by J. R. Ward
At that moment, he saw a pair of ropes hanging from the ceiling about thirty feet away. He could have sworn they hadn't been there before--who knew.
"That's the next option," he said.
"Let's do it."
The pair of them took off, running around the exercise equipment, heading for the ropes before anyone else went over there. There was no telling where the lengths led to--he couldn't see that far up--but the lights were strobing with greater intensity, and there were no other options.
"Rock, paper, scissors for who picks first," she said, putting out her fist.
He did the same. "One, two, three." Craeg threw rock, she threw paper. "Your pick."
"Right."
Craeg grabbed the left one and pulled so hard his palms burned. Certainly seemed strong enough. But if he was wrong? Long way to fall, and there was no padding underneath.
He and the female went hand over hand, gripping, pulling up, using their feet to clasp the loosey-goosey they left behind as they ascended. And she was nearly as fast as he was, not that he spent a lot of time measuring her progress. Up, up, up--until the speakers from which the explosion noises ripped were directly above his head and the light boxes generating the jagged illumination overwhelmed his vision from straight ahead.
"Now what," he barked when he was about six feet from the ceiling.
"Scaffolding," she yelled back, shifting her grip and pointing.
Sure enough, there was some kind of catwalk suspended from metal wires. Glancing down, he said another prayer that the platform was strong enough to hold his weight.
"I'll go first."
"Rock, paper, scissors," she hollered. "One, two, three."
He threw scissors; she threw paper.
"Me first," he announced.
Except the catwalk was a distance away even as he came up to its height. Holding on to the thick rope, he used his lower body to create a swaying motion . . . that increased to a full-on swing. It was going to require perfect timing to get this right--he was going to have to go hands-free for a good five feet of nothing-but-net. And shit only knew what he was going to find when he landed.
More metal with an electrical current piped through it?
Craeg pumped his pelvis one last time, brought his knees up, and sent his weight away from the scaffolding; then as momentum brought him forward again, he arched his back and kicked his feet out ahead of him.
At just the right time, he released the rope, giving up his tether.
At least . . . he hoped it was the right time.
Chapter Seven
"Get up! Peyton, get up--now!"
As Paradise lost the fight with her survival instinct and rolled her friend--or nemesis or whatever the hell he was--over onto his back, she cursed him, herself, the Brothers, pretty much anything that was a noun.
That whole faceup thing didn't last long. As he began to heave again, she shoved him back over so he didn't aspirate.
Glancing around, she saw . . . so many on the ground. As if it were a battlefield.
"I'm gonna die," Peyton moaned.
In the back of her mind, Paradise noticed that although the noise was just as calamitous, there was more illumination, the flashes coming faster and staying lit longer.
"Come on." She pulled at his arm. "We can't stay here."
"Leave me here . . . just leave me. . . ."
As Peyton vomited again and not much came up, she looked to the far corner of the gym. There were a number of people standing around the dark opening that Craeg had told her to head toward.
"Peyton--"
"We're all gonna die. . . ."
"No, we're not."
And it was a shock to realize she actually believed that--it wasn't just a line to offer false hope to Mr. Smooth with the stomach issues. The thing was, all this noise and light wasn't actually producing any debris, smoke or dust, any structure rattling, any sort of real impact on the space or the people in it. It was a light and sound show, like a thunderstorm or a theatrical production--and that was as far as it went.
She also had the sense that the lights were changing, and that had to mean something.
Probably nothing good.
"Peyton." She grabbed his arm and pulled him over onto his back again. "Get your ass up off this floor. We've got to make it over to the corner."
"I can't--it's too--"
Yup, she slapped him. And she wasn't proud of it or satisfied by sharp contact, either. "Get up."
His eyes popped wide. "Parry?"
"Who the hell did you think you were talking to? Taylor Swift?" She pulled his upper body off the gym floor. "Get on your feet."
"I might throw up on you."
"Like we don't have bigger problems? Have you seen this place?"
Peyton started babbling, and that was when she decided enough was enough. Straddling his legs, she took hold under his pits and used her newfound strength to walk back and drag him upright onto his pair of Adidases.
"Paradise, I'm going to be--"
Oh, fantastic.
All down the front of her.
And he was weaving so badly that walking in a straight line was going to be a challenge. Running? NFW.
"Fuck this," she muttered, grabbing him around the waist and jerking him into a dead lift off the floor.
Heavy. Really heavy on her shoulder.
Now she was the one with the whoa-nellies: It was like trying to balance a piano up there--made worse by the fact that the weight was arguing with her--and barfing down the back of her right leg.
Paradise set off, ignoring everything but the goal of getting to that godforsaken door across the way. Her head was wrenched to one side, her neck straining so badly it burned; her shoulder was going numb from lack of circulation; and her thighs were already quivering from the stress on them.
The temptation to get lost in all those physical sensations was strong, especially as they grew ever louder and more insistent. But she wanted to . . . well, she wanted to get to that door, to the fresh air, to the end of all this shock-and-awe business. Then she could take a deep breath, put Peyton's whining deadweight down, and sit in a nice, clean classroom.
