No Working Title (4)

I wedged the toe of my sneaker into a link of the fence and wrapped my fingers around the top bar. No barbed wire here, fortunately for us. Guy held up the other foot; once I was steady, he lifted it up and I swung over. Landing on the concrete jarred my ankles, but it was much more graceful than my attempts at climbing the neighbors’ fences a few mornings ago.
         Marilyn came over next, somehow managing to make vaulting a chain link fence stylish. Guy tossed my messenger bag and his backpack (which we had taken out of the Hummer – we had decided to ditch the big red monster) over after us. They landed with a thump next to me. The fence, which was probably a eight-footer, was no problem for him. I swear, he’d never faced a physical challenge in his life.
         We picked up our stuff and surveyed the area. “The area” turned out to be a narrow and dark alley between the two-level garage and the side of another concrete building. The only remarkable thing in the immediate vicinity was a black windowless door in the wall of the garage. I figured it had to be a service door, since there weren’t any markings.
         Guy swung his backpack over his shoulder and closed the distance between him and the door in a few steps. As Marilyn and I appeared over each shoulder, he grabbed the handle and pushed it. To my great surprise, it gently swung inward. And still we were silent as a sinister orange glow crept through the gap towards us.
         Opening it wider and wider still, Guy stuck his head through and around the corner. I saw his gaze rapidly scan what was ahead, and he said,
         “It’s the main level of the garage. Shall we?”
         Without waiting for an answer, he stepped inside, and we followed him through the door.
         It was gloomy in here, dust floating in the air in slow, lazy currents against the orange floodlights that covered the walls. Most noticeable was the stale, mingling odors of concrete and car fumes. There were only a few cars, and they were all parked in a clump on either side of a pair of brightly lit doors. The second most noticeable thing was the presence of the ambulance a few spots away.
         My eyes raked every inch of the garage. What was this place? It didn’t seem remotely important enough to be the home base of this operation. This assignment. Could it be just a pit-stop on the way somewhere else? Somewhere much farther away? I started to worry about abandoning the Hummer. Not just because we were dumping the evidence of our criminal act, but because the only candidates for stealing were the cars in front of us. And to nab one right under the noses of whoever was behind this wouldn’t be easy.
         We cautiously crossed the length of the cave-like space. I paused at the back of the ambulance, peering in through the back window. It was empty.
         I refused to blink as we reached the entrance to what appeared to be a well-lit room with two elevators. Every resounding step sounded separate from our gaits, and my eyes flickered back and forth between the dark corners. I wasn’t scared, exactly – just restless. Maybe a bit excited in spite of myself – because there was no changing our minds now. Just walking fifty feet had determined that.
         The elevator room also appeared to be empty – this I was glad about. As we crept inside, no alarms went off; we closed the doors as gently as we could.
         The atmosphere was oddly warm – lamps throwing pools of tepid light onto the walls, a scented candle blowing breezes of aromatic air. It was a startling shift from the garage, and it made me suspicious.
         We all hesitated in unison.
         I bit my lip. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
         “I never said it was a good idea,” said Guy, shrugging, eyes on the wall. “It’s just our only idea.”
         My face went red. Of course there wasn’t another option. We didn’t need another option. The alternative would be walking away, leaving Lila behind – trying to sidestep the police. That was not going to happen. Breathing as deep as I could manage, I stretched out my hand the same time Guy did, brushing his fingers. I let him hit the “Up” arrow with his palm. It glowed red, seemingly telling us to wait – to think this over some more. But I wouldn’t have it. To hell with caution; we were getting Lila out of here.
         With a rumble from the elevator’s descent, the paneled doors pinged and glided open. We were inside a second later, and I surveyed the array of buttons carefully. There was one long row of them laid into the stainless steel. The highest was labeled fourteen. Guy and I stood there puzzling after them for a solid minute after the doors had slid shut. Finally, I pressed them all in turn.
         As the ascent began, I was distinctly aware of Marilyn’s wandering expression and drawn-out sighs. I clenched my fists around the strap of my bag, which I had been clutching tightly anyway. Nobody said anything, so the soft sound of the smooth jazz playing over the speakers was well-defined and especially annoying. It was a fairly awkward ride up to the second floor, but then my focus was on the hallway ahead as the doors drifted open.
