2020: Emergency Exit

by Hayes, Ever N

  It wasn’t altogether a wasted trip though. Not even close. As Eddie entered the storage room downstairs where three Qi Jia men lay, it was clear this was where they’d been keeping the girl. What didn’t make sense was how the men were positioned. They didn’t appear to have been moved either. How did they get this far into the room with four armed men and a little girl in it? How did two of them die from single shots to the head while the third took three to the chest? Why not shoot the other man in the head too?

  He had an uneasy feeling he wasn’t getting the entire picture. He had Cabo radio the other vehicles to try to find someone who had been in contact with the dead soldiers downstairs. Two men were brought to Major Eddie. They both admitted to having been in conversation with the men who were killed prior to chasing the other Americans away in the jeep. Eddie wanted to know what they had said.

  One of the soldiers gave a detailed account of what he’d heard on the radio. The men had followed a heat signal into the building and then heard voices. They came downstairs and entered the room but saw no one.

  “Wait,” Major Eddie stopped them. “Saw no one?”

  The man nodded. They had radioed that the room was completely dark and no one was in it. Then there was shooting, and they all died.

  So the room was empty, but these men were killed in here and not moved? Major Eddie nodded to himself and cleared the room of everyone except his men. “What are these names on the lockers?” he asked Lazzo, tapping the steel doors and reading some of the names to himself. “Stephen King, John Grisham, Shel Silverstein…”

  “Writers,” Lazzo replied. “American writers.”

  That meant nothing to Eddie. He and his men searched the lockers but found nothing of real value, until they took the clothes out of the C. S. Lewis locker and found what seemed to be some kind of safe in the wall. It had an alphanumeric keypad. Eddie had a feeling the answers he was looking for were locked behind this door.

  He had no clue what code might be needed to open the door, so he had the panel scanned for any explosive devices that may have been set on the other side. Showing none, Eddie had Cabo wire it with their own explosives. They cleared out of the room, in case the explosion caused the roof to cave in, and blew the door. Omar climbed down into the hole first, ready for anything. There was no resistance. He gave the “all clear,” and Eddie and Lazzo descended into the bunker while Cabo stood guard at the entrance.

  Eddie took in the room with a panoramic turn. Impressive. There was a wall of monitors with only two screens on, one showing Cabo in the room above them. The other showed a few men hanging out in the hallway. So, from down here they’d seen the men coming, closed the door, and watched through the cameras as they’d searched the room. That’s how they’d gotten the jump on them. Made sense. He looked around at the rest of the room. There was a large control panel with tons of switches with stickers covering them. He read some of the stickers. “Room 217 – Turn chair…Room 217 – Whispers…Room 217 – Door creak…Room 217 – Cat Meow…” It meant nothing to him. There were more switches for the individual monitors, the heater, the generator, etc. The room also contained a refrigerator, a table and several chairs, and a bed in the corner with a generator humming beside it.

  Eddie sat on the bed and looked at the pillow. Someone had been lying on the bed recently, and based on how far up the blankets remained tucked, it couldn’t have been a big person. A little girl perhaps? There was only one light in the room, and a tunnel leading to somewhere Lazzo said was welded shut from the inside. How many people had been down here? The four men and the girl? So where was the girl? He walked to the ladder and called up to Cabo, telling him to have the men do a room-by-room scan of every room they could get into in the hotel. There were thirty men here now—fourteen he’d brought with him and sixteen others who had been here before or arrived since. They should be able to cover everything.

  Still, Eddie felt like he was missing something. He stared closely at the monitors, and then it dawned on him. The equipment in this room was extremely high-tech. So why weren’t there any recorders? Cabo called down to have Omar come help him. Eddie told Omar to go ahead, and he and Lazzo would be up shortly. Then he told Lazzo what he was looking for. They pulled out their flashlights and started looking in corners, behind objects in the room, and anywhere else they could think of. Nothing. Then Lazzo snapped his fingers.

