The Thousand Dollar Escape

by J. T. Brannan

  I stomp-kicked the door as I got there and it crashed into the cop, his shot going high and wide; and then I was aiming through the cabin, shooting another officer on the far side of the car, hitting the arm which held his gun.

  I picked up the shotgun of the man next to me, kicking him in the head as I took his weapon, and loosed a shot across the top of the vehicle in the direction of the second car.

  I swiveled round and fired some warning shots at the other cars, then – in the confusion which followed – turned on my heel and ran, racing around the side of the building in time to see Sam a little way ahead.

  She must have climbed down the other side of the building and started running again.

  She was learning.

  I followed her across an open lot, and while I was gaining fast, Kane had already reached her, and together they rounded the corner of a large building, finally out of sight of the cops.

  I heard shouts from behind, felt the hot air around me as the rounds flew close, started to zig-zag my path to make it harder for them to aim at me and then – halfway to the corner, worried I might not make it unless I did something – I turned around and dropped fast to one knee, shouldering the shotgun in my good shoulder and using the finger of my bad arm to pull the trigger.

  It hurt like hell, but it did the trick, sending everyone diving for cover, once more scattering wildly in all directions. These weren’t combat troops, I reminded myself, not even a SWAT team, and they weren’t trained for this kind of sustained firefight.

  There did seem to be a hell of a lot of them, however, and I was quick to return to my feet and push myself hard to the corner.

  I could hear more sirens in the distance, and realized that – despite what head-start Carson might have negotiated for the Sand Springs PD – Tulsa law enforcement must have had enough, and were moving in to assist.

  This, I supposed as I rounded the corner, was both good news and bad.

  Good news because – under the watchful eye of a more neutral party – Carson and his men might find it harder to execute us in cold blood.

  Bad news because there would soon be one hell of a lot more cops in the neighborhood.

  And then as I looked at what was around the corner, I realized that I had yet another problem.

  I was facing about half a mile of concrete wall, what looked like the back-end of a large shopping mall, and there were dozens of service doors leading inside

  And I couldn’t see Sam anywhere.

  Chapter Twelve

  There were two large blocks placed on an angle to one another, one directly facing me and the other heading off west. On the other side there was a grassy bank which led to rail tracks, a road beyond.

  Had she gone inside somewhere in the first block? Or the second? Or had she raced away over the rail tracks?

  And where the hell was my dog?

  I saw Kane then, head sticking out from a large industrial garbage skip backed up against the first block.

  Checking over my shoulder – still in the clear – I raced across, and he turned and put a paw on one of the service doors. I nodded, turned for another look, then pulled open the door and ducked inside, shutting it quickly once Kane was with me.

  It was dark, and we seemed to be in some sort of access corridor. I still couldn’t see Sam, and I was glad Kane had waited to show me the way otherwise I would have had no chance. But I was sure she was in here somewhere – wherever here was.

  ‘Hey fella,’ I heard a deep male voice say from the dark some way off to my right, ‘you’re not supposed to be back here.’

  I turned, saw a strange outline in the dim light.

  ‘And is that a dog?’ the man said, exasperation in his voice. ‘Can’t you read, man? No live animals allowed inside the house, okay?’

  The house?

  What the hell was he talking about?

  He came closer and my eyes – adjusting to the low light – finally saw him.

  What the fuck was this?

  The man was short and fat, and wore a surgeon’s mask and a butcher’s apron. Blood spattered his clothing, and in his right hand he held a small chainsaw, more blood dripping from the teeth.

  In his left hand, he held what looked like a severed human head, gripping tight onto the hair, neck dripping blood onto the concrete floor.

  My handgun was up and aimed toward him instantly, Kane emitting a deep rumble from next to me, body poised, ready for action.

  ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ I asked, unable to take in what was happening.

  Whose head was he holding?

  ‘Hey, hey!’ the guy cried out, holding up his hands pleadingly – although the effect might not have been as he hoped, as he was just raising the chainsaw and the gory head closer to me. ‘What are you doing, what are you doing?’

  ‘Whose fucking head is that? What the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘What am I doing? I work here, man, I’m an actor.’

  An actor? ‘The head,’ I said again.

  ‘This thing?’ he asked, looking at it in surprise. ‘It’s a fake, a prop, man.’

  ‘Where the hell are we?’

  ‘The Hex House, man,’ the guy said, the eyes above his bloody surgeon’s mask confused. ‘Don’t you know that?’

  ‘A haunted house?’

  The eyes looked insulted. ‘Not a haunted house, the haunted house, the best in the state, man.’

  I had to give him credit – here I was with a gun in his face and a dog that wanted to finish him off for dinner, and the guy was still trying to sell the place.

  ‘Have you seen a woman back here?’ I asked, relieved that I hadn’t stumbled in on some sort of psycho’s slaughterhouse but now concerned about losing time; every second I spent with this guy was another second that Sam was getting further away, and another second that brought the police closer.

  ‘I told you man, nobody’s allowed back here.’

