Gunblade - The Rebellion of Cain

Chapter 6 - Interlude: Monitor's Station

Buried deep within the towering infrastructure of steel and glass of a corporate office skyscraper, a lone individual swiped his unremarkable white security card against the scanner. As it flashed green and bade him entry into the room beyond the secured double doors, he let out an exhaustive sigh. Sweeping long, unkempt hair from his eyes, his vision adjusted to the darkness of the room which was a stark contrast to the hallway he'd come from.

Moving at an uninspired pace beyond the entry doors, he trudged up the slightly inclined ramp to an elevated floor. The soft glow from rows of flat LCD monitors danced across his face as he walked slowly to his station. The mundane hum of the climate control system kicked up again in an attempt to keep the computer and monitoring equipment at a stable operating temperature. The other two individuals in the room were stiffly standing by his vacant station, as if they were impatiently awaiting the return to his seat. Dressed in impressive designer Italian suits and aggressively clutching slate computers, they looked at him with a conflicting air of contemptuous disdain yet burning need. He considered it quite an interesting conundrum. Any other night, he would take pleasure in relishing their attention, despite their clear perception that they were superior to him in almost every way. However, a swift look around the room reminded him of just what kind of night it was.

Approaching his multi-screen workstation, he watched each display flash the same sequence of videos in a continuous loop. At first, it had deeply disturbed him, but by now he had grown desensitized enough to the brutality that it no longer viscerally repulsed him.

Still, the horror of the events were not lost on him. The stark realism of the slaughter of an innocent woman in front of her husband. The unbridled fury and violence of a vengeful assassin who now, in the words of the monitor on the recording that he slaughtered, 'had nothing to live for'. The shockingly violent deaths of the tactical team sent to guard the Monitor. The final chilling message of a raving, homicidal, bloodthirsty renegade assassin espousing his private manifesto. All these events on their own were earth-shaking, shocking and catastrophic happenings. Combined, the bone-chilling significance of these events, despite the innate horror of their occurrence, left an intensely disturbing impression on him. Understandably, it was clear that these happenings upset the two lanky men that breathed down his neck now in an even deeper manner.

"We need to determine his most likely destination following the time index of the video loop in this sequence," the man to his right said as he bent low, dragging the time index of the looping video into focus on his slate.

The smarmy, perfectly manicured English accent grated over his ears. He marveled at their ability to say the most mundane sentence while communicating their superiority at every chance.

"We've managed to track the locator beacons on each individual in the room that was tagged. However, we noticed that there was one missing. While the body count in this room is correct, this man," the Monitor circled a dead body on his slate, "is dark."

Brandon leaned back in his seat with a puzzled look on his face as the two senior Monitors scrutinized his reactions. Understanding that each tac team member was 'lit' by a transponder tag, it was strange enough that the dead body was dark, but it was stranger that the tag no longer showed up anywhere within scanning frequency range of the tower they were in. Turning without saying a word, his hands flew like birds over the pair of keyboards angled toward him. The looping video restored itself to the corner of the large monitor directly in front of his station as he began to initiate a query of the online fleet database for the façade company associated with the tac team's provisioning group. Quickly navigating the directory of vehicles, Brandon joined the results of the entire fleet's VIN numbers to the lower-level garage's entry and exit logs. He finally spoke to the two Monitors behind him.