#NoEscape (Volume 3) (#MurderTrending)

by Gretchen McNeil

  “The numbers must mean something,” Kevin said, shifting to the next table. “But I’ve never seen fuck all of three hundred million or whatever dollars.”

  Three hundred million dollars…“Holy shit.” She was a fucking idiot. “Neela, how much did you say the Brownes lost after the Prison Break debacle?”

  Neela gasped. “Two hundred and fifty million!”

  “Backward math,” Kevin said, pointing at Neela. “Stat.”

  She was way ahead of him, eyes closed, lips working as she did the mental calculation. “One hundred and eighty-seven million, seven hundred and sixteen, two hundred and fifty pounds.”

  “And a partridge in a pear tree,” Kevin added dryly.

  The ceiling was dangerously close—another couple of minutes and Kevin and Riot, the tallest ones in the room, were going to have to crouch as they moved from table to table—and even though they suspected their target amount was correct, it was still a moving target. Neela, poised at the center, directed traffic. Persey could see her eyes flashing back and forth between the tally and the tables, watching as the numbers raced up and down.

  “This is useless,” Kevin panted, eying the rapidly approaching roof as they futilely switched places yet again. “We’re about to be Swiss cheese, people.”

  “Swiss cheese?” Neela asked.

  “Holey.” Kevin forced a laugh at his own joke. “Man, I wish there was actual food with this….” He bent forward to look at the bill on his table. “Twenty-four and a half pound tea. I’d like something for my last meal.”

  “Twenty-four pounds fifty…” One check had been for twenty-two fifty, another for seventeen. The one at the table where she currently sat was for twenty. Those numbers, all different, couldn’t have been random. Nothing in these rooms ever was. “Guys, the numbers on the checks are all different. Maybe that’s a clue to where we’re supposed to sit?”

  “What are the numbers?” Riot asked.

  “Twenty-four, twenty-two fifty, twenty, seventeen.”

  “Huh,” Mackenzie said. “I just turned twenty last week.”

  “And I’m seventeen.” Persey straightened up. Could it be that simple?

  Riot raised his hand. “Twenty-two and a half,” he said. “Almost to the day.”

  They all turned to Kevin.

  “Any chance you’re twenty-four?” Persey asked.

  He smiled. “That’s what my ID says!”

  “And I’m nineteen,” Neela added. “But since apparently I wasn’t supposed to survive this long, it makes sense that my age would not be represented.”

  Persey didn’t know what was going to happen when they all took their “assigned” seats, but it wasn’t as if they had much of a choice. Without further discussion, they scurried around, dodging sliding books and one another, and took their places: Kevin was nearest the door, Riot farthest way, Mackenzie and Persey in opposite corners. Neela stayed at the dead center of the room, trying to remain a neutral weight. Kevin was the last to take his seat, and then they all turned to the tally on the wall. It should have been 187,716,250 pounds, if their theory was correct.

  “One hundred and eighty-two million, five hundred thousand, seven hundred and twelve,” Neela read. “It didn’t work.”

  “Fuck!” Mackenzie started to stand up. “This is pointless. We’re all going to die!”

  “Don’t move!” Persey cried, holding up her hand. She was watching the wall near her table, where the floor wasn’t perfectly perpendicular to the wall. She waved to her left. “Neela, can you shift that way?”

  Neela complied with little baby steps. The tally shifted slowly, rising incremental amounts. Persey held her breath. 185 million. 186…Neela froze with the tally just a few hundred pounds from their target, then shifted her weight onto her left leg. 187,716,250!

  The sound of a heavy lock being thrown echoed through the tearoom; then the door swung open into the darkness beyond.

  “NOBODY MOVE!” RIOT CRIED. THE MOMENT THE DOOR WAS open, everyone had subconsciously begun to move toward it, which rocketed Riot’s end of the floor upward toward the descending spikes.

  Persey froze, then shifted her weight backward. Slowly the floor reached the horizontal. But the dilemma had been clearly illustrated by their collective impulse: every time one of them tried to reach the door, it would tilt someone else toward a pointy death.

