Olympus

Chapter 10

"Mum, watch out!"

A blinding white light followed by the sound of glass breaking were the last things Megan recalled before her eyes jerked open and she shot up in bed, panting and heaving. A nightmare, Megan, she told herself. It was only a nightmare.

Ten... Nine... Eight... She counted down the seconds till her heart calmed down and she looked at the digital clock on her bedside table. 4am, it read; right on cue as always.

Thing is, nightmares- the particular one she just woke up from, in fact- were an eventful part of Megan's night for a very long time now. The scream, the light, the sound; they were as familiar to her as the bed she slept on; as familiar as the very incident which changed her life and brought them on to begin with.

But I'll not be going down that path today, she said to herself and quickly put away the thought before it persisted, just like she did every time she woke from the nightmare.

Megan grabbed a bottle of water next to the clock and took a sip from it. "It's not your fault," she spoke her mantra. "You were just a child. You couldn't have known that it would end like that."

Truth be told, the words didn't really mean much to her, at least not as much as they did when she started saying them those many years ago. Of course, it's my fault, she criticized herself. Being a child doesn't change what I did and its consequences because I failed to rectify it in time.

However, hearing herself speak the mantra even though she didn't believe a word of it somehow managed to her calm down so she kept it up. Guess that's the extent of your self-delusion, Megan, she mocked.

Just then, her phone rang on the table and she picked it. "Megan Months," she said into the receiver. "What?" Her face took on a serious expression. "Alright, I'll be there in a minute."

Olympus was a surprising bustle of activities especially for that time of the morning when Megan stepped out of the elevator. 5:30, she looked at her watch and confirmed, very surprised. She had actually thought it was much later with the amount of people already at their posts going about their duties in the building.

Perhaps they never left, she reasoned and found herself in awe again of the environment she was in. Whatever Olympus was at its core, its employees took it very seriously.

Megan reached Dennis's office and found that he was just as busy as the operatives, typing away furiously on his tablet with the major part of the top portion of the monitor-map behind him in bright red.

"Hello, Director, I heard-"

"That we've got a very serious situation up here?" He looked up briefly to acknowledge her presence but didn't stop his activity. "That's correct. One of Olympus's secret storage facilities located in the Arctic was just attacked."

So, that's why the top part of the map is practically glowing, Megan realized. Dennis must have every operative in the region on high alert.

"Wait, how can the facility be attacked if it's supposed to be secret?" it suddenly dawned on her.

"Good question, Miss Months." Dennis pressed something on his tablet and the map on the monitor's screen was replaced by a footage from the facility. "How about you tell me?"

Megan looked and saw four men on the screen. They were dressed in heavy combat gears, rifles in their hands as they went through each section of the building in two groups of two without any bother for the guards, whom they shot dead on sight, the cameras, or anything else for that matter.

"Brazen and confident," she read off from what she was looking at, "but cautious and organised. I reckon that whoever these guys are, they had a very deep knowledge of the facility's layout before they came. They knew exactly where to go and how to go about it."