City of Twilight Part II: The Fallen (The Vanguard Chronicles Book 2) Read online

  City of Twilight

  Part II: The Fallen

  By Donald D. Stephenson III

  The Vanguard Chronicles: City of Twilight © 2015 by Donald D. Stephenson III

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the author

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For Tif, who inspired me to not only begin this journey, but to finish it.

  He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

  -Friedrich Nietzshe

  42

  ​It was approaching evening in Dirge, the city of twilight. The sky, which was already dim, grew darker as oncoming clouds threatened rain. The rain wouldn’t start for a little while, though. It was this weather that James enjoyed the most. Mainly because it was too difficult for anyone to spot him from the ground below.

  ​Remaining hidden was easy enough, even from the others who possessed his unique mind’s eye ability. It was just a matter of concentration. The only other way for him to hide was to will the creature on his back to mimic patterns and colors directly behind him. It doesn’t matter right now, he thought as he stood perched over the city.

  ​He looked down at the street below. People were leaving work now, heading home. There were thousands of people below him, and thousands more in the surrounding streets and buildings. Dirge had several million people living in it, but just how many, he wasn’t sure. It was impossible to count them or even make a census. Not with places like Old District where people lived in broken buildings and hovels, hiding from everyone but their kin. Many people would see the message he was about to send, however.

  ​ On every corner of every street there was a vid screen, large enough that people could see it clearly from anywhere they stood. Vid screens, unlike data screens, were only displays. Data screens were touch sensitive and interactive. Vid screens were made to only be watched. Although the number of screens was significantly lower in Old District and Lower District, James knew word of mouth and rumor were just as powerful in those areas. The rumors of the Hunter had grown in the three weeks since he’d rescued his sister, Alicia, from Civic Protection. He wasn’t sure exactly how many people would accept his message, but he just had to hope enough listened for it to make a difference.

  ​He held a small satchel over his shoulder, watching the station. The building he stood on the roof of was right across from the network vid station. From there he had access to every vid screen in the city. It was guarded heavily on the ground floors, but not as much from above. There was an effective surveillance system. James remembered what Luke had told him, how the security systems of the Network Vid station were all connected to the nearby Civic Protection station. No need to worry though, James thought as he grinned under his Hunter mask.

  ​The station looked like most other buildings in Dirge, a large uninteresting rectangle. What made it stand out was the enormous antenna structure on its roof. The antenna made up a third of the building’s height. The presence of the large antenna was a little bit ironic to him, since it had nothing to do with the network vids. It was a communications antenna, just like all the others posted around the city.

  ​James could see his point of entry on the station, a window on one of the upper floors. He just needed to target it when the time came. He heard a bell chime in the distance. The library clock tower in East District.

  ​He’d been waiting for that bell. It would soon be six o' clock. He waited, listening. The last chime hit, signaling the top of the hour. There were a series of explosions that echoed after that chime, disabling all of the communications towers in the city. The closest was on the vid station building in front of him. He could see the fire and smoke from the base of the antenna on the building’s rooftop. The charge James had placed on the power cables a few days before had done its job. The antenna was disabled, but not too severely damaged. Some of the other antennas he had to place a significantly larger amount of explosives, due to varying circumstances in how the structures were built.

  ​He could see a few dots of smoke coming from those structures as he looked up across the city’s skyline. The phone towers would all be disabled now. He smiled again. It’s time. He dived off the building, his coat morphed instantly into his massive wings. He glided toward the structure, heading right for the window he’d chosen as his entrance. In a few short seconds he broke through the window with a glass shattering roll.

  ​He landed on the soft blue carpet of an empty office, bracing his landing with his feet and his left hand. Under his other arm in the satchel was the equipment that he’d need here in the station. His silver eyes surveyed the room. He knew no one was there, not detecting anyone with his mind’s eye, but he wanted to make sure visually. His wings reformed back into the long gray coat. Anyone who saw him would immediately recognize him as the Hunter.

  ​He left the room quietly, entering a hallway with the same gray-blue carpet and light gray walls. He hadn’t detected anyone in the hallway, but he was wary. He kept watch on everyone in the building with his mind’s eye. They were all distracted by the explosions anyway. No doubt the news vid would be reporting this, and plenty of people would be watching. He continued on through another hallway, heading for the elevator. He never needed a map; his enhanced senses combined with his mind’s eye gave him a mental picture of the floor plan around him. He needed to get down the fifth floor, where the all the main servers were. The auxiliary servers were on another floor, but that didn’t matter. He could tap into the lines and create a direct feed into their system, overriding all of their signals. He arrived at the chrome elevator doors and pressed the down arrow on the small data screen embedded in the wall.

