“Lead the way,” Kevin said calmly.
“Right.” She had to go first. Into the unknown. Persey lowered her chin, turned toward the doorway, and strode through with as much confidence as she could muster.
PERSEY WASN’T SURE WHAT SHE EXPECTED TO FIND ONCE SHE walked through that door—an Indiana Jones–style booby trap ready to drop on her head? Labyrinth-ine maze complete with a spandex-clad David Bowie? Clarice Starling stalking her with a drawn handgun? All of those might have been legitimate possibilities, but none of them even compared to what she saw.
Nothing.
Well, not totally nothing. In the distance, Persey could see another wall—low and long, just like the one behind her, and she could just make out a single door in its face, the metallic doorknob glowing in night vision. But between her and that door, it looked as if someone had dug out an Olympic-size swimming pool.
She edged closer to the pit and realized that her swimming-pool analogy was somewhat apt—the pit was maybe ten feet deep, uniform as far as she could see in either direction, but this certainly wasn’t a pool you wanted to dive into. The bottom was lined with the same pointy, lethal spikes that were coming at them from behind.
This room truly was an iron maiden.
“What do you see?” Mackenzie said, impatience fluttering in her voice. “Why are we just standing here? That thing is still after us!”
Persey felt a gentle push as five people pressed in behind her. “Don’t move!” she yelled, stutter-stepping away from the edge. If they accidentally (purposefully) knocked her and her night-vision goggles into the spikes, they’d all be dead meat.
She felt a strong hand on her arm, holding her steady. Kevin. “We can’t stay here.”
“I know,” she snapped, instantly wishing she hadn’t. He was right, of course. But they also couldn’t go forward until she found a way across.
“Tell us what you see,” he said. Again, cool and calm.
Right. “The floor drops away right in front of me. Ten feet, maybe twelve.”
“We should be able to jump down without breaking anything,” Riot said. “Drop and roll, parkour style.”
“Only if you’d like to add a few dozen holes to your body,” Persey said grimly.
“You’re kidding.”
“The entire floor is riddled with those spikes.”
“Okay, so jumping is off the list,” Kevin said.
“There’s a door on the other side,” Persey continued, “directly across. But I’m not sure how we get to…” She stopped as her eyes fell on something all the way down the room to her left. It was light green against the blackness of the pit, and Persey realized what she was staring at. “There’s a bridge!”
“Really?” Wes said. “That seems too easy.”
It did seem too easy. But what choice did they have?
“We’ll cross that, er, bridge, when we get to it,” Kevin said with a laugh.
Persey groaned. “So glad you’ve retained your sense of humor.”
“If I can’t laugh in the face of death,” he replied, “when can I?”
Persey could think of like a million other times where bad puns were more appropriate, but she didn’t have time to banter with him. “This way!” she said, then remembered that no one else could see her. “Sorry. To your left. Put a hand on the wall so you stay away from the edge. I’ll go first.”
Even with the night-vision goggles on, Persey followed her own advice and kept her left hand against the wall, tracing its smooth surface with her fingers as she led the group down the narrow ledge toward the bridge. She kept her eyes moving, half expecting to feel the moving wall of spikes crash through the stucco at any moment, but the wall never so much as shuddered from the grinding movement of the iron maiden, and as she carefully hugged the wall, she realized that the mechanical rumble of the engine had also ceased.
“How much farther?” Mackenzie whined like a kid in the back seat of the family minivan on a cross-country road trip.
“I warned you to use the potty before we left,” Riot said, taking the joke right out of Persey’s mouth. “Now you’ll just have to hold it.”
But Mackenzie’s nerves were too frayed to see humor of any kind. “THE. FUCK!”
“It was just a joke.”
“Not funny.” Mackenzie choked down a sob.
“Everybody stay calm,” Kevin said. He strode confidently behind Persey, despite the darkness. “Listen to Persey and we’ll all get through this.”
I really hope so.
