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Chapter Eighteen
The room where the men were being held was bigger than he’d pictured. They were lined up on the floor against a wall between arched doorways that led to three bunk rooms. In each room were six bunk beds, a small closet for toilets, and a sink. On its own, there was a shower room across from where he stood with a sign reading, Contain showers to three minutes.
As the men were whispering questions and orders around the rags in their mouths, Sel quickly ran into each of the rooms, checking for ways out of the bunker that wouldn’t have to be out the front door.
He didn’t see one in any of the rooms, but there was a door off to the back of the main room in a short corridor.
There was a big television, couches, and tables in that big main room, shelves of books, DVDs, video and audio cassettes, and even a rack of record albums.
Once he went to that back door, seeing there was a window in it of thick glass, he saw a back entrance. “Shit.”
Rushing back to the men, he took Marius’s gag out first, and while getting the others taken out, Marius whispered, “What the living fuck are you doing here? Dante is going to kill us all!”
“Really? That’s your big concern right now?”
After Dex’s gag was out, he told his cousin, “Selestino’s right, Mar. He might be our only hope. I’m sure no one knows about this bunker, or we’d have heard about it.”
“No one knows,” Sel confirmed as the other two gags were taken out. “It’s under a big mound of earth. The door is even disguised as part of the ground. It’s sick, it’s so good.”
“Fuck. Well, you’re stuck in here too, Sel,” Marius told him. “That mother fucker told us as soon as we woke up that there’s no way of getting out if he gets caught out there. He warned us that even if we got free, we’d be stuck in here. We might not die, but we’d never get out. There are a couple different codes or some shit. Not saying I believe him, but in this case, I don’t doubt it a bit.”
Sel started working on their bindings after he finished the gags, but three of them, they were tied with metal wires attached to Master locks.
“Marius and Bennie are the only ones I can untie. And Indio,” he said, untying his bindings before he took Indio’s head onto his lap, holding it off the floor. His hair and clothes were still wet. Sel figured he would be cold and uncomfortable once he woke.
“He’s got the fucking keys for these locks on him,” Avery said. “I saw him when he tied up Jim.”
Sel nodded to him. “We haven’t met. I’m Selestino.”
“Good ta meet ya, Selestino,” Avery said, then nodded to his African American friend. “This here’s Jim Delmont.”
“Jim, hi.”
“Hey.”
Jim, Avery, and Dex were the three with the locks on their wrists and ankles. Bennie got up after untying his feet and started into the hall. “I’m going to check to make sure he wasn’t lying.”
Marius did the same, heading to the back. “If he comes back while we’re all untied, he’s going to know what’s happening. He’ll find Sel and most likely kill him.”
Sel didn’t care. Indio was still unconscious and he worried terribly that he got hurt somehow. “How long before you guys woke up?”
Avery shrugged. “Who the hell knows?”
Jim said, “We all woke up ‘round the same time. I figure it might have to do with weight, all that. I’m a big guy, Avery’s skinny, so he likely got me after Avery.”
“What drugs is he using?”
“He’s got a syringe he was threatening us with,” Dex told him. “Likely ketamine, some form of tranq that can be placed in a dart.”
Sel lay Indio’s head back on the floor and got up to look around a little more. “Another key, a set of bolt cutters, something.”
“No,” Dex said as Marius came back into the room. “You all that are free can get out. Wait for him to open the door and go. It won’t stay open long enough to get us out, too.”
Bennie came in then and announced, “It’s true. You need a code to get out. That’s so fucked up, man. If Harrison had done that and had told no one the code, he could have kept people captive in here too.”
“He was scared, which is why he built this,” Marius said. “When Brooks was terrorizing the ranch last year, we found out that Harrison knew about his illegitimate son but wanted nothing to do with him. I think Brooks met him a few times, and in those few times, he scared Harrison. This place, as much as it’s built for the end of the world, or whatever, I think Harrison built it to hide from his own kid. With the bunks and shit, maybe his legitimate kids too, grandkids, whoever Brooks could be a threat to.”
“Makes sense. The mother fucker is scary. Crazy is written all over his ugly face,” Jim agreed. “I think Dex is right, man. When he comes back, get the fuck out.”
