Survival of The Fittest | Book 3 | Final Ride

by Fawkes, K. M.

  Still, when I woke up the next morning and found him still asleep, his face relaxed in the way that only sleep can do, I found myself smiling a touch and sinking down into my pillow again, my eyes on his face. We were in a weird, scary, completely eery situation, and I had absolutely no clue what today might bring—or if we would survive it.

  But seeing him still there, pink with life and breathing… well, it made me feel safe. It made me feel like we would get through whatever it was that we faced today. And yeah, sure, there was a little tingle in my stomach, and my heart started beating a little bit harder at the sight of him.

  Hey, I was a woman. I appreciated a handsome man. And that was my one and only ally laying there. The one person I thought actually wanted me to be safe at the end of the day. That was all there was to it.

  I got up soon after that, leaving him sleeping, and made my way to bathroom. We did have one attached to our room after all, and I was thanking the universe for that one small favor, because moments later I was ensconced in a hot shower, suds running down my back as I washed off the last days of being on the road.

  It never even occurred to me to wonder where they were getting their electricity, or how Adam managed to have hot water, when Will and I had seen on the road—and even in that mansion back in Ashland, where Sally and her crew were hunkered down—that the electrical grid was out. Hell, I’d seen the people who ran things like that actually dying on the TV in my uncle’s bunker. The lights I was under and the hot water I was enjoying should both have been completely impossible.

  They had been everywhere else. And if I’d been paying attention, I would have realized in that moment that there was even more going on in that bunker than I had realized.

  When I got out of the shower, Will was awake and wandering around the room.

  “Guy stopped by, gave us fifteen minutes before we have to be ready,” he told me, grabbing his clothes and heading for the bathroom himself.

  “Ready for what?” I asked.

  He stopped at the door of the bathroom and gave me a sarcastic, sassy look. “And how exactly do you think I would know the answer to that? He didn’t give me any details. We didn’t sit around and have a chat about what was on the schedule for today, and how it applied to the larger plan for this place. Believe it or not.”

  I turned to my pack, frowning over my one set of clothes.

  “Guess this is my only choice, then,” I said to myself, pulling the clothes in question out and starting to get dressed.

  My other clothes were on the floor at the foot of my bed, and I glanced at them quickly, wondering if someone would pick them up and take them to the laundry, or if I’d have to put them on again tomorrow, dirty and smelling like the road.

  Then I put that away as a problem to consider tomorrow, if I was even still alive.

  Get through today, woman, and then you can worry about tomorrow’s clothes, I told myself bluntly.

  I had just finished pulling my boots on when Will appeared again, his hair damp from the shower and his skin an entire shade lighter than it had been. He grinned at me when he entered the room.

  “I forgot how much I love hot showers,” he said ruefully. “Hot water and food. If this place wasn’t run by an outright lunatic, it would be okay.”

  “No kidding,” I replied. “Maybe even worth staying here. If it wasn’t run by a lunatic.”

  Then it occurred to me what he’d said. Hot water and food. Electricity. Running water.

  Things we hadn’t had in the mansion in Ashland. Because the electricity was out. It had been out when I got back into Ashland from my uncle’s, and it had been out when we hit the road, trying to get to Somersville. They shouldn’t have had it here, either.

  Because the people who kept the grid going were, as far as we knew, dead.

  “How the hell are they getting electricity and hot water?” I asked—at the same time as there was a pounding on the door to our room.

  The pounder didn’t want for us to answer. He just threw open the door and glared at us like we’d been doing something other than sitting in our room, discussing having electricity and hot water.

  God, people were jumpy around here. I mean yeah, maybe it was because we’d already broken out and gone spying. Maybe they had specific orders to watch us.

  Though I was leaning more toward the idea of people just being jumpy around here. People get that way when they’re doing something wrong—or when they’re building a house of cards that they think is going to collapse at any moment, which it seemed like these particular people might be doing.

  “What?” I snapped, annoyed by the glare.

  “Get up,” he said gruffly. “You’re going on duty today.”

  “On duty?” I asked, my tone matching his. “And what the hell does that mean?”

  Instead of answering, he marched over to where I was sitting, grabbed my arm, and yanked me to my feet. “I said get up,” he responded. “Now move.”

  The sudden yank sent me flying forward, and I would have fallen if Will hadn’t appeared in my path, moving with what must have been actual superhuman speed. He caught me around the shoulders and looked down at me, concern creasing his forehead, before directing a glare in the other guy’s direction.

  “Look, dude, we’re cooperating, okay?” he said with a growl of his own. “If you want us to keep doing that, I suggest you learn some manners.”

  I didn’t expect it to work, but something about his voice, something about the way he was standing, evidently put the other guy off. There was a long pause in the conversation before the guard responded.

  “Right,” he said, his tone a bit more polite. “Let’s go, then. I’ve got orders to get you two tools and hardhats and assign you to a group.”

  Tools. Ah. So, we were going to become part of one of those working brigades, then.

