Dead Lines [911]

by Grace Hamilton

  Ava had read the book early on, and its description of simple, tech-resistant and tribal mankind at peace with the Earth had greatly appealed to her. Now she saw the book for what it really was—Marr’s admittedly elegant attempt to justify her mind control of others.

  How many others have been trapped in this room? she wondered.

  She looked around again, and for the first time noticed some markings on the wall in the corner, down by the floor. She hadn’t noticed them before because of the way she’d been sitting. She moved over closer and put her hands on the wood where it’d been scratched out—maybe with a nail, she thought.

  A name and a date. Both meaningless to her, but the date was over ten years old. Seeing it sent a chill through her. That long ago, Marr and Gruber had been locking people into this room. She felt tears building in her eyes and she turned away, leaning her back against the wall.

  She closed her eyes and thought about Finn, wondering what had become of her friend and glad she hadn’t come to this place. She couldn’t have forgiven herself if she’d trapped her friend into this same hellish situation.

  She thought about the person who’d scratched the name and date into the wall—a girl named Sara, maybe a lot like her. Ava stopped, opening her eyes. How had the girl managed to scratch her name into the wood? A nail?

  Things were made of things. Smaller things made up larger things. She turned over on her hands and knees, following her hunch. After a few minutes, on the far side of the room from the door, she found what she was looking for, a nail in a floor board that wasn’t flush. She pinched it between her fingers and slowly applied pressure.

  The nail, already loose, came out easily. She had a tool.

  She looked around the room. What else could she use? There was only a bed, a chair, a book, and the door. Standing, she walked over to the bed and flipped up the mattress to look at the bedframe. It was gray metal, the springs attached directly into the structure, all one piece. The mattress rested on the springs with only a crossbar in the middle to add support.

  She knelt by the bed, looking closer. The metal bar was round, about the same circumference as a tube of toothpaste. At either end, the bar tapered down into flat tongues of metal secured to the frame by a flat underhead screw with a deep groove in the middle where the slot for the screwdriver blade was meant to go.

  She reached under the bed and found the nut securing the screw on the underside. She pinched it tight. But either the metal was secured tight, frozen into place over time, or all the movement and bouncing of bodyweight had worked at it, loosening it. She stuck the nail into the slot, pinched the nut tight, and tried to turn it.

  It gave way beneath her pressure, turning. She worked diligently, unscrewing first one side and then the other. After several minutes, she was able to pull the bar away from the bedframe and hold it up. Now she had a pry bar.

  Moving to the door, she pressed her ear against it and listened as best she could. The ‘reflection rooms’—as they were called—were in the office space in the basement of the television station, and the single hallway’s only other use was for storage. The hub of activity for the church was on the main floor.

  She slid the narrow tongue of the bar’s metal into the door jamb and secured it. Once set, she began cranking on the lever. This wasn’t San Quentin, thankfully; the lock popped free of the latch with a metal on metal screech and the sound of splintering wood. The door swung open, and Ava stepped out into the hallway.

  The overhead light was off, casting the space in a gloomy twilight darkness. Holding the bar up like a baseball bat, Ava began making her way down the hall. At the end was a short flight of stairs leading up to a door that opened onto the main floor. That door would be locked, too, she knew.

  That didn’t matter, though. She wasn’t going to use it. Emerging onto the main floor would only reveal her to church members. She needed to find a basement room that held at least a small window. She came up to a door and tried the knob. It was unlocked. She opened it and looked in, finding a janitor’s closet. No window.

  She tried the one across the hall and found a moderately large room that she knew had once been filled with desks and chairs. It’d been stripped, and now sat empty and unused as a tomb. There was a window high up on the wall. It was grimy and looked long unused, a long rectangle of a basement window with a bar latch, clouded with old cobwebs in its corners. The window was far too narrow for her to fit through.

  Okay, she thought, that’s not an option.

