#NoEscape (Volume 3) (#MurderTrending)

by Gretchen McNeil

  No one responded. With the clock ticking down, Persey heard Mackenzie trying to plunk out the melody on the keyboard, but her brain was only half registering the noise. She was completely focused on the immobile form of the boy band singer.

  Persey didn’t know why she felt the need to discover why B.J. was lying on the ground, but she did. Logically, his role in the escape room completed, he was just staying out of the way until they either opened the door or failed miserably. But then why lie on his back? Why not crouch down behind the sofa, where he’d be completely out of sight? Or better yet, just duck inside one of the still-open ATM booths? Either of those choices made more sense.

  But as she rounded the leather sofa, she knew exactly why B.J. was on the floor. He lay on his back, his pale face turned toward her at a sharp, unnatural angle with open, unseeing eyes. His frost-tipped hair was slick and matted, blood pooled around his cheek and nose, oozing outward as if in slow motion, and on the ground beside him lay one of the framed records, the plastic corner of which was cracked and caked with skin and blond-tipped hair.

  B.J. was dead.

  PERSEY WANTED TO BELIEVE THAT B.J.’S BODY WAS A FAKE, A masterful illusion meant to up their panic and anxiety levels as they continued through the competition, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away, and as the seconds turned into a minute, she noted that his chest never moved. He wasn’t breathing.

  B.J. was dead. There was no doubt. His eyes never blinked, his neck was crimped at an unnatural angle, and as she peered down at his body, she could even see the jagged wound peeking out through the blood-matted hair where the plastic corner of the framed record had made contact with his skull.

  Not just dead. Murdered.

  There was no way he could have slipped and landed unluckily on the framed record—it had been on a shelf at shoulder height, which also meant that it couldn’t have fallen from the shelf and hit him. From that height, it might have broken his big toe, but the kind of force required to crush his skull and possibly break his neck…No. Someone did that to him. Someone—perhaps one of the other competitors—picked up that record and struck B.J. down from behind.

  Panic hit her like a bucket of ice water to the face. The anxiety Persey had felt in the airplane as it approached Las Vegas and the claustrophobia she’d fought against in the ATM booth were nothing compared to the terror that descended upon her as she stared fixedly at B.J.’s corpse. He had died right there in the room with eight other people and no one heard a sound. Had they been so absorbed in solving a puzzle that they didn’t even notice a man dying on the other side of the freaking room?

  “Guys!” she cried, forcing her eyes away from the body. At the keyboard, Mackenzie was plucking out a tune on the keyboard, with more wrong notes than right ones.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be a music major?” Arlo asked, wincing as Mackenzie hit another wrong note.

  “I am,” Mackenzie said through clenched teeth. “But I’m a voice major.”

  “So?”

  Mackenzie sighed. “So if they asked me to sing that stupid tune, we’d be out of here by now, but transcribing by ear isn’t exactly the opera singer’s forte.”

  “No kidding,” Wes said.

  “Guys!” Persey yelled louder. Her voice felt raw, strangled. “You need to see this.”

  “Yeah, well, your superweed didn’t help.” Mackenzie shook her head as if trying to clear it.

  “Guys?”

  “Kosher Kush,” Wes said reverently. “So good.”

  If anyone heard Persey, they paid her no attention. They were all focused on Mackenzie and the piano keyboard and the relentlessly ticking clock.

  “Guys!” Persey yelled. She hated yelling. “Something happened—”

  “Shh!” Arlo hissed, holding her hand up for silence. Mackenzie, shoulders hunched over the keyboard, was starting again.

  “B, A, G,” she sang out the note names as she played them. “E, F-sharp, Geeeee!” Quick breath. “B, B, Deeeeeee, G, F-sharp, G.”

  Persey heard a loud thud, as if a huge bolt had been thrown, and the double doors at the top of the stairs slowly swung open, revealing a brightly lit room faced in shiny, silvery steel.

  “You did it!” Neela cried. But her excitement was short-lived. “The clock is still ticking, though, which leads one to believe that the challenge is not completed. Maybe we need to vacate this room entirely?”

  Persey staggered toward the desk. Her legs felt like limp spaghetti. “Neela…”

  “Agreed,” Arlo said. “Let’s move.”

