“You got it,” Peter said, eyeing Boone’s sidearm. It was a Heckler & Koch P30 with .40 caliber rounds. Not heavy enough to do serious damage to an Apex, but heavy hitting enough to drop a human target with one shot to the right spot. He resisted the urge to take the weapon, fell in line behind Boone and followed him down the path.
He wasn’t sure what they would find, but he suspected there would be bodies. The question was, would Peter and Boone join them?
12
“Sweet tea?” Mason asked, leaning against the side of the wooden desk. He’d been polite since Peter left with Boone, but he had a gleam in his eye that made Ella uneasy. He had the cocky arrogance of a high school football star, but if he had trophies, she suspected they’d be something closer to heads mounted on stakes.
She wanted to dive over the desk and bury her nails in the sides of his neck. She could do it. As deadly as he might be, it wasn’t because of his own prowess, but rather the men who followed him—and at the moment, none of them were present. But neither was Peter, or the kids. So she stifled her urge to channel the primal instincts she’d discovered in herself over the past few months, and tried her hand at charming the man in return.
“Sweet tea?” she said, smiling. “God, yes. Don’t tell me you have ice, too.”
“In cubes. Yes, ma’am.” He picked up a small bell from the desktop and gave it a shake.
The door opened and the black woman wearing the maid outfit took a single step inside before bowing her head. Her eyes flicked toward Ella, making eye contact for just a moment before returning to the floor. Her face was hard to see, but Ella felt the woman’s embarrassment. Or was it shame? “Massa Mason. What can I do for you?”
“Sweet tea for two,” he said.
“Yes’ah.” With another quick bow, she turned around and scurried away.
“Won’t be a long wait,” Mason said, “but how about a tour in the meantime?”
“Absolutely,” Ella said, standing. Despite her willingness to play along, her body still burned with tense energy, looking for an outlet. “I’d love to see the biodomes.”
“Sure you would,” Mason said, “but as a former biodome resident, you know that can’t happen in your...” He looked her up and down. “...current state.”
Shit, Ella thought. She’d set herself up for what was coming next, and with enough enthusiasm to ensure that backing out would look suspicious. Still, she had to try. “Another time, then.”
“Nonsense.” Mason stepped around her, and entered the hallway. She noted the lump on his back where a gun was hidden, tucked into his gleaming white pants. “Once you’re cleaned up, I will personally escort you through the biodomes. We’ve managed to accomplish a lot. I think you will be duly impressed.”
Ella smiled and said, “I’m sure.”
Mason stopped at the end of the hall, resting a hand on the polished banister and calling through the formal dining room, into the kitchen. “We’ll take that tea upstairs, Charlotte.”
“Upstairs?” She sounded nervous.
“That’s what I said, indeed.”
“Yes, massa.”
He grinned at Ella and motioned to the hardwood staircase. “Now then, ladies first.”
“A true, Southern gentleman,” she said.
“One of the few left on Earth, I’d guess.”
“Perhaps even the last,” she said, stepping by him and heading up the creaky stairs. She could feel his eyes on her, watching her shifting backside as she took each step. She was covered in dirt and dressed in unflattering cargo pants, a black tank top and a green, plaid flannel shirt, but men sometimes saw reality and fantasy at the same time. To Mason, she was a world of new possibilities. More than he knows, she thought, and she continued up the stairs, putting a little extra thrust into her hips.
The second floor felt much like the first: old wood, white walls, and the gentile décor of a middle-aged Southern woman. Still life paintings hung on the wall. A small table cloaked in a doily held a vase of wild flowers—freshly picked by the look of them.
Ella flinched as a door to her left swung open. A woman dressed in a maid uniform, similar to Charlotte’s, but far too tight, stepped into the hall. “Something I can get for you, Mister—” Her eyes registered surprise at seeing Ella, then a flicker of something else, like pity, before turning toward Mason as he crested the staircase. “Something I can get for you, Mister Mason?”
“Not right now, Shawna,” Mason said, taking her hand and kissing the back of it. “Perhaps later. In the meantime, heat up a towel for our guest.”