  She backed out of the room and went down the hall to try the last door in the corridor. This door was much heavier than the others, more sturdy and built from thicker materials that she recognized as useful for sound muffling situations. Even with this quality, though, she heard the heavy, droning vibration of a generator.

  Curious, she pushed it open and looked in.

  The big genny sat rumbling in the center of the room on grease-stained concrete. Cables thick as jungle vines ran out from it and connected to outlets beneath a circuit box. Opposite the utilities panel, against the far wall, there were red and green five-gallon jerry cans of what she took to be gasoline.

  She was stuck. The frustration was overwhelming. She fairly shook with it, but despite this, her determination remained unshakable. She had cultivated it through the long, hard years of her childhood.

  As she’d watched her parents, already unreliable and sometimes hated figures of chaos in her formative years, descend into the slavery to drugs, her resolve to live free had only grown, solidifying into an almost feral intensity.

  She knew most people wouldn’t have understood how she could reconcile such determination with her willingly submitting herself to life in the church. But the indifference of addicted and distant parents had left her craving comfort and connection. Finn had become a surrogate little sister, sure, but in moments of weakness and loneliness and doubt, she craved the feeling of being cared for; Dr. Marr had understood this and worked to become the mothering figure Ava had wanted on her deepest level.

  But push had come to shove. She would not submit. No matter what, she would fight. She hadn’t fought off the stoned advances of dangerous bikers to give in now. She stopped for a moment, thinking back. Bikers. Not all of them were evil. But among their ranks, she’d been exposed to some of the scariest people she’d known—guys who would have made Gruber their prison bitch. Loan shark enforcers, drug traffickers, internet gonzo porn producers, hijackers, and armed robbers....

  Criminals liked to brag, and especially when drunk among others of their kind. What had the steal-by-force guys gone on about?

  The benefits of distraction. That was it. Some of the most dangerous bikers were former Army grunts or Marines who’d come out of Iraq and Afghanistan with a hatred of military rules and spit and polish, but a love of guns, lightning raids, and massive adrenaline rushes. They liked to talk about ‘complex’ ambushes where a smaller strike such as a landmine or IED explosion triggered a secondary, more massive attack of RPGs and machine guns. Or diversionary tactics.

  She needed a diversion.

  She’d learned other things while cowering in fear in her bedroom as the terrifying men her father called “brothers” had boasted and joked among themselves. The same brothers who’d leered at her with meth gleams in their eyes or whiskey on their breath, not bothering to close the door when they pissed in order to expose themselves to a young girl, or who’d given her compliments about “how big she was getting.”

  They did a lot of backyard, Anarchist Cookbook street-chemistry, talking about it, as well. They weren’t breaking bad; they’d broken bad a long time before she’d been exposed to them. She knew the difference between crystal meth made Shake and Bake P2P based, and the more common ephedrine-based variety. She knew how to make a homemade car bomb using Crystal Drano, a ping pong ball cut in half, and some electrician’s tape.

  She stopped, staring at the generator. She knew what she was going to do. It was a desperate, risky p
lan. But desperate and risky was all she had.

  If what she was about to do went wrong, she’d be hurt badly, likely killed. If she did it correctly, then other people would be hurt badly, likely killed. In the words of her once upon a time outlaw biker of a father, though… “Better them than me. Fuck ‘em.”

  Moving fast now, heart beating hard, she entered the janitor closet and went to the shelves of cleaning supplies, and gathered what she needed before heading back to the generator. Gasoline was not just flammable, it was corrosive. The biker car bomb worked precisely because of those two principles of flammability plus corrosiveness.

  The gas ate away the adhesive on the tape, causing the ping pong ball, which had been cut in half and filled with the Crystal Drano, to split apart, leaking the chemical into the fuel and igniting it in an intense chemical reaction.

  She didn’t have tape, but she did have those cheap latex gloves that came with state-mandated biohazard clean-up kits. Gasoline eroded latex back down into its original petroleum product. The reaction would cause all the lovely cleaning product she’d poured inside to spill out into the gas chamber of the generator.

