Escape Room

by Brian Ullmann

  “If you had only gone back to Darwin’s house,” Jenny repeated. “You wouldn’t be standing here right now.”

  “That’s quite enough,” Kaiser ordered. “It’s time to finish this.”

  “This is madness,” Chance said. “You can’t hope to succeed. Even if creativity is declining, there are still too many of us out there.”

  “I concede that point,” said Kaiser. “But we don’t need to eliminate all of you. My foundations have supported expansive population analytical studies to help us determine the proper sampling size needed for success. You see, one of the undeniable factors about dissent is that it needs a critical mass to be successful. Opposition needs a fire. I am simplifying, of course, but we have determined that all we need to do is eliminate roughly a quarter of the creatives. That is enough. When dissent emerges, it will simply die of suffocation, because no one will be there to fan its flames.”

  “We … trusted you,” said Chance.

  “Deceit is occasionally necessary — laudable, even — when the truth is even more awful to consider. I told you this directly. In this case, the threat is very real. And the answers, sometimes, are unpalatable to the weak-minded.”

  “You know we can’t let you do this,” Chance said. “We are going to fight you.”

  Kaiser barked a laugh. “Surely you realize you are in no position to fight us, Mr. Matthews. We have more men, more guns. There are only five of you, mere children. You are unarmed and have no idea where you are. There is no escape.”

  Kaiser’s words hung in the air. Tahoe, Wolfie, Kate, and Jackson exchanged glances of defeat. Their heads were bowed, shoulders slouched. They had not even undergone the genetic engineering, but Chance could see their spirits vanquishing.

  “You may be right about a lot of things,” Chance said. “But you’re wrong about one thing.”

  “Yes?” said Kaiser with a smirk. “And what is that?”

  “I am not unarmed.”

  Chance pulled his pistol from his waist and fired.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Richard Kaiser braced for the impact. But Chance was not aiming at him.

  The bullet cleared Kaiser’s head by a good two feet and slammed into the elevator control panel in an explosion of sparks. The blast triggered a second explosion, then a third. Flames licked at the elevator cage.

  Kaiser flung himself to the floor, apparently believing Chance’s next shot would not miss so wildly. Drake and his men scrambled, reaching for their guns.

  Several things happened at once.

  Chance fired a second bullet at Drake’s feet. Drake and his men leapt for cover behind a metal pod.

  Chance turned to his friends, still pressed against the railing. “Jump,” he commanded.

  There was something absolute in his tone and in the crackle of the elevator fire, and the frantic shouts of Kaiser and Drake and their men. And so, in a single unified movement they turned as one and spilled over the railing.

  A split-second later, Chance hurled himself off the catwalk after them.

  A volley of gunfire exploded over their heads, but the bullets were frantic, scattered.

  They crashed through the webbing of cables, each hard cord slowing their fall. As their bodies they fell through the netting, the cables yanked free from the tops of the metal pods. A chorus of pops echoed in the hangar, followed by the loud hissing of escaping air and smoke. Suddenly, the entire chamber filled with thick billows and the staccato pop-pop-pop of portal doors popping open.

  It was the sound of freedom.

  Drake and his men fired wildly down into the chamber, but they were now shooting through a billowing gray murk that swallowed the fleeing Picassos.

  Chance flailed. The cables may have been constructed of flexible rubber, but they slammed against his body like iron bars. He scrambled to grab hold of one, somehow dropping the gun in the process. He crashed through a few more cables, his body twisting out of control. He smashed to the ground, hard, and felt the unmistakable crack of snapping bone. He groaned, tried to roll over to his back. His right arm screamed.

  He had only the vague sense of the others falling beside him. They landed in horrific-sounding crunches. Even with the webbing slowing their fall, it was still a 40-foot drop from the catwalk onto unforgiving concrete.

  He was relieved beyond measure when he saw movement from each of them. They were all alive.

  “I am really starting to question your leadership ability,” said Wolfie, holding his left elbow and wincing in pain. “Once we get out of here, we’re really going to have to evaluate your track record.”

  Chance, still on his back, and peered up through the smoke. Pod doors continued to pop open, and now he saw the ghostly outlines of arms, then entire bodies, emerge from their metal cocoons. Little more than indistinct shapes in the murk, the forms slowly regained their strength. Dozens of them, boys and girls, crawled out of the pods as if reborn.

