Hardwired Page 13

  So it didn’t make sense. None of this made sense.

  I took a tentative step down the dark corridor, paranoia quickly settling in. Maybe my gait was off, or my steps had gotten smaller once exhaustion set in. Maybe I’d miscounted or taken a wrong turn.

  My foot landed on something sharp. Whatever it was jabbed through the rubber sole of my sneaker, piercing my skin. I bent down and carefully swiped my hand across the floor, wincing as shards of glass dug into my fingers. Instinctively, I looked up. There was an emergency light above my head—or at least there used to be. Now, it was nothing more than a pile of shattered glass at my feet. I was absolutely in the right hall; I was just being screwed with.

  “Carly,” I whispered as I inched forward, my hand making contact with what I’d assumed was the door to the isolation unit. The hall was so silent that my own breathing roared in my ears. If she was there, I couldn’t hear her.

  I leaned against the door, listening for a creak on the stairs, the click of an air cartridge attaching to the barrel of a Taser, the twist of the doorknob that separated me from the guard down below. Something … anything … to clue me in to what was going on.

  “Where are you?” I called out into silence. This was our meeting point. This was where she was supposed to be!

  “Carly!” I called out one last time, the familiar sting of fear suffocating me. I’d all but promised Nick I’d keep her safe, and already I’d lost her.

  I turned around and ran back down the dark hall, the faint glow of an emergency light in the distance guiding my feet. If she wasn’t at our meeting point, then chances were she was still inside the staff lounge, being beaten to death by a mob I’d purposefully incited. And I’d left her there, stupidly assuming she would follow my directions this time around.

  The door to the room came into view and I paused, reeling at the sounds I could hear filtering out. Grunts of pain mingled with muted thuds filled me with terror and guilt. Crap, what had I done?

  “Carly!” I yelled and ran toward the door, skidding to a halt a few inches away. I couldn’t isolate a single voice, didn’t know if the shrieks were coming from the guards or the kids or, worse, Carly.

  A flash of blue spilled out from underneath the door, the burst of light disappearing almost instantly. A second flash lit up the small crack, quickly followed by a third and a forth. Some of the guards were still in possession of their weapons, still fighting. Either that or we had them and were firing at anything that moved.

  I felt around the back waistband of my jeans for the Taser I’d gotten off Ms. Tremblay. It was gone—my hand brushed across nothing but the top of my boxers. I swore long and hard, pissed that I’d lost the only weapon any of us had managed to score.

  A scream shattered my thoughts, and as I ran my hand across the doorknob, I winced in pain. Someone had wedged a shard of glass into the keyhole, jamming the lock in place. Glass littered the floor below. It was spread out in rows, waiting to meet someone’s bare feet. I didn’t bother to look up. I knew the emergency light above this door was functioning; it had guided me back here. Which meant the shards of glass on the floor had been placed there, purposefully picked up from a different location and dumped there after I’d left.

  “Shit.” My mind ping-ponged between opening the door to the lounge and simply finding the nearest exterior door and running for my life. Problem was, I had no clue where the exits were. That, and I couldn’t leave Chris or Carly behind.

  I kicked the glass as far away from the door as I could. If the kids behind that door managed to get out, then I wanted them to have at least a fighting chance, and stepping barefoot into a pile of glass would make that impossible. Every curse word I knew tumbled from my lips as I gripped the shard of glass jammed in the keyhole. It tore through my skin, and I pulled back, blood streaming from my palm. I couldn’t get it to budge, not without severing my hand in half.

  I put my ear to the door and tried to block everything out, listening solely for the sound of Carly’s voice. I’d done the one thing I feared the most: I’d gotten her trapped in this place. I pounded my fists into the door over and over as I screamed out her name. I needed her to know I was here, that I hadn’t left her. That she wasn’t alone.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  I spun around at the sound of Chris’s voice, my eyes automatically trailing to his hands. They were bleeding, rivulets of red trickling between his fingers. “What happened to your hands?” I asked.

