Sweet & Sassy Anthology: Stormy Kisses

by Rebecca Rode

  “What is this place?” I turned to the judges, who sat next to each other.

  “It’s an underground shelter,” one of the two judges said. His bushy eyebrows raised and lowered as he continued to talk. “A hideaway and escape path for anyone that might need an incognito exit from the courthouse. I can’t remember the last time we used it. It might have been fifteen years ago when Judge Nolan had to get out of the courthouse when everyone was rioting. He stayed here for a few hours until the rioters lost interest and left and was taken through those tunnels and out. No one ever knew how he left the building.” He seemed to realize he was babbling and stopped abruptly, licking his ample lips nervously. “Anyway, I guess it makes just as good a prison as it does a shelter.”

  The other judge, a rotund man with a ruddy face, narrowed his eyes at me. “Who are you?” He didn’t hold out a hand to me.

  “I’m here to stop a terrorist attack.” I had to hedge. “I’m—Jenny,” I said. It was the alias Jeremy had given me, and remembering Jeremy’s face as he’d said it, how he’d called me his colleague, caused a rush of anger to flood through me. I gritted my teeth and pushed through it. I needed to focus. “What’s your name?”

  “Judge Hilton,” he said, slightly grudgingly. “I hope there are others of you.” The insinuation was clear. He wondered how I was planning to stop the attack now that I was in here, trapped with them and if there was hope to be had.

  “I was able to disarm a bomb in Judge Mitchell’s courtroom.” I eyed the other judge who said, “That would be me.”

  I nodded. “I didn’t find any in your courtroom, Judge Hilton. Why were you taken?”

  “Not sure.” He didn’t know if he should trust me. Any normal person would be anxious about the situation, but both judges, who experienced extreme stress on a daily basis, appeared only slightly agitated. The rest of the prisoners exuded more than their fair share of anxiety.

  “Did you play any role in the Yousef decision last week?”

  “No.” He clasped his meaty hands together.

  “Make any comments to the press about it?” I raised my eyebrows.

  “Well, yes, but—” He shrugged.

  I spoke as clearly as I could, to make sure he, at least, understood the gravity of the situation. “A group connected with that decision is determined to make everyone involved pay with their lives.”

  A female clerk put her hand to her mouth, and realization dawned on Judge Hilton. He, along with all of us, was put here to die. Was there a bomb nearby or had they had to alter their plans severely because of the storm? “Our job is not to let them.”

  “Ah,” Judge Hilton said. “Now that kidnapper’s words make sense.”

  “What?”

  “One of the kidnappers did spit in my face,” he admitted. “And said something about evil men who thought they could change the laws of Allah must be punished.”

  Emily spoke up. “The one that grabbed me didn’t spit on me, but said I must pay for his sister’s death.”

  It was all fitting together now. The full picture formed before me. These were men who felt forced by grief and pain to find justice. They were most likely peaceful men, Samaira’s family, who could not stand for Judge Mitchell’s decision. They were now trying to seek justice in a sick, twisted way that was, in truth, against the laws of Islam, but not in their eyes. They believed they were praising Allah with their efforts.

  It was worse than I thought. Not only were we working with novices, but also men who were fighting for their beliefs—a most deadly combination. I needed to get to work and get us all out of there.

  I turned to the two women. “What are your names?”

  “I’m Emily,” the one who had held my head in her lap said. Her modest white button up was fastened all the way to her neck, and if it hadn’t been for her bright and flowery skirt, I would have thought she was a hipster. “And she’s Charlotte.” Emily indicated the woman with rich black hair, who was leaning into the heftier of the two bailiffs, sobbing. Her clothes were tailored and all name brand.

  Judge Mitchell spoke up. “We’ve tried everything we could think of to get out of here. Unless there’s someone on the outside working with you who knows where you are, I think we’re stuck and at the mercy of those men.” I didn’t miss the slight tremble in his chin as he said the last words.

