Single White Psycopath Seeks Same (15 page)

I took a swing at Stan and missed, but a blow with my other hand struck him in the chin, almost exactly where Daniel had hit. I could hear footsteps behind me...Daniel rushing for the door.

A brutal knee to the groin took away a good portion of Stan’s savagery. He still held the gun, but didn’t look like his aim was going to be all that it could be, so I hurried back to the cube door and fastened the lock an instant before Daniel reached it.

A bullet ricocheted off the door right next to me. I didn’t see anybody in the hallway outside, but unless Roger had gone loopy it had to be Mortimer. I ran toward the wall and around the corner of the cube, cursing myself for it before I’d finished my second step. I should’ve fought for Stan’s gun.

Mortimer entered the dart room. “You take the left, I’ll take the right,” he said. Stan nodded weakly and began to limp around the cube in the opposite direction that I was running.

I ran around to the far side of the cube. No other exits except the way I came in. Armed bad guys moving in on each side. Bummer, bummer, bummer.

Chapter 20

I THINK it’s safe enough to say that I’d had my share of bad luck during this whole ordeal, so as I watched Mortimer and Stan move closer I decided that it was high time for a bit of good luck to come my way.

Of course, that’s a really stupid thing to decide when you’re in a situation like this. Sort of like the thunderstorm that always follows “So what else could possibly go wrong?”  As soon as I thought it, I expected a suffer a fatal coronary, or for a slab of the cube wall to drop off and squish me, or for the floor to crack open revealing the pits of hell and six hundred and sixty-six demons ready to drag me down to my fiery demise.

As it so happened, I lucked out.

Roger entered the room, still uninjured. He saw my predicament, and began waving his arms over his head. “Hey! I’m still around! What’s the matter, you can’t find someone in your own place?”

Mortimer and Stan each turned toward the sound of his voice, but they didn’t go after him.

“Damn it, Roger, forget about me!” I shouted. “Get out of here! Unlock the rest of the cells!”

Roger left the room.

Stan and Mortimer exchanged a concerned glance. For all they knew, Roger had the pass card. After a moment’s hesitation, Mortimer went after him.

I truly hated sending them after Roger, but it wasn’t like he could get out of here without my pass card. Okay, so, he could have somehow taken out one of the bad guys and got a pass card of his own, but still...it was a wise strategic decision.

And the fact that Mortimer had gone after him revealed an important piece of information. Even though the alarm had gone off and the second cell door hadn’t opened with the pass card, they still believed we might have the means to get the prisoners out. So maybe we did.

I went around the corner on Mortimer’s side just as he exited the room and just before Stan appeared on my end. I ran toward the door. Stan followed me, but he was still shaky from the gonad pounding and engaged in a lackluster pursuit.

Daniel was crouched next to Josie, wrapping his shirt around her leg, not really paying attention to what was going on outside the cube.

I left the dart room, took a split second to recall the layout of the parts of the structure that I’d visited, and hurried down the hallway away from the cell area. After crossing through an intersection, I waved the pass card, opened the door, and stepped into the operating room.

Charlotte was strapped to the table, fully clothed this time. Her eyes widened as I shut the door behind me.

“I’m here to help!” I insisted. “I promise, I’m not some deviant rapist...despite my lack of pants.”

“What on earth is going on?” she asked. “Who are you?”

“It’s really kind of complicated,” I explained, unfastening the straps. “Your husband hired me to help rescue you, but things worked out kind of goofy.”

I cringed as I unfastened the strap binding her left wrist. Her arm was covered with five or six long cuts, stretching from the back of her wrist to her elbow. She noticed my concern.

“It’s nothing—don’t worry about it,” she said. “You look a lot worse.”

“Yeah, it hasn’t been a good day for my body.”

“I saw them wheel you through the place where they’re keeping everybody. I take it they don’t think you’re one of them anymore?”

I shook my head. “It was nice while it lasted.” 

I finished the final strap and she got off the table. I knew we had to hurry, but we could most definitely spare a moment to gather some supplies. There were a
lot
of great weapons in here.

Charlotte grabbed a spiked metal club and a short spear. I went for the machete. “Could you take these?” I asked, handing a screwdriver and small knife to Charlotte. “I don’t have pockets.”

“Sure.”

“Thanks. Let’s get out of here.”