  ​It only took a minute, and the doors opened. He walked in and noticed that he would need a key to access the fifth floor. He moved his hand over the keyhole and willed the xeno to extend some small metal tendrils into the keyhole. He then forced it to imitate the key-shape required. A small light went on, signaling that the elevator had been activated and was heading for the fifth floor. He then waited. He looked up at the deactivated camera that was in one corner of the elevator. There was a small box in his satchel that also scrambled the signal of any electronic device within ten feet of him. He would need to deactivate it once he got to the fifth floor. It wouldn’t matter by then if they knew where he was.

  ​The elevator was fast, like most elevators in the large buildings. It arrived at floor five, and he could see with his mind’s eye two security guards watching the elevator. They weren’t waiting for him specifically, just guarding the floor. They were curious who’d just arrived on the floor, not receiving a notice that maintenance was headed there. Oh well, it was inevitable that I would run into security eventually, he thought as he disabled the small box that was scrambling the cameras. The doors started to open slowly.

  ​He reacted quickly when there was enough space for him to fit through the doors. He leapt through the doors with the speed and ferocity of a predator. The guards were startled, but slow to react. Their speed was incomparable to James though. He grabbed the first guard by his vest, and James slammed his forehead into the other man’s head. James dropped the unconscious guard.. The second guard was in the process of raising his gun as James just as quickly pulled it out of the man’s hand.

  ​“I don’t think so,�
�� James said. The man looked very afraid. James had disguised his voice to sound metallic and raspy.

  ​“Please don’t hurt me,” the guard said.

  ​“Who said I was going to hurt you?” James said. "I need you.” He took the man by the jacket and moved him in front of him. “What’s your name?”

  ​“My name?” the guard said. The man was shaking. This man was definitely not Civic Protection. None of them would ever show this much fear. James remembered that Luke had told him that the network vid station convinced CP to not post guards inside the building, that it would make the employees uncomfortable. It had instead hired armed guards of its own. A private security force.

  ​“Yes,” James said, “your name.”

  ​“My name,” the guard said, “is Aaron. Aaron Michaelson.”

  ​“Well Aaron, take me to the terminal. Don’t act like you don’t know where it is either, there’s only one way.” James kept his voice threatening, and Aaron complied. He silently led him through a few gray hallways with the same blue carpet until they arrived at a heavy door. The lighting was dimmer here, not the usual office lighting. The large vault door seemed like it would be more appropriate at a bank as a safe door, not in a network station. There was a small data screen keypad next to the door.

  ​“Enter the code,” James said. The man did so with little hesitation. There was a loud creak, followed by some mechanical whirring. The door then unlocked. “Now open it.” The man pulled on the large handle, and the door silently opened outward.

  ​There were a few darkened terminals in the room, but they were small compared to all the large servers lining the walls. The loud cooling system above them made the room sound like a subdued wind tunnel. James walked in the room with Aaron ahead of him. He then turned to Aaron.

  ​“If I were you I would sit in that corner and be very quiet.” Aaron did what he was told, and James opened up the satchel that had been over his shoulder. There was a small box with some wires attached to it, hanging loosely off of it. James then opened up the nearest terminal, a six foot tall black column with two large data screens on its front. He pulled a curved side panel off of it, with little effort. With the panel removed, wiring and data boards were exposed. He pulled some other wires and equipment out of the back.

  ​In a few short minutes the small box was hardwired into the terminal. He then activated the system via a small data screen it had on top. The terminal took a moment to start up, and then requested certain security information to continue. He tapped the override key on the small box’s data screen. He then pulled another data screen from the back, and linked it wirelessly to the server. He stood and watched. It would take a minute or so to activate. Soon, a blank screen covered all the terminal screens, and the feed from his data screen was overriding all the servers and their own feeds.

  ​Most of the vid screens across the city were dedicated to either news vids or public announcements. Right now, all of them were set to the news network vids, where the announcers were discussing the terrorist attack on all the phone towers that had happened just a few minutes ago. They were discussing the possibility that it was the Hunter, and that people should fear him and regard him as a terrorist. Just as that bit of dialogue had passed, all the screens went blank, syncing up with the terminals with James’ overriding data feed.

  ​Something new began to play on the screens all over the city. There was a loud pop, and then the screens all turned white. Then there was a voice, James’s voice as the Hunter.

  ​“Evil thrives when good people do nothing,” the recording said. “That’s a phrase I read recently. No one in this city will have read anything like that. It’s because you’ve done nothing up till this point. Nothing to stop them.

  ​“People know me as the Hunter. What people don’t know is who I am, my message. Why I exist.” Then his appearance was shown on the screen, the Hunter. He looked exactly as he always did as his hunter guise, with the silver eyes and hair, and the metal-cloth covering his nose and mouth as well as the rest of his face below his eyes. It was an actual video recording of him talking, not just a photo with a sound recording. He stared intently at the camera.

