Hours, then a whole day.
Nothing.
Aubrey and he had filled out their paperwork and been given what looked like a medical ID tag. The difference was it had a steel cord running through the tag to make sure it didn’t come loose. Roger also noticed that they were designed so they only worked once so they could be traded. You can’t pretend to be someone else.
Sometime after midnight a troop of men came to Roger’s home sweet cage. Roger looked over and he could feel the others in the holding pen shrink back, making him feel like he was standing out. With no other course of action Roger sat up and cracked open a beer. “So, what has my monstrosity unleashed?” he said, taking a long draw. He always loved a fresh beer.
“Then you know where they are?” McNabb walked forward.
“No, I could give you the ‘even if I did speech’ but that always gets you beat.”
“But didn’t you just tell me…” he waves his hand. “Roger Gillespie, I’m going to need you to come with me. “
He started to get up. “I’m not going anywhere without the lass.” He nodded to Aubrey, who was looking very nervous now, hugging herself tightly.
“I thought you said you didn’t want to be beaten?” McNabb said dryly.
“No, I said that it got you beat, not that I wouldn’t take a beating.” He looked around at the other men. “And it’ll be taken at price.”
McNabb stepped back and the men moved forward. “That won’t be necessary. We’ll take her with us.” The men opened the doors and started to try and take the beer from him. When he growled they thought better of it. Roger accepted the handcuffs, and Aubrey was cuffed up next. He could feel her shaking against his side as they were shuffled out of the holding pen.
“We are going to take you back to talk, Mr. Gillespie. We’d like to better understand your friends,” McNabb said, walking in stride with the beer guzzling Scotsmen.
“What do you want me to tell you? He’s a beast of insecurity. A monster of half ass plans. A lover of…”
“I get the point,” McNabb said cutting across him.
It was now that Roger could truly appreciate the sheer size of this place. There were electric carts moving about at different tasks. “Just how big is this building?”
“It’s not a building per se, it’s an underground bunker. It used to house part of the United States nuclear stockpile during the Cold War. With the disarmament treaty this place had been over looked for years. Everyone but the group in charge of project ARC.”
“Project what?” Roger finished his beer and tossed it to the side, watching as it clanged along the concrete floor, earning a frown from McNabb.
“ARC,” he said over the clatter. “It’s a contingency plan to be enacted in the case of a humanity threatening disease.”
“Or the undead.”
“Same difference when you look at it,” McNabb said stopping before a large security door.
Roger moved in closer to McNabb. “Don’t think I’m letting what happened on the transport go. When the time is right, I’ll be there and I’ll have my justice.”
McNabb pushed Roger up against the wall, mashing his cheek into the unforgiving concrete. “Jim, get the door.”
Silence.
“Jim?” he looked back to find his squad less one person.
Roger smiled. “Tick, tock.”