  And then, miraculously, they moved to other capsules and started opening other pods.

  Even though Chance and the others had only unplugged a small fraction of the cables from the capsules during their fall, the freed figures were doing the rest themselves. The escape spread like a wonderful contagion. One person opened one pod, helped a prisoner out, then those two helped another two, which became four.

  Dissent needs only a spark to spread.

  Tahoe climbed to her feet, limped over to Chance and helped him to his feet. “Jenny,” she hissed. “She betrayed us. Again.”

  Wolfie and Kate staggered toward them. Chance could see that they were all thinking the same thing.

  “No,” Chance said. “She saved us.”

  “We all saw what happened,” Kate protested. “She’s up there right now, standing with Kaiser and Drake and the men with actual guns. She’s with them, Chance, not us. She’s always been with them.”

  “No,” repeated Chance forcefully. “When she was talking about Darwin, she was giving us the key to our escape.”

  “You’re delusional.” Kate’s voice was laced with revulsion. She didn’t need another reason to loathe Jenny, but she had just gotten one anyway.

  “That little speech up there, about the Darwin Room. That was not what you think it was.”

  “Yeah? Because it sure sounded like a warning to me,” said Tahoe.

  “Not a warning,” said Chance. “A clue.”

  The others glared at him in disbelief.

  “She wasn’t threatening us. She was telling us something. Remember how she said go back to the Darwin Room? She repeated it twice, to ensure I didn’t miss the reference.”

  “She was telling you to fuck off, Chance,” Tahoe spat. “That’s what she was saying.”

  “No. She wanted me to think about the Darwin Room, Darwin’s actual home. Darwin’s countryside manor was called Down House, named for a town just outside of London. She wasn’t threatening us, she was telling us how to get out.”

  “I don’t understand,” stuttered Tahoe. “Down?”

  “The exit isn’t on the top floor like we thought,” Chance said. “It’s here, on the ground level.”

  Understanding dawned. “That’s why you shot the elevator controls,” Wolfie said. “They’re trapped up there. Kaiser and Drake, the others.”

  “Yes.”

  For a beat, nobody spoke.

  “That’s a pretty flimsy reason to jump off a four-story platform,” protested Wolfie. “One of those cables nearly snapped my arm off.”

  “Yes, but look.”

  Dozens of figures lurched toward them. Boys and girls, bodies greased, dressed only in cream-colored shorts and T-shirts, approached on unsteady legs. Picassos from the ground level. Others were shimmying awkwardly down from the upper floors on disconnected cables. The lingering smoke prevented Chance from seeing the higher floors beyond. But he could sense movement there too.

  He winced at the sound of more gunfire.

  The shots fired a rush of adrenaline through his body. />
  “Time to go,” he said. He turned to the dazed strangers that were starting to surround him. “Follow me, help the others, try to keep up.”

  They sprinted out of the chamber. The control room was empty, but warning lights flashed on the monitors like a fire alarm. They ran blindly into the corridor. More red lights flashed along the hallway. There were no signs to indicate the way out.

  Chance prayed that Jenny had been telling them the truth, that the exit was somewhere down here. He fought off the nagging thought that a ground-level exit would be impossible. Surely, no building in a big city like Washington, D.C. could conceal such a cavernous research facility as this aboveground. It must be subterranean.

  And yet.

  Tahoe, Wolfie, Kate and Jackson were right at Chance’s back, and a few feet behind, a swarm of Picassos followed. Their numbers were growing. He felt an overwhelming burden of responsibility for every one of them.

  Their faces were forlorn, their eyes wide-eyed and lost. Black and white and brown faces.

  Another volley of gunfire exploded in the corridor. The shots sounded closer this time. He heard screams and the crumpling of bodies. He watched as a young boy fell. Some of them weren’t going to make it.

  He couldn’t save them all. But he would save as many as he could.

  He turned down another corridor, trusting his instincts.

  There, at the end of the hallway, four steps climbed up to a closed door.

  If they couldn’t get through that door, it was really a dead end. For all of them.

