It’s chill. A gun.
That someone has a gun pressed into my side is difficult to grasp. It’s surreal. I break into someone’s home, discover my mom’s employee wants me out of the way for some reason I can’t fathom, and now his partner in crime jabs a gun barrel in me?
It’s a lot to take in. I might have kept going too, and maybe she wouldn’t have shot me, but my ankle catches on the fence top and I see something very wrong.
My ankle is bent so that with my leg up, instead of the toe pointing out to the left where it should, it points down where it shouldn’t. As if seeing it makes it real, pain surges into my stomach and I begin to vomit.
Dark corners crowd out the light and my vision blurs. I wobble, catch my already broken ankle on the fence, and collapse.
Chapter 20
Pain shoots through my leg, and with each throb of my heart, pulses of agony surge to my brain. I’ve never broken anything before; the torture is paralyzing. If I move, I’ll black out. I can’t see a thing, but at least I’m conscious, shaking with cold, but alive.
A thick paste fills my mouth. I might have been out for hours. My head feels woolly and I try to remember everything that has happened. The only thing seared into the hard drive of my mind is the image of my foot, dangling. My stomach heaves, but produces nothing. Just then I realize that it’s not dark; my eyes are clenched against the pounding in my ankle.
I open my eyes.
I’m in the basement. The two windows to the backyard filter gray light through their grime. A furnace clicks on and roars to life, the gas flames flickering blue like tiny demons dancing in a ring. I listen for voices or footsteps but hear none. Another hum rises above the furnace. It’s familiar. I’d know it anywhere. It’s the purr of computer servers.
My arms stretch behind my neck, the hands tied to a metal desk. My foot thumps with anguish. I’m still wearing my shoes, and it’s causing part of the problem by constricting blood flow. With the toe of my good sneaker I touch the heel of my bad foot. I cry out and bite my lip from the pain. It’s too late to take the shoe off. I can only hope the shoe won’t cut off blood flow and make it a gangrenous foot. But I have bigger things to worry about. Survival.
I don’t wear a watch and my iPhone is nowhere to be seen, so I can’t tell how late it is. My mom might not even know I’m missing yet, and as for Heckleena’s tweet? I don’t watch my own feed, so how can I expect anyone else to? Not to mention that tweets disappear in about a minute off most people’s feeds and anyone who did catch it probably thought it was a joke or lives a million miles away. If no one has saved me yet, they’re not coming. I’d even take the police. The only others who know I’m here are Foxy and Fenwick—Fenwick, who could be holding my mom hostage too.
I have to help her.
I roll to my right so that I can see the area nearest the front of the house. More boxes are piled there, most of them unopened. A ladder leans against a concrete wall with several large bottles of cleaning solvents and paint cans. The water heater is tucked under the stairs, which descend into the middle of the single room. It looks like a regular basement. On the wall opposite me I see the alarm system—which is evidently a silent alarm and likely what brought Foxy home early. It’s all the stuff on the far right that’s out of place. Alien to any normal home, definitely weird for this neighborhood, and just about the last thing I’d expect to see here: a rack of servers.
Not just any rack, this is one of those professional jobs. If you’ve ever seen a baker’s cooling rack for cookie sheets then you have a sense of what it looks like. This one is black and has sixteen slots for servers. All sixteen of them are filled with blinking green lights. A twist of blue wires descends from it and runs up to the ceiling, where it disappears. Beside the servers are an eclectic group of computer towers, all piled one atop the other in a grid of beige, black and white. At least fifty, all humming, all connected to the professional rack. Evidently, the sixteen servers weren’t providing enough juice and he needed to supplement them with the older boxes.
What would Fenwick use servers for? The guy is good with his hands but I never thought he understood computers. I’m looking at over a hundred grand in technology.
