“Now, Gabriella, let’s not be too hasty here,” said Jordan, his palms held up in a conciliatory gesture. “Just give us some time, we’ll get you the money.”
“They don’t listen, do they?” my mother asked, putting a gun to Chloe’s head and pulling the trigger.
The sound was unlike anything I’d ever heard before as crimson sprayed across the steel floor. Chloe’s body collapsed like a bag of wet sand. The smell, like a thousand pennies, hit my nose, and my stomach sloshed. The world spun beneath my feet as I fell. I would have hit the floor if Roberto hadn’t grabbed me. I was about to pull myself away, but instead, my stomach opted to lose its contents onto his shoes.
I shuddered again, unable to look up as tears filled my eyes. Chloe… My mother had just killed Chloe. Why had she done it? Why?
“What have you done!” barked Jordan, face red.
“I warned you,” my mother said offhandedly and shrugged as if to say ‘I don’t know what else you want from me.’
“Five,” sounded a voice that reverberated around the room, and as I wiped my mouth and glanced back at the timer, it said, “four.”
“Please Gabriella, just give me more time,” the man with the yamaka pleaded, tears in his eyes. “All I need is three minutes.”
“Three.”
“Pity, I don’t have any more agents to kill,” my mother said, glancing at Roberto. “They just keep talking, don’t they?”
Wait… she didn’t have any more agents? Did that mean Stephen had escaped somehow? Did that mean he was on his way here, right now?
“Two.”
Roberto nodded minutely to my mother before helping me to my feet, ignoring the mess I’d made on his pants. Points for him.
“Have someone clean that up,” my mother said, gesturing at the corpse.
“One.” The screen with the counter went red. The one with the dollar sign hadn’t changed.
My mother glanced up at it and shook her head. “Politicians,” she said, and the screen with the yamaka guy turned to static. “You try to tell them exactly what you want, and somehow, they try to find a way not to give it to you.” She shrugged. “Well, this time there is no escape plan. Now, shall we try this again? Double or nothing? Where the prizes are twice as big and the stakes twice as high?” She glanced at me, eyes bright with amusement. “Somehow, I don’t think they’ll listen, but you never know,” she added under her breath.
“Did… did you just blow up a city?” I asked, ignoring all the noise coming from the monitors. “All those people…” I suddenly felt sick as the image of millions of people going up in flames filled my mind. Women, children, families, all destroyed in an instant, and for what? So my mother could make a point?
“Yes,” my mother replied. “I nuked Jerusalem, try not to make a big deal about it. Now,” she turned toward the screen, “we’re going to try again with Rome.” She put her hand to her mouth and spoke conspiratorially. “I don’t think they believed me the first time.”
“But you asked for a trillion dollars in thirty seconds, no one has that kind of money,” I said, my hands balling into fists. Someone had to stop my mother, and with Stephen absent and Chloe dead, that pretty much left me.
“I’ll be honest with you, Abigail. College is expensive,” she said with a shrug as the counter behind her flashed with the number fifteen. “Besides, I never really expected them to pay for the first city. That was more to show them I’m serious.”
I took a step toward her, intent on, well I’m not sure exactly, when Roberto seized me around the waist with one giant arm. He held me there, so that I couldn’t move while my mother turned back to the screen and smiled maliciously.
“Okay,” she said, addressing the screens again. “Two trillion dollars for Rome.” The counter started flashing downward. “That’s less than a million dollars per person, sounds like a deal, doesn’t it?”
I turned away from the screen because if I watched, I was pretty sure I was going to start crying. I was pretty sure my mother didn’t expect them to pay her for Rome either, so why was she doing this? For fun?
“Five.”
“No,” the voice on the screen rang out so crisply.
“Four.”
It zoomed in on the pope. He stood there, dressed in his robes. He was on his knees, staring up at the sky. “We will not pay you, Ms. de la Mancha. If it be His will for us to die, then so be it.”
“Three.”
“Let’s not forget, Pope, you don’t rule Rome. I’m sure the others there are willing to pay,” my mother smirked, “Or not.”