Shawna feigned an ‘aww shucks’ kind of smile. It was a noble effort, but her jaw was clenched tight. She was pale white, like she hadn’t seen the sun in a long time, with straight black hair and a curvaceous, almost plump body. Locked inside, but well fed, Ella thought, like cattle. But there was something about her, in that clenched jaw, that said she wasn’t quite as docile as a cow. That’s what Mason likes, Ella thought. What gets him off. Breaking defiant women. She didn’t look like Shawna or Charlotte, but she had defiance in spades, and he had no doubt taken note.
Ella took a small measure of comfort in the fact that Mason had requested only one towel, and that he seemed interested in Shawna’s...services…later on. He might be interested in Ella, but he wasn’t ready to be overt about it. Ella thought he was still evaluating whether or not she was his type, and no doubt trying to conjure a way to get Peter out of the picture—or perhaps just hoping that would happen while he was out with Boone. Had the two men shared a signal that she missed? Was there really an emergency, or was Boone taking Peter into the swamps to execute him? If that turned out to be the case, Mason would find out that Peter wasn’t the only member of their ragtag, post-apocalyptic family worth fearing.
“Of course, sir,” Shawna said with a strained giggle. “Anything for you.”
They’re living out his fantasies, Ella thought. Role playing. The vivacious, slutty maid. The old-world, Southern, black maid. She wouldn’t be surprised if the next maid she met wore a short skirt, held a feather duster and spoke with a French accent. Maybe that’s what he has in mind for me?
And if not, maybe that’s where I can get his mind.
When Shawna headed downstairs, Mason snuck around Ella and opened the next door on the left. Inside was a large bathroom with a claw-foot porcelain tub, a white tile floor and marble countertops. Mason flipped the light switch turning on a row of large bulbs mounted over a massive, wall-sized mirror that reflected the bathroom. And everything that happens in it, Ella thought.
“Bathroom is one of the rooms I upgraded after resettling Hellhole. It’s a far shade more luxurious than it was before. Hot water, soap, shampoo and conditioner are at your disposal—not that you’ll have much use for the latter two, but your hair will grow back in time.” Mason grinned. “Shawna will stop in with a warm towel and some fresh clothes. I’ll come to collect you in what, twenty minutes?”
“Sounds divine,” Ella said. “The bath, clothes and towel, I mean.”
“Not the company?” Mason said with a faux pout.
“That has yet to be determined,” she said. “But you’re off to a good start.”
He flashed a sly grin and tipped his Ascot hat. “Best I can ask for. I’ll leave you to it.”
Ella stepped inside and offered Mason a parting smile as he closed the door behind her. Her smile dropped into a grimace. She rolled her neck, hearing her vertebrae pop from the tension. Then she looked at herself in the mirror and froze. It wasn’t that her reflection was almost unrecognizable—she was too skinny, covered in dirt, and had a few fresh scars—it was how the mirror itself was constructed. She looked it over quickly, inspecting the side closest to her, and then the top and bottom. It was five feet tall, rising up from the bottom of the sink, all the way up to the ceiling, and it stretched the twenty foot length of the bathroom. She looked for clips holding it in place, but there weren’t any. The mirror wasn’t mounted to the wall, it wa
s part of it.
Her eyes widened for a brief moment, but then she forced a casual smile back onto her lips, the kind of smile a woman thinking about a man might have. The kind a man hoping for something more might want to see. Then she leaned in close to the mirror like she was inspecting her face and placed her finger tips against the glass like she was holding herself up.
She turned her face side to side, looking it over, glancing at her hand against the glass just once. But it was enough. Ella had worked in enough labs, in her long years of schooling and outside it, to have been on both sides of an observation mirror. There were two dead giveaways that a mirror was two-way, designed for spying. First, the mirror was part of the wall, not hung on it. The second was called the ‘finger test.’ A finger placed up against a normal mirror can touch its own reflection. A finger placed up against a two way mirror was separated from its reflection by the thickness of the glass, in this case, a quarter inch.
