by Jen Haeger
37
It seemed to Evelyn that she had just closed her eyes when someone was shaking her awake.
“Evie, Evie, wake up!” whispered David.
“What, what’s going on?” Evelyn’s voice was slurred with sleepiness.
“Somebody’s here!” he whispered frantically, “They’re trying to get in!”
It was dark, but David had on his hiking headlamp, so Evelyn was able to see the concern on his face and on the face of Kim standing right behind him. She shook her head to try to wake herself up as David helped her to get out of the bed. It was then that she heard it. There was a bang and then the sound of straining metal.
“Hurry, Evie!” David breathed as he pulled her towards the closet and the secret door to the lab.
They all went through in a rush and then Evelyn stopped short causing Kim to run into her back.
“The presentation! The flash drive!” Evelyn cried softly. She turned and pushed past Kim back into the bedroom.
She heard David exclaim, “Evie, no!”
The little memory stick was in her pack which was in the bedroom next to the bed. Evelyn stumbled into the bedroom and groped blindly in the darkness until she banged her shin on the foot of the bed. She followed it around and grabbed the whole pack lugging it back into the closet with her and closing the door just as she heard a terrible crash and then angry voices. David dragged her through the secret door into the lab proper and then sealed it and began to barricade it with the culture cabinet. The environmentally friendly lights of the lab had come on and were obscenely bright after the darkness of the bedroom as Evelyn fumbled to find the presentation in the packs many pockets. Kim was helping David barricade the door but it was difficult and going slowly because they were also trying to do it silently.
Evelyn had emptied a substantial portion of the pack’s contents onto the floor of the lab when her hand finally closed on the little white stick. Evelyn went to put it in her pocket and then realized that she had changed into sweats to sleep. She cursed and her eyes darted frantically around the lab for an alternative. She snatched up a latex glove and a roll of thick tape, put the drive into the glove, taped the glove shut, and then taped the glove to the inside of her arm. She wound the tape round and round until she was certain the glove couldn’t easily come free without ripping or cutting the tape from her arm.
David had abandoned the door by then and was carefully removing the contents of the emergency hatch cabinet and setting them on the floor just in front of it. There were several large opaque plastic bottles of solvent meant to obscure a view of the hatch and its locking mechanism. David crawled in first and opened the hatch then directed Kim through into the escape tunnel beyond. He then motioned frantically for Evelyn to go in ahead of him. Evelyn took one last wistful glimpse around the lab and then followed Kim into the tunnel. The passageway was not very large, just big enough for a single person to creep through on their hands and knees, with barely enough room for Evelyn to turn around if she really needed to. It was made out of concrete, but in deference to delicate knees it had a soft, foamy material lining the floor of the roughly circular shaft. Evelyn turned her head to look over her shoulder and found David was backing himself into the tunnel so that he could replace the cabinet’s contents and close the cabinet door to buy them a little more time. Once David was satisfied with the placement of the bottles and had closed the cabinet door, he closed and barred the hatch door.
“Go, go, go!” he ordered.
“Go!” Evelyn relayed to Kim who began to edge forward as quickly as she could.
Evelyn and David had, of course, tested the escape tunnel when it was built, but hadn’t really had a reason to check it since then. She hoped that the exit hatch hadn’t rusted shut or been obstructed by a fallen tree or something equally unfortunate had happened to prevent their egress from the claustrophobic space. As they crept forward Evelyn felt like they had been in the tunnel way too long and her hands and knees were beginning to ache despite the foam-like material. She thought that David must be having an even worse time having to travel backwards in the same uncomfortable position. Finally, Kim halted ahead of her and turned her head.
“I’m at the end, but I can’t see how to open the door!”
The tunnel would have been pitch black had David not been wearing his headlamp, but with him facing backwards, it wasn’t helping enough to illuminate the latch mechanism for Kim. Evelyn knew that the tunnel wasn’t wide enough for David to turn around because he was taller than she. Evelyn turned her head.
“David we need your light!”
He backed as close to Evelyn as possible and took off his headlamp, but she couldn’t reach back far enough for him to hand it to her, so he had to clumsily throw it back towards her. Evelyn then was able to recover it and pass it up to Kim by squashing her face into the other woman’s back. Kim put it on her head, and a few moments later Evelyn heard Kim working the latch. Kim strained to pull the bolt back. There was a scraping sound and then the loud clang of metal on metal as the lock released. Kim pressed on the hatch and it began to inch open.
Evelyn tugged on Kim’s foot. “Kill the light!” she breathed.
Kim clicked the light off and then resumed her efforts to open the hatch. Gradually the door gave way and the gap widened until Kim was able to squeeze through. She gracelessly slid headfirst out into the foliage, making a minor racket. Kim then struggled to regain her feet and help Evelyn’s exodus from the tunnel to be quieter and cleaner. Once they were both on their feet outside the opening, they wrenched the stubborn door wider to allow David to pass and he slid deftly out of the shaft onto his feet. He then shoved the door closed even though there was no latch on the outside of the door to secure it. They cautiously made their way out of the thicket that hid the exit and David hurried to rearrange the bushes so that the door was covered again.