“Two.”
“Forgive her,” he said, dropping to his knees, head bowed.
“One.”
Static.
Chapter 9
“Well, the cat’s dead.” Those were the last words my mother said before sending me back to my room.
That’s where I was going now, trudging along the stainless steel hallway with Roberto behind me. “I’d say something, but I’m not sure what to say,” he said, huge paw resting on my shoulder as he steered me through the winding corridors.
“Say ‘it’s okay’ or ‘she was just joking and that wasn’t real’ or something like that,” I replied. Somehow, someway this was my fault, and that made my insides twist up into knots. While I didn’t know anyone in those cities, I didn’t want them to die either. Because I’d let myself be captured, millions of people were destroyed in an instant, and for what, so my mother could prove a point? “Hell, you could even say ‘she’s not always like this,’ you know, anything, really.”
“I’d be lying,” he said with a shrug. “But it is okay. Not for those people, they’re dead, but for you. We have you now. We’ll keep you… safe.”
“You’re lying,” I said, swallowing. “You’re going to chop me up and use me for spare parts, aren’t you?”
Roberto said nothing for so long that I turned to look at him. Only… only he wasn’t standing there anymore. He was lying slumped on the floor, his eyes rolled up in the back of his head.
Stephen, glorious Stephen of the perfect eyes, stood over Roberto. A giant cut that split his left eyebrow was stitched shut, and I wondered what other injuries his tight black long sleeve shirt and matching black jeans hid.
“We have to go,” he said, reaching out and taking my hand, and I swear to God, my heart did a little somersault because he was alive. “I disabled some of the doors so the guards will have trouble reaching us, but I don’t know how long that will hold them,” he added, gesturing for me to come to him.
“Thank god you’re here!” I cried, barely resisting the urge to hug him as relief flooded into me. “I was so worried…” I bit my lip. “I was worried you were dead.”
“You were worried about me?” he asked, his cheeks reddening just a tad before he shook his head as if dismissing an errant thought. “I was worried about you and Chloe too. After the explosion, I was buried under a bunch of rubble. It took me a long time to dig my way out.”
“So how’d you find me?” I asked as the memory of Chloe crashed down on me. Tears tugged at the corner of my eyes, and I fought to keep them from spilling out.
“I followed Chloe’s transponder, but it stopped signaling a few minutes ago…” he trailed off and looked away, staring far off into space. “I’m guessing she didn’t make it,” he added a moment later.
I shook my head. “No,” I whispered, and it was very nearly the hardest word I ever had to say.
“Okay, well,” Stephen said, pulling me back down the hallway. “Let’s get you out of here. Donovan’s arranged for a transport so we just need to get to it.”
An air raid siren went off in the hallway. Flashing red lights began to strobe, filling the room with crimson shadows as I put my hands to my ears in an effort to drown out the noise. All around us doors tried to rise up, but they stopped, screeching to a halt after moving only a couple inches. Acrid smoke drifted out of the mechanisms as Stephen glanced up and down the hallway.
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br /> “Dammit!” Stephen snapped over the din, worry crisscrossing his face. He said something else that sort of sounded like, “they shouldn’t have found us so quickly,” but it was hard to hear him over all the racket.
He grabbed something from beneath his brown leather bomber jacket and flung it down the hallway behind him before pulling a gun from the waistband of his jeans. It had that huge ominous look to it that reminded me of old gangster movies, and I wondered how lucky I was feeling. Not really very lucky.
Stephen pushed me forward, not hard, just enough to get me moving. I turned to look at him, and he nodded before stepping in front of me and edging down the hallway. Then the corridor shook so violently I nearly lost my footing.
I glanced over my shoulder as my heart tried to escape through my chest with a battering ram. Behind us, twenty feet away the hallway was just gone. Someway, somehow it had been replaced with a boatload of twisted metal, burning wood, and broken rubble. Thick plumes of grey-black smoke filled the air as Stephen reached back, wrapping one of his slender hands around my wrist and jerking me forward.