Maybe share a laugh with the Brotherhood that she had made it through the worst part and now the self-defense and schoolbook training could start.
To keep herself going, she tried to remember the classrooms she'd seen as the trainees had walked from the parking area to the gym. They'd had fluorescent lighting, and banks of tables with chairs in orderly positions facing the blackboard--
"Stop," Peyton said. "I'm going to die. . . ."
"Will you shut up and stay still?" she said with a grunt.
"I'm going to--"
Oh, for fuck's sake, she thought as he lost it again.
As she trudged along and panted from the exertion, the maze of athletic equipment was a total pain in the ass, the various stations seeming to have been spaced and angled in a way that made it incredibly awkward to get through, past, around.
Especially with Peyton draped over her.
And then there were people who were scattered along the ground.
Every time she stepped by somebody or had to lift a foot over one of their hands, their feet, their leg or arm, she wanted to stop, ask if they were okay, call for help . . . do something. The fact that she couldn't save anyone but herself and Peyton made her scream on the inside, her lungs burning in her chest, a strange anger motivating her.
She kept looking for blood. Obsessively.
But there was no sign of it: no red stains on clothes, no red streaks on skin, no red sweeps across the honey-yellow floorboards. There was also no scent of it that she could detect--although there were plenty of other smells, none of them pleasant.
No blood, though. And that had to be good . . . right?
"Ahhh!" she screamed, as a white-hot blast of pain shocked her.
Applecart. Over.
The pain in her left elbow destabilized everything, her body becoming like
a folding table that had had a leg kicked out--and just like a bowl of fruit on a previously level surface, Peyton crashed to the ground, his limp limbs bouncing like McIntoshes.
"Oh, my God," she gritted as she grabbed her arm and massaged where the electrical current had licked into her.
She'd gotten too close to a chest-press machine. And as she measured the amount of equipment she still had to work through, she thought . . . I can't do this. I can't. . . .
"Can you stand up?" she said.
Peyton answered in a non-verbal fashion that didn't just suggest no, but emphatically announced that that was still a negative.
God, how could there still be anything left in his stomach?
"I can't do this," she moaned as she looked around and massaged her elbow.
As her eyes bounced back and forth, she realized that she was searching for help, some kind of lifeline, a rescuer. There had to be somebody she could turn to. . . .
For only the second time in her life, she prayed to the Scribe Virgin, squeezing her lids closed, trying to find the proper words against the jarring backdrops of the sounds, smells, sights, and the razor-sharp adrenaline spasms racking her internal wiring. Somehow, she managed to ask the race's deity to send someone to make this stop, to take care of Peyton, to rescue all the other people who were down, to get everyone out of this hellhole--
Stop wasting time, an inner voice commanded.
It was such a shock, she wrenched around, expecting to find somebody behind her. No one was there.
Maybe it had been piped in from overhead?
Stop wasting time. Go!
"I can't pick him up again!"
You'd better fucking figure out how!
"I can't do this!"
You'd better fucking do this!
"Okay, all right, okay, all right."
She mumbled those words over and over again as she restraddled Peyton and humped him back up into position. The second dead lift was even more uncoordinated than the first, her body loose in places that really, totally didn't help--but Peyton seemed to be recovering strength, his hands gripping her hips and holding on.
By the time she cleared the obstacle course, she was running out of energy, and she performed a quick calculation on the distance to the door--and then added ancillary factors like how much her shoulder was deforming under the weight, and the fact that, inconveniently, she needed to pee so badly she felt like someone was daggering her lower abdomen.
Breaking into a shuffling gallop, her feet skimmed over the blessedly unobstructed floor, and the less shimmying, the better for her passenger and her whole body.
Wait a minute.
The door was shut.
As she closed in on her destination, she frowned and commanded her eyes to focus through the flaring lights. Shit, the door was shut. But there had been people standing around the opening only moments before?
Coming up to the panel, she let Peyton slide off her back and barely spared him a glance as he sprawled out flat on the floor.
What had happened to the frickin' door?
No handle or doorknob. No hinges. No glass to break.
Pivoting around, she surveyed--Jesus, there were gym ropes hanging about thirty feet away. The thick lengths had appeared from the ceiling, and there were two people climbing them with the kind of speed that made her want to sit down and give up right where she was.
"Peyton?" she said as she angled her head to watch the pair ascend. "I'm not going to be to carry you up those."
Hell, she didn't think she could drag her own weight on the twirling lengths.
Where were the two of them going? she wondered as they disappeared out of sight.
"Peyton, we're going to need to--"
One after the other both ropes fell to the floor, the slaps of the thick, woven lengths sounding out even over all the other noise.
Where had the two people gone?
Rubbing her eyes, she wanted to scream. Instead, she gritted out, "What the hell are we going to do--"
A fresh blast of cool, clean air had her twisting back around. The door had opened again, revealing a dense black void.
As though it had consumed the other trainees who had entered and was ready for another meal.
Peyton struggled to his feet, his shaking hands wiping down his face. "I can walk."
"Thank God."
He glanced over at her. "I owe you."
"Let's see if heading through here actually gets us anywhere first."
