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

up close in operation, ensured that the boxed items were stacked and collected without any human intervention. When their work was finished, the protective screens and robotic arms retreated to the end of the aisles, allowing the human workforce on their forklifts to safely access the racks. It was, in addition to the safety aspect, a neat and effective way of preventing prying eyes from seeing what was happening to the packaged goods after the robot platforms had taken them away. The answers lay at the end of that tunnel.

Luckily for John, his host was heading in that direction. The guard didn’t hesitate to walk straight into the path of the moving platforms coming at him from different directions. In the same way that they avoided each other, the platforms moved around him as if he had some kind of invisible, protective force field. As they did so, their flashing yellow beacons turned red and emitted high-pitched warning sounds. He reached a steel access door set into the wall to one side of the tunnel. On the door were more warning signs: DANGER! DO NOT ENTER! AUTHORIZED MAINTENANCE PERSONNEL ONLY! and POWER DOWN ENTIRE SYSTEM BEFORE ENTRY!

John’s host walked to the door and offered his eyes to the reader for scanning. The door clicked open, revealing a corridor about twenty yards long. A wire mesh fence on the left separated his host from the robotic units that rushed past, each causing an onslaught of hot, dusty air mixed with vaporized grease.

They moved the length of the pedestrian stretch of walkway to the end of the tunnel, where it ballooned out into an area where a number of green robot platforms were docked into what John could only assume were charging stations. There were wire-fenced enclosures containing packaged spare parts, and one of the massive, red robotic stacking arms was suspended in a hoist for maintenance. Two guards were present, dressed the same as John’s host except these guys were toting compact automatic weapons like the one he had seen in the pill-packing room back at the club. The guards’ focus was on what stood in the middle of the space, and it clearly needed protecting.

The steel- and glass-clad behemoths with conveyor belts jutting out at each end looked to John like they might be packing machines. It wasn’t that the four large machines looked strange in themselves. Machinery of some sort or another was to be expected in a warehouse. What was strange was the fact that two of them were elevated to about twelve feet in the air by hydraulic jacks built into the floor. Directly beneath each machine was a large opening in the floor with the top of a shaft visible—large enough for a panel van to disappear into. The robot platforms, emerging from the tunnel, joined one of two slow-moving queues leading to the openings. The automated procedure at each opening was identical: each driverless platform took turns to wait for an infill section of the floor––like an elevator without any walls or ceiling–– to appear from the depths of a shaft. It arrived carrying a robot platform and its cargo upward from what John assumed was a hidden basement, and stopped level with the floor, allowing the waiting and arriving platforms to exchange places, whereupon it immediately descended with its new load. The driverless platforms arriving from the basement headed, as John expected, straight for the tunnel.

“Get me an empty elevator!” John’s host shouted at one of the guards who stood next to a podium-style table with a laptop on it about six feet away from one of the shafts. The guard nodded and started typing. A moment later, the line of waiting driverless platforms to one of the shafts stopped their slow crawl toward it. As soon as the arriving robot platform vacated the elevator floor, John’s host stepped onto it, signaled to one of the guards, and John and his host started their descent.

There were lights inset into the walls of the pit, and, as John counted, they went down past six rows of lights, roughly three feet apart, before the pit walls suddenly changed to a steel cage, through which John could see they had now started a slower descent through a cavernous space.

After traveling down the distance of three floors of a normal building, the elevator passed a free-standing mezzanine level, comprising a line of what looked like modular office units with an external balcony like a walkway running along their length. Ventilation equipment and large ducts ran across the roof of each the units. As the platform descended alongside them, John could see through their glass walls that they were all connected to form what looked like a central laboratory. Inside this inner sanctum there was an abundance of white finishes and furniture contrasting strongly with the blue coats, hygiene hats, and masks of a number of personnel. They sat in front of screens or attended to equipment that included many huge stainless-steel receptacles similar to the brewing vats John had seen in a microbrewery.

Next to the vats, there was more equipment, and at one end of a bench covered in laboratory hardware, several trays of white powder were carried along a conveyor belt and then automatically tipped into a funnel leading to another set of machines. He caught a glimpse of pills cascading out of these machines before his view of the mezzanine level was cut off by the elevator platform starting to descend again.

These had to be the same pills John had seen in the beer kegs. In all the movies he had seen, drugs like meth or fentanyl were ‘cooked’ into powder or crystals by people wearing gas masks. This setup was nothing like that, and if it wasn’t for the clandestine location, it could pass for a legitimate pharmaceutical operation.

What he saw below the lab, as the elevator finally came to rest at the foot of the shaft, finally confirmed what he suspected. They’d arrived