They both continued to ignore me. Which was frustrating as hell.
But they also kept right on talking like we weren’t even there. And they weren’t careful about it, either. They talked about some sort of bunker and the schedule they were working on for the people who lived there, and then they said something about an amusement park.
Wait, amusement park?
I cast a confused look at Will at that, and he returned it quickly, one lifted eyebrow telling me that he was listening just as closely as I was—but not getting anything more from the conversation.
Then the passenger let the driver’s name drop.
“Adam, you know it’s going to take time. We don’t have the experience we need to get it done quickly,” he said in response to something the driver had said. Something that the passenger evidently didn’t like.
Without even hesitating, Adam straight up punched the guy, his fist smacking right into the guy’s cheekbone. The passenger’s head hit the window and he went completely still—though I couldn’t tell whether he was knocked out or just playing it safe by pretending to be.
“No names, Zach,” the man I now knew to be called Adam growled. “Not when we have strangers in the truck.”
Which was rich, considering Adam had just outed Zach’s name as well.
Zach—if he was still conscious—didn’t respond. But I leaned back in my seat, carefully holding my breath, and reached out to take Will’s hand.
Who the hell were these guys, and what the hell did they want with us? Because they definitely weren’t military. And as much as I was wary of the military, it made me beyond nervous to be in a truck with people who were posing as military… and weren’t.
People who, it seemed, were so intent on keeping themselves hidden that their leader was actually willing to knock out his own man to make sure it happened.
Chapter 3
After two hours of incredibly tense driving through wilderness that alternated between outright desert and a sort of scraggy, scrubby landscape made up mostly of water-starved bushes and barren ground, we evidently started nearing our destination. Adam—who had, since that one punch, managed to drive without actually attacking anyone else—started to slow, and I could see Zach—who had, since that one punch, kept his mouth completely shut—start shuffling around, gathering things and doing that general organizational thing you do when you’re starting to get near wherever you’re going.
Will and I, who had been sitting very quietly in the backseat, holding hands and keeping our eyes on the passing landscape, turned our eyes toward the front of the truck. We’d had some murmured conversation during the drive, mostly to do with where we thought we might be—we had no idea—and where we thought we might be going—again, drawing a complete blank—and now that we were evidently nearing our destination, I felt a wave of increased tension go through each of our bodies.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d been doing plenty of panicking during the entire drive. It wasn’t like we started slowing down and I suddenly realized we were in trouble or something. It was just that I didn’t know what to make of the whole thing—and Adam refusing to give me any information was making it a whole lot harder to come up with any sort of plan. The whole thing was just so freaking crazy. We’d been driving along, minding our own freaking business, congratulating ourselves on having gotten away from Sally and company with Will alive, and suddenly there were tanks on the highway. Then someone had actually started shooting at us—for not fucking reason—and then, once we'd cooperated, they’d refused to tell us anything.
I had spent almost my entire life going after whatever I wanted. If I wanted to get into a specific site, I found a way. If I wanted to steal something from someone—digitally speaking—I did it. If I wanted information, it took me about three seconds flat to find a way to get it. So this whole being ignored and not understanding what the hell was going on thing had started rubbing me the wrong way pretty much immediately.
The problem was, there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it. And that pissed me off even more.
So I’d been doing the logical thing and had spent the entire drive trying to figure out where we were and whether I could remember anything about anything in this area of the country. I’d lived here for some time and I had done a fair amount of research for the newspaper I used to work for—both legal and illegal. Which meant that I knew what was in the general area, as long as it was freely available information. And I knew I should have known if there was anything to do with the military here.
Yes, I’d already had this conversation with myself. And yes, I spent most of the drive having it again and again and again. Because I already knew we were in trouble. And if we were going to get out of that trouble, we needed to know where we were, so we could figure out where we needed to go.
I mean that was just plain and simple logic, right there.
When we pulled up to our destination, though, I have to admit that I was brought completely speechless and thoughtless. Because we weren’t at some military compound or even some top-secret bunker for the rich and famous. We weren’t at anything that looked like it might be the home of the cult members I was starting to believe had somehow kidnapped us.
Instead, we were at the High and Mighty Amusement Park. Home of the biggest coaster in this part of the country, according to the sign over the parking lot. And there were about two dozen SUVs parked in the parking lot, each of them looking just like the ones we’d seen on the road.
And the one we were riding in right now.
I stared at it, my mouth actually dropping open in complete shock, and didn’t even realize I was staring until Will reached over and closed my mouth with a snap.
“Not what I was expecting, either,” he whispered in my ear. “What the hell are we doing here?”
I shook my head, speechless. I couldn’t figure out whether I was horrified… or amused. This all seemed like some completely insane dream. One of those bad ones where nothing makes sense and you wake up feeling all disoriented and confused about whether the world is real or not.
Then the guys in front of us jumped out of the truck, jerked the rear doors open, and motioned intently for both of us to get out.
