding elevators down, taking the stairs, all dispersed. Opening the stage for the Three Horsemen.

Grant gazed through the moving mass of people, watching the Three Horsemen join Spencer in the boardroom.

That’s when she understood what Ruiz had done.

He had stuck a bug underneath the table where he had been sitting. A tiny little black device, so small that nobody would notice unless they checked. She couldn’t even spot it from here, but she knew the movement, the motion of his hand, how it hadn’t fit.

A bug. A spy.

Ruiz thumbed his lips and patted himself down on the way out, looking for his pack of cigarettes in his pockets. The man with the looks of an underwear model shot Grant a sideway glance, then he shot her a flirtatious smirk.

Waiting for the next elevator down, she kept her cool. Kept her poker face up. It wasn’t really like her to respond to such a smirk, especially not from a guy who in all likelihood was a huge womanizer.

Ruiz’s eyes flashed and his entire expression fell, stopping just shy of something sad. Maybe, aside from whatever espionage he was embroiled in, Carter’s death still weighed on him.

Ruiz pushed through the doors and disappeared into the stairwell.

Grant’s haze had lifted. Replaced by something else, something creeping; something that sent a tingling sensation down her entire spine.

She was back in her element, and it offered a whole buffet of distractions from any darker thoughts. After all, Spencer had hired her out of the private sector, with a history of counterintelligence and cybersecurity.

Grant was going to find out what was going on. What the hell Ruiz was up to.

The next elevator arrived. She stepped inside.

Roger Cole, Kim Jae, and Lena Romero had gathered in the boardroom. Cole and Romero took seats left and right of Spencer, while Kim Jae paced around the room like a stag in heat.

Whatever they were talking about, Ruiz had planted a bug that would allow him to listen in.

Grant wanted to know what that was he was listening in on. And why.

The elevator doors slid shut.