  “Yes, I concur,” Shaun said. As if his robot opinion mattered. Mackenzie, Wes, and Neela had already dashed up the wide staircase toward the open doors.

  “Stop!” Persey screamed. The sound coming out of her own mouth was jarring, disconnected. She was pretty (positively) sure she hadn’t screamed since she was in diapers.

  At least not where people could hear.

  “Two minutes,” Neela said, her eyes shifting back and forth between the countdown clock and Persey so quickly Persey was afraid she might give herself motion sickness. “I think we all have to be out of the room to pass the challenge.”

  Persey shook her head. As much as she didn’t want to hang around with a dead body all day, she certainly wasn’t going to just leave him there. “It’s B.J.”

  “He probably disappeared into one of those booths,” Kevin said. He jogged across the room and took her hand. “Let’s go.”

  “All the doors are locked.” She yanked her hand away, pointing to the floor. “Look!”

  “Holy shit.” Kevin’s eyes grew wide as his voice dropped to a whisper. “Is that real?”

  Are you joking? “Of course it’s real. He’s dead!”

  Neela sucked in a breath. “What?”

  “I think this is an elevator,” Mackenzie mused. She stepped through the double doors into the giant metal box. “Oooh, I wonder where it goes?”

  “Um, didn’t you hear me?” Persey asked. These people were unbelievably self-involved.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Wes said. “Dead body. Sure.”

  “You have ninety seconds to get into the elevator,” Shaun said, “or this competition goes on without you.”

  “Or we all fail…” Neela’s voice trailed off. “Persey, please. We have to go!” She stepped into the elevator with the others, leaving just Kevin and Persey at the far end of the room.

  “He’s dead,” she said again, as if repeating it made it more real.

  Kevin was noncommittal. “He looks dead, but we have to go.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t make me carry you.”

  Persey narrowed her eyes. He wouldn’t.

  For a moment, Kevin looked as if he was going to throw her over his shoulder and drag her kicking and screaming into the elevator, but then his body relaxed. “It’s just part of the game,” he said, repeating Mackenzie’s line from before. Regardless of whether or not he believed it. “Are you willing to risk everything to stay here with him?”

  The prize money. Damn it.

  Kevin smiled, sensing victory, then grabbed her hand again. “Come on!”

  Reluctantly putting one foot in front of the other, Persey followed Kevin into the elevator.

  Persey glared at Kevin as the elevator doors closed, angrier at herself than at him. She shouldn’t have let him talk her into continuing. B.J. was dead, and this competition needed to end, but she’d allowed the promise of money to sway her. What kind of a horrible human being was she?

  Just like your dad. Just like your brother.

  “Are we even moving?” Neela asked, her voice higher pitched than before. She must have sensed the tension in the cramped elevator, and it heightened her nervousness.

  Riot shook his head. In contrast to Neela, he seemed cool and calm. “Not yet.”

  “It’s all part of the game,” Kevin said dismissively, off Persey’s look.

  “You saw him!” Persey cried. “How can you say that wasn’t real?” />
  Mackenzie jumped in immediately, taking Kevin’s side. Shocking. “Totally a setup. Like Kev said—this happens all the time in Escape-Capades rooms.”

  Kev? Ew. “He was dead.”

  “Looked dead,” Mackenzie said, correcting her. She was going to cling to her “none of it is real” routine to the bloody end. “It’s amazing what they can do with special effects and makeup.”

  Persey was relatively (unfortunately) sure that she’d had more up-close experience with dead bodies than Little Miss Royal Academy, and she was not about to let herself be lectured on what she did or didn’t see. Not even Hollywood’s biggest and brightest could replicate that glassy, open-eyed look of death. No matter how much you wanted it not to be real.

  “When we get out of here, I bet Leah will show you how they did it,” Mackenzie continued. She liked the sound of her own voice almost as much as Arlo did. “Like a magician exposing her tricks. You’ll see!”

  “There was a camera in the room,” Shaun said. “It might have the proof.”

  Persey sucked in a sharp breath. That’s right! Arlo had been threatening Leah through the camera when she was released from the ATM booth. Somewhere in the Escape-Capades HQ, Leah was watching the proceedings.

