Fight or Flight

by Natalie J. Damschroder

  There were no doors in this endless hallway. Lights went on ahead of them, off behind them, like in some sci-fi movie. Regan didn’t see cameras, but knew they were there. She drew her pistol and readied herself. But it didn’t ease her apprehension.

  Tyler punched a code into a keypad at the end of the hall. It beeped but stayed red. He hesitated, then punched again, a little slower. The same thing happened.

  “Did he change the code?” she asked, looking back over her shoulder.

  “Apparently.” He frowned and thought, then punched something completely different. This time the light flashed green, and they could hear the hum of the electronic release. He pulled the door open quickly.

  Regan stayed behind him. He could catch the first wave of black-clad goons.

  But again, there was no one there.

  “I don’t like this, Tyler.” They were now in a small antechamber with more halls branching in three different directions. “Where is everyone?”

  “I told you, he sent his entire—”

  “But he has no security here? No scientists? Who’s working on the project?”

  Tyler nodded to the right hallway. “The labs are down there. About two hundred yards, then down a level. They wouldn’t be up here. And he never had reason to need much security.”

  But he couldn’t be stupid enough not to know he needed it now, Regan thought. Not when he’d kidnapped her daughter.

  “Which way is Kelsey going to be?” she asked.

  Tyler hesitated. “I think that way.” He pointed left. “It’s more medical. Exam rooms and stuff. There’s no room to the right where she could be secured.”

  “Lead on.”

  They moved through what felt like miles of corridors, all looking the same. Regan memorized their turns, years of planning escape routes making it easy. Tyler stopped at the top of a dead-end hallway. “Down here, I think. There’s a room at the end like a bedroom, a kid’s room. He wouldn’t tell me what it was for.”

  Regan rolled her eyes. “And you’re just putting it together now?”

  “I only saw it once, on the first tour he gave me,” he growled. “I forgot.”

  Regan ran down the hall toward the door at the end. She zeroed in on the handle, knowing it would be locked, knowing she couldn’t get in, but her heart speeding up and her breath coming in a rush nonetheless.

  To her shock, the handle turned when she grasped it. The door pushed open…

  Into an empty room.

  It was a little girl’s room, just as Tyler had said. She felt him come up behind her, but couldn’t see or say anything through the sudden swelling in her throat and tears blurring her vision.

  She wasn’t here.

  “It’s okay.” Tyler squeezed her shoulders, tugged her back. “We’ll find her.”

  “Yeah?” Regan rubbed her sleeve vigorously across her face. “How big is this place?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “So where do we freaking look?”

  They both froze at the echo of a muffled shout. It was deep and male, not Kelsey, but it could be because of her. They dashed back up the hall and turned right, moving in unison. Regan’s feet seemed to beat out her daughter’s name. Kels. Sey. Kels. Sey. Kels. Sey.

  Tyler got to the corner a split second before she did and slammed to a stop, jerking back and pushing her behind him. She could hear footsteps and voices now, something about blood and centrifuges. They were going the other way. She waited, impatiently, until Tyler peeked around the wall and nodded. They hurried, a little slower and more quietly now. Tyler pointed to a door halfway down the hall.

  But then Regan heard a scrape above her. She stopped and looked up. Nothing moved, but she heard the scrape again.

  “Tyler!” she hissed in a loud whisper. He halted and came back.

  “What?”

  She pointed upward and mimed him lifting her to the ceiling. He nodded. She stuck her gun back in her waistband, stepped into his hands, and pushed up through the tile. There was nothing in front of her, but as she turned a blur of movement warned her too late. Something slammed into the side of her head. Lights exploded in her vision and she crumpled. Tyler barely caught her, lowering her to the floor with a curse. He leapt up and caught the edge of the ceiling, but his weight pulled it down with a squeal of metal and shower of dust. Regan heard a small scream. She scrambled to her feet as Tyler lunged again, pulling down more of the ceiling, and a body came crashing through to the floor.

  “Kelsey!” a voice bellowed from inside the room next to them.

  “Oh my God.” Regan rushed to the coughing, gasping body and realized it was her daughter, hidden in pieces of acoustical tile and twisted metal. “Kelsey.”

  “Mo—” cough “—Mom?” Kelsey reached up a hand and Regan hauled her to her feet. “What the hell?” She coughed again and squinted at Tyler. “Tyler?”

  “Are you okay?” Regan patted her down until Kelsey pushed her away. “Thank God we found you.” She leaned against the wall when her noodly legs tried to give out, but kept one hand on Kelsey, not entirely convinced she was here, safe—at least for the moment—and whole. “What did he do to you?”

  “I’m fine. Help me get Tom out.”

  But Tom apparently hadn’t been willing to listen impotently to the commotion. More tile came down, and he plummeted to the floor in front of the door. There was more coughing and choking and hugs—and then running.

  “We’re all going to get lung cancer,” Kelsey wheezed.

  “If we don’t get a bullet in the back first.” Regan cringed and reached back to pull her along by the elbow. “Faster.” Now that the initial wave of relief had passed, being reunited with Kelsey poured strength into her like concrete, reinforced by rebar of determination.

  Tyler in the lead, the group pounded through the maze of hallways back toward the entrance they’d come through, but crashed to a halt as they approached the last doorway. Tyler flung out his arms as if to shield them, but Regan pushed up next to him.

  “The prodigal son returns.” Archie stood in front of a group of well-armed men. The soldiers Regan had been expecting all along.

  Tyler glanced down at her. “Told you.”

  She shrugged. “Okay, you were right. But I told you, too.” She waved her hand at the guns.

  “Yeah. Sorry. I guess they recovered a little.”

  “Ya think?”

  “A child’s betrayal is the most painful,” Archie said. He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked forward on his toes. He looked like a lecturing professor, but sadder. Regan saw no signs of madness or fervor, and wondered if that made him more or less dangerous.

  “You betrayed me first, Dad.” Tyler didn’t sound like he was still angsting over it. “You think you can disappear without a word, then drag me back into your pathetic life without regrets?”

  “Pathetic?” Archie’s eyebrows rose, and Regan could see what Tyler would look like in twenty years. “Hardly pathetic, son. Groundbreaking. The stuff for history books. I’ll transform not only the way we live, but the way we protect ourselves. War as we know it will no longer exist.”

  “You’re so delusional,” Tyler said. “First off, you think you can get away with kidnapping and detaining a couple of kids? Or murdering them, which I’m sure was your plan once you didn’t need them anymore.”

  Archie looked appalled. “I would never kill them!”

  “You tried to kill Regan.”

  “No, she misunderstood. They were supposed to bring her back here. If they could,” he added in a mutter.

  Regan had had enough. “Look. We don’t need to go through the whole Scooby-Doo scene here.” She pulled her pistol and aimed it at Archie’s head. “Let us out.”

  There were a couple of chuckles behind Archie, but he didn’t look amused. “Don’t be foolish, Ms. Miller.”

  “Oh, I’m not. See, you put yourself in a bottleneck. You’ve got four machine guns back there, but only two can shoot without plowing down y
ou and their own men. I can get three shots off before anyone else fires. That kills you.”

  “But they will fire, and you’ll be dead, as well.”

  “Yeah, and so will Kelsey. I’d rather have her dead than part of your program,” she lied, her heart clenching at the words of bravado, but her hands steady on the pistol. Cold determination had set in the instant she saw the men, and now it sank down into her, icing out everything else.

  “Hey!” Kelsey cried indignantly.

  Regan didn’t waver. “Let us out.”

  Tyler pulled his own weapon. “You gonna kill your own son, Dad? Can you watch any of us die right in front of you?” He waited, but there was no response. “I don’t think you can. You never liked that part of the business. The reality of death, an inescapable aspect of being in the military. You know what, though?” He took one step forward, then another. The group ahead of them backed up a step. “I was STT. I’m pretty used to death.” He yanked on the slide of his pistol, chambering a round, then aimed again at his father’s head. “You want to risk it?”

  Archie backed up a little more, but having four guys behind him made retreating problematic. He stopped, eyed his son and Regan, then gave a tiny nod. “Hand to hand.” Then he stepped aside.

  The hallway filled with grunts and thuds as the guards surged forward, meeting Tyler with gloved fists and the butts of rifles. He went down on one knee and was swarmed.

  But Regan didn’t stand helplessly by, watching her future be destroyed and waiting her turn. She let out a screaming yell, reversed her pistol in her hand, and started slugging away. Her first blow landed on the skull of a guy bent over Tyler and he dropped like the proverbial ton of bricks. Tyler surged to his feet and slammed an elbow into another’s solar plexus.

  And then the corridor was a haze of black uniforms and flying fists, warlike bellows and grunts of pain. Tom and Kelsey didn’t hang back. Regan saw flashes of color among the black. At first she tried to shield her daughter, but that made them both more vulnerable, and as long as the kids remained on their feet, she concentrated on her own fight. Time stretched, and minutes or hours passed with pain sweeping over her in waves, from the glancing blow on her right cheek to the ache in her hand where she clutched the pistol, to a kick she took in the left kidney.

  Then, suddenly, it was over. The soldiers were on the floor, she, Kelsey, and Tom were not. Tyler held his father against the wall with a forearm across his throat.

  “Get out of here,” he shouted at them. “Call the police.”

  Regan stood in the hall, her chest heaving. She looked from him to Kelsey and Tom, who were already near the door. They could get out easily now. She took a step that way.

  But then she looked back. Tyler appeared invincible, even oozing blood, but the men at his feet would not stay there for long. And there could be more. She couldn’t leave without him.

  “Go,” she told Kelsey and Tom. Her heart split in two. But her daughter, her mature, bright, brave daughter, only nodded.

  “Be fast,” was all Kelsey said. Then she grabbed Tom’s hand and ran.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Archie’s pleading guilty to the kidnapping and to misuse of government funds,” Ben told Regan on the phone a few weeks later. Tension she hadn’t been aware of fell away, and the rush left her light-headed. She sank onto her sofa and lay back, suddenly without the strength to hold her body upright.

  “What about all the goons?”

  Ben chuckled. “We’ve gotten them all taken care of, don’t worry. I have a lot of connections. There are no strays. And the facility under the park, which was originally supposed to be a Cold War bomb shelter, has been closed up.”

  “They’re going to have the data,” she said. Her neck ached. Maybe not all the tension had disappeared. “The government. They’ll know about Kelsey, and—”

  “Nope.” Ben’s voice went gruff, the way it always did when he got emotional. “It was all destroyed. I supervised the operation personally. Mine, too. My granddaughter will never be in danger again.”

  Regan knew that was impossible to promise. There had been too many people, too many years, and today’s storage systems allowed easy backups and redundancies. But she couldn’t live the rest of her life the way she’d lived the past eighteen years. If Ben said he’d destroyed it all, she’d hope it was true and move on.

  “Thank you, Ben.”

  “How is she, by the way? We talked to her yesterday, but it’s so hard to tell.”

  Regan smiled. “She’s great. Back in her routine like nothing ever happened.”

  Not totally true. Kelsey had insisted on returning to Whetstone immediately, not wanting to derail her education before it even started. Van had taken a little longer to convince her parents, but managed to get back mid-week. Tom’s coach was livid at his disappearance and had benched him, and his father had stayed in a hotel for two weeks, shadowing his son and making sure he was truly safe before deciding things would be okay.

  Regan thought the transition back was too abrupt, and expected nightmares, jumpiness, and clingy behavior, but she drove down to Whetstone twice, and both girls seemed as close to fine as possible. They talked about Kelsey’s father, and except for a lingering sadness, Kelsey seemed far lighter than she ever had in her life, now that the burdens they’d lived under were gone.

  “We’d like to have you for Thanksgiving,” Ben said now. “House is still a bit shot up, but…that is, if you can handle…my wife tells me I’m being an insensitive prat. I’m sorry.”

  “Prat?”

  “She’s reading Harry Potter again. Anyway, we’d like to see you for the holiday.”

  “Why don’t you come here?” she said, and he quickly accepted.

  She hung up a few minutes later and returned to her home office, where she’d been juggling the bills that had piled up. It was amazing how wrong the stupid little things that made up a life could go in eleven days. She’d lost her job at the club, who she hadn’t bothered to call once, not even right after the attack. They would have been understanding if she had, she was sure, but when she’d “disappeared,” they’d cut her off. She’d managed to find a new job, a better one, but she hadn’t gotten her first paycheck yet and things were getting dire.

  The front door opened and she jerked, adrenaline spiking, before she heard Tyler’s voice. Dammit. She rubbed her forehead, suddenly just as exhausted as she had been when she and Tyler emerged from the tunnels into the bright sunlight in the park. Kelsey and Tom had gotten the police there in record time—must have been a slow crime day—and they’d found four trussed guards, a sedated Bulldozer, and a furious and talkative Archie Sloane tied up in the main corridor.

  Tyler came into the room and bent to kiss her. “You okay?”

  “Ben just called.” He sat on the futon and listened as she told him about the conversation. “So you shouldn’t have to testify against your father or anything.”

  “Good.” He looked pensive, but didn’t say anything more. Regan wondered if he was ever going to let her in. He’d stayed in California for a while to help Ben and Jeanne ferret out the traitor and manage cleanup, and had returned to his house next door just a few days ago. Somehow they’d fallen into a comfortable routine, coming into each other’s houses and sharing meals and sleeping arrangements as if they’d been together for years, without sharing the important things.

  Like how they felt about each other.

  “You scared me when you came in the door,” Regan said.

  “I’m sorry. Should I knock?”

  “No, I need to adjust. It’s been very weird not having to…you know.” She blew out a breath. “I’m still taking six different routes home from the grocery store.”

  “You’ll get there. It’s a lot of training to undo.” His mouth turned down and he studied the carpet. “We haven’t talked about the last moments—you know, in the tunnel.”

  “I know.”

  When he lifted his head, she was shocked t
o see torment in his eyes. “Did you stay because you thought I was going to kill my father?”

  Regan’s mouth fell open. “What? No! The thought never crossed my mind!”

  “Then why?”

  “Oh, man, we should have talked about this sooner.” She laughed. “I stayed because you needed me more than Kelsey did. I couldn’t leave you with all those guys and risk losing you.”

  He slumped in relief. “I didn’t bring it up because I was afraid of the answer. I know you didn’t fully trust me, but…” He shook his head. “If you thought that about me, I was afraid there was no chance for us.”

  Regan got up from the desk chair and sat next to him on the futon, weaving her arm around his and threading their fingers together. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this trust thing.”

  “I understand, Regan, I do.” But she could tell by the heaviness with which he said it that understanding wasn’t enough.

  “The thing is, I did trust you,” she admitted, the words coming more easily than they should have. “All along. I convinced myself I couldn’t, but every step of the way, no matter how much I questioned you, I gave you far more than I would have if that trust hadn’t been real.”

  But how she felt about Tyler was only one small part of the equation. The rest was so much more difficult.

  His hand tightened on hers. “And?”

  “And what?” she hedged.

  “I’m glad. It means a lot. But it’s not enough.”

  She sighed. “Tyler, I’m a mess.”

  “You’re not the only one.”

  “Seriously, though.” She stood and started pacing, ignoring the déjà vu. She’d had it a lot since she came home. “You’re rebuilding. You’ve opened your security firm and have three clients already. I’m working a desk at an insurance company, which, by the way, is not my life’s ambition. I don’t know what my life’s ambition is, now that Kelsey seems like she’s going to be okay.” She stopped. Her eyes filled with tears. “She and Tom are engaged.”