“Perhaps everyone would feel better,” Neela began, her voice higher pitched than usual from nerves and adrenaline, “if Persey narrated what she’s seeing? I think the silence is more terrifying than the darkness.”
“Yeah, for you,” Wes grumbled.
“Okay.” Persey swallowed. Listening to herself monologue was probably the least stress-reducing thing she could think of, but if it helped her get everyone through this room alive and in one piece, it would be worth it. “I can see the bridge clearly now. It’s thin. Like the plank on a pirate ship and…”
Persey’s throat closed up. Wes had been right. A bridge had seemed too easy but now that Persey was steps away, she realized that this thin piece of wood, only wide enough to allow one person to pass at a time, had no railing. One false step and impalement awaited on the floor below.
“And?” Wes prompted, impatient.
Persey sighed. The trust exercise just got a whole lot more trusting. “And there’s no supports on either side. No handrail. Nothing. If you don’t walk directly straight ahead, you’ll fall.”
Wes emitted a sound somewhere between a growl and a gasp. “I knew it seemed too easy.”
“We’re here,” Persey said, stopping before the bridge. The shuffling of feet behind her ceased as she stared out at the bridge. It was a foot wide, if that—more than a gymnast’s balance beam but narrow enough that they’d have to walk one foot in front of the other, further diminishing their stability. To make matters worse, unless the wooden beam had been crafted around a titanium core, it was going to sag in the middle as they crossed. There were no additional support beams.
“It’s narrow,” she said, trying not to understate the danger but unwilling to instill panic. “And I don’t think it will hold the weight of more than one or two people at a time.”
“This isn’t fair!” Mackenzie stomped her foot, her voice nearing hysterical. “She’s the only one who can get out of here. What the fuck are we supposed to do?”
“How long is the bridge?” Kevin asked.
Persey wasn’t great at judging distances, but it didn’t seem that far. “About as wide as a swimming pool?”
“Anything on the other side?”
“Just the door.”
Kevin sighed. “You’ll guide us across one at a time. There doesn’t seem to be a clock in here, so we have all the time in the world.”
“For fuck’s sake!” Wes cried. “Don’t say that! Every time you say that something awful happens.”
“Like what?” Kevin said. “How could this possibly get worse?”
A whoosh of air blew past them. Persey felt the breeze against her cheek and turned in time to see something green streak past her from right to left across the length of the room. A split second later, a thud. It sounded like an arrow hitting the bull’s-eye.
“What the hell was that?” Riot asked.
The green streak had struck the wall on Persey’s left. She could have guessed what it was without looking at it, but one glance confirmed her worst fears. “That was a spike. Like the ones on the floor. Only it was shot across the room.”
“Okay, my bad.” Kevin sounded sheepish. “It’s worse.”
Persey didn’t look at him. She was still fixated on the spike on the wall. Beside it, glaring white in her night vision, a countdown clock.
“Can you guys see what’s on the wall?” Persey asked. “On your left.”
“We can’t see anything!” Mackenzie scream
-sobbed. “Not a single fucking thing.”
She was going to have to get her shit together if she wanted to survive.
“How much time?” Riot asked.
That was the weirdest part of all. “I don’t know.”
“Huh?”
“It’s not a clock face. It’s just a number. Eight hundred and twenty-one point three.”
“Huh,” Riot repeated, this time without the inflection of a question. “Elizabethan poetry.”
Now it was Persey’s turn to be confused. “Huh?”
“The call numbers. Eight twenty-one is poetry, point three is Elizabethan. My specialty.”
As he spoke, the numbers began to move. “Eight twenty, eight nineteen,” Persey said. “It’s still a countdown.”
“Thirteen minutes and forty-two seconds,” Neela said. “In seconds. Approximately.”
Persey had no idea what the Dewey decimal number for poetry meant or how she was going to ferry five people across that spike-filled gap in under fourteen minutes even if they did manage to evade the spikes flying across their path, but she knew she had to try.