  That didn’t mean that he hadn’t seen anybody though, only that nobody was allowed here; and surely my presence put paid to the idea that one thing necessarily guaranteed the other. But I supposed that meant that this guy hadn’t seen her, and would therefore be of no further use to me.

  Except for one more thing.

  ‘Where’s the nearest door to here?’ I asked, and the crazy surgeon-butcher led me further down the corridor and tapped on a wooden panel on the left.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to burst through and scare some customers in about . . .’ – he checked his watch – ‘oh, about two minutes from now.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, reaching for the door and pushing it open, strange red lights and unnatural screams coming from the room beyond.

  ‘Hey,’ the man said, ‘you can’t go through that way, it’ll spoil –’

  The butt of my pistol connecting with the side of his head cut off the rest of his protestations, and the weird figure dropped to the floor unconscious.

  Looked like the customers would be missing out on their scheduled fright in two minutes.

  Unless something else happened inside – something real – which might frighten them even more.

  I pushed open the door carefully.

  It was time to find out.

  The room I entered was bizarre, to say the least, like something out of the Amityville Horror.

  In the corner was a baby’s cot, the swaddling clothes stained with blood; across one wall was a row of dolls, dozens of the things in all shapes and sizes. Some were made of rags, others were porcelain, but all of them had an eerie appearance that – even though I knew the whole thing was just a show – still chilled me to the bone.

  Maybe it hadn’t just been a sales job when the guy had told me this was the best haunted house in the state.

  There was an air of menace in the room, and then I noticed another bed on the far side of the room, this one a child’s. There was a lump inside the sheets that I couldn’t identify in the strange, dim red light; and something told me that I w
as better off not knowing anyway.

  It was then that I heard the sound of children crying, and this didn’t help my mood one little bit.

  There was still no sign of Sam, so I started to head for the door ahead of me; but then the door opened, and a group of people came in – about eight kids in their teens and early twenties, already looking scared, some holding onto each other for support.

  I shrank back into the shadows with Kane.

  ‘What’s this?’ one of the girls whispered.

  ‘Have you seen the cot?’ another asked.

  ‘Fuck, it’s covered in blood!’

  ‘Look at the bed!’

  ‘John, go and have a look!’

  I watched as John approached the bed, and I slid slowly around the freakish room with Kane as the others were distracted.

  And then John got to the bed and the sheets moved, and all of a sudden the whole room was a screaming, crying, screeching mêlée as a child rose from the bed, bright red blood running down pallid white cheeks, one eye seemingly gouged out of its socket, a huge gash across his throat.

  ‘I can see you,’ he hissed at the crowd, who recoiled in disgust and fear; and then the concealed door to the back corridor flew open.

  But instead of the surgeon-butcher-actor, three armed cops crashed into the room, pistols raised.

  The crowd screamed again, and I think I might have even joined in as the cops’ trigger fingers pressed down; but by then I’d reached the second door, and Kane and I spilled through into the next room as the bullets smashed into the walls around us.

  I gasped for breath, looked left and saw another door close after someone.

  Had it been Sam?

  I rushed past a rotting dead body in a chair, dental mask pulling the jaw wide open, teeth pulled out from the gums inside; I tried to ignore it, but it was damned difficult.

  Then a cupboard opened with a creak near my knee, and a woman crawled out toward me, a cracked white porcelain mask covering a face and head which looked charred and burnt.

  This place was seriously starting to freak me out, and I skipped over the girl on my way to the door.

  I was halfway across the room when I sensed the door I’d come through open again, and I knew the cops would be shooting as they came; in an effort to pre-empt them, I turned on the spot and let off a few rounds from my handgun, making them retreat back into the last room for cover.

  I reached the door that I thought Sam had taken, but just then a hidden door opened and two cops turned cautiously into the room, pistols up at the ready. ‘Shit, this place is a fucking maze,’ said one, moments before a disembodied scream filled the room.

  As they scanned the room, I saw that the second man was none other than Don Carson. ‘You got that fucking right,’ he said to his partner, just as I raised my gun and fired; I’d already decided, after all, that the evil bastard was a legitimate lethal target.

  But the gun clicked on empty, and both cops’ heads swiveled round at the sound, guns tracking toward me only moments later.

  But Kane and I were already moving, Kane leaping at one man while I hurled my empty pistol at Don’s face.

  Kane attacked the first man’s gun arm, sinking his teeth deep and knocking him hard onto his back, the house now filled with genuine, pain-filled screams.

  My gun hitting Carson knocked off his aim, and his own shots went wide of the mark; and I was in front of him a second later, taking control of the gun by gripping the wrist with my left hand, wrestling it out of the way to the side. Pain raced through my shoulder, which had started to bleed through the bandage, but I ignored it as I threw a short punch at Carson’s throat.

  He reacted well, dropping his chin to block the shot, but although no longer fatal, the blow was enough to daze him and I followed up with another rabbit-punch straight into his face, making his eyes water and messing with his vision.

  Then a knee found my balls and I gasped in pain, and I felt Carson pull the gun free from my grasping hand. He pulled it low, elbow into his waist and let off a shot at my abdomen.

