Escape Room Read online

  “It looks like a giant Advil capsule,” said Wolfie. “You sure that’s a boat?”

  Chance wasn’t about to admit his knowledge came from a Tom Hanks movie, so he simply said, “Yeah, it’s an enclosed lifeboat. It’s completely closed in to protect the crew from rough weather and waves. It also keeps it from tipping over and sinking.”

  “You know how to drive that thing?” Tahoe asked.

  “Or get it into the water?” Wolfie added.

  Good questions. The answer to both was the same. No.

  “Yes,” he said.

  A deafening alarm abruptly blared across the deck. Red lights atop the wheelhouse started to flash, off and on and off and on. The klaxon screamed loudly enough for Kate to place her palms over her ears. The deck rumbled as the sound of engines revved. The massive shipping containers rattled like metal avalanches as the ship shuddered from bow to stern. Then the engines died.

  “They’re stopping to find us,” Chance said. “Time to move.”

  Ducking behind the seemingly endless row of containers, they fled along the port railing. The smell of the sea was strong, and salt water sprayed onto the deck despite the towering height. The alarm wailed on.

  They reached the wheelhouse and gazed up to the lifeboat. It was shaped like an orange bullet. The size of a small submersible, the craft had several small portal windows and one metal door. It was hanging 20 feet over their heads, affixed by a complicated-looking knot of ropes and pulleys. Instructions for launching the boat were posted on the side of the wheelhouse. They were not particularly helpful. Remove harbor-securing pins. Disconnect electrical charge cable. Place EPIRB and SART in boat. Release grips. Chance didn’t know what any of these things were.

  He just had to figure out a way to release the damn thing into the water. There was a lever set into the exterior siding of the wheelhouse labeled “Counterweight Release.” His gaze followed a series of heavy ropes that rose from the lever to a winch and a series of davits on the exterior of the life raft.

  He shoved the lever forward. The lifeboat started to descend.

  An explosion over his head sent Chance diving for the floor, his arms instinctively covering his head. The others threw themselves to the ground. As his ears rang, Chance could hear faint shouting.

  “Get down and stay down!” somebody yelled at them.

  The lifeboat was nearly level with the deck now. It was still moving, and Chance had no idea how to slow it down so they could board.

  Another round of gunfire shattered the air. Bullets slammed into the wheelhouse. Chance looked up to see three men, maybe 200 yards away, running toward them and holding rifles in front of them. “Stay down!” a burly man in front shouted.

  Chance immediately knew that was a bad idea.

  “Everyone!” he shouted. “Into the boat!”

  Kate was the first to move. She scrambled to her feet and threw herself through the small metal opening into the descending lifeboat. Tahoe and Wolfie scrambled in behind her. Jenny paused at the portal as another spray of bullets coughed overhead.

  “Come on, Chance,” she said.

  “I’ve got to release the chains and ropes from the boat,” he said. “It’s got to be done from here.”

  “You don’t have time for that!” she cried. “You have to get in with us now.”

  “No, you don’t have time.” The lifeboat had fallen beneath the deck and was still dropping. He reached out and grabbed Jenny about her shoulders. For a flickering moment, their gazes locked. He swallowed and shoved her from the deck. She fell and slammed hard into the side of the lifeboat. Arms pulled her inside the craft, and the metal door slid shut with a loud clang. He heard Jenny pounding on the door from the inside, screaming his name.

  He turned back to the lever and wrenched it to the right. With a series of loud bangs, the chains fastened to the metal exterior broke free. The lifeboat plummeted.

  The descent was more violent than he expected. The five-ton pod plunged like a bomb dropped from a B-52. About halfway into its fall, it started to tilt, bow down.

  The lifeboat crashed into the water in an explosion of water that rattled Chance’s bones. The concussion was so strong that he immediately feared the worst for his four friends inside. They must’ve been tossed about like popcorn kernels in a hot skillet.

  The lifeboat righted itself, bobbing like a giant cork in the storm-tossed sea.

