by Leah Rhyne
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Beside me, my parents laughed too. All we could do was laugh.
On the ground, Sondra started to turn blue.
After a second, when we hadn’t heard a response from Strong and Martha, I looked around. “We need to go,” I repeated. “They’re coming. And I don’t know how many people are here, but I have a feeling it’s not just them. At least, not for long. You heard them talking about the Master. I’d rather not be in this room when he gets here.” I pointed at my prostrate professor. “Daddy, help Lucy. We’re taking the professor with us. Wait a sec, are you really even a teacher?”
My father and Lucy yanked Sondra to her feet, each with a tight grip on her arm. She coughed and sputtered, but nodded. “Yes,” she said, her voice tortured and hoarse.
My father nodded. “Yes. So, Professor. What way’s out?” He shook her arm, and she groaned.
“Easy!” she said. “I’ll show you, but you have to promise not to hurt Adam! Take me to the police, do whatever you will with me, just promise you’ll let him go.”
Lucy shuddered. “Oh, God, are you guys? Really? That’s disgusting.” She froze there, clutching Sondra’s arm and staring at her with a mix of horror and confusion. “I can’t…I just can’t…” Her mouth gaped.
“Knock it off,” Eli said. “Stop standing there like that matters right now. You know it doesn’t. We need to move.” He left the wall and shoved Lucy roughly from behind. “Move!”
But as he shoved, even though it looked like he only meant to move us all forward, he knocked the normally graceful Lucy off her balance, and she stumbled, losing her grip on Sondra’s arm. Sondra yanked her other arm free from my father, who was busy trying to catch Lucy. My mother yelped, as the sudden freedom from Sondra’s burden sent my father back into her. They all went down, except Sondra, who slipped through the only doorway in the room, still coughing. She was gone before Eli or I, the only two still standing, could react.
“Crap!” Eli said.
“Crap!” my father shouted.
Lucy didn’t yell because she was facedown on the concrete floor. Eli limped to her side and pulled her up from under her arms.
I ran into the hall, surprised at how springy my knees felt. I heard Sondra’s coughs disappearing as heavy footsteps headed our way from the same direction. I called over my shoulder. “Everybody hush! We go this way.” I pointed the opposite direction.
“How do you know?” My mother stood behind my right shoulder.
“Don’t you hear that? They’re down that way. Sondra’s still coughing, and Strong is clomping.”
“I don’t hear anything, but I trust you. We go your way.”
Everyone crowded around me. Lucy peered over my mother’s head. “You hear something? Do you have bionic hearing?”
“It would make sense,” my father said. “They’re creating something new. Why not create something spectacular? With enhancements? Modifications?”
Eli breathed out. “Cool. I wonder what else you can do. How haven’t we figured this out already?”
“I guess they fixed me.” I paused. “Shh. Listen, they’re getting closer. I think we should go.”
Lucy looped an arm around Eli’s waist, and my father took my mother’s hand. I stood in front of them all, peering into the hallway that opened before us. Suddenly we heard a click, and the room and hallway plunged into darkness. It was total.
Behind me, the whole group gasped, and spoke over each other.
“Crap, I can’t see anything!”
“Oh no! What next?”
But I was calm. “It’s okay, you guys,” I said. “I can see in the dark, too. That explains how I didn’t kill myself that first night in the forest. I was just too scared to realize what I was doing.”
Behind me, Eli coughed, and then groaned. “Great news. The blonde leading the blind. I guess we’re all in your hands now, Jo.”
“Eli, hush,” I said, and Lucy giggled. It was odd to me, how quickly we adjusted to this strange new world in which we lived. We clung to our banter like a security blanket against the horrors around us. Our laughter was a balm, a salve, against the pain. Even in the midst of war, people fall in love, and they laugh, and they cry. That was us, in those first moments in the hallway.
I didn’t have time to think about that right then, though. Right then, I had to save my family. I cocked my head like an inquisitive puppy and listened. The footsteps grew louder, the voices more insistent. They were coming.
I started to walk away from those noises, cutting a path through the inky black. My family, the people whose lives I held in my rehydrated hands, followed.
The hallway became a tunnel, all stone walls and damp floors. We crept without speaking, afraid to give away our position. My mother removed her high heels and navigated her way barefoot, like me. Without the pain-free feet I enjoyed, though, she stumbled frequently, tensing in pain when her feet found something sharp. She tried so hard for silence I decided not to point out that our position was painfully obvious to our captors, as we’d not yet passed anywhere that wasn’t this one long, straight shaft. There was no other position we could be in.
This tunnel was different from the one we’d traveled down in Primrose Path, and it became increasingly evident that the Order of the A-holes, or whatever they called themselves, had more than one secret lair in and around the Smytheville campus. I wondered where we were, but I kept my mouth shut, and kept my group moving forward, using my brand-new super-sight to navigate the way for all of us.
I turned around and glanced over the heads of my family. In the distance, I saw the faintest flicker of flashlights, bobbing through the darkness like drunken fireflies. “Shh,” I said, and I listened. First I heard nothing but the faintest of whispers, but then, as if someone turned up the volume inside my ears, I heard their voices. All three of them. Only three of them. But they sounded pissed.
