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Drake blinked, glanced at the folder in my hands then back at my face. "What?"
I shoved the folder toward him. "It says it right here. That has to be Sam’s handwriting. It says the power is out for thirty minutes every night from two to two-thirty. It also says he’s got gas vents in all our rooms too." I put the folder down. "There’s so much here. Calendars and names of the people we’re going to torture. The tools he wants us to use, the camera locations and angles, it’s all here. All of it."
Drake looked shell shocked, staring at the folder. Then shook his head as if to clear it. "Doesn’t matter, we need to get out of here."
He took my arm in his, but I yanked it free. "No. Not yet. Look. If the power is out, the electric locks on the doors probably go out too. It’s why he gasses us each night. Right? Thirty minutes should be time to get to the fence."
Drake looked more anxious by the second. "Yeah, the electrified fence. You saw it. That thing will shock the shit out of us, maybe even kill us, if we tried to climb it."
"No," I insisted. "It says the power goes out. If it goes out here, it probably goes out everywhere, including the fence. Don’t you see? This is our chance. If we can somehow bypass the gas that knocks us out, then we can run for it. Escape." I dug my hand into the filing cabinet again. "Holy shit, what else might be in here?"
"Dahlia, dammit, we need to get out of here. We’re gonna get killed. If we’re dead, then none of what you found matters."
Still ignoring him, I opened another file and realized things were even more bizarre than I thought. Dahlia Belrose. The name on the file I’d opened. My file. They were photocopies of my therapy files. I gaped at it, and even saw notes from my doctor. It had everything. The violation sliced into the core of my mind, laying it bare. Naked and open, searing pain, like a raw wound exposed to sand. Sam knew my deepest secrets. I flipped through them; Drake’s urgent pleas to go vanished to the back of my mind. At the end of the files tears sprang to my eyes when I discovered what else he had. My journal. Copies of all the pages from my diary. The little book I kept under my pillow. The fucker must have taken it when he took me.
Tearing my eyes away, I looked back in the filing cabinet. Grabbing a file at random, I opened it. Bri. The same thing. Medical files, therapy files, printouts of what looked like an online blog or online journal she used. Holy shit. He knew more about us than any of us realized.
"Fucking hell, Dahlia. Are we going or not?" Drake hissed in my ear. I could hear the panic starting to take over.
He was right. We’d been here too long as it was. I had the beginnings of a plan. We needed to go. Now. I could figure the rest out in my head.
"Okay. Let’s get the hell out of here."
Drake sighed with relief and took my hand, leading me back to the ladder. Once we were in the living room, I glanced at the wall opposite the ladder and froze.
"Drake, what is that?" I said, pointing at the spot where the wall met the ceiling. A small six inch length of rope, ending in a plastic ball, hung out from the angle.
"Uh, I have no idea," Drake said. "Maybe an antenna or something?"
It looked like no antenna I’d ever seen. What it actually looked like was a pull handle. My foster parents, the ones I’d ended up with after the Cartwrights, had an attic. The hanging handle that pulled the folding stairs down had looked similar to that. Upon closer inspection, there were two seams running down the wall, concealed by the pattern of the wallpaper, about three feet apart. A hidden door?
"Drake," I whispered, immediately dropping my voice. "It’s a door. I’m too short. Open that. I think it’s like a Murphy bed. It looks like it pulls down."
Drake, who’d already had one foot on the ladder, turned to inspect what I was saying. He looked uncertain until he saw the seams in the wall. Begrudgingly, he reached up and took hold of the ball at the end of the handle.
"Ready?" he mouthed.
I nodded, and lifted my machete, ready for whatever was inside. Drake pulled the rope. At first all that happened was another six inches of it pulled free of the inside of the wall. Once all the slack was out, the seams grew larger, opening into the unknown. The first thing I noticed as the wall descended was the thick foam attached then the opposite side. Small pyramids of it. Glued to the door. Soundproofing.
The next thing almost caused me to drop my machete. A man lay on a couch at the back of the room. The entire hidden area was covered in the soundproofing. Drake and I could have been screaming at eachother and this guy may not have heard it. The stranger turned over and released a hiccuping snore. Laying my eyes on his face forced an involuntary gasp from my mouth. It was the guy in the suit. The one who’d come to talk to us. Sam himself.
I rushed forward. Drake yelled at me, shocked by my sudden movement. Sam’s eyes sprang open, wakefulness exploding as sleep vanished. I leaped over the soundproofing on the door, teeth bared in determination.
Sam raised an arm, grabbing the back of the sofa he’d been asleep on. I could see from his eyes that he wasn’t fully awake yet. Confused and disoriented, he wasn’t ready for me.
The machete made a meaty thwack as I buried it in the top of his head. Blood spurted from his scalp and ruined skull. His hands shot out, fingers spasming.
"Gah…gah…gah…" It was all he could say, guttural and pointless vocalizations. He didn’t even know he was already dead.
I wrenched the blade from his head, and the force pulled him free of the couch. He tumbled to the ground still barking strange sounds, blood pulsed from his skull, and a grayish goo was pushing through the sliver of bone I’d busted open with the weapon. Before I could think, I brought the blade down on the back of his neck, cleaving the spine. His noises stopped abruptly but his feet made a weird shuffling spasm as the last electric signals flared through his nervous system. Bringing the blade down a second time, the entire head rolled free of the body. Blood surged out of him, pooling and puddling on the carpeted floor of the hidden room.
The machete dropped from my fingers as I stood above the body, gasping for air. Finally, I raised my face to meet Drake. He was gaping at the decapitated body on the floor at my feet.
"Holy fucking shit," he said. "You killed him."
A smile began to form on my lips. I couldn’t stop it. In ten short seconds I’d ended it all. Finished him. We were free. I searched the room for a phone or computer but found nothing. Not even in the dead man’s pockets.
"We have to tell the others," I said, running for the ladder.