  The launch of the lifeboat momentarily distracted the pursuers. They leaned out over the railing, shouting and pointing. The alarm howled. Lights flashed.

  Chance froze, hoping the men wouldn’t see him hunched behind a metal bench filled with life vests. Maybe the men would think he had escaped with his friends.

  “Freeze, asshole!” the burly man shouted. He swung a rifle toward Chance. “Don’t move a fucking inch.”

  Chance thrust both hands over his head. Stepped out onto the deck. “Don’t shoot,” he said pathetically.

  The three men approached warily. It wasn’t Scarface or Desmond, Chance now saw. Their faces were unknown to him. Great, he thought. Now they had five men trying to kill them.

  “Don’t shoot,” he said again.

  Something flashed off the port railing. A bolt of flame rose up from the sea, and soared over their heads. It was followed closely by a second blaze, then a third.

  Flares. Three of them in rapid succession. The men looked off the deck in unison. So did Chance. Wolfie was there, leaning out of the lifeboat door, flare gun in his hand.

  Everything seemed to slow.

  Chance looked up at the winch, and the dangling ropes that only minutes before had been fastened the lifeboat. He turned to the three men, who after the momentary distraction of the flares pointed their rifles at him. They were shouting at him, spittle flying from their mouths. Overhead, the flares flamed out in streaks of smoke. Below, the orange pod nodded and dipped in the swells. At this height, the 30-foot boat was little more than a plastic fishing bobber.

  The men drew closer, shouting. This time, it was accompanied by gunfire. Bullets pierced the ground at his feet. Warning shots. The next volley, Chance knew, would not miss.

  Chance took one final look over the railing to the gunmetal gray water below.

  Oh hell.

  He jumped.

  SEVENTEEN

  Chance opened his eyes to find Jenny kissing him.

  It was a strange sensation. Although he could sense her lips pressed against his, he couldn’t actually feel her. She leaned her body against his chest, but again, he felt more a physical sense of pressure than an actual feeling. It was if he was detached from the scene, floating above it. And yet, the intimacy was undeniable.

  He reached out for her.

  Something punched his chest suddenly. Now that he felt.

  He moaned in pain. Jenny pulled away abruptly.

  A torrent of seawater gushed from Chance’s mouth. It tasted like rotted fish. Smelled like it too. He gagged and vomited again. Kneeling beside him, Jenny lifted his shoulder and helped him roll over to his side as he emptied his stomach and lungs.

  He desperately gulped for air.

  Four sets of eyes gazed down on him, all with the same dazed expression: fear and relief. It was only then that Chance realized Jenny had not been kissing him; she had been resuscitating him.

  “What happened?” he gasped.

  “You almost just died,” Tahoe answered. “Like, for real. If it hadn’t been for Jenny —” She didn’t finish the thought. Chance looked at Jenny with questioning eyes.

  “You jumped,” Jenny said. “From a stupidly high height. But you grabbed one of the ropes when you jumped from the deck, and somehow managed to hold on as you fell. It slowed your fall. Not a lot, but just enough to save your life. When you slammed into the ocean, you were knocked out cold. Wolfie jumped in and dragged you into the lifeboat. But you weren’t breathing.”

  “So you—?”

  “I started CPR, yes,” she said.

  C
hance fell silent for a moment. “Then you’ve saved my life twice today.”

  Jenny smiled and swept a strand of wet hair behind her ear. She looked suddenly radiant. Behind her glasses, Jenny’s eyes brightened like the dawning of a new day. Maybe that’s what a near-death experience induces.

  “If we’re keeping track of lifesaving, you’ve got a healthy tally yourself,” she said, looking away.

  Wolfie helped Chance to his feet. “You good?” he asked.

  “I’m good,” Chance said.

  The inside of the enclosed lifeboat was bigger than Chance expected. There was room for 20 people, easy. Each side was lined with a long metal bench; life vests were affixed below each molded seat. Small portal windows lined the craft. At the bow, an array of switches, levers and buttons encircled several lighted displays. It looked like the interior of a small submarine.