“They can’t get out of here alive,” Strong growled.
“They won’t,” said Martha. “The others will be here soon.”
Sondra coughed. I pictured her for a second, back when she was my professor and I was her student, lecturing my classmates and me on the works of Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe, wearing her ill-fitting clothes with her librarian hair and glasses. She’d been so meek, so mild, so full of useful tidbits of information about iambic pentameter. In that second, I almost felt bad that Lucy had probably done real damage to her throat; she’d struggle to lecture again, at least for a while. And then I heard a click.
It was a distinctive sound, one I’d only ever heard in the movies, but it was unmistakable.
“They have the gun out, you guys!” I whispered frantically. “Someone just cocked it.” I don’t know why this surprised me, but it did.
“How do you….”
“Bionic ears! I heard it. Come on, we have to go faster. Grab onto each other. I’ll lead you!”
Lucy grabbed onto Eli and my father. My father grabbed my mother. She smiled and reached out for my hand.
“Are you sure?” I whispered. “I still might be toxic.”
“You’re my daughter,” she said. “The love of my life. I’ll never let you go.”
Like a group of first graders on a field trip to a museum, we became a train of people rushing down the tunnel. I led us down a long flight of steep stone steps, deeper into the mountain. Behind me my mother shivered, so I knew it grew colder and colder, the deeper we went.
“This may not be the way out,” I said. “I still can’t see anything other than more tunnel.”
“Keep going, Jo,” my father said. He was getting winded, they all were, but still we ran. “We have no choice. Can you still hear them?”
“Shh,” I said, and everyone pressed against the cold walls. I heard footsteps in the distance, but I couldn’t see the beams of the flashlights. We’d just turned a sharp corner, though, so it was impossible to know how far behind us they were.
“Yes, they’re still there.
I think there has to be something up ahead. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they just wait for us to come back out. Eli, you doing all right?”
“Yeah, thanks. I’m the least of our worries right now.”
But his voice was less than convincing, and I remembered how gray he looked, even before we started running the track meet through the tunnel. “Lucy, you got him?”
“I won’t let him go,” she said.
And so we ran further.
And we ran down.
And eventually, the tunnel ended at a wall.
I skidded to a stop right before it, and my blind followers crashed into one another. I fell into the wall, forehead first, and slapped a hand against it. Closing my eyes to ward off the ugly thoughts that flowed into my head, I squeezed my other hand into a fist.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“Jo!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, turning to watch my father pick up my mother from the ground. “I’m sorry for everything. This is the end.”
My parents, Lucy, and Eli pressed against the wall, huddled together and whispering. I tried to ignore the sounds of their voices as I ran my hand along the wall, searching for a solution that I didn’t believe was there. Not anymore. Not there, at the dark end of the dark tunnel deep in an underground labyrinth.
Even though it was dark, I could see quite clearly the outline of each brick and cinderblock. Water dripped down the walls, so my fingers glided easily over the rough stones, though I watched two fingernails fall to the floor, the magic fluids clearly pumped into me over the prior few hours not helping to keep them attached. Once, my nails were neatly manicured at all times. Now they rested beneath my bare, decaying feet. I stepped on them and ground them into the dusty, damp floor.
I silently thanked our pursuers for giving me some enhanced abilities in exchange for all they’d taken from me. I could hear their conversations easily as they bounced off the silent walls.
“The others are on their way, but they’re not here yet!”
“Damn snow.”
“The Master won’t be happy if we have to kill the father.”
They repeated themselves, filling the tunnel with worried chatter. They feared the Master. He would hurt them. Their end, if ours wasn’t to his liking, would be no better than mine. But as they’d not yet said anything to indicate we were stuck, I kept going. They were still afraid we’d escape. There had to be a way out.
If only I could find it.
It was on my shoulders, I knew, to help my parents, Lucy, and Eli escape. Their eyes couldn’t adjust to the thick, palpable dark; their ears couldn’t hear our enemies’ whispers. The burden was heavy, unbearable, and part of me wanted nothing more than to give up, to sit down and throw in the towel and admit I couldn’t hack it. That I’d failed. Especially when I felt the charge start to drain out of my battery, and I knew I didn’t have much time left.
But they stood so close to me, those people I loved. Lucy and Eli. They stood by my side through our unexpected journey. Beside them: my parents. The two who’d given me life, a short nineteen years earlier. They’d be devastated to go on without me, but I couldn’t fail them. I couldn’t let them not go on without me. They’d survive. They had to. Or else it would be like I’d never existed. Never mattered.
And I couldn’t bear their deaths on my shoulders, however briefly my life would continue after theirs ceased.
“Daddy,” I called. “I can’t see a way out yet. I feel like there should be a door somewhere, but I just don’t see one.”
“It may be there’s not one, baby. If not, that’s okay. You’ve done your best.” My mother responded instead of my father. She sounded serene. At peace. I wondered if she’d already accepted death, imminent as it felt for all of us. I wondered if she thought that for her, death might be preferable to survival without me.
