Escape Room Page 6

  The new rules passed through both houses of Congress with minimal debate. Critics claim that the complexities of the regulation process led to widespread confusion about the impact of the new rules.

  “Make no mistake about it,” said Paul Hickey, vice president of administration at Etsy. “These new rules hurt innovators, entrepreneurs and creators because new ideas will have almost no chance to reach the public.”

  The privately held Roi Foundation, which aggressively lobbied Congress for passage of the new FCC rules, had no comment.

  EIGHT

  There was a bloody handprint on the corridor wall. A slash of crimson streaked from the print, toward the reception area. Dark pools stained the purple carpet, still wet to the touch. An unsettling metallic smell filled the corridors.

  “Oh, my God,” Kate whimpered.

  “Look,” said Tahoe, pointing down the hallway.

  There was a body lying on the carpet. Chance gestured for the others to stay put, and crept down the hallway, careful to avoid stepping in the tracks of blood.

  The body was face down, arms outstretched toward the front door. A dark gray suit was stained red-black just below the back of the neck. A trickle of blood fell to the carpet. A top hat had toppled beside the body.

  It was Leo.

  Judging by the tracks, he had been stabbed between his shoulder blades and then tried to crawl to safety. It was surely his handprint — a left hand — that had stained the wall opposite the escape room door.

  “Jesus,” Chance breathed.

  “Who is that?” whispered Kate. Her bottom lip trembled.

  “It’s Leo,” Chance said.

  “He’s … dead?” asked Tahoe, her voice quivering. Wolfie wrapped a comforting arm around her. Jenny staggered back, a hand pressed to her mouth to keep from crying out.

  “Yeah,” said Chance. “He’s been stabbed.”

  “The blood,” whimpered Kate. “It’s all over the walls.”

  Then, voices. From the reception area.

  Chance hurried back to the door and shoved them all back into the escape room. He closed the door quickly behind them.

  “I heard voices,” Chance said. “Coming from down the hall, near the front door. Two men, I think. We need to stay here and stay quiet.”

  “Bad idea,” Tahoe said. “We’re trapped here. Whoever is out there, it’s only a matter of time before they come down here.”

  Wolfie shook his head in disbelief. “Someone got murdered. And we were right in here, playing a game.”

  “And why?” Tahoe added. “Why would anybody want to murder Leo?”

  “We didn’t know him,” Chance said. “He had a life beyond being a game master at an escape room. This is just his job. Who knows what he had going on?”

  “Maybe it was a robbery?” Kate proffered. “Leo just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “How much cash could this place really have?” Wolfie said. “And who even knew about this place?”

  “Something isn’t right,” Chance said. “I mean, why are the killers still here? If they came for Leo, job done. Why stick around? And if it was to rob the place, they would’ve grabbed what they could’ve and gotten out as fast as possible.”

  Chance pondered both of the options. Neither felt quite right.

  “I don’t like this,” Kate said loudly. “We have to get out of here.”

  “Shhh,” Tahoe hushed. She grabbed Kate by the shoulder and shoved her to the far corner of the study. “Be quiet. We need to stay quiet in here.”

  Kate muffled her sobs, and nodded her understanding. Her cries turned to whimpers. Jenny crouched against the wall beside them, visibly shaking.

  Chance’s brain raced. Kate was right. They were vulnerable here. They had to move. He struggled to remember the layout of the building. The front door, the reception area, the control room. The second escape room must be down the opposite corridor. He had heard voices down that way when he had arrived; it was probably another group headed for the other escape room. There was nothing to the left except the small waiting room where Leo had delivered the briefing. Tahoe was right — they were cornered.

  “We can’t stay in here,” he said. “Hoping they won’t come down here isn’t much of a strategy.” He paused, inhaled, disbelieving what he said next. “I’ve got to go out there.”

  The others stared at him, incredulous.

  “Think about it,” he said. “This isn’t a robbery. Can’t be. Not enough money here, nothing else worth stealing.”