  Lazzo had walked over to the monitors and tried to move them, and they pulled away from the wall easily. Behind each monitor there was a small box, and the ones behind the two working monitors both had lights on them. They appeared to be hard drives of some sort, and they had buttons on the back to go forward or backward or to record. Exactly what Eddie had been hoping for.

  Eddie pushed the back button on one and ran it back until he was able to watch from the beginning what had unfolded. He saw four people come into the room wearing hooded white camouflaged military uniforms and ski masks. He couldn’t make out any distinguishing characteristics, but it appeared to be three good-sized men and one smaller male or female. Three of them were carrying handguns. The smaller one held nothing but a flashlight.

  They entered the locker, and he forwarded the feed until the soldiers came in. He watched as they searched the lockers, as the first man went down with a gunshot to the head, as the man behind him took three shots to the chest, and as the third man entered to a headshot. Then there was an explosion, and four men came out of the locker wearing…business suits? Not the same white-uniformed people and no girl with them. Likely the guys from the hallway, the parking lot, and the ones who raced away in the jeep.

  Those men engaged in a gunfight in the room and then appeared to continue it out into the hallway. So where was the girl? He watched as the four people in white uniforms suddenly reemerged from the bunker, with the smallest one of them carrying the girl. They turned the other way down the hallway and he lost sight of them. There was nothing recorded after that until more Qi Jia men showed up to search the room. Eddie switched to the other monitor.

  On the other monitor the first action was a single Qi Jia soldier walking down the hallway towards the storage room. He had come from the direction of the stairs. So the white uniforms had come the other way. “Huh,” Eddie half laughed. He and Lazzo watched the gunfight between the Qi Jia soldiers and the men in business suits. They never saw the people in white uniforms on that monitor. Eddie looked at Lazzo, mulling over what to do with what he’d found. “Erase it,” he told his brother.

  Lazzo nodded and did so on the hallway monitor. Eddie rewound the one watching the storage room and froze the picture where the four strangers first entered the room. This was the only glimpse he’d had of them from the front. Who are you? And how did you know the girl was here?

  He turned to Lazzo, who had read his mind and was holding out his camera. Eddie nodded, enhanced the frame as close and clear as he could, took a quick picture, and then hit delete on that box too. They turned the boxes off and climbed out of the room.

  Eddie called off the search and sent all his men outside, except Cabo, Omar and Lazzo. The four of them walked down the hallway in the direction the white-uniformed people had gone. They eventually came to a stairwell with a gap carved through it two flights up to open air. Eddie told Cabo to climb up through the hole to wherever it led and to stay there until they came to him. He, Lazzo, and Omar turned around and exited the building with the others. Eddie ordered the soldiers—other than those who had flown down with him—to return to their camps. He then led his men to where Cabo was waiting for them.

  A few inches of snow had partially filled in the four sets of tracks Cabo pointed to, but Eddie’s men would still be able to follow them. The tracks were heading north, out of town towards the mountains. Where are you going?

  The men were looking to him for answers, but he still had too many questions. It was already after 4:30 a.m. It would be light in a couple of hours. The tracks would be much easier to follow then and maybe, just maybe,
they would lead them straight to the girl.

  Eddie and his men walked back to the helicopter, and Eddie radioed in that the Americans had all been killed, and there was no sign of the girl—which only Lazzo knew to be a lie. The Russian commander was none too happy and ordered him not to return until he found her. He gave Eddie an 11 a.m. deadline to return to the Alpine Visitor Center base with the girl.

  Eddie didn’t mention the four visitors, the recordings, or the tracks. He was still not comfortable with the intentions of the Russian commander, and he didn’t want to compromise his own value to this mission or to the other commanders. He ordered his men to grab an hour or so of sleep and told them all to be ready to go at 6 a.m. sharp.

  He and Lazzo stepped inside the main entry of the Stanley Hotel and sat on the cold floor. “What you think, Lazzo?” Eddie asked, looking at the still photo he’d taken of the video from the supply room monitor. Eddie stared closely at the one holding the flashlight. That person seemed to have a curved black stick on his or her back. He hadn’t noticed that before. What the heck was that?

