Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense by Fynn Perry (popular romance novels TXT) 📗

The host walked with purpose, a powerful body and a strong will. His mind was focused on routine and order; John guessed he must have been in the military. He wasn’t going to be easy to influence, but it didn’t matter—John was just along for the ride and to see what he might find out about Vargas’s operations. On the other side of the forbidden door was another corridor with several doors to the sides, and one straight ahead which had a keypad.

This door opened out onto a warehouse. They were in a long, narrow area behind yellow metal-framed racking which, John estimated, extended upward for at least forty feet. The sound of big diesel engines turning over, hydraulics in action, and electronic warning beeps seemed to echo off all the hard surfaces around them. Various consumer goods were stored on the shelves: washing machines, dishwashers, and ovens. The host walked to the end of the racking and turned the corner. Only then was John confronted by the cavernous size of the building and the scale of the operation inside: to his left, the ends of the rows of brightly lit racking seemed to stretch to infinity across a polished concrete floor. Interestingly, the color of the racks changed from yellow to orange halfway along.

To his right was a line of trucks in separate docks, all with their side curtains hitched open. Forklifts busily picked at them, speeding away the contents or rushing goods to those waiting to be filled. John noticed that the incoming cargo was always placed on the racks painted yellow that he and his host were walking past. However, the packages leaving the warehouse and that the forklifts were loading onto the trucks were always collected from the orange racks ahead of them. John knew a little about fulfillment centers from doing some research for his father, who had considered investing in them. They were a byproduct of internet shopping, enabling e-commerce merchants to outsource warehousing and shipping. But what John was seeing didn’t exactly fit his understanding of their function. If a fulfillment center was a place where goods were received and simply stored for later dispatch, why would the goods be stored in one spot when they arrived and then be moved to another while they were waiting to be shipped? It was inefficient, and therefore made no sense. John looked again to make sure. There were indeed two distinct areas.

A few minutes later, his host changed direction, turning into one of the many aisles created between the rows of now-orange-colored racks, and John saw a missing part of the puzzle. A foot-wide rail was submerged beneath the floor. It appeared to run the entire length of the passage despite the aisle being dead ended, two-thirds of the way along, by a tall wire-mesh partition. Through the partition John could see something he had only read about. A bright-green, driverless, wheeled cargo platform, laden with boxes, stood parked with its warning lights strobing. Towering above it and riding the rail was a gigantic, robotic arm painted in red. Its hydraulics whined and servo motors whirled and clicked as it carried out precise movements, taking boxes from the wheeled platform and stacking them on the orange shelves with a huge claw-like gripper that John imagined had the power to squeeze a man into two pieces. John’s host stood for a moment as the massive arm flexed its joints and rotated its tapering sections to pick up and stack the last package.

The empty platform whizzed away from them, between two rows of shelving, flashing its beacons and making electronic chirping sounds to alert all employees of its approach. After placing the last package on the rack, the arm folded itself away into a rest position, and then something even more impressive happened. The robotic arm slid away on its fat rail, followed by the entire wire-mesh partition on its own separate rails towards the distant end of the racks with a cacophony of strobes and warning sounds.

Minutes later, the guard caught up with the moving partition, which had come to a stop at the end of the aisle, preventing access to the area of the warehouse beyond. A doorway was inset in the center of it, with signs that read: DANGER! DO NOT ENTER! ROBOT OPERATING AREA!

The host approached a retina scanner next to the door and for a moment John was concerned it wouldn’t work because of the possession. A beam of light flashed over his host’s eyes, followed by a series of low-pitched, countdown beeps. John was getting ready to leave his host when, to his relief, the door clicked open and the guard stepped through and past the giant robotic arm, inactive but buzzing with readiness as it sat at the end of its rail.

With the rows of racks behind them, John and his host had now entered another open area. It was populated solely by green robot platforms like the one John had just seen, all moving in different directions yet avoiding each other with only a minimum reduction in speed. It reminded him of the roundabout surrounding the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which he’d seen at rush hour once during a school field trip. It, too, had looked like some form of barely controlled chaos.

John regarded a large opening in the wall to the back of the area. It was the mouth of a two-lane tunnel with robotic platforms moving boxed goods in and out of it. He tracked their movements and quickly noticed that they all followed the same predetermined route. Loaded platforms coming out of the tunnel would take goods to the orange-colored racking for dispatch; empty platforms traveled only from orange to yellow racking and they only returned to the tunnel after being loaded with incoming goods that had been stored in the yellow section. The movable partitions and robot arms in each aisle, just like the ones he had seen