One that we weren’t going to be able to get access to. Because not even my hands were small enough to fit through the space when the door was open but the bar was stopping it.
We’d considered that problem for quite a while before Will had come up with a relatively simple solution.
“We’ll just have to break it,” he’d said.
I had thought he was absolutely insane—and that we’d get caught trying to do it—but he’d quite calmly pointed out that whoever these guys had been in their former lives, they definitely hadn’t been engineers or even moderately responsible construction workers. Whoever had done the architectural blueprints for the fortress, they weren’t here. Everyone else seemed to be… well, not the sharpest tools in the shed, if I was being honest.
“You know they didn’t work too hard to screw in whatever screws are holding the thing in place,” he’d said quietly. “And even if they did get them in, they probably didn’t hold the drill right. I bet those things are as loose as can be.”
That statement had eventually become a fuller thought, and the fuller thought had become a plan, and that was how we found ourselves now standing about ten feet back from the door, shoulder-to-shoulder, our muscles tensed as we got ready.
“Are you ready for this?” he asked.
I chuckled. “You mean am I ready to actually try to break a door down with my shoulder? Sure, why not? What could possibly go wrong?”
He gave me an answering chuckle. Then he gave the signal, and we both sprinted forward, shoulders lowered at the door we were about to break down.
It was a wonder we didn’t kill ourselves crashing through the door and into the wall on the other side of the hallway. It was also a wonder that no one came running at the racket.
Hell, I’d half expected someone to actually be standing guard outside our door, and it was really pretty odd that no one was. Except, I guessed, that they’d thought that padlock would actually stop us.
I whirled around to stare at the door and saw that Will had been right; the screws on the end of the lever had given right out at the sudden explosion of pressure from inside, and the thing was hanging from the padlock side now, looking crumpled and broken.
We went quickly to it and Will picked the padlock while I worked on getting the screws gathered up. Once that was done, we moved the lever back into its original position and I used the screwdriver Will had managed to smuggle into the room to resecure the lever into place—with one screw held out in my pocket. Once the lever was secured, I pushed it up against the door and held it there while Will screwed that remaining screw into the door, using it to attach the lever itself to the door right over the knob.
We finished by putting the padlock back through the loop at the end of lever—the loop that should have attached to the piece that was still on the wall. Then we removed the broken piece, threw it into our room under the bed, and closed the door.
If you weren’t looking closely, it looked exactly the same. The padlock was still there to be unlocked. It just wasn’t attached to anything important anymore. And with luck, the guard who came for us in the morning would only see that much. He wouldn’t notice that the padlock wasn’t actually locked to anything.
He’d just unlock it, let us out, and be none the wiser.
By the time they tried to lock it again, we’d be long gone. At least… that was the hope.
“Think it’ll work?” Will breathed.
I shook my head. “I hope we’ll never have to find out if it doesn’t,” I answered. “Let’s go.”
We turned and started creeping down the hallway, our mission threefold: Get to the networking room, then the sleeping quarters, and then the armory. If we could get it all done in one night, it would be a miracle.
Because we didn’t have more than one night in which to do it. I was tapped out on things I could do to keep Adam and his guards off my back, and the minute I was done with that solar network, I was going to have to start watching my step.
Yeah, I was being paranoid. But paranoid was the thing that had kept me alive this long. I wasn’t going to just drop it now.
The electronics room was a breeze, as I’d known it would be. We didn’t need much in here, since I already knew where we were going, but there was one very important file that I wanted to look at one more time: The list of sleeping arrangements.
Because we were about to start paying visits to some of the other inhabitants of the bunker. And I wanted to make sure we started with the people who would be most useful to us. Like Louis, he of the loose tongue, who Will had been making inroads with up top. And a couple other men that had been on Will’s team as well, and who we thought might help us.
We were going to try to talk the entire population into helping us in the escape. But to do that, I knew we needed people that they trusted. People that they’d known more than two days. That was where Louis and his friends came in. They were going to be our undercover cops. Our inside guys.
I slid into the seat in front of the computer I’d been using and let my fingers fly across the keyboard to take me quickly to the file I needed. I shouldn’t have been able to get in here so easily, but that was another benefit of being in a bunker run by idiots, I guessed. Adam and his friends didn’t seem to understand that they should have been using passwords to protect things like their computers.
Sort of like they didn’t understand that you shouldn’t keep the armory so close to the equally important electronics room.
And sort of like they didn’t understand that you shouldn’t keep either of those things anywhere near the sleeping quarters of your prisoners.
Of course, that was the sort of thing I thought about because I was a crook. Maybe when you were insane, you didn’t consider all of the ways people could screw you over. Or maybe I was just lucky enough to fall in with would-be captors who weren’t that smart.
A moment later, I had the sleeping list and was running through it with Will, each of us matching the names we knew to their room locations.