  “Neela should stay,” Mackenzie said. “She was supposed to die last time. It’s only fair.”

  “Um, how is that fair, exactly?” Neela asked.

  “No one has to stay and get impaled,” Persey said, not entirely sure how she was going to accomplish that mandate. “We just need to find something to balance the weight. Like a piece of furniture—”

  “Which is all bolted down,” Kevin countered.

  Yeah, I know. “Or…” Persey cast her eyes around the room, looking for anything they could use as a counterbalance.

  “The books!” Riot cried.

  “Oh my God!” How could Persey have been so slow? “Of course. That’s why they’re here.”

  “Okay, but…” Kevin pointed up. The gleaming tips of a hundred spikes were just inches from his head now. “We need to do this quickly.”

  With the books scattered across the tilting tearoom, this wasn’t going to be an easy task. They had to get everything piled up at Riot’s end of the room to act as a counterweight to the five of them as they all tried to make it through the door. Mackenzie, shockingly, refused to help, parking herself inches from the open door to ensure that no matter what happened, she’d make it out alive.

  Neela did most of the hustling. Aside from being the shortest contestant left, thus able to stand upright long after the others were forced to crouch, she was also, essentially, superfluous weight, so as she moved back and forth, to and fro, across the room, and the shift in one person’s weight was easier to counterbalance than if Persey, Kevin, Neela, and Riot had all been schlepping those books around at the same time. She started with the largest volumes—Shakespeare, Byron, Tennyson—and with every additional hardcover added to Riot’s corner, he and Persey were able to move a little bit closer to an escape.

  “Almost there,” Persey said after delivering all of Don Juan to the back corner. She had to crouch low, which affected her speed, and wasn’t entirely sure how many more of these trips would be possible.

  “We’re almost there.” Riot was halfway across the room at this point, Neela having long abandoned that area as the shifting fulcrum took her closer to the open door. “We’re going to make it.”

  But Leah wasn’t about to make it that easy. Almost as soon as the words left Riot’s mouth, the motor that powered the ceiling roared, the intensity of the noise indicating a new level of danger, and the ceiling began to fall faster.

  “Shit.” Persey had an armful of books, but at this rate, there was no way she’d be able to deposit them at the other end of the room and make it to the door in time.

  “Throw them!” Riot cried.

  It was a good idea. They needed the weight of the books, not eBay-condition collectibles. She dropped them on the ground and with a swift series of kicks, sent the volumes careening toward the corner.

  “Go!” Riot ordered, taking a few more steps toward the door.

  Mackenzie and Kevin hadn’t waited. They stood as close to the door as they could without actually stepping through.

  Persey eyed the distance between Riot and the door. “You won’t make it.”

  “Perhaps,” Neela suggested, “if we move fast enough, Riot can outrun the acceleration of gravity. I mean, not really, but the appearance of it in this case, yes.”

  “It’s worth a shot,” Persey said, though she didn’t think it would actually work.

  “On three, then.” Riot edged closer to the door before he even started the countdown. “One. Two. Three.”

  The angle of the floor shifted almost as soon as Persey began to run toward the door. She immediately felt as if she was running uphill,
if the hill was magically growing steeper by the second, and the open darkness of the door began to disappear. They hadn’t distributed enough weight at the door end of the room to make this mad dash work.

  But just as suddenly as Persey had found herself running uphill, the dynamic shifted. She’d passed the point of no balance return, and she had to lean back to keep from tumbling forward into the darkness of the open doorway.

  “Son of a Shatner!” Neela cried. She lost her balance and slipped onto her butt, sliding all the way down toward the door. The faster she fell, the faster the room tilted until Persey was sure the whole floor would topple over and fall away.

  “Shit!” Riot cried. Persey turned to find that he had flattened himself on the ground, his head just inches from the spikes.

  “Go through the door!” Persey cried. Mackenzie, Kevin, didn’t matter. They had to even out the weight or Riot was going to get skewered.

