The Girl in the Box 01 - Alone (20 page)

The last five minutes were the worst. I would follow the plan Kurt laid out. Even though I didn’t trust him, I suspected he wouldn’t have any problem taking me to die, especially if he could get away with it.

With two minutes left, I stared back at the news. The timing was perfect: they were just beginning a montage of pictures of all the people who had died so far in this insanity. I watched their faces scroll by, some smiling and innocent – the children, mostly – some staid and serious, caught in candid shots. I would have wept, but my resolve was hardened. Soon enough, there wouldn’t be any more.

I walked to the door at six, knocked on the steel and waited for it to slide open. When it did, the same guy that had told me that he wasn’t my serving wench became my bitch instead, and I battered him against the opposite wall with a single punch. Not bad, considering he was at least a hundred pounds heavier than me.

Three more guards flooded the hallway. I pulled the gun from the first and heaved it at the farthest guy, and my enhanced dexterity scored a perfect hit; the butt of the shotgun clipped him in the jaw. I had seen people get knocked out before, but this time it was like slow motion; his eyes fluttered, he looked woozy for a second, then he dropped to his knees and flopped facedown.

I grabbed the closest guy to me as he went for his radio and yanked him forward, pulling him off balance with the ease of uprooting a small plant. I landed a hammerfist on the back of his head and he went down. I surged forward with a front kick, catching the last guy in the corridor in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. I followed up with a punch that broke his jaw as well as knocked him out, giving the Directorate guards yet another reason to hate me. There were so many.

After the last one hit the floor, I looked down the steel-plated corridor. It stretched about a hundred feet in either direction, and there was no sound or movement. Most of the Directorate staff were out for the night, so this building was likely much quieter than, say, the dormitory building where all the metas and on-campus staff lived. Nonetheless, I crept quietly up the stairs to the first floor, where, without even leaving the stairwell, I found an exit door.

I studied it in a rush, making sure it wasn’t an emergency exit that would set off a fire alarm. It didn’t appear to be, so I pushed through the crossbar and opened it, sprinting out into the snow. I was back in my turtleneck, coat and gloves…the only thing I was missing was a ridiculous hat to keep my head warm. And I was headed home.

I ran across the snow, heading toward the woods. I passed the dormitory building, giving it a wide berth, snow up to my knees but still moving fast, when the alarm klaxons began howling. They might have found my handiwork in the basement. All those guards beaten senseless.

I didn’t spare a thought for it, just ran faster. I was having to lift my legs high to clear the snow, but I was amazed at how fast I was moving. I went several hundred yards through two feet of snow in seconds. I reached the tree line and kept moving, trusting my reflexes to keep me from getting clotheslined by a low-hanging branch or plowing into a tree trunk.

Darkness appeared in front of me and I realized it was the wall. It stretched a good ten feet up and was made of solid block.

And I cleared it in a jump.

I landed on the other side with an inelegant roll, brushing off the snow as I got to my feet. I heard slow clapping coming from in front of me. Lit by the beams of headlights, Kurt Hannegan stood in front of his car. “Very nice. Now can we get out of here?”

I followed him, getting into the passenger side and shutting the door. He gunned the gas, wheels slipping on the wet pavement. “Where to?” he asked, hands gripping the wheel and his jaw clenched.

“Just drive me to my house,” I told him, brushing the snow off myself. He shot me an angry look as he watched it land on the upholstery. “I have to let Wolfe know where to find me.”

“Do it after I’m gone,” he said with a scowl.

“Fine,” I lied. “I’m going to sleep until we get there.”

“Don’t know why you’re bothering,” he shot back. “You’ll be getting plenty of that soon.”

I didn’t respond to his dig, instead leaning back in the seat, resting my head against the side of the car, close to the window. The steady thrum of the tires against the road gave off perfect white noise, and the motion of the vehicle rocked me to sleep.

Darkness encompassed me, enshrouded me, took me away from the road and the headlights and that asshole Hannegan, and deposited me right where I wanted to be. Blackness surrounded me, swirled me into its vortex, and then, in the distance, I saw a spot. Burrowing through the dark, it got clearer and clearer, coalescing into a shape – like a man, but with black eyes, horrific teeth and a face that gave me nothing but fear. He drew closer and closer, a smile lighting his terrible features. A smile that broadened when I spoke.

“Wolfe…it’s time to play.”

I woke up, intentionally, a few minutes later to find myself rolling through the streets of my neighborhood. We’d left behind the wide open farmland, the stretches of suburbs and freeway, and entered the densely packed blocks of houses that had only a few feet between them. I lifted my head to find Hannegan looking around in all directions, as if he were expecting Wolfe to ambush.

“I don’t think he’s here yet,” I said with a hint of amusement. Not sure where that came from. Gallows humor, I assume.

“I don’t care; I’m not hanging around.” He kept up his searching pattern. “You may be ready to die but I’m not.”

“I’m not really ready to die,” I said. “But neither are any of the people he’s killing to get to me.”

Hannegan grunted in acknowledgment, but did it so neutrally I wondered if he’d heard a word of what I said. He came to a stop at the end of a driveway and I looked up at the house. Unlike last time, I was sure it was mine. I opened the door and pondered making a sarcastic comment to him or lingering for a moment, but I realized I was more scared of what was coming than vindictive about what had happened in the past.

I wordlessly shut the door and I watched him swallow heavily, the sort of action that might make a gulping sound had I been in the car to hear it. He looked at me with hollow eyes and I could see his fear at the thought of facing Wolfe. He looked away and stomped the accelerator, slinging muddied slush on me as he sped away.

