Survival of The Fittest | Book 3 | Final Ride

by Fawkes, K. M.

  And after that, I was pretty sure, he was going to kill both Will and me. We would know too much about what he was doing, and we’d already proved that we were too much trouble.

  Which just made it even more imperative that I find a way for us to escape before I got to the end of my little project.

  Chapter 22

  The minute Jerry and Adam left, probably wishing there was a door they could slam and lock behind them, just to make sure I didn’t go out wandering while they were away (something I was really, really considering), I cast one more glance at Will on the screen and then sat down and moved that picture to one of the other monitors. It wasn’t like it was hard. There were five different monitors, and each was hooked up to the same set of wiring, which meant I had them all at my beck and call.

  And I wanted to see Will for as long as I could. I wanted him in my sights. I wanted to know he was safe.

  Okay, sure, it was sentimental. But come on. I’d seen my entire world disappear in front of my eyes. I’d lost one of the only friends I had made in a long time, then my only living family member, and then went back into the world to see more dead bodies than I had ever wanted to see. I thought I had probably earned a little bit of sentimentality. Besides, if they shot him, it meant I was free to do something really reckless.

  Like escape without him. Get up and run the hell right out of here without worrying about stopping to pick anyone else up.

  Regrouping once I was out and coming up with a plan to save the people I’d left behind.

  In fact, I was betting that they were thinking that having him in their sights—literally—would keep me in line. I was betting they thought that I would come in here and do exactly what they’d asked, like some good little girl who didn’t have three full thoughts in her head.

  Well, they didn’t know me—or how much I was willing to gamble. And they damn sure didn’t know how much I was capable of when I got in front of a computer.

  I ran quickly through the maps that Adam had directed me to, letting my eyes scan the blueprints for the things I actually needed. Within moments I understood exactly how the solar panels worked. How they gathered sunlight in their little pods, did some fancy compression, and sent the compressed packages—now energy—into the network of wires below them, and from there into the larger network, and from there into the electronic grid that fed the property itself. It all made sense, and it was really incredibly logical—if you spoke the language that they required.

  In fact, it was going to be ridiculously easy to sort out how to get that energy into the park as well. Right now—I scanned the readout that ran down the side of the blueprints, which gave me a real-time account of what was going on with those solar panels—the bunker was only using about one-third of the panel system’s total output.

  The rest was being put into a very fancy storage unit that looked as if it functioned more like a battery than anything else. A battery that you could plug in, essentially, if the solar panels themselves went down. That battery was nearly at full capacity, though, which meant that unless we started using all of the output from the solar panels, a whole lot of energy was just going to start going to waste.

  I mean yeah, who really cared about that? It wasn’t like money was actually going down the drain or something. Sunlight would just go on being sunlight rather than being converted into energy for humans to use. But the idea of it going to waste, the idea of that beautiful electricity not being used, was almost painful to me.

  Still, I put that away for now and searched for what I would need to expand the network to include the amusement park.

  Ah, I realized. There was a second connection point right there. Right now, the panels were literally only plugged in to the bunker’s inlet—possibly by design, as that was what Dear Old Dad had been most worried about. Smart guy, I thought with a chuckle. Still, Adam wanted the park’s wiring to be hooked up as well, and that was my current mission.

  As long as the amusement park had an appropriate single inlet—a connecting point, so to speak, where it could hook into the solar network—I would be able to connect them up by hand and allow that one inlet/outlet connection to spread the electricity throughout the park.

  Easy as pie. They were idiots not to have been able to do that themselves.

  It would work to power the park. When it came to whatever Adam was building… well, I’d just tell him that he had to maintain that single inlet so that he could keep the connection to the solar panels. And from there, how they did the wiring into whatever he was building was really his problem and not mine.

  Because I wasn’t an electrician, first of all. And secondly, I had absolutely no intention of being around whenever they got that thing built.

  And with that in mind, I decided that I’d done enough of the solar panel research for now—enough to be able to recite to them what I’d been doing, at least, and make it sound like it had been hours and hours’ worth of work—and that I could move on to something more interesting. I minimized the solar blueprint and live feed—minimized, so I could pull it back up quickly if someone happened to enter the room—and got started looking for something better.

  I wanted a security system for the bunker. I wanted a map of the security system and a way to get into the network, and I wanted a map of the bunker itself. Complete with all available exit points. I wanted to know where we could get out, once we escaped from our room.

  I wanted to know where the nearest exit was and build that into my mental map.

  And while I was looking for that, if I found something that would give me more information on what exactly Adam was up to? Well, so much the better.

  It took me approximately three minutes of poking around through the standard settings—documents, desktop, downloads—to find where they kept the information I was looking for. And from there, I was flying through all of their data. Everything they’d ever looked at on the computers. Everything they’d thought they might need someday.

