by Ho, Jo
I shook my head to clear the fog. I couldn’t let them down. I had to figure this out now but with millions of worse case scenarios flying at me from all angles, it was hard to focus, much less think of a doable plan.
Three minutes, Chase! THREE MINUTES!
OK… let’s do this in steps.
The guy had the others trapped somewhere. I wouldn’t be able to take the two of them on without any weapons… so my only option was to get them away from the others!
Thrilled, I now knew what I needed to do, my mind went through several possible options, but as they ranged from unlikely to impossible, I shot them down fast. I stared around the corridor I was desperate for something to jump out at me. But there was just the dust and dirt. Nothing tangible that I could use. I was about to give up when I saw it. The small red flower-like shape of a sprinkler attached to the ceiling… and with it, the bank of TV monitors and the map of the camera locations that I had seen in the office flashed up in my mind. With my photographic memory, I could see every single one of the locations.
And suddenly, I knew exactly what I needed to do.
“Bandit, I’ve got it!” He danced around me excited as I quickly explained my plan to him. After I had run through the details, I checked that he had understood them all.
“Woof.”
He dashed down the corridor while I ran into each of the small rooms leading off from the corridor. The first was completely empty, but in the second, I found a few textbooks, covered with an inch of dust. Perfect! Grabbing them, I sprinted out of the room and went into the next. But this room had nothing I could use. Trying not to freak out over the time, I bolted into the next few rooms until I found myself in a classroom. And here, with relief, I saw some tables and chairs stacked in the corner.
Dropping the textbook, I grabbed a table and dragged it across the room until I could position it under one of those sprinklers. I stacked a chair on top of the table then hurriedly tore pages out of the book. With the loose pages in my hand, I ran outside, almost colliding with Bandit who returned with a rusty bin in his mouth.
“Good boy, that’s exactly what we need!”
Taking it from him, I dropped the torn pages inside, set the bin on the ground then we searched for the final missing piece. It was Bandit who saw the beer bottle first. He barked and grabbed it. Bringing it to me, I smashed the bottle on the ground, then grabbed a shard which I held over the bin.
It was the early afternoon, and a sunny day so I was desperately hoping that it would be enough to start a fire. As I waited impatiently, I suddenly wondered how for the second time in recent days, my life relied on my ability to start a fire. It would have been funny if it wasn’t for the fact that a madman was about to start shooting my family down, one-by-one.
The two of us stared at the paper in the bin, silently willing for it to catch alight. I had lit fires using this method several times while I was on the street, but I had never been timed for it, plus it worked much better when it was a magnifying glass, but as I didn’t have one on me, it was this or nothing.
Please, God. Please make this work.
By now, I’d lost any idea of time, but I knew we must be coming close to his deadline. Deathly afraid, I tensed, my body on full alert for the gunshot that would announce that all was lost when a black mark appeared on a piece of paper! It started to scorch then sizzle as the sun’s ray focused through the glass to form concentrated light.
“It’s working, boy!”
“Woof!” He cheered me on. And suddenly, the rest of the paper burst into flames! We’d done it! We sprinted back inside even as Gideon’s phone started to ring again. I snatched it up without hesitation as we ran into the classroom. I set the bin on top of the chair, just beneath the sprinkler and the two of us immediately run back out into the corridor then answered the call, breathlessly. Before I could speak the man’s irritated voice came down the line.
“Time’s up young lady, yet I don’t see you here?”
“Wait!” I yelled desperately. “We’re on our way! Don’t hurt any of them! We got a bit lost but we’re almost there now!”
“If I don’t see evidence of your imminent arrival, you can say goodbye to Sullivan.”
He hung up, but I was beyond relieved that they were all still alive.
“Quickly, boy, onto the next part of the plan!”
He took off fast as I prayed that my idea would work…
It just had to.
91
Sully
I sat on the ground, in a line with the others.
Our hands were chained behind us, locked up tight and secured with padlocks. Having learned their lesson, there were no cable ties that we would be able to easily escape from this time. I looked at Sam to find her genuinely scared. Seeing the fear on her face made me realize that the danger was very real. Unless Chase could come up with a way to get us out of here safely, we were going to die.
When we were previously in danger, everything had happened so fast, I had no time to think of anything other than trying to survive, but now I found myself reflecting over everything that had happened. I ran my eyes over Sam’s face, desperately trying to memorize every beautiful freckle and line. Even as fear would have crippled lesser people, her eyes never stopped working the room. She would be trying to find a way out of this for us until there was no time left.
I should have married her the instant we had met. What a fool I was for waiting this long.
An image of Zeb flew into my mind, pale and unconscious, lying there on his hospital bed.
I’m sorry I failed you.
Tears blurred the edge of my vision even as my eyes moved to rest on Gideon. The boy who had initially greeted us with a shotgun, so determined was he to protect my dad. Gideon sat there quietly — very unlike him — with a focused expression on his face. He kept his eyes pinned on Xavier and Dick, who had their eyes peeled to the monitors on the wall. Their weapons lay within reach, but neither had their hands on them. I tried to get his attention, to let him know my regret at failing him too, but Gideon never looked away from them. As I watched, he slowly changed positions, shifting his right leg and bending it back so that the heel of his boot was inching towards his hands.
