Chapter Twenty-Six – The Break-Out
“Will!” I shriek, watching as he grabs hold of his shoulder and rubs the spot that just crashed into the door. “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”
“Come on, let’s go.” Will rushes through the now open doorway, yet my legs stay firmly in place. “What?” Will hesitantly stops running and turns back towards me when he realizes I’m not with him.
“We can’t leave the others.”
“We’re not leaving them; we’re going outside.” Will’s eyes plead with me.
I know this is a bad idea. I know I should say no, but my mind races ahead to being outside. Fresh air and rain. Will has already broken through the door, the harm is already done. Obviously there isn’t a guard here waiting for us so we might as well enjoy it rather than stay in here now.
“If we’re going outside, then we should pay attention. Look out for a computer.” My legs move forward and before I know it, we’re rushing down a new corridor, my heart pumping hard while my body fills with adrenaline. I take in every new image that I see, glad for something new to look at. There definitely aren’t armed guards at our door like Stan had said. Did he lie about that or are we simply lucky?
All my senses are heightened as I wait to hear running footsteps behind us or a shout for us to stop. However, there is nothing. This whole thing feels too easy and dread fills my body. Something must be wrong, nothing is ever this easy.
The lights remain on in the corridor and I wonder if we’ll be coated in darkness soon. I feel an urge to search for Charlie. Is he in trouble? Is he behind one of these doors?
We turn down another corridor before the hallway comes to a finish with a closed and, no doubt, locked door with a sign saying ‘stairs’ over it. That’s the door we need to get to. There is one problem, though. We have to pass another hallway, which after a quick check we discover has a guard patrolling down it. From the quick glances I take, I notice he seems to be guarding a door there rather than anything else.
“What do we do?” I whisper as quietly as I can manage to Will. Will leans down near my ear and so quietly I have to strain to hear, he speaks to me. “Are you ready for this?”
I know what he wants to do; he wants to run. We can’t really turn back now. The doorway to our lounge area has already been broken. We can’t fix it, so they’ll know we broke through it. It’s a waste not to enjoy our short lived freedom.
I nod to him that I’m ready, even though I’m not. I still have adrenaline pumping through my veins, but my legs are stiff from the recent exercise. I’m completely unfit and not competent to outrun a guard who most likely is quite fit.
The power shuts off again and it feels like fate. Now is the time to run. Will grabs my arm and we run past the open hallway completely hidden. We try not to make a sound with our shoes, however to my ultrasensitive ears I think we sound like a herd of elephants on a stampede. I know we’ve made it to the door when Will crashes into it and breaks the door down. Darkness still surrounds us and already I hear noises from behind us and a flashlight aiming at us. Will and I race down the stairs and I almost trip down them in my haste to hurry up. Will races ahead and soon he is too far ahead for me to see him and the guard is now chasing me down the stairs. I keep my arm on the rail to guide me downwards, running down three flights of stairs when arms grab hold of me and I scream at the same time that I try to push them off. A flashlight hits Will’s face and I realize that it’s him I’m pushing.
“Sorry, I thought—”
“Come on!”
I don’t get a chance to glance backwards to see how far away the guard is. Will takes my arm and pulls me beyond the door he must already have crashed through. Footsteps behind us are louder and I know we’ll never make it outside.
I slow to a jog as I take in this new level we’re on. We’re on the ground floor and the ceilings here are higher than what we have on our floor, even higher than the training area. Glass walls encompass the entire outside as it moves around in a circle. The grey, stormy sky outside pulls at me and I feel a smile come over my face to see how close we are to fresh air.
Will suddenly stops dead in his tracks and I run straight into the back of him, falling to the ground from the impact. I’m not even sure if Will noticed that I hit him, though. He feels like solid rock. Looking ahead, I see why he has stopped and my heart sinks. Two guards are running our way from straight ahead. Looking behind us, we see the guard that we had passed on our way to get to the stairwell. We have nowhere to go. I look back out at the glass wall as I continue sitting on the ground and watch the rain pelt hard outside. It’s almost as if the weather can sense my despair as the rain gets harder. We’re so close.
The guards start to close in on us and I glance around, wishing this hadn’t been such a waste. It’s then I notice to my left several unused desks and sitting on top of the second desk in from the stairway is a laptop. My heart jumps seeing it. If we can get Rose here, then maybe she can use it to get word out of our location. She can get us help.
Will moves away from me and before I understand what he’s doing, he picks up one of the chairs at the first desk closest to us and throws it against the glass wall. Upon impact it smashes into shards, some large and some small. The chair keeps flying into the air and it doesn’t land for an inhumanly long amount of time. An earsplitting alarm sounds and I block my ears as the noise tries to pierce through to my brain.
Will grabs one hand away from my ear and pulls me to my feet. We run through the now exposed wall, over all the broken glass and into the rain outside. He keeps pulling me along until we’re a good fifty or so meters away from the entrance we have made. We’re on a massive patch of grass next to a large car park.
It’s the best feeling being outside. I laugh as I twirl in the rain. Within seconds my hair and clothes are soaked and I don’t care. This was what I’ve missed. This is what I want. I don’t even feel the cold. I just breathe in the fresh air. I promise myself I’ll never take this for granted. That if I ever get out of this place, I’ll appreciate being able to leave somewhere whenever I want to, to be able to breathe in fresh air and not have had to stage a huge breakout simply to get outside.
I look over at Will and see that he’s laughing, too. I don’t think I’ve seen him laugh once while he’s been here, maybe not even smile. Laughing looks good on him and it also makes him look so much younger. I look back at the building we’re being kept in and realize why it was called The Windmill. It appears they’ve taken a regular looking, bricked, rectangle building—the one where our rooms are—and added an eccentric, circular, glass contraption to the side of the building where Will and I have just come out from. It’s glass up all the levels and it gets narrower until the very top where blades of thick metal move in the heavy breeze. It’s kind of amazing and yet completely stupid looking. I wonder if they were hoping to use the blades for power to try and help with Charlie constantly setting the power off. Would power from a windmill work when that happened?
“We did it, Zoe! We really did it!” Will brings me back to the excitement of now and I watch as he holds his arms upwards and looks up at the sky, letting the rain hit his face.
I’m about to say that he has been the one who had done everything when I feel a sharp pain at the back of my head. My legs drop in shock and my vision wavers as dizziness overtakes me.
The last thing I see is Will’s furious face approaching me and then the world goes black.
Taken By Surprise Page 55