Chapter 98

The Senate Office Building was a mess on the outside. Large chunks of mortar had fallen from between the bricks. That and litter from who knows where trashed the yard. Papers were strewn all over the place, as if the filing cabinets inside of the building had been left open with all the windows wide during a storm. The papers were wet and stuck to the ground and trees. It was an awful sight, but it also let Jo know that no one came around here much. No one of consequence anyway. If the Vampires were aware of this building having tunnels, surely they’d do a better job of keeping them guarded.
One swift kick of a boot from Brandon, and the main door fell in, taking a chunk of rotten wood from the door jamb with it. “That was easy,” the Guardian mumbled.
“It’s too bad getting into the other building isn’t that easy,” Scott said under his breath. Jo could tell he was nervous. She didn’t blame him. She was nervous, too, and it wasn’t even her dad they were trying to save.
“Where’s your mom, Scott?” Cassidy asked as the group entered the building, guns drawn, just in case.
“She’s at the Australian headquarters,” Scott told them. “She’s trying to use diplomacy. Of course, she’s not having any luck. Maybe Margie will have better luck.”
“Margie just needs to distract them, not actually get anything done,” Jo reminded him. She was picking her way through a mess that made the yard outside of the building look like it was freshly cleaned by the staff of a five star hotel.
“True, but if we fail, we’re going to need Aunt Margie to come through,” Scott replied, making it clear that he wasn’t putting all of his eggs into one basket.
Furniture littered the hallway, along with plenty of other papers and other office debris. It was sort of sad, seeing a building that had once been used as part of the government of the strongest nation in the world in this sort of shambles. To Jo, the inside of the building was a metaphor for what the country had become since allowing Vampires the same rights as people.
“Where is this tunnel your father spoke of?” Grant asked Brandon as they continued through the building in tight formation.
“There should be an entryway up here in just a bit,” Brandon said. “He showed me on the map.”
Jo decided to ask Cassidy to wait to throw the shield that was intended to block whatever was interfering with their IACs because she wanted to make sure the Hybrid was ready if they were ambushed inside the building. They’d been walking through the mess for a good fifteen minutes, and Jo still didn’t have that bubbly feeling in her gut that told her there were Vampires around, so she felt like they were okay and there was nothing lurking around the corner.
Her finger was on her trigger just in case. They turned the corner, and off to Jo’s left, she heard a sound coming from an office. Quickly, she whirled around, ready to fire. The rest of the team did the same.
Jo’s eyes focused on a moving body across the room. The lights were off, and the windows were so covered with grime, even the waning sun wasn’t able to light the corners. “Who’s there?” Jo shouted, ready to shoot.
“Please! Don’t kill me!” The voice of an elderly man echoed across the empty space. “Are you Vamps?”
It was clear to Jo that this wasn’t a Vampire. It was just a man who’d sought shelter here. She couldn’t blame him. As rundown as this place was, the chances of the Vampires finding him here were slim.
Lowering her gun, Jo said, “We’re not. You’re safe. Don’t worry.”
“What? Wait!” Cass said. “What if he’s a spy? He could be going over there to report to Crimson Crotch that we’ve infiltrated this building and are on our way over there right now.”
Jo didn’t think that was likely. “He seems like a frightened elderly man to me,” she countered.
“Check his head, Cass,” Brandon said. “You can tell, can’t you?”
Cassidy growled. “I can tell if he’s ever interacted with them before, but not whether he will run over there now.”
“Please--I ain’t goin nowhere, I promise,” the old man said. He was wearing a tattered, oversized flannel coat. His gray hair stood up on top of his mostly bald head creating the image of a thin white bird’s nest, and his jeans were filthy. He wasn’t a threat, and they were wasting time.
Cassidy stared at the man very intensely for several long seconds before she blinked a few times and said, “Let’s go.”
Leaving the old man behind, they continued on their way, following Brandon down the hall, down some rickety stairs, to what should’ve been a basement, but it wasn’t.
It was a tunnel.
The ceiling above them was much higher than Jo expected, and the tunnel itself was wide enough for them to walk through shoulder to shoulder without bumping into one another. It all seemed way too easy. Jo kept her finger on the trigger and her eyes and ears open wide.
“Do you want me to see if I can throw a shield to keep the interference away from our IACs now?” Cassidy asked a few minutes after they started down the tunnel.
“Sure,” Jo said. She turned and looked behind them, wary that they were being followed. She didn’t think anyone was back there, but the fact that they were marching down this tunnel with nothing stopping them seemed… impossible.
The light in the tunnel was practically nonexistent. Scott and Grant pulled out flashlights to help them see what lay ahead of them. Their eyes were much stronger than humans’, and Jo was pretty used to walking around in the dark without falling, but there seemed no downside to turning the flashlights on. If Elliott’s guess was right, this tunnel would be sealed off at the end that emptied into the new building, via the old Capitol Building, so the Vampires wouldn’t be able to see the light.
Unless the tunnels had cameras.
Jo’s eyes went to the ceiling as she scanned the area for any sign that they were being monitored. It really didn’t seem like something the Vamps would neglect.
“I keep thinking we’re going to run into a crocopire or something,” Brandon whispered.
“Yeah, me, too,” Scott said.
‘What’s a crocopire?” It was the girl that Margie had sent--Pamela. Her Australian accent was so thick, it was difficult for Jo to understand.
“It’s a crocodile-vampire,” Brandon explained. “Holland used to make all sorts of crazy shifter creatures.”
“That sounds… horrible,” Pamela said. “Have you ever seen one?”
“No, but my dad and Jo’s mom ran into one a long time ago. Cadence killed it,” Brandon said.
