Fractured (Unreel series Book 1)

by Sanna Wolf-Watz

  “Here’s how I see it,” Sofia said some time and a lot of crawling later. “We have two options. Either we die in this blasting pipe that doesn’t lead anywhere or we give ourselves up and trust they’ll get hold of the right guys before they kill us.”

  Thomas decided that he had liked it better when she wasn’t talking to him.

  “It’s leading somewhere,” he muttered.

  “Where? We’ve been crawling for forever,” she hissed.

  “Stop talking,” he hissed back. “Sound travels easy and fast in metal cylinders like this one.”

  She muttered something that sounded a lot like “wish they’d all hurry the hell up and put us out of our misery”, but he wasn’t sure.

  He glared at her even though he knew she wouldn’t be able to see it in the darkness. Her pessimistic attitude was another thing he looked forward to being able to yell at her about as soon as they got out of here and were safe again.

  Sofia had been crawling around in this bleeding ventilation system in her bleeding tight jeans for too bleeding long. They had been crawling through it for hours and all along she’d had to pretend that she wasn’t in a small and tight space or she would have had another attack.

  She wasn’t claustrophobic, technically, but she wasn’t comfortable with small and tight spaces which was why she kept trying to pick a fight with Thomas. Fighting with him made her concentrate on other things than the tiny pipe she was in and the armed people who were looking for them in the corridors beneath them.

  Turning around another corner she blinked. She took a deep breath. The air smelled fresher here. Was it her imagination or was the darkness less dense here? The complete blackness had turned into a shade of dark grey.

  She wondered if Thomas noticed. He didn’t say anything so she supposed not. He wasn’t the most observant person. For all she knew he might be color blind. That would explain some of the t-shirts he’d been wearing the last few weeks. Turquoise was not his color.

  She turned yet another corner and saw that the light was coming from a hole in the pipe from which daylight positively flowed. This could have been the happiest moment in her life. If only that hole hadn’t been positioned behind a large, spinning fan that was pushing air towards them with an impressive force and likely to cut them to pieces if they tired to climb through it.

  “Hey, that’s daylight!” Thomas exclaimed from behind her.

  Sofia didn’t bother to answer. The disappointment of being so close and yet so far away from freedom made her eyes well up. There was no way they could get past that fan. If she stuck so much as her pinky in there those rotor blades would take it off.

  Thomas tried to look around Sofia to see why she had stopped. Air was blowing past him at an alarming force. He managed to get a look o a giant fan before Sofia shifted again and blocked his view.

  The movement pulled his attention back to her body. He could see more of it now that they weren’t in the pitch dark anymore. Those jeans looked good on her. Thomas closed his eyes. He did not think of Sofia Hansson like that. He opened his eyes and swallowed deeply. He had to get out of here.

  “Er…Sofia?”

  “Yes?”

  “Could you lie down for a sec, please?”

  “Why?”

  “So that I can disable the fan that is blocking our way,” he replied, forcing himself to talk slowly and softly and ignore the tone of deep suspicion that had entered her voice.

  “You can do that?”

  “No, I just want to crawl over your body to have galleons of air blown into my face. Of course I can!”

  “I’m not comfortable with you crawling over my body,” Sofia said, sounding as if she would be more comfortable with being dipped in syrup and buried in an ant stack. He tried not to feel offended.

  “Well, if you’re more comfortable with my face being an inch from your… backside in this supreme daylight we can stay like this for another twenty minutes.”

  She considered this new information for a few seconds before sighing deeply and doing as he asked.

  “Smart move,” Thomas said and moved over her.

  “Ouch! That’s my hair!”

  “Sorry.”

  Finally, he was past her and right in front of the fan. He shook his head. The idiot who installed this thing had obviously no idea of what they were doing. You didn’t just plug one of these things into the wall.

  “Sofia, do you still have that vase with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  ”Could I borrow it for a second?”

  ”Why?”

  ”Just give it over!”

  He knew she was going to argue and prepared himself for a fight, but then she shook her head and handed it over. He shoved it through the rotor blades before she had time to change her mind.

  With a groan the fan hacked a couple of times and before coming to a halt. Unfortunately, it kept making a lot of noise. Thomas hurried to reach in through the blades and pull the plug. The noise stopped and Thomas managed to catch the vase as it fell. He gave it back to Sofia.

  “Thank you,” she said in a tone that was completely new.

  He looked back at her upturned face. No sarcasm, no raised eyebrows.

  “You know, that’s the first nice thing you have ever said to me,” he told her.

  “Well,” she said sweetly. “It’s the first nice thing I’ve ever seen you do.”

  Thomas didn’t know to respond to that so he concentrated on trying to get past the fan instead. It was a lot harder than it looked on TV. In the end he had to kick the blades off.

  “Not so loud!” Sofia hissed.

  “Do you want to stay in here?” he asked irritably as he tried to get his body through the last part of the pipe without cutting his skin on any of the metal.

  Sofia, who was a lot smaller than him –and a lot more flexible than she looked– crawled through it in five seconds. She looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

  Thomas shook his head and continued to the hole. It was covered by a metal grid, but that old thing was rusty and cracked so he could kick it out without too much difficulty. He was grateful that although he hardly had on any clothes, he at least had his shoes.