  “Do you think they caught Brian’s death?” Wes asked.

  “Who?” Kevin asked.

  “The…the singing dude,” Wes stuttered.

  “His name is B.J.” Mackenzie clicked her tongue in annoyance. “How you made it into this competition with your inability to remember details is totally beyond me.”

  Wes scowled at her. “His name doesn’t fucking matter to that camera.”

  Persey pictured Arlo shouting at the wall. She’d been standing just inches away from where Persey had later discovered the body. If the camera had caught her antics, then it had caught the killer as well. Whoever was monitoring them must have seen B.J.’s murder.

  Without warning, the elevator began to move. They were going up, and rather quickly, judging by the way her stomach sunk to her knees, and Persey just hoped that Leah and a dozen 911 first responders were there to meet them when the door opened. Prize money or not, this competition needed to end before someone else got hurt.

  No such luck.

  The first thing that struck Persey about the new room was its height: twenty-foot ceilings soared above her, dotted with skylights through which blue halogens streamed semi-realistic sunlight. The room was two stories with a banistered second floor hugging three of the four walls while an open staircase climbed the fourth, and a fire station–style pole had been installed at the far end for quick escapes from the upper level.

  But while the room was technically spacious, it squandered that breadth with a claustrophobia-inducing assortment of shelving and display cases, all of which were stuffed to bursting with toys.

  Action figures, lunch boxes, Pez dispensers, Hot Wheels cars, posable dolls, Lego constructions, spaceships hanging from the ceiling, and everything was sorted and displayed by genre: superheroes on one side, horror on the other, anime in the middle, sci-fi upstairs. Mannequins dressed in everything from Wonder Woman’s costume to a human-size Rocket Raccoon were posed throughout—some staged in the corners, others facing the bookcases, which housed their matching memorabilia, and special items such as signed comic books and personalized letters were mounted on the support beams that held the upper balcony in place. It was a dizzying hoarder’s delight of collectible junk.

  “Hello?” Persey called into the pop culture chaos, unwilling to leave the elevator. She needed to raise the alarm, demand that Leah end this competition and bring in the authorities. “Is anyone listening? There’s been an…” A what? It wasn’t an accident.

  “There’s been an incident,” Kevin said for her.

  “A murder.” He was technically correct, but Persey didn’t think he was adequately relaying the gravity of the situation. “Someone needs to call nine-one-one.”

  “Murder?” Neela squeaked.

  “Um, no! You don’t!” Mackenzie elbowed past her, dragging Kevin by the hand. “Everyone but Miss Crazy Pants knows that it’s all part of the competition. Right, Kev?”

  Kevin gave Persey a look of encouragement as he followed behind Mackenzie. “Right.”

  Shit.

  “Shit!” Arlo’s voice was as elated as Persey’s mood was depressed. “Is that an original The Incredible Hulk number one eighty-one?” She dashed to the nearest display case and crouched before it, pressing her hands against the glass. “First appearance of Wolverine. Pristine. That thing is worth like fifteen grand. Easy.”

  Mackenzie wrapped her arms around her waist, Kevin’s hand still firmly clasped in hers, as if she was afraid of touching something icky and was using Kevin as a human shield. “I doubt Escape-Capades would have anything that valuable in here. Gotta assume it’s fake.”

  “Just like Persey’s dead body.” Wes laughed. He’d seemed tense in the elevator, but now his stoner happy-go-luckiness had returned.

  “You mean the dead body I saw,” Persey said coldly. “Not my body, which is not dead.”

  Wes shrugged. His signature move. “Whatever.”

  “Look,” Riot said as he scanned the walls for the ever-present cameras. “We have to assume that if B.J. really died back there, Leah would have ended the game and the police would have met us the second we stepped out of the elevator.”

  You’d think. “Okay, then if his death is supposed to be fake, what does it mean? You’d think a dead body would be a pretty big clue, but we didn’t even search him.”

  “I bet we’ll find out in the next room,” Arlo said. “Try to remember every detail of the ‘crime scene,’” she added, using air quotes.

