Celes.”
I’m glad of that too, and it hits me then. Jack came back into the past to stop the apocalypse, but I came back just to find Jack. All this way, and I succeeded. I found him, exactly the way I promised myself I would, and apocalypse or no apocalypse, we’re together. That’s actually pretty impressive, when I think about it like that.
We slip inside the storage facility, and I see that Jack has his gun out. I’m not sure what it will do against automated defense systems, but it’s better than nothing. Although I think what’s going to keep us safe has more to do with Jack’s ability to sense danger. With luck, that will at least keep us from stepping on any shock pads.
“Are you getting anything?” I ask.
Jack shakes his head. “I think the power must be down in the whole facility.”
“Well, that’s good,” I say.
“Not really. It means we won’t be able to get the front gates open, and for what I came here to pick up, we need the front gates open.”
Jack continues to lead the way. I’m not sure I’d trust too many other people to lead me through an abandoned facility like this. Especially not after what we found in the library back in town. Grayson, maybe, but not many others.
We check the facility carefully. Aside from us, it seems to be empty. Jack picks out a door or two, but it seems they aren’t locked by the usual arrangement of padlocks that I’d expect in a storage place. Apparently, the Faders prefer automatic doors. Which is as much of a problem as the gate was.
“I can probably burn the doors open,” I say.
Jack nods. “I know, but can you get the gate as well? There isn’t enough room between the units for what I want.”
I think back to what I was able to do at one of the Others’ facilities. There, I blew a pretty good hole in one of their base’s blast doors.
“Maybe. I mean, I can probably make a hole in them.”
“A hole won’t work,” Jack says looking around. How big is what he’s here to collect? “We needhe ? “We to find a way to open them. There should be a power relay here somewhere. Maybe we’ll be lucky and it will just be a blown circuit.”
“Which, when we’ve fixed it, will have mini guns shooting at us,” I point out.
“I’m still working on that part,” Jack says. I guess that whatever we’re here to collect, it must be pretty important. Why else risk our lives over it? “First, we need to find the controls for this place.”
That takes us maybe ten minutes. We finally find them in a fenced off area of the storage compound, behind a chain link fence that doesn’t take me long to burn through. Behind it, there’s a kind of control console, flanked on both sides by what appear to be turrets. I’d thought that Jack might be exaggerating when he mentioned the mini-guns, but here a couple are, right in the perfect position to kill anyone who tries to mess with the system. I’m just glad that they aren’t powered up right now.
“So how can we do this?” I ask.
Jack takes a look at the console. It’s as dead as the rest of the place. “I think that whatever has been messing with the cars has messed with this too.”
“So in theory, I might be able to power it back up with my energy?” I ask.
“Maybe,” Jack agrees. He looks at the turrets. “But there’s an obvious problem with that. The moment you power it up, those are going to start spinning, and a few seconds after that…”
“We become Swiss cheese.”
Jack
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