#NoEscape (Volume 3) (#MurderTrending)

by Gretchen McNeil

  But Mackenzie wouldn’t be placated that easily. “You’re trying to make me think that I’m the jealous one, when really you’re the one who’s envious.”

  “Um, why?” Persey could think of several reasons that she might be jealous of the accomplished singer, but she doubted that Mackenzie was thinking of any of them.

  Mackenzie leaned on Kevin’s arm possessively. “Because of the way Kev feels about me.”

  To steal a phrase from Mackenzie: The. Fuck.

  “Holy cow balls, you guys!” Neela cried. She tossed Persey’s bloodstained T-shirt aside in disgust. “Are you seriously arguing over a guy? Right now?”

  Wes snorted. “I’m with the lesbian. This is ridiculous.”

  “I don’t see how my sexuality has anything to do with it.” Righteous indignation had calmed Neela down. “But I have to agree. Arlo is dead. Dead dead. Like really completely dead with her gore dripping down between the cracks of this wholly nonsensical floor and in no way can that be explained by special effects. It has been approximately three minutes since her headless body crash-landed and we’re still here. No one’s come to get us. No authorities. No EMTs. Has anyone else wondered why?”

  “Ambulance response time from the nearest medical facility would be approximately twelve minutes,” Shaun-bot said. How he knew, off the top of his head, where the nearest medical facility was located boggled the mind. “Though an Escape-Capades representative should have been in contact by now.”

  “Maybe no one’s coming,” Persey said. “Maybe we’re on our own?” No “maybe” about it.

  “Leah did say that once the competition began, she’d be unable to stop it,” Wes said.

  “Yeah, but I thought that meant, like, if we got stuck or something. Not…” Kevin winced as if in pain. “Not because somebody freaking died.”

  Persey remembered Leah’s words only too well. They’d felt ominous at the time, but Persey had no idea how prescient that feeling would be. She didn’t believe for a second that any of this was an accident. B.J. had been murdered, and Arlo’s death conveniently came after she freaked out at Leah. Persey was sure that both deaths had been intentional, and she didn’t want to wait around to be proven right by a third. “We need to get out of here. Now.”

  “Agreed,” Riot said. “If no one’s coming to get us, we need to find our own way out.”

  Shaun arched an eyebrow. “Isn’t that the point of an escape room competition?”

  “Screw the competition!” Riot threw his head back, exasperated. “I don’t give a shit who wins this thing anymore. Do you?”

  Shaun shrugged. “We all knew the risks.”

  “Knew the risks?” Persey said. The android had no soul. “We didn’t enter a guillotine-dodging competition. We shouldn’t have to worry about getting decapitated.”

  Neela, visibly weary of all the bickering and wisecracks, plopped down onto the floor, hugging her knees to her chest. “I want to go home.”

  Even though she was two years older than Persey, Neela seemed younger. Maybe because she was so enthusiastic about life and its possibilities—hope and joy hadn’t been beaten out of her yet by the cruelty of the world—and Persey instantly wanted to make her feel like everything was going to be okay. Even if it wasn’t.

  “Hey,” she said, crouching beside Neela. “You’re going to get out of here, okay?”

  “Of course she is.” Kevin sat down cross-legged on the floor beside her. “We’ll just wait here until the clock runs out. Then someone will have to show up.”

  “Clock?” Persey asked. She hadn’t seen a countdown since they were upstairs.

  “Yep.” Kevin nodded and pointed to the back wall.

  Persey turned and saw the red digital numbers on the wall, set for thirty minutes again. It hadn’t been there before, and even weirder, it hadn’t started moving yet.

  “That’s your plan?” Riot asked, jumping down from the altar. The floor rebounded from the force of his body mass. “Sit here and wait?”

  “That’s my plan,” Kevin said.

  “Wait for what, exactly?”

  “Police?”

  “Maybe they can’t get to us,” Mackenzie suggested. “Maybe, wherever we are, the doors won’t open unless we do it ourselves.”

  “Do it ourselves?” Neela’s voice went up almost a full octave as she spoke as her panic re-escalated. “We can’t keep going. What if there’s another accident? Or…or…” She swallowed, unwilling to finish the thought, but Persey knew exactly what she was going to say.

