by Hunter Shea
“I know, I know. We’re going to get them back.”
“Can we go now?” she asked, sniffling. If she didn’t get in the car right now, she felt like she would lose her mind.
“Yeah, come on.” He left a ten on the table and walked her out of the diner.
She spotted a phone booth and decided to make a quick detour. “I just want to call home, see if anyone answers.”
Maybe they’d never been taken far and returned just after she’d left. Or Gavin had found a way to escape and was at this very moment with Dwight on their couch wondering if she’d been abducted as well.
The phone rang six times, and then the answering machine picked up.
“No luck?” Rob asked, leaning against the booth, a toothpick in his mouth.
“No, but I can retrieve my messages over the phone. Hold on.” She dialed the five-digit code and waited.
“You have one new message.”
Her heart galloped.
Please be Gavin or Dwight. Please.
“Hello, bitch. You have any more complaints you’d like to file? Oh, that’s right, you can’t, can you? Unlike our money back guarantee, there is no policy on getting people back. We apologize for the inconvenience.” The insane laughter that followed drove Rosemary to the brink.
“Shut the fuck up!” she shouted, slamming the phone down again and again until it shattered into sharp pieces. Her brother pulled her out of the booth. Several people who had driven up to the diner were outside of their cars staring at them.
Rosemary couldn’t stop trembling. She fumbled for her car keys that had tumbled to the bottom of her purse, speed walking to the car.
“What happened, Rosemary?” Rob said, almost on her heels.
“We have to get there right away,” she said, grinding her teeth so hard she saw stars. She gunned the engine, put the car in drive, and laid down half the rubber on her tires as she careened onto the ramp. “I’m going to kill every last one of them.”
Rob grinned. “Now that’s what I’m talking about.”
Chapter Eleven
If those crazy bastards from AdventureCo were still calling her, they’d begin to get suspicious if she didn’t start answering the phone. Rosemary worried that they’d suspect she was with the police and make good on their threat.
She kept the speedometer pinned at eighty. Along the way, Rob gave her a tutorial on the various weapons he’d stocked for their mission. He’d gotten his hands on some primo shit (his words) since she’d last seen him, stuff from other countries that would blow a hole through a polar bear. It was all white noise to her right now. As far as she was concerned, there were big guns and little guns and they all had triggers that were easily pulled.
There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation wondering if she’d have the guts to shoot someone. They wanted to play rough. She was ready to play rougher. No one touched a hair on her child’s head and got away with it. No one. She desperately wished Gavin were here with her now. No evil company could stand between united parents and their child.
Rob chain-smoked and talked strategy. If Gavin couldn’t be here, she had to admit her brother was a damn good substitute. Perhaps even better, only because he was slightly crazy and heavily armed.
“You hearing me?” he said, tapping her upper arm.
She nodded, eyes on the road. “Yes. How much farther until the exit?”
He looked down at the map on his lap, his finger tracing the route he’d marked with a highlighter. “Let’s see. We passed exit twenty-nine just back there, so it looks like ten miles. Once we jump off the highway it’ll be another couple of miles on back roads.”
Swallowing hard, she felt the rising patty melt burn her throat.
“We go in with silencers,” Rob continued. “The quieter we can be, the better. No sense bringing the place down on our heads the moment we step inside. You got it?”
“Got it.” The anxiety bubbling up inside of her had her nerves tingling. She willed the old car to go faster, but it started to shimmy alarmingly when she neared ninety.
“Part of stealth mode is not getting pulled over by South Carolina cops. Take it down a notch, sis. You want another coffin nail?”
“God yes.” Kools had never been her smoke of choice, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. The cigarette did little to calm her frayed nerves.
They took the long curving exit onto Route 35, which was just a two-lane road surrounded by red clay and shrubs.
“Go west,” Rob said.
A quarter mile in, they took a right down a narrow, winding road, then a left that dumped them into an empty bowl of cleared land, sparse clumps of weeds growing between cracks in the concrete. It looked like a long-abandoned parking lot, but there were no vacant structures, no evidence of why this spot would have been paved at all.
It was a complete dead end. Rosemary made a U-turn and drove out of the bowl.
“Maybe we should have gone left,” she said.
Rob’s brows scrunched together. “No, according to the map, we need to go right.”
“Well, you saw the same thing I did. There’s nothing there,” she said, unable to mask her agitation.
She wanted to roll down the window and scream, “Dwight, Gavin, where are you? I’m here! I’m here!”
Taking the road on the left brought them to a thick chain roped between two massive trees, a rusted no trespassing sign clamped to the middle of the chain.
“This looks more promising,” Rosemary said.
“It might, but that’s not it.”
Rob had always been so sure of himself to the point of arrogance. Rosemary felt some of the old anger flare up.
She cast him a hard look and he shot back, “Hey, I know how to read a map and this isn’t the place. It’s back there by that lot.”
“But there’s nothing there.”
“And there’s nothing here.”
