Hardwired Read online

  Carly gasped and straightened up at the sound of her brother’s name. She inched to the edge of her seat, away from the medic and closer to the door in an attempt to better hear the conversation. I shot her a look, one that told her to stay in character.

  Ms. Tremblay sighed as she glanced at Carly, the look of pity in her eyes making me physically ill. “There’s no way to draw power from somewhere else? Even for one night? Until the roads have cleared and we can move her out?”

  Murphy shook his head. “Not if you want the external doors locked and the isolation cells to stay secured.”

  “We can’t house her with the boys,” Ms. Tremblay thought out loud. “It’s not safe.”

  “Why, afraid one of us might crack and take it out on her?” Chris asked, unprompted. “You afraid I might do that? Because I got news for you. We had plenty of time alone with her outside this place and I never touched her, did I, Lucas?” He shifted his position, giving both Ms. Tremblay and the guard his back. He was up to something, and knowing him, I doubted it was good.

  “Well?” Chris asked again. “Did I touch her even once?”

  “No,” I said, completely confused as to what he was getting at. He’d barely said three words to me since we’d entered this room, and now he was getting all worked up for absolutely no reason. “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “Nobody is suggesting that—”

  “That’s exactly what you’re suggesting,” Chris said. “That’s what you thought, what you pretty much accused us of when you first saw us outside. You think I don’t see the way you’re looking at me now? The way you and that medic are fawning all over her while Lucas and I sit here half dead?”

  Chris was up and out of his seat, his fists balled as he walked toward Carly. He mouthed something to her, something so quiet nobody else in the room could make it out. Her eyes briefly slid to me before she gave Chris a quick nod.

  “Tell them the truth,” Chris demanded. “Did I hurt you? Did I ever once lay a finger on you?”

  Carly hesitated, her entire body sinking into the chair she was sitting in. Her eyes caught mine and she mouthed a quick “sorry” before she turned to Ms. Tremblay and said, “No, Chris never touched me.”

  “Are you saying Lucas did?” Ms. Tremblay asked.

  Carly brought her hands to her face, trembling like some traumatized little girl.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I stood up, knocking over the chair I was sitting in. I’d risked everything for this girl, and she was screwing it all up with some fake story about how I’d hurt her. “I never touched you. Neither of us did.”

  Carly was sobbing now, her tiny body shaking in time with her whispered words as tears streamed down her cheeks. “Stop yelling at me,” she hiccupped before turning to Chris. “How could you? How could you just stand there and watch him?”

  Before I had a chance to even process the absurdity of what I was doing, I launched myself at her. I wanted to wrap my hands around her throat and choke the truth out of her. Accusing me of hurting her, in any way, would get me locked up forever. No going home. No seeing Suzie. No college or friends. No future. “Have you lost your mind?”

  Murphy came out of nowhere and wrapped an arm around my throat, tightening it into a chokehold. I struggled against him, hurling every curse I could think of at Carly as he wrestled me face-first into the wall. I’d risked my life to save her brother, convinced Chris to do the same, and here she was, lying.

  I twisted against Murphy’s hold, landing an elbow to his ribs. He doubled over and groaned, letting go of me in the process. He backed up and widened his stance, bracing himself for my next move. I lowered my head and surged forward, intent on tackling him to the ground.

  Light streaked across my vision. A crackling sound hovered in the air, milliseconds before a sharp pain shot through my chest and lodged itself at the base of my spine. My entire body tensed. My knees buckled and I tried to scream, but nothing came out. Nothing but a painful gasp of air. Someone lowered me to the ground, the arms around me tightening as every muscle in my body seized up.

  Twenty

  I’d never been hit with a Taser before, but I knew damn well what a concentrated shot of electricity could do to your system. Knew it could leave a person shaking uncontrollably as they lost control of their muscles. And thanks to Chris and Carly, I was now sitting in a glass cage in the isolation unit, trying uselessly to still my tremors.

  Chris was in the same glass room as me; Carly was in the next one over. My focus wasn’t good enough to make out the shadow in the cube across from us, but if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it was the coveted Cam Denton. And after everything that happened in the past hour, I was more likely to leave Carly’s brother behind to rot than try to save him.

  “What the hell just happened?” My mind realigned with my body just long enough to get those five words out, and even that took a painful amount of energy.

  “Keep your voice down,” Chris said, wincing as he massaged his temples. “I’ve got a welt on my ass the size of Texas, and my head feels like it’s about to explode.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was referring to being quasi-electrocuted or the injuries from the accident, but I got what he was saying nonetheless. “They got you too?”

  He nodded. “Yep. I took a swing at Murphy. Bastard had no business tasing you.”

  “And what about her?” Carly was the last person I’d expected to find down here in the bowels of hell. The way they’d coddled her upstairs, I figured she’d be safely tucked away in Ms. Tremblay’s room, drinking tea and eating cookies.

  “She went for the second guard’s gun. Of course, Ms. Tremblay tried to convince the guards that Carly only reacted out of fear and to leave her in her care, but that didn’t fly.”

