Escape

by Francine Pascal

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Ed snapped. He didn’t care if Jake was watching. This was the second time Tatiana had started talking in these annoyingly cryptic terms about Gaia, and it was truly starting to get on his nerves.

  “Nothing.” Tatiana replied with a reassuring smile. “Nothing, I just mean, here you are pining away, you know? Always sort of ‘waiting by the phone,’ so to speak. . . and meanwhile Gaia is so. . . you know. . . independent.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?” Ed squawked.

  “Nothing.” Tatiana laughed. “Oh my God, Ed. Nothing. You know what? I am being silly. You are just in a bad mood, and I am going to let you be in your bad mood, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.” She gave him one more friendly peck on the cheek and finally slid off his lap, following the rest of the girls into her bedroom.

  Ed tried to shake the tension out of his legs and relax. He took a deep, cleansing breath and tried not to think about Gaia or Tatiana’s weirdness or any of it. But he’d barely even finished that breath before Jake opened his mouth.

  “So. . . stud boy. . .” Jake placed his beer down on the coffee table and turned to face Ed, flashing him a curious smile. “What’s the deal there?”

  “Where?” Ed asked, dreaming about a ten-pound bottle of extra-strength Tylenol.

  “Well. . . are you with Gaia or not?”

  “What?” Ed couldn’t quite mask his anger at the question.

  Jake held out his hands defensively. “No, dude, I wasn’t trying to pry, okay? I was just. . . you know. . . I was sitting here watching your. . . vibe with Tatiana, and I just wasn’t sure. Which one is the friend and which one is the girlfriend?”

  Now Ed really wanted that ten-pound bottle of Tylenol. So he could use it to crack open Jake’s skull. Or maybe he’d just use it to crack open his own.

  “Tatiana is just a friend,” he stated coldly. “And yes, Jake, I am with Gaia. I am definitely with her.”

  Black Vinyl Body Bag

  IT MADE NO SENSE. HE’D BEEN RUNNING ever since he and Gaia had pulled over at that gas station. That gas station, which only days ago had served as Sam’s passageway to the outside. And now he was using it to get back inside. He had it all backward—like those hostages in Stockholm who’d grown so attached to their captors, they resisted rescue.

  What kind of grip could that horrible place have over him? Why would he possibly want to see those ugly stone buildings with their stupidly futuristic glass atriums, where he’d been prodded and tortured and left alone for entire days with nothing but his disturbing morphine-induced dreams? Why wasn’t he moving just a bit more slowly? Biding his time, cautiously avoiding the inevitable moment when he would step back into all those nightmarish memories?

  Because it was no longer his prison. It was no longer the place where he would eventually die, reduced to nothing but the withered muscles of an invalid and a zipped-up black vinyl body bag. He would be seeing the place as a free man this time. And that was all he had ever dreamed about while lying on that hospital bed: coming back as a free man and wiping them all out—every single one of those dirtbags. That and seeing Gaia again.

  So in some twisted sense, as they stepped through the cold woods, nearing the dreadful place and most likely risking their lives, all of Sam’s dreams had come true.

  One more step and he knew. They had reached the perimeter. He turned back to Gaia and held her back in silence.

  Gaia froze and focused her attention on the mass of shrubbery and branches just ahead of Sam. He placed his hand on a batch of the low-hanging branches and bent them out of the way.

  And there was the first sight of something man-made amidst this towering, dense forest. A wall. A cold and forbidding white stone wall.

  “I think this is the back of one of the barracks,” he whispered. “I saw them lining up in formations in front of this building when they’d transfer me for tests.”

  “Do you think they’re still here?” she whispered back.

  “I don’t know. Everything was so chaotic when I made it out. I think some of Loki’s men had even turned on each other. They were definitely all piling out, but did some psycho loyalists stay on to defend the place? I have no idea.”

  Gaia looked into Sam’s eyes and nodded. She understood the situation. They were searching through an abandoned ghost town for clues. But Sam couldn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t run into some ghosts.