  There was a ten feet drop from where they were sitting to the ground so Thomas quickly swung from the tube and landed on his feet like cat. Sofia carefully edged closer to the hole and looked down. Alarmed by the distance between her and the hard, unrelenting asphalt she pulled back again.

  Thomas suddenly appreciated that her face was so easy to read. He could swear that in her mind she was seeing herself lying crushed on the ground with broken bones sticking out from her skin in all kinds of uncomfortable angles.

  She swallowed hard. Then she looked up and saw the smirk on his lips. Before he knew what she was going to do she had thrown the vase to him and jumped.

  Stunned, he watched her plunge to the ground. Mid-air she twisted and when she landed, she did so surprisingly elegantly, adding a few somersaults. Thomas stared at her.

  “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “Jiujitsu for two years. We spent months learning how to fall without injuring ourselves,” she told him and shook her feet. “I’ve never done it from a height though. It hurt more than I thought it would.”

  Thomas shook his head in disbelief before he remembered where they were and looked around to see if they were being watched by anyone. There was no one in sight, but it looked like they were standing in a car park and there should be at least one surveillance camera around.

  There was a large fence around the property and even though the parking lot was deserted he was certain that the box made from glass a hundred yards away was not. Behind it he could see a huge, massive, massively huge metal gate.

  “So how do we get out of here?” Sofia asked, looking around.

  Thomas grinned at her. “You tell me, Jackie Chan.”

  She frowned at him, full of suspicion. “I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

  �
��You should.”

  To his great surprise she smiled back. That was the first time that he could remember her smiling at him. His breath caught. That smile was dangerous.

  “This is all super weird,” she said. “It’s like we are stuck in an action movie, and not a good one. Hopefully some idiot left their car unlocked.”

  “Hey, don’t jinx us. We’re not out of here y…” Thomas said as an explosion of noise erupted from the large building behind them.

  20

  Having a Blast

  They looked at each other, the same concern mirrored on the other persons face, before setting off across the parking lot at a run.

  “I told you not to jinx us,” Thomas panted to her.

  “Don’t blame me for this,” she hissed back. “Can you drive?”

  “We don’t have any keys.”

  “Keys? What would you need keys for?” Sofia asked and hurried over to a green Jaguar.

  Thomas followed, mainly to see what she was going to do. He kept looking over his shoulder. He couldn’t get rid of the feeling that someone was watching them. Sofia apparently was not bothered by this. Possibly because the car in front of her had captured all of her attention.

  “Beautiful, beautiful. Yes you are, you are stunning,” she mumbled to herself while caressing the car’s green lacquer.

  “It’s a car,” Thomas whispered, forced to point out the obvious. “Can we hurry this up?”

  “It is a Jaguar E-type Roadster Sports Green. It is not a car, it’s a work of art,” Sofia bit out, and sighed ruefully as she stepped away from the car. “Do you see anything more like a Jeep or a truck?”

  “We’re not gonna take that one?” Thomas asked, pointing to the Jaguar.

  “What? Are you crazy? Would you drive this into a locked gate?”

  “So what was all that touchy feely stuff about?”

  Sofia opened and closed her mouth. Thomas stared at her until she blushed.

  “Are you out of your mind? We have been kidnapped and tortured by terrorists and you want to stick around petting their cars!” Thomas hissed and stalked off.

  Sofia hurried after him.

  “I don’t think they’re terrorists,” she said. ”That makes no sense. I think they’re more likely part of an organized crime syndicate. My best bet would be they want to traffic us for sex or steal our organs.”

  “What? That makes no sense either.”

  “Nothing about this makes any sense! They should have…”

  “What about that one? The black one over there?” he interrupted and pointed to a Chrysler parked some twenty feet away.

  Sofia nodded and skipped gingerly towards it, flinching every now and again as she put her foot down on a pebble. He almost felt sorry for her, but at least they’d let her keep her clothes.

  She looked through the window of the car, then looked up at him.

  “You don’t happen to have a screwdriver on you, do you?” she asked, her eyes snagging on his boxers.

  “Sorry?” he said.

  “Hrrm? Oh, nothing,” she said and shook her head. “I don’t know how to get into a car without keys or tools to get the lock open. Damn it!”

  Frustrated, she pulled at the door handle and fell over when it opened. Stunned, they looked from the open door to each other.

  Thomas was the first to recover. He cleared his throat. “Er, right, so, do you think they might have left the keys for us too?”

  Sofia shook her head incredulously, but got back to her feet and looked around for potential keys. Nothing. Well, he supposed that would have been asking for too much.

  “That’s not a problem,” she said and fiddled with a couple of cables that she had mysteriously produced from under the steering wheel. Seconds later the engine started.

  “Yes! Gotcha! Okay, Jefferson, get in. You’re driving,” she said and climbed over the stick to the passenger seat.

  Thomas didn’t need to be told twice. He didn’t even care about where, and why, she’d learned how to hot-wire a car. What mattered right now was that she had learned it.