  She was playing with fire.

  Opening up one of the latex gloves, she dumped it full of the powdered cleaning agent. She tied it off and then unscrewed the cap on the generator gas tank. She stopped then, looked at the five-gallon jerry cans, and set her mind on what she was about to do. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  She set the little chemical IED down on the shelf and unscrewed the caps on all the cans before picking one up and splashing some fuel on them. The astringent, slightly euphoria-inducing smell of gas filled the space. With the door shut on such a confined space, she knew the gas would fill up to the ceiling, turning the room itself into a seven by five by four-foot bomb.

  It scared her to death.

  Fuck ‘em, she told herself.

  Picking up the glove, she shoved the fingers into the gas tank of the generator and crammed it down hard into place. Then, shutting the door behind her as she went, she ran for it.

  16

  Dutifully, Washington took a half-step back, pivoted from the waist, and snapped back the bolt on his submachine gun. He swung the blunt, industrial looking muzzle around and centered it on Finn’s high, broad forehead.

  Finn looked at him. “Go ahead,” she whispered. She wasn’t going to give them anything, and she felt a remarkable freedom accepting death this way. Washington tightened his finger on the stamped metal curve of the trigger. His knuckle whitened as he took up the slack. Washington liked killing people; he grinned as he squeezed.

  Like a sudden storm front moving in, the corrections officer stepped forward through the door and out of the shadows. Washington spun, surprised by the sudden movement. The one Finn had heard the others call ‘Spencer’ kicked the con in the shin, using the pain to short-circuit the man’s reactions. He knocked the barrel of the submachine gun away from Finn’s direction and slammed the heel of his palm upward into the man’s nose.

  The pain and shock instantaneously blinded Washington, the excruciating pain sending him staggering.

  “Enough!” Spencer snarled, a Glock .40 caliber appearing in one of his fists.

  Using the weapon to cover the stoned crew, the officer shoved his finger in Colson’s face. Finn was stunned. Where in the hell had the officer come from? Where had he been?

  “I have never seen a more grotesque example of amateur-hour in my fucking life, and I was in goddamn Fallujah,” he said. “You people are pathetic, and seriously about to piss me off. Colson, you better calm your boys the fuck down or I will kill everyone, burn this place to the goddamn ground, and start over from fucking scratch!”

  He turned and glared at the stunned Colson. “Don’t believe me?” Colson, still holding his bloody ear, whimpered. “Tell them!” Spencer snapped.

  Colson muttered something Finn didn’t hear. Scowling, Washington slowly backed up. The big criminal nodded at the other two men and they lowered their weapons.

  Spencer lowered the Glock, but let it stay down by his side where he could bring it back up in a moment. He turned towards Colson.

  “I know, I know. Everyone loves a great torture and gang rape, especially after their pride has been hurt. But let me remind you our deal was to steal something! Are you fuck-ups too wasted to remember that?”

  No one said anything.

  “Or have you all found what I told you to look for already and this is the celebration?”

  No one said anything.

  Spencer walked over to Washington. The convict glared out at him from under a beetled brow. The warden smiled. The man looked confused behind his crude bandage. Spencer laid the heavy barrel of the .40 cal upside his temple with a single, whip-like crack.

  Washington went down. His legs folded up underneath him at an unnatural angle and his thick jaw hung open like a door with a broken hinge. The warden looked down at him like a sewer inspector regarding a leaking pool of waste.

  “Colson,” Spencer sighed. “You’ve had time to have your fun with this skank—”

  “Fuck you and the horse you road in on,” Finn told him.

  He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “But the deal was for the money and product the OST had in this black site. But I have to get my gimme. I have to have the motherboard. Have you found it yet?”

  “You’re supposed to be a police officer,” Finn said. “How can you be doing this? Doesn’t being a cop mean anything to you?”