  I wondered what the hell we would be doing. I wondered what sort of tool they were going to give me—and whether I’d be able to use it for anything other than whatever they wanted me to do.

  I found out about five minutes later, when the guard dropped Will and me off in a line that led up to a door.

  “Suppose this is where they hand out the cookies and milk?” I asked out of the side of my mouth.

  A soft snort was my only answer before the line started moving. We were shuffled quickly forward, the people at our backs moving with an intensity that made me think there was some sort of punishment for going too slow, and before long we were at the front of the line in front of the magical door.

  “Please, sir, can I have some more?” I whispered, doing my best impression of a British accent.

  This time though, Will didn’t even laugh. Instead, he stepped in front of me, as if to keep the guards in the doorway from hearing me. I lifted my chin, trying to see over his shoulder, but before long he moved out of my way and I was at the front of the line. Some guy in the doorway shoved some stuff into my hands—a power drill, I saw when I looked down, along with a hardhat and a tool belt—and then gestured impatiently for me to get out of the way. I moved to the left, caught up with Will, and glanced down.

  “My tool is bigger than your tool,” I whispered, unable to stop myself.

  He chuckled at that because it was true. I had a power drill and he just had a regular old hammer—along with whatever was in his tool belt.

  “Doesn’t matter how big it is,” he responded. “What matters is how you use it.”

  And that right there? That was the God’s honest truth. I was about 99 percent sure that something really ugly was going on down here, and that we were caught in the dead center of it. I was even more sure that we didn’t want to be here, and that we wanted to get the hell out of the damn place as quickly as we could.

  And this tool in my hand? This power drill? I was hoping I would get to hold onto it for a while. Because I was already coming up with several ways that I thought I could probably use it.

  Chapter 13

  From there on out, we
didn’t get much room for conversation—joking or otherwise. Will and I were shoved into yet another line, with a bunch of other people, and marched through the halls toward an unknown destination. I kept my eyes peeled as we went through the bunker, looking for anything I hadn’t seen before, but it was all pretty much the same: People cleaning in certain rooms, cooking in the rooms around the kitchen, and handling some sort of sorting machinery in a room that must have led into the gardens.

  Honestly, the longer I was in this place, the more I was thinking that it felt like a fucking maze. Just when I thought we were in one place, it turned out we were in another. I longed for the clean, easy lines of a computer program, the mapping software that showed me where I could find certain things and where I had to go to get out of wherever I found myself. Hell, I would have gone for an old-fashioned, hand-drawn map at that point, if it had given me a bird’s eye view of the bunker and marked the spot where I was with an X.

  The platform could do that, I thought suddenly, narrowing my eyes. If I could get up there and get a good look at the entire place, now that I knew what was actually down here, I thought I could put it down to memory to access later. Get a visual of how the whole thing was laid out. I hadn’t known to do that when we were up there before, and suddenly I wondered if that was by design. Maybe Adam only allowed people up there on their way down into the bunker, before they knew that they should pay attention to that sort of thing.

  Although we had to be going up there again at some point, right, if we were going to do whatever maintenance we were supposed to do? Or were the tools for something we were actually doing down here, on the main floor?

  Then, quite suddenly, we were at the stairs that led up to the very platform I’d been thinking about. I grinned to myself. So we were going up to the surface, then, because as far as I knew, this was the only way out of the bunker. I’d been on that platform for long enough to see that this was the only set of stairs that led down into it, and I knew enough about… well, I knew enough, period… to know that the bunker was far enough underground that you had to change elevation pretty significantly to get back to the surface.

  Change elevation via stairs. Of which these were the only ones.

  We climbed the stairs in single file, Will towering over me with his increased height and his position on the stairs, and before long, I was at the platform itself. I turned and cast my gaze over the place, quickly taking it in and trying to commit everything to memory. There were the gardens—though I saw now that there were multiple gardens, which could have been why I was so confused—and there were two of the kitchens. There was the dining hall, there were the sleeping quarters… and there was the dome, the only roof in the entire place, that told me where Adam’s office was.

  I was shoved by another guard before I could take any more in, but I comforted myself with the thought that we would have to come back down the exact same way—which would give me another shot at that bird’s eye view.

  Turned out that Adam wasn’t so smart after all. If I had prisoners, I wouldn’t have let them see things from so high up. But maybe this went back to that whole him not thinking anyone here had the balls to try to overthrow him thing.

  Once I turned around and started marching forward again, rushing past a bunch of other people to get back to my space in line, behind Will, I let my brain turn to other things. So we were on our way out of the bunker, then. Out into the open air. We had to be; it was the only reason for having come up to surface level.

  So these tools weren’t for updates or maintenance in the bunker itself. Or… well, maybe they were, but that wasn’t what we were using them for today.

  Which left only one question: What the hell could we be doing on the surface that was important enough to give us potentially dangerous tools that we could potentially use to escape—or do damage to our captors?