  “Or what if it wasn’t an accident?”

  “The. Fuck,” Mackenzie said, throwing her arms up. “This again?”

  “Like I said, I’m not going anywhere until we get some answers.” Kevin’s carefree grin seemed out of place in the blood-splattered Cavethedral. “Whether that clock starts or not.”

  A loud buzzer tore through the room the instant Kevin stopped talking.

  The countdown had begun.

  PERSEY JUMPED AT THE BUZZER, GASPING IN SURPRISE. Someone was watching, cuing off of Kevin’s words for dramatic effect. Why hadn’t they called the police?

  “Thirty minutes,” Wes said, as if anyone needed to be told. “Now what?”

  No one answered. In fact, no one moved. Unlike previous buzzers that had kicked off a flurry of motion and energy as the contestants began their search for clues, this time no one seemed to know what to do.

  Persey didn’t blame them. She didn’t know what she was supposed to believe anymore. Her eyes trailed to Arlo’s crumpled corpse. Somewhere, she had friends, a family. Her brother who went to Notre Dame…What was his name? Atticus. Persey imagined he would be devastated when he learned Arlo was dead. Heartbroken by the loss of his sister.

  I wonder what that’s like?

  Riot approached Persey, touching her back lightly with his fingertips. “I’m sure she didn’t feel anything.”

  I’m sure.

  “You okay?”

  Persey peeled her eyes away from the body. “I didn’t like her, but I didn’t want her dead.”

  “Not your fault!” Kevin called up from the floor. He’d leaned back on his elbows and stretched out his legs before him.

  Isn’t it?

  Riot glared at Kevin. “Maybe if you’d listened to Persey about that Boyz Distrikt singer, we’d all be outside right now.”

  “Maybe if you two stopped flirting,” Kevin countered, “I wouldn’t feel like barfing right now.”

  “Us? Are you kidding?” Riot laughed. “You and that prep school groupie have been practically dry-humping since you met!”

  Kevin wouldn’t be derailed. “And your eyes have barely left Persey’s face.”

  Once again, Persey felt the heat rising up from her neck. She spun away from Riot, picked up her bloodstained T-shirt that Neela had discarded, and gently draped it over Arlo’s remains, obscuring the gaping neck hole from view. She hadn’t been a very nice person, or even a very good person, and there had been no love lost between them, but Arlo didn’t deserve this. None of the contestants did. And Persey wanted to make sure that no one else shared Arlo’s fate.

  “Sit there if you want,” she said, without looking at Kevin. “I’m going to try to find a way out.”

  “Excellent!” Riot dashed across the room, mounting the steps to the altar in one leap. He hoisted himself back up onto the marble slab and stood facing the crucifix, examining the engraving Neela had spotted on her way down the pole. “Exurge Domine et judica causam tuam,” he read.

  Riot’s energy spurred everyone else into motion. “‘Arise, O Lord, and judge your cause,’” Shaun translated. “The motto of the Spanish Inquisition.”

  “I knew it,” Neela said under her breath.

  Riot continued to read. “Then in the middle, it says Psalm Seventy-Three. Any chance you know that one, Shaun-bot?”

  “One of the Wisdom Psalms, also known as the Psalms of Asaph.” Shaun cleared his throat, eager to show off. If he’d felt any f
ear or remorse in the face of Arlo’s death, it had quickly been forgotten. “‘Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence. From their callous hearts comes iniquity, their evil imaginations have no limits.’”

  “I really shouldn’t be surprised that Shaun-bot can quote the Bible,” Kevin said, “but somehow I am.”

  “Bible cryptography, also known as a Bible cipher, is one of the earliest known means of encoded messaging in the Western world.” Shaun sounded even more like a computer reading an encyclopedia entry out loud. “It’s relatively common for cryptographers to have more than a working knowledge of its verses.”

  Wes clapped him on the shoulder. A weirdly intimate gesture from the guy who had treated them all like enemies from the beginning. “I knew your Catholic schooling would come in handy.”

  “Don’t touch me,” Shaun said coldly.