  “I’m not a cop,” he said without looking at her. “I work in corrections. Less money.” He poked a finger at Colson. “Answer my question, Colson,” he continued. “Have you found the fucking motherboard yet or did you all get really fucking wasted instead?”

  Washington moaned as he roused himself. He got to his feet, eyeing the warden with murder in his eyes. The other two men came forward to help him up, but he waved them impatiently away. It was an unintentional parody of his attempts to help Colson a few moments earlier.

  He glowered at the warden then, the side of his head swelling from the blow he’d taken.

  Spencer looked back at him. “You feeling froggy, boy?” he asked. “Leap. Because I promise you, promise you deep, the guys I’m supposed to get that motherboard for? They frighten me a lot more than you do.”

  Washington looked away, and the warden looked at him in disgust. Turning, he then looked towards Colson who was getting slowly to his feet.

  “Colson, we need to talk for a moment. I really don’t want any of the three stooges here overhearing what I have to say.”

  “We’re in this together,” Washington protested.

  Spencer looked at him. “I’m changing the plan. You didn’t fucking kill the guy this bitch was with, and now your boy, Jackson, is dead up there in the fucking mall.”

  Washington looked as if he’d been slapped. Colson’s mouth hung open. “I fucking emptied every bullet in my gun into that water! No way he survived that, no fucking way.”

  “Go tell it to Jackson,” Spencer said. “Go on, I’ll wait. Be sure to speak really loud, okay? See, Jackson’s going to find it real fucking hard to hear anything, what with being shot in the damn head.”

  “How do you know it was that guy? How do you know it wasn’t some other looter with a gun?”

  “Fair point,” Spencer said. “But if you’d been up in the communications center, you could have watched on camera while the guy took him out and then shut down our cameras.”

  Visibly shook, Colson turned towards his men and nodded. Scowling, the crew backed out of the blade farm; standing on the landing at the bottom of the stairs, they looked nervous. Spencer shut the door in their faces.

  Parker alive? Finn thought. And here? Hope suddenly burned within her again.

  The warden turned towards Finn, seeing that her head was held funny, all of her dark hair hanging thickly to one side. It seemed slightly out of place, but he didn’t have time to figure out what was wrong. The clo
ck was ticking, and if he was going to salvage anything from his plan, then obviously he’d have to hurry.

  He looked at Colson. “The men on the other side of my phone are not happy. Not even a little bit.” Turning his back on the bound and naked Finn, he waved Colson towards a door at the back of the room between the CPU racks.

  “Come on,” he told him. “Let those guys guard against the cowboy. We need to find where the motherboard is. It wasn’t with the heroin, so that means we have to look everywhere.”

  “We looked,” Colson protested. “Are you sure it’s even really here?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” the warden snapped. “My CI hasn’t steered me wrong yet.”

  “Then maybe that snitch bitch should be here looking for it.”

  “We’re here. Now let’s get fucking paid.”

  Just that quickly, Finn found herself alone. She wasted little time.

  Turning her head to the side, her hair fell back and revealed Colson’s switchblade. Slowly, carefully, she grasped the pear-handled stiletto in her white, even teeth and lifted her head to the side. Stubbornly, slowly at first, the tip of the knife eased clear from the laminate.

  She paused, knife in her mouth like she was a pirate out of the movies, and considered her situation. She was nimble; she was agile. And she needed to be on, dialed in, because she wasn’t getting a second chance.

  Her hands hung below her, bound at the wrist to the legs of the desk she lay across. But the legs of the little table were short, her limbs long. The fingers of her hands just reached the floor. The problem was, they were growing more numb with each passing second.

  Stretching her neck out, she tried touching her right ear to her shoulder, but the extension reminded her of her other pains. Blood was caked on the backs of her thighs and the spidery-touch memory of Colson’s grotesque fingers still burned her flesh.

  She opened her mouth. The knife fell like a dart, straight down into the thin linoleum tile. The point drove into it and stuck deep. The handle didn’t even quiver as it came to a stop.