Remy was as ready as he was going to get for the task at hand, he’d called in a favor, maybe two, to get a driver, two movers and a phone. Everything else he’d already gotten from Belle.
He had the easy job, all things considered, no heavy lifting, he was going in the front door to spring the traps and take the alarms offline, just in case anyone was still paying attention to them, and just in case everyone else had to come through the front door as well.
After that he was going to find the back door, if there was one, and call in the hired help.
Really it should have been just that easy. There was one small problem however.
Nobody knew that Candra’s vaults were at the bottom level of what amounted to a seven-story bunker, best bomb shelter in the area, if they ever needed to worry about that sort of thing.
He knew the first level would be the easiest, as well as the most time consuming. That was where the bulk of the alarm systems were. Even though he’d expected it, the lack of guards was still a little creepy to him and set his paranoia off like nobody’s business. Just going in the front door set off a klaxon which nearly drove him crazy before he found the speaker, silencing it with a knife through the box, glowering at it as he went about finding out what else was still attached.
Whoever’s idea it was to have the fuse box right there in the control room was an idiot, he flipped all the breakers off, double-checking by disrupting what should have been a typical laser-and-mirror, cross the line set off the sirens system. Nothing happened.
He grinned then, retrieving the knife he’d killed the speaker with before tugging the only other door open. Huh, stairs. Another door at the bottom. Well, nothing for it but to keep moving.
He leaned against the doorframe at the bottom of the stairs, eyeing the corridor beyond, the almost-irregular speckling on one wall could only mean one thing, and he could see where a simple front roll and slide would get him past, aside from the fact that the floor was patchworked and just looked wrong.
Of course, times like these were why he kept around a good collection of ball bearings. Good, old-fashioned, industrial-size steel ball bearings. He eyed the difference in floor panels as he rolled one of the bearings between his palms, finally rolling it out across the floor like a bocce ball, sliding easily through the dust, picking it up even and when it hit the out-of-place panel sending off sparks of static.
He sighed, shaking his head, this was going to be a bit more difficult than he thought, given the placement of both what was clearly darts and the electrified floor-squares. He nodded, fastening his coat drumming his fingers against the handle of his staff, deciding that the most direct route was probably the best in this situation, all but throwing himself across the room in a mad dash, the last part was going to be tricky, but he knew he could do it.
It was the trick he hadn’t used in his sparring match with Will, planting one end of the staff and swinging himself up at a right angle, kicking at the doorlatch with one foot and the door itself with the other to get it open.
That was when he heard the grinding and realized that the floor and ceiling both were edged with spikes, closing like an oversized mouth. He shoved all his strength into the movement, turning it into a veritable pole-vault, bowling through the door and into the stairwell beyond.
Remy was actually feeling pretty good as he made his way down the stairs again, the darts had been no match for his jacket and a spiked maw trap? Seriously? Of course, thanks to the electrified floor panels, he knew better than to just stroll right into the corridor at the bottom of the stairs, and it was a good thing too, since the door opening was what started the motor for the massive swinging battle axes of doom.
He stood back to watch for a moment, trying to see the pattern they swung in, finally he figured it out, after looking ceilingward, the whole thing was set up like a carousel, one rotating rod with the posts that made up the handles of the axes attached to it at varying intervals. All he had to do was get across the room so he could blow the motor.
It wasn’t difficult, all in all, he just had to swing himself up onto the first axe, dodge the second, swing up onto the third and so on. Which worked fine until about halfway across when they were closer and closer together, causing the swings to be more random. He waited in the barely large enough gap between two of them, eyeing how far he had to go, wondering if he could actually hit the motor from where he was, deciding against it just in case he missed and ended up making things harder for himself.
He grinned as random started to become less-so, the axes moving in an almost perfect wave, he swung himself up into the first, just dashing from one to the next, flipping around one as it started to swing back, repeating the process until he just dropped off the last one, fishing a coin out of his pocket, charging it as he rolled it across his knuckles, flicking it in a high arc off his thumb and right into the motor, ducking out through the door to get out of the way.
He stood in the doorway long enough to watch the pendulums come crashing down before bounding down the stairs, easing the door open and eyeing the corridor beyond. He knew it couldn’t be as empty as it looked, and as he turned his head he caught a glimmer out of the corner of his eye, which was odd in and of itself.
He dug around in a coat pocket, coming up with a jar of graphite dusting powder taking a deep breath before he opened it, blowing it in a great gray cloud across the room, clinging as it went to the vast webwork of hair-thin wires strung across the corridor like some cybernetic spider’s web. It took him a few moments to eyeball clearances, deciding that only an Olympic-class gymnast could get through the mess as it was, and maybe not even then. This meant that he was going to have to make some modifications before he could get through.
He didn’t have welder’s gloves, but he did have a Kevlar-reinforced, gator-leather jacket, which was just as good in his opinion. He really did make good progress with just his jacket for protection and a pair of wirecutters as a weapon, stopping where he could to assess the next few feet of wire.