“Let’s hope we don’t run into anything like that,” Daniel said.
“Or anything worse,” Jo said under her breath.
Just then, her IAC flickered to life and a flood of messages came flying through her head, most of them from Elliott. “When the hell are you going to get the IAC working? Jo? Jo! For the love of God, didn’t you say you were going to have Cass throw a goddamn shield? Where the hell is it?”
In response to the fifty thousand messages, Jo responded, “It’s up now. Did you need something or are you just having a panic attack?”
“Panic attack,” Elliott said. “We’re good. We’re in the tunnel. You?”
“Same,” Jo told him. “It’s going a lot more smoothly than I ever would’ve imagined. Which scares the shit out of me.”
Jo was glad that no one else could hear them. It probably wouldn’t do to let the others know that their leaders were both petrified that everything was going way too smoothly.
“I think we should pick up the pace a little bit, now that we know that there are no Vampires in here,” Scott said.
“We’ve got plenty of time before midnight,” Grant said. “Margie needs to start her negotiations before we try to infiltrate the main building.”
He had a good point. Jo sent a message to Margie now that the IACs were up. “Are you in communication with Crimson Crotch yet?”
“Not yet,” Margie said. “I put in a request to speak to him, but I’m still going through red tape. Bastard likes to keep people waiting. Makes him feel more powerful, I guess. Asshole.”
Jo understood the sentiment. “All right. We don’t think we should go in unless you’ve started the distraction. So… once we get to the end of the tunnel, we’ll check in with you again.”
“All right. Let me know when you get there, too.”
“Will do.”
Jo ended the conversation and returned her attention to the tunnel she was walking through.
“Is that the stairs ahead of us?” Brandon asked. “Are we at the end of the tunnel already?”
“Well, it wasn’t that far, though we do walk pretty damn fast,” Cassidy said. Jo stole a glance at her aunt to see how she was holding up. Despite however much energy it was taking her to ward off the interference with their IACs, Cass looked like she was doing okay and could potentially manage another task on top of what she was doing. Which would come in handy when they reached what was sure to be a blocked end of a tunnel.
“What if we walk up those stairs, and there’s just a door up there?” Daniel asked.
Jo turned and looked at him. He was handsome, with short brown hair and brown eyes. Jo thought he might be Latino, but it was hard to tell. He didn’t have an accent at all. She didn’t know how old he was, so it was quite possible an accent is something he’d lost over the years. Even her own dad had a thick Irish accent when he wasn’t trying to sound American.
“If there’s a door at the top of the stairs, we’ll walk through it,” Scott said with a shrug.
“If there’s a door at the top of the stairs, it’ll be because they want us to walk through it,” Brandon countered.
They’d reached the bottom of the stairwell. It was a bit steeper and taller than the one they’d originally come down. Even with the flashlights, it was hard to see what was at the top, but to Jo, it looked like a door.
“I’ll go first,” she said, taking a deep breath, not because she was scared but because she was ready to fight. They couldn’t even touch that door until she heard from Margie, though. If they opened it and it led right into the old Capitol Building, they’d be too early.
At the top of the stairs, there was a door. Using her X-ray vision, Jo looked through the old wood to see what was on the other side.
“It’s a door, but there’s concrete on the other side of it, and it looks like it’s pretty thick, too,” she whispered.
“Yeah, I’d say a good eight feet thick,” Brandon agreed.
They turned to look at Cassidy. She snapped her fingers. “Piece of cake.”
“I know you can get us through it, but how can you do it quietly?” Scott asked.
“I will be as quiet as I can,” Cassidy said, “but I don’t think it’ll matter. We will be walking into the old Capitol Building, and I'm pretty sure the Vampires don’t use that for anything much. They just kept it here because it was a symbol of the old Democracy. All of their offices are in the new part of the building.”
“How do you know that?” Scott asked.
Cassidy shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but everything they post online shows the new building, not the old one.”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Jo reminded them.
Waiting on this side of the barrier was difficult when all she wanted to do was bust in there and find the hostages and set them free. To pass the time, she decided to check back in with Elliott. “Are you guys at the end of the tunnel yet?”
“No, not yet,” he said. “We had a little further to walk than you guys,” he reminded her. “And… I have some slower people in my group.”
“Who?” Jo asked, slightly amused.
“These two Australians Margie sent me. I don’t know their names, but they’re insisting on walking in defensive formation all the way down the tunnel.”
Jo couldn’t see him because they didn’t have their IACs set to visuals, but she could imagine how silly they must look walking that way, with their guns out, spinning around every few seconds, when there was absolutely nothing there. “Let me know when you get there,” Jo said.
“Will do.”
The temptation to check in with Zane was overwhelming, but Jo managed to keep a lid on it. There was no sense in distracting him when he clearly had to concentrate--on not running into the two Australians.
“We’re at the end of the tunnel,” Elliott said. “Going up the stairs.”
“All right. Whatcha got?” Jo asked, assuming they’d have the same thing on their end that Jo did.
“A door… with a bunch of concrete on the other side,” Elliott confirmed.
“Can Heather handle it?”
“She’s looking at it right now,” he said. It took a few seconds for him to say, “Yeah, she thinks so. But she said it'll be loud.
“Then you’d better be ready for a swarm.” Jo wondered if it would actually be their other team that ended up being a diversion instead of Margie.
Thinking of her seemed to summon her. Margie’s voice sounded in her head. “I’m going on with Crimson Crotch in five. Give me at least five minutes after that, okay?”
“All right--but what if he hangs up on you?”
“I’ll let you know.”