         Immediate surveillance yielded that it was empty. Secondary observations told me that the walls were the same pastel yellow as the garage-lobby downstairs, with the same cheery lighting. It was not the setting I had pictured at all – nothing like the dank cement walls and dark corridors that made up the top-secret headquarters in my imagination. It was even too friendly to be a regular old office building. I heard the click of a button as Guy hit the “close” switch. The doors shut again.
         We had gone up six floors – all of which were largely identical to the first – when I spotted the camera in the corner.
         It was tiny, maybe the size of a dime, and it was pointed right at us, the glare from its lens just barely discernable in the dimness. I was sure it was a camera – I shifted my weight back and forth. Side to side. The glare was still there. Every bit of me froze, including my heartbeat. We were entering some secret lab or command center or whatever the hell this place was, and it belonged to the people that were following me. Law enforcement. We were trespassing – practically breaking in – and they had us on camera.
         I tried to take a few full breaths. Slow. What fundamental detail was I missing? 'All elevators have cameras.' Right. There was nothing that indicated that this was a special situation. It took a second to recover, but I did it.
         I was getting impatient, feverish. The meter above the doors blinked to “13,” and the doors slid aside.
         This hallway wasn’t anything like the others.
         I clamped my eyes shut for a moment against the blinding white that turned the blackness behind my eyelids red. When I could open them again, I noticed several things at once. One: the walls were white; the floors were white; the lighting was white. Two: it was also clear of other people. Three: my feet were carrying me over the threshold towards a large door at the end of the passage.
         I wasn’t sure how I got there, but I was pressing my forehead against the vertical window on the face of the door, looking through the links of the faux chicken wire that ran inside the glass. The medical ward on the other side was almost obscured by the white plaster wall behind an unoccupied receptionist’s desk. But I could see a row of beds with curtains drawn neatly around them quite clearly.
         My palms were on the middle of the door, which appeared to swing back and forth, and I shoved as hard as I could. I was only briefly aware of how heavy it was until Guy’s arm reached past my ear and held it open, at which point I sprang through the opening.
         Running down the aisle, I looked left and right at the perfectly made beds. The white sheets stretched tight over the cots. My shoes squeaked on the linoleum.
         Lila wasn’t in this room. But I wasn’t stopping here.
         I didn’t hesitate a step as I hurried to the end of the rows, my breath and my heartbeat and the echoes of my strides all roaring in my ears. There was another windowless door against the far wall. I ignored the keypad above the handle and wrenched it open.
         I almost shouted, but I caught myself just in time. There was a single bed in the room, right across from where I was standing, and Lila was in it. I felt my chest seize up.
         Tons of wires and tubes snaked around her head, attached to blinking machines that were clustered around her like a circle of sympathetic but indifferent visitors. She was Medusa. I said her name once, but it was obvious that she was out cold.
         In the two or three steps I took closer to Lila, my heart pounded at an exponential rate that increased twice and three times respectively. Half of her forehead was missing.
         In the space from her eyebrow to her hairline on the left side was a metal plate, gleaming with a metallic luster. Its surface was punctuated by a handful of haphazard red and green LEDs, and they were flickering at various speeds.
         My eyes skipped from Lila to the table of instruments on the other side of her to the monitors above her head. They tried to take in everything at once – the intricate layout of tiny parts on the stainless steel plate, the message on the central screen that read “Electron Count: Normal”, and the wires and the soldering iron on the tray, a tiny wisp of smoke curling from its tip.
         I found myself backing away from the edge of the bed, sucking in breaths like I had constricted my lungs for a solid two minutes. My foot landed on Guy’s toes, and I fell back onto his shoulder. I felt him steady me from behind. From there, I was paralyzed.
         “They did something to her,” I stammered, reciting the only thought passing through my mind. Guy’s hands tightened on my shoulders. My legs wobbled beneath me. For an agonizing second, the only sound was the beeping of the machines.
         Guy’s weight shifted forward, and he released his hold on me.
         “Let’s get her out of here,” he said, approaching the bed, sliding the backpack square on both shoulders.