  Hell, I even found the original blueprints for the bunker itself, which meant, I supposed, that these computers pre-dated Adam’s dad himself. They must have been here when the military was still here. It probably made them a little bit older, but since the military usually worked with tech that was light years ahead of what the public could get their hands on, I didn’t notice them lagging much.

  And boy did those blueprints tell me a lot.

  I found out that there were actually three stories to the bunker itself, though it looked like we were only using the middle one for the people. The bottom one looked as though it was built for storage while the upper one—a sort of attic—was for… well, I didn’t know what it was for, but I took careful note of how I could get into it, just in case we needed a hiding space at some point.

  Or a way out of the bunker that didn’t include those goddamn stairs and the platform where everyone could see you.

  And from there, I started mapping out other exit points. Places that were just doors in the bunker itself and led to hidden staircases that could take you to the surface. Places where we could not only ascend to the top unseen—but also come out in a place where Adam might not be expecting us.

  I jumped from blueprint to blueprint, one eye on the doorway behind me and one on the screen in front of me, and then—when I could manage it—turning to the next screen over, where Will was struggling along in his work, his shoulder very obviously hampering him but his mouth moving a mile minute as he no doubt talked his guard into submission. And my mental map of the bunker grew and grew until I thought I probably knew more about it than Adam himself.

  And since I found a list of rooms and locations, and a further list of what those rooms contained, I knew that there was also an entire armory in the bunker. And I knew exactly where it was.

  “Tsk tsk,” I muttered to myself. “Keeping guns right in reach of the people you’re trying to take advantage of. Not smart, Adam.”

  There was also a security system, as I’d known there must
be, though it wasn’t incredibly complex. There were no cameras, per se—though I still thought they must have had some way to see into Adam’s office—but there were automatic locks on all the doors in the place. And I mean all the doors. The doors to the rooms, the doors to the exits, the doors to the armory…

  They were all accessible right here. I’d be able to unlock them all with the touch of a finger.

  God, he really was stupid. Or maybe that had been Daddy-o’s work rather than Adam’s. Honestly, it seemed too high-tech for Adam to have bothered with it. Either way, it gave me exactly what I needed to know if we were going to try to move a bunch of people from inside the bunker to outside the bunker in a hurry, and without making too much noise.

  I continued, clicking through one particularly hidden file, wondering what else I might possibly find, when I found the greatest treasure of them all. It was a file marked ‘Personal, Private,’ and I immediately knew that it was important. When I opened it up, I found that it was even more important than I had thought.

  One quick scan told me that it was a sort of digital diary. And this one encompassed everything Adam had done—and was doing—here in the bunker.

  I bit my lip, looked around for a printer, saw that there wasn’t one—of course, because why would they have a printer in here so I could print something like this out?—and started reading as quickly as I could manage, scanning through the text so fast that I barely took it in and counting on my memory to store it away so I could unpack it later, when I had Will with me again.

  Chapter 23

  They gave me a break for lunch and a break for dinner, and each time I managed to put the journal away before they arrived and look like I was studiously poring over those blueprints for the solar panels—doing whatever they thought I should do with them, though it still seemed ridiculous to me that they thought it would take more than an hour to do it—and by the time Jerry arrived to take me back to my room for the night (I hoped), I’d managed to read the whole thing.

  And there was a lot of it.

  I just hoped I could remember everything I’d read. At least the important parts. I’d read all of Adam’s ramblings, parsed through them to try to find the things that were actually important, and packed it all away in my head. I’d gone over map after map of the bunker itself, locating all the exit routes I possibly could. I’d gone through the path I had to take to get to the locks on the doors until I thought I could have found it in my sleep—because I knew I might have to. I’d even memorized the layouts of the top and bottom layers to the bunker—the rooms we hadn’t even seen yet—just in case we needed them for something.

  In short, by the time Jerry took me back to my room, I was so exhausted that I could have cried, and my head was packed so full of information that I was surprised I could walk rather than just toppling over, too top-heavy to function like a normal human being.

  But I had what I thought we needed. I knew what Adam was up to. And I knew how we could get out of the bunker. I also knew that we had to get out of there as quickly as possible. Before they figured out that I could rewire that solar network now, and was just sticking around to get the information they didn’t want me to have.

  “Well, I don’t think I can go through another day like that,” I whispered anxiously to Will the moment he stepped into the room.

  I was relieved to see him. I’d been keeping an eye on his feed all day, so I’d known that he was still out there and kicking, but I’d lived the entire day with the knife hanging over my head. Or rather… the gun hanging over his head. I hadn’t known from one moment to the next whether he would still be there when I looked again—and I hadn’t known, not for sure, that they’d bring him back to me at the end of the day. Honestly, it wouldn’t have completely surprised me to hear that they’d decided to keep him to make sure I worked even harder tomorrow.

