That idea made better sense. But I wasn’t sure that was it, either, for the same reasons I’d already noted. If they didn’t think anyone would dare to rebel against them, why would they bother watching what was going on?
And add to that one more point: From what I’d seen in the bunker itself, the people looked dazed and confused. Subdued. Resigned. They certainly didn’t look like people who were in the midst of planning an active rebellion. Which probably just backed up Adam’s idea that people wouldn’t dare to rebel against him. Which further supported my idea that cameras would have felt extraneous to what qualified as the leadership in this joint.
So what was it? What had given us away?
And more importantly, what the hell was I going to do about it?
We turned another corner—thanks to another muttered command from the guy at our back—and came to a sudden stop, the hallway so crowded with people that we couldn’t actually move at all. Will and I backed up against the wall, our eyes on a group of men and women moving through the hallway in single file, each of them looking… resigned. Lifeless. As if they weren’t even using their brains anymore.
And they were all carrying tools of one sort or another. Shovels. Hammers. Picks. Wrenches and screwdrivers and even a few saws. Some of them already had on what looked like welding gear, the masks flipped up over their heads and torches in their hands attached to tanks on their backs.
What in the ever-loving hell was going on, here? What were they doing, going off to do repairs on the rides or something? Upkeep on the bunker itself? Whatever they were doing, that was some pretty heavy-duty machinery. I hadn’t ever entered the world of welding, myself, but I knew enough about it to know that it took some pretty specialized training and could be really, really dangerous if you did it wrong or you weren’t wearing the right protective equipment.
Had Adam been recruiting people with specific training into his little club? And how would that even be possible when so many people were dead? It wasn’t like he had access to the full range of human talent. Not anymore. And not the way he was finding people.
The workers—which was the name I gave them in my head—filed by without looking at us, and a moment later they were turning the corner and disappearing. A moment after that they were all gone, leaving nothing but the whiff of burnt metal and a general feeling of unease.
“Who the hell were they and where were they going?” I asked sharply.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I was supposed to be keeping my mouth shut. But when something that important happens, you give up on the rules you might have set for yourself.
“Keep walking,” the guard grunted instead of answering.
We did—because of the gun—but that didn’t stop me from asking more questions.
“Are those people trained on how to use that welding gear? Where did you get them trained? What exactly are they doing with those welding torches?”
I’m not going to lie; at that point, I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that they were somehow there to torture people who stepped out of line. The entire place was starting to give me that creepy sort of vibe.
Our guard, though, was evidently totally uninterested in satisfying my curiosity. Instead of answering, he jabbed me sharply in the back with his gun and grunted.
Great. We’re communicating in grunts, now, I thought.
But I kept walking. Walking and trying madly to come up with something that looked like answers. Because I had just realized that we had an even bigger problem. Yes, bigger than the problem of how we’d been caught. Bigger, even, than the problem of who those workers had been and where they were going.
I hadn’t exactly been nice to Adam in my interactions with him, but I had told him that we could help each other. I thought I’d even suggested that we could—and should—be allies rather than enemies, courtesy of my knowledge of what had happened and his obviously generous stock of equipment.
And now we’d been caught sneaking around the place and actually finding our way into his personal office—where we’d found and read through his personal journal. I didn’t know how much he would know about that—it depended on whether there were actually cameras in that office, I supposed—but the fact that we’d gone out exploring on our own and been discovered doing it was going to make it awfully hard to sell the ‘we’re your friends, don’t worry about us’ line.
I needed to come up with a relatively innocent reason for us having done what we did, stat. Because by the time Adam finally got around to seeing us—which I was positive he was going to want to do—I needed to have that reason so well-rehearsed that it came across as completely natural. If I wanted him to keep thinking of us as allies.
If I wanted to salvage whatever goodwill and freedom of movement we might have had.
I didn’t have anything by the time we got back to our bunk, though, and when the guard shoved us through the doorway, muttered something about us staying put and waiting to receive a visit from Adam himself, and then slammed the door in our faces, I turned to Will.
“Well, I don’t think we can go adventuring again,” I said miserably. “Not until we’ve come up with a good reason for having done it the first time. A reason good enough to keep them from punishing us for disobeying their rules.”
I didn’t add the rest, because it wouldn’t have made any sense to Will. But in my head, I was thinking that this bunker was even worse than the one my uncle had been running. And I was adding to that the fact that I was betting the punishments would be worse, too.
Chapter 11
It was about an hour before the door to our room was unlocked again. And in that hour, Will and I had come up with one grand plan: Watch. Listen. Keep our mouths shut.
Look, I know. It wasn’t a great plan, and it left a whole lot to be desired when it came to active participation in our own fate. Hell, we were basically agreeing to be as passive as humanly possible and just sort of wait for something to happen. It was the opposite of what I’d promised myself I would be doing. The opposite of what I’d thought when I’d come down into this bunker.