“Okay,” she began. “I’m going to take everyone across one at a time.” Without waiting for a volunteer, she reached out and took Neela’s hand, pulling her around Kevin. In the night-vision goggles, Neela’s monochrome black on black was now white on white. Her mass of curly hair looked like a Santa Claus wig on steroids, and her eyes, rimmed in real life with heavy black liner, were huge and sparkly. Persey couldn’t tell if she was crying or if the sparkling was just an aftereffect of the goggles.
“What do we do about those flying spikes?” Neela asked.
Persey wasn’t entirely sure. If she saw one coming, she and Neela might have time to flatten against the bridge before they were impaled. Might. It was a chance she had to take. “When I say duck, duck. Ready?”
Neela squeezed Persey’s hand. “I trust you.”
“Of course she’s taking the lame one first,” Mackenzie cried. “The. Fuck.”
“I’m not lame,” Neela said, bristling. It took all of Persey’s self-restraint not to push Mackenzie into the pit and be done with her.
“No, you’re not. Come on.”
The plank felt surprisingly firm beneath Persey’s feet. A little wiggly as Neela joined, but not enough to make her lose her balance. She walked slowly, purposefully, Neela’s hand still clasped in hers. The bridge wasn’t particularly long, but Persey wasn’t taking any chances. She kept her eyes glued to the far wall, which had shot the initial spike, praying she’d have enough warning to dodge the projectile.
They weren’t even a quarter of the way across when the barrage began.
The first spikes came in a cluster. Four of them, aimed at the beginning of the bridge, behind where Neela now stood.
“Don’t move!” Persey said, holding Neela’s hand firm. “They’re behind you.”
She froze, holding her breath, as the spikes whizzed past. From the distance, it looked as if they’d all been shot at once, but as they struck the wall, they did so with a distinct rhythm. One-two. Three-four.
Persey started moving again, wondering why the spikes had been so poorly aimed, when she saw another set of green dots streaking toward them. Closer this time.
“Move!” Persey cried, tugging on Neela’s arm. They stumbled together, Persey’s eyes fixed on the wooden beam beneath her feet, which was now sagging so close to the spikes on the ground that she could see their gleamingly sharp tips. Neela’s balanced wavered, but she regained her footing, following closely behind Persey. They just cleared the spikes that went racing by Neela so closely that if her hair had been blown backward in the nonexistent breeze one of the spikes would have soared right through it.
Once again, they hit the wall with the same, distinct rhythm: one-two, three-four.
“Hurry up!” Mackenzie screamed. “What if those spikes get shot at us, huh? We can’t even see.”
Not that Persey needed Mackenzie’s reminder to keep moving. After the last near miss, she didn’t so much as pause after the spikes hit. She and Neela kept moving forward as quickly as they could safely manage, but they were far enough away that when the third blast was unleashed, they struck the wall harmlessly behind Neela. One-two, three-four.
Persey could see the other side now as they began to climb upward on the sagging plank. She just had to deposit Neela safely, then do this four more times. Easy, right? The spikes seemed to be meant as an incentive to keep moving more than anything. If it was the same on the way back, then she had this one—
“Get down!” Riot shouted. “Now!”
“What?” Persey turned her head. Riot, who couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, was waving his arm wildly over his head as if to get her attention. Why would they stop now, when the spike blasts were just driving them toward the far side?
“GET. DOWN,” he repeated.
Before she could even process how she and Neela were supposed to “get down” on an unstable piece of wood hardly a foot wide, she saw the danger. Tiny little green points of light on the far wall. At least fifty of them, all in a row.
She tugged at Neela’s hand while she flattened herself on the wooden plank. “What’s happening?” Neela cried, awkwardly groping for the beam with her free hand. Persey wrapped her arm around Neela’s head, pushing it down onto the wood as she tucked her own face into Neela’s cascading hair. A row of spikes the width of the entire room flew above them, followed by another identical wave, striking the wall one after another, one-two.