Too close, they could hear shouting voices, loud bangs, and the roar of dirt bike motors. They couldn’t risk turning the light back on, so the three of them staggered through the thick underbrush in the dark, heading in the opposite direction from the commotion. Between David’s ankle, Kim’s previous injury, Evelyn’s stocking feet, and the entire pack’s near blindness, forward progress was slow. They had to stop and take cover several times as the headlight of a dirt bike or beam of a flashlight appeared in the distance. Evelyn didn’t want to think about what the intruders were doing to her lab and all of her data and hard work of the past two years. She had sent copies of all of the files to their mysterious Council benefactor, but since they hadn’t heard from him and the manor house may have been compromised, Evelyn didn’t hold out much hope for those files’ survival either.
Hours into their ungainly flight from the lab, they crossed a six-foot wide, knee deep stream and the sounds of the motorbikes gradually began to fade away. They paused briefly to rest and catch their breath, and Evelyn had to ask the obvious question.
“How did they find us?” she muttered.
“Maybe they followed David and me?” Kim suggested.
David shook his head, “No, if that was the case, they would’ve shown up yesterday night,” he hesitated, “Evie, do you think that you could have been followed back from town?”
Evelyn considered that. She had been careful and there was no reason that anyone would have known that she was going to be in town to follow back to the lab, unless of course they knew about the sample that Karen had sent her. Following that logic, if someone knew about the package, they would either have had to be watching Karen very closely, or have somehow overheard their phone conversation. Then it struck Evelyn.
“Oh, no…my phone. It must’ve been my cell phone. They must’ve tracked it!” she said.
It was the only plausible explanation since David had lost his cell phone at Kim’s apartment and Evelyn had used her phone several times this visit to the lab. I’m so stupid, she thought, I led them right to us.
“I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I
thinking using the cell phone here.”
David shushed her. “It’s not your fault. We both would have been using our cell phones here if I hadn’t lost mine, Evie.”
Kim patted her shoulder gently. “It’s O.K., it doesn’t matter how they found us, we’re alright.”
Evelyn was too upset to reply.
“Well, we’re O.K., for now, but we have to get out of these woods and somehow get back to Michigan,” David reminded them.
He risked turning on his headlamp while he shielded it with his hand. His watch was an expensive model with a compass that he had purchased when they’d finalized the lab’s location. It appeared that they had been travelling roughly northeast.
“We need to veer more to the north.” David said adjusting his course through the trees.
“What’s north?” Kim asked.
“The highway.”
“What about my car?”
David hesitated. “Sorry, Evie, I think it’s too risky to go back for it. Any Vulke tracker worth their salt would have to realize that the parking lot is at the trailhead closest to the lab. Even if they don’t know which car is yours, they could still be waiting for us.”
They set off again at a slightly increased pace, but even with the aid of the shielded headlamp, it still took another two painstaking hours before they could hear the sound of the cars on the highway. The sky was just beginning to lighten.
“What now? Hitchhike?” Kim suggested.
“Not likely with the three of us,” David admitted. “Also, I don’t think it’s such a great idea to be visible out on the road if the Vulke are still looking for us. We’re not too far from the next exit, let’s head over there. I’ve got an idea.”
Even under the circumstances, Evelyn couldn’t help but smirk and wink at Kim.
“Uh oh.”
When they made it to the exit, David targeted the back corner of a large Walmart parking lot, and showed off certain useful skills that he’d learned during his misspent youth, specifically how to break into and hotwire a car. They chose an older model Chevy that had manual locks and was unlikely to have a sophisticated hidden alarm. In no time they were felons, and on their way to the Kentucky border with David driving, Kim collapsed exhausted in the back seat, and Evelyn ministering to her bloody toes in the passenger’s seat.
38
David, Evelyn, and Kim made it just past the Kentucky border when they had to stop for gas. Kim awoke when the car stopped and helped by scanning out the back window while Evelyn covered the front and David pumped the gas. He also purchased some Cokes to keep them all awake and three redneck baseball caps for them to wear to keep a lower profile. Unfortunately, there were not that many routes back to Michigan and they didn’t have that much time to play with, especially since they were driving a stolen vehicle. If the Vulke were watching the highway closely, the three of them still might be spotted.
Once they were back on the road, Evelyn removed the tape from her arm and double-checked the flash drive to make sure that it had not been damaged during their escape. It appeared intact, but Evelyn just prayed that they would be able to retrieve the presentation from it without any problems. She closed her eyes for a few minutes and attempted to marshal her thoughts to compile exactly what she was going to say to the roomful of Betas. She considered making it sound as if she had only just started her research on Languorem luporum after she became aware of the strays who had not been turned into werewolves the usual way, but quickly dismissed that idea. If the other packs suspected that she was not being completely honest with them, they were less likely to believe her about the Vulke and support her research.
David interrupted Evelyn’s train of thought. “If the Vulke have been keeping tabs on us and tracking our cell phone use, why would they attack us now?” he said contemplatively.
“What do you mean?” she said, turning to him.