  They crept through the opening in the branches and walked carefully along the side of the abandoned barracks, then poked their heads around the corner of the building—ghost town was definitely an accurate choice of words. Dirty manila folders and documents flew across the empty road in random windblown circles. Piles of unmarked wooden boxes lay cracked open and pillaged all along the side of the road. The splintered wood had scattered everywhere, along with the numerous crowbars and black sledgehammers they’d used to pry the boxes open.

  “Weapons,” Gaia whispered. “They knew he was gone, so they looted and pillaged all his weapons.”

  “Great,” Sam muttered. “Now we’re on the lookout for psycho loyalists with extra weapons.”

  “I don’t think there are any psycho loyalists, Sam. I don’t think there’s any anything.”

  The empty hiss of the wind blew across the road, pushing Sam’s hair back as if to confirm Gaia’s point. The only thing left in this horrid place was wind.

  “I think you’re right,” Sam said. “But we should keep looking. Those papers flying around. . . they must have come from one of the buildings down there. I think there’s an office or an archive in that third building.”

  “Okay, I’m taking the lead,” Gaia said, pushing her body in front of Sam’s.

  “What are you talking about? You don’t know where everything is. I’ve studied this place every chance I had, Gaia. I took as many mental pictures as I could whenever I crossed through the outdoors, planning for an escape I figured would never happen.”

  “Sam, don’t be stubborn,” Gaia snapped. “If you think I’m letting you lead the way in the state you’re in, you’re nuts. Let me be the first round of defense. Just in case.”

  “In case what? There’s nobody here. We just agreed that nobody is here!”

  “Shhhhh!” Gaia slammed her hand over Sam’s mouth and widened her eyes as she looked over his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam whispered, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I know we need to be—”

  “Shhhhh.” She silenced him again, taking a step back toward the side of the barracks. “No, it’s not that. . . ,” she whispered.

  “Then what?”

  “Do you hear it?”

  All Sam could hear was that merciless wind whipping through the center of the compound. And perhaps the occasional combination of caws and chirps from the three birds in nearby trees.

  “Hear what?”

  “A voice, Sam. I hear a voice.”

  Thick and Ugly Silence

  IT WAS COMING FROM TWO BUILDINGS down. And it sounded an awful lot like one word being yelped out again and again.

  Help.

  Of course, Sam couldn’t hear it. Very few people other than Gaia would have, but she knew what she was hearing. And she knew she was going to follow it.

  “Gaia, wait.” Sam grabbed her by the arm. “Whatever you’re hearing could be a trap. Let’s just get to that office, see if we can dig up some clues, and get the hell out of here.”

  She was shaking her head before Sam had even finished his sentence. “First of all, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not scared of these so-called psycho loyalists of which you speak. Second, and much more importantly, there’s a man’s voice calling for help down that road. And I have a thing about saving people, Sam. I know it’s a little obsessive-compulsive, but the potential victims seem to like it.”

  “Well, how would you know if the voice belonged to someone dangerous or not?” Sam pointed out.

  “I don
’t know,” she replied defiantly. “I’ll just have to find out when I get there.”

  “Where?” Sam pushed. “Which building is this supposed cry for help even coming from?”

  “That one,” Gaia argued, pointing to a short but sprawling gray building two “blocks” down.

  Sam suddenly went silent. He turned a shade paler than he already was as he gazed down the road at the gray monstrosity. “That’s the hospital,” he uttered. “That’s where they had me the entire time. . . .”

  Gaia could see the flashbacks playing out in his eyes as his forehead began to crinkle into a series of tense creases. “Okay, look. You should just hang out here and stand guard, and I’ll check it out and be back in—”

  “No,” Sam huffed. “I’m fine.”

  Gaia grabbed Sam’s shoulders. “Look,” she began cautiously, sensing the fragility of Sam’s current emotional state. “If you think about it. . . it doesn’t really make sense that you would be the only person being held in that facility. I know Loki, Sam. He thinks big. He probably had twenty potential enemies and pawns and puppets locked away in that place. Do you really think his idiot paid thugs went door-to-door and let them all out before they ran?”

