Chapter 33 Ana
Ana
Ana stood shoulder to shoulder with Alex in the baking-hot storage shack, looking down at the hatch.
The small flashing keypad winked at them tantalizingly. On and off. Stay or go. If they stayed, three of them would die before the sun set. If they figured out the code and got out of here, out of the “balloon”, they had a fighting chance.
There was no more thought about what they might find inside the hatch.
There was no time for that. Maybe it would be empty—maybe not.
Maybe whatever was inside was worse than anything they would face out here.
Maybe it would kill them. They didn’t know.
All they could do right now was focus on the next step.
On getting the hatch open. Whatever came next, they would figure it out when the time came.
Game on, Bates.
No sign of Ellis or Jade. They were probably lurking around, watching from a safe spot. Ana felt her jaw set. Even if she somehow guessed the code, it was too late for Team Ellis. They’d lost their chance to escape with her when they killed Raya.
Her fingers were in her pocket; she touched the cool surface of Raya’s Zippo, feeling the texture of the etched letters. RM.
Not now. Later, the grief would come, but right now, their mission was clear.
Find the four-letter code that would open the hatch and get inside.
Ana kneeled by the keypad and, taking a deep breath, typed L O B A, followed by the hash.
Beep. A white light flashed. Okay. That would have been too easy, but she had to try.
She looked at Alex. He shook his head and shrugged.
“I don’t know. Maybe ‘Hunt’?”
Ana’s hands shook as she entered H U N T. If Bates had chosen the name of the kid who’d deliberately started the fire, what would that say about him? She was almost relieved when the beep sounded.
K A R L. Nope. Phew.
Beep. Three wrong guesses. The keypad turned red, and a countdown appeared on the screen. Sixty seconds, ticking down. Sixty seconds to think. Sixty seconds lost.
At the one-minute mark, the pad turned green.
S F H S—maybe St. Francis High School?
F I R E
L I N E
No luck. They were locked out. Another precious minute wasted. Ana looked nervously at her phone:
33:06
They couldn’t keep messing up like this. They couldn’t afford to.
Squatting next to each other on the floor, they both took turns keying in guesses. Alex found a pencil on a shelf, and they scribbled ideas on the side of a crate next to them. Brainstorming as fast as they could. Scratching out the worst ideas. Trying out the better ones:
Y E A R
L O S T
H O P E
On and on. Time was ticking away. They could both feel it. Their guesses were getting wilder, off target. Desperate. This wasn’t working. Bates didn’t play that way. There had to be something more, something they were missing.
E X I T
D E A D
S I G N
Panic was setting in. They had wasted well over ten minutes and were no closer. They were running out of ideas and had given up writing words on the crate, instead taking turns to enter any words that entered their heads.
She looked at Alex. He was bent over the keypad, his hand hovering over the glowing keys. His long fingers were shaking.
Oh, god, what if she had made a mistake? What if the code was random?
The thought sent a bolt of fear through her. If her plan didn’t work, it was too late to try something else. They’d put all their eggs in this one basket. Was Alex going to die because of one of her stupid ideas? Just like Danny. Was it happening again?
No! Not this time. She closed her eyes and took a deep steady breath. Focus.
Bates could have gone with a standard numeric lock.
It would have had tens of thousands of combinations, compared to this alphabet lock.
Or if he’d wanted to be really secure, he could have used biometrics—money didn’t seem to be a problem for him.
No, Bates chose an alphabetic cypher for a reason.
It wasn’t random. There was a word that would unlock the hatch.
A four-letter word that meant something.
Maybe it was a name or a clue. Maybe it was something personal to Bates. But the lock was new, which meant it must have been deliberately installed as part of the setup for the Balloon Game. It was all connected. The code had to mean something, it had to be part of the game.
Which meant it was guessable. They could do this. They would do this.
A loud metallic clang shook her from her thoughts. Someone was banging on the door to the shed.
Ana turned to Alex. They’d had the forethought to bar the door by wedging a steel pole through the handles in case Ellis came for them, which was only a matter of time. It was getting close to the end of the hour, hunting time.