The servers scare me as much as the gun had. Both point to a more professional operation, and if I add in the acting of Foxy and the infiltration of Fenwick into Assured Destruction, then I have to assume these guys are doing this for good reason, an investment they’d do anything to protect. The edges of my vision grow dark again and I fight off unconsciousness by taking deep slow breaths. If I’m going to escape, I have to stay lucid. I need a way to signal the cops, or to break free and reach help. At this point I don’t even care about Assured Destruction, or my expulsion. I just want to see my mom.
I half-heartedly twist around, but no, my teeth can’t reach the bindings. Surprise. I inspect my wrists. Tight to the flesh are two translucent plastic ties. I don’t know if they’re the kind cops use, but I can’t budge them and it cuts into my skin to try. The ties are threaded through a hole in the metal drawer of the desk and the edges are not sharp enough to cut the plastic. I strain against the ties; the increase in blood pressure causes my ankle to ache in rebellion. The desk moves an inch and I slump back to the floor. But as I lie on the cold concrete, my heart thuds in my chest. I’m grinning … the desk moved a whole inch.
I look around again with a keener eye. I inspect the furnace. Gas lines must feed it. I could break the lines, cause a leak and let the entire house explode?
My mouth tightens. Perhaps not so great an idea if one of my criteria is staying alive. The ladder is useless. The paint and cleaning solvents—maybe not. The boxes? Other than the servers, there’s little else that could be useful. I have to try something before dark descends and my only light will be from the twinkling of data flowing over Fenwick’s lines.
I don’t want an explosion, but I do want smoke. A part of me likes the concept of revenge. I know how expensive servers are. I also know how much time it takes to set everything up and, of course, then there’s the content residing on the servers. It’s all valuable or it wouldn’t be there. Poetic justice, Principal Wolzowski called it—when the punishment matches the crime.
I haul on the desk and gain another inch. The desk legs screech against the concrete. I hold my breath. No activity upstairs that I can hear. I decide it’s better to make a lot of noise quickly, rather than drag it out.
I’m sitting up, looking down at my swollen foot and calf. My head is between my arms, which are stretched back and on an angle. Each time I throw my weight forward against my arms, the desk moves. A little. Between pulls I don’t bother to listen for sounds of people coming. Instead, I lunge forward, grimace against the pain, and lunge forward again. One, two, three … Ugh! One, two, three … Ugh! I haul.
My arms feel as though they’re ripping from their sockets. Inch by inch, I reach the paint. The broken ankle sends tears to my eyes with each movement. Slick blood coats my wrists where the ties rub my skin raw. I take a few deep breaths to calm myself and to blink away tears.
With my good foot, I turn each of the labels of the containers, looking for the campfire symbol for flammable. I’m in luck. A can of paint, three quarters full. Its lid is even open a crack. My plan might just work. I shove the can with my foot toward the servers and move it several feet. Then I drag the desk closer. Shove the paint. Drag desk. Shove paint. Desk. Paint.
Fresh pain lances through my leg and down into my shoulders from my wrists. I grit my teeth and shove the paint further. Desk. Paint. Desk-paint.
Finally I’m at the servers with my can of flammable paint.
Now for the tricky part. I lodge the can of paint between my calves and haul upward. I manage to lift it only a few servers high. I’m not sure if that’s high enough for what I want, but my first task is to snap the lid off. Holding the can between m
y calves, I bang it hard against the servers, trying to catch the lip of the lid on a bracket. When I do so, the agony nearly renders me unconscious. The can slips and crashes to the floor. The smell of paint blankets me. Its stringent odor brings me back. It stinks like something that can burn.
Liquid seeps out of the can, beginning to form a pool. I panic, madly collecting the can between my thighs and turning it right side up. My jeans are coated in the same burnt red coating the living-room walls upstairs. But I have half an open can of paint. A skin had formed on top from it being left open, but there is plenty of liquid paint still left.
I wriggle until the can sits between my calves and then, with all my might, I swing my legs up and with them the can. I’m jackknifed and shaking from the effort of holding the position. The blood draining from my ankle hurts more than ever. My vision begins to tunnel from the suffering. I twist my legs and lean to the servers. Paint begins to drizzle out of the sideways can. I twist more. More paint. It’s syrupy and drips on the servers’ sides.
I begin to jerk from the exertion; the paint glugs a little farther out, rather than just drooling down the face of the servers. I jerk the can on purpose. A chug slops over the servers, seeping through the ventilation grills in the gear. Heaving the can back and forth, I douse the equipment as far back as the paint will go. My muscles spasm and my legs drop to the third server down, then the second. First. With a final haul of my legs, the can hits the floor and rolls. My feet slump and pain screams up my leg. I faint.
I wake to smoke.
Smoke hugs the ceiling, pooling in great oily billows. It’s what I wanted. Perhaps more than I wanted. It’s dark. I can’t tell if that’s because the smoke is blocking the light from the windows, or if it’s night. Flickering orange sparks highlight the smoke like a miniature thunderstorm; next to me, the servers sizzle and twitch with death throes of their own.
A small lick of flame spurts from a vent in one of the boxes. The fire slips down the side, following the trail of paint, spreading fast. This wasn’t in the plan.
I look down at the red covering me. My mind slowly rolls through the implications. The paint looks an awful lot like blood.
Chapter 21
Fire tracks down the paint like a lit fuse. I’m stiff from my time unconscious and my legs don’t respond right away. The flames suddenly accelerate and reach the side of my pants, but instead of turning my legs into torches, the flame stops, unable to make the leap to the cotton. Suddenly I realize, I’m still soaking wet and the rain has saved me.
My jeans begin to steam and I wince from the heat of the fire. My eyes burn with fumes. Inch by inch, I shift my legs out of the puddle of paint. The fire soon reduces it to a black patch of tar on the concrete. Finally the flames on the floor extinguish. The third server up from the floor burns steadily, however, flames licking over the edge of the fourth. It’s only a matter of time before the whole stack is ablaze.
I throw my weight against the desk and it shifts a half an inch from the fire. But then I stop to think about what I am doing. The smoke bumping up against the ceiling has lowered a foot; if I don’t get out of here, the smoke will choke me. That’s the more immediate threat. I can’t depend on enough smoke escaping to alert a neighbor.
I look around. There’s no way to cut my binds. I’m not strong enough to haul the desk up the stairs, so what can I do? If I stay, I burn or asphyxiate. I stare at the flames and they’re hypnotic. The same way ocean waves lap at a shore, tongues of fire lap at the servers’ edges. The fire’s color changes to green as it pick up flecks of copper, or even red and blue as other precious metals imbedded in the server’s circuitry cook. A flare of white brings me back. I have an idea. It’s a little crazy.
It may have been six years since we covered conduction in science class but it’s amazing what comes back to you when you need it.
The desk moves an inch. But this time, instead of moving away, it shifts toward the fire. I pull again. Another inch.
I cough as a swirl of smoke dips down and into my lungs.
I yank again. I heave. Finally, with my legs covered in the burnt charcoal of the paint residue, the desk nudges against the server rack. Flames run from the servers to curl beneath the underside of the metal desk. I tuck my head, slippery with sweat, between my arms to escape the baking flames. I feel like a rotisserie chicken. The heat is growing, the ceiling lowering.
Upstairs I hear nothing. No shouts of alarm, no footsteps. No one is coming.
My arm closest to the fire blisters. Tears stream from my eyes and dry just as fast. Every so often I rest the back of my hand against the metal of the drawer to which I’m strapped. It’s burning hot—maybe that will be enough.
I rub the plastic ties against it. Back and forth. Praying for them to melt. Nothing. The heat through my jeans is frying my leg. I can feel the flesh cooking, but the metal is taking longer to heat and I try to distract myself by recalling the math. Silver is the most conductive metal, then copper, then … where did steel rank? I test the metal again; it’s searing. I jerk the ties back and forth, back and forth, and then haul down on them. They snap and my head cracks against the floor.
I am dazed. I’m free.
Liquid plastic drools on to the floor from the server casings. I roll further away, wincing as my broken ankle swings with me. The only possible exits are the stairs and the windows. I can break the windows, but can I fit through their narrow openings? With my ankle, can I use the ladder to climb up and out?
I decide on the stairs and drag myself. I keep my ankle splinted against my other good ankle and slide across the floor using my arms. It reminds me of how my mom sometimes needs to get around, when her legs have totally given out and she can’t make it to her chair. It’s slow, painful, and frustrating. I feel for her. I understand her a bit more. I miss her.
I won’t let her down. She’s all I have. I ignore the new pains in my forearms, but commando crawling is easier than dragging a desk. Finally, with my back to the bottom stair, I place my palms on it and push myself upward until my butt sits on the wooden step. I draw a deep breath. The whole basement dances crazily in the firelight.
I shift my hands to the next stair and press upward. Another step higher, I press up again. I count twenty steps, and by the time I reach halfway, my triceps are aching, my foot is impossibly swollen, and I have to lean forward to keep my head out of the smoke. The servers are now a column of greasy flames. I note that the nearby boxes have also begun to smolder—my time is even shorter than I’d thought. The ceiling, when in view, is black and charred.
I push up onto the next step. The higher I go, the worse the smoke. My lungs rebel and I cough and hack, still pushing higher, aiming for the doorknob that sometimes can be seen within the murk. On the seventeenth step, my eyes sting and my body spasms with racking coughs. My foot hurts so much, and I’m tempted to reach for the doorknob but know it’s still too far—impossibly far. I feel light headed and sleepy. I can’t tell if it’s due to the smoke or because I’m dying, but everything is shadows. I shut my eyes against the irritating fumes and lie back against the stairs.
Suddenly my world brightens, snapping me out of my funk. The boxes have burst into a bonfire, burning like a pile of birch bark. The billows of heat push the smoke away from the staircase, clearing a passage to the door that immediately begins to close. I manage two more steps.
I pause on the nineteenth stair to cough again and slump over the final step onto the landing. The door is to my right. My head is pressed against the cool wood. I watch the smoke slip beneath the door jam. I wait for a series of spasms of coughing to fade and then reach for the doorknob. I twist, lusting after the clean air beyond, for its cool balm.
The doorknob doesn’t budge. Locked.
Boxes tumble from the pile, boxes filled with old computer equipment and books—equipment that probably came
from Assured Destruction and highly flammable books that probably came from Ellie Wise’s house. These now burn against the stairs, blocking the path of anyone wanting to reach the windows. Blocking me.
The solvents explode in a ball of flame, and I shield my face, feeling my hair curl and catching a whiff of its burning.
The fire crackles and roars as it sucks precious oxygen into its hungry throat. I cough again, slumped, weakening as my fist knocks at the door. A cloud envelopes me. I’m going to die. I’m sorry it came to this, and I hate that my mother may never know what happened. Maybe Fenwick will get away with his plans. Maybe Jonny won’t even attend my funeral. I won’t have a chance to make up with my mom. I curl at the landing, lips sucking for air through the crack beneath the door.
The next bright light I see, I presume to be heaven. But this heaven has a creature waving its arms and choking on the heavenly, swirly haze, which isn’t quite white enough to convince me of a celestial origin.
My eyes are filled with tears, so I can’t see well, but when the figure bends closer and says something that’s muffled by the roar of the fire, I make out the identity of my angel. It’s not whom I expect. Not whom I expect at all.
Chapter 22
Peter.
Good, old Peter stares down at me, his face a mask of concern between intermittent coughs. I reach out to him, and he snatches my arm, dragging me from the stairwell and into the hallway. I scream in pain from his grip around my tender wrists. He kneels when we’re several feet into the hall. I fall against his shoulder and draw deep clean breaths of air.
Assured Destruction: The Complete Series Page 13