All was going well until he slid one arm out to brace himself, running it right along a still-taut strand of wire in the process, laying open leather and Kevlar both, barely missing doing the same to the skin beneath. The surprise of it caused him to squeeze the wirecutters more sharply than he should have, which in turn caused the wire he was working on to snap wildly instead of ease into slack like planned. He heard it whine past his face, causing him to wince, more in surprise than at the sudden searing pain across his brow, he shook his head, dislodging a recently sliced clump of hair in the process, realizing a moment later that his brow was bleeding.
He eased himself more carefully through the gap he’d made, opening the door with an elbow, fingertips pressed to his brow to stay the flow of blood, finally slapping a self-adhesive gauze to it once he was in the stairwell.
He sighed, shaking his head and fluffing his hair, that last one had been far too close, closer than he’d realized, given his new haircut, not to mention the paper-thin slice across his brow. He gave his hair another fluff, it wasn’t so bad, really, not much of the front was missing and if he just tossed it over to the opposite side nobody would notice.
He didn’t much like the eerily sterile smell of the stairwell and the room beyond, in fact, that usually only meant one thing. He shook his head, hanging back for a moment, just looking at the apparently bare space of floor he had to cross to get to the next door, deciding that Candra had had altogether too much fun designing this place.
It was right about then that he decided he was glad that he’d kept the breathing mask, he hadn’t actually thought he’d need it, but he was fairly certain, eyeing the still corridor, that he was going to. He shook his head as he pinched the mask down over his nose to make sure it was sealed properly, thumbing the switch, his breath sounding impossibly loud to his own ears as the recycler started, rasping loudly enough that he barely heard the hiss of vents over the sound.
He smiled at the vibrant green of the smoke cloud that filtered in once the door had swung shut behind him, he figured it was mostly designed to cause panic. He strode carefully through it, confident in thinking that would be his only hazard.
That would be why he didn’t see the nozzle at almost eye-level until he’d already started to open the door, getting an arm up just in time to protect his face from the spray of acid, of course, instead of blinding him as it was intended to do, it hit the skin bared through the slashed sleeve of his jacket, he threw himself -cursing- into the stairwell
Stuffing the breath mask into one pocket before rooting around in another for one of the baking soda capsules he kept there, he hadn’t thought he was actually going to need one, he just kept them around because he occasionally liked making volcanoes. It wasn’t going to be a permanent fix for the acid burn across his arm and he knew it, but it would be enough for the time being, he’d finally have a chance to see what the Milliways infirmary looked like. He was oddly looking forward to it.
He shook himself, taking the opportunity to catch his breath before shouldering open the next door. He waited at the threshold for a moment, brow arched, scanning the apparently empty corridor, empty except for the pond at the far end. He sighed then, shaking his head and muttering something about ‘fucking radioactive leaches’ before he realized that the corridor wasn’t empty, not by a long shot, he just hadn’t noticed because they were back in niches, not breathing.
He swore then, very nearly facepalming, “Zombies. Should’ve guessed t’at.” Luckily enough, he knew how to handle zombies. He waited. At least until one finally figured out where he was, whereupon he grinned, ducking under it’s searching arm and pressing a hand against it’s chest, giving it the biggest charge he could manage before darting back out into the stairwell, slamming the door behind him again, counting, he hadn’t even got to five before the rather squelchy explosion.
He grinned as he eased the door open again, nose wrinkling at the mess, the zombies still staggering around missing limbs. Those were easy enough to pick off one at a time. He should have known better than to think he was home free, because, eyeing the pond and debating how to cross, an alligator surged out of the water. An albino, fifteen foot alligator. Remy leapt back, blinking, it took him a moment to realize that it wasn’t following because it wasn’t really an albino. It was another zombie. A proper voodoo zombie, not one of the mindless brain-eating ones that the rest had been. He edged closer, “You’re t’bridge aren’t you.” He shook his head, smile tilting as he stooped to pick up what turned out to be an arm, waving it at the gator, “You want t’at?” He couldn’t help but laugh a little when he realized that it’s eyes were tracking the arm. He nodded then, “C’mon, let’s get across y’pool and y’can have all t’bits you want.”
It was an odd sensation, pond-surfing on the back of a zombie gator, but it got him to the door, whereupon he did give the critter the arm still in his hand, laughing as it just hung in the water to gnaw on it. He shook his head then, keeping behind the door as he opened it. When nothing happened right away he peered around it carefully, “S’about damn time!”
There, at last, was the actual vault, with all the various treasures and odds and ends that Candra had collected throughout the years, and, likely, that others had collected there before her.
What brought him the most joy, however, was the fact that there was a back door, of course, the moving crew was already gone, as it was well after he’d told them to leave if he wasn’t back, but that meant that getting things out would be easier. He slipped through the room, swinging open the
door…