“Well, there was no way that they could’ve known about the lab, they shouldn’t really have known about our relationship with Kim, so why decide to suddenly attack us in Tennessee? Why not ambush us back in Michigan? Assuming they didn’t know about the lab, that’s the logical place to have been looking for us. You’ve lived in that same apartment for over a year, and I’ve lived in mine a year. You work at the same clinic. We usually only use our cell phones in Michigan. It just doesn’t seem to add up, and the timing is just too perfect. They wait to attack us until we are actually a threat, have proof of their involvement, and have called a meeting? Doesn’t that just seem like too much of a coincidence?”
Evelyn considered what he said and the more that she thought about it, the more she had to admit that what David said did make sense. The Vulke had always considered Evelyn a threat. If they were tracking her and David, why not take them out before? They clearly had thrown the laws of both human- and Wolfkinkind to the wind, why not just kill the two of them before they could really become involved in events? Evelyn racked her brain for an answer to that question and came up with only two answers, one highly plausible and the other highly dubious.
“Maybe they couldn’t kill us before because it would have tipped off the other packs. I mean the other packs know that the Vulke have a grudge against us. If both of us died, even if it was made to look accidental, it would cause suspicion, especially if other odd things started happening…Or…” Evelyn hesitated, “they intended to blame us for everything. Blame us for creating the mutation during our research and have the other packs turn on us. But that would mean that they knew about the lab all along, and it just frankly seems like way too much forethought for the Vulke.”
“Maybe…” agreed David reluctantly.
“Does it really matter?” Kim interjected from the back seat.
At first Evelyn was annoyed with Kim putting in her two cents, but then she sighed, “Girl’s got a point. The Vulke be crazy. We may never know exactly what was going on in their rotten little brains.”
“It might matter,” David replied seriously.
“Why?” Evelyn said, exasperated.
“Think about it, Evie. The Vulke might have known about the lab, but they couldn’t have known that you had found proof of their involvement, or at least not the exact timing of it. What if somebody else tipped them off?”
Evelyn sat up a bit straighter in her seat thinking, “But, all of the other packs would have known about the meeting within about half an hour of me calling Caroline. Any of them could have tipped off the Vulke. It really doesn’t help us to speculate at this point.”
David mulled that over. “I guess not.”
The rest of the drive into Michigan was spent mainly in silence. They drove through a McDonald’s at one point when David felt like he was going to drop from hunger. They were making good time and so far they had no indications that they were being followed. As they neared the airport, there was just one more stop that Evelyn felt necessary to make. They pulled into one of the cheaper department stores and they all bought new clothes. For Evelyn it was a dark blue suit and white silk shirt, for Kim it was khaki pants and a business casual patterned shirt, and for David it was khaki dress pants and a green polo. They then quickly skirted over to the drug store across the street and bought some toiletries, a brush, some makeup, and a few other necessities. Evelyn was normally opposed to wearing make-up, but she thought that it couldn’t hurt to look as put together as possible during the presentation.
In almost no time at all they were pulling into the long term parking lot at the airport. Before they abandoned their stolen vehicle, they took some pains to wipe down the inside to remove any fingerprints, and David sprayed the interior with bleach that he had bought at the drug store to remove any latent DNA. He then carefully wiped the outside of the bottles and threw them out in a trashcan on the way out of the lot. As they made their way into the airport and then over to the hotel, Evelyn tried to keep her head down, and David’s eyes were constantly scanning the area. She had also purchased sunglasses in an attempt to look less con
spicuous, but was now wondering if that single accessory would really fool the Vulke. They sent Kim up to the counter to ask for directions to the meeting room and for an extra laptop. Fortunately, the hotel was well equipped for business travelers, so acquiring a laptop for the room wasn’t an issue.
As they approached the meeting room, Evelyn’s heart began to pound faster. This was it. This was the moment of truth. Either she was going to convince the other packs that they needed to band together and do something about the Vulke, or things were going to go horribly awry. The worst case scenario was that the packs decided or were convinced that Evelyn and David were responsible for the mutation and condemned them for their research, with possibly fatal consequences. A less dire, but still bad outcome was that the other packs simply didn’t believe the evidence and David, Evelyn, and Kim were left on their own against the Vulke. Evelyn shuddered. She didn’t like their odds in that scenario. They got closer to the door and Evelyn thought of another scenario that she hadn’t yet considered. It was one in which the other packs just decided that they were too busy with other problems and didn’t show up at all. Evelyn’s heart skipped a beat at that thought. After all of their hard work and narrow escape, that would’ve been a terribly demoralizing blow.
Before they reached the meeting room David took them aside.
“Evie, Kim and I will wait outside the door and watch for trouble. If we see anything odd, I’ll send Kim inside to warn you. O.K. Kim?”
Kim nodded nervously.
Evelyn didn’t particularly like that plan, since it left David outside on his own should something go wrong, but it was the only feasible plan.
“Alright.”
They reached the doors and Evelyn opened one a crack and peered inside. The room was empty, but there were still about two hours before the twenty-four hour deadline expired. The space reminded Evelyn of the meeting room of the Holiday Inn Express in Sault Ste Marie where David and Evelyn’s fate had nearly been decided two years ago.