  Charlotte let out a squeal and burrowed deeper into the hefty bailiff’s shoulder. I shook my head, a slight movement to ask Judge Mitchell to be more cautious about what he said in the future. “Don’t worry, Charlotte,” I said. “There’s always a way out. We’ll find it.” My words sounded empty in my mouth.

  Judge Mitchell gave Judge Hilton a withering look that underlined his belief that there was no way out, and I shouldn’t be giving hope when there was none.

  I stood slower than I would have liked, my head pounding to the beat of tribal drums and pulled a bobby pin from my hair just above my neck. I’d discovered it was a great place to hide a very handy tool, and no one ever thought to look there. I went for the exit door, then glanced back at the other one, only then realizing I had been looking at a reflection. The other door was not metal, but glass. Beyond it lay some sort of tunnel. “Where does that lead?” I pointed to the tunnel, but kept moving toward the steel door.

  “It’s the passageway out of here. There’s a steel sliding door that usually covers the glass one. It makes the room completely secure. I’m not sure why they have that open. The door leads to the old sewer tunnels,” Judge Hilton said. “They aren’t used anymore,” he continued. “They have them totally blocked off to the updated sewer system. There are a couple ladders leading up to street access. It’s how Judge Nolan got out unseen.”

  “Clever,” I said as I walked toward the steel door. The closer I got, the more concerned I became. “Wait. There’s no keyhole on this door?”

  “It’s electronically controlled.” Judge Mitchell said. “The keypad is hidden behind one of the fake rocks.”

  “Do you know the code?” I stared hard at the steel door and my vision fuzzed a little. I blinked hard. Why did it have to be steel?

  “I did at one time,” Judge Mitchell said, “but the terrorists must have changed it. The door didn’t open when I tried it.”

  Great. Someone on the inside had most likely helped the lunatics gain access to this shelter. Then again, hackers these days were pretty good, and if the courthouse hadn’t updated their online security in a while, they very well could have left themselves open for an attack. “Just for laughs and giggles, let me give it a try.” I wasn’t sure why I thought if I used the same code they’d tried, that I might get it to work, but I had to try.

  “Justice101.”

  I smirked at the code. I couldn’t help it. I tapped the stones until I came upon the right fake stone and lifted it up to reveal a keypad. I punched in the code and, like he said, nothing happened. The door remained closed. I thought about my time in the country of Monterra and how hard it had been to jimmy that booby trapped keypad. I hoped this wouldn’t be the same ordeal. We’d barely made it out alive.

  Charlotte cried out when I turned back to the judges after the code hadn’t worked. The civilians seemed to huddle a bit closer to each other. “Any fail safes to keep people from messing with the keypad?” My mind sorted through all the training modules from spy academy and various problems I could run into if I pressed too many incorrect key sequences. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something.

  The judges looked at each other and shook their heads. “Not that we know of.”

  The second bailiff spoke up. His skin was like porcelain, not a hint of stubble anywhere. His uniform had sharp creases. “I took a class on cyber security, and I still remember the top five passcodes. We could try them.”

  It couldn’t be that easy, could it? “Good idea,” I said, hoping to encourage everyone to participate in the escape. I punched the five codes in as he said them. I had learned these codes as well, and a few
more besides the top five, but for some reason, I couldn’t pull them up in my mind. I couldn’t even pull up the latest memo Division had sent out on the subject. I must have been hit really hard. The codes did not open the door.

  I heard the scrape of metal on metal outside the steel door. It was most likely a guard’s gun brushing up against the door. “Someone’s guarding the door. Maybe we should go out that way.” I pointed to the glass door.

  I let the fake stone cover the keypad again and took a few steps toward the glass door. It looked to have a key lock.

  “They destroyed the lock,” Judge Hilton called out to me and joined me. He was not a small man. His movement triggered several others to also stand, and he towered above them and me. Charlotte and her bailiff along with the other civilians stayed seated.

  The closer I got to the door, the easier it was to see the damage. It was like they’d hit it hard with something. My hand went up to the bump on my head. Had they used the same thing on me? My head gave a painful thud in response. If only I had some headache meds. I had to squint to look properly. I most likely had a slight concussion. Great. I touched the lock, looking for a way to use it despite the damage.

