The Unlucky Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

one day someone’s gonna take a pop at you."
    Now, with a pumping hole in my chest, I remembered that. Someone finally took that pop, I thought.
    And then there was the shadow. It spread over me, a cool dark breeze, inky clouds obscuring the too bright light. I realised my eyes were closed and struggled to open them, to look into a gaze straight out of another world.
    I wanted to think these eyes were like none I had seen, but that wasn’t true, I’d seen them yesterday, looking down from a fire escape as some poor soul cooled on the smashed up wreck of the car we used to ferry the dead.
    It might seem like I’m retreading old ground, but things get clearer with retelling. Without blinking or breaking eye contact, the guy with the outline-eyes reached into the pocket of my suit jacket and pulled out the deathly capsule. It was this that he placed between my teeth.
    The thing dissolved. Acid taste. And my mind dissolved with it. I saw the world fall apart on the wings of a million crows.
    "What do you see?"
    I told him.
    "The sky is falling."
    He nodded, his voice telling me he knew exactly what I meant, even if I didn’t any more.
    "Then you’re already dead."
    He put the gun to my heart and pulled the trigger.

                            

Waking Up
    In an old fashioned, lushly bedecked office a man sits behind an enormous dark wooden desk, inlaid with green leather, his face hidden in shadow. The ornate chandelier above him is unlit and there is no natural light as this office lies deep underground but a clever arrangement of devices means that fake spring light softly illuminates the room from behind a large, frosted bay window on the western wall. Art hangs on this and all of the other walls too, hunting scenes in the main housed in lavish gold frames over old fashioned bottle-green wallpaper that matches the darker thick-ply carpet. This is a room out of time.
    The man at the desk is named Horst, although few would dare speak it to his face, or anywhere where they thought he might hear which, arguably, is everywhere. He sits like a neat spider at the centre of the web of what they refer to as Control: to all intents and purposes, he is Control.
    He is whip lean, middle aged, with an uncompromising rigidity in his appearance: short, neat iron grey hair, closely cropped beard. He wears a plain, dark military tunic. Everything about him is a straight, efficient line.
    He sits now peaceful and still in his immaculate, expansive office, one room in a colossal bunker buried beneath enough earth and concrete to survive an apocalypse that Horst thinks just might, if he plays his cards right, possibly be on the verge of happening. Below his feet are rooms and rooms of storage, barracks, living quarters, labs, technical hubs, weapons testing facilities and the housings of the hundreds of other requirements to keep his bunker fortress ticking over effectively. There are warehouse storerooms full of canned food, great storage tanks of fuel and even filtration works to provide clean air. In the event of their failure, there are also reserve oxygen tanks to keep at least some of the work force, as well as Horst himself, alive for quite some time.
    Below all of these again lie the more sinister levels, expunged from the blueprints that all but the most trusted have ever seen. These are the floors that house the cells, a level of dark, hopeless square pits built to house unfortunate prisoners who should never again expect to see the light of day, at least not before they have talked and certainly not in the same way as they did before they went in. They have seen scant use so far, but Horst envisions a day, soon, when they will be pressed into greater service.
    Although the cells in themselves, cramped, windowless and dark, are enough to break the spirit, there are other rooms down there too with purposes darker and more sinister still. These rooms have tiled walls for ease of wiping down and sluice