Will and I exchanged one highly suspicious glance, and then he turned and slid out of the truck, with me hot on his heels. I reached down and took his hand the moment we were out of the vehicle, my first thought being that I didn’t want us to be separated. Because if we were going to find a way out of this mess, then we needed to do it together. I’d only known this guy for a matter of days, but we’d already been through several life-threatening adventures together and as far as I was concerned, he was now on my team.
There was no way in hell I was leaving this place without him.
When I went, I planned to have him watching my back the entire way.
Adam and Zach marched us forward, guns at our backs—as cliché as that was—and before I knew it, we were walking toward the building that looked like it had once housed the admission/ticket window of the park. It was deserted, now, and a quick glance told me what the lack of noise should have already indicated.
The entire freaking park was deserted. The rollercoasters weren’t running, the booths were all closed, and there was a not-so-fine layer of dust over everything. I mean, there were real live tumbleweeds blowing through some of the ride line areas. Well, not live, since tumbleweeds are by definition dead, but you know what I mean.
The place was closed. It was impossible to tell how long that had been the truth, but I was just going to guess that the lack of any living human beings in the area was the thing that had done it. Which would put it, I guessed, at nearly two weeks now.
I wondered suddenly whether the owner of the place was also dead—and thought it very likely, given the fact that he probably hadn’t known, either, that the attack was coming.
And God, the whole thing was just so creepy, and I’m talking horror movie level creepy. The kind of
horror movie where there’s a clown with an enormous knife hiding in the tent where the adults are sending all the kids. The park should have been full of noise: People talking and laughing, the roar of the rollercoasters, the screams of the riders, the dinging and singing of the carnival booths around the rides, the music from the carousel…
Instead, a deathly quiet hung over the entire place. It was an amusement park filled with nothing more than ghosts.
I frowned at that, though. Every other place we’d come across had been full of… well, bodies. Corpses. Hundreds and hundreds of people who had been caught in the attack and died right where they’d been standing—or where they’d run to, expecting to find help. Horrible, twisted corpses that had showed exactly how much pain those people had been in when they died, too.
Even thinking about it made me sort of sick, still.
The memory of the guy in one of the towns we’d come across made it even worse. Because he’d evidently been the lone survivor. And he’d been dining on the people who had died.
But this place looked picked clean—and not like there was a random madman running around eating everyone, either. There was nothing out there but the trash and litter that must have been there since the place closed down. No bodies, live or dead. No sign that there were any people left.
Where were they all? And what the hell were we doing here, now? With these guys who were pretending to be military… but were clearly not?
I’d evidently paused while I took it all in, because I received a shove from Adam. One that actually made me trip. Will caught me, and grunted when the movement jerked his shoulder, and that got him a shove from Zach—who, I had decided, probably wasn’t actually a bad guy, but did what he did to try to keep Adam from punching him again.
Because Zach might seem like he might be okay. Adam, on the other hand, seemed like he was a complete nutso.
“Walk,” the man in question suddenly snapped.
“We are, in case you hadn’t noticed,” I snapped back.
Yeah, the guy had a gun and I maybe should have been a little bit more polite to him. But he’d pissed me off—repeatedly—and I was clean out of patience.
At that point, we got to what had been the ticket window and Adam pulled out an enormous key ring with about fifty keys on it. He fooled around with it for a moment, then finally found the one he was evidently searching for and stuck it into the lock in the door. A quick turn, a shove, and the door flew open.
Another shove, and Will and I were preceding our two captors through that door, my heartbeats getting louder and louder as we went. Because this was starting to feel horribly familiar. The door. The lightbulb swinging above us. The long, cemented tunnel that led down into the ground.
What the actual fuck? Did this… did this amusement park have a bunker under it?
I started fighting with them, then. I couldn’t help it. Because I’d been in a bunker before, and horrible things had happened there, and I would be absolutely damned if I was going to go through it again. I’d be damned if I was going to let them take me down into the ground again against my will.
The last time, it had been my uncle, and I’d at least known that he was going to try to do right by me. Maybe even protect me. But these guys? I didn’t know them from Adam.
Well, I mean… other than the fact that one of them was named Adam.
I didn’t know them at all. I didn’t know what they wanted or why they wanted me and Will. And I was out of patience. I wanted out of here, like, now. The walls felt like they were closing in on me and I was starting to panic, my breath growing faster and faster with every passing second.
I turned quickly and took a swing for Adam’s throat, connecting with it and sending him spluttering to the floor. Then I turned to kick at Zach—but he’d already seen what I’d done to Adam, and was waiting.
The butt of his gun came down on my temple, and I went crashing to the floor.
Chapter 4
The blow didn’t knock me out like it was probably supposed to, though it did send me to my knees—where I came face-to-face with the man I’d just hit. And boy, was he mad.
I mean, I couldn’t blame him. I had just hit him in the throat, after all.