  “I smashed the lights inside the lounge,” he said, studying me as if I’d lost my mind. “What happened to yours?”

  I pointed to the door and the shard of glass jammed in the lock. “I need to get back in there!”

  Chris backed up, his eyes scanning the entire length of my body. “You all right?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” I ground out, irritated that he was looking at me like I was completely insane.

  He tore a strip of fabric off the bottom of his shirt and reached for my hand, wrapping the fabric around the gash. “You sure you’re okay?” he asked again.

  “I said I’m fine. Now help me with the damn door.”

  “Umm, okay,” he said, making no move to help me. “But why do you want to go back in there? Why aren’t you with Carly?”

  “She’s not there,” I spat out, then set about trying to pick the piece of glass out of myself. “And what the hell are you doing here anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be permanently taking care of the lights?”

  I didn’t have a watch, but even so, I knew it should’ve taken him much longer than five minutes to locate the electrical panel. This facility was huge. There was no way he could’ve found the panel, screwed with it, and made it all the way back up here already. No way.

  “Lights are all set, and it was a hell of a lot easier getting there than back,” Chris said, tilting his head toward the darkened hallway. “Thanks for that, by the way. I was unaware that smashing all the lights in the hallway was part of our plan. That should make it so much easier to find our way out.”

  “I didn’t smash anything,” I fired back. “I’m not the one with the blood dripping from my hands.”

  “Yeah, you are,” he said, jabbing his finger at my bandaged hand. “And again, I smashed the light inside that room. I was standing on your back when I did it. What the hell is wrong with you, Lucas? Did you take a fist to the head or something while you were in there?”

  “Well, it sure as hell wasn’t me, and Carly is locked in that room, so … ”

  “What are you talking about? I was just standing outside the isolation unit door talking to her,” Chris said. “Why do you think I came back here looking for you? Girl’s hysterical, going on about how you never made it out of the lounge.”

  I shook my head, not believing a word he was saying. I’d just come from our meeting spot, called Carly’s name multiple times while blindly searching the hallway. She hadn’t been there. Nobody was. That hallway had been empty. Dark and disturbingly empty.

  Twenty-eight

  I took off running, the darkness forcing me to slow my pace to a crawl as I searched my way along the cinderblock wall. Irritated that I couldn’t see jack shit, I gave up and simply yelled out her name.

  “Here!” Carly called back. Her voice became my guiding point, and I instructed her to keep talking, keep drawing me toward her until I eventually felt her hands closing around mine.

  “Where the hell were you?” I asked, my voice rising as I struggled with the overwhelming sense of relief flooding my system. She was here, safe and standing right in front of me. “I called out to you, searched this entire hall for you, but you weren’t here.”

  Carly squeezed my hand, and I pulled away, fought through the darkness to see her eyes.

  “I was here, waiting for you and Chris the whole time.” She sounded like she was out of breath, her words clipped and lodged in her th
roat. “You never came. I didn’t know what to do or where to go.”

  I knew I’d followed the right halls, and she hadn’t been here the first time. “No, I was here,” I told her. “I came looking for you like I promised I would, but you weren’t here. Nobody was.”

  “This is where I found her,” Chris said. “She was sitting with her back to the wall, crying.”

  I shook my head, the events of the past few minutes becoming hazier by the second. This place could mess with your mind; that’s what it was designed to do. And given Tyler’s history …

  “You probably took a wrong turn or something,” Chris continued, as if sensing my fear. “This place is like a damn maze.”

  “That’s not possible.” Even I caught the hitch in my voice. Sure, getting turned around in the dark was plausible, but I’d counted my steps, made sure I knew exactly which way I was going. “Are you positive?” I asked Carly. “I mean, I know I was here. Right here. In this exact spot.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Chris said. “We’re all here now, so let’s grab Cam, leave the flash drive in his cell, and get the hell out of here before things get any worse.”