  “I didn’t know you were into Bible code,” Riot said, nodding his head as if discovering a newfound appreciation for the Shaun-bot. “Did you know the King James version predicted the 1906 San Francisco earthquake?”

  “Bible cipher,” Shaun sighed wearily. “Bible code is for charlatans and idiots. There are no scientific facts to back up a single fake prediction.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they want you to think.”

  A distant rumbling interrupted the conversation. It sounded like thunder, and Persey could feel the reverberations beneath her feet. “Is there a storm outside?”

  “No,” Neela said. She pressed her palms flat against the floor. “That’s coming from below us.”

  Kevin gasped in mock fear. “The call! It’s coming from inside the house!”

  “I don’t feel anything,” Mackenzie said, unprompted.

  “It’s true,” Wes said. “She really doesn’t.”

  Persey was amazed by how easily distracted they all were. “The floor is shaking. Can you feel that?”

  “Probably just the construction,” Kevin said. “I doubt these wooden slabs are very thick. Maybe they’re mounted on scaffolding or something. That would explain…” He swung his arms forward, launching his butt and legs off the floor for a moment. When he landed, the floor jiggled. “The bouncy room.”

  “Seems safe,” Wes said, sarcasm dripping from each word.

  “One more reason to get the fuck out of here,” Riot said. “Anything else in that psalm that might help us?”

  “Let me think.” Shaun placed a hand over his eyes, while he accessed his memory banks.

  Persey wasn’t Catholic, hadn’t gone to Catholic school, so as she watched Shaun silently mouth the verses of the psalm, she was amazed by its length. The Bible must be wordy.

  “‘Those who are far from you will perish,’” Shaun said at last. “‘You will destroy all who are unfaithful to you. But as for me it is good to be near God. I have made the Sovereign Lord my refuge; I will tell of all your deeds.’”

  Mackenzie stared at Shaun as if he’d just spoken one of the many languages she didn’t know. “How does that help us?”

  “That’s the ending,” Shaun said, dropping his hand from his eyes. “It’s the crux of the verse.”

  “Destroy all who are unfaithful?” Neela hugged her knees tighter to her chest. “What the Helvetica does that mean?”

  Persey wasn’t really sure, but she didn’t like it.

  “Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?” Wes asked, unbuttoning his flannel shirt.

  As much as Persey wanted to disagree with just about everything Wes had to say, as she sat beside Neela, she felt sweat on the back of her neck, and her palms were damp. She swept her hand across the floor, and when it passed over one of the seams between the wooden “stones,” she felt a jet of hot air against her palm.

  “It’s hot,” she said, scrambling to her feet.

  One by one, each of her fellow contestants dropped to the ground, testing the temperature of the air wafting up between the floorboards.

  “Well, that’s not good,” Kevin said.

  Shaun also tested the stone walls, pressing his palms against it in several different places. “Walls are still cool. Heat must be coming from below.”

  “From hell,” Mackenzie said.

  “You’re not wrong.” Riot, from his position on top of the altar, was staring at something in the back of the Cavethedral, eyes so wide Persey could see the torch flames dancing in them. Emblazoned on the stone wall, as if it had been carved in flames, were two lines of verse.

  “‘What a day for an auto-da-fé,’” Persey read.

  “That’s from Candide!” Mackenzie squealed, showing a disturbing amount of levity considering the decapitated body oozing gore just a few feet from her. “I sing ‘Glitter and Be Gay’ at auditions all the time.”

  Persey ignored her. “What’s an auto-da-fé?”

  “An act of faith,” Riot said, his voice suddenly hoarse.

  “During the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, that usually meant a public execution…” Shaun said. A tremor had crept into his monotone.

  Persey didn’t like the sound of this. “Executed how?”

  “By burning.”

  As soon as he said the words, Persey felt the entire floor shake beneath her. This time, there was no mistaking the jolt. Was it an earthquake? Those didn’t happen much in Las Vegas. She crouched, lowering her center of gravity to keep her balance, and just as she was about to make a break for the wall and press herself against it, one of the floor sections dropped away.