  Lazzo shrugged. “I don’t like Russian,” he finally said, speaking of the Russian commander.

  Eddie agreed. “Ya. These four men in white uniforms. They look Russian to you?”

  Lazzo took the camera. “Uniforms, yes.” He paused. “The people…they are white,” he said, pointing at the skin around their masked but visible eyes, and nodding, indicating it was still possible. “But no.” He handed the camera back to Eddie. “You?”

  Eddie shut the camera off, leaned his head back against the wall, and closed his eyes. “No,” he said. “No way.”

  The Russian might be up to something, but he wasn’t working with the men in the suits to keep this girl safe. He wanted this girl up at the Alpine base. He wanted her to get info from the Vice President. The girl was his ticket to infamy. These four people in the white uniforms—they were someone else.

  SIXTY: “Blake and Kaci”

  It was almost 6 a.m. and starting to get light as Blake trudged through the deep snow, now carrying Reagan’s little sister. Blake was exhausted, but knew he had it much better than Cameron. He had to keep pushing forward. His thoughts drifted off to his own little sister.

  Kaci wasn’t nearly as little as the vice president’s daughter, but he remembered waving goodbye to her, just days before the attacks, as she walked away from the security line at the Bismarck airport. They had gone on more than a hundred trips together in the eight years since her eighteenth birthday. This was the first time she was going alone.

  The two of them had created a “bucket list” years ago, and they had checked off a dozen or so incredible destinations every year since: Cancun, New Zealand, the Dominican Republic, Alaska, a plethora of national parks—with tons of hiking, skydiving, river rafting expeditions—every imaginable kind of adventure. Their parents had died in a car accident when Blake was ten and Kaci was eight. His only aunt and uncle had taken them in but essentially ignored them for a decade, reaping the tax benefits from having dependents but neglecting their intended responsibilities. Blake had basically raised his little sister on his own.

  There was one perk to their relationship with their guardians. Hawaii. Their aunt and uncle, who they privately referred to as Dick and Jane, owned a time-share on Kauai, where the four of them vacationed together every year. Or at least they traveled there together. Typically, as soon as they arrived at the condo, Dick and Jane split. Dick was a cheap strip bar savant, a womanizing drunk, and Jane was of the same class, a needy, slutty drug addict—incredible how sudden fortunes can really transform some people. Blake’s parents had left Dick and Jane with a few million in their will to raise the kids. Blake and Kaci saw little of that, but Dick and Jane still managed to burn through it like toilet paper.

  Blake had done his best to shield Kaci from Dick and Jane as they grew up. Hawaii was their annual chance to “escape the tyranny,” and they took full advantage of that on each trip. They were constantly planning what they’d do when they were old enough to break off on their own. Blake could have moved out when he was eighteen, but he stayed two more years for Kaci…waited two more years to tell Dick and Jane to go screw themselves.

  When Kaci turned eighteen, the two of them found an apartment together. Blake turned twenty a month later, and their family lawyer signed over twenty million dollars to him from his parents’ will. His aunt and uncle knew nothing of that money, and couldn’t have touched it if they had. Kaci would get another twenty million on her twentieth birthday as well. They were set for life.

  Finally independent, they were now free to do what they wanted, spend what they wanted, and go where they wanted without their relatives having any say. Blake dropped out of college, Kaci never entered college, and they dedicated themselves to seeing the world.

  Every trip was to somewhere new; they seldom returned to a place they’d already been…except Kauai. There was something special about that island. Although they never went to their aunt and uncle’s condo again, they returned to Kauai every year, sometimes even more than once, always looking to make it a permanent part of their lives, if they could find the right place. Finally, they did.

  Three years ago at a bar in Kauai, Blake had met a girl named Alexa whose family owned the island of Niihau, just west of Kauai. A dramatic seismic shift had splintered the former island into two pieces. The smaller southernmost piece had slipped several hundred yards east of the larger part of the island. It was stable and secure, covered with tons of trees and beautiful beaches, but not of any use to Alexa’s family. Her family was going to keep the main island, but Alexa offered to talk to them about Blake and Kaci buying the small twenty-acre island. The family signed off, and the two of them purchased the island for a cool twenty million cash in December of 2018. That twenty million was worthless now, but the island was still Blake’s, if he could ever get there.