  Persey shuddered. B.J.’s battered skull certainly wasn’t an image she wanted to dwell on.

  “See?” Riot’s tone was light. Was the conspiracy guy really buying this theory? “Logically, it was just a part of the competition like Mackenzie suggested.”

  Mackenzie flashed him a smile, sparkly brown eyes crinkling at the corner. “Thank you!”

  Persey understood right away why Mackenzie was so used to getting her own way. When you were that pretty, everyone gave you what you wanted.

  But Riot seemed unaffected, turning away from Mackenzie’s flirtation to lay a hand on Persey’s shoulder. “I’m not saying you’re wrong,” he said, his voice hardly above a whisper. “But if he was murdered, then we have to assume Escape-Capades is involved….”

  Persey stiffened. “You think this was planned?”

  He nodded. “Which means no one is going to call the police.”

  No police. No help. And they were completely cut off from the outside world. Persey felt the bottom of her stomach fall away as the realization sunk in. We’re at the mercy of Escape-Capades.

  “And if someone from Escape-Capades killed him,” Riot continued, dropping his voice even further, “we have much bigger problems.”

  We sure the hell do.

  Riot placed his other hand on her opposite shoulder. “Because they may not want any witnesses.”

  You’re right.

  The tingling of panic returned to Persey’s hands as she looked up at Riot. His soft eyes were a stark contrast to his firmly set jaw, lips pressed tightly together. She saw kindness in him, but also fear, and she wasn’t sure which of them scared her more.

  She turned away, unwilling to let him see the wave of emotions cycling through her. The others were never going to listen—they had spread out around the room, searching for clues, blissfully (pathetically) unaware of what was happening.

  But maybe they were right? Despite Riot’s willingness to believe her—or maybe because of it since he was a conspiracy-theory kinda guy—perhaps she’d been mistaken in what she’d seen. Riot probably wanted to believe that there was something nefarious at work. No police could mean that Escape-Capades was involved, but it could also mean that there was no reason to call them. No actual murder.

  Pe
rsey forced a laugh. “Maybe I’m just seeing things,” she said, shaking free of Riot. “We’re not exactly superspies. No one could have killed him in that room without someone else seeing.” It sounded like a good rationale, and she wanted to believe it.

  “If you say so,” Riot said, retreating to the stairs that led to the balcony. “But I’m going to keep my eyes open, and I suggest you do the same.”

  I always do.

  “FIND ANYTHING INTERESTING?” WES ASKED, STROLLING through the aisles, staring aimlessly at all the collectibles.

  “Like I’d tell you if I did.” Mackenzie leaned against the wall, yawning. The weed hadn’t worn off yet.

  Arlo glared over her shoulder. “You could, like, pretend you’re trying.”

  “Why?” Kevin laughed by Mackenzie’s side. “We’re not even on the clock yet.”

  A chime dinged as if in answer. As if someone was listening. Above the elevator door, the countdown clock had just blipped to life ushering in another forty-five minutes of puzzle-solving fun. In addition to the digital face, the clock was ringed by eight lightbulbs, screwed directly into the wall, lending the room an old-timey fun-house vibe.

  “I wonder what those are for?” Persey asked to no one in particular.

  “Eight of them,” Shaun replied. “Eight of us. Just like the cubicles.” Not that his observation explained anything, but it was certainly something to keep in mind.

  “An original Greatest American Hero costume,” Arlo said, gawking at a mannequin wearing a heinous long-sleeve suit and cape with a curly blond wig on its head.

  “Looks like Harpo Marx and Mrs. Claus had a love child,” Kevin mused.

  Arlo slowly circled the mannequin. “There are only two of these left in existence.” Then her eyes caught something else. “That must be a Batarang set,” she said pointing to a case with metal-tipped bat-shaped plastic boomerangs, “from one of the films. Batman Returns, if I were pressed to make a guess.”

  “You’re not,” Wes said.

  “And that appears to be an original-issue Captain America action figure. From 1973, I believe.” The smugness in her voice signaled that she knew damn well which year the little red-white-and-blue toy had been issued. She practically could have designed this room herself. “This collector is into everything. DC and Marvel. Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. I’d pretty much kill for most of this stuff.”