Without Riot’s warning, both she and Neela would now be pincushions.
“Holy fajita!” Neela cried. Even in the face of death, curse words escaped her.
“Hey!” Riot called. “You guys okay?”
“How did you know?” Persey unwrapped strands of Neela’s curls from her night-vision goggles as she sat upright.
“The rhythm,” Riot explained, sounding relieved that they were still alive. “It’s an Elizabethan rhyme scheme. ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.”
The library call numbers. Now they made sense.
“I just assumed the GG part would be cataclysmic,” he continued. “Was I right?”
So right.
“Get to the other side before it starts again,” Kevin instructed, as if Persey or Neela needed to be told. They were almost all the way across before the rhyme scheme of lethal projectiles began again. One-two, three-four. One-two, three-four. One-two, three-four. ONE-TWO.
They made it safely to the other side before the final couplet, and Persey positioned Neela with her back to the wall, safely out of harm’s way. “Stay here.”
“I will do so until you return,” Neela said. She sounded out of breath. “And try to relocate my heart from the unfortunate migration it has made to my throat. Ha-ha.”
Persey made it halfway back before she had to hit the deck to avoid another volley. The spikes were striking the wall in the same place as previous rounds, bouncing off each other and clanking down to the spike-lined floor, which meant Persey also had to keep an eye on the ricochets, but she made it back to the group safely, this time taking Mackenzie’s hand. Not for girl solidarity or because she thought the guys would be chivalrous, but because she couldn’t stand listening to her whine anymore.
“Do what I tell you to do,” Persey said, trying to sound like she was in control. “Understand?” Mackenzie didn’t have a good track record when it came to taking Persey seriously, and this kind of command would have touched Mackenzie off a few hours ago, but to her credit, Mackenzie just nodded, and despite the nagging fear that Persey might be holding hands with a killer, they both made it safely to the other side.
Riot was next, and when Persey took his hand, she felt his thumb graze over the back of her own. It was the last thing she should have been thinking of, but her stomach fluttered, and for one fleeting moment, she thought of what it must be like to have someone in your life—anyone else—who cared about you.
Persey half
expected to find Wes and Kevin engaged in a blind-man’s fistfight when she returned, arguing over who would go next. The countdown clock was at 378 seconds, or about six minutes if Persey’s crappy math skills could handle basic division, which meant she had time to get both of them out, even with the now-predictable spike volleys, but instead of the expected altercation, she found Kevin leaning back against the wall, arms folded across his chest, über-casual.
“I’ll go last,” he announced.
“Really?” she blurted out.
Wes answered for him. “Yes, really.” He inched his way toward her, one hand trailing against the wall. Even through night-vision goggles, he looked awful. The sheen of perspiration on his face glistened in green light. His hair was stringy and matted down, like he’d been running a sweaty hand through it repeatedly, and his eyes were puffy. She wondered if he’d been smoking more of his special weed while he waited.
She tried not to cringe when she took Wes’s moist hand.
They started across the plank at the same deliberate, steady pace Persey had used for the others, but Wes wasn’t content to move that slowly. “Hurry up,” he growled in her ear.
One-two. Three-four.
“The wooden plank isn’t very sturdy,” Persey said, refusing to be bullied. “We’ll make it halfway before the first big barrage, and you’ll have plenty of time to get down and avoid—”
He shoved her. “Move. Faster.”
Persey stumbled, hand down to the wooden beam for support, and just barely avoided a headfirst fall into the spike pit below. “Cut it out!” she yelled, trying to yank her hand free from his. If he wanted to run blindly in the darkness, he could go right ahead. But she wasn’t going with him.
One-two. Three-four.
“What’s wrong?” Neela cried. “Persey, are you okay?”
Before she could answer, she felt a hand smack her head. Then another. Wes was groping for her goggles.
#NoEscape (Volume 3) (#MurderTrending) Page 23