  Chance bounded up the steps and shoved hard on the handle. Locked. There was no keypad here, no keyholes, no indication of where the door led, or how to open it.

  He turned back toward the others. Tahoe and Wolfie, Jackson and Kate, all staring at him. Dozens of barely dressed Picassos gazed up at him expectantly.

  Gunshots banged down the corridor.

  There was no time for a creative escape this time.

  “Everybody press together,” he called out. “We need all of you for this.”

  “Chance,” said Tahoe, climbing the stairs. “What are you doing?”

  “Come on, press your shoulders against the door,” Chance ordered. “Sometimes, brute force is better than a clever hack.”

  Nodding, she got into position, then Jackson shoved a shoulder against the door. Tahoe and Kate followed. Then a few strong-looking Picassos joined them. The entire horde jostled for position. A hundred disparate bodies became one.

  Gunfire exploded again. Screams filled the corridor.

  “Now,” he shouted. “PUSH!”

  As one, they heaved their full collective weight against the door. Chance was crushed between the immovable door and the surge of the crowd. His body screamed in agony. Grunts and cries of exertion filled the air. Chance’s head swam, teetering close to unconsciousness.

  And then, a loud crack. A flash of bright light. And they were through.

  The door snapped off on its hinges, and the horde tumbled out in a mass of tangled limbs and gasping breaths. Chance was propelled out by the force of the crowd’s momentum, and he nearly lost his footing.

  It took him a full second to gain his bearings. And he couldn’t believe what was before his eyes.

  FIFTY-SIX

  They were not in Washington, D.C.

  They were not in a city at all. There were no buildings, no streets, no people, no cars. There was no Starbucks on the corner, no taxis to be hailed. No wail of ambulance sirens and no smell of bus exhaust. This place was far from a city.

  Chance stood on a wide ledge of rock, beneath a towering cliff. A vast expanse of red slick rock stretched out in front of him, tumbling down to a green strip of thick forest. Several miles distant, a wide stretch of golden sand. He could see the tops of a stand of palm trees beside the beach. Beyond that there was nothing but a vast gray sea.

  Chance’s gaze swept slowly across the view. There was nothing but water, stretched to the curved horizon. The giant rock tower obstructed his view behind him, but he already knew where they were.

  They were on an island.

  Bodies were still streaming out of a metal door set directly into the rocky cliff. More Picassos. Chance climbed down to a lower ledge to make room. The prisoners squinted into the bright sunlight. Shock and fear were plastered across their faces.

  “Chance?” Kate looked at him. “Where are we? What’s the plan? What are we going to do?”

  He didn’t know. Chance was just as lost as they were, just as confused about what was supposed to happen next. But as he looked up at the growing crowd of wide-eyed boys and girls that were slowly encircling him on the outcropping of red rock, he knew one thing for sure. This wasn’t over.

  There were so many unanswered questions.

  What was the Picasso Project? What was its true purpose? What role did Jenny play in all of this? How was he going to deal with Kate?

  And the single most important question in his life: What happened to his mother?

  The idea that she might still be alive, out there somewhere, sucked the breath right from his lungs. He was staggered and buoyed by the thought all at once. Adrenaline surged through every molecule in his tense body.

  Standing on the cliff, surrounded by dozens of boys and girls that were looking at him, expecting him to lead, expecting him to deliver them. Chance felt the enormous crush of responsibility. He may not have to save the world, but he knew he had to save them. And if it cost him everything, even his own life, he would find his mother.

  He didn’t have answers, not yet anyway, but he knew two things with absolute clarity.

  One, he knew they would all have to fight. Would not let Kaiser win. If creativity died, freedom would die with it. They would need to fight. Together.

  And two, he had an army behind him. An army of Picassos.

  “What are we going to do?” he heard Kate ask again.

  “Right now,” he announced loudly enough for all of them to hear. “We’re going to get off this island.”

  The Escape will continue in the

  breathless sequel to Escape Room

  The Picasso Project

  Coming Soon

  Brian Ullmann is the author of Darwin’s Race, The Devil’s Gospel, Five Dangerous Things, Blood Canyon, and two Jonathan Dougherty thrillers, The Retriever and The Lost.

  For more information, please visit BrianUllmannAuthor.com.