Beyond the Mirror

Chapter Two

Arriving at Berlin, Gabriel felt a nostalgic sense of familiarity. Had he been here before? The city felt like a place he had been before but somehow couldn’t just place it. He followed the woman’s instructions, meeting a contact who led him to a secluded hotel in the city. The contact, a man in his mid-thirties, handed him a car key and a note before he departed and left him at the hotel. “Stay Quiet” the note read. He read it with fear and agitated curiosity. Before he could finish glancing through the note, the man had vanished into thin air. He scurried out of the hotel only to discover that the man had torn away in his car, leaving a fog of dust in his wake. He looked round the hotel. It was nondescript and forlorn, but lodging in his room, he discovered that a real luxury resided within. The outer look was just a camouflage. The interior was completely opposite the looks from the outside. Why could that be? It’s all strange. Even stranger was his discovery that his trip to Berlin was all-expense paid. He suddenly had a salon car and a free lodge in a hotel that appeared abandoned from the outside, somewhere in Berlin. He knew this city. He had a fragment of memories of being here before, but he couldn’t just place it.

Inside the hotel, he met a man named Thomas, a chef. Thomas’s behavior was rather peculiar. He would smile briefly and switch to keeping a straight face at quick intervals. He did this with ease. Gabriel couldn’t help but to feel a sense of unease.

Sometimes, Gabriel would see him whispering to the hotels staff, their voices hushed and urgent. Whenever Thomas realized Gabriel was watching, he would quickly comport himself. This left Gabriel with more questions than answers. Other times, Gabriel would bump into Thomas in hidden corners of the hotel typing away urgently on his old, dusty laptop. Each time Thomas noticed Gabriel was watching, he would shut the laptop swiftly. “uh….Just checking my recipes,” he would say. Most times, Thomas would skip his night shifts and leave the other cooks to manage on their own.

As Gabriel observed Thomas’s strange behavior, he realized that Thomas might just be hiding something from him. This Thomas might just be as dangerous as “the people who did not want him to know who he was.”

One night, Gabriel received a call from a strange number. It was Ethan. "Meet me at the Brandenburg warehouse," he said. "Come alone."

Gabriel arrived at the warehouse in his black Sedan car, his heart racing. He ventured into the warehouse. It was dimly lit. Finally, he would meet Ethan. He would ask him lots of questions, how he faked his death. This was a man supposed to be dead. He couldn’t just wait to meet his friend again. He strolled through the warehouse, albeit cautiously. He was fascinated by number of workers bustling with work. They all wore long white overalls with their hands covered with gloves, and their faces covered with lab masks. His nose was assaulted by an unpleasant smell from the red meat each of them was defrosting from different giant chillers. Was Ethan now a butcher in Berlin? Could he one of the unknown men in white overalls? These and many more possibilities raced through his mind. He watched carefully strolling through as the warehouse kept buzzing with these men going about that business. Quick movement. Non-stop flow of work. The men moved to and fro, depositing the frosted meat in at different locations in a regimented pattern. Gabriel tried talking to one of the men, but none stopped to acknowledge his presence. He began to feel that these men were robots after all. Gabriel could only watch in awe. It was not long before one of the workers shoved him by the shoulder and rumpled a white paper in his fist. The worker opened their mask briefly to reveal their face to Gabriel. Damn, it was the woman who had handed him a ticket to Berlin. He knew that face from way back. Before he could part his lips to talk to her, she had scurried away, already mixed up with others and back into their routine.

He straightened the paper. “Run!” the paper read, shouting at him. He looked round to see if he was in trouble. A gang of five men had barged into the warehouse. They harassed the workers while some of them brandished their Sniper rifles. They blasted at the roof. Gabriel frozen to a spot, he silently questioned why Ethan had asked him to come here if this would mean more trouble for him. Chaos broke out. Trouble unleashed. The gangsters had now overrun the Brandenburg warehouse. He stared at his phone expecting a prompt from Ethan but found none. He dripped with sweat. He trembled with fear.

The gangsters approached fearlessly with rifles. “Gabriel Drogo, specimen 107 -1957!” One of the men blasted into his lavalier mic. “Any attempt at escape, fire.”

He knew these men were on his tail. They had come solely for him. But he had lost too much to give up now. He looked round. Chaos was still ravaging the warehouse as some of the workers put up defense to fight off their oppressors. The gangsters advanced, eyes bulging, threatening to fire their rifle. Gabriel threw caution to wind and fled through the door behind him. The door led to three more doors. He was swift and intentional, but the blast of gunshot followed in his wake as the gang advanced even faster. He went crashing down in the last room only to be assaulted by more potent smell of decaying meat. He sprung up and cursorily looked around the room. Torsos were hanging from the ceiling. It was not clear if the torsos were of humans or animals. Poor Gabriel only wanted a way out of chaos. His phone beeped this time. It was Ethan’s voice mail.

“Stop running, Gabe. The dream is real until you wake up.” Ethan blasted through the mouthpiece, “stop running. Those are our friends. They have come to save you.” He checked the timestamp briefly. It was today’s. How could Ethan call those monsters friends. They literally just shot at him. Now he was confused than ever before. The woman who had invited him to Berlin to meet Ethan had asked him to run, but here was Ethan’s voice asking him to stop running. Perplexed. Discombobulated. Time was not on his side. He didn’t think twice about choosing his fate, he chose life. He found an underground sewage tunnel and climbed down till the sewage floated him to a manhole. The manhole was right in the middle of a highway. It was covered. It was stark dark in the dead of the night. He opened the manhole cautiously and discovered that he had been brought far away from Brandenburg warehouse.