A moment after that, I was hitting the security code to unlock all the doors in the sleeping quarters—and the armory—and then we were back out in the hallway and conferring one last time before we got started.
“Right, so we get to the rooms, get to the people we know, and tell them what’s going on,” I whispered. “We get their help, take them with us to all the other rooms and get as many allies as we can. Meet back here in half an hour with all the people we’ve managed to gather.”
“And then we arm them,” Will answered grimly. “Let’s do it.”
No, it wasn’t a fully formed plan. It might not have even been a good plan. But I was pretty sure Adam was going to kill me once I was finished with the solar panels, and I didn’t think he was going to leave Will alive to mourn me. And that meant we were on a pretty tight timeline.
It would’ve been nice to have a better plan. A more solid idea of what we were doing. But that just wasn’t in the cards.
He gave my hand a single squeeze and then we shot off in separate directions, each of us with a single room in our sights—our starting points—and about fifty people on our lists to get on our side and free from this hellhole.
Chapter 25
It only took me about five minutes to get to the room that was marked as holding Annie, the woman I’d noticed when I went up top yesterday. She was one of the women who had looked at me with challenge, to see if I was going to do anything about the situation. She was the only woman who’d really acknowledged me dropping back, ready to creep away, and she’d been the one I had made eye contact with at the last moment, motioning for her to keep quiet.
I had no doubt that she’d kept the guard off my case for as long as she could. And I’d remembered her name, from when she was speaking with the guard. I’d remembered the look in her eyes, and the way they’d seemed to tell me that if I was going to do something, I’d best get it done. She’d seen me leaving—and must have known that I didn’t come back. She
must have noticed that I wasn’t there today, either.
But she was a fighter. I’d been able to tell that much with one look at her. So she was a natural first choice when it came to people I wanted on my team.
I mean, let’s be honest. She was also one of the only women whose name I knew. But that just made it look like it was meant to be, as far as I was concerned.
The moment I got to the door that had been marked on that document as hers, though, I hesitated. I hadn’t really come up with a script—it just hadn’t been on our list of things to do, what with breaking down the door and breaking into the control room to unlock all the others—and now that I was here…
“Shit,” I whispered to myself.
Because this needed to be good. It needed to be convincing. It needed to make me sound like I was a responsible heroine rather than another lunatic trying to run the place.
Heroine. That, I thought, was my angle, right there.
I knocked lightly on the door… and was surprised when it flew right open, exposing the brown-haired woman I’d had the silent conversation with under the rollercoaster.
“The door is unlocked,” she breathed, her eyes going bigger. She looked up at me, her face covered in shock. “Did you do that?”
I grinned. I couldn’t help it. I loved being able to show off my skills.
“I did,” I told her. Then I walked right into the room. “I’ve gotten into their computer system and figured out how to unlock all the doors.”
“I heard it unlock,” she said, following me. “What are you doing in here?”
I turned to her, straightened my shoulders, and broke into the speech I’d only halfway come up with. “Getting out of here. It turns out the guy running everything—Adam—is using us to try to build a booby-trapped fortress for his delusions. In which he plans to use everyone here as basically slaves. We’re never getting out, never going back to our lives. Not if we stay here. And I don’t know about you, but that’s not okay with me. I never signed up to be a slave. I want to get back to my life.”
Annie stared at me for what felt like an eternity, a range of different emotions chasing each other across her face. Then, finally, she nodded firmly. Just once.
“Right. I’m with you. What do we need to do?”
And with that, I had my first ally. A woman who had been there from the start—and a woman all the other women knew. A woman they’d listen to.
“We’re going to build an escape team,” I whispered. “And I’m going to need your help with that.”
Roughly thirty minutes later, I went rushing back toward the tech room with my team of forty women or so, each of them wearing an expression full of pride and intensity. It hadn’t been that hard to gather them, and if I’d had time, I thought we could have gotten more. But Will and I had realized right from the start that we couldn’t take all night doing this. We were already running a huge risk just to be out at night with so many people—and stealing from right under Adam’s nose. We had to make sure that everyone was back in their rooms, the doors closed and locked again, well before the guards showed up to take them to breakfast.
And we had to make sure we did this quietly enough that it didn’t raise any alarms. I knew there weren’t cameras. I didn’t know where the guards were, though, and whether they made regular tours of the residential area.
So a smaller group would have to do, as long as it meant that we all had guns before the morning came. And that none of us had been caught out in the halls in the middle of the night.
I came to a stop at the electronics room and looked around, seeing… no one. And suddenly I was terrified that something had already happened. That Will and his own team had already been caught. I’d told him half an hour, and yeah, I thought I was a little bit early, but he should have known that the sooner he got back here, the sooner we could get it all finished.