But I didn’t really think he could blame me, either. He’d taken Will and me prisoner for no reason and then brought us to this random underground concrete tunnel—which was under, of all things, a freaking amusement park.
No sane person would have gone without a struggle. And I was a lot of things, but insane had never been one of them.
“Where the hell are you taking us?” I snapped. “Who are you, what do you want, and where in the ever-loving fuck are we? We’ve cooperated with you so far, Adam, but you owe us some answers. Like, now.”
His face closed up on itself, all anger and sour, stubborn pride—or something close to it, it was hard to tell—and I could see that he, in fact, didn’t think he did have to answer my questions. Hell, for all I knew, he was some insanely pie-in-the-sky nutcase just like my uncle, who thought he actually had the right to be doing what he was doing and was going to get all ragey when someone told him 'hey, guess what, we have lives and brains too, and we disagree.'
I thought suddenly of Simone, the one friend I’d managed to make in my uncle’s bunker, and the woman who had helped me break the hell out of there. And then I thought about what had happened to her. Her head had been literally blown to pieces by my uncle, who hadn’t wanted to let us leave, and had taken it really personally when we’d tried to do it anyhow.
I was not going to let that happen again. I was not going to lose someone else I cared about just because some insane guy thought that a bunker was the answer—and that the people he had kidnapped shouldn’t have a choice in the matter.
And no, I didn’t know for a fact that we were going into a bunker. But the concrete tunnel that seemed to lead right down into the ground sure did feel like it was giving me a big fat clue.
I reached out and shoved Adam, sending him back onto his ass, and snarled like a wild animal. “Tell. Us. Where. We. Are!”
Zach must have made some sort of move at that point—probably because I was roughing up his boss, though the fact that Adam had actually punched Zach really should have put him on our team, in my opinion—because Will was suddenly behind me and yanking me to my feet. He pulled me up, then shoved me behind him so my back was up against the wall and Will’s towering hulk was in front of me.
I scowled. I hated being shoved to the back of the action.
“She’s got a good point,” Will said, much more calmly and reasonably. “We want to know where you’re taking us and why. We haven’t done anything wrong, and as far as I can tell, you guys haven’t actually arrested us. As far as I can tell, in fact, you don’t have the authority to arrest us. What’s going on here?”
Right, so maybe his way was better. Maybe we were more likely to get honey with sugar water, or whatever that stupid saying was. At the end of the day, I didn’t care which one of us ended up getting the answers.
I just wanted answers.
Instead of answering, though, Zach helped Adam to his feet with a murmured question about whether the other man was okay or not—which seemed to piss Adam off even more—and then those two were shoving Will and me in front of them again.
Down the cement hall. Which was very definitely leading in a downward slope, now. With no doors along the sides, and just swinging lightbulbs above us for light. There was no other sound, and though I strained my ears with everything I had, I couldn’t hear a damn thing. No voices. No echoes. Not even the grumbling of machinery—which made sense, in a way, since the rollercoasters above us were all shut down, presumably because no one was left alive to run them. Plus the power was out.
But if the tunnel was leading somewhere, you would have thought I’d have been able to hear some sound of it. That sound that comes with enclosed spaces, if nothing else.
As it was, the silence was creepy as all get out, our
footsteps the only things sounding through the echoing corridor, and though I tried desperately to get my mind to kick into gear in terms of things we could possibly do—or learn—here, all I could think about was whirling around, punching both of these guys, and running as fast as I could for the entrance to the hallway.
God, I thought, when did I become some so physical? What did I think I was, some sort of action hero?
I was starting to, actually, I realized with a small huff of internal laughter. After the last week and everything I’d been through, that part of me that would rather exist in a dark room by myself with nothing but a computer or five for company? That girl was completely gone. The little mouse that fought like hell to get through the maze called the dark web, and then the further mazes that built internet security?
Yeah, that mouse was long gone. Not by my choice, I could guarantee you that much. If I had it my way, I would still be there in my little apartment, finding my way through those very things, letting my brain do all the running while my ass sat right there in a chair.
But evidently the world had different ideas about what I should be doing with my time. Evidently—and I wasn’t even remotely happy about this—the world thought I should get off my ass and do something a little more physical. Starting with trying to turn the world’s eyes toward that cult in Turkey and what they were going to do.
And after that, doing all sorts of action hero-type things. Shooting at my uncle. Running through the night to get to town. Fighting with street gangs. Pulling kung-fu moves on the guy trying to trap me. Dashing through a mall, poisoning villains, riding on the back of a motorcycle.
That reserved girl from the dinky apartment wouldn’t even recognize who she’d become. But as long as I was here and was now capable of doing those sorts of things, I was thinking I might as well take advantage of them.
I was just tensing my muscles up, ready to try something else, when we suddenly came out of the tunnel and onto a platform that looked out over the biggest room I’d ever seen in my life.
Survival of The Fittest | Book 3 | Final Ride Page 2