“We have to move, Abby,” he yelled over the blaring siren and took a few more steps forward, not bothering to look at me. It was just as well because I’m sure I looked like a hot mess. I wiped my eyes with the back of my free hand and swallowed the lump in my throat.
“Okay,” I mumbled and was pretty sure he didn’t hear me because I didn’t hear myself. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Okay,” he replied, stopping for a moment as we reached the end of the hallway. We were at a fork. Either we went left or we went right. He turned toward me, and his blue eyes fixed on me. Emotion traveled just below the surface of them, like a giant fish swimming just beneath the surface of a lake. I swallowed again and felt my cheeks start to heat up as he stared at me.
“What?” I asked, and he paused for a long time, studying me.
“Do you trust me?” he asked, brow furrowing.
“I don’t really have a lot of choice right now,” I replied, glancing down both the left and right path. It was too dark for me to see much of anything.
Stephen shook his head, blond hair falling over his eyes as he did so. He reached up, pushing it out of the way with his gun hand, which seemed a little dangerous to me, but otherwise made me melt a little inside.
“I know you don’t have a choice right now, Abby,” he said. “That wasn’t what I asked.”
I mulled his question over, and came to find, surprisingly, that I did trust him. I couldn’t say why exactly, given his track record of working for an agency that kidnapped me, but he also hadn’t nuked two cities.
“Yes, Stephen, I trust you,” I whispered, barely getting the words out.
“Good,” he said and released my hand. I looked down at my hand. It suddenly felt very cold, and well, unheld. “I need you to follow me very closely and when I tell you to run, I want you to run. Don’t look back. Don’t ask questions. Just put sneakers to pavement and move. Got it?”
I nodded, biting my lip.
“Okay,” he said and darted into the right fork. As soon as he stepped into the hallway, neon lights in the shape of footprints lit up the floor. Were we following some kind of evacuation path? I was about to ask when Stephen beckoned me to follow. I swallowed, steeling myself for a moment and darted after him.
For some reason I couldn’t explain, I felt really vulnerable and exposed passing by the left fork. Maybe Stephen had another one of those tunnel killers? Then no one could come down the left fork and I don’t know, ambush us from behind? I was about to ask him just that when something zipped through the space to the left of my ear.
“Down!” Stephen screamed, throwing himself backward in a half-twist. His shoulder struck me hard in the chest, as his free hand wrapped around me and pulled me to the ground. Breath exploded out of my chest with such violence that I wasn’t sure I could even remember how to breathe.
Instead, I rolled into a ball on the floor as Stephen swung his body around on his elbows. His gun went off, and its crack shattered my already done for hearing. It rang in my ears so loudly that I couldn’t hear anything but the dull cry of the bullet.
He fired again, the flash off the muzzle so bright that it was nearly blinding in the darkened hallway. More zings pinged off the metal around him, but strangely, they weren’t anywhere near me. Well, that was good, right?
“Abby, it looks like our pathway is blocked. I was afraid this would happen. Remember when I asked if you trusted me?” he asked, but I could barely hear him.
“Yes,” I yelled as loudly as I could even though I didn’t mean to do it.
“Okay,” he said, grabbing me by the shoulder and hoisting me upright in front of him like… like a shield.
“What the hell are you doing?” I screamed, my stomach falling into my shoes as he shoved me forward in front of him.
“Improvising,” he whispered in my ear, his breath warm on my neck as he spoke. He put his wrist on my shoulder, and out of the corner of my eye, I could just make out the barrel of his monster gun.
“Don’t do anything stupid!” Stephen called from behind me, his voice echoing in the sudden silence. “I don’t want to hurt her, but you all know what my orders are.”
Adrenaline surged through me as his words clicked in my brain. Wait, hadn’t he just asked me to trust him, and now, he was threatening to kill me?
Stephen’s gun exploded next to my ear, and I thought I was dead. Only, I wasn’t dead because Stephen held me firmly with his other hand on the waistband of my scrubs. “Don’t run,” he whispered. “If you do, we’re both dead.”