But we were also both exhausted by that time, having done very little sleeping or eating in the past twenty-four hours, and on top of that, Will was still wounded—or at least very heavily bruised, and potentially bleeding on the inside. At that point, keeping our mouths shut and trying to see whether we could see or hear anything that might help us get the hell out of there—maybe even getting some food in the process—seemed like an awfully good idea.
Besides, the not-so-glamorous truth was that we were running pretty low on options. We’d already used one of the aces up our sleeve in the form of Will being able to pick locks, and it turned out that they’d guessed that was how we’d gotten out—rather than, for example, perhaps thinking that Zach had just forgotten to lock the door. They knew we’d gotten out on our own. We’d checked. The lock to our room was still vulnerable to Will’s talents, but they must have installed a padlock on the outside of the door as well, because even with the door unlocked, we hadn’t been able to open the thing.
“Guess it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how we managed to get out of our room when they locked the door and didn’t leave the key,” Will muttered, banging his shoulder against the door.
“Right,” I said, watching from one of the beds. “So, what other options do we have?”
None, it turned out. Because as long as we couldn’t unlock the door, it meant we were stuck in the room. Which meant we were also stuck waiting. We’d spent some time trying to figure out how we were going to explain why we’d been out in the first place—and I thought we might have a viable excuse, there—and the rest of the time coming up with the Very Solid Plan of keeping our mouths shut and our eyes open.
When we heard a key being shoved into the padlock we thought was on the door, I went through the ground rules again as quickly as I could.
“Remember, we’re looking for a way out,” I said, keeping my voice as low as possible. �
�We’re listening for anything that could be of use to us. And we want to know what sort of schedule they’re on. Places like this always run on a schedule. If we can figure that part out, we can try to figure out how to get the hell out of here while everyone else is asleep.”
Hey, it had worked the last time I was in a bunker. I saw no reason to think it would fail me now.
The guard who showed up at the door was, as it turned out, the same one who had found us in the office. He cast one dubious look at the doorknob, and then at us—probably, I thought, because we hadn’t relocked it after Will had picked it—and then shook his head.
“You two need to learn your place,” he grunted. “Let’s go. Dinner.”
Dinner. That sounded amazing. I jumped to my feet and turned and held a hand out to Will, who looked at my hand and then up to me. I noticed that he held out the hand that wasn’t attached to the injured shoulder and twisted my mouth a bit.
We had to get him in to see a doctor, and the sooner the better. And with all the things I’d seen in this bunker, the one thing I hadn’t seen was anything that looked like it might include healthcare or first aid.
Which was, you know, weird. Why gather all these people here and then ignore the fact that some of them might get hurt? Did Adam not have a plan to treat them if that happened?
Or was not treating them actually part of his plan?
Look, I’m not saying that we were handcuffed or anything like that as we walked from our room to the dining hall—or whatever they called it—but the way we were frog-marched, a gun at our backs, definitely didn’t indicate that we were treasured or trusted guests. My earlier concern about whether Adam still thought we could be valuable was definitely warranted.
I was sure he’d heard about our little adventure. And I was equally sure he was the one who told his minion to walk us to dinner with a gun on us, rather than letting us get there ourselves as so many of the other people around us were doing.
So we were no longer even quasi-allies, and that, I thought, was probably going to be a problem. Not only because it meant we didn’t have free run of the place, but also because Sally and her crew had taught me one thing, and that was that you always wanted your enemies to think you were important. If they thought you were important—or at least useful to them or whatever they were trying to do—they had a lot smaller chance of deciding that they wanted to kill you.
True, it was completely possible that Adam did still think we were important, since he (probably) still thought that I knew things about the VXM that he didn’t. Starting with its name. There was a good chance that he’d still want to keep me around just for that, but that he had no intention of letting me have any freedom while I was his ‘guest.’
Maybe he thought he was keeping us safe—or more likely, secure. Maybe this whole gun-on-your-back situation was just to make sure he kept track of us rather than letting us get away. Particularly after we’d already escaped once.
And I was just going to have to hope that was the truth, I decided. Because yeah, the lack of freedom was going to be one enormous pain the in the ass, and Will and I were probably going to have to figure out how to actually bust through the padlock they were keeping on our door. But if he thought we were still useful, at least we’d probably be alive to do it.
Before I could come to any other brilliant conclusions, we got to the dining hall—which was, you guessed it, one of the larger cubes in this maze of a place. It was lined with table after table, about half of them full of the same people we’d been seeing throughout the day. No, I didn’t exactly recognize any of them, but I recognized their general demeanor. That hopeless resignation that seemed to blanket the place.
Like none of these people had the will to try to fight back against the jail they’d found themselves in.
I frowned, wondering how they’d been beaten down so quickly. After all, they could only have been here for a week or two. How had they all lost hope already? Or had they all started this particular journey as such sad sacks?