  Sam broke from Gaia’s stare and looked back at the building, gazing in a long contemplative silence. “Jesus, there’s still someone in there. . . .” Out of nowhere he launched into a surprisingly powerful sprint. Gaia took off after him, scattering the dust and ripped-up paper of the empty road as they stomped their way up to the entrance of the prison building.

  The place had Loki written all over it—an ornately modern design of cool gray lines layered on top of each other like some hideous modern-day coliseum. Squares of black and white marble hung where the windows should have been.

  “There are a few tiny windows on the side of the building,” Sam explained. They cut around to the corner of the building and scanned the two rows of eight-inch windows. And now Gaia was sure she heard it. Coming through a tiny golf-ball-size hole in the top-left window. A cry for help.

  “He must have broken a hole in the window,” Sam said, squinting through the sunlight to get a better look. He turned back down to Gaia with a look of absolute puzzlement. “How the hell did you hear him from back there? I can still barely hear him.”

  “Good ears,” Gaia replied, already trying to figure out how to get up there. “My mother was a musician.”

  “Right,” Sam mumbled.

  Gaia sprinted back toward the front of the building.

  “Wait a minute,” Sam called to her. “What are you doing?” He caught up with her at the front door, which was made entirely out of industrial - strength polarized glass.

  “Sam, we need to get up there,” she said. She stepped down next to one of the pillaged wooden boxes and picked up a black steel sledgehammer.

  “I know we do,” Sam said, “but what if the security systems are still—”

  Sam was cut off by the deafening smash of breaking glass as Gaia blasted through the doors with the sledgehammer. Giant shards of polarized glass sprayed across the lobby, leaving a gaping hole in the door. She stepped through the jagged remains of the door frame, leaving Sam speechless. His only choice now was to try and keep up with her breakneck pace.

  “Stairs?” she barked, stepping into the center of the cold marble lobby. It was obvious that all activity had been interrupted by surprise. Security phones were dangling off their cords. A fly-infested can of half-eaten chicken was lying behind the security desk. But there was at least one small bit of good fortune in this nightmare. The power had been shut down. That meant any high-tech security was a nonissue.

  “Behind there,” Sam said, pointing to a shadowy corridor.

  The door to the stairs was partially open, and Gaia wasted no time, flying up the steps three by three until she reached the top floor. Sam huffed and puffed behind her. She was giving him the biggest workout of his life since his escape from this place. He was working just as hard to get back in as he had worked to get out. The irony didn’t go unnoticed.

  But Gaia had given him the choice to stay behind while she investigated. And in truth, without him, God knew where she would have been at this point. Probably still traipsing through those woods until the freaking Blair Witch found her.

  Gaia was the first to burst onto the floor. Sam followed close behind. “Hello?” Gaia called out as her echo traveled down each and every hallway.

  “What are you doing?” Sam whispered urgently, grabbing her by the shoulders. “There could still be guards around any one of those corners.”

  “Bull,” she said, pricking up her ears for the man’s call again. “This place is dead. It’s as dead as Loki.” She finally picked up the sound of the man’s voice and began a series of careful twists and turns down the endless halls.

  “Can you hear me?” she called out. “We’re here to help you. . . .”

  “Here!” the desperate voice croaked. “I’m in here!”

  Gaia turned behind her and realized that the voice was coming from down the hall. “Just hold on,” Sam called to him.

  Gaia could see the increasing determination in Sam’s eyes. This wasn’t just a chance to free some stranger from an abandoned prison. Sam had found himself a brother of sorts behind that door. Sam ran down the hall and turned the corner. “Here it is—N 37. The door’s open!” he called out triumphantly.

  “Door’s open?” Gaia asked.

  There was no response.

  “Sam?” She hollered much louder this time.

  All she could hear was a thick and ugly silence.