There wasn’t a window in the door, so I opened it as silently as possible and peeked out. The hallway was empty. We left the operating room and began to quickly but softly move down the corridor. Our first job was to get to the cell area and hope that Mortimer hadn’t been able to catch up to Roger.

Hoping we wouldn’t get lost, I turned at the intersection. I didn’t particularly want to walk by the dart room, and I assumed there was another way around. The cell area was on the far left side of the structure, so if I just kept heading that way....

A gunshot. One that sounded like it came from the far left side of the structure. I picked up my pace, and Charlotte followed.

Off in the distance, I saw Mortimer run across an intersection. He didn’t see us, or even look in our direction.

We began to run even faster.

We reached the cell area. Roger immediately spun around and pointed a gun at us, but relaxed when he saw who we were. “Give me the card! Quick!”

I tossed the red card to him. He caught it in the air. The other prisoners were pressed against the cell bars, anxiously waiting to be set free.

“Are they right behind you?” he asked.

“Not at the moment, but pretty soon, yeah.”

“What do you think made the alarm go off?” he asked.

“I have no idea. Try a different cell this time.”

“If it goes off, what do we do?”

“We run. I’ve got some keys, and I’m pretty sure they belong to the vans that brought us here. We can smash through the gates and drive somewhere to get help.”

“Then everyone else will die,” Roger said. “I told you, they’re going to execute the prisoners if anything else goes wrong!”

I didn’t know what to say to that. “Well, there are four of them out there. Josie’s hurt pretty bad. What about Mortimer?”

“I might have broken his nose,” said Roger. “I knocked the gun away from him, but he ran away before I could use it.”

“He could come back with something worse.”

“You think?”

“Oh yeah.”

“I’ve got a gun. There’s only one way they could come in. We can keep them from getting in here, can’t we?”

“But nobody knows we’re here. They had Charlotte for months. They could just lock the place up, leave us to rot for a couple weeks.”

“Can we
please
stop talking and do something?” asked Charlotte.

“Try it,” I told Roger.

He waved the card over a cell reader, across the path from the one that had previously set off the alarm.

The cell didn’t unlock. The alarm went off.

“Shit!” Roger shouted.

“We’ve gotta get out of here!” I said. “Give me the gun!”

Roger handed it to me. I headed for the doorway, and then held the gun out to a heavyset, redheaded man in the cell closest to the exit. “Don’t let anyone through that door. We’ll be back for you. I promise.”

The man gave a grim nod and took the gun. Roger, Charlotte and I fled the room and ran down the hallway.

“Don’t worry,” I told Roger as we ran. “We’ll get everybody out of here.”

“Hell yeah, we will,” Roger said. We ran without speaking for a few seconds. “Hey, Andrew?”

“Yeah?”

“Will you promise not to be offended if I share something with you?”

“Sure.”

“You smell
really
bad. I mean, nasty beyond description. I’d almost rather be back in the cell.”

“I’ve missed you, Roger.”

“I missed you, too, Andrew.”

WE REACHED the far right end of the structure, which stopped at a wide white door. The pass card worked on it, and we went through.

Beyond the door was a small garage. Surprisingly, it looked like any other filthy garage, although standard equipment like a vice certainly carried a foreboding aura.

The van was there.

“I think we’re saved!” I said, unable to contain my relief even though it was far too early to relax. After a couple of tries I found the correct key on Foster’s key ring, and we all got inside, me in the driver’s seat, Roger and Charlotte in the back.

“Anything useful back there?” I asked, setting my machete on the passenger seat while I started the engine.

“Some chains, big metal clamps, something that looks like a cattle prod...”

I reached under the visor. There were two garage door openers. I pressed the button on the first one, and the door behind us began to open with a loud hum. It opened slowly, almost maddeningly so.

“Come on...come on...” I whispered, because you never know when a slow-moving garage door will hear comments like that and decide to speed things up a little.

“I’m not seeing anything good back here,” Roger said.

“Come on...come on...” Charlotte said to the garage door, obviously working under the same theory I was.

I expected a pair of legs to become visible in the gap any second. Or, more likely, for the white door to fly open. I revved the engine. The door was about three-quarters of the way up.

The white door flew open.

I slammed my foot on the gas pedal. The tires squealed and the van shot forward. There was a horrible screech as the roof scraped against the rising door, but then we were outside the garage. I turned on the headlights and kept the accelerator floored.