  I managed to twist out of the way just in time, elbowing Carson in the face as I turned. As I felt him sag to his knees, I slapped the weapon out of his hand and went for his throat again.

  He was fast though, and got a hand up to protect himself, pulling a Taser at the same time and pressing the trigger.

  I swayed out of the way, knocking his arm to one side so that the electric wires missed their intended target; I went to take control of the Taser immediately, but something – the hairs on the back of my neck, a sixth sense, maybe even because I saw Kane move first – made me instead leap and roll the other way.

  Bullets tore up the floor near where I’d been just moments before, passing dangerously close to the dazed and bruised chief of police. Unfortunately, they missed him; but they missed me as well and I was at that second door an instant later, scooping up Carson’s dropped pistol as I went and firing wildly back at the cops behind me. With my survival on the line, I wasn’t so concerned about aiming for arms and legs anymore; just anything to pin them down and stop them from killing me.

  Kane and I burst into the next room, and a heavy-set guy with a shaven head, weird leather cloak and a bloody baseball bat came at me as soon as we arrived. I reacted instantly by kicking him in the gut, doubling him over and turning him into a moaning, freakish mess on the floor.

  It was only then that I realized he was an actor; I felt bad, and then better when I remembered that I was carrying a gun. At least I hadn’t shot him.

  There were stairs on our left, a corridor to the right. I didn’t want to go any higher, because that would make getting out harder. But where had Sam gone?

  The corridor filled a moment later with another section of customers, an older party this time but equally excited to be there.

  I wondered how long it would be before the cops got the entire building closed down. The fact that they hadn’t indicated that Tulsa PD still weren’t on the scene. Carson and his men – out of their jurisdiction – had probably just gatecrashed the party like we had, and were hoping to sort out their little problem before their big-city colleagues arrived.

  But arrive they would, and then the lights would go on and the place would be emptied and searched in a thorough and professional manner.

  I wanted to be well out of here when that happened.

  But where the hell was Sam?

  ‘Colt?’ a member of the group said as they got near, and I saw that it was Sam, she’d joined in with a party, trying to blend in. I nodded my head, gave a reassuring wink.

  ‘Woah,’ said one of the men in the group, ‘what happened to that guy on the floor?’

  ‘My bad,’ I said, holding up my pistol and grinning like a maniac before firing a shot into the ceiling and then aiming it at the customers. It had the desired effect, the group screaming and turning on their heel, running back the way they’d come.

  I pulled Sam by the hand, dragging her halfway up the darkened staircase at the same time as the door behind us opened and Carson and his men came out into the corridor.

  A dazed Carson saw the people fleeing out of the door at the far end of the corridor and pointed a finger. ‘There!’ he shouted, ignoring the stairs entirely. ‘Get ‘em!’

  As they raced by below us, I considered taking a shot at Carson but thought better of it; if I missed, someone else might get hurt, and – more importantly – it would give away our position to the half dozen or so other officers that were with him.

  We waited until they’d gone out of sight, then we slipped back down the stairs, heading back for the door we’d just left. With any luck, we could retrace out steps and make it back to the service yard at the rear of the building, make our escape across the railroad tracks and away in the opposite direction.

  The only thing was, I couldn’t find the last door we’d used, at least not where I’d thought it would be; but there was another, very similar door about six feet over.

  W
hat kind of madhouse was this?

  I pulled open the door and we stepped through, into a scene straight from hell – in a reclined chair was strapped a young man, stripped to the waist. His skin has been flayed from his chest, his ribs had been prized open to reveal internal organs beneath, and his tongue was in the process of being pulled out of his mouth by a half-naked man in a leather mask holding a pair of iron tongs.

  All around the room, customers from yet another group were screaming, crying, literally pulling their hair out with the horror of the scene, and I was sure that I saw one young woman on the ground, probably having fainted.

  And then as if that wasn’t bad enough, a hidden door opened to one side and the group we’d just seen in the corridor came running in – and from an angle I simply couldn’t reconcile with where we’d just seen them – still screaming for their lives.

  This set the other group into a higher state of delirious panic, and not one of the people there knew what was real and what wasn’t; should they be having fun, or should they be getting the hell out of there?

  The trouble for us was that we knew that the cops were on the tail-end of that corridor group, and would also soon be in the room with us – and if they opened fire, this could well turn into the slaughterhouse it was pretending to be.

  We turned back to the door we’d just come through, racing back out to the corridor – and came face to face with four boys-in-blue coming the other way.

  Damn.

  Why couldn’t anything be easy, just once?

  I attacked first, whipping my gun into the head of the nearest cop, Kane taking down two of them with one giant leap; I slammed an elbow across the jaw of the fourth, as the two men struggled under the savage mass of Kane’s body. Their weapons were on the floor, which was good; I was worried that they might get a shot off, and at point-blank range, even Kane wouldn’t have stood a chance. But – clever boy that he is – he always goes for the guns first.

  The first man proved more resilient than the norm though, and a moment later I was being tackled back into the wall behind me, the shock of the impact sending shooting pains through my shoulder and stars to my eyes, my pistol dropping from my hand to the floor.