  Virtual Walking Database

  GAIA WHIPPED AROUND THE CORNER to N 37, hammer cocked behind her shoulder, and kicked open the door, coming down squarely on both feet in a crouched position. And then she froze solid in her tracks. She was more thankful than she had ever been to feel no fear.

  Because she was standing before a three-man firing squad.

  Three men in black jumpsuits and black combat boots were standing in front of an abandoned prisoner’s bed. The man in the center was holding Sam against his chest, with his black-gloved hand pressed firmly against Sam’s mouth. His right hand was holding a semiautomatic machine gun about two inches from Gaia’s head. He was flanked by two other goons, both of them with their guns stabilized on their shoulders, aiming from only inches away.

  The thug on the right looked up from his gun sight and examined Gaia’s face. His eyes grew wider the longer he looked. “Is that her?” he asked, sounding just as thick as he looked.

  The man holding Sam began to nod and smile. “Oh, that’s her.” He grinned. “That’s her.”

  Gaia had never really stopped to consider just how familiar all of Loki’s thugs must be with her face. They’d all been after her for so long, she wondered if these idiots had even gotten the memo that their boss was brain-dead and that this particular war was over. It had been over for days now. Most of his men had obviously gotten the picture, but these freaks. . . they really put the psycho in psycho loyalist.

  So Sam’s fears had been right. There were a few of them roaming the compound like robots that someone had forgotten to turn off. That’s what Gaia got for having no fears—a three-gun wake-up call.

  They obviously hadn’t abandoned their posts in days. There was not an ounce of sanity in their eyes. They were like those libertarian hillbillies, who thought the best thing they could do for their country was to march around on their crumbling porches, just loading and reloading their shotguns. It almost seemed worth it to Gaia to put these poor bastards out of their misery. But three on one with Sam and the man as their hostages? Not to mention the fact that deranged psycho-loyalist lunatics tended to be trigger-happy. Maybe she could talk some sense into them. . . .

  “Okay, look. . . ,” she began.

  “Let’s just kill her and bring Loki the body,” one of them said.

  “Good idea,” another agreed.

  Okay, talking sense was out. Action wa
s the only choice, given their very clear and simple plan. She saw their fingers pulling down on their triggers and her plan became equally clear. There was only one way to free Sam and the man and take all the guns out of the picture in one move. She tightened her hands around her hammer, and she swung away.

  Gaia’s hammer knocked against the barrels of their guns in quick one-two-three succession. She smacked all three weapons into the corner simultaneously as the bullet spray clanged along the metal-reinforced walls. The deafening sound of rapid machine gun fire filled the room, reverberating off every shining key and dark corner.

  The thug on the right let out a loud growl as he leapt toward Gaia. He slammed her up against the door as the hammer fell from her hands. He ripped a hunting knife from his belt and pushed forward to plunge it into her stomach, but Gaia grabbed onto his wrist and drove his arm to her side. She shoved her knee straight into his groin and then flipped his entire frame over her head, cracking his spine back as he collided with the door. One down.

  She saw the glint of the gun out of the corner of her eye. “Sam, get down!” she ordered. “Down!”

  Sam ducked and flattened himself on the ground as the thickest goon fired off the gun he’d retrieved from the corner. The only advantage to dealing with someone who had gone off the deep end: no aim. He was just firing off round after round, hoping he would hit something. Hoping he would hit everything.

  Gaia leapt to the far corner of the room, landing in a fast roll that nearly threw her against the wall. But she pushed her hands out against the wall and bounced back under the only table in the room—a fold-out card table. It wasn’t exactly bulletproof, but it was sure as hell easy to throw.

  She shot up from the ground and hurled the table at the trigger-happy maniac like a rocket. It connected with his gun first, redirecting his gunfire up toward the ceiling and then knocking him to the ground.

  Gaia took to the air again, landed by the sledgehammer, and snatched it from the floor. She ran at the goon as he threw off the table and aimed his gun again. She could feel the third psycho running at her from behind. It seemed Loki hadn’t done a very good job of combat training.