He wasn’t here. And if he’d been caught already…
Then he came around the corner ahead of us, his eyes on the room. Those eyes flashed to mine and he gave me a grin, then motioned with his head over his shoulder, to the men following him. He had a lot more than I did, which meant he’d found a better way to do it.
Honestly, I didn’t even care that he’d beaten me. Because we had our escape team. Now we just had to arm them, courtesy of the armory down the hall, and hope that they managed to get the guns up top tomorrow without getting caught.
Chapter 26
The next morning, when Jerry came to my door, I met him with a smile. Will had already been taken out into the hallway on his way to join another group of reclamation men, a gun shoved into one boot and a knife in its case in his pocket—just in case someone got close enough for him to use it, he’d said.
“Is that a knife in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” I’d joked when I went to see him off.
To my complete and utter surprise, he’d pulled me in, kissed me hard on the lips, and rocked back to stare at me for a second. “I’m always happy to see you,” he’d whispered. “Be careful. Don’t do anything stupid. Keep your mouth shut for as long as you can. No smart remarks. Don’t do anything to get yourself in trouble before trouble finds us. I’ll see you up there.”
Then he’d left, leaving me breathless and speechless—two things I almost never was.
I have to admit that it had also made me extremely nervous. Before, when we’d hit the road running from Sally and her gang and knowing that they might come after us at any moment, I hadn’t been too worried about anyone but myself. I hadn’t considered—well, too much—whether I was putting Will’s life in danger or not. Because he hadn’t been anything more than just being a temporary ally.
Clearly, he’d become a whole lot more than that now. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Because though it gave me hope and a warm, floaty sort of feeling in my stomach, it also gave me a whole lot more to lose.
Still, the warm, floaty feeling was what I answered the door with when Jerry arrived, and I grinned at him.
He looked at me suspiciously—and rightly so.
“What are you so happy about?” he asked.
“Oh, it’s a beautiful day and I’m still alive,” I said with a shrug. “Lots of other people aren’t. I figure I can be thankful for the small things, right?”
Yeah, it was incredibly sketchy, and if I’d been thinking, I probably would have toned it down a whole lot. But I was flying a bit from the kiss, and at the thought that Will and I might be getting out of here today… and carrying on with our lives. I was, in fact, flying a bit at the thought that we might carry on with those lives together—which wasn’t something I’d thought about anyone else, well… ever.
So I was in a good mood. And I was letting it show.
He just harumphed and glared at me, though I didn’t take that too much to heart. I’d come to the conclusion that glaring was his standard MO. Nothing personal.
“But,” I said, doing my best to sound hesitant. “The thing is, I can’t go right to the control room this morning. Yesterday I saw something in the blueprints that got me to thinking, and last night, middle of the night, I realized what it was. I don’t know if the solar panels produce the right voltage for the park’s inlet box. I might need a transformer there. I might need several transformers—each with different amperages. I have to actually see the spot to decide whether this will even work or not. Get a reading, you know?”
No, I didn’t think half of that was true, but I’d needed what sounded like a viable reason for getting up top. Now I just had to hope that I’d thrown in enough big words for Jerry to think I knew what I was talking about. At worst, I hoped he didn’t understand enough to argue with me about it.
Jerry frowned for a long moment, seeming like he was trying to unpack everything I’d just told him, but then just shrugged.
“I guess that makes sense. Let’s go.”
God, he was being so nice about it that I almost felt bad about the fact that he might be shot in the next
hour or so.
We walked quickly through the hallways that housed the sleeping quarters, my eyes on Jerry’s back so that I didn’t have to look at the people who were still in here. Because the people up top? Yeah, those people were our team. The ones we’d armed… and with luck, everyone else, too. And if we did what I was hoping we’d do, then we were going to get the hell out of this place before Adam did anything crazy like start shooting us.
But the people down here? They weren’t in my designated get-out group. They were, for the most part, inaccessible. No matter how many times Will and I had gone through it, we’d decided that we just wouldn’t be able to get everyone out of the bunker through the exits. Not without attracting unwanted attention. Getting people up top and starting something there had been the best we’d been able to come up with.
So the people down here? Everyone cooking and cleaning, and those kids in that room doing whatever it was they did in there?
We’ll come back for them, I told myself firmly. Once we break out, we’ll kill Adam and come back for them. Or hell, maybe even hang out here for a while, with the food and running water and energy.
The important part was the fight we were about to have. Once we won that fight, I’d have more options. I’d have freedom, first of all, and more time to come up with a better plan. And I’d come back to save these people. I swore I would.
Still, I didn’t make eye contact with any of them on the way by.
Then we were at those never-ending stairs, and I walked up them as quickly as I could with Jerry in my way, my heart hammering away with a mix between excitement and nervousness about what was going to happen once I reached the surface.
Survival of The Fittest | Book 3 | Final Ride Page 13
