“The way out is right through there,” Cole said, tipping his head toward the exit, just as something collided against the door once more. They had started up again, and they were in a room full of chemicals; if they decided to look around….Faster, we would need to be faster.
“The alarm doesn’t call the police. There are no weapons here to defend us. She didn’t think the police would ever come if she needed them—she didn’t want them to, for whatever reason. But she wouldn’t just…leave us here,” I said. “She was scared, but she was also smart. Look at this place. She would not leave us to be sitting ducks inside this room.”
“Well, there was that walkie-talkie,” Annika said.
I shook my head. “It wasn’t in here. It was up in her office. There’s something here. There has to be.”
Don’t let me down, Mom.
The others looked at me curiously, disbelievingly, hopefully, in turn.
“This door,” Ryan said, pointing. “I didn’t notice it from the outside the first time we were in the basement.”
I nodded. “Things are meant to be hidden here,” I said. And so were we.
“Did she ever show you? Tell you something?” Cole asked. “I know you’ve been in this room before.”
But that’s the thing. She never told me about the passports, either. Or whatever she was hiding in her past. She never expected to leave this house.
What to do if men got inside.
She’d never told me, because she always expected to be here to help.
I placed my hand on the shelves, on the metal bars lining the walls from floor to ceiling, and looked at the metal base. I shook, and they gave. “These aren’t connected to the walls,” I said. And now the boxes were scattered around the floor, no longer weighing them down. “Help me.”
But Ryan already had the other side, trying to force the shelf away from the wall. Annika was working on the one against the opposite wall. Ours started to tip, and we only had a second to yell “Watch it!” before it came crashing down. The remaining boxes slid off the shelves, and everything scattered. Behind it, only thick concrete remained. I ran my hands over the cold wall, feeling for any seams, any hollows. I knocked on the spaces, and Ryan did the same. Ryan helped Annika pull her shelf unit away from the wall as well. I moved on to the third unit, pulled it out from the corners, inch by inch, as the metal feet scraped against the floor.
“Nothing,” Annika said as she kicked the wall. She was staring at the door again. The only exit we could find.
“Nothing here either,” Ryan said.
Cole was resting with his back against the door, staring at the mess. Annika shined the flashlight over everything, looking for any deviations in the walls.
What had my mother taught me? She had prepared me for this.
Look for the exits. The ones besides the obvious. Windows. Ceiling. Floor. There were no windows in this room. I looked up at the ceiling—there was a single vent, but it was too small for anyone to fit inside. And the floor was a floor.
Except.
That tile. “Check the other tiles,” I told Ryan. I kicked the debris aside and rolled the rug completely out of the way.
Annika dug her fingers into the edges next to the hole, trying to pry the tiles away, but nothing gave. “It’s all one big slab,” she said. “They’re not tiles. It’s just the design.”
We were stuck inside a concrete box. But someone had cut away this square in the middle of the floor. Someone had dug to make room for this hole, for this compartment to hide things inside.
Passports. Money. New names. Things you would need on the way out. A go-bag, for when you ran. Where, Mom? I thought, rocking back on my heels. How do we get out?
I crawled back to the hole, nudging Annika aside with my shoulder, and pointed the flashlight inside the hidden compartment. Inside the floor. Under the rug. It made no sense to dig a single hole to hide passports. Unless there was something more. Something already there…
A safe room within a safe room, Ryan had said, and then I was running my hands around the seams, tapping at the sides and the wooden bottom. I took the base of the flashlight and hit it against the walls. The sides were dull and unforgiving against the concrete. But when I hit the bottom—it echoed. It echoed because it was hollow underneath. Because there was a way out.
I dropped the flashlight, and Ryan picked it up, shined it into the gap again.
My fingers shook as I used my nails to pry the bottom lining up, a piece of plywood, and my entire body trembled with adrenaline as I saw what lay underneath: hinges along the seam, a lever in the middle. A way out.
Ryan and Annika hovered around me, watching. Cole made his way closer, dragging himself across the floor. I moved the lever, and the bottom dropped open—revealing a cold, dark tunnel below.
Annika shined the other flashlight. “It’s a tube,” she said.
“A drainage pipe maybe,” Ryan said. “Not a lot of room,” he mumbled.
“But enough,” I said. “Enough room.”
“Where does it go? What if it stops?” Cole asked. “What if we just get trapped somewhere else?”
“No,” I said, “it wouldn’t be here if it didn’t go somewhere. It’s a way out. It’s hidden. It has to be.”
Of course there was a way out. There were many ways out.
There were the passports under the floor. There was the door, right in front of me. And there was the pipe below us.
There’s always a way out. The problem was deciding which one to take—and taking it.
From the floor, the air felt colder—I imagined dropping down inside, an endless fall, and hoping for the bottom.
“How deep is it?” Annika asked, positioning the flashlight directly over top, the light cutting straight through the shadow. I could see the bottom, but there were no steps to get back up, and it was deeper than I was tall. Maybe if someone stood on someone else’s shoulders? Maybe.
Ryan backed away, shook out his arms. “Someone has to go first,” he said. And that someone would be him. He ran his teeth along his bottom lip. “And then you need to help Cole get down.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe there’s really a way out. Where does it go?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s somewhere other than here.”
Annika started laughing, “Holy shit, Kels. Holy shit.”
Goose bumps rose on my arms and legs, and there was a feeling of something sizzling in the air. Fear, or something else. Like water starting to boil. Like Ryan said, maybe it wasn’t just the fear.
We heard something pound against the door again. “Let’s do this,” Cole said. He pushed himself to standing, leaning to one side, a hand pressed into his side. Annika grabbed on to his other arm for support.
“Okay,” Ryan said. “I’ll go first, to help you all down.”
He eased his body to the edge of the hole. I knelt on the other side, holding the flashlight. “So,” he said, the slightest smile. “This has been fun.”
“Next time,” I said, “we’ll pick something better. Safer.”
“Like a padded room?” he asked.
“Ha.” I leaned across the gap and kissed him quickly, and when I moved back, he pushed himself off the edge and was gone.
He put his arms over his head as he descended, his feet scraping against the sides to slow his fall. When he reached the bottom, he shined the light back up toward us. “It opens up,” he called. “A little at least. It’s a tunnel. And I can hear some water.”
Which meant it went somewhere, and so would the tunnel. And so would they.
“Come on,” he said. “There’s enough space for all of us here, but we’ll have to crawl the rest of the way.”
Annika and I helped Cole sit on the edge, and Ryan waited at the bottom. Cole slowly scooted off the edge, and he grunted as he fell, Ryan bracing for impact at the bottom.
Annika pulled me close, whispered in my ear, “I’m sorry.”
As if she knew I could sense her wavering earlier, that I knew she had thought it, even if she hadn’t done it. But I understood fear. I was raised on it—I knew what it could do to a person, what it could turn you into, if you let it. I held her tight.