         The next thing I knew, bag dropped where I stood, I was unplugging things left and right. Cords, switches, anything I could get my hands on. Anything that wasn’t keeping her stable – obviously auxiliary equipment. Guy’s hands were a blur.
         “Bed has wheels,” he said simply. “Elevator.”
         I glanced up. The monitors said her heart rate was normal. She was breathing properly. I snatched some more wires from various plugs.
         That was when the bell started. It started pinging from the instrument following the “electron count” that I had just disconnected. I jumped away like the wires had fried my hands. Meters fluctuated on the screen. Guy and I swore simultaneously. The result was “shuck.” Our eyes automatically jumped from Lila to the monitors and back again.
         With a crash, the door behind us burst open, and raucous voices blended with the alarms. We all spun around. A procession of figures had spilled through the door – at the front was a guy in a white lab coat, who looked at first glance to be about 18, arms in the air, yelling something that I couldn’t understand. Behind him were several guys in black, a couple of guards in taupe uniforms with security badges – and within a split second I had caught a glimpse of Pale Cop in the background.
         My feet rooted to the ground, the two guards bustled forward, shouting for us to put our hands on our heads. It only took a moment for me to comply, but in my moment of hesitation, one of them had pulled a nightstick from his belt and raised it over his head. I couldn’t even flinch before the guy in the lab coat intervened on his way toward Lila.
         “Whoa, whoa, easy! Cuffs, not clubs!” He pointed at my guard. The nightstick reluctantly returned to the guard’s belt. In a flash, Lab Coat pushed past me. The guards produced large black zip-strips – one advanced toward me and locked my wrists together. I saw Lab Coat leaning over Lila, Marilyn being approached by the second guard, and Guy struggling against Pale Cop, who had stepped forward with a real pair of handcuffs. There was no contest – Guy’s skinny ass was overpowered by his distinctly butch captor. His arms were behind his back, trussed together securely. He grimaced against their hold and looked at me.
         His gaze said, “Fire. Big fire. Right now.”
         My gaze said, “No way. I can’t engulf the whole room.”
         I couldn’t tell if he understood, but I could tell that suddenly there was a black linen bag over my head.
         My first instinct was to struggle, to thrash my arms, anything, but a hand grabbed my shoulder roughly and jerked me one way, then another. I felt a door slam behind me, and then I was stumbling forward. The hand’s presence became clearer and more rigid with every step.
         First I smelled antiseptic, hospital-smell, then the fragrance of the hallway. The ping of the elevator doors was loud and distinct, as was the dreamy trumpet solo that emanating from somewhere within. The sound soon enveloped me as my feet lurched as short distance farther. With a small clank, the doors closed. Just that small sound of finality set panic racing through me, and I tried to twist away again as the elevator began to rumble.
         A deep voice spoke into my ear. “Hey, now, sweetheart, take it easy,” it said. Its baritone made my teeth vibrate. “We’ll let you have a seat in just a bit.”
         I could tell that the hand and the voice were one and the same; the ferocity of the hand made the voice all the more threatening.
         “Jena?” Guy’s voice was a few feet away.
         “I’m here,” I managed, just before I heard a heavy thump that shook the walls and then a groan.
         “No talking, children,” the voice scolded, sounding rather humored. A second hand joined the first on my shoulders, so wickedly tight that I wondered if he was trying to break my collarbones in half.
         I couldn’t determine if we had descended or headed upwards from the thirteenth floor, but the doors opened once more, and the hands shoved me forward.
         After a few seconds, I had already lost count of the thresholds we’d crossed, but before long we came to a stop.
         The scrape of metal on metal beneath me was the only warning I got before the hands pushed me down into a chair and snatched the bag off my head.
         Dim light from two small lamps on the wall greeted me – I only had to blink once to clear my vision. Most of the room was cast into shadow. The click-clack of shoes started from behind, raising goosebumps on my arms, circling around to my front. I didn’t dare turn my head.
         “Well, Miss Rawles,” Baritone drawled, his silhouette entering the corner of my eye. And then his face was inches from mine, and I didn’t for a second mistake Pale Cop. “I think it’s time we had a little talk.”