  I quickly glanced at Carly. From the looks of it, she hadn’t received so much as a slap on the hand for her actions upstairs. Figures. Electrocute the boys and leave the batshit-crazy girl unharmed.

  “They left you some clean clothes,” Chris said, pointing to the jeans and T-shirt sitting on the cot next to him. “I’d turn my back to give you some privacy, but these walls are glass, so what I don’t see, she will.”

  “Screw you,” I said as I literally crawled my way over to the cot and pulled the clothes down to the floor next to me. Let Carly look all she wanted; it’d be the first and last look at me she got.

  I pulled the shirt over my head, enjoying the feel of clean, warm clothes. It felt good to change, to sit in something that wasn’t covered in vomit and dirt.

  “You want to tell me what that was all about?” I asked, quite sure Chris had orchestrated the little stunt upstairs.

  “Got us down here, didn’t it?” Chris said, a smug smile playing across his face.

  “You did this?” I asked. “You actually planned this?”

  “Not this, exactly,” he said, his hand fluttering to my half-naked state and the pile of soiled clothes sitting next to me. “But getting us down here, in plain sight of Cam, yeah … that was my plan all along. I figured inciting the guards was the quickest way to do it. Carly playing along … well, that was just an added bonus.”

  Anger set in and I didn’t know who I wanted to get my hands on more, him or Carly. “When were you gonna clue me in?”

  “I wasn’t.” Chris shrugged his apology. “You know, she never actually accused you of anything. You came to that conclusion all on your own, and it worked.”

  “What the hell do you mean, ‘it worked’?”

  “We needed you to snap, for all three of us to go after each other so that we’d get tossed down here close to Cam. And that was the first idea I came up with. If it’s any consolation, the guards and Ms. Tremblay don’t believe you did it either.”

  “Not good enough,” I growled out. “Not even close.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Chris
started. “I agreed to help you, but I’m not gonna log any more time here than I have to. I want out of here, and you snapping was the quickest way I could think of to get us down here.”

  I kicked at my dirty clothes on the floor. Shit, I couldn’t deny that his messed-up plan had worked. We were now within feet of Cam.

  “So that’s Cam,” I said, tilting my head toward the shadow of a person in the cell across from ours.

  “Yup. Or what’s left of him anyway. He hasn’t so much as moved, didn’t even raise his head when they dragged us down the stairs.”

  Fantastic. That was just what I wanted to hear. I’d risked my life to save someone who was pretty much gone to begin with.

  My gaze shifted back to Carly. She was staring at her brother, her shoulders hunched and her entire body curled in on itself. Despite her little game upstairs, I felt bad for her. I’d been where she now was, staring at the shell of my brother, wondering what had gone wrong. Difference was, her brother might still have had a chance.

  “She all right?” I didn’t know why I’d asked; it wasn’t like either of them deserved an ounce of my consideration.

  Chris nodded and shifted his position on the bed so he could see Carly through the glass wall. “Yup. She’s been watching him like that for the last hour. I don’t think he’s looked back once.”

  “So what now?” I reached down, yanked off my sneaker, and pulled the stupid flash drive from my sock. Every single piece of proof Joe had collected, the key to our freedom, was stored on that tiny stick. If I’d been smart, I would’ve tossed it at Ms. Tremblay through the fence and walked away, hiked the forty miles to the reintegration facility, and finished out my time in peace. But no, I had to get sucked into Carly’s stupid plan to save her brother.

  “Ms. Tremblay isn’t going to believe a word we say, not after this.” I threw the flash drive across the room, doubting it would be any use to me now. It bounced off the glass wall and landed at my feet. “Any idea how to get us out of this fish bowl?”

  “Weren’t you paying attention upstairs?” Chris asked.

  I snorted. “No, I was too busy writhing around on the floor to listen to Ms. Tremblay’s incessant ramblings.”

  “Well, they have enough fuel to keep this place secure for three days.”

  “I know that,” I barked. “What else did they say?”

  “We’re in the middle of day two, and according to the argument upstairs, the one you missed while you were ‘writhing around on the floor’”—he paused only long enough to air-quote his words—“they’re trying to decide which section of the building to pull power from to secure these two additional cells we now call home.”

  “And … ” I fanned my hands out for him to continue. Lower security was better, would make our job easier.

  “They’re running on the bare minimum as it is.”

  “Which means?”

  “They’re diverting power from that other section to these cells down here. Being that we’re so dangerous and all,” Chris said. “Using more power will cut the generators’ run-time, and my guess is that the fancy locks on these doors and the cameras above our bed suck up a crap-load of power.”

  “Which means the time frame for the generators just got cut way down,” I reasoned, a flare of excitement building inside me. For once, something was going in my favor.

  “If I’m right, which I usually am, those doors are going to unlock all on their own tomorrow morning when the generators fail. If not sooner,” Chris said.

  “And we’re supposed to just sit here and wait until that happens?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Chris said as tucked his hands behind his head and lounged on the cot.

  I stood up, bracing myself against the wall for support as I eased myself toward the door. I tested it, pushing the full weight of my body against the six-inch-thick glass, wishing I could just shove my way out.