  Chance approached the controls. “Where are we?” he asked.

  Wolfie said, “Unless you know how to read radar, we don’t know. Best I can tell, we are this blinking green dot in the middle, here.” A line, like the long hand of a clock, swept clockwise around a circular display. There was only one other dot on the screen, the Colombo.

  “We’re putting some distance between us,” Wolfie said. “That’s what a smaller, faster boat will get you.”

  Chance felt the hum of an engine. “How did you manage to get this thing running?” he asked, impressed.

  “Not as hard as you might think,” Wolfie said. “There’s a big green switch labeled IGNITION. I pressed it, and the motors came on. I used these two levers to steer, this little doodad here to aim us in the right direction, and this lever to move forward.”

  None of the controls made much sense to Chance, but the craft was definitely moving forward at — according to another digital display — 12 knots. He knew that was about the same as 10 miles per hour. Pretty slow. But then again, this was a heavy metal craft designed to save lives, not host a pleasure cruise.

  “Which direction are we going?” he asked.

  “Pretty much due west,” Wolfie said. “Pretty sure the cargo ship was heading south out of the bay. So that means if we head west, we should hit the coast. I’m guessing somewhere south of Virginia Beach or the coast of North Carolina.”

  Chance tried to clear his head and do some calculations. If they had been trapped in the storage container for six hours, Wolfie’s guess was probably right on. Even if the ship had sailed directly east across the Atlantic, they couldn’t be more than a few hours from land.

  Chance nodded, finally relaxing. There was nothing more to do now other than wait.

  “You hungry?” Tahoe asked. “We found provisions in this locker.” She held up a white bag with blue lettering that read DALTREX. “Wolfgang Puck, it is not. Hell, it’s not even McDonald’s, but it’s food. And there is fresh water too. Enough for days, looks like.”

  Chance tore open the vacuum-sealed bag and took a few bites of a dense food bar. It tasted vaguely of coconut and had the texture of a protein bar. Tahoe was right, it wasn’t gourmet, but his hunger took over and he finished the bar. He drank deeply from a box of water, ignoring the faint taint of iodine.

  There were a half-dozen empty bags on the damp floor of the pitching lifeboat. The others had apparently been famished too.

  “Now what?” Tahoe asked.

  “Now we wait for land,” Chance said.

  They clipped along through the swells. The rise and fall of the ocean lulled them all to silence. Jenny and Kate slept, while Wolfie curled into a ball on the floor, fighting seasickness. Chance tried to sleep, but his eyes remained stubbornly open and fixed on the horizon.

  “Can’t sleep, either, huh?” Tahoe sat down beside Chance on the molded pilot’s bench.

  “Tried,” he said. “No luck.”

  “Same. I’m not great with enclosed spaces. Hard to relax.”

  “After the day we’ve had, hard to blame you.”

  “When I woke up this morning,” Tahoe said. “I wasn’t even sure I was going to do the escape room thing. It was either that, or binge the new season of Riverdale. Archie and Veronica and Jughead would’ve been safer. Apparently, I chose poorly.”

  “Yeah, we all did,” Chance nodded. Suddenly, a thought occurred to him.

  “How did you even find out about the escape room?” he asked. “I mean, how did you get invited?”

  “You want the long version or the short version?”

  “I’ve got nothing but time.”

  “Okay, then,” she said. “Long version it is.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Her name was not Tahoe.

  As a young girl, Margaret Andrews could not seem to get her mouth around her own name. No matter how much she tried, she always seemed to skip right over the first syllable. Like it wasn’t even there. So when people asked the 4-year-old what her name was, it invariably came out as “Garrett.” To other preschoolers it sounded like a boy’s name, so when she moved to Arbutus, a hardscrabble suburb of Baltimore, her new schoolmates simply called her “Boy.”

  Margaret didn’t like Arbutus. It was as bland and colorless as white bread. It was nothing like where she lived in California, which her mouth decided was “Fornia.” Where she spent her mornings doing somersaults on the beach near the cool Pacific waters.