That was a possibility, I guessed, though I didn’t like it. I liked to think that there was more spark in the human race than that. Of course, I didn’t know the human race as well as I might have. I’d spent most of my life in dark places where I didn’t have to deal with them.
Then I saw two tables at the right-hand edge of the room that were filled with kids.
And some of those, I did recognize. They were the same kids we’d seen in that room earlier. The ones who had looked so freaked out and terrified. Those ones, I noticed, hadn’t lost one ounce of their fire.
“Who do you suppose they belong to?” Will murmured, his eyes having followed mine.
“Some of the people around here, I guess,” I answered. “And they seem to be the only ones who haven’t lost the will to live.”
“Or the will to fight,” he muttered.
We exchanged a quick grin. “We think alike,” I said.
Then the guard noticed us talking and shoved us forward.
“Get moving,” he grunted. “Before the boss makes his speech.”
I had no idea what that meant, but I did get moving. Mostly because I had taken a deep breath… and smelled food. Canned ravioli, if I was guessing correctly. It had that cheap, overly processed tomato sauce smell, topped with equally cheap cheese. Probably slimy. Probably tasteless. Probably something I’d eventually regret eating.
But food. God, food. I tried to remember the last time I’d eaten and recalled a hurried snack on the side of the road, via firelight. It hadn’t been enough then, and it certainly hadn’t carried us through everything that had happened since.
I didn’t want to be there. But I was willing to stay a bit longer for food.
Before we got to eat, though, we had to listen to the speech. Adam himself strolled to the front of the room, where I realized now there was a small stage, and climbed it as if he was climbing to the podium at the front of the White House press room.
“What does he think he is, the king of the world?” I asked no one in particular out loud.
“Sure does,” the man next to me answered.
I turned to him, shocked that any of these people even remembered how to speak. And that he was speaking ill of Dear Leader, which seemed quasi-suicidal, honestly.
“You’ve seen this before?” I asked, going for an question that hopefully would allow him to give me as much answer as he wanted. And boy was I rewarded.
“Been here since the start,” he answered, dropping his voice low. “Louis Jones. I was in the amusement park when all hell broke loose. Had my daughter with me. She’s over there at the kid’s table, now. Teenager with the red hair. The one with the glare on her face. She’s mad as hell, not that I’ve heard it from her mouth. I haven’t been allowed to talk to her since we got here.”
Oh boy, howdy, I thought, starting to get excited. This guy had been here from the start. Which meant he might be able to tell me more about what was going on. If only I could get him someplace where we could actually talk.
I was just trying to figure out how to do that when Adam himself started speaking, though, and all faces turned toward him like there were nothing but automatons in this room.
“People!” he thundered out. “Thank you for joining me tonight!”
I snorted at that—though I kept it quiet. As if any of us had had any freaking choice in the matter.
“I wanted to make a quick appearance here and let you know that our work is paying off. We’re nearly halfway through our plan already, and we’ve now got the pieces we need to make sure we can accomplish it all. Soon, my friends, my acolytes, we will be safe. We will have the security we all desire. And I will make sure that each and every one of you never has to face the world or any of its ugliness again. Eat up, friends. We have another long day of work ahead of us tomorrow!”
He turned and left the stage without saying anything else, and Will and I stared after him for some time, then cast worried looks at each other.
Safety? Security? That didn’t sound like he was just trying to survive. It sounded like he was planning something a whole lot bigger.
And much to my horror, even more like my uncle than I’d guessed at before.
Chapter 12
By the time we got back to our room, we were both so tired—so heavy from the sudden consumption of food, and so overwhelmed by everything we’d learned and seen during the day, plus the pressure of, you know, being randomly kidnapped by people who wouldn’t tell you why—that although we discussed how we needed to stay up talking about what we were going to do to get the hell out of there, we both fell asleep almost the moment our heads hit our pillows.
Which was just as well, if you asked me. Will and I still hadn’t discussed that kiss that had happened on the road, or the weird tension that had started building between us long before that, and as far as I was concerned, if we never even talked about it, it would still be too soon. Sure, I’d had a moment of serious relief that he wasn’t dead, and I’d acted on it. Without thinking. But I was no fainting damsel in distress from a fairy tale, and I wasn’t looking for romance.
I hadn’t even been looking for a partner, honestly, though it turned out I hadn’t had a choice about that.
But when it came to getting romantically entangled with said partner? No thanks. Maybe if we got through this whole thing, and managed to stay alive and were still together…
But until that point, I wasn’t planning to repeat the kiss. Besides, it wasn’t like there was time and it wasn’t like this was the place. Hell, even if we’d randomly decided to make out, we would have stopped ourselves just for the simple fact that there wasn’t a freaking ceiling on our room.
No, I wasn’t thinking about kissing him. But if I had been—and I wasn’t!—I would have stopped myself the moment I realized that anyone else might have been watching it happen.
Survival of The Fittest | Book 3 | Final Ride Page 6