  ​“Why do any of us exist in this world? Do we exist for the High Council? Do we exist for Civic Protection? Or do they exist for us. How many people go to work, and then go home in fear? Fearing for your lives, fearing the very people who have the word ‘protection’ in their name.

  “The collapse that occurred fifty years ago, that wasn’t a war. It wasn’t a disaster. We were all captured, enslaved. Our memories erased by the very man who calls himself Father. He leads the High Council and Civic Protection in the oppression of our basic human rights.

  “Yes, it is a right for us to be able to walk across the street without fearing for our lives. It’s a right to be able to choose to not be a part of Civic Protection if we don’t want to be. It’s a right to not allow them to enter our homes, take away our loved ones, and torture, kill and burn their way through those that speak out against them.” James paused for a moment in the recording, looking down before going back to the camera.

  “I’ve witnessed their brutality first hand. Civic Protection and the council killed my family, my mother and then my father. It’s his legacy that I will continue on. I will continue to fight this war, but we will win. Decades will pass from now and when people tell the tale of Dirge, the city of twilight, will you be able to say you stood up? Did you shout ‘no more’ to the fear and oppression? Did you try to give the new generation a chance to have what you and I did not have?

  “When our government and the people in it fail to protect and represent us, it is our civic responsibility, our duty to build a new one. In this case, the only way to fight is with the very violence they have used against us. Civic Protection has given us no other alternative. Their iron grip has already torn so much from us that we cannot take any more of it. We have already received many casualties in this conflict, all have had people killed or loved ones disappear.

  ​“My father was the late Elijah Vanguard. Three weeks ago he was murdered by the agents of this city. He’d dedicated his very life to helping this city, the people in it. Just like his father. I’m here to fulfill that legacy as well.

  ​“I have made my choice to not only survive, but to thrive. To live again. Join me and united we can triumph against this crucible that has spanned three generations. If you can’t stand, if you stay quiet, then we will all face the alternative. A city with no life, covered in this despair we call twilight.

  “I am the Hunter, the Vanguard of this city, of this resistance. With you I will no longer be alone. We will be the new Dirge.” With that, all the screens in the city went blank.

  ​Civic Protection soldiers were already storming the building, trying to reach the fifth floor. The first group of soldiers had just made it to the fifth floor, exiting the elevator and preparing to face the Hunter. They reached the terminal room to see all the terminals shattered and broken, and a guard tied up in the corner. The soldiers split up and started searching around. One of the soldiers called out for assistance, and they all headed over to him. He had his rifle trained on the James, who stood in-between them and a wall.

  ​“Hunter, you are under arrest, don’t move.” the officer shouted James stood ten feet from the wall behind him. They could see he was smiling beneath the mask.

  ​“If you only knew,” James said, shaking his head at the soldier. He held up his hands, revealing two grenades with the pins already pulled. The two closest soldiers dropped to the ground as James casually turned and rolled them into the wall behind him. The two grenades tapped against the wall, exploding afterwards. The force knocked the remaining soldiers off their feet. James, who’d been closer to the explosion than any of them, didn’t have scratch on him. He turned to the newly made hole in the wall. Beyond it was the city, with people in the streets looking upwards from below.

  ​People were pointing at where the explosio
n had occurred, and they saw the Hunter leap from the hole, his wings unfolding. People grew excited and pointed up at him as he gained speed and momentum. He flew over the streets, circling over the confusion and the crowds. Soon he was out of view, hidden from all eyes. Civic Protection soldiers stood all around the building, and looking through the hole he’d made as a new exit. Patrol cars and sirens echoed throughout the city.

  ​The soldiers began to make a perimeter around the building, holding off pedestrians. Some of the soldiers grew uncomfortable looking at the crowd. People were staring at them in looks they weren’t used to. Looks of defiance. Looks that no longer held fear.

  43

  ​Christina stared at the blank vid screen on the wall above all the cubicles. Everyone had stopped, and they were still staring at the screen silently after it had gone blank. She looked back at everyone, hoping to see a response. She was impressed, not realizing the leadership charisma James had. He was so intelligent that she’d never noticed how natural he was at not only acting as a leader, but presenting himself as one.

  Suddenly someone in the back of the room started clapping as he stood up. He was alone at first, but then someone else joined in. More and more people started clapping in the room as they all stood.

  ​Christina remained stoic as she watched the large office room stand. She remained seated. People started leaving. They just walked out. All the data and vid screens were still blank. It really worked, she thought as she remembered what Luke had said.

  ​“I designed this box,” Luke said, “to be wired into one of the terminal’s motherboards. It will release a command for all of the systems to shut down for twenty-four hours. Even after the box is disconnected from the terminal, the damage will have been done. There will be no Network vids for twenty-four hours after your message, no propaganda. It’ll give people plenty of time to think, to understand that this is real. The council’s media influence will be held back for a day.”