  They had moved to Maryland for work. Her father was a truck driver, and a friend had found him a steady job at a local distribution center. The hours were reliable, the pay was not bad, and he was good at what he did. Margaret’s mom didn’t immediately take to Arbutus, but found part-time work in a nearby Kroger as a checkout clerk. The extra money helped them make a home in a two-bedroom apartment near the supermarket.

  In an instant, Margaret turned 9, and entered the third grade with no friends, a funny-sounding name, and a secret.

  She couldn’t read.

  The other kids, of course, noticed right away. When the girl named Boy struggled to read the instructions on the whiteboard, they snickered. When she was asked to read aloud from their social studies book, she made excuses to be skipped over. During independent reading, her classmates would hurry to retrieve their favorite books from the library and read in small groups on the floor. Margaret held back until the others were settled, then found a picture book from the beginning readers’ shelf. She flipped open the book, then stealthily pulled out her prized pink sketchbook.

  The sketchbook was filled with her intricate drawings of scenes from these picture books. They were skillfully detailed, with graceful pencil strokes and nuanced shading. She drew for the entire reading period, and then just before the end, she hurriedly stashed away her sketchbook so nobody knew she hadn’t been reading.

  But her teacher noticed. Teachers always notice. She called in Margaret’s mother for a parent-teacher meeting.

  “Margaret is struggling,” she said.

  “She’s a slow learner,” Margaret’s mom acknowledged. “We’ll work extra hard at home. We can get her caught up.”

  They did, but it didn’t help. Margaret just couldn’t seem to understand how letters went together to make words. Even simple one-syllable words posed problems for her. “Make” became “wake,” “left” became “felt,” and oddly, she would sometimes substitute words entirely, like “house” for “home.” Or she shortened longer words by cutting off syllables.

  A year later, a different teacher scheduled another meeting.

  “Margaret is not progressing,” she told Margaret’s mother. “She’s behind the others. And the other children are noticing. They are starting to pick on her, make fun of her because she can’t read.”

  “I spend hours every single night with her,” Margaret’s mom said, her eyes turning moist. “I just don’t know what else to do.”

  “I think Margaret might have something called dyslexia,” the teacher said. “It’s a learning disability that makes all of the letters look mixed up.”

  In a way, Margaret’s mother was relieved. She had h
eard of dyslexia but little beyond that, and she certainly didn’t know how to fix it. So when the teacher suggested bringing in a learning specialist to help Margaret, she agreed enthusiastically.

  Later, when Margaret’s mom told her father, his first thought was money. His hours on the road had recently been cut back, and finances were tight. He was looking to pick up shifts on the side, but freelance gigs meant picking up the unwanted scraps. His trips took him farther and farther from home. When he was home, he was exhausted. He was relieved when Margaret’s mom told him it would not cost anything.

  The specialist was Ms. Costa, a severe-looking woman assigned to the case by the Howard County Public School System. She was the only specialist in the county, and for one hour a week, she went through flash cards with Margaret. Margaret didn’t like her much. She thought she was mean and didn’t like how she made her feel when she got something wrong.

  Another year passed. When a third teacher scheduled another meeting, the principal of the school joined them.

  “Margaret is starting to be disruptive,” the teacher said. “Yesterday, she threw a book at another student.”

  “That student was laughing at her,” Margaret’s mom said. “And nobody was doing anything to stop it.” The accusation against the teacher was obvious.

  The principal said, “It wasn’t the first time. I am afraid that the resources available from Howard County are insufficient to provide the appropriate diagnostic and corrective accommodations for your daughter.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means we are recommending that Margaret attend a specialized school where she can get the help she needs.”

  “A special school.”

  The principal gave her a pamphlet. “There is a school in Reno, run by the University of Nevada, that specializes in treating learning disabilities. We think that would be a wonderful environment for Margaret.”

  “Reno,” repeated Margaret’s mother. “It’s so far.”

  The principal looked at his shoes. “It’s a special school. For learning disabilities. And, for behavioral problems.”