Mason was on the other side of this mirror, watching. Observing. Waiting for a show. And if she didn’t give him one...
She stared into her own eyes for a moment, picturing Mason on the far side of the mirror, looking back. If it’s a show he wants...
She lifted her shirt slowly, bunching the fabric beneath her breasts. She’d lost a lot of weight and dropped a cup size while living in the wild, eating a diet of foraged food. If she wore a bra, it was a sports bra, but the tank top had enough support built in, so she’d opted to go braless. And today, that worked in her favor. She let her breasts fall out of the shirt together, smiling beneath the fabric as she lifted it away. If Mason was watching, he was already entranced.
She walked to the tub and turned on the hot water. As steam wafted into the air, her smile turned genuine. She could, at least, enjoy this. Before they went back into the wild, she’d have to wallow in mud again like a pig. But for now, she’d enjoy the bath, and the notion that it would completely disarm the man behind the glass. Thinking of her hands around his throat, she pulled down her pants.
13
“So, let me get this straight,” Anne said. “No one has tried to break out of these cells?”
“I think it’s generally assumed that escape would be worse than being caged,” Carrie said in dismay. “Besides, the gate is chain link.”
“And the floor is concrete.” Anne rolled her eyes. “I can see. I have eyes. But I’m starting to wonder if you guys need glasses. Or maybe new brains.”
She looked at old Willie, then Carrie and finally John. The first two seemed befuddled. John seemed almost uninterested, resigned to his fate at the end of the hangman’s noose, or whatever these people did to execute people.
A groan rose from Anne’s throat when Jakob seemed equally baffled.
“Seriously?” she said to her half-brother. “Have you learned nothing?”
“What?” he said. “No one knows what you’re talking about.”
And no one is taking me seriously, because I’m twelve. “Ask a question. Observation. Hypothesis. Test. Repeat—if necessary. And when that’s all done, take action.”
Jakob sighed. He’d heard her modified version of the Scientific Method, which she called the Survival Method, more than once. She tried to teach him. Tried to make him memorize it and use it the same way Eddie Kenyon had taught her. He turned out to be a bad guy, but the method still made sense. Still worked. But Jakob resisted learning from his little sister. In the safety of Beastmaster, with her mother and father, it hadn’t bothered her much. But here and now, with their lives on the line, she wished he’d taken the lesson more seriously. Especially now that she had to convince a bunch of adults that she wasn’t a foolish child.
“Question,” she said, “Can we escape? Observation. One, the floor is concrete. We’re not digging out. Two, the gate is chain link, padlocked shut and screwed into a sturdy wooden beam. It’s not going anywhere. Three, the ceiling is made of corrugated metal held together by bolts.”
All eyes turned upward. The waves of metal siding, used for a slanted ceiling, were indeed held together by bolts.
“Holy...” Jakob reached up and tried to twist one.
“Observation,” Anne said. “They’re rusted. It’s humid as a fat man’s ass crack here.”
Jakob grunted, trying to twist the bolt. He hissed in pain, withdrawing his hand and shaking it.
“Hypothesis.” Anne raised a finger. “Humidity affects wood, too. Rots it. Especially when the lumber isn’t pressure treated.” She patted the wall behind her. “Like this wood. So, the cell’s weakest point is the exterior wooden walls.” She pointed to the front gate, the side wall behind Carrie and John, and the back wall behind Willie. “There, there and there.”
“How do you know all this?” Carrie asked.
Anne shrugged. “I read a lot.” It was true. Before her life in the wild began, she didn’t do much more than read and cause mischief in the ExoGen facility, pulling pranks and spying. But there were a lot of subjects Anne knew a lot about that she couldn’t remember learning. Like with pressure treated wood. Everything back in San Francisco was metal and glass, built to survive the end of the world.
“Continuing hypothesis,” Anne said, but was interrupted by Alia.
“The roof overhangs in the front and back, so those walls probably stayed drier during rainstorms.” Alia crawled across the cell, stopping short when she noticed the five-gallon bucket. She winced and reeled back.
