Escape Room Read online

  “So what, Chance?” said Tahoe. “Why does that matter at all?”

  “Because it begs the question — where is the hidden room that Leo was telling us about?”

  They stared at the walls, considering the mystery.

  “Chance, we don’t have time to play these games,” Wolfie said, his voice edged with impatience.

  “It’s underneath us,” Kate said suddenly. “The secret room. It’s under the floor.”

  “Under us?” Tahoe asked. “How do you figure that?”

  Chance grinned. He let Kate explain.

  “I suspected it even before we got into the room,” she said. “The steps, outside the room. Why would they need steps to get into this room? And you notice how the throne reaches almost to the ceiling over there? That’s when I noticed the ceiling is lower in this room.”

  “Only —” Chance said.

  “Only, the ceiling isn’t any lower, not really. It’s just the floor that’s higher. Hence, the space is underneath us.”

  Chance pointed to the right arm of the throne. “See this groove in the arm here, see how it doesn’t quite match the other arm? Because there is a jewel missing. I’m sure it’s cleverly hidden somewhere in this room, but Wolfie was right. We don’t have time to diddle around with puzzles and secret decoder rings.”

  Tahoe pressed her ear to the door. “I hear something,” she said. “I think someone is coming. Whatever you’re getting at, get at it faster.”

  “There is a mechanism in the bottom of the groove, triggered when the jewel is re-inserted.” Chance made a show of shoving two fingers into the groove.

  Something clicked, the sound of a latch opening. Chance reached for the seat of the giant throne and swung it open on a concealed hinge, revealing a darkened passageway.

  “Everybody down into the room,” he ordered. “Now.”

  One by one, the others dropped through the opening in the seat of the throne. Chase helped them down, then climbed down into darkness, closing the seat behind him.

  ELEVEN

  The hidden space beneath the Pharaoh’s Room was as cramped and dark as a coffin. It was no taller than three feet and no brighter than a midnight sky. The air inside was thick and hot. The chamber had to be as wide as the room, yet Chance immediately felt claustrophobic. He didn’t like tight spaces, and the crush of bodies did not help. His pulse skipped like a stone across water.

  “Now what?” Wolfie whispered. “Hope that the two bad guys don’t know about this secret room?”

  “For starters, we need to shut up,” Chance said in a hush. “And no, we’re not going to just hang out in here. We need a plan of action, not a plan of inaction.”

  “Poetic,” said Tahoe. “But what does that mean? I can’t see shit in here.”

  “Look for anything,” Chance said. “Air conditioning ducts, maybe. There’s got to be another way out.”

  The five spread out and searched blindly along the space with their hands. If there was writing on the wall, it was impossible to see. Chance swept his palms along the floor and wall, then the low ceiling. All were smooth and featureless. And yet there must be something down here. It was part of the Egyptian escape room, after all. That didn’t necessarily mean it led somewhere, but it seemed odd that it would be just a dead end. It could just direct players back up through the hidden door in the throne.

  In the darkness, he heard Wolfie swear. A second later, a faint light illuminated the space in a blue glow.

  “I forgot I still had this black light thing in my pocket,” whispered Wolfie. “Now we can at least see something.”

  “Quickly, shine it on the walls,” Chance said. “There’s got to be something down here.”

  Wolfie trained the flashlight on the walls. “Ho-ly shit,” he gasped.

  Like the room above, every wall was lined, floor to ceiling, with hieroglyphics. Some were pictographs — birds, bowls, snakes — and other characters were drawn with thick lines, some straight, some curled. If there was a code to be broken here, Chance realized, they were in real trouble. It took modern scientists years to decipher the stylized figures; five frantic and scared kids certainly weren’t going to do it in under a minute.

  “There’s got to be something else,” Chance said. But he barely believed his own words.

  Something exploded above their heads. It sounded like wood splintering apart.

  “The chair,” Wolfie croaked. “They just busted through the front door.”

  Above, the sharp bark of voices. Two men, angry, but their words too muffled to hear clearly.

  “I think I found something,” Kate said. “Looks like words, English words.”

  Wolfie crawled closer, and illuminated the spot on the wall where she was pointing. Kate read aloud.

  A young man makes a visit to the Great Pyramids and, deeply moved by the experience, returns years later with his own son. The man’s first trip to the pyramids was in 1995, and yet he took his son on the second trip in 1969. How is this possible?

  “This is too much for my brain,” Wolfie said, “with two guys with a gun and knife right above us. Anyone else?”

  They huddled there in the darkness, thinking. Something crashed in the room above. It sounded like the killers were tearing the room apart.

  “I got it,” said Chance. “We’re thinking this is impossible because we’re thinking in terms of A.D. After the death of Christ. But the pyramids were built five thousand years ago. B.C. Until year zero, the years counted down. So the man traveled to Egypt in 1995 B.C., and then 26 years later, came back with his son, in 1969. Before the common era.”

