7. Daisy
Gunfire popped intermittently from outside as Otis raced down the hall with me over his shoulder. Our escape was a blur of movement I only caught in flashes.
The hallway, smelling like sulfur and littered with the bodies of three guards.
Shouting between Otis and a man I didn’t recognize, and improbably, between Otis and Neo Alinari, who appeared at one end of the hall before disappearing again.
We rounded a corner, the far horizon of my imprisonment, the place beyond which I’d never gone in all my trips to the bathroom.
I lifted my head enough to see that we were in a shorter hall, still concrete, this one empty.
“Put me down,” I shouted, sick of being hauled around like one of the giant bags of flour Joan got from the store where she did the bulk shopping for my dad’s house.
“Are you going to punch me again?” Otis asked, still moving.
I thought about it. “Not here.”
He laughed. “Good enough for me.” He paused to put me on my feet, then leaned in to kiss me hard and fast on the mouth. “I’m happy to see you, doll. Keep up.”
He grabbed my hand and tugged me toward a yellow metal staircase. We climbed it as a single pop of gunfire sounded from somewhere behind us.
“Don’t think about that,” Otis said. “Just keep moving.”
I followed him up the staircase and into a room filled with thick cables and metal pipes. I felt like I was a mouse trapped in a maze, but Otis seemed to know where we were going, pulling me along through concrete room after concrete room, water roaring louder and louder beyond the walls until I couldn’t hear anything else.
Finally he pushed through a metal door marked EXIT and we spilled out into the night. I stumbled a little, feeling like a deer in the headlights as the lights of the dam complex shone down on us, the surrounding woods so dark it felt like I was standing on a stage, peering at an unseen audience.
I shied away from the harsh light after so many days in semi-darkness and felt Otis’ steadying hand on my arm.
It was surreal being free after so long, the night sky inky overhead, a soft summer breeze blowing off the water. I’d thought that when I got the chance to escape I’d run and never look back. Instead my mind cataloged a series of observations, trying to make sense of the situation.
I’d been right: I was at the dam, had just exited one of the control buildings at its base.
We were standing on a large concrete platform, a series of walkways running every which way, the bright lights — like the ones that illuminated a football stadium at night — shining down on us from above.
Up a steep hill, the woods towered around the complex.
Then the timing mechanism of the dam kicked in, shutting off the flow of water downstream.
Quiet. A quiet so loud after the deafening rush of water that I felt like all the noise in the universe had been sucked out of it.
Footsteps sounded from the shadows beyond the lights. Otis raised his gun.
“It’s us,” Wolf said, stepping into the light with Jace. They walked slowly toward us, like I was a wild animal on the verge of fleeing, which wasn’t too far from the truth. “Rafe says the place is clear.”
A few weeks ago I’d felt like they were my harbor in the storm.
Now I knew they were the storm.
They hadn’t held me prisoner, but they were every bit as dangerous as the men who had, and I knew from the way they looked at me that they’d found my phone.
They knew I knew about Blake.
I crossed my arms over my chest, waiting for Jace to say something snide, waiting for Wolf to make excuses for what they’d done.
But they just stared down at me, a river of knowledge moving between us in the moments before Jace finally spoke.
“You’re alive. Good. Now let’s get the fuck out of here.”