  I ignored Chris and reiterated my question to Carly. “Are you sure you were here? Right here? The whole time?”

  “Yes. I came straight here like you told me to. But when you didn’t show up and everything went dark, I … ” She trailed off.

  Those emergency lights hadn’t simply gone out. They were purposefully broken, including the ones in that hall, and the one directly above Carly’s head. I pushed that thought to the back of my mind, unnerved by the way her voice trembled in time with her words. She must’ve been scared to death locked inside this building, knowing what they’d done to her brother, seeing the chaos in that room. Thinking back on it, I kicked myself for not putting the flash drive in Ms. Tremblay’s hand when I took her Taser, then grabbing Carly and running. The hell with shutting this place down. The hell with Cam.

  I reached out to calm Carly’s fears, my hand brushing across the sleeve of her shirt. It was wet, warm, and the first thing I thought of was blood. “Are you hurt?”

  “No, I’m okay,” she said, flinching me off.

  I didn’t believe her. I’d dealt with enough blood those past two days to know what I was feeling. “No, you’re not. You’re bleeding.”

  “It’s not mine.” The words tumbled from her lips so fast that I almost didn’t understand them. “I made it out of the lounge, but then somebody pulled me back and hit me. I clawed at them until they let me go. I couldn’t see anything, so I don’t know who it was. But it’s their blood, not mine.”

  That did little to calm my rage, and I slammed my fist into the wall. This insane idea that any of us could slip in and out of this place alive was idiotic. I should’ve listened to my instincts and told Joe to go screw himself.

  “This is so not worth it,” I mumbled under my breath.

  “Like I said, it doesn’t matter now.” Chris wrapped his palm around my fist as I went to slam it into the wall again. “Let’s just finish what we started. Carly, did you happen to see who smashed the lights out here in the hall?”

  “No. I didn’t see anyone until you showed up. Why?”

  “Because you were the only one in the hall when the light above the door to the isolation cells was knocked out. So the way I figure it, you must have seen who did it.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Carly said. “I heard footsteps coming. At first I thought it was Lucas, but the voice was off, so I—”

  “So he was talking,” I interrupted. “Was it a guard or one of the guys from that room? What were they saying?”

  “I don’t know,” Carly replied. “The only people I’ve ever talked to in here are the medic and Ms. Tremblay.”

  “And the guard in that room with us when we first got here, and the one down in the isolation unit. Also the one who escorted us to the staff room,” Chris added.

  “Was it any of them?” I put in. “Think Carly, was it any of them?” My eyes shifted toward the door. As far as I knew, there was only one guard not locked in the staff lounge, and he was sitting directly below us.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I honestly don’t know.”

  I knew asking her to pinpoint the voice was useless. Without the experience with the guards that Chris and I had, she had no way of telling them apart. “Okay, forget the voice. Can you tell me what he said?”

  “I wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying,” she replied. “I was scared and looking for you.”

  “And you’re sure nobody followed you out of the staff lounge?” Chris asked. I remembered the brief flash of light as she’d opened the door, but I hadn’t taken the time to watch her leave and make sure nobody followed her. That said, I had no idea if anybody had followed Ms. Tremblay out either. Or me or Chris for that matter.

  “I’m positive no one followed me out. I waited at the door for a few seconds before I made my way here.” She reached for my hand, squeezing it gently. “I was hoping you were right behind me.”

  “And you’re convinced the guy you heard didn’t see you?” Chris asked.

  “I’m positive. I opened the basement door and hid on the top step until he was gone. When I came up, it was completely dark. All the lights were out and the hallway was empty.”

  “It had to be the guard who’s watching over Cam,” Chris reasoned. “I mean, who else could it be?””

  “Ms. Tremblay.” I regretted the words the second they left my mouth. The counselor might have been the only other person to escape the lounge as far as I knew, and god knew I hated her more than life itself most of the time, but, after hearing her beg me to keep Carly safe, I doubted she’d had a hand in any of this.