  When we got to the top of that long concrete tunnel, we found another set of guards, and these ones were sending the women in one direction and the men in another. Which meant I was going to be separated from Will.

  I flat-out wasn’t willing to accept that.

  “Hold on just one moment,” I said, bringing my hand firmly down on the arm of the guard who was trying to usher Will to the left. “He’s wounded.”

  The man threw my hand off and glared at me. “Don’t matter, lady.”

  “It should,” I said calmly, striving to keep my voice as even as possible. “He’s got a shoulder wound and quite possibly broken ribs. He’s not going to be of any use to anyone that way.”

  “If he’s not useful, I guess we’ll just have to shoot him,” the guy said, sneering at me.

  I almost broke his nose right then and there. It was all too much. The sneer, the casual reference to shooting Will. The fear of being separated from the only person I knew and trusted in this place. The fear of where we might be going and what we might be forced to do.

  The terror that I hadn’t even fully acknowledged until right then that no matter what Will and I did, we might not actually make it out of this one alive. Because it had been far, far too easy for them to find us when we'd broken out of our room. And it had been even easier for them to use their guns to force us back into that room. We didn’t have anything that could stop them, and though I’d been surviving on bravado and forward momentum up until that point, those things really only worked if Will was with me.

  For a girl who had fought partnerships her entire life, it was horribly ironic to suddenly come to the conclusion that if I didn’t have a partner, I didn’t believe I’d be able to get out of this alive.

  It was even worse to go one step further and realize that my feelings for that partner—the affection that had been building since the moment he helped me break out of Sally’s mansion—were going to make this whole thing even harder.

  There was a reason I’d lived my entire life so isolated. A reason that I’d gone out of my way not to care about people. People made you weak. They made you sloppy. And they gave you way too much to lose.

  I was about to say something else to the guard, continue my argument, when a voice behind me suddenly said, “You’ll get him back tonight. We’re not going out to do anything dangerous. Don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  I tossed a glance over my shoulder to see my new friend Louis, he of the red-haired daughter, and realized that Will wasn’t my only ally. Not anymore. I mean, he was definitely still my best ally, but there were other people in here who didn’t like what was going on. People who might help me if I got into a jam—or figured out how we could leave. Even better, and more to that particular point, Louis was an ally who had actual experience with this place. He might not know what was going on here, but he knew what had happened before.

  I could trust him. My instincts told me so. They also told me that I wanted to get him alone and start asking some questions, so I could get a better idea of what had happened before we arrived.

  Maybe Louis would even have ideas about how we could get out of here. Ready-made escape plans, so to speak.

  But I wasn’t going to get to go with him today, judging by the way they were dividing us up. Which meant that I needed someone else to collect that sort of information.

  And so I turned back to Will, gave him a single nod, shifted my eyes toward Louis in a silent suggestion that Will get closer to him, and then turned to the right and followed the rest of the women to whatever chore Adam and his friends had decided we needed to do that day, clutching my power drill firmly in my hand and casting my gaze side to side, looking for a place to use said drill.

  Chapter 14

  The line in front of me was full of women who weren’t talking, but were instead standing morose and lifeless, and though I studied faces like my life actually depended on it—I mean, it might; I just didn’t know when I might need to actually know these women well enough to call on them for help—I didn’t recognize any of them. They were all adults, no kids included, and they all had that hapless, sort
of resigned look to them.

  None of the fire I’d seen in Louis. Then again, though, I wouldn’t have thought Louis had any fire, either, until he started talking. Maybe the people here had just learned how to hide it. How to act like they were all resigned, when really they were constantly trying to find a way out. If that was true, then they were a stack of firewood waiting for a spark. Better: A pile of dynamite waiting for a match.

  And if they were actually dynamite… then I might just be the match.

  If I could figure out how to get the hell out of here, and pass that information along to them. Because I wouldn’t be able to set them alight without a plan.

  I put that thought away to consider later, when I actually had time (I mean, theoretically, at some point I would) and looked around us, coming to the more immediate problem: Where the hell were we currently going—and what were we expected to do there? Yeah, I had a drill and a tool belt at my disposal, plus a hardhat on my head, so I was thinking it was something to do with… tools.

  But I was also starting to realize that when it came to Adam, it was awfully hard to tell. I wasn’t positive he was working with a full deck. Hell, I wasn’t positive he was even working with the same deck as the rest of us.

  Within five minutes, though, the guard leading us had stopped and whirled on us, holding his arms out like he was presenting something really cool. I looked up… and up and up and up. We were standing in front of one of the rollercoasters. A big red one with green trim that made me think of Christmas—though I didn’t think it was supposed to. A quick glance at the sign over the entry gate and I saw that this particular coaster was called The Monster.

  A monster that they had painted in Christmas colors? That didn’t make any sense. Why hadn’t they painted it black? Wasn’t black a typical monster sort of color? I mean, unless we were talking about some sort of underwater monster. Or a dragon, I guessed.