  He threw himself into the driver’s seat and reversed out from the parking space as fast as he could. The tires screeched.

  “Could you try being less conspicuous?” Sofia hissed at him.

  Thomas didn’t answer, he was too busy manoeuvring the huge car without ramming any of the other parked vehicles. If any of the car alarms went off and someone looked out the window they’d be easy to spot in this monster of a car.

  Sweat vas pouring down his forehead and into his eyes and he rubbed irritably at his face. Finally he managed to get the car in position for exiting through the closed gate.

  Sofia turned in her seat as a loud boom echoed behind them. He hoped it didn’t mean that the large doors of the building had been thrown open. Sofia turned white as a sheet. “Hurry!” she ordered.

  “Okay, buckle up. And brace yourself.”

  “Done. Step on it!”

  He did. For a moment everything seemed to be standing still before suddenly surging forward. The gate grew larger as the car sped up. The metal bars looked even more impenetrable when approaching at a speed of 200 miles per hour.

  Thomas couldn’t hear anything, not the sound of the engine, not the shouts from the people in grey suits and black body socks as they poured out of the building behind them, not the guns they were firing at them.

  His hands were gripping the wheel so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. Through the windshield the gate was all that he could see. They were seconds away from ramming it straight on now. He should have aimed for the fence instead, never mind that there were three layers of it. There was no way that they were going to get through that gate. For a second he hesitated and lifted his foot a little.

  Then Sofia’s voice cut through the fog in his head.

  “Kör!”

  Thomas didn’t understand the language, but the meaning was crystal clear and went straight to his right foot. He sent up a quick prayer as he pressed the accelerator all the way down. With a roar from the car they hit the gate.

  It’s a genuinely painful experience, driving into a closed metal gate at a speed of 200 miles per hour, Sofia reflected a few seconds later. She wasn’t sure exactly how fast 200 miles was in terms of kilometres, but she reckoned, from her recent experience, that it was really fast. Not that she minded. She had, in fact, ordered Thomas to go faster.

  She closed her eyes for a moment in an attempt to get her racing heart under control. She was alive and no matter how much thundering into the gate had jarred her she was positive that it would have been worse to get shot. Also, for some reason the airbag hadn’t been deployed so that was a silver lining right there.

  A bullet broke the side door mirror to her right. She ducked and looked over at Thomas. He was staring at the road in front of them, his shoulders tense. She checked the speed meter. 220 miles/hour. Thank goodness he was concentrating on the road and holding on to the wheel with both hands. She could see him grasping the wheel so hard his hands had turned white.

  Sofia turned in her seat and looked behind them. The car was mainly intact, but what remained of the gate they had crashed through was spread over an impressively large area. Some of it littered the road behind them and was causing problems for the vehicles that were trying to follow so she supposed that was a good thing

  Thomas was murmuring to himself. She wasn’t sure what he was saying, but it sounded like he was praying. She turned back to watch the vehicles following them. Two or three had managed to make it past the metal rubble and were quickly gaining on them.

  “I’m not dead, I’m not dead,” Thomas mumbled to himself.

  Sofia hoped that he wasn’t going to have a breakdown right now. She wouldn't mind falling apart herself, but she wasn’t driving a car a hundred miles over the speed limit.

  She looked at his face. He looked tired and tense, but he was scanning the rear-view mirror and seemed to know what he was doing with the car
. After fifteen minutes they were coming up to an intersection. There were no road signs and Thomas hesitated.

  “Take a left,” Sofia said.

  Thomas jumped and looked over at her, before quickly turning back to the road. They were still flying down the road at 200 miles per hour.

  “How do you know?” he asked her.

  “I don’t. But you need to choose one and fast,” she said with a carelessness she wasn’t feeling. “You might as well take left.”

  Thomas shook his head, but hit the brakes and made the turn. Anther few minutes and they came to the next intersection. He glanced at her and raised an eyebrow.

  “Right. Why don’t they have any road signs?” Sofia asked and threw another look over her shoulder.

  She couldn't see the cars that had been following them now, but she was sure it was only a matter of time before they turned up. Thomas turned right.

  “This is a small road,” he replied. “Which is a good thing, considering the speed we’re going at.”

  “I’d love for us to be pulled over. That would save us the time of going to the police station ourselves. Take left.”

  “Why do you want us to zigzag?”

  “It’s better than going in circles.”

  Thomas frowned, but didn’t object. He checked the rearview mirror again and Sofia looked over her shoulder. They still appeared to be alone on the road. They might actually survive this.

  If Thomas could keep them on the road long enough for them to get out of these backwoods and reach civilization they would be fine. So long as… She sniffed the air. She could smell something burning. She hoped that it wasn’t their car. She’d thought most of the bullets had missed them, but one of them could have found its mark. More likely, the speed and the constant breaking and accelerating was getting to the tires. She decided to ignore the smell. So long as she didn’t see any flames she didn’t have to deal with it.

  The car was slowing down again and Sofia looked ahead to see that they were coming to yet another intersection, this one with traffic passing through. She looked at the signs and frowned. She’d never heard of any of those places.