  “Twelve hours,” Chris called out from behind me. “Give it twelve hours, and I guarantee that door will slide open all on its own.”

  “And then what? We grab Cam and stroll up those stairs and out the front door?” Sitting in the cell, locked up with nothing to do but wait, I began to realize just how bad our plan was. All we’d hammered out as a group was the lie we would sell to get us inside. After that, we had absolutely nothing figured out.

  Twenty-one

  Three hours. Three miserable hours had passed since they’d dropped us into this cube, and I was already going nuts. Carly had given up staring at Cam and was now pacing in a tight circle like a caged animal. No way would that girl survive a day, never mind six weeks, in a place like this. But then again, neither had her brother.

  A savage scream erupted from Carly’s throat and she hurled herself at the glass wall, her fists connecting with it over and over again. Cam didn’t move; he didn’t so much as flinch. How he was tuning her out so completely, how he lacked even the tiniest bit of empathy for a girl obviously in so much pain, amazed me. She was one of my least favorite people in the world right then, but even I felt bad for her.

  It was dead silent in our glass cell, but my mind refused to shut down. I spent most of my time staring at the circular security camera mounted on the ceiling, memorizing its schedule.

  They’d turned it on when they first locked us down there, the red light constantly twitching. Since then, they’d cut it back, the camera only activating every ten minutes. And pretty soon, I guessed, even that would stop.

  I glanced over at Chris, astounded that he could sleep through any of this. With each peaceful breath Chris let out, I alternated between wanting to smother him with that thin, pathetic excuse for a pillow he rested his head on and patting him on the shoulder. Somehow his ability to completely ignore things both impressed and scared the crap out of me.

  “Get up,” I yelled, kicking his cot with my foot. He grumbled something inaudible and rolled over, but I could tell he was awake. His breathing had changed, his body tensing as he remembered where he was.

  “Just how sure are you that those doors are going to unlock?” I asked, shoving Chris’s feet off the side of the cot so I could sit down.

  “Positive,” Chris answered, pushing himself up. “This far out in the middle of nowhere, they’ve gotta be fueling the generators with actual gasoline. Once all their red containers are empty, they won’t be able to power anything. Why?”

  “Nothing, just thinking out loud.” Part of me didn’t really believe the generators would run out of fuel. Our neighbors back home, the Jenkins, used to have one. They would drag it out whenever there was a storm and the power went out. Thing was as loud as hell and kept me up at night. The problem was, generators were usually kept outside, and I wasn’t sure Chris slipping in and out of the Bake Shop’s doors to mess with the generators—if we could even get out of these cubes—was possible.

  He went to lie back down, and I put out my hand to stop him. He may have been at ease with the sit-tight-and-wait-for-the-generators-to-fail plan, but not me. All that waiting afforded me was an excess of time to dream up all the ways things could go wrong. Deadly wrong.

  “What about the lights above the doors?” I asked. I’d been running over contingency plans in my head for hours, and none of them seemed workable. “Those have their own battery backups, right?”

  Chris tilted his head toward the door at the top of the stairs. There was an exit sign hanging there with a floodlight attached to each side. “Yeah, they run on batteries. Once the generators fail, they’ll come on.”

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. At least six hours, more likely eight.” He paused and looked up. There was an emergency light above each of the three glass cells, as well.

  “And the chance of the actual power coming back on before then?” I asked.

  Chris shrugged. “We passed at least one downed utility pole on our way
here. Plus, you heard Nick—there’s a transformer down, and those can take days to fix. I doubt the power will be back on anytime soon, but if you’re looking for absolute certainties … ” He paused and tossed his hands out, not willing to even hazard a guess.

  I wasn’t looking for absolutes, but something a little better than 60-40 would’ve put me at ease. My biggest fear was that the electric company would find a way to fix the power before we had a chance to get out of there. A facility housing a bunch of high-risk teens must have been at the top of their power-restoration list.

  “If I can get you to the main electrical panel, do you think you could cut the power to this place for good?” I was hoping for a yes, but at that point, I would’ve settled for a strong maybe.

  “Absolutely,” Chris replied. “But that would require us having unmonitored movement around the facility, and I don’t see that happening.”

  “What if we created a diversion, something that would occupy all the guards’ time for a couple of hours?”

  “And how the hell do you plan to do that?” Chris asked. “Everyone is upstairs, and you were against bringing Nick or anybody else in here with us. It’s just you and me, buddy. I’m not sure what kind of diversion we can drum up on our own.”

  I was slowly beginning to regret leaving Nick and Joe outside. Having a few more of the Carly’s friends in here to cause a distraction was exactly what we needed. Without them, I had to bank on the people already in here for help. Guys like me. Strangers. People who society believed were destined to become the next Charles Manson.

  “We gotta get upstairs,” I said, cringing at my own suggestion. “We’re going to need some help distracting the guards if we have any chance of getting out of here with Cam. If we can convince even two of the other guys in here to try and escape, then it’ll scatter the guards and make it easier for us to handle Cam.” I glanced over at Carly’s brother. From the looks of it, I doubted he would put up much of a fight or do anything more than mumble something incoherent as he slid farther into the darkness of his own mind.