  The floor beneath them suddenly buckled. Chance’s immediate panicked thought was: earthquake. He placed a hand on the ceiling and the other on the floor to brace himself. A second shudder rocked the entire room, and suddenly all five of them were moving.

  The floor, Chance realized with a start, started to retract into a slot in the wall. Kate yelped as the floor pulled away from the opposite wall, directly beneath her legs. She scrambled backward on all fours, away from the growing gap. Wolfie shined his blue-tinged flashlight down into the widening gap, but there was only darkness below. They could not see the bottom.

  The floor rumbled, as if on an unseen track, and with every passing second, the floor space shrunk. The five of them clambered to keep from falling over the edge into the pit. Someone, Chance couldn’t tell who in the darkness, started to whimper.

  The shrinking floor wasn’t their only problem. The rumbling was loud, loud enough to be noticed.

  Something exploded over their head. Agitated shouts. Then, a second crash. A splinter of light pierced the crawlspace. Then, bright light invaded as the throne seat was hurled open over their heads. A scarred face stabbed into the shaft of light.

  “Ready or not, motherfuckers,” Scarface growled.

  “Jump!” Chance yelled. He blindly grabbed for the others and shoved them off the receding floor. Kate tumbled into the darkness first, followed by Jenny and Wolfie. Tahoe kicked at Chance, resisting, but with his back braced against the wall, Chance drove her into the gaping hole.

  Scarface slithered headfirst through the opening, knife slashing. Chance kicked up at him, striking his arm just at the elbow. The killer grunted out a curse, and hauled himself backward out of the hole.

  The floor had retracted almost completely now. Chance balanced precariously on less than a foot of space. And it was shrinking rapidly.

  Another head jabbed into the hole above him. It was the second man, the one wearing the baseball cap. The one with the—

  The man swung his arm into the hole, his gun aimed right at Chance’s temple.

  Chance drew in a deep, steeling breath … and jumped.

  TWELVE

  For an instant, Chance felt like he would fall forever. The pit was an inky void where the only force was gravity, pulling him farther into its depths. His arms flailed for something, anything, solid.

  He abruptly slammed into somethi
ng hard. His right shoulder bore the brunt of the fall. The crack of bone echoed. Breath was knocked from his lungs, and the sudden lack of oxygen made his head swim.

  Above, the rumbling floor paused. Chance’s heart lurched. Had the killers, Desmond and Scarface, figured out how to control the retracting floor? A second later, the rumbling picked up again, the tone slightly different. The floor had reversed, Chance realized. It was moving back across, forming a floor again. Forming a barrier between them and the two killers.

  The floor boomed shut like a bank vault door. A split second before it closed entirely, a loud voice screeched down at them. “You can’t escape!”

  A voice rose up from the raven-dark pit. “Fuck you!”

  Tahoe.

  Something writhed beneath Chance, groaning. He scrambled away, fumbling with his hands across the body, searching for something he could identify.

  “It’s only me.”

  The voice belonged to Jenny. Her voice was frail, tinged with ache. She tried to move, but it only elicited another painful groan.

  “Jenny,” Chance said, his hands finding her face. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  “You landed on me,” she said. “And I’m not sure, but I think my shoulder is hurt.”

  The snap of bone. It wasn’t Chance’s shoulder that had cracked. It was Jenny’s.

  “Don’t move,” he instructed. “Let me check it out. Wolfie, are you okay?”

  He got a grunt in response, then, “Yeah, I’m here. Jacked up my knee, I think. But I’m good.”

  “I need the flashlight.”

  A half-second later, a dim blue light shone just to Chance’s left. A mass of bodies illuminated, limbs moving like a sea monster. Chance grabbed the flashlight and trained it on Jenny’s shoulder.

  It was clearly dislocated. Jenny’s arm hung limp, the shoulder socket a sunken hole. Jenny reached for the shoulder with an agonized whimper. “It hurts, Chance,” she sniffed. “Real bad.”

  “What’s happening?” It was Kate’s voice, from the darkness.

  “Kate, are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said after a pause. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “Tahoe and Wolfie, you good?”

  “Considering you just pushed us into this deep dark pit, yeah, I’m doing just fine.” Tahoe was still her sarcastic self.

  Wolfie grunted. “My knee hurts, and I’m pretty sure I’m bleeding from my forehead, but I feel okay. What’s the matter with Jenny?”

  “It’s her shoulder,” Chance said. “I’m pretty sure it’s dislocated.”

  Jenny whined again, as if hearing the diagnosis caused a sharp stab of pain. Chance slipped his fingers into Jenny’s hand, and squeezed gently. “Be still,” he said quietly. “And count to 10, okay?”

  “Chance, what are—?”

  “Jenny,” he whispered. “I need you to trust me.”

  He saw her nod slowly in the dim blue.

  In a soft voice, Kate started to count. “One, two, three…”

  “Wait,” said Jenny suddenly. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  Chance smiled at her reassuringly. “Absolutely not,” he said.

  ”Four,” announced Kate.

  Chance grasped Jