Fight or Flight

by Natalie J. Damschroder

  “He gave me a special code. Even though I left, I don’t think he’d have changed it. He has a serious sentimental streak, and I think he always hoped the prodigal son would return.” He said it all absently, as if he’d expected her to ask and had prepared his answer, but didn’t have his mind on it.

  “Tyler, what is going on?”

  He seemed to come to a decision. “Look, Regan, I don’t like ‘if we don’t survive’ speeches.”

  “I wasn’t going to make one.”

  His lips quirked upward for half a second. “I didn’t expect you to. And I plan for us to come out unscathed.”

  A tongue of fear stretched inside her, but she smothered it quickly, not willing to be distracted. This was going to be difficult enough without latent insecurities rearing up.

  “I plan for the same thing,” she said.

  “But I have to say it anyway.”

  She knew what was coming and didn’t want to hear it. “You’ve already said it.”

  “No. Not like this.” He stilled, his eyes locked on hers. “Over the last two years—”

  A new fear flared. “I know, Tyler. You’ve watched us, good mother, struggle in the face of unknown danger, blah-dee-blah-blah. You fell in love with me, went against employer orders—”

  “Will you shut up and listen!”

  Her mouth snapped closed.

  “Thank you. Over the last two years I’ve watched you live the loneliest life I could ever imagine.”

  Okay. Unexpected. She could have told him she wasn’t lonely because she had Kelsey.

  “No matter what happens in there,” he continued, “your life is about to become even lonelier.”

  What the hell?

  “Kelsey will go back to school, and the center of your life will go away. You’ll have to learn a whole new way of living. Of loving.”

  Now she understood where he was going, and apprehension flared higher. “I don’t know if I can make you a part of that, Tyler.”

  “I know.” He took a step toward her. “Like I said, I can’t say anything to make you believe. Make you trust me. Maybe the only way I could is to die for you.”

  She swallowed, hard. “I don’t—”

  “I’m not going to die for you, Regan.”

  She stopped talking, her mouth open. “You’re—not?” What a stupid thing to say. You don’t want him to die!

  “No. I’m going to live for you.” He caught her around the waist and pulled her against him, reached overhead to grab a pipe running the width of the ceiling, and yanked down.

  The entire floor started to sink.

  Kelsey stared at the door in front of her, open a crack, then at the plastic pick-up sticks in her hands.

  “Well, that was easy.” Too easy, of course. She should never have been able to pick a dead bolt with a couple of plastic sticks. She remembered a TV show she saw once, where a guy was kidnapped and put in a cage. The cage opened suddenly and he ran, with the other caged guy telling him it was a trap. He was right, of course. The smart guy, who stayed put, lived. The dumb guy, who “escaped,” was hunted and killed.

  She imagined Archie stalking her with a shotgun in the brilliantly lit corridor outside and laughed softly. That wasn’t going to happen, she was sure. But she was wary, too. She’d expected him to secure the room better.

  The sticks went back into her left rear pocket with the others. The marbles filled both her front pockets, and the Barbie legs stuck out her right rear pocket, toes down, for easy access. She stood against the wall, listening. No footsteps. No voices. No hum of machinery or any other sound.

  It was going to be so easy to get caught.

  “Oh, well, nothin’ to do but to do it!” she murmured in Van’s voice, and slipped out into the empty hall.

  Her door was near the end of the corridor, so she could only go in one direction. There were about a hundred feet of blank space before a side hall branched off to the left, and no doors in between. Taking careful steps, she went a few feet, checking how loud her shoes were. Luckily, they didn’t squeak on the linoleum floor, and she risked going faster.

  In the absence of floor plans, she hurried up and down countless passageways, all seeming to intersect and circle back on themselves. They were all identically white and brightly lit, and most contained only one door, unmarked, no windows. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, either, which she found as weird as the hallways.

  I bet he meant me to get out and see this, she thought. Wear her down, convince her not to try to escape for real. Well, he had seriously underestimated her.

  She started trying doors, unsurprised to find them locked. Her sticks wouldn’t open them, either, also not a surprise. But she wasn’t giving up. Only a few minutes after she started, she found herself back at the open end of the hallway to her room. There was only one direction she hadn’t explored: up. Her room’s ceiling was solid plaster like the walls, but out here it was acoustical tiles. She jumped up and tipped the one above her enough to glimpse inside. As she’d expected, the lights set into the ceiling illuminated the crawl space above, too. She knew if she spread her weight she could move around up there, but getting up was another story. The metal braces wouldn’t hold her.

  She quickly did the jumping/tipping thing in all four directions before she found what she was looking for—a wood support beam next to the edge of the metal brace. She jumped harder, moving the tile away from the beam, then again, this time catching hold of the wood.

  “Dammit.” She hadn’t thought it through. The angle was too tight for her to pull herself up. She dropped, toed off her sneakers, and tied the laces together so she could drape them around her neck. Then she peeled off her socks and stuffed them into the shoes.

  Better. She turned so she faced the opening, and this time jumped with her hands facing backwards. This was harder, so it took her three tries before she was high enough and timed it well enough to grab the beam again. With her hands twisted, her grip was weaker. She swung her legs quickly up in front of her, using her toes only on the edge of the brace. It gave slightly under her weight, but she didn’t hang long. Her body arched until she’d cleared the edges of the opening, and she rolled to her right, landing on her stomach on the inside of the ceiling.

  “Yes!” She pumped her fist. A man’s voice suddenly echoed down the hall, and she hurried to replace the open tile. It dropped neatly into its spot as someone walked below her. She heard only one set of footsteps, so who was he talking to?

  It took her a moment to realize the man was Bulldozer, and he was singing.

  She held her breath, but he crossed below her and went left, not right and the direction of her room. She heard a door open and close, then silence again.

  Moving slowly, like a spider, and trying to keep near the rafters where the anchors were strongest, she headed in his direction.

  When she heard Bulldozer humming below her again, she silently lifted a tile out just enough to peer into the room below. Her gasp was loud in her ears, but neither Bulldozer nor the other man in the room seemed to hear.

  It looked like an examination room in a doctor’s office. Bulldozer leaned over a counter, playing with some kind of medical-looking tool, and on the exam table in the center of the room…

  Lay Tom.

  “That’s not special,” Regan told Tyler as they descended into darkness. “Anyone could pull that pipe.” Focus on the silly details, not the churning nausea building with every inch we drop.

  “True.” He held on to her even though he didn’t have to. The floor was very stable in its movement, very smooth. She didn’t pull away. Heat seemed to be the antidote to churning nausea. At least for a few seconds.

  “The next step is the special one,” he said. The floor glided to a stop with a gap of about four feet between it and the bottom of the wall above. Tyler ducked through, stepping down onto another white-painted concrete floor. Regan followed, and as soon as her weight was off the platform, it rose again, taking her veneer of
calm with it. What if they had to get back out that way, fast?

  Focus on the… This was more what Regan had expected. Smaller than the one above, this room had six visible cameras, an intercom set into one wall, and a panel beneath a computer monitor. Her muscles tensed against the feeling of being watched, braced for a loudspeaker to shout at them or something, but nothing happened.

  “How does your father fund all this?” she asked, not caring but still trying to distract herself. Her free hand clenched. She unclenched it, but it curled right back up of its own accord.

  “I have no idea.” He dropped her hand and turned his back to stand at the computer. Regan immediately put her hand on his shoulder—he wasn’t going to shut her out now!—but he was immovable. She moved up to stand next to him and watched him rapidly type a series of letters and numbers, sending him from one screen to another.

  “Don’t start lying to me again, Tyler,” she warned, the edge in her voice betraying her nerves.

  “I’m not.”

  The lights dimmed. He kept typing. A motor started up with a whining, spinning sound, somewhere behind the wall they faced. Her nerves revved with it until she thought she’d lift off the ground on her own.

  “You are.”

  His lips pressed together. Eyes still fixed on the screen he said, “I think he was still working on some government projects.”

  Holy crap. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to tell her where his father got the money. “The government has sanctioned all this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They knew all along what he was doing?” Her voice went shrill. “What he planned for my daughter?”

  “I doubt it.” This time his voice was less tight. His body relaxed an inch, projecting relief that dampened Regan’s own tension. The computer screen flashed three times, then a big black box came up saying, “Welcome Home, Son.” He grimaced, his eyes flicking sideways at her, then back to the screen. “Told you I’d still be able to get in.”

  “Good for you.” For the moment, she was focused on her anger. “The Harrisons told the Air Force what they thought Archie’s plans were. Did they just overlook it?” She didn’t need Tyler to answer. Of course they did. There was no reason for them not to, especially if they thought they could control Archie and get what they wanted from the immunity program. The entire fricking government was against her.

  “We are so screwed.” She spun and gripped the rail surrounding the hydraulic shaft for the platform they’d just descended on. Implications cascaded over her, pummeling her hope that soon this would all be over. “Even if we get her out of there, they’ll just keep coming after us.”

  “No.” Tyler’s hands closed over her shoulders. “There’s no ‘if.’ We will get her out. And then we’ll call the police and he’ll go to jail for kidnapping and you can both start living a normal life.”

  Her shoulders dropped under his grip. Her hands released the rail. “I don’t know what a normal life is.”

  “You’ll create one.”

  The computer behind them beeped and a rumble came from their right. She turned. The wall was opening, a thick, steel, reinforced vault-type wall. She waited, expecting more black-clad action figures to come jogging through, ready to spray them with machine-gun fire. But nothing happened.

  With a deep breath and a hand on her churning stomach, Regan followed Tyler into the darkness.

  Kelsey lay in the dark ceiling, incredulous terror paralyzing her. How had they gotten him? Why? What were they doing?

  The paralysis was good, because it kept her from slamming through the tiles to the room below, and from screaming at the top of her lungs, which she somehow would have managed despite the lack of air. The screams reverberated in her head, though, until something snapped, and hysteria shut off like flicking a switch.

  You’re his only help. She slowly sucked in a long, silent breath. Lights danced at the edges of her vision, but she heard her mother’s voice: Never leap until you know where all your nets are. Okay. She could do this. Observe, assess, plan. Her vision sharpened like a camera lens.

  Bulldozer was busy at the counter with something she couldn’t see, so she watched Tom’s chest rising and falling in a very slow rhythm. He’d probably been drugged, which would make it difficult to get him out of here. Which she would. Don’t leave any option but success. That one was her own.

  Confidence seeped back into her, despite the obstacle. Yes, that was good—this was an obstacle. Thinking of it that way made it easier to be analytical. So her original plan—to find the exit, get out, come back with help—totally blown. She couldn’t leave without Tom. What if they had Van, too? She thought of crawling around in the ceiling trying to find her friend, trying to get two drugged people out of here, and blackness pressed down on her.

  Don’t leave any option but success. And don’t accept “maybe” problems, either. She’d deal with what was in front of her. Tom. She waited, watching, her heart squeezing with love and despair as he lay motionless below her. Impervious to her attempts to mind-meld with him and jolt him awake. If only her mother was here—God, she hoped she was okay.

  Kelsey’s shoulders screamed from her cramped, half-supported, half-leaning position as she lay still, trying to plot her next move. The door opened and Archie walked in. She couldn’t see him, but recognized his voice right away.

  “How is he?”

  Bulldozer looked over his shoulder at Tom sprawled on the table. “Still out. Don’t know how much they gave him, but he should have been waking up by now.”

  Kelsey’s breath caught. What was wrong?

  “Give him a stimulant. I don’t want to delay this phase of our project.”

  What? Tom was part of all this? No, he couldn’t be. That was far too coincidental. And…and he’d been sick, she remembered. He’d caught Van’s cold and joked he hadn’t even had the benefit of making out with her first. So what was this guy talking about?

  “Don’t you want to make sure the girl’s blood will work, first?”

  Archie stepped forward into Kelsey’s vision, his hands in his lab coat pockets. “That’s completely separate. We’re running three phases of this program now. The girl’s blood can take us down one road, but we’ve got to analyze the mother’s before we proceed with phase one-A, the original plan. Assuming they can bring her in, of course. She’s been such trouble.” He tsked, sending a new wave of pride and fury through Kelsey. That’s right, asshole.

  “We’ve already injected Mr. Johnson with the original compound. His system will process it within two days. We can mate them within a week after, and the child, phase three, will be the ultimate achievement.”

  “I don’t think the girl will go along with this.”

  Stop calling me the girl! Kelsey was so outraged by what she was hearing she wanted to rip off Archie’s head. This was so…so…diabolical!

  “The girl will go along with anything, once she has her boy toy in residence with her. She won’t know what else is happening.”

  “How can you be sure they’ll—you know?” Bulldozer lifted Tom’s arm from where it hung down next to the table and injected him with something, probably the stimulant. The men watched him in silence for a minute before he stirred.

  “If they don’t, we’ll do it manually. But it will be considerably easier if they do. Don’t worry. They’re teenagers. They won’t be able to help themselves.” Archie jumped back as Tom suddenly rolled to his side and vomited on the floor.

  My poor baby. Kelsey wished she were down there, helping him. He was going to be so scared and confused when he realized what was going on. But if she tried, they’d just lock them both up again.

  Tom rolled onto his back and opened his eyes. They locked right onto Kelsey’s face. She quickly put her finger to her lips. He took in the room, the men, the syringe still in Bulldozer’s hand, and shoved himself off the table with a roar.

  “Where is she, you bastards?”

  Unfortunately, he was still unstabl
e. His wild swing missed both men and he toppled onto the floor. Bulldozer caught him before his head connected and tossed him back onto the table. Tom retched again, then tears squeezed out from beneath his closed eyelids. Answering tears dripped down Kelsey’s cheeks. I’m sorry, baby, so sorry.

  “I’ll kill you,” Tom whispered. The men laughed.

  “Leave him here until he stabilizes,” Archie told Bulldozer. “No sense getting more vomit in Miss Miller’s room. It won’t be conducive to romance.”

  “I’ll bring him some food. Should help.”

  “Excellent. Now, with the blood sample you drew…” There was a click of the lock, then Archie’s voice faded with both sets of footsteps down the hall.

  Tom jumped to his feet on the table and reached for Kelsey. She stuck her hand down through to grab his, but they couldn’t reach any farther unless she moved, and there wasn’t time.

  “They’re going to find me gone,” she whispered urgently. “I’ll find the exit and come back for you.”

  “No, I’ll come with you!”

  “You can’t, the ceiling won’t hold you. I mean it! I’ll be back soon.” She tugged her hand free and more tears fell at the rip inside her. “Do they have Van?”

  “No, she’s back home. I talked to her—well, I don’t know when, but it was shortly before they took me. Kelsey, what—”

  “No time! We’ll do all that later.” Before she lost her resolve, she pulled back and replaced the tile, then started crawling. New goal, she told herself, trying to focus. But she couldn’t shake the fear that she was never going to get them out of here.

  When they entered, the dark corridor lights automatically came on, this time without Tyler’s command. Regan spotted motion sensors and assumed they sent a signal back to security or the main office or whatever. Tyler strode confidently down the hallway, apparently not worried about being heard or seen.

  Regan couldn’t believe they were doing this. Everything told her it was a trap.