John Gilstrap - Hostage Zero

“What the hell is that?” Jonathan barked.

She ignored him, because she hadn’t a clue what to tell him.

“The fuck?” Jimmy Henry said, though his voice was lost in the squeal of the alarm.

He’d articulated Jonathan’s thoughts exactly.

The radio on Shenton’s belt crackled to life. “Emergency. Emergency in A-Wing.”

Jonathan planted his hand in the center of Jimmy’s chest. “We’re still on plan,” he said, feigning calm. “We’re just on a tighter schedule. Stay close to me.” He reached for the door and pulled.

It was locked.

“Mother Hen?” Jonathan asked over the radio. Venice recognized the concealed rage. “The door is locked.”

None of this had been built into their contingencies. “The panic button must have locked everything down,” Venice said.

“Then how about you un lock something?”

Venice refused to reward his snarky attitude with an answer. She wasn’t going to reward him with an unlocked door anytime soon, either. The panic button had done something to wipe out all of her prepared codes. All of the door annunciators were showing red, meaning they were locked, but when she glanced up at her screen, she saw the front desk guy typing furiously, and then the annunciator for the front Receiving Area blink to green. The guard was selectively undoing the lockdown protocol to allow guards to respond.

Now it was a race to see who was the better keyboard operator.

Granville tried to push his mind away from figuring out who had overridden the cell-opening protocols in the computer. Neither the who nor the why mattered right now, and they sure as hell didn’t affect the immediate future. Right now, all that mattered was that someone was trying to escape on his watch.

And that, sports fans, was not going to happen.

Back when they’d designed the system, they’d put in a fail-safe mechanism that would lock down all the cells simultaneously in the event of a prisoner disturbance. That done, it would be a simple thing, according to the manual, to mouse-click individual doors to reopen them as necessary. Only that wasn’t working tonight. Whoever had been fucking with the computer system must have screwed up the presets, leaving him with no choice but to enter key codes individually.

There was a manual for this somewhere on the shelf behind his desk, but he only had time to wing it from memory. In the boredom of desk duty, he’d actually read all that shit-probably the only deputy in the department who could say that and not blush. He’d never thought he’d need it, but as a lifelong geek, he’d sort of enjoyed it. Now all he had to do was remember it.

Each door required a lengthy series of keystrokes, beginning with the individual door identifier, followed by command codes. His fingers flew as he tried to enter the number for the air lock between the central security area and A-Wing, the men’s cell block, but when he hit ENTER and saw the RECEIVING AREA icon go green, he realized that he’d fat-fingered the door identifier and opened the wrong one. He spat a curse under his breath.

He settled himself. At least it was one door open. He started on the next.

And then the RECEIVING icon went red again.

Jesus, he was fighting an active enemy live! Someone was undoing every command.

Venice typed in the code to lock all the doors simultaneously. It would undo the progress that the guard was making and also buy time for her to find her cheat sheet with the doorway codes on it.

From the way the guard cursed when the lock turned green, she knew he’d made a mistake, and that now he’d be working on a more useful door. If he got his guards loose before she got her boss loose, this was going to get very ugly.

She found the crib notes on the far right-hand side of her desk and snatched them up. But she’d fallen too far behind in the race. The guard had such a head start that she’d never win without cheating. She once again entered the code to lock all the doors, but she waited to push the ENTER key until she saw the icon for the main administrative office shift to green.

The instant it did, she made it turn red again.

The guard slammed his fist. “Who the hell are you?”

Jeremy Schuler squinted against the light, bright enough to backlight the tiny blood vessels through his closed eyelids. He tried to roll away, but the light followed. “Quit it,” he tried to say, but his vocal cords were still sleeping, so it came out as a meaningless groan.

A thick hand clenched itself over his mouth. “Make a sound and I’ll cut out your eyes,” a hoarse voice growled from very close to his face. The man smelled of garlic and cigarette smoke. “Do you understand me?”

The pressure from the hand cut off all air, making it impossible for him to answer. He must have nodded, because the pressure eased.

“What’s your name?” the man hissed.

“Jeremy,” he wheezed. He coughed to clear the block in his throat and tried it again. “Jeremy Schuler.” There was a sound of tearing fabric to his right, and a quick glimpse revealed three men clustered by his roommate Anthony’s bed. The other boy was bucking and trying to yell, but it sounded like his mouth was full. After the sound of a hard smack, the kicking and the noise stopped.

“Look at me,” the voice said.

Jeremy squinted back into the light.

“Don’t you look at them. Keep your eyes front. How old are you?”

Jeremy felt himself trembling, his whole body vibrating with an involuntary tremor that wouldn’t stop. “Th-thirteen,” he stammered.

“Well, Jeremy Schuler, if you want to see thirteen and a half, you do everything we say, understand?”

Jeremy nodded.

“Say it.”

“I’ll do everything you say.”

“You’re a smart boy.”

The ripping sound from Anthony’s side of the room stopped, and the men left that bed to surround Jeremy’s. “We’re set,” one of them said.

The flashlight shifted from Jeremy’s eyes to Anthony’s bed. It looked like they’d mummified him with strips of duct tape. The light returned, once again gouging Jeremy’s retinas. “Stand up,” his attacker said, stripping off the sheet and blanket. “Get out of bed.”

It was only a couple layers of fabric, but somehow that cover felt like protection. Now he was so terribly exposed. He drew himself up into a ball.

The hesitation pissed off the attacker, who grabbed Jeremy’s arm and pulled him off the bed and dumped him in a heap on the floor. “I said get up.”

Jeremy found his feet and rose to his full height, adjusting his pajamas as he stood. At Resurrection House, everyone wore the same light blue pajamas with dark blue piping-like something out of a Leave It to Beaver rerun.

“Don’t cross me, kid,” the attacker said. “Killing you wouldn’t bother me a bit.”

Jeremy nodded. And trembled harder. His head still felt fuzzy from sleep, giving him hope that maybe this was just a very real, very bad nightmare that would set a new standard for nightmares everywhere.

“Do you know Evan Guinn?” Garlic Breath asked.

Jeremy nodded again. “Yes.” Then as a self-preserving afterthought: “Sir.”

“Do you know where his room is?”

“What did he do?” A lightbulb popped behind his eyes when a slap he never saw connected with his cheek. He smelled blood inside his head. A moment later, it was trickling down his lip onto his chin. “Yes,” he said. “I know where his room is.”

His upper arm disappeared into Garlic Breath’s fist as he was nearly lifted off the floor. “Take us there,” the man said. He stuck out a finger so close that the boy couldn’t focus on it. “And don’t make a sound.”

Jeremy sniffed and nodded emphatically. The sniff brought a mouthful of blood.