Michelle Rowen - Countdown

And that was exactly what I was doing by even talking to him.

Damn. Rogan was right.

“Where do you want to go?” He closed his laptop and stood up from the table.

“You know what?” I swallowed and shook my head. “Never mind.”

He moved a step toward me. “Kira, you look really stressed. Tell me what’s wrong.”

I took a step back and felt Rogan behind me. “This was a mistake.”

He eyed Rogan with a mix of fear and hate. “Is it him? Is he forcing you to do something?”

“None of your business what I’m doing,” Rogan growled.

Oliver’s jaw tensed, and he turned his glare from Rogan to me again. “I can help you. You just have to come with me.”

“Help her? Yeah, you look so tough.” Rogan snorted. “You think you can save her from me?”

I really wanted him to shut up and not make this worse than it already was.

“If I have to.” Oliver gave me another confused look. “Is he hurting you?”

I shook my head. I had to back away. I couldn’t get Oliver involved in this. It had been a mistake to approach him. “No...Rogan and me...we’re together.”

“Together?”

I nodded. It was better to hurt him now if it would keep him safe in the long run. “I just wanted you to know so you...so you stop bothering me.”

He put a hand to his chest. “I’m bothering you?”

“Just leave me alone, Oliver.”

He blinked. “He’s a murderer, Kira. Don’t you know that?”

I gave him a blank look and turned my back to him. “Maybe I don’t care.”

Wow, what a huge lie that was.

“Kira—”

“Don’t follow us,” Rogan snarled at him.

“Or what?”

“Or you’ll regret it. Trust me on that.”

I didn’t look back as I left the food court with Rogan at my side. I never should have gone there in the first place. Oliver must hate me. I hadn’t wanted to hurt him. He had nothing to do with the mess I’d somehow gotten myself into.

Tears of frustration slid down my cheeks. “You didn’t have to be such a dick to him.”

“I did what I had to do.”

I brushed my tears away before Rogan could see I was crying.

Two men in security uniforms approached us.

“We’re going to have to ask you to leave the premises,” one said. He had a hand on the gun at his side. “Now.”

Rogan’s lips twitched. “My, how times have changed. How do you know I wasn’t about to do some shopping with my daddy’s gold card?”

One of the guards eyed his dirty clothes and the bloodstain on his shoulder and then glanced at me. “Is this boy bothering you, young lady?”

They didn’t seem to recognize Rogan like Oliver had.

Tell them! my mind screamed. Tell them everything. They can help you.

I caught a flash of silver out of the corner of my eye. The digicam.

“The level’s already begun, hasn’t it?” I asked Rogan quietly.

“Yeah, it has.”

I knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, if I told the security guards what was going on, I would be severely and painfully punished. And the guards themselves would probably not walk out of here alive.

“He’s with me, actually.” The words felt thick and unnatural leaving my mouth.

The other guard grabbed my arm. “Then you’ll both have to go.”

“Fine. We’ll go.” I wrenched away from him.

We cleared the food court and headed down a mostly abandoned hallway toward the exit. More tears burned my eyes, but I forced them back. Crying wouldn’t solve a damn thing.

“What are they doing to us?” I asked after a moment, mostly to myself. “How could anyone find this entertaining?”

“You’d be surprised. Some people are sick.”

Yeah, he should know. “Why did they even put us here in the mall? Just to mess with our minds?”

“Something like that.” Rogan’s arm tightened around my waist then, as if he was trying to comfort me. Weird. A moment later, as if he realized what he’d done, he pulled away from me and crossed his arms over his chest. “Do you remember what Jonathan told us this level is all about?”

I tried to think back through the thick storm cloud of memories. “The accountant.”

He nodded. “Take a look.”

I looked in the direction he pointed to see the man who had been featured on the holoscreen. Bernard Jones. I recognized his balding head and bland features. He emerged from an electronics shop with a bag of purchases, then turned left and started walking toward the same exit we were headed for.

I heard the whir as a camera moved behind us. It was moving behind things to stay hidden from any regular people.

Rogan’s attention was fixed on the man. “We’ve got to follow him.”

“He’s got a wife. And a kid.”

“Yeah, you’re right. And we can’t let him leave our sight.”

“There are ten minutes remaining in this level of Countdown.”

I turned to meet Rogan’s gaze.

“You know what we’re supposed to do,” he said, his jaw tensing. “And we have ten minutes to do it.”

To successfully complete level three you are required to assassinate him, Jonathan’s instructions echoed in my mind.

I shook my head. “No. It’s not going to happen.”

“Do you want us to die?”

I blinked at him as a sick churning steadily grew in my gut. “I don’t want us to die. But I also don’t want to kill a man I’ve never met before. Somebody who doesn’t deserve it or even see it coming. There’s no way.”

“Come on.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me along with him. “We can’t let him get away.”

“You can’t kill him.”

“It’s him or us.”

“I don’t care.”

“We’ll see if you’re still thinking that way in a few minutes.”

“I’m not capable of murder. I’m not like you.”

Rogan let go of my hand but kept walking. He didn’t look at me. “You don’t know what I’m capable of. You don’t know me.”

“I don’t want to know a sick bastard like you.” I pressed my lips together to keep from saying anything more. That had sounded crueler than I’d wanted it to.

That earned me a sharp look. “We’re running out of choices. Get that through your pretty head. There are no choices. We do what they tell us to or we die.”

“Maybe I don’t care. My family was murdered. I’d never do that to another person’s family. I’d rather die first.”

“I’m not in the mood to argue with you, Kira. We don’t have the time.”

I watched as Bernard Jones exited the mall through the swinging doors.

“So you’re going to follow him and then what?”

“And then I’m going to kill him.” He raised an eyebrow. “But then again, I am a sick murdering bastard, right?”

“So it’s that simple for you?”

His fists clenched at his sides. “You’re acting as if I have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“Not for me,” he said grimly. “Not anymore.”

And with that he stalked out of the entrance to follow his prey. I raced to keep up with him.

Kill or be killed.

There had to be another way. And I needed to figure it out. Fast.

Chapter 6

BERNARD JONES WALKED down the sidewalk outside of the mall completely oblivious to the fact that he was being stalked.

“Where’d the camera go?” I looked around the area, gray and bland, and noticed that we were alone again.

“It’s around, I’m sure.”

“You seem to know a lot about how this game works.”

He raised a dark eyebrow. “Do I?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Yeah. You do. Who are you, Rogan? Who are you really?”

“I’m nobody.” He flinched and looked away from me, but not before I saw a hint of pain slide through his gaze. “You’re imagining things.”