I pressed the button on the second remote, praying that it opened the gate. Nothing happened. I pulled it from the visor, and then slammed on the brake. “It’s got a code!”

“Just ram the gate!” Roger shouted. He scurried to the back of the van and peered through the rear window. “The front door’s opening!”

The rest of the fence looked quite a bit less sturdy than the main gate, but I couldn’t exactly work up any speed plowing through a couple of feet of snow. I fastened my seat belt, and then turned the van toward the main gate, backed it up about ten feet, and then floored the gas pedal again.

“Hold on!” I warned. Roger and Charlotte both grabbed something to brace themselves. I gritted my teeth, waiting for the impact.

The van smashed into the gates, safety glass from the windshield flying everywhere. The air bag inflated in front of me. The gates didn’t budge.

I put the van into reverse and backed up again. “Three of ‘em are coming out the front,” said Roger. “And another one, the one whose nose I broke, he’s coming out of the garage!”

“That’s the whole party,” I said.

“I’m not a weapons expert,” Roger admitted, “but the things they’re carrying look a lot like machine guns.”

At that moment, there was a loud series of clanging and shattering sounds as machine gun fire ripped through the side of the van. Roger and Charlotte dove for the van floor, glass raining down upon them.

I returned my attention to the gate, ducked down as far as I could, and then floored the accelerator. It was hard to steer the van with the air bag in the way, but I managed as well as I could.

As machine gun bullets continued to hit the van, it struck the gate a second time. I heard Charlotte grunt as she smacked against the back of my seat. The gates held firm.

Then the machine gun fire ceased. After a moment, Roger peeked through the broken rear window.

“I don’t want to be Mr. Doom and Gloom,” he said, as the van’s engine began to sputter and it began to sink on its deflating tires, “but they seem to be passing out grenades.”            

Chapter 21

I PUT THE van into reverse again. Even though I had the accelerator against the floor, it seemed to be struggling to hit five miles per hour. I wondered what my chances were of taking all four of our pursuers out via vehicular homicide.

Something slammed against the side of the van, followed by Daniel’s charming voice shouting “You idiot!”

There was a huge explosion that rocked the van.

I kept the accelerator down, and by some miracle the van kept moving.

I heard something land in the back. Something rolled along the floor.

“Move your head!” Charlotte ordered.

I did so. She flung the grenade out where the front windshield had been. It struck the gate, and for a heart-stopping instant I thought it was going to bounce back at us, but it dropped straight down to the ground and exploded.

No damage to the gates.

I swerved the van to the left, steering it back toward the garage. I couldn’t run anybody over going this slowly, and the gates were a hopeless cause.

In what remained of the rear-view mirror, I saw another grenade fly into the back of the van.

Then a second one.

A third one sailed in as Roger grabbed for the first. Charlotte scooped up the second and threw it past my head again. It landed on the ground and exploded, sending a huge blast of snow into the air.

The van was picking up speed. Not much, but a little.

Roger threw his first grenade out the window. Charlotte began to frantically look around the rear of the van. “Where’d the other one go?”

“By your foot!”

Charlotte grabbed it and threw it again. But she was so frazzled that the throw went wild, hitting the top of the windshield, bouncing off the dashboard, and into my lap.

I’d played Hot Potato many times as a kid, but never a version with such high stakes. I grabbed the grenade and whipped it out the window. It exploded in mid-air, barely clearing the front of the van.

Then the machine gun fire started again.

I ducked down and blindly drove the van, hoping I wouldn’t go off the mostly-cleared path and get us stuck. I was amazed that the van was still functioning, even at this fairly pitiful level. Another grenade exploded, but this one hadn’t made it inside.

The machine gun fire didn’t stop, so I couldn’t tell if we were leaving them behind or they were running after the van. I sort of hoped they were running after us. Slipping on a patch of ice while firing a machine gun could cause one heck of a nasty accident.

After an endless minute, the van reached the garage. I attempted to turn into it, but instead crashed against the side of the doorway. While Roger and Charlotte climbed over the seats toward me, I grabbed the machete and scrambled through the front window and onto the smashed hood.

More machine gun bullets hit the van as the three of us hurried through the garage. I opened the door and we rushed back into the hallway. As I pulled it shut, the door began to twitch with the impact of machine gun fire.

“Any great ideas?” I asked.