What was the boy doing?
Slowly, carefully, I saw Gideon remove a thin piece of metal from the inside of his boot, and suddenly I realized what it was. His lock picks! My eyes flared open as I realized what he meant to do. I had to buy him time. Neither Dick nor Xavier could see what he was up to.
What could I do to help him?
92
Sully
Getting up on my feet, I ignored the terrified looks Sam cast my way as I suddenly barreled into the two men. I smacked into Xavier, knocking him into the monitors where his head hit them with a satisfying thud. He stumbled back, stunned, touching his head where it must have been throbbing something bad.
“Sully! What’re you doing?” I heard Sam scream in the background, but I didn’t have a chance to answer. Furious that I had dared touch his idol, Dick roared as he came at me with his bare hands, too mad to even think about snatching up a weapon. With my hands bound behind me, I made an easy target so that even this weedy boy was able to sucker-punch me in the face. I dropped down, reeling from the blow. Dick shook his fist, hurt from hitting me and grabbed one of the guns. As he pointed it at me, Sam suddenly darted forward, blocking his shot with her body.
“No! Please don’t hurt him. You don’t have to do this!” she cried.
“Sam! Get out of the way!” I shouted at her. This was disastrous and the last thing I wanted. I had wanted to buy Gideon some time and was willing to risk my life to do it, but Sam’s actions had me facing the death of another woman I loved. The fear almost suffocated me.
Dick’s finger hesitated on the trigger. Whatever he felt about me, he obviously didn’t feel the same about Sam. “What do you want me to do?” he asked Xavier.
Still seething from the blow to his head, Xavier glare
d at me. He opened his mouth to give the command to end me, but then his eyes were drawn to the monitors as Bandit raced across one of the screens. On another screen, Chase appeared, desperately chasing after him. A light blinked on a monitor, drawing his attention. Xavier smiled.
“It’s too late, Sullivan. It seems the dog has made his decision to sacrifice himself for you.”
Turning to study the chart on the wall, Xavier located Bandit’s position. “He’s by the junction between the library and the gym. He just tripped the alarm by the boy’s locker room. Get there quickly before the girl does,” he instructed Dick. The boy nodded, grabbing his shotgun. Shooting one last filthy look at me, he went to do his bidding. Holding onto the remaining shotgun, Xavier pointed the weapon at me.
“As soon as the dog gets here, you are a dead man, Mr. Sullivan.”
And then a miracle happened.
He barely finished speaking when an alarm suddenly shrieked overhead and the heavens burst open.
Water rained down on us, pouring out from the sprinklers overhead. I realized in an instant that Chase must have set them off! Clever girl! Xavier froze, unsure what to do. He stood there, watching the water spray onto the paperwork pinned to the wall, turning the calculations into inky blobs. Then panic hit as he saw his life’s work becoming ruined.
“No! My work!” he screamed.
Leaving the gun, he ran to the bench, pulling diagrams and calculations off the walls, trying frantically to protect them from the water. Pre-occupied, he never saw that Gideon had broken free of his restraints. Quickly, he unlocked my chains, then Sam’s, as chaos and water showered down on us. With the three of us free, I picked up the chain and ran for Xavier.
Scrabbling around with an armful of his work, and with the alarm drowning out all sounds, he didn’t see me coming until the chain lashed out at his head.
It hit him with a sickening thud. His eyes flew open in pain before they rolled into the back of his head. He fell down into a pool of water, out for the count.
93
Chase
Huddled in the dark room, Bandit and I waited.
Having memorized the locations of the cameras and trip wires they had set around the place, my plan was for it to look as if Bandit had run off without me, to make it seem like he was sacrificing himself for the others. We tripped the wire that lead into this locker room here, and we were now waiting for them to leave the others to find us. Bandit hid behind the door while I waited in the shadows close by with Gideon’s wrench and his flashlight.
It didn’t take long.
Someone thundered down the hallway outside and crashed into the room. It was a young guy, not much older than Gideon and quite a bit weedier. He held a shotgun in his hand so I knew we had to be careful. I waited until he approached me and I turned the flashlight on and aimed it at his face. Blinded, he instinctively went to cover his eyes when I hit him with the wrench using the full force of my body, and Bandit flew at him from the other side. The guy dropped onto the ground like we’d knocked him over with a demolition ball. Bandit stood over him, snarling into his face while I relieved him of his shotgun.
“Don’t move, scumbag!” I hissed into his face.
The guy froze, eyes still glazed from the flashlight. Having scoped out the room before his arrival, I knew there was a small side room in here. Though it was empty, it still carried the scent of chemical cleaners. I prodded the gun at him.
“Get up. Slowly…” I commanded in a voice that was hard from the hatred I felt at this guy who had been threatening my family. I marched him into the side room, shut the door, and wedged the wrench under the handle so that he couldn’t get out.
As we started out of the locker room, towards the others, the sprinklers and alarm turned on.
And with it, I knew we only had moments before the fire trucks would arrive.