  Mackenzie, thankfully, was only thinking of herself and didn’t need to be told twice. She disappeared through the doorway, followed closely by Neela, who rolled rather than stepped off the Tilt-a-Whirl. The absence of their weight did the trick, and the room shifted back toward equilibrium again. But the ceiling hadn’t slowed, and Riot was only able to push himself as far up as his hands and knees to continue the trek.

  “You can do it,” Persey said, turning to face him as she ducked into the doorway, careful to keep both feet on the tearoom floor so they didn’t lose Riot altogether.

  “Come on!” Kevin held out his hand as Riot frantically crawled toward them on his elbows and hips, an army trainee doing the crocodile.

  “He’s not going to make it,” Persey said, hoping that Riot didn’t hear her as she tried to guesstimate the distance left between spike and flesh.

  Riot stopped crawling. “I know.”

  “Dude!” Kevin cried. “What are you doing?”

  “I won’t make it to the door in time.” He rolled onto his side, eyes flying across the ceiling as it rapidly approached. “But what if I don’t have to?”

  “Has he gone mental?” Kevin asked.

  As if in answer, Riot began to stretch his limbs in a variety of ways—one hand out before him, elbow crooked at a ninety-degree angle, a leg kicked back as if he was stretching while the other was hitched in front. Riot kept glancing back and forth between his weirdly stretched body and the lethal spikes, and just when Persey was about to look away because she couldn’t handle the idea of watching his impalement in slow motion, he called out excitedly. “I’ve got it. This is going to work.”

  “What’s going to work?”

  Kevin clapped his hand over Persey’s eyes. “Don’t look. You don’t want to see this.”

  THUD.

  Then silence.

  “I’m okay!” Riot’s voice was excited, rapturous. Not even a hint of agony. Persey’s eyes flew open, and she saw that he’d managed to contort his body so that his sinewy limbs all fit in the gaps between the spikes that were now penetrating the floor. But they’d stopped, leaving a gap of about twelve inches between ceiling and floor, crisscrossed with the metal spikes.

  “Now what?” Persey asked. It was a miracle that Riot was still alive, but how long would he stay that way? Would he have to lie there until they managed to escape and summon help?

  “I think I can get to you,” Riot said, craning his neck in her direction. “I just need to get my shoulder around this one spike; then it’s almost a straight shot.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. Pretty sure.”

  “Dude,” Kevin said, repeating himself. “That is pretty badass. Do you think you could teach me how to curl my body up like a—”

  But Kevin’s final thought was cut off by a sickening crack. He and Persey felt the floor shudder beneath them and just had enough time to leap into the open doorway before the two pieces of the tearoom—floor and ceiling—slammed together like a giant industrial garment press.

  Persey heard a scream accompanied by the crunching of 206 human bones being pulverized all at once.

  And then Riot was nothing but dust.

  PERSEY CONTINUED TO STARE AT WHAT WAS LEFT OF HIGH Tea. From her vantage point on the other side of the door, she could see the seam where roof and floor had slammed together. They were totally flush, not a centimeter gap between the two. The force of the two pieces being clapped together pulverized everything. Tables, chairs, books. Riot.

  He was still in there, just on the other side of this door, pinned like a pressed flower in a book but with significantly more blood and guts sprayed everywhere. Dead. Just like Wes. And Shaun. And Arlo. And B.J.

  Persey couldn’t save any of them, and as she slowly rested her forehead against the rough surface of the door, she wondered if there truly was no escape from all this death.

  She understood why everyone had been brought to Escape-Capades that day, understood the gravity of what Riot and Wes and Mackenzie and Shaun and Arlo and even the unwitting Neela had done. But did they deserve this? Wasn’t there some kind of less lethal justice that could have been doled out instead? Couldn’t they have been turned over to the authorities and prosecuted for idea theft, extortion, something? Why wasn’t justice left to the authorities?

  “This shouldn’t be happening,” she said out loud.

  “But it is,” Kevin countered. He stood close behind her.

  She turned to face him, tears welling up in her eyes. “Why?”

  “It just is.”

  That’s not an answer.