  “So, what does that mean?” Wolfie asked. “You think somebody came here specifically to kill Leo?”

  Kate had finally composed herself. “It definitely isn’t random,” she said. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. The killers had to know about this place.”

  “You a crime expert now?” asked Wolfie.

  “I’ve been around.”

  Chance stepped between them. “Guys, focus.”

  “There are only two people here that we know of,” Kate continued. “The receptionist Carrie and Leo.”

  “Oh my God,” Tahoe whimpered. “Carrie.”

  “I saw a third person,” Chance said, shaking the thought of the receptionist from his mind. “In a little control room behind the front desk. And I think I heard voices from the other escape room when I got here.”

  “So somebody came here specifically to settle a score with one of the people in this building,” Tahoe said.

  “Or more than one person,” Chance said.

  “We’re all going to be dead bodies if we don’t get out of here,” said Tahoe.

  “I’ve got to go out there,” Chance said again.

  “By yourself?” Wolfie asked. “That doesn’t seem smart.”

  “You volunteering?” asked Tahoe.

  “I ain’t saying all that.”

  Kate turned to Chance. “I’ll go with you. You need someone to watch your back. You have a plan?”

  “Not much of one. We need to get to the control room. That’s where Leo said he was going to stash our cell phones. We get our phones, we call the police. That’s it, that’s the plan.”

  They stood there for a full minute in silence. It was one thing to have a plan, Chance realized, and quite another to take action. Suddenly his legs feel like anchors. He stared at Wolfie, then at Tahoe. He was thankful when Kate mercifully broke the silence.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  NINE

  They peered around the frame of the doorway and stepped tentatively into the hallway. Chance was thankful for the thick carpet, which softened their footsteps. He stepped carefully over Leo’s body, gesturing to Kate to avoid the pooling bloodstains. The warning was unnecessary. She looked away as she passed.

  Chance crouched as he inched down the corridor, keeping close to the wall. Kate stayed close behind, her right hand pressed to the small of his back.

  They crept toward the front door. Chance cocked an ear, but heard nothing. The voices from earlier — if that’s what he had heard — had gone quiet.

  The reception area was empty. Leaving Kate crouched beside the front desk, Chance hurried to the front door and glanced down the opposite hallway. He wrapped his fingers around the handle and pulled on it. Locked. He studied the handle. There was no locking mechanism that he could discern, no keyhole. It had either been locked from the outside, or it somehow sealed electronically.

  Chance returned to Kate and slipped behind the desk. They paused to scan the top of the desk. Leo’s tablet, assorted office supplies. Nothing of interest.

  They found Carrie’s body shoved up against the wall in the corner. Her lifeless form was twisted awkwardly, legs and arms splayed, neck cranked awkwardly. Her eyes were open, vacant. A thick red gash slashed across her throat. Blood leaked, staining the top of her blouse.

  Swallowing rising bile, Chance placed two fingers into the wound. The tips came away warm and wet and red.

  “Knife wound?” Kate whispered.
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br />   Chance nodded. Jesus.

  They stepped past Carrie’s corpse to the back of the reception area. The door to the control room was closed. Chance placed an ear to the side of the door.

  “I can’t hear anything,” he said.

  “That doesn’t mean the room is empty,” Kate warned.

  Chance turned the knob and pushed the door inward. A hinge squeaked, freezing them. Kate’s grip on his arm tightened. Hearing nothing, they slipped into the room and closed the door quietly behind them.

  The room was empty. The man with the hooded eyes, the one Chance had glimpsed when he signed in, was gone. There were no obvious bloodstains anywhere.

  The control room was not much larger than a closet. A desk, topped with four large flat-screen monitors, filled much of the space. A microphone was set into a stand in the center of the desk. Leo should’ve been here, Chance thought, monitoring the Darwin Room. And yet there was no blood here. Whatever happened, Leo hadn’t been killed in this room.