"We go together." His eyes burned as he offered her the crook of his elbow--as if they were going into a ballroom full of silk gowns and white-tie tuxedoes. "I'm not going to leave you."
Paradise stared at him for a moment. "Together."
Linking her arm through his, she wasn't surprised that he used her to steady himself. Still, this was a huge improvement over his comatose-but-for-the-barfing.
They stepped forward at the same time, the doorjamb wide enough to accommodate them both--
The door slammed shut behind them and cut off all light--and she opened her mouth to scream, but then sucked back the sound, holding it in. That feeling of the floor slipping out from under her feet happened again, a lesson on the significance of vision to things like balance and the spatial orientation of limbs and torso.
Beside her, Peyton was panting.
From out of nowhere, rough hands grabbed at her hair, latching on, yanking hard. And she screamed bloody murder as fear made her contort and spasm and fight against the hold.
"Paradise!"
They were ripped apart and something was put over her head and tied around her neck. Forced to the ground, her legs were bound and then used to pull her along on her back. Twisting and turning, trying to kick, to breathe, to stay even partially calm enough to think, she felt like she was suffocating.
She felt like she . . . might be dying.
*
Up on the scaffolding, Craeg learned the hard way that you'd better frickin' balance yourself--the electrical shock he got each time his arms flailed into something metal sent his heart racing and shorted out his mind for a split second that he couldn't afford to spare.
And naturally, the goddamn platform was as rickety as an old man, shifting this way and that, swinging like a baseball bat.
"Get in a rhythm!" he shouted to Novo. "Follow my steps!"
Strong hands grabbed onto his waist. "Got you."
They fell into a walking stride that was quick but cautious, lurching from side to side, the heat from the lights and the mass of bodies down below making him sweat. Extending his arms, he counter-balanced himself and her, and began to make even better time, heading for God only knew--
All at once the scaffolding went rock-steady, and that was bad news. What had worked on an unstable surface didn't fly at all on a stable one, and both of them careened into a series of electrical shocks that sent them reeling, their bodies slamming into each other and then hitting the metal supports, only to get reshocked. Muscles began to cramp up and refuse to loosen, his limbs unable to follow his mental commands.
"Fuck!" Craeg barked as he tried to stop his body from reacting to the stimuli.
"What the fuck!" Novo yelled.
Or some version of that.
Thin air.
Next thing he knew, he had fallen off an edge he hadn't seen coming and gone into a free fall that left even him screaming at the top of his lungs. All around him, air rushed up, traveling through his clothes and making them flap, streaking his hair and the skin of his face and back, riddling his ears with a buffering sound. He was going to snap both of his legs if he landed feet-first, but there was no time, and no distance--and no reason to even try to broker a landing that wasn't going to be devastating--
Sploosh!
He hit an unanticipated pool of water on his side, his body getting caught in the safe hold of cold, fresh liquid. The relief as he didn't end up with both his femurs coming out of the tops of his shoulders was short-lived. His Tasered, tortured
, overheated muscles immediately cramped on a oner, everything freezing up, his lack of body fat turning him into an anchor, not a buoy.
The shock of the unexpected bottoming-out had caused him to pull in a tremendous lungful of air, but that oxygen supply wasn't going to last. He needed to get to the surface.
With clawed hands, and only one leg that had any mobility, he scratched and kicked in what he hoped was the way up. He had no visual orientation at all, nothing but a black abyss that was going to consume him if he didn't save himself.
The surface of the pool, pond, lake, whatever it was rearrived with the same unexpected, unannounced surprise that he'd plunged into it with. Coughing and trying to suck in air were two mutually exclusive activities, and he had to force his primordial sense of survival to regulate his diaphragm's spastic responses.
Chlorine. They were in a pool.
He didn't spend a lot of time thinking about that. The pain in his cramping muscles was unbelievable, like having daggers driven into his thighs and his ass and his gut, and he started to sink back down before he'd caught his breath--and that was a no-go. He was going to die that way.
Fighting against his body's impulses, he used his mind to override his sympathetic nervous system: Taking an enormous breath in, he stroked his arms out and down, creating an artificial current that swept his torso flat across the top of the water. Then he stopped . . . fucking . . . moving.
And let the air in his chest cavity become the life jacket he wasn't wearing.
It wasn't a perfect float. His legs continued to sink, and he had to kick every so often to stay on top, but it was a hell of a lot better than hitting the bottom and drowning.
From time to time, he expelled his breath and reinhaled.
He wasn't sure how long he could last like this. But he was going to find out.
God . . . his cording muscles were a torture to endure, and to distract himself, he relived being up high on that catwalk. The Brothers were brilliant, he decided. Going from that heat to this cold? After the electrical shocks?
It was an engineered environment guaranteed to put someone exactly where he was: fighting against his body's natural responses to certain stimuli and environments.
What was happening to everyone else? he wondered.
Where was the female?
Not the one he'd been on the elevation with . . . but the other one? Paradise?
As water clapped in his ears, it was like the light show from the gym, obscuring and then letting in sensory input. He heard splashing, both close to him and farther away . . . a lot of shouting and gasping from others in the pool . . . echoes--they must be somewhere large with a relatively low ceiling and a lot of tile.