  Kevin’s face was hard-set as he stared down at her. He looked bigger than before, wider and stronger, and he stood like a wall between her and whatever lay behind him in the room. The implication was clear—he meant to protect her. But would he be able to? If push came to shove, would he let one of the others die to save Persey’s life?

  And could she live with that?

  “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t. I didn’t do it.” Mackenzie paced in a tight circle, wringing her hands in front of her once-white shirt, like Lady Macbeth attempting to get the imaginary spots out. Her eyes were wide, hair half matted, half frizzy, and the carefully applied makeup from this morning was now smudged and smeared across her face, leaving raccoon eyes and the illusion of an off-kilter mouth. “I didn’t. This isn’t happening. This is all a dream. I’m stuck in a bad dream.”

  “Mackenzie?” Persey asked as Mackenzie passed by. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll just wake up, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll wake up and I’ll be in the hotel and all of this is not real.”

  Kevin waved his hand in front of her face, but she didn’t even flinch. “I think Mack has gone bye-bye.”

  “Guys,” Neela said. “I don’t know what the hell that thing is, but I’m scared.”

  “That thing?” Persey turned away from Mackenzie to face the rest of the room. It was almost entirely bare, a rarity in the Escape-Capades All-Star Competition. Instead of an incredibly detailed set, perfectly thematic and mindfully decorated down to the square inch, the space looked unfinished. Half conceived. The floors were a gleaming white tile, shined squeaky clean so that it reflected the bright overhead lights embedded in the ceiling. The walls were white to match, so unmarred that Persey assumed they had been painted that morning, perhaps not even dry. A single black dome on the ceiling housed a camera, which was mounted right in the middle of the room, as if begging to be seen and acknowledged. Not just a reminder that someone had been watching them all along, but a demand for that surveillance to be recognized.

  But the walls and the tile and the camera were background noise to the star attraction in the room. Standing squarely in the middle of all that whiteness was a giant yellow tractor-looking thing, with a conveyor belt on one end and some kind of blower on the other. It looked as if it had been brought inside to do some kind of industrial construction work and just left there, forgotten.

  There was one more item in the room, so small in comparison to the tractor that Persey almost didn’t
see it at first. A table stood directly in front of the yellow machine: simple, small, and made of a clear acrylic material, it was the perfect display for the handgun that sat squarely at its center.

  Just sitting there. Waiting for someone to take it.

  “Welcome to True North.”

  Neela jolted at the sound of the obviously male voice. “Wh-who’s that?”

  Persey shook her head. “No idea.” They’d only heard Leah’s voice today, so this was jarring.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Mackenzie screamed, spinning around the room looking for someone to address. Her trance had been broken, her hope that this was all a bad dream obliterated. “Why are you doing this to us?” Her entire body shook. The raccoon eyes now looked more like leaking inkwells, her face streaked black by running mascara, dragged down her porcelain cheeks by heavy tears.

  The voice paused, contemplating. “Isn’t it obvious why you’re here? You’ve already had that conversation.”

  Mackenzie sobbed uncontrollably, drool flinging from her lips with each word. “I had nothing to do with that, okay? It was all Wes. All of it.”

  “I don’t know about the Black Widow over there,” Kevin said, speaking directly to the camera, “but I’m just an innocent bystander.”

  “Are you?”

  Kevin threw his arms up in a gesture of blamelessness. “Dude!”

  Persey stepped around Kevin, whose protection she wasn’t sure she wanted. She felt stupid addressing a black domed camera. It was like talking to someone in dark sunglasses—you could never tell if they were looking at you, paying attention, or even awake behind those shades. “What do you want from us?”

  “Justice.”

  “This isn’t justice!” Mackenzie screamed. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Kevin shot her a look. “Why, because you didn’t actually put the Glock in Melinda Browne’s hand?”

  Neela crept up beside Persey, staring at the camera. Unlike Mackenzie, she was perfectly calm. Resigned, perhaps, to their fate. “I know we can’t bring them back,” she said. “And I know this doesn’t make up for anything, but I just want you to know that I’m sorry.”