  Chance and Kate turned their attention to the rest of the room. There wasn’t much else. A wireframe set of shelves, mostly empty except for some props, office supplies and power strips.

  There was no sign of a lockbox. Leo had taken their cell phones, promising to keep them locked up and safe. Now there was no sign of a safe, and worse, there was no sign of their cellphones.

  “Chance,” Kate said. She pointed at the monitors.

  Black and white images filled the screens. Chance recognized one of the feeds immediately. It was a live shot from the camera in the Darwin Room. He could see Jenny, Tahoe and Wolfie huddled together on the wingback chairs.

  The second monitor drew Chance’s attention.

  Two dark figures stood in center of a room, their backs to the camera, their faces hidden. The image was grainy, slightly out of focus, details difficult to discern. One of the figures was slightly taller than the other. The taller one had dark hair, the other wore a baseball cap. They were both dressed in dark clothes. Something glinted in the taller one’s right hand.

  Kate drew herself up close to the monitor, peered closely at the grainy image. “Is that a knife?” she asked.

  “It sure as hell is,” Chance said. “And that —” he pointed to the right hand of the shorter figure. “ — is a gun.”

  The two figures moved, striding to the far side of the room.

  That’s when Chance saw the other bodies.

  There were four of them, sprawled across the floor. Arms and legs tangled in a heap of limbs. On the screen, it was nearly impossible to distinguish which appendage connected to which body. Dark stains pooled around them.

  The men turned and stared up at the camera, startling Chance.

  Their faces were visible for the first time. The taller one had dark skin, and maybe was Hispanic. He sported the rough stubble of a three-day-old beard. A thick scar ran from the corner of his right eye to his temple. The shorter man’s face was obscured beneath the baseball cap.

  The men disappeared from view.

  “They’re coming,” Chance said.

  “No,” said Kate. “Not here. They’re going for the others in the Darwin Room.”

  “Either way, we need to get the hell out of here.” Chance reached for the door.

  Just in time to see the handle turn.

  They were too late. Chance and Kate took a halting step back.

  The door flung open, and Wolfie, Jenny and Kate spilled through. They frantically closed the door behind them.

  Chance and Kate exhaled in relief.

  Wolfie caught the panicked expressions on the faces of Chance and Kate. “What? We couldn’t just sit around in there and wait.”

  “Scared the shit out of us,” Kate said through gritted teeth.

  “It’s a good thing you’re here now,” Chance said. He quickly brought them up to speed about the two men in the other room, and the other bodies.

  “We saw Carrie,” Tahoe said quietly.

  “So now what?” Wolfie asked. “We hide in here and wait for the cavalry?

  “No,” Chance said. “We have to fight. There are five of us, and only two of them. We’ve got the numbers.”

  “But you just said they have a gun and a knife,” said Tahoe. “They’ve killed six people already. You think they’re just going to let us saunter out of here?”

  “Hey, I’m open to better ideas. Anyone?”

  Nobody offered a suggestion.

  Chance outlined his plan. “All of us need to grab something we can use as a weapon. I know the pickings are slim in here, but anything will work. Think differently. The power cords can be used to choke someone. This microphone could really do some damage if we crack someone over the head with it.”

  “You’re like an evil MacGyver,” Wolfie said.

  “Who is MacGyver?” Kate asked.

  “Just get ready,” Chance said. He grabbed the microphone and handed it to Tahoe. “They are coming, whether we are ready or not.”

  They scrambled to find anything resembling a weapon. Tahoe looped the power cord around her wrists, creating a garrote. Kate slid the chair back out of its base, wielding the sharp metal end like a sabre. Jenny and Wolfie rummaged through the shelf of props, and came away with a letter opener and a heavy skull. Chance pried a heavy glass sconce from the wall, and after removing the light bulb, slid it over his right fist like a lethal boxing glove.

  They assumed positions behind the door. They would at least have the element of surprise.