  “Holy shit!” Wes cried. He was nearest to the newly formed hole and scrambled away from it. Almost immediately, another section at the opposite side of the room also dislodged from the floor, opening a gaping wound in the ground. Then another. Another. Persey watched in horror as a dozen of the huge wooden slabs disappeared into the darkness below the room.

  Except it wasn’t really darkness that swallowed the missing floorboards. The new gaps in the floor flooded the Cavethedral with an orangey-yellow light emanating from below. The peppered, hickory scent of a campfire wafted upward along with choking black smoke. There was a fire raging beneath their feet.

  Persey leaned tentatively over the nearest hole, trying to get a look at what was down there. Heat seared her face as scorching air rushed upward, but in the split second before Persey had to pull away, she saw what appeared to be an industrial furnace with the top removed. The flames were fed by the wood from the floor that had already dropped away.

  “Auto-da-fé,” Persey said, her voice hardly above a whisper. Death by burning. This can’t be happening.

  “Nobody move!” Kevin cried. He was on his feet now, crouching to maintain his balance.

  “Just stand by and wait to be dropped down there?” Wes said. “No thanks.” He was about to step toward the wall when the wooden platform beside him, the one he was nanoseconds away from shifting his weight onto, released and fell away.

  “Or not,” Kevin said.

  Persey, meanwhile, couldn’t move if she wanted to. She was petrified.

  “How did they work?” Persey said, forcing her brain to function even if her body wouldn’t. “These auto-da-fé things?”

  “They lit you on fire,” Mackenzie replied. She was scared, but not too scared for a dig. “What’s there to know?”

  “Like, the process.” Smartass. “It might give us a clue as to what we’re supposed to do.”

  “It was a public ritual,” Shaun said. His voice quivered, his eyes locked onto the empty hole in the ground beside him. Shaun-bot might have been terrified, but thankfully he could still access his memory banks. “The accused would be paraded through a public square, their crimes of heresy, usually confessed under torture, would be read out loud, and then the guilty would be executed.”

  Shit. Well, they couldn’t parade around the room with half the floor gone, and the execution part was something Persey was hoping to avoid, so that left only one thing.

  “Confession.”

  “Good call,” Riot said. “Bu
t confess what?”

  Persey wasn’t sure, but there was only one place to start. “I cheated on a test,” she said, her voice clear and strong. “The entry exam for a private school. It was my dad’s idea, to make sure I got in, but I went along with it.”

  There was a pause while Persey’s confession hung in the air. She held her breath, hoping that was the worst thing she’d have to confess that day; then with a metallic creaking from whatever mechanical contraption controlled the floor slabs, the nearest wooden section slid toward her, stopping flush against the one she was balanced on.

  Mackenzie stared at the fake stone as if it was possessed. “The. Fuck.”

  “Step on it,” Shaun said. “See if it will hold your weight.”

  Kevin snorted. “What if it plummets into the inferno?”

  “Then we’ll know it doesn’t.”

  Gee, thanks.

  Kevin laughed. “You step on it.”

  “If I was close enough to jump without the risk of falling, I would consider it.” His words were confident, but Shaun’s voice sounded strange, like his tongue wasn’t working correctly. He lisped his s’s and his pronunciation was indistinct.

  “Are you okay?” Neela asked.

  “Fine.” Shaun sounded like he had a mouthful of cotton balls. “I highly doubt the platform would have moved if it wasn’t meant to be used.” At least that’s what Persey thought he said. He was getting difficult to understand.

  Maybe that’s how androids react to fear? Mush mouth.

  Regardless, Shaun had a point, though Persey didn’t relish the idea of testing his theory with her life. As she stared at the wooden disc painted to look like a stone paver, another piece of the floor gave way, crashing to the inferno below. This time it was right behind Persey, and the roar of the fire as it consumed more food made her mind up for her. She took a deep breath and leaped onto the new platform.

  “Be careful!” Neela cried.

  The stone wiggled a little, bouncing with the force of her arrival in the same way the entire floor had jolted when Persey landed at the bottom of the fire pole, but it felt steady. Firm.

  “I’m okay!” she said, surprised. She looked around and saw that there were two platforms within jumping distance of her own: one toward the altar, the other toward an empty wall. The choice was easy.