“Found the shitter,” Willie said, leaning up. He took hold of the bucket’s handle and dragged the concentrated filth to the back of the small cell. “Might seem gross now, but sure beats soiling yourself.”
Alia just scrunched her nose and continued on her way, a little bit slower now, carefully picking the spots she put down her hands. “Hypothesis,” she said, upon reaching the side wall beside Carrie and John. “Of the three outside walls, this one will be the weakest.”
She reached out and pushed on one of the vertical planks. It bowed, but held strong. She moved down the line toward Willie, testing each plank.
“Not that way,” Anne said. “The other way. Specifically, behind him.” She pointed at John, who looked more annoyed than surprised.
Carrie shifted away and swatted John’s shoulder. “Move out of the way.”
John obeyed, but didn’t move far. Alia had to partially lean over his cross-legged knee to reach the wall. She probed the middle and then moved down. “This feels wet, still. I think—” Alia let out a yelp as the wooden plank folded outward at the bottom. Without the wall’s support, she fell forward, face-planting. “Oww!”
Alia reeled back from the impact, sliding back across the floor, hand to her face, into Jakob’s arms as he rushed to meet her.
“You all right?” Jakob asked, trying to look past the girl’s hand.
She took her hand away from her face to reveal a bloodied nose. “How bad is it?”
Anne leaned over the girl, reached out and squeezed her nose between her thumb and index finger.
“Oww!” Alia said, flinching back.
“What the hell was that for?” Jakob asked, glaring at Anne.
“She’s fine,” Anne said. “Just pinch it.”
Jakob motioned to Alia’s face. “Her nose could be broken.”
“If it were broken, she would have screamed instead of saying ‘oww.’” She took hold of Jakob’s arm and squeezed it hard. “And we have bigger problems.”
The intense pressure on his arm and Anne’s deep, threatening voice, which he had learned to never ignore, freed him from his mind-numbing concern for Alia. Jakob had overcome a lot of his weaknesses over the past few weeks, but his girlfriend had replaced them all. She distracted him. Put him in danger, and by extension, put the rest of them in danger.
“The hole in the wall?” Jakob asked.
Anne shook her head and sang, “One of these things is not like the others.”
Jakob looked confused. “Sesame Street?”
Anne shared his expression.
“What?”
“That song is from Sesame Street,” he said.
“People on a street sing that song?”
“It was a TV show. For little kids.”
“I spent my ‘little kids’ days in a tube,” Anne said. “I’ve never seen—” But then she remembered it. The people. The strange fuzzy creatures. What the hell? “Tell me how to get to Sesame Street.”
“Exactly,” Jakob said.
“Brought to you by the letter H,” Anne said, her mind drifting, and then snapping back to reality. “H for hypothesis. One of these things is not like the others.” She left out the sing-song tune and looked at Carrie and John. Then turned to Willie. “How badly do you want your freedom? And I don’t mean just from this cage.”
The old man squinted at her. “What exactly are you asking me, kid?”
“Before we talk about getting out of here, and about who will help us once we’re free, and about how Mason and his pals can be...usurped, we need to make sure that only the right people hear the plan.”
“No one here but us,” Willie said. “And they only check on us twice a day with food and water.”
“What I’m asking you, Willie...” Anne said, leveling her most intense gaze into the man’s eyes. He was old enough to be her great grandfather, but was listening carefully. “...is this. To regain your freedom, for however few years you have left, are you willing to listen to me?”
“I’m listening now, aren’t I?”
“Are you willing to fight?” she asked.
“Much as an old man can.”
“Are you willing to kill?”
“Anne,” Jakob said.
“Same question goes for you, Jakey boy.” She turned to Carrie. “And you.”
Silence settled into the cell, squeezing her eardrums until John leaned forward and spoke. “And what about me?”
“I already know about you,” Anne said. She pointed at the ring on his finger. “School ring, top of the class, worn proud. Don’t recognize the school name, but you’re not stupid.” Her finger rose to his hair. “That haircut makes you look handsome to the ladies, but it was also done with a sharp pair of scissors, by someone else.”
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