I sat there, freezing, in disbelief for a moment, sopping wet. “Screw it,” I said and pulled my gloves off, throwing them into the gutter. I pulled my jacket off, also soaked, and tossed it on the ground. I took a couple steps toward my front door and faltered.

He probably wasn’t in there yet. Probably. I found myself in no great hurry to find out. He was either here or on his way.

The chill wind combined with the lingering wetness of Kurt’s spinout caused a frigid feeling that was eating into my bones. Still, I stopped at the edge of the driveway and scooped up a handful of snow. I felt the cold of it, the dull feeling of numbness that started radiating through my palm after I held it against my bare skin for a few moments. I couldn’t have imagined two weeks ago that everything would end up like this.

I thought again about Zack and I wondered where he was, if he was still in South America. It didn’t matter; I had no faith that M-Squad could take on Wolfe and win. I thought about his list of things, the things that I never got to do. That I would never get to do. Then I thought about the other list, the one I made after he left that night. Things he didn’t mention, like having a first date…getting my first kiss…

I felt tears stinging at the corners of my eyes and I looked back to the house where I’d spent every hour and every day of my remembered life up until a week ago. Those four walls enclosed my life like a grave, and they would likely end up being my tomb, the place where my body would lie, maybe forever.

The hell of it was, with Mom missing, there really wasn’t anybody else who’d care I was gone – care about me, the real me, not the supposedly super-powerful meta that everyone was chasing. Who’s so powerful she can’t even save herself.

I looked up past the trees that stretched into the sky. They’d been there for decades, growing in the ground here on this street. Clouds covered the sun, just as they had every day since I ran out the front door. I walked, slow, shuffling steps, each one an act of pure will, as I made my way to the door. I was going to die without ever even seeing the sun.

I remembered a few days before, when Wolfe first threatened to do what he’d done to this city. I recalled being so sure that there was not a soul that could stop him, but truthfully there was all along. The problem with being self-centered, as we humans are, is that sometimes we miss the obvious solutions when the effect on us is less than desirable. There was a person who could stop Wolfe. And it was me. I could stop him. And all I had to do was give him what he wanted most. And what I wanted least.

My hand felt the cold metal of the doorknob as I turned it, opening the porch door. I stepped inside and felt it slam shut behind me. I sat there in the semi-darkness, just breathing for a moment before I took my next step forward and entered the front door. I looked down, expecting to see the dead agent’s body that had been left here last time, but it was gone. There wasn’t a sound in the house, but outside I could hear a far-off police siren, probably answering the call of another person worried about Wolfe slaughtering them.

I looked around the living room as I shut the door behind me. It was still in scattered disarray from the battles it had seen in recent days. Wasn’t your life supposed to flash before your eyes before you die? Not that I had a life; just a thin, cardboard cutout version of reality that involved me waking up every day, eating breakfast, reading books, working out and, if I was good, sitting on the couch that was upturned in front of me and watching an hour of TV before I went to bed at night.

It wasn’t a life. My entire existence was circumscribed by the same walls I was looking at now, the walls of this house, and when I was bad, the walls of the box.

The box. That damned box.

I slipped down the stairs to the basement, leaving the wreckage of the living room behind me, replete with the smell of gore. The lights were still hanging overhead, the mats still bloody where Zack and I had left our contribution from the fight with Wolfe. I stepped over them and made my way to the corner to look at it.

It didn’t matter if I grew ten feet taller, I would still look at it as a huge, metal, imposing figure. The side that swung open hung off its hinges, moved from where I left it. The last time…I tried to put the hinges back together, tried to set it right again, to make it look like it wasn’t broken. It stood open, the darkness inside a silent reminder of days spent within.

I wish there was some brave, exciting reason why I tried to fix it, but the truth is that as irrational as it sounds, I feared Mom’s reaction when she saw I’d broken out. It was the act of a scared little girl that vainly hoped her mother wouldn’t realize that when she left the house, I was locked in a metal sarcophagus and when she got back, I was sleeping in my own bed and sitting on my own couch and going about my life unfettered by the metal prison she’d confined me to before she left.

Of course, she never came back, so it didn’t matter. I wondered what Mom would say when she found out what happened to me. If she found out. I wondered if Wolfe had caught up with her, as well. Mom was a fighter; way better than me. If he did, I bet she hurt him before the end. The thought of the pen sticking out of his ear, blood trailing down his face, came back to me, along with the thought of tranquilizer darts and the knife I had buried in him last time I was here. Yeah. Mom would have given him hell.

“Little doll,” I heard from behind me, turning to face the staircase. He strolled down, an idle man with all the time in the world. His nose was sniffing, as if he were savoring the meal he was about to eat. He paused at the last step. “So nice of you to call on Wolfe. I was beginning to question how many people I was going to have to kill before you’d pay attention…of course,” he admitted with a broad grin, worthy of his name, “Wolfe can’t take credit for all the kills the news has been giving to him…someone else has joined in on Wolfe’s good times…”

“Who?” A brief spark of interest crossed my mind as my brain scrambled for ways to avoid the fate I knew was moments away.

A shrug from the beast. “Wolfe doesn’t know. Wolfe doesn’t care.” A grin. “Wolfe cares about you, little doll. Wolfe knows from the little samples how good you taste…now he wants the full course.” He paused and wagged his finger at me. “Wolfe thinks you know that you can’t beat him. But before we start, he wants to hear you promise you won’t try.”

An involuntary shudder passed through me and I gave my full effort to blotting out thoughts of what was about to happen. “I can’t beat you,” I admitted. “And if I kept running, I believe you will keep killing forever; everyone you could – men, women and children. It would never get better. It would be my fault. And that realization would sap every ounce of joy from my life – or what passes for my life – forever.”