Elisa squirmed across the carpet toward him almost immediately, her bound hands in front of her, holding a dangerously large chunk of window glass. She had wrapped her hands in her sweater to protect them. “Roll over. I’ll do your handcuffs.”
He didn’t have time to warn her. Gil reared up out of nowhere into his field of vision, his face streaked with blood, his mouth wide in a scream of primal rage.
He lifted his handgun to shoot at Elisa.
Nate kicked out wildly, sweeping Gil’s legs. The guy screamed as he fell, over Nate, over Elisa. The gun went off, hitting Nate in the chest.
Fuck. Another hammer blow to the body armor over his ribs. Close range, too.
A fresh volley of bullets pounded the walls. Nate struggled to roll over to see behind him. He only caught the tail end of it. Elisa slashing her piece of glass across Gil’s face, laying him open over the bridge of his nose and over his eye.
Blood sprayed. The guy pin-wheeled back, shrieking. Nate kicked up at Gil’s gun hand, hard enough to shatter all the bones in the man’s wrist.
The gun flew, landing several feet away.
They crawled away, Elisa on her hands and knees, him crab-stepping, to get some distance from the horror of Gil, writhing and screaming, blood oozing through his fingers pressed over his face.
“This way!” she hissed. “Come on! I know where to go!” She pulled him around a bank of bookcases to a stairwell. A metal spiral staircase led down into darkness.
Elisa crawled down it, her butt on the stairs, still holding the now bloodied glass shard between her bound hands, beckoning for him to follow her.
Fresh gunfire jolted him into doing so.
At the bottom of the steps, they had only the light that came from the room above. He turned, holding up his hands, and Elisa sawed at it desperately with the chunk of glass, cursing. “My hands are bloody,” she said. “They keep slipping.”
“Are you bleeding? Let me see your hands.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she muttered. “Later.”
His arms snapped loose, and he turned around and took the glass shard from her, sawing through her plastic cuffs until they snapped loose.
Elisa grabbed his hand and pulled him after her. “Follow me.”
He followed her into what might have been a big, utilitarian utility room. From there, they entered a storage room, with only high, narrow windows at ground level that let in just a little light and showed rows of storage shelves, packed with boxes.
And the very back shelf there was a panel with light switches. Elisa slid the entire panel up, revealing a hidden mechanism behind it. She pressed the button on the smooth metal face beneath. He heard the faint click of a mechanism opening, and she grabbed the entire shelf and tugged it forward.
It opened on a hinge, but only far enough for one person to slide through a very narrow aperture sideways. Beyond it was a narrow stairway leading down.
“What is this?” he asked, his voice hushed. “Another panic room?”
“The ultimate panic room,” she said, sliding inside. “It’s a bunker. Not for burglars, though. More for global thermonuclear war. Come on, we need to get this door closed from the inside, and it’s heavy.”
Nate forced himself through the door. It was touch and go for a while. Bulked up with the Kevlar, he barely made it through. He dragged the heavy door closed, stifling the howl of pain in his ribs.
The door shut with an ominous ‘click,’ and he stared into the darkness, considering a question he should have asked before. “There’s another exit, right?”
“Yes, Nate.” Her voice came from too far ahead of him, so he hurried to catch up. “There should be light in this passageway at all times, supplied by the solar collectors. But it’s been a long time since we’ve done maintenance. This was dad’s obsession, not ours, so after he died, we let it go. But let’s see if…yeah. Here we go.”
A muted ‘click’ and pale, eerie light flooded the tunnel, which was lined with cinder blocks and reinforced with cement columns. The air was stale and damp, and smelled of earth and mold. Cobwebs were draped over everything.
Elisa gave him a reassuring smile over her shoulder and continued on ahead.
He followed, as the tunnel switched and curved, and they came up to a large armored door, with a panel beside it that had a number key. A light on it glowed red. He figured that any kind of light being still on was a good sign.
Elisa entered a long string of characters into the keypad, and hit ‘enter.’
They both held their breath. The light went green. The door popped free with a sigh. Elisa grabbed the handle. Nate reached out, his hands covering hers, and they dragged the heavy door open together.
Nate looked around in amazement as the room lit up for them. It was big, high tech. The air was clearly filtered, climate controlled. No mold or humidity in here, the temperature was regulated. Machinery hummed softly. Screen displays and LED lights were everywhere.
There was a bank of security monitors, each screen showing a different vantage point of the property. Others showed the public rooms in the house, including the garage, each side of the deck and the grounds right behind the house. It was like the bridge of a spaceship.
In the back of the room was a series of cots, piled with plastic-wrapped pillows and blankets. There was a utilitarian kitchen, a table.
Elisa went to the keyboard in front of the security monitors and clicked on a few of the boxes. The audio switched on, and they heard the rattle of gunfire in the speakers. Men screaming. Explosions. Glass breaking.
She looked back at him. “There are more supplies in here,” she said. “Food, water, gas, propane, food, medical equipment and supplies, solar cells, replacement parts. Everything my dad could think of.”
“For how long would the supplies last?”
“Years,” she said. “This was my dad’s ultimate panic room. His favorite one. There’s another tunnel that comes out in a cave about a quarter of a mile from the house. But there’s an armored door to that exit, as well. Nobody gets in here.”
“Does Clemens know about this place?”
Elisa shook her head. “I never told him about it,” she admitted. “When Dad was still alive, I felt a little self-conscious about it. I didn’t want Gil to judge him, or to think that Dad was crazy and paranoid. Even though he kind of was. Then Dad died, and Gil started to, well…change. And I just stopped telling him anything .”
“Good survival instincts.” Nate looked around, impressed. “Wow. This place is amazing. Your dad would have gotten along with the people up at GodsAcre.”
“I’ve thought that myself,” she said. “I’m just grateful that Gil picked this house for whatever awful plan he had for me. That was lucky. But who the hell was that, anyway, shooting at the house? Were those the Trasks?”
“Nope,” he said. “That was Kimball.”
Elisa’s eyes went wide. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Nate. What did you do?”
“What I had to,” he replied. “Gil said come now, or you die. I took him at his word. The Trasks were in no condition to mount any kind of offensive on the fly, not with Fi and Anton down and Eric gone.”
“And Josh?” Her eyes were wide and fearful.