“There’s that.” She pointed at the sign. “Seems to me AdventureCo is a place that doesn’t want to be seen.”
Rob tossed the map into the back seat. “Which is exactly why this isn’t it. Doesn’t that seem a little too obvious to you? Just do me a favor and circle back. Give me two minutes. If we don’t find anything, we come back here, okay?”
As much as Rosemary wanted to tell him to stuff it, this was his area of expertise. Right now, she was strung tighter than a drumhead. She’d give him two minutes but nothing more.
Rob told her to park just outside the bowl, keeping the car hidden on the access road. He took a gun from the back of his waistband and jumped out of the car. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
“No, I’m coming with you.”
He gave her a lopsided smile. “Recon is best done alone.” He opened the trunk and came back with a handgun with a long silencer screwed onto the end. “Keep this handy, but please look before you shoot. I don’t want to be fragged by friendly fire.”
Running in a crouch, he disappeared before she could say anything. The gun was awfully heavy, the silencer upsetting the balance. Rosemary’s head swiveled on her neck as she kept a close eye on every direction, expecting someone to jump out at any moment.
It wasn’t a small concern that she would shoot her brother by mistake. She remembered to keep her finger on the trigger guard.
She sighed with relief when he came jogging back.
“I was right. Come on, let’s unload the trunk.”
She slung one of the heavy bags over her shoulder. Rob had one on each of his.
“Stay close to me,” he said.
The vacant lot looked just as empty as before. A stray breeze kicked up some dust, forming a tiny cyclone that skittered past them.
“I don’t see anything,” she whispered.
“That’s the whole point.”
There was nowhere to hide, so they strode
across the bowl.
Rosemary wondered what could possibly be out here. AdventureCo had to have a factory making their dangerous toys. How the hell could you hide a factory in an open lot?
Rob stopped and she bumped into him. He pointed to their left. “Right there. You’ve got to be up to some seriously bad shit for this kind of setup.”
All she saw was the jagged stump of what was once a massive tree at the corner of the lot. The stump looked to be about ten feet high, the victim of a hurricane or lightning strike or something frightful cooked up by Mother Nature.
“A tree stump?”
He tugged her along. “Yeah, only it’s not real.”
When they got to it, he grabbed her hand and laid it flat against the stump. It was smooth and cold.
Like plastic.
“What?” she said.
Now he pulled her around to the back of the stump. He moved his hands along the fake bark, and one of the wedges slid aside, revealing a keyhole.
“This is too Alice in Wonderland for me,” she said. “You mean to tell me we have to go through this stump and AdventureCo is down there?”
“Yep. Only this time, you’re bringing the Mad Hatter with you.” He took a square case from his pocket. She remembered it as the lock-picking kit he’d bought at a head shop when they were teens. Over the course of that summer, he’d taught himself how to open almost any lock. She worried then that he was turning into a thief.
Maybe that’s how he has the money to buy all the guns, she thought. It didn’t matter how he got them. Not now.
There was a faint click and a door opened up. Rob darted his head in and out quickly.
“Just like my place. There’s a ladder leading down, but it’s too dark for me to make out what’s at the bottom.”
Rosemary looked around. “You think they have cameras out here? They could be watching us right now.” She didn’t need to add that they could be walking into an ambush.
Rob took a deep breath, getting a flashlight from one of his bags. “I checked and didn’t see any, but they could have one of those new tiny cameras anywhere. If you want, we could head back and get the police to raid the place.”
She was pretty sure the police would deny there was anything out here, just like the mayor had. Plus, if AdventureCo could see what was going on up top, the moment they spied cop cars, Dwight and Gavin were doomed.
“No,” she said. “Let’s do this.”
They headed down the rungs. The door closed on its own, shutting out the daylight. Rosemary said a silent prayer, especially for forgiveness, because if she was successful, she was going to have blood on her hands before the day was done.
Chapter Twelve
The climb down was longer than the one to Rob’s bunker. When they got to the bottom, motion sensors made a set of overhead lights snap on, startling them so much, they had their guns out and ready to blast the bulbs. They looked down a long hallway that looked like the interior of a typical office building, minus the doors leading to offices. There was a set of double doors at the end of the hall.
Rob kept his voice low, “Looks like there’s only one way to go. I’ll take point.”
Rosemary’s heart beat so hard, she thought it would crawl up her throat and sprint out of her mouth. She was sure her brother could hear it echoing in the bright hallway.
She pictured her family, focusing on them and not her fear, walking slowly and quietly behind Rob.
The doors had another lock. Rob took out his kit. “Watch our backs.”
This lock was giving him a little more trouble. His breath hissed between his teeth.
Where are the people? Rosemary wondered. The place was too clean to be just a front. But it was so quiet.
“You know, I’m sorry it took something like this to see you again,” Rob said, eyes squinted, working the picks with his calloused fingers.
“I’m sorry, too.”
“I know you all think I lost my mind.”
Rosemary smiled. “Yeah, well, maybe a little.”