“Run between the bullets,” Roger suggested.

“How can you be a smart-ass at a time like this?” Charlotte demanded.

“We could die at any second,” Roger explained. “I’d like my final words to be something clever.”

We swerved down another corridor just as they began firing again. It was readily evident that this had been one of my typical bad decisions, because the corridor had a door at the end but no other options.

“Piss,” Roger remarked.

I unlocked the door, flung it open, and we rushed through, finding ourselves in a small, dimly lit room. A small room with a bearskin rug on the floor, and nothing else. No windows, no doors, no portable teleportation devices, nothing.

“Piss, piss,” Roger added.

“Okay...problem...” I mumbled, shutting the door. Maybe we could smother them with the rug.

“I hope you’ve got your clever comments ready,” said Charlotte.

Why was there a bearskin rug in an otherwise empty room anyway? I slid it aside, half-expecting it to try and bite my foot off. There was a trapdoor underneath.

Bullets began to tear through the door. The three of us dove to the floor. I unlatched the chain on the trapdoor and lifted it. It was too dark to see anything but a slide leading down.

“Looks good to me,” said Roger.

Then I remembered what Daniel had said about his latest project, the underground one that wasn’t completely functional but would be
amazing
.

“You know what, I don’t think we want to go down there.”

More bullets tore through the door.

“Okay, yeah, we do.”

Roger jumped down into the trapdoor and vanished from sight. Charlotte followed. Just as the door broke apart from a violent kick on the other side, I went after them.

I slid down for about ten seconds, and then kicked somebody in the back as I landed. It was pitch black down here, as well as hot and humid, almost like I was back in Florida.

“Everyone still alive?” I asked.

“Not dead here,” said Roger.

“Here either,” said Charlotte.

I got to my feet. I couldn’t see a thing except for a faint light from the trapdoor above, but if any of the others slid down here, they were going to run into the machete.

The trapdoor closed, cutting off all the light.

“Okay,” I said, “our situation does not seem to have taken much of an upward turn.”

“Why is it so hot down here?” asked Charlotte. “What is this place?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, “but I have a strong feeling that it’s not going to be fun.”

“What’s that noise?” asked Charlotte.

“Okay, I don’t need questions like that,” said Roger. “When you ask something like ‘what’s that noise?’ it really makes me nervous, and I’m plenty nervous already, and I’d just rather you—”

“Shhh! Listen!”

We all shut up and listened. I couldn’t quite tell what it was, but there was some sort of noise coming from the darkness ahead of us. Something too soft to make out accurately. Almost like a buzzing.

“We can’t stand around here,” Roger said. “If there’s a way out, we’ve got to find it as soon as possible. How long do you think the other prisoners can defend themselves with that one gun?”

We spent a few minutes trying to find a light source. There was a wall right behind where the slide had dropped us off, but sliding our hands along it turned up no light switch.

“Forget it,” I finally said. “We’ll just have to do it in the dark.”

Slowly, cautiously, we began to walk forward. I had my arms out on front of me, and assume the others did, too. The floor was smooth, possibly cement. The sound got a bit louder as we moved forward, but was still impossible to identify.

Then I slipped on a wet patch and pitched forward, smacking into something at waist-level. It felt like one of the carts in the operating room. A second later there was a huge crash—glass breaking against the floor. I tried to move away and smacked into something similar. It also toppled over in an explosion of shattering glass.

There was a long silence.

“Smooth move,” said Roger.

I could feel a large shard of glass pressed up against one of my bare feet. Now it was officially time to move very, very slowly, unless I wanted to leave large strips of my feet behind. I carefully slid my right foot forward, pushing away the glass in front of it. I did the same with my left.

The noise was much louder now, and this time I could identify it.

Rattling. And hissing.

I very much wanted to take off running across the room, screaming at the top of my lungs, but the presence of the broken glass made that a poor decision.

“Are those fucking
snakes?
” asked Charlotte.

“Everyone stay calm,” I warned.

The hissing continued, and now I could hear slithering coming from at least four places around me.

“What is the problem with these people?” Roger demanded, his voice panicked. “Who keeps rattlesnakes in their basement in Alaska? Where the hell did they get them? When do they feed them? I’m having a really hard time with all of this!”

“Be quiet!” snapped Charlotte. “Just don’t make them mad!”