“Hurry Bandit, we’ve got to free the others!”
94
Sully
Xavier lay on the ground, unconscious.
My hand itched over the trigger of the shotgun, but Sam stopped me. “No. You do that, and you’ll never come back from it.”
I looked at her, torn. Though I heard the truth of her words, I wanted retribution for the pain this man had caused on so many others. In that moment, I didn’t care about the future, whether I would regret this. I wanted nothing more than to blow this man off the face of the Earth.
My finger started moving of its own accord but I stopped short of pulling it when two familiar beloved faces flew in through the doors.
Bandit barked joyously, while Chase ran in, stunned but relieved to find us safe and sound. “But, I came to rescue you,” she said, confused yet happy.
“And you did an amazing job, hun, the sprinklers were genius,” Sam said, smiling as she hugged her close. I didn’t even blink. I ran over and grabbed the two of them, mashing their bodies against me until Chase’s muffled voice sounded from within.
“Sully… I can’t breathe…” she said.
Watching us from across the way, Gideon fussed Bandit, grinning. Chase pulled reluctantly away from me, brushing the wet hair from her eyes.
“This is him? This is the guy who’s been after Bandit?” Chase looked down at Xavier’s prone form. She rolled him over with a sneaker to see his face but gasped when it flopped into view.
“This is the IT guy who’s renting the apartment above Warrey’s!”
Gideon nodded, mouth tight from the guilt of not knowing that this was the man who was out to ruin our family. “I had no idea… if only we’d known sooner, I could’ve done something. Maybe Zeb wouldn’t be lying in the hospital now if I had…”
I shook my head at him. “You can’t blame yourself, Gid. It happened, but now it’s over.”
“We’re not out of it yet,” Chase said suddenly. “The fire trucks will get here soon and there’s still all this stuff everywhere.” She pointed at the piles of Xavier’s paperwork. Though some of it had been ruined, I could still make out his writing on the rest. “And what about him? We can’t just leave him there. Remember what happened with Forbes…?”
It was Bandit who came up with the solution. Grabbing the chains Xavier had used on us, Bandit carried them over to Xavier and dropped them onto his prone body, his intention clear as day. Chase nodded and looked to Gideon for assistance. “Gid, help me get him into the cell. Let’s see how he likes a taste of his own medicine.”
“Woof!” Bandit barked solemnly.
While they dragged him into the cell and chained him up, I looked to Sam. “Quickly, we need to destroy anything that mentions canine anatomy or Bandit. If you’re not sure, just tear it up.” I led the way, ripping up whatever I could get my hands on.
We quickly destroyed all the evidence we could find that mentioned Bandit. Xavier had taken copious notes and pictures. Some of the notes I understood, but I had no idea what the end goal was. All I could fathom was he had some sort of living experiment that he was conducting but it looked like something was wrong with it. He needed Bandit’s brain’s ability to remap itself and his super fast healing to essentially fix his experiment’s damaged organs. In the brief amount of time I had to go through his notes, what I learned filled me with dread. The last time a scientist had played like this he created Frankenstein and we all know how that story turned out.
We got rid of most of his research though I made sure to keep the most incriminating things I could find. These I stacked under a sheet of plastic where they would be protected from the water. We worked fast, together as a team. With the alarm screeching overhead, I knew we didn’t have much time to get out of there before the fire trucks started turning up.
I found a vial of Telazol, a cocktail of two other drugs, which when used together resulted in the sedation of cats and dogs. Xavier had obviously been keeping it in case he needed to use it on Bandit, but I took it now. The plan was to use it on Pixie. I was ready to leave Pixie to the cops to deal with, but even after everything, Chase remi
nded me that it wasn’t Pixie’s fault. You don’t get bad dogs, she had said. Only badly trained dogs, and that was on the owners. She had pleaded with me, letting me know that if anyone could help her, it would be me. I had mixed emotions knowing that she was the cause of my father lying in hospital, but in the end, I knew Chase was right. I had spent my life saving animals and I couldn’t turn my back on this one.
As we left to find her, we passed by the office Xavier had used as his control room.
“Hold up,” I said to the others as I ran into the room. Searching around the monitors, I guess I was hoping for a simple way to disconnect the cameras that they had in our home. I couldn’t find one, however. As the cameras were all inside the ranch though, I hoped the authorities wouldn’t be able to identify the location. In any case, there wasn’t much I could do about that now. I turned to leave when a movement on one of the screens caught my eye. A figure had moved out of one of the school’s corridors, through a door to the outside. I would have thought it a figment of my imagination, but for the fact that the door was closing slowly on itself now. I had no time to guess at who that might be, however, as Gideon called through the door at me.
“Sully, hurry up!”
Nodding, I sprinted out to join them. We found Pixie moments later. It took two of us to hold her down as she had worked herself into a frenzy by now. When the syringe finally sank into her, she yelped and twisted her head around, trying to snap at me with those jaws but the drug was quick-acting and within seconds she was out for the count. I picked her up and followed Gideon as we met back up with the others. Securing her into the back of my car, we drove off, moments later passing by the fire trucks as they screamed past us on their way to the school.