  “There’s also an electronic keypad to your left that controls those two doors. Each door has one, but the code doesn’t work on those either.” Judge Hilton moved with me, followed by the bailiff that wasn’t soothing Charlotte, Emily, and another male clerk.

  “Both of the doors?”

  “There’s a steel door that normally slides out behind the glass one.” Judge Hilton said. “It’s there as a failsafe, in case someone is down here waiting something out and the tunnels are breached. Like the steel that could be raised on the main floor to prevent a car or something from smashing the glass and entering the building. Once the two steel doors are closed, it’s supposed to be completely cut off and impenetrable. The glass gives people the comfort to know there is a way out if they need to take it and I think the designers couldn’t stomach a room made solely of steel when the rest of the building was a combination of both, even if the room would be seen by very few people.”

  Surprisingly, it did ease my claustrophobia to look out the thick glass and see tunnels beyond. I tapped on the glass. “I’m guessing there isn’t anything we can use in here to break that glass?”

  “No,” a stocky and tan male clerk said. “There’s nothing in here besides those bloody boxes, and we can’t find a way into them.”

  “What’s in them?” I asked, glancing at the four metal boxes.

  “Food and blankets and such. Survival stuff.” Judge Mitchell brushed his hand through his hair.

  I immediately went to work on the locks on the sturdy boxes and had them open in no time. At least I could manage that small win. There had to be something that would help us in there. It seemed to shift the feel in the room from complete resignation to slight hope. Instead of dead silence, the captives began speaking in low tones as they took blankets and food from me. It was obvious that this shelter was not meant to hold people for very long and that it was made to protect wealthy people. Expensive survival items were in the boxes, things normal people would never buy simply because they didn’t have the funds to do so. “How long have we been down here?” How close were we to being blown up?

  “We’ve been down here an hour maybe.” Judge Hilton said. “You? Fifteen minutes or so.”

  It was a little after four then. I shuffled through the rest of the contents in the box, looking for something to help us break the glass. There was nothing. The most promising items were the locks themselves, but they would never break such thick glass. I tossed one as hard as I could just in case, but it simply clanked off. I wanted to scream, but closed my eyes instead.

  Outside the glass door, the tunnel went out until it disappeared into the dark abyss. Stones in varying shades of gray butted up to the enclosure. I examined the lock. There was no hope of using bobby pins to open it, or a key for that matter. It was smashed almost beyond recognition, the keyhole nonexistent. I had to work with the electronics.

  “No one was able to keep their phone were they?” I said, glancing back at the group while I located the keypad. If I had a phone, I could use it to help me jimmy the lock.

  “Those are the first things they took,” Charlotte said and began sobbing again. I wanted to shake the girl, but instead I took a deep breath.

  “Besides our guns,” the tall, thin bailiff said, sending a quick look to the other bailiff. They all shook their heads no. The tall bailiff’s nametag read, J. Babcock and the other N. Freeman.

  “I’m pretty sure they messed with the codes,” Judge Hilton repeated. “I’m sure they have control of them. Why else wouldn’t our code work?”

  He had a point, but I tried to pull the keypad out of the wall anyway. It appeared to not have a cover. I couldn’t get to the wires. I’d never seen anything like it. “Could someone work on getting that keypad by the other door out of the wall?” I asked. “If I can get to wires, I can manipulate them.”

  The extremely tan and bulky male clerk headed over to it. “Sure. I’ll give it a go. I’m Lam.” He had a smile plastered on his face and almost skipped to the door. Judge Mitchell joined the stocky young man. He moved swiftly despite his size. I realized that giving people jobs helped their mood.

  I worked on getting the device out of the wall for a bit when Emily came over to help.

  “I have these,” she said, holding up a set of three keys. “I might be able to dig with them.”

  “That would be awesome.” She grinned a toothy grin, her glasses rising up her face slightly with the curve of her mouth. Emily was most certainly a born helper. I liked her a lot. I stepped back to let her dig with her keys at the mortar around the pad.