I moved my toe forward, past something sharp and into something soft and wet. The open mouth of a dead snake. Unable to control myself, I rapidly stepped back, crushing a small, scaly mass that had come up behind me, and then I lurched forward again.

I bit down on my knuckles to keep from shrieking. Of course, with my knuckles muffling my shriek, I could hear the rattling and hissing and slithering perfectly well.

Then Charlotte shrieked for me.

“What? What happened?” asked Roger.

“It went over my foot! The snake went over my foot!”

There were loud pounding sounds that were apparently Charlotte beating the ground around her feet with the spiked club.

“Everybody calm down!” I said, pulling my hand out of my mouth. “If we don’t get bit we’ll be fine! Just keep moving forward!”

There was definite writhing behind me, and I was starting to think there were well more than four active snakes on the floor. I slid my foot forward, hooking my toe underneath the dead snake whose mouth I’d explored and flipping the creature out of the way. Not toward Charlotte.

The snake behind me brushed across the back of my foot. I hadn’t killed it when I stepped on it, and it seemed to be freaking out, twisting back and forth wildly. Hopefully it would slice itself to death on the glass, or at least not dig its fangs into my heel.

I kept moving forward. There was a sudden stinging pain in my toe. I screamed.

“What? What?” demanded Roger.

“I got bit! One of the snakes bit me! I got me right—okay, no, that was a piece of glass.”

“Listen to me, both of you,” said Roger. “No more screaming. None!”

“Easy for you to say. You’re not barefoot.”

“I mean it!”

We continued walking. The glass on the floor thinned out quickly, but I still couldn’t see anything in front of me. After a few more steps I stopped worrying about the snakes, though I figured I’d have plenty of other things to worry about before too long.

“Ow!” said Roger.

“What happened?”

“I bumped into the wall.”

“Smooth move.”

“Shut up.”

I touched the wall as well. Now we had to figure out if we were in a completely sealed-off room, in which case we were totally screwed, or there was a way out, in which case we were only
close
to totally screwed.

“Hey, everyone, guess what I found?” asked Roger. “Let there be light!”

Nothing happened.

“I’m going to be really annoyed if you just released some wild animals into the room,” I said.

But then there was a low hum, and some fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling lit up with a dim glow. A second later, they switched to full power, completely lighting the room.

The walls, ceiling, and floor were cement. There was a camera mounted in each corner...naturally, Daniel and his good friends would want to watch what was going on below. There were two other carts with glass aquariums containing rattlesnakes that I hadn’t knocked over. I also observed that rattlesnakes hadn’t been the only occupants—in addition to the snakes slithering through the broken glass, there were several tarantulas.

In fact, Charlotte had one on the back of her leg.

I tensed up, and then forced myself to relax and act casual as I walked over to her. “I need you to stay very, very still and very, very calm,” I said. I held the machete out toward her leg, ready to scrape the spider off, hoping my spider-phobic hand wouldn’t be twitching so badly that I severed her limb.

Charlotte glanced down at her leg, picked the spider up between her fingers, and tossed it with the others. “They’re not venomous, you know.”

“I know,” I admitted. “But they’re...big.”

“The one on your leg isn’t all that big.”

I swear to God I almost chopped my leg off. I spun around a couple of times, searching for the dreaded arachnid. There was nothing, and I sighed with relief.

“Real funny,” I said.

“It crawled up to your waist,” Charlotte explained.

I came very close to ripping the boxer shorts right off my body in panic. But there was no tarantula there, either.

Charlotte shrugged and grinned. “Just in case I die now.”

“I don’t think that was very clever. But I’m glad we’re keeping our sense of humor instead of getting all mopey. Now we should probably get moving.”

There was a long tunnel ahead, with brick walls rather than the cement. It was about eight feet tall and six feet wide, but the light from this room didn’t illuminate far enough for me to tell how far the tunnel stretched.

Walking side by side, we moved into the tunnel. There were two more video cameras, and numerous quarter-sized holes in the walls, irregularly spaced, and a sprinkler on the ceiling just ahead. The floor had a slight downward angle as it extended forward, and was completely covered with a thin layer of dry leaves.

“What do you think?” I asked, pointing at the sprinkler. “Death trap or safety precaution?”

As I took my next step, there was a sudden roar and I spun around to see the passage behind us closed off by a sliding cement door, casting us into complete darkness again.