Day 10: Nothing witty to say. Except for this, if you consider self-reference hilarious

There was nothing for him in this direction. He would have to head back and look for something better, another way out or something to get the door open. He had just begun his trek back through the halls when he heard footsteps around the corner and snapped to the wall, gun out and safety off in an instant. He waited, listening, counting the steps and gauging their volume as they approached, wild and unmeasured, either in a hurry or…

Or not a member of the security detail. That glimmer of hope swelled within him, his guard breaking and allowing it through. He turned the corner as the steps grew loudest and threw an arm out, hand coiling around a thin neck and driving it around into the wall, trapping the attached woman against it.

“Megan?”

She looked like she was about to spit venom, her face red from exertion, anger or both.

“Err… Sorry.”

He flipped the safety back on and returned the gun to his waist, then let her go and back off. His head spun and his ear rung as her palm collided with his cheek.

“The fuck, Jack!”

“I said I was sorry! What more do you want from me?”

Her breathing, ragged and hurried, began to calm. She leaned backward, into he wall, and brushed her hair out of her eyes. It stuck to her forehead in defiance of her wishes. Her eyes were still seething, though, fire beneath he surface, deep within her pupils. Vengeful flames of “what the fuck were you thinking” and “if you ever do that again I will castrate you with a dull, rusty spoon.”

Jack did not want to be castrated. He just wanted to be home.

“Let’s go home, Megan. Let’s get out of here.”

“How?”

That was the operative question, the one he’d been afraid to ask because, as it stood, he didn’t have an answer. He’d hoped that whomever he found would have such an insight, but that was a moot point. He should have checked the guard more thoroughly. He had been rushed. He hadn’t had a chance.

“Dammit. I bet the guard had a key card or something, too. Identification, whatever. Something to get us out of here.”

Something besides anger flashed through Megan’s eyes. She slid a hand into her pocket and, when it appeared again, it held a thin, translucent card, apparently made of plastic. It had writing on it, but in unintelligible arrangements of what was presumably some sort of code, likely to be interpreted by a very specific computer. Perhaps that computer was at the entrance. He couldn’t help himself lunging forward again, hugging Megan tight as he mumbled “thank you” over and again into her ear. She laughed, a light, floaty sound, and pushed him off of her.

“Settle down a little, at least until we know if it works.”

They rushed back to the front of the square, the doorway out of the cellblock, and held the card up in front of a red light at its side, apparently a laser reader of some kind. Its lens spun and shifted, altering the shape and size of the opening and the light issued thereof, centering in on a small portion of the gibberish on the card. It had, apparently, found the segment it sought, because the light faded and the doors slid open, groaning in protest as they moved apart and allowed Jack and Megan to slip through. Here, though they had never, to their knowledge, seen the hallway before in their lives, they felt a sense of déjà vu, the cold grasp of unwelcome memory. Here, they realized, the doors before them led to only one type of room: The interrogation chambers.

They recoiled, not so much in fear as in disgust. It confirmed, for Jack, that his experience had not been a unique one and, for that, he was relieved, ashamed that he was relieved, and sorry that anyone else had been subjected to that terror. It was the least pleasant image of a naked Megan his mind had ever held and he was quick to block it, hoping that neither of them, or Don or Zach, would ever be exposed to that again.

No, he didn’t want to hope. He wanted to make sure. He wanted to make damn sure.

“Megan.”

She turned to face him, eyes barely restraining tears. Looking into that face, seeing those eyes and the lips beneath, vibrating, quaking in an attempt to keep her quiet, he was no longer sure what he was going to say, what he was able to say, but his mouth opened regardless and he felt the words leaving him, spoken, but as new to his ears as to hers.

“We’ll make them pay. We’ll fight them with every last breath in our bodies because, with them around, able to do this to anyone they choose, neither us nor any of our loved ones are safe. No one is safe. We can change that.”

He breathed, regained his composure, felt her staring at him.

“But to do that, first we need answers. We need to know who we’re dealing with, on what scale.”

She nodded, silent, then put her hand out. He took it and they shook, drawing strength from each other.

No, not drawing.

Pooling. Pushing it together for them to share, compounding their individual ability, their individual strength.

They needed to make a decision. They needed to make it fast, before the inevitable swarms of guards rushed in or the gas started pumping or… Jack didn’t know what it would be, but he was sure that here was some measure in place to keep them from escaping. Best not to find out what.

Left, down the hallway, off toward who-knew-what. They turned at the corner, walls so white they were almost blue wreaking havoc on his sense of direction, sending splitting pain to the center of his skull, a shooting numbness that was dull, but so confined that it was pointed when contrasted to the rest of his thoughts. He knew that, eventually, they would have to pick a door, and could tell that Megan was aware of that as well. She was growing impatient and, frankly, so was he, but there was so much potential that the next turn might provide a sign, an indication, anything that would distinguish the next hallway from the one it followed.

And there was risk. Risk that any door they entered could be a gateway into a trap, a hellish portal with no way out. But he was beginning to realize – had been realizing since the moment the bomb had hit – that life was nothing without risk. You took chances and, if you got burned, you recovered; if you hit the storm, you weathered it. Life, after all… Was it anything but risk?

He stopped, Megan taking a few steps past him before she caught herself and turned to face him, then looked over at the door between them. It was indistinguishable from any of the others along the wall, and it wasn’t so much a gut feeling. He just felt that he needed to do something, to take some kind of action or he was going to go insane. There were so many unanswered questions. Why was the government interested in them? Who within the government had taken them from their homes? Who had set them free? For that matter, when had the message been carved into his desk and where were the other survivors, Don and Zach included?

Too much on his mind to waste time running down empty hallways when the answers could be just beyond a door, any of the slabs of hydraulic-controlled metal lining the wall. He held out his hand, motioning with his fingers and Megan gave him the keycard, the ID card, whatever it was, it had worked before, maybe it would get them through now. There was no light, but the wall beside the door had a slot with an unlit bulb above it, recessed into the wall. He fed the card to the slot and waited, anticipating the blare of rejection and the return of their purloined card.

The slot did spit out their card, but the light above it lit up, a yellowish-green, and the door split down its center, the two halves quickly sliding into the walls on either side of the opening. Inside was a lab. At least, Jack assumed it was a lab, mostly because it possessed the varied accoutrements he associated with the labs at the hospital, computers and test tubes full of liquids of various colors and opacities. He avoided looking at the red ones in particular, not because blood disturbed him anymore, but the thought that said blood might have come from him while he wasn’t aware of its extraction… That was an unsettling thought. Violating. He shivered and continued in, deeper into what was, it turned out, a very shallow room. Megan stood in he doorway, keeping watch of the hallway, ready to inform him if anyone came into view, and to hold the door open. It would probably open again, from the inside, but that wasn’t a chance he wanted to take after the events in the cellblock.

A computer had been left on, screen alight with row after row of data, and Jack thanked whatever deity was concerned with him that the user had never set a screensaver or, for that matter, a password on his terminal. Between that and the universal mouse/keyboard combination, he was soon on his way to deciphering just what he was seeing.

Names. Names and birthdates, addresses and spouses. Siblings and schools and jobs, all in a neat chart that still managed to stagger him with its sheer density. He was sure he was in there, and Megan, too, but that meant that Don and Zach would be in the database. He hoped they had gotten out, but, if they hadn’t, the last column seemed like a list of room numbers, though that did little to help since, as far as he could tell, the rooms were unmarked.