It was a chilling, sobering thought.
As if I hadn’t already been sober enough.
For lack of anything better to do, I accused. I got angry. “You guys still can’t see? Why haven’t your eyes adjusted?”
“The human eye can’t see in a light vacuum,” my father said, but I noticed he started moving down the wall, his arms outstretched.
Lucy, too, started walking, running her hands along the wall. “We can’t see, but we can still help you look,” she whispered. “We have eight more hands that can search the walls for something.”
“There’s nothing there! At least, not here,” I said, frustrated. “We must have missed something back there. But they’re still coming. They’re getting closer!”
It was true. They were getting closer. In a matter of minutes, or even seconds, I’d see a change in the subtle light patterns, indicating their arrival. It was weird; now that I knew I could do some things, I was already good at controlling them. I could turn my hearing up, just by thinking about it. I could see further, just by trying. It was amazing. But still I couldn’t quite force myself to see around curved walls.
I stumbled and crashed into a wall, stubbing the big toe on my left foot. It fell off and lay on the floor, mocking me, reminding me that the magic elixir hadn’t healed me all the way. I was still very much a walking dead girl.
I cried out in frustration and threw my arms into the air, trying to look anywhere other than at my big toe, staring at me accusingly on the floor.
And then I cried out in excitement instead.
Because there, in the ceiling, right above my head, was a door, like the door to an attic long forgotten. It was possible it wouldn’t lead anywhere useful, but it was better than nothing.
“Daddy, Lucy, come here and help me. I found something.”
My father lifted Lucy to his shoulders, like children playing Chicken in a swimming pool. She wobbled there, and they almost tipped as she stretched to reach the chain to the trapdoor that hung, tantalizingly, just out of her reach. They grunted in tandem and moved in tandem, and suddenly, as the rest of us circled around, our arms reached up in an empty promise to catch Lucy if she fell, she reached the chain, and there came a creak and a squeak as the trapdoor fell open.
Lucy tumbled backwards, off my father’s shoulders, and landed on Eli with a crash.
From the floor, Eli groaned. “Really? You had to fall on me? Ouch, Luce, just ouch.” He sounded pitiful.
My father and I stood together and stared up into the opening in the ceiling. “Can you see anything?” he asked.
I smiled, my face cracking and popping. “I see another chain, going to a light bulb. Fingers crossed it lights!”
He nodded. “Does it look safe?”
I shrugged. “Safer than meeting the Order of the Idiots, armed and dangerous, while we stand here, undefended, in a pitch-black tunnel.”
“Good point. Who’s going up first?”
Lucy popped up, barely even fazed by her six foot fall to the floor. “Me!”
Without another word, my father pulled Eli to his feet, and together they boosted Lucy up into the ceiling. Eli winced from the exertion, and he almost fell, but Lucy pulled herself up and turned on the light. As the square of brightness burned their eyes, my parents and Eli all turned away. Seconds later, Lucy called, “You guys, get up here!”
They boosted my mother next, and then looked at me. “Oh, no,” I said. “You guys next. Climb on.”
“What?”
“I don’t know, let me try something.” I reached for my father, held out my hands for him to step into.
“I don’t know, Jo. This isn’t…” But I pushed as hard as I could, and he acted on instinct and vaulted himself up into the hole. He tumbled in, and I heard another grunt, and Lucy cried out in pain. “Sorry,” he said. “Jolene, how did you do that?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “I just had a feeling I could…come on, Eli, let’s go.”
He gave me a look. “Be gentle.”
A brief moment later he was safe up above.
I couldn’t describe it to them, but ever since I’d heard Strong talk
about how powerful I could be, I had been noticing things.
Things I’d been too terrified to notice before.
Like the fact that, since I felt no pain, I could push myself harder than I ever knew possible. I thought of my run through the woods on that first terrible night, and I realized I’d been doing it even then. I’d never stopped, never slowed, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment just how powerful that made me.
“What’s up there?” I whispered.
Lucy stuck her head down, her red ponytail falling down like a lava flow. “It’s a huge vault or something. Solid walls. There’s like, food and stuff. Get up here, you can see for yourself.”
I shook my head. “No. Close the door. I have a plan.”
“What? No!” Lucy scooted back. “Mr. Hall, get over here! Help me pull Jo up!”
My father’s head appeared in the rectangle of light. “Here, sweetie,” he said, reaching his hands down to me. “Come on, we’ll get you up here.”
“No,” I said again. “I have a plan. Get back, get down, close the door. They’re coming. Fast.”
“Get up here,” he said.
Instead, I reached up, used the hanging chain for leverage and slammed the door on him. I was bathed in darkness once again. I liked it, I won’t lie. I felt safe in the dark, protected, like I held the secret advantage. I listened in my parents’ direction and heard my mother whispering. “David, you have to go down there. Go get your daughter.”
He was silent for a moment, and when he spoke his voice was strained. “No. She’s a grown woman now, and she has nothing to lose. Nothing but us. We have to let her try.”
I tried to cry for a split second, but failed. It didn’t matter. I turned my hearing to the bad guys to distract myself from my roaring emotions. They were close.