The building was three stories, but you could see it for miles. The lights wouldn’t permit anything less.
Each of them was twelve feet in diameter, backed by a bulb that would’ve made an IMAX blush and cover its face. They never stopped; turning and glowering and peering like a great-aunt checking for dust on bookshelves.
There was another light. It was smaller, and gaudier, and it was only just now beginning to scream.
ALERT was the meaning. It was discernable in any language and in several species. ALERT. DANGER. PROBLEM. WARNING. And in case you didn’t get the meaning it was spinning at a few hundred rotations per second, spackling the world bright red on and off again.
Prolonged exposure to it would result in deafness. Luckily, it only needed to be on for a few seconds: one millisecond for the team to engage; the other four-and-a-bit for everyone else to get out of their way.
The team was organized in pairs. One slept while the other waited, all equipment within arm’s reach. They blinked at a precisely calculated rate. They thought only of performing their task. They dreamed of the floor plan, and of its weaknesses (imaginable?) and its strengths (incalculable). When they moved, they moved together: the waking guard on point as their partner followed two seconds behind.
They were armed. Their weapons were indescribable and numerous, and their feet were fast. There was a lot of ground to cover.
The intruder had come.
The grounds themselves were a little park, underlain by some mulch, gravel, a little brick path, and seven hundred million dollars of electronics and metal. Some of them were warnings, many of them were detectors, and one or two were intended to deter the bejeezus straight out of anything that came into their firing range, which was considerable and rapid.
All were silent.
The walls themselves were higher than the building, although the last forty feet was the most translucent and undetectable plexiglass (and yet more invisibly, they extended far higher in a perfect dome of electronic security), and every unbreachable inch of them was ablaze. Every corridor was filled with quiet, furious footfalls. Staff took refuge in any room to hand, trusting in auto-locking codes to ensconce themselves from the patrols. Anyone in a hallway without the hand pass and that morning’s badge-code was an enemy.
The intruder was here.
The target was one room among dozens. A door in a wall like many others. A resident who was quite specific in her qualities.
They’d been prepared for this. Not just this eventuality, this exact victim. There’d been plenty of warnings. Everyone had been tense as tenterhooks the past week, just waiting. Practicing. Honing. On the most literal of edges, staring out into the abyss, cursing and waiting for it to blink so they could kill it.
The chance was here the moment had come the time was now and BANG in flew the door off its hinges and the tiny chamber was filled with forty different bodies and a hundred muzzles sweeping every inch of its contents, eyes on special cocktails that let them see everything from infra-red to hidden-guilt, brains buzzing out of control.
The form in the bed was motionless.
Carefully but faster than the untrained eye could follow, the designated pointer went to its side, performed sixteen separate rites both physical and invisible, and nodded.
“Got away clean.”
Against all professionalism and training, someone said ‘fuck.’ Everyone silently and mutually did not notice.
With a lack of haste that was infinitely more alarming than their earlier speed, the medical examiner filled out a small sheet with the victim’s name (Bernice Pondsmith); C.O.D. (cardiac arrest); and the damnable, eternal, familiar name of the perpetrator:
Death.
The intruder had won.
Again.
Defeated but undaunted, the peerless, matchless forces of the Sunnyhill Retirement Community returned to their posts, weapons holstered, thoughts already on how to improve their response times, how to cut that last second out of the schedule.
The architect was on call. The walls would be made higher. The lights would shine brighter. The alarms would be surer. The guards would be faster.
Next time. NEXT TIME, it would be different.
And there was always one more next time, wasn’t there?