  No, they hadn’t done anything to hurt either of us yet. But the things I’d been reading in Adam’s journal had made it more and more obvious with every passing second exactly how insane he was. And you just can’t count on insane people for anything but insanity. Which made my fears about Will seem really, really realistic.

  I stepped quickly up to him and gave him a hug, but let go almost immediately when he grunted in pain.

  “Oh my God, are you okay?” I asked, surprised. Had something else happened while he was up top? Something that I hadn’t seen?

  He grimaced. “Just the same shoulder. It’s getting stiffer with all the work, is the problem. And they keep expecting me to do more with it.”

  I glanced up and down at him, taking in the tall, muscular frame, the well-built shoulders. Of course they expected him to do more. He looked like a freaking superhuman.

  The fact that he was already sporting an injury evidently didn’t matter to them. It certainly hadn’t motivated them to get him a doctor.

  I guided him toward one of the beds and made him sit down, then pulled his shirt up over his head… and gasped.

  The shoulder was definitely getting worse. It had been a mass of bruising yesterday, but those bruises had mostly been older and starting to hit the yellowed-out phase. Now, though, the shoulder was black-and-blue again, and swollen with fresh internal bleeding.

  “What happened?” I asked, putting gentle fingers to his skin.

  He shivered. “Just the work. The joint is damaged, I think, and using it too much is making it worse.”

  I dropped to my knees in front of him and took his hand. “Then I guess it’s a good thing I figured out what’s going on—and how we’re going to get out of it.”

  And then I told him everything about my day.

  “I think I can get us to a door that will lead us out,” I whispered in conclusion. “Out or into one of the other hidden levels. And from there, we’ll have all kinds of options for getting the hell out of here.”

  Will nodded tensely. “Did you find anything else out about Adam himself?”

  “Oh God, did I. I found another journal. One he’s been keeping since he got here. And it’s even worse than we thought. He’s not just rebuilding the amusement park or fixing the rides or making new ones or anything like that. There’s a reason they call the groups that go up ‘salvage groups,’ Will.”

  I bit my lip, mentally going back through all of those journal entries and finding the parts that were important. The parts that actually pieced together to make the plan.

  “They’re having the coasters taken apart so they can use the metal to build a fortress of some sort. The machinery is going into booby traps that they’re planning to put outside of it.”

  Will’s face creased with a frown. “A fortress? Why?”

  “Because Adam is dead set on the idea that someone is out to get him. He thinks the entire attack—every bomb they set off around the world—is because of him. He’s convinced that he’s someone important, and that the cult found out where he was and came after him. He’s convinced that they’re going to come after him again.”

  “So, he’s building a fortress,” Will muttered quietly. “To protect himself.” His eyes met mine, then, sparks jumping out of them as he put the pieces together. “Because a bunker evidently isn’t good enough? And what about all the people? What’s he planning to do with them once he gets this fortress built?”

  “Keep them,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach. “He thinks the world as we know it is ending and that it’s his job to repopulate it, or something like that. And if he fails at that, at least he’ll have these people as slaves. They’re his slaves right now, and they’ll stay that way. Unless something happens to change the plan.”

  Will’s mouth twitched. “Something?”

  I shrugged. “We can’t just leave them here, Will. We can’t leave them to become breeding stock—or servants.”

  He jerked his head in a nod. “So we’re taking them with us when we break out.” Then, though, he turned to me again, questions in his eyes. “The question is, how and when are we going to do it?�
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  Chapter 24

  An hour later, after watching the clock and waiting for the lights to go out while we planned our asses off, we thought we had it. We weren’t going to be using the basement or the attic area of the bunker. We weren’t even going to be using the exits around us—mostly because we didn’t think we’d be able to get everyone out of their rooms and to an exit without causing enough commotion that the guards came running.

  Yeah, sneaking out in the middle of the night and just getting to the nearest exit sounded like the most ideal way to do things. The completely logical way to do things, if we were coordinating an escape. The problem was, though, that no matter how many plans I’d gone through on that computer, I hadn’t been able to figure out where Adam and the guards actually slept. We had no way of knowing whether they were in a place where they could watch us, or even stationed next to the exits or something.

  Which meant that getting out in the middle of the night, no matter how logical and straightforward, wasn’t an option. We’d had to come up with something else. Something that included most of us already being outside.

  The minute the lights went out, we got started. They’d given us a flashlight for using the bathroom at night, and I stood behind Will, shining the light on the doorknob while he worked his magic.

  Will, of course, made very quick work of the doorknob—he really was good at that, and I made a mental note again to get him to teach me at some point—and then slowly tried to open the door. But we’d both been in and out of the room enough times now to know that it wouldn’t open on its own. Because they’d secured a steel band across it on the first night, after we broke out. And that steel band—more of a lever than a band, honestly, as it looked like it swung over the door once the door was closed—was fixed to the wall on the other side of the door with a padlock.