“I’ll go see if the door’s holding,” Ana said, looking around and finding a long wooden pole resting against a shelf. “Keep trying, okay? Maybe it’s something we’ve seen, or a word, a name. It has to have meaning.”
Alex nodded. Their eyes locked, a grim determination in their expressions. There was no time for drama. They were in the fight for survival here. He squatted in the dirt by the hatch and entered another word.
A L E X. Wrong.
Ana clambered over the piles of junk towards the door. More loud bangs and clattering noises.
A chair leg poked through the gap and splintered as it was levered sideways in an attempt to pry the door open. There was more loud clanging as dents appeared in the corrugated metal. Something heavy was being thrown at the door, over and over.
Ana checked out the makeshift lock. They were surprisingly lucky that the handles were D-shapes of solid metal, welded to the door. The bar wedged through them was holding. It would take a supreme effort to break it down. It would take time.
They needed a distraction.
“Nice try, Ellis,” Ana shouted.
There was a pause. A shadow appeared under the doorway. Ellis was right outside the door.
“Need help?” Ellis called out. “You’ve been in there a while, so I’m guessing you found the hatch.”
“Lucky guess.”
“So, what’s up? Is it locked? Can’t get inside? I’m pretty good at puzzles. Let me in and I’ll give you a hand. You know what they say, teamwork makes the dream work.”
“Thanks for the offer, but as we’re not playing for the same team, I think we’ll pass.”
She could see glimpses of Ellis through the cracks. Up and down, examining everything—the door, the hinges, looking for a chink in their armor.
“Okay. Well, have it your way.” Ellis’s voice sounded distracted. She wasn’t the only one killing time. “You know we have less than twenty minutes left?”
Twenty minutes? How had the time gone so fast? Ana felt a bolt of fear. Twenty minutes and they were no closer to figuring out the code. What if they didn’t guess it in time? What next? Give up? Leave the outbuilding and let Ellis pick them off one by one? Or stay in here and die? Some choice.
Things were silent outside. The shadow had moved away.
Ana listened carefully, trying to figure out which way Ellis was heading.
She mentally ran through his options. There were skylights on the curved roof, but it would be next to impossible to climb up over the blistering hot sheet metal.
Most likely Ellis had already scouted around for any holes he could crawl through.
He must have decided the door was his best option.
Where was he?
“Ana, I got nothing.” Alex sounded panicked. “I’m blanking.”
Ana looked for any sign of Ellis. Still nothing.
She had a bad feeling about this, but there wasn’t anything she could do.
There was no way around it, their only hope was to open the hatch.
If they failed to crack the code before the hour was up…
well, she couldn’t let herself think about what would happen. They had to. It was that simple.
“Let’s swap,” she called back, heading to the hatch again. “I’ve no idea what Ellis is up to. Be careful.”
As they changed positions, Alex briefly caught Ana’s hand.
The warmth of his fingers on her skin, soft against her scars, stopped her.
That feeling. She pushed gently against him, and they stood for a moment, stealing precious seconds as they held each other close.
She closed her eyes. They were not dying today. Not like this. Not now.
That was when it hit them.
There was no mistaking it. The all-too-familiar smell of smoke. The smell of fire and the bitter scent of burned rubber, paint, and plastic. The smell of death.
“No!” Ana jumped back. Was Ellis really doing this? Was he going to smoke them out and then pick them off? Or let them burn to death then throw their charred bodies across the line? How could he? What was wrong with him?
“That bastard,” Alex said, running his fingers through his hair, turning to look at the door. Smoke was billowing under it; a flicker of flame licked the edges of the metal frame.
It took just seconds for the smoke to spread throughout the shed. They would have minutes before they wouldn’t be able to breathe. Outgunned. Ellis had won. He’d figured out that if there was only one way in, there was only one way out. They were trapped unless they opened the hatch.
This was bad. Really bad.
Ana’s hands were shaking. She was transfixed by the fire, the flames. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t go through this again. She froze on the spot, unable to move, barely breathing.
Seeing her face, Alex turned and squatted down by the keypad.
D O O R
L O C K
H E L P
Red light. The one-minute countdown started. Alex stood up.