  They waited.

  Just outside the door, a rustle of footsteps. And then, the sound of something metal scraping along the papered walls. The man with the scar, the one holding the knife, was slicing the wall as he passed. The thought chilled Chance.

  Then, voices. Muffled.

  “So far, so good,” said the first. The voice was deep and low.

  “This is just the beginning, Desmond,” said the second. There was a hint of an accent there, the i’s emerging as e’s. The taller one, the one who looked Latino. With the scar. “The hard part comes next.”

  “That gun loaded?”

  “What do you think?” said Scarface.

  “Then let’s go.”

  Chance heart drummed so loudly he could barely hear the footsteps recede down the hallway.

  “They’re headed to the Darwin Room,” he said. “We need to move now.”

  Single file, they slipped from the room. Keeping low, they crept to the reception desk and peered down the hallway. Chance figured they had three minutes, probably fewer, before the two men discovered the empty Darwin Room and returned to the control room. It was the only other possible place to hide.

  “Go now,” he ordered.

  They half-ran down the corridor and scampered up a short set of steps into the second escape room, closing the door quietly behind them. Wolfie immediately grabbed a wooden chair and crammed it at an angle against the door jam. When he felt the weight of stares, he said, “We don’t have much time. Seconds matter.”

  “Wolfie is right,” Chance said. “Those two men will find an empty room back there, search the control room and then head back here. The front door is locked up tight, so we need to find another way out.”

  “And you think that’s in here?” Tahoe asked.

  “Back when Leo was giving us our final instructions, he talked about this room, remember? Invited us to come back, give this one a try. He mentioned a secret room. We need to find it. Right now.”

  TEN

  The room was decorated like the inside of an ancient Egyptian temple. A pair of 6-foot-tall statues of the Egyptian god Anubis — half man, half wolf — flanked the doorway. Hieroglyphics covered all four walls. The figures, thousands of them, lined the walls in columns that stretched from floor to ceiling. An ornate gold desk sat in the corner. Model pyramids of various sizes sat on top of it, some featureless, others etched with pictograms and other symbols. The ceiling had been painted a dark blue, broken only by a constellation of stars. A thin
wall-to-wall carpet, emblazoned with a geometrical pattern of intersecting lines, looked like an Escher drawing.

  A massive throne dominated the room. Its back was easily 8 feet high, almost to the ceiling, the seat half as wide. The entire surface was bedecked with jewels of all colors and majestic carvings of horses, pyramids and pharaohs. Even the curved legs of the chair had been bedazzled.

  Even without an introduction, he could guess the theme. Escape from Pharaoh’s Tomb or something like that.

  The four bodies lay piled in the center of the room in a lifeless, bloodied tangle of legs and arms.

  “Jesus,” Kate murmured. She leaned down and extended a hand toward the bodies.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” said Tahoe. “Just leave them.”

  “We’re just supposed to ignore the four dead people in the room?”

  “There’s nothing we can do for them now,” Tahoe said. “We need to find a way out.”

  “Where do we even start?” Wolfie asked. “We barely got out of the Darwin Room in an hour. How are we going to solve a puzzle and find this secret hidey-hole in two minutes? It’s impossible. Yo, Chance, you part of this or what?”

  From the moment they had entered the room, Chance had been inspecting the walls and knocking on them with his knuckles. He finished scrutinizing the fourth wall and turned back to the others.

  “You’re right, it is impossible,” Chance said. “We don’t have time for puzzles. So we’re going to do something different. Wolfie, you and Jenny and Tahoe stand beside that door. Get those weapons ready. If those two guys try to get through, you need to buy us as much time as you can.”

  “And you and Kate?” Wolfie asked.

  “Look at this room,” he said. It’s bigger than the Darwin Room, right? If you look closely, you can see it. But the Darwin Room only seemed smaller because we couldn’t see the space behind the bookcase. When you factor that in, the two rooms are exactly the same size.”