I nodded, but wasn’t sure he could see it as he pushed me forward again. That’s when it clicked. They still wanted me alive, but Stephen, well they didn’t exactly need him to make any points. My mother had just nuked Rome and Jerusalem. What was one more dead secret agent? Now, I just had to assume he was the good guy, and, you know, didn’t actually plan on shooting me.
A moment later, I saw the body of a man in white scrubs. Blood leaked out of his body, spreading out around him in a pool of foul smelling ichor. I swallowed, but that didn’t seem to help my stomach any. I took another step, my shoe squelching in the blood as Stephen moved us past the corpse.
Had he just killed that guy? I shook my head, trying to banish the thought as Stephen reached down and picked up the guy’s weapon. It looked like some kind of machine gun but for all I knew, it was a bazooka.
“Is this where you say ‘Ho, ho, ho, now I have a machine gun?’” I asked, and my voice cracked partway through the statement.
“I will if it will make you feel better,” he said, moving next to me, which seemed sketchy. What if there were more bad guys?
“What if there are more bad guys?” I asked, glancing at him as he took the lead once again.
“Why, Abby?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder and quirking one golden eyebrow at me. “I’m starting to think you’d be sad if I got hurt.”
I didn’t respond to him. What was I supposed to say, honestly? “No you’re wrong, I want to watch your bullet riddled corpse hit the ground so I can go back to my mom who wants to chop me up and make my bits her bits.” I shook my head, dismissing the notion. Nope, I wasn’t going down that road. Then again, it could have gone the other way so easily. Stephen could have been forced to shoot me.
I wiped my hands on my pants and followed after Stephen as he approached a steel door with a large control panel attached to it. He wouldn’t do that, would he? He wouldn’t shoot me…
Stephen pulled on a glove made of black rubber and placed his hand against the screen on the control panel. Electricity arced between his fingers, and he turned to glance at me as wisps of energy darted over his gloved hand.
“Open sesame,” he said, and the door slid open with a whoosh.
I glanced at him, narrowing my eyes and shaking my head. “You think you’re so cool,” I said, trying to shove down thoughts of him shooting me in
the back of the head as I stared past him into the dank, dark hole beyond the door.
“I don’t think I’m cool,” he said with a grin and pulled his hand away, lightning crackled between his fingertips and the control panel. “I think I’m positively electric.”
He turned and stepped boldly into the room with his shoulders squared, and I followed more timidly. For whatever reason, he seemed to think we weren’t going to get shot at anymore, but I wasn’t so sure. I mean we were trying to escape a secret base of a woman who had just nuked two major cities. She had to have more than two guards here, right?
The first thing I noticed about the room was the smell, like old salt water and oil. It hit me in a rush that made me think we might be on a pirate ship in the middle of the ocean. Stephen took another step and put his hand out, grabbing the slick bronze railing of a spiral staircase that led down into the dank blackness below.
“Be careful. It’s slippery,” he said, taking a careful step onto the staircase and descending a few feet before turning to watch me.
“What?” I asked, taking a tepid step forward, setting my bloody tennis shoe down on the first corrugated-metal step. “Afraid I won’t follow you down into another dark hole?”
“You never know,” he replied with a smirk before facing forward and moving deeper into the inky darkness.
“I don’t suppose you brought a flashlight,” I replied, a few moments later. I could barely see even a few feet in front of me and now every step was slow and measured because I wasn’t sure if I was going to drop off into oblivion.
“Yes, I have one. No, I’m not turning it on. If there are gunners in here, I don’t want to give them a target,” he said. His voice seemed far away, impossibly far away.
A second later, my shoes hit what felt like concrete, and my next step confirmed I was on the level as it were. “Okay, we’re here,” I said. “Where are you?”
“Heading to the submarine, mon petite chou, like you should be.” Donovan’s voice broke through the darkness and nearly made me leap out of my shoes. I spun toward the sound of it. I could just barely make him out standing next to a hulking hunk of metal. I took a few steps toward him, still bewildered, and something grabbed my wrist.
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