  The second Sunday in October, just two days before the attack, Kaci had left by herself for a week on their island. They’d been building a couple houses there and had made monthly visits the past six months to check on the progress. Blake was supposed to join Kaci a week later, but he had first agreed to help a close friend paint her house.

  Blake watched his sister board the plane without him. She called him from Denver later that evening, and then the attacks hit and he never heard from her again. He didn’t know if she made it. Didn’t know if she’d survived. But he was motivated to get to Hawaii and find out.

  A couple American soldiers had passed through Medora before Danny and his family had, and told everyone about the attacks. Most of the people had dismissed their warnings but not Blake. He hadn’t been able to reach Kaci or Alexa or anyone else on his phone. Their words of warning made sense to him. He had intended to make the cross-country trek on his own, and then Nathan had volunteered to go with him. Then the Miners arrived in Medora and he listened to Danny speak at the town center. Blake was confident Danny was a guy who could help him get where he wanted. He could hopefully help him get to Kaci. He had no idea how skilled Danny, and Cameron, would turn out to be. They had thoroughly impressed him since, and this journey had given Blake a unique bond to the two of them…to all of them.

  Still, Blake hadn’t mentioned a word of his hopes regarding his sister, except to Hayley, and she’d sworn herself to secrecy. Blake was reluctant to put any emotional investment in his sister’s survival. But the chance, however slim it might be, well, it was more than enough to keep him plodding through the chest-high snow right now. The girl he carried in his arms—he kept telling himself to pretend she was Kaci. Just as he’d done for years with his own little sister, he needed to take care of the vice president’s daughter tonight.

  Blake glanced back at Hayley helping Cameron behind him. Blake was doing his best to make his tracks as wide as possible, to help Cameron as much as he could, but he knew the guy had to be absolutely miserable. This wasn’t the ideal way to travel even when you weren’t torn
up and bleeding. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like when you were.

  Danny was a short ways behind them, trying to cover their trail of footsteps and blood. He was hopeful the snow would continue to fall and mask it even more, but they weren’t moving nearly as fast as he wanted. It was almost six o’clock now, and they still had the two most treacherous miles to go, across the face of Bighorn Mountain to the cave. It didn’t matter that it was only Colorado’s 1,567th tallest peak; climbing even halfway up was as daunting as facing off with Mount McKinley at this point. Danny was just starting to wonder how much longer his injured friend could hold out, when Cameron collapsed into the snow.

  Definitely not the answer he was hoping for.

  SIXTY-ONE: “Man Down”

  At 6 a.m. sharp, Eddie gave his men their instructions. Plows were brought in to clear the roads alongside them as they walked the tracks. A dusting of snow had filled the footprints in, to an extent, but not enough to completely cover them. But then they reached Black Canyon Creek, and the tracks disappeared. Eddie figured they’d walked through the water for a ways, so he had his men spread out and proceed until the tracks picked up again.

  They finally found a set of fresh tracks a half-mile north, about two miles from the hotel, where Devil’s Gulch Road broke east. But there were only two sets, and they didn’t look human. Big, but not human. Like lions, but not his lions.

  Eddie contemplated the options. The tracks were fairly fresh, so the animals had crossed here recently. He decided to call in the helicopter for an overhead view. If there weren’t any signs of people up ahead, they were wasting their time. A few minutes later, the helicopter hovered above them, and Eddie ordered it to move on. The helicopter whirred up the canyon, and a minute later the pilot called in that he’d found bodies and a ton of blood about a mile ahead. Eddie ordered him to hold his position until they arrived, and he and his men picked up their pace to where the helicopter was waiting. There was nowhere for him to set the chopper down, and Eddie couldn’t handle the noise directly overhead, so he told the pilot to take a run five miles or so up the canyon and then come back down.