  “How did she get out of the staff room?” Chris asked. “Last I checked, she was curled up in the corner clutching her precious Taser.”

  “She doesn’t have a Taser anymore.” It was a stupid reply, and one that didn’t even begin to answer the question he’d asked, but somehow I thought it would help. One less person to think of as a threat. “I took it off her.”

  “Let me have it,” Chris said.

  “I don’t have it. I must’ve dropped it fighting my way out.”

  “Is this it?” Carly’s hand brushed mine, turning my palm over so she could lay the Taser in my hand. I couldn’t see much in the dark, but judging from the cords falling between my fingers, I knew this wasn’t the same one. This gun had been fired; the probes were dangling limply from the cartridge. Ms. Tremblay’s hadn’t been fired.

  “Where did you find this?” I asked.

  “It was lying right here by the doorway. Why? Isn’t it hers?”

  “Yup, it’s hers,” I lied, and then handed it over to Chris.

  Twenty-nine

  My hand tensed on the doorknob to the isolation unit, a thousand thoughts flying through my mind all at once. None of them good. None of them even remotely helpful. We didn’t have a contingency plan that included a guard stalking us or smashed emergency lights. In fact, we didn’t have a contingency plan at all.

  “You positive not a single light in this place is going to come back on?” I asked Chris. I needed everything from here on out to go as smoothly as possible. No more surprises. One more snag in our plan, and I’d give up altogether.

  “Yup. It’s not coming back on without the help of an electrical crew and a few spools of wire, trust me.” Chris laughed. “I may have messed with a bit more than the circuit boards.”

  I tucked my hand behind me, seeking out Carly. I knew she was there, standing between Chris and me, but I needed the confirmation all the same. “In and out,” I said, reminding everyone, including myself. “We grab Cam, leave the flash drive in his cell with a note for Ms. Tremblay, then we get out of here. No detours, not even a trip to the bathroom, got it?”

 
The emergency lighting in the isolation unit was different than in the rest of the facility. The spotlight in each cube was positioned to shine directly down on whatever poor bastard was locked inside. And the lights had a blue tint to them, one that seemed brighter and more menacing than the lights upstairs.

  The top step creaked under my weight, and I stopped in my tracks. On the off-chance Murphy was still posted down there, I didn’t want to alert him to our presence.

  Chris pushed past me, annoyed by my cautious approach. His tactic probably made more sense. Springing on the guard would give us the element of surprise, and hopefully give him less time to prepare.

  I stared at the Taser in Chris’s hand. Deadweight. Without another air cartridge, he couldn’t reload it. Couldn’t fire it. But he still clutched it in his hand like it had some value.

  “Stay here,” I said to Carly, then quickly made my way down the stairs after Chris. She didn’t listen, but I wasn’t surprised; it was her brother down there, after all.

  “Guard,” Chris called out, and I spun on my heels, half expecting to be tackled from behind. I caught a glimpse of Murphy behind the staircase, only his navy blue pants and black shoes visible. With no real weapon in sight, I grabbed a chair and lifted it over my head. The frame was metal and it was damn heavy; heavy enough to knock the guy out should he decide to make a move.

  Chris took the left, and I took the right. Approaching Murphy from both sides meant he would at least be forced to choose between us. I was banking on that decision stalling out his brain for the half second I needed to hit him.

  “Not moving,” I said, suddenly noticing the angle of his shoes. His toes were pointed up toward the ceiling, which meant he was lying on his back and had a clear view of the staircase … and us. Yet he hadn’t so much as flinched when we made our approach.

  “Shit,” I hissed out as we slowly rounded the corner and looked down at him. He was dead, or at least he looked like he was.

  Chris motioned for me to be ready, then eased in, his fingers spreading over the guard’s neck. It wasn’t until he shook his head, confirming what I already suspected, that I put the chair down.