  I worked on putting in codes, and the pad gave a terrible sound every time I missed the right one, which didn’t help the pounding in my head.

  “You guys, come dig around these stones.” I showed N. Freeman, who left Charlotte soothe herself, and Lam some places that most likely hid door hinges. I set others on digging around the pad. I tapped my foot on the door, too, hoping to make enough noise that someone other than the guards might hear or perhaps the guards would become so annoyed, they’d open the door. We’d have a fighting chance then. A girl could hope.

  “I got one loose!” Freeman yelled, bringing me back to the task at hand.

  I turned, more determined than ever to get them all out. “Pull it off the wall!” I yelled and made my way to them.

  Judge Hilton helped me yank on the stone, and my heart sank when I saw what was behind it. Steel. A steel wall. I shuddered. The stones were decoration to calm the inhabitants. Steel would make anyone feel they were stuck in a vault and not a shelter. All eyes were on me now, and I saw the faces fall as mine did. “It’s okay,” I said, bolstering every ounce of hope I could. “You can all stop scratching there, though.” There was no hope of escaping out a steel door or wall. I wouldn’t say it, though. It seemed like too big a nail in the coffin. “I need you to work on getting rid of some stones right here, where the ceiling meets the wall.” Certainly the ceiling was made of boards, not cement or steel.

  I went to work on the keypad again. I couldn’t help but notice how cold and stiff my hands felt. I scoured my brain for anything related to this type of keypad, but I couldn’t think straight. The training manual would have to be updated after this. But who would tell Division it needed to be done if there was no one left to tell them? And how would I get the information to them even if I did live? I wasn’t supposed to be here.

  Judge Mitchell and Emily finally got rid of all the rocks and mortar around the box.

  Charlotte stood alone, reciting the Lord’s Prayer over and over again. I stopped entering codes, and we tugged and pulled on the box until it finally moved out an inch. Then I yanked on the box, using all my fury and hope and fear all balled up into one and as I did, it popped out. A steel shaft came out with it. The wires were encased in st
eel. Babcock had lifted Emily onto his shoulders so she could scrape at the mortar above us. Scraping and scraping like it was scraping my skin off. Freeman had resorted to tapping on the steel door with his keys.

  I saw the truth then. Because the wires were all encased in steel tubing, I would not be able to cut them. At about the same time, the guys working on the ceiling stones called out. “Also steel.”

  I turned my back on the steel door and as my knees buckled, I slid down it, a prayer taking over my heart. I didn’t want to give in to despair, but there was nothing else I could do. It would take a miracle to save us.

  No one knew I was here. Jeremy wasn’t looking for me. The CSIS didn’t know. No one would find us. Phones weren’t working. There was no way out. We were trapped and there was a bomb about to go off.

  A grim thought entered my head—with all the steel around us, we probably wouldn’t die in the blast. No, we’d just be trapped in here until we starved to death.

  I couldn’t help but look at the tunnel entrance. If I were a terrorist, that’s where I would have put the bomb if I had been planning to lock people up in this room.

  Where could Jeremy be? A flash of resentment went through me. If he had been with me when he was supposed to be, this wouldn’t have happened. My head pounded and nausea filled me. A sick horrible feeling captivated my chest thinking that he was with Celeste somewhere, laughing and chatting while I was trapped in an underground room. Nothing could be worse than this. We heard a sound, and everyone’s eyes flicked to the glass door.

  Emily said, “What was that?”

  “They’re coming now to shoot us all,” Charlotte cried.

  "No," I assured her. And just as I said those words, out of the dark recesses of the tunnel, a raging roar filled our ears and a wall of water slammed into the glass door.

  Chapter 10

  WATER CRASHED INTO THE GLASS, but the glass held, not even a crack showing the impact. The water receded slightly, but left a knee-deep river of water right outside the room, sloshing against the glass. Before the horror, shock, and surprise of it could subside, our attention was drawn to trickling sound. The water was pushing its way through the cracks around the door, and puddles began to grow around it.