Valhalla Virus, Nick Harrow [simple ebook reader txt] 📗

The sedan’s suspension groaned in protest as the monster settled into position beside me, and the engine protested mightily as the driver slammed it into drive and punched the accelerator. We glided through the streets of downtown Dallas, and the lack of foot traffic and Uber drivers told me I’d been taken in the dead hours of the night between the time when the barflies buzzed away from their booze halls and when the early risers dragged their sorry asses off to their slavery in corporate hellholes.

“Put this on,” the cartel thug said. He slapped a burlap sack against my gut, and I grunted in surprise. My blood ran cold as I raised the hood to get a better look at it. The coarse brown cloth was exactly the sort of thing you’d put over someone’s head before you put a bullet through the back of their skull.

“I never touched an Inkolana system,” I argued in a desperate effort to save my life. Maybe they thought I’d hacked them and they were taking me somewhere to torture me for a few days before they shot me. A vivid image of my naked, mutilated corpse lying in a ditch with the bloody bag over my shattered head bullied its way into my thoughts.

“It’s for your safety,” the orc said. “You don’t need to know where we’re going to do your damned job.”

The argument made enough sense to put my paranoid dread at ease, and I yanked the bag down over my head. The loose weave of the burlap made it possible to see light and shadow, but I couldn’t make out any details.

We cruised along for a while longer but never hit highway speeds. That told me we’d never left downtown, but not much else. Dallas had exploded in size over the past couple of decades, and its downtown was littered with massive skyscrapers. There was no way for me to tell which underground parking garage we pulled into, and I hoped the cartel would feel the same way.

The car stopped, my kidnapper dragged me out of it, and a few seconds later we were inside an elevator. A few seconds after that we were zipping up so fast my stomach tried to convince me we were on a roller coaster. It was hard to smell anything but the rich, musty scent of the burlap in front of my nose, but I picked up a harsh antiseptic smell that only got stronger as the elevator went higher. It reminded me of a hospital or a doctor’s office. Something medicinal.

Why would they bring me to a hospital? Did they want me to hack into its systems and assassinate someone during an operation? I’d seen a movie with that plot once, and the whole thing had seemed stupid to me. There was almost no reason for a hacker to come on site to do a job like that.

The elevator’s doors dinged open after several minutes, and the orc muscled me out of the elevator. He waited for a few seconds, then yanked the hood off my head and shoved it into one of his jacket’s pockets.

I blinked and struggled to adjust my eyes to the harsh light. Everything around me was polished white that gleamed with a sterile perfection. There were no pictures on the walls, no carpet on the floor, not even the thin black grid of tiles. It looked as if the whole place had been molded from a single block of white acrylic.

The orc snatched my right arm in his iron grip and almost yanked me off my feet as he hauled me forward. I took a deep, surprised breath, and my nose burned from the chemical reek of cleaning agents and raw alcohol in the air. A faint bubbling noise grew louder over the slap of my soles against the smooth floor. It reminded me of an aquarium’s oxygenating pump.

Where the fuck was I?

We rounded a corner and came into a square white room about thirty feet on a side. The only furniture was a simple black desk with a fancy office chair made of so much chrome and leather it looked like it belonged in the private room of a strip club. My babysitter hauled me over to the chair and tossed me into it. He spun my seat around to face the desk with a hearty shove and slapped his hands down on the chair’s back.

“This is your workstation,” he said. “We need you to stop an attack on our system.”

“What system?” I asked. The more information I had, the better equipped I’d be to deal with whatever enemy they’d put me up against. “And what kind of attack?”

“This is the system,” the big boy said, and the white wall in front of me vanished to reveal an enormous aquarium that looked like it was at least as big as the room that held my workstation.

A sinister black manifold hovered above the surface of the yellowish fluid that filled the tank, and thick, wire-wrapped cables descended from the multitude of bulbous nodules that dotted its surface. Those artificial umbilical cords drooped into the thick fluid, where they were each connected to a brain.

A whole bunch of brains.

The lumps of gray matter were surrounded by status lights that mostly glowed amber. Whatever the cartel had to deal with, it looked like it had already taken a toll on their vat of brains.

“I’m a coder, not a biologist,” I said. Something about this place creeped me out, and I did not want to get stuck messing around with a swimming pool filled with dead heads. “And I don’t think anyone can fix brains after they’ve been scooped out of their skulls, so I’ll just mosey on back home—”

I didn’t get halfway out of the chair before the orc slapped his enormous hands onto my shoulders like a raptor putting the death grip on a rabbit. He pressed me back