“Kind of a good thing I did, huh?”
She hefted the pistol in her hand.
“I guess it is.”
She heard a soft pop, and he leaned his sweaty forehead on the door. “We’re in.” He stood up, slinging the bags back onto his shoulders. Holding up three fingers, he gave a silent countdown.
On three, he opened the door.
The blast was deafening.
Rosemary’s face was splashed with something hot and terrible smelling, her ears ringing.
She looked in horror at where her brother’s head had been just a second before. Blood spurted from the interior of his exposed neck for just a moment before his body hit the ground.
* * * *
Without thinking, Rosemary raised her gun and fired blindly, pulling the trigger over and over until the gun was empty, the silenced shots making whup, whup sounds as they burst from the barrel. Her body jolted with each depression of the trigger, expecting return fire to do to her what had been done to Rob.
Legs trembling, she was shocked to see two men face down on the floor, blood pooling around them. They wore black suits and shiny dress shoes. Somehow, she’d managed to hit them both in the chest, the exit wounds ruining their suit jackets.
There was no one else around, but that wouldn’t last long. The men didn’t use silencers, their shots loud enough to wake the dead. Kneeling by Rob’s cooling body, Rosemary fumbled in her bag for a fresh clip. She found four, jamming the other three in her waistband.
She couldn’t bring herself to touch Rob, her tears falling on his bloody shoulder. Turning away, she saw the splattered remains of his head on the wall and floor. She threw up so hard she thought she felt a rib crack. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she willed her legs to move. She had two choices: the long corridor leading to her left or the one leading to her right. Again, there were no doors.
There was no way she could walk past the mess of her brother’s head, so she chose the right, stepping over the fallen men. Rob had talked about stealth, but that ship had sailed. She ran as fast as she could, breathing heavily. There was a thick, steel door at the end of this one. Lock picking was not one of her skill sets.
Looking in the bag, she wrapped her hands around one of the things she’d managed to listen to Rob explain about during the drive, what was to be used when shit went south.
Hoping not to be hit by a ricocheting bullet, she fired at the lock in the door until it popped open. Once it did, she pulled the pin on the flash-bang grenade and chucked it through the opening and closed her eyes.
Whoever was on the other side would be blinded and disoriented. Wasting no time, she stepped inside and saw three men, also in suits, staggering. She quickly shot them each in the head.
Just like smoking, firing a weapon was like riding a bike. She’d always been a good shot.
Through one man’s blood smear on the window behind him, Rosemary saw that she had truly arrived, and it took her breath away.
Chapter Thirteen
She looked out at the tremendous underground factory. Machines and conveyor belts pushed out novelty product after novelty product. There were rockets made of balsa wood and rubber bands, X-ray specs with red and white swirls on the lenses, giant ghosts that were nothing but cheap sheets, little plastic tanks that would one day hold disappointing sea serpents, and thinly pressed soldiers, tanks, and planes that would upset every little boy who bought them.
And there, just below her, was the big cardboard-cutting machine, spitting out nuclear sub after nuclear sub.
The hum of the machinery thrummed from her feet to her teeth. The factory was inordinately busy, meeting the demand of children everywhere who craved the wonders advertised in their comic books.
Except there were no people running the machines.
Using her sleeve, she wiped most of the blood away so there was no square inch of the factory floor hidden from her. It all ran by itself. She knew that robotics had come a long way and had taken over a ton of manual tasks, but didn’t they still need people to run them and make sure things went according to plan?
The little room overlooking the factory was another dead end.
Red lights popped from the ceiling and flashed, a siren going off. Rosemary jumped, pulling the trigger and firing into the glass. It shattered with an ear-splitting crash, shards cascading over the equipment below. Someone burst through the door behind her. She swiveled around and fired, catching the man in the mouth, his teeth flying so hard, they buried themselves in the wall. His body slumped against the door, shutting it. It vibrated as someone slammed into it from the other side. The door didn’t move, held fast by the dead weight.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
There was only one way to go. She poked her head through the broken viewing window and looked down. Just seven feet below her was a metal gangway. Tossing the heavy bag over first, she leaped over the sill, landing on her feet, a sharp pain rocketing from her ankles to her knees and hips.
There was shouting above as more men worked to get the door open.
She was going to need a bigger gun. She took an assault rifle out of the bag. To test it, she fired at the nuclear sub machine. Bright sparks flew upward as metal clanked and stopped.
“Where the hell is my family?”
She worried that this was all there was and the Dwight and Gavin had been taken somewhere else. Running down the gangway, she shot at each machine, shattering the mechanisms that spewed out their crappy, dangerous merchandise.
“There!” someone shouted.
She glanced up. Several men had gotten through and spotted her. They raised their guns and fired. Rosemary catapulted off the gangway and rolled behind one of the big machines. The bullets from their pistols impotently bounced off it.
Taking a chance, she returned fire with the rifle, catching one man in the chest, nearly slicing him in half. He didn’t even have time to scream before falling onto the factory floor.
