Godzilla vs. Kong by Greg Keyes (read people like a book .txt) 📕

She tried to stay calm. Panic killed more swimmers than anything else.

Jenny let go, floating on her back, and allowed the bay to pull her out. Godzilla was already mostly out of the water. Soon the pull would end and even reverse. Then she could easily swim back to the beach and watch whatever was going to happen from there.

Mist rolled in, and then the rain, as if Godzilla was pulling them, too, in his wake.

Apex Facility, Pensacola

That should keep him away for a while, Bernie thought, as Horace’s footsteps receded. He slipped a thumb drive from his tool belt and into the CPU tower, began typing commands, and took a bite of Horace’s apple.

In moments he had what he was looking for, or at least he thought so. It was a shipping manifest, something being sent to Hong Kong from here, the Pensacola facility, from sub-level 33.

“What are they shipping to Hong Kong?” he wondered. “And what’s sub-level 33?”

And also, how? He couldn’t find the name or ID code of a ship. Were they maybe sending it by plane? Whatever it was looked heavy for that, but maybe they were in a hurry. Either way, this facility wasn’t equipped for that kind of shipping. Maybe they were sub-contracting with someone else in the port. Or they might be using one of the big troop carriers at the Navy base; Apex and the government were tight, after all. The manifest had an entry for maglev data, which also did not make a damn bit of sense. Unless it was an acronym for something he wasn’t aware of, maglev usually referred to the magnetic levitation technology used in trains. Which they did not have here in Pensacola.

“What’s this?” he muttered.

There was a sort of schematic on the screen. It was circular and looked like a dynamo or a reactor chamber, but it wasn’t either. There wasn’t enough detail to figure out what it was.

It was all very weird, but absolutely something he could investigate. He just had to find sub-level 33.

Before he could follow up on that thought, the alarm went off.

For a horrible second, he thought he had been caught, that there was a safeguard against copying files that he hadn’t known about. He lifted both hands in surrender before realized that it was the facility-wide alarm. If he’d been noticed, or if Horace had reported him, they would have probably sent security to quietly drag him off someplace, not alert everyone in the building. He lowered his arms sheepishly, pulled the USB key and hurried out.

Everyone else was already obediently forming lines. Bernie merged into one, trying to look like he belonged in this part of the building.

“Proceed toward the fallout shelter in a single-file line,” a security guard said.

Fallout shelter? What was this? If the place was on fire, or if there had been a chemical spill, they should be headed outside, right? There had been a storm coming in, but could it really be that bad?

Or maybe it was something else. Maybe Apex wanted all of its employees locked underground, where they could easily be scanned, searched, questioned, exposed to certain chemical agents…

The woman in front of him glanced back. Maybe she saw he was nervous. She had a friendly, round face and bangs.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said.

“You know,” he replied, “back in the day they used to use cyanide capsules instead of fallout shelters, keep the secrets in. But that’s neither here nor there so don’t listen to … me.”

Her brow creased, and she acted like she was about to say something. Instead she turned back around.

Again, he thought. No one was listening to him. They were all intent on getting to the shelter, away from whatever threat the alarm portended. No one was paying attention to anything. There would never be a better time than now to figure out what Apex had hidden away on sub-level 33. And to escape whatever diabolical fate awaited those who stayed in the line.

He watched a few guards and guys in white lab coats run through sliding doors marked “Authorized Personnel Only.”

“That way,” he said to himself.

As the line turned a corner, Bernie slipped out of it and through the sliding doors.

SEVEN

Loyal listeners, I’m gonna start with another history lesson. This one’s about pirates. Yeah, the real thing, not what you see in the movies. Most of ’em started out as privateers. What does that mean? It means they worked for the government. Unofficially. Off the books. So English privateers robbed French and Spanish ships, but never English ones. And the privateers from France and Spain, same rules. And everybody was sort of okay with it, for a while. Then comes along the first multi-national corporations, like the East India company, and they say, this piracy thing is bad for business. And yeah, they’re Freemasons, they operate across national lines, we’ve talked about that before. The point is, it’s not the kings and queens and parliaments that have the real power anymore. It’s the corporations. And all of a sudden, English privateers are being hung by the English government—that they worked for. In a couple of decades, the pirates are all gone. Because this Company wanted it that way. They want trade to be free, predictable, and profitable. That’s what they still want, these corporations. You think they have an allegiance to any country? Think again. They want their stuff to ship on time and get where it’s going. And you know what can throw one hell of a monkey wrench in that? Titans. You can’t bribe a Titan, you can’t lobby a Titan. Like the Tea dudes, Apex can control governments. If Walter Simmons can figure out a way to control Titans, he will. And take it from me, he is trying. But if he can’t, then he will absolutely do everything in his power to snuff them.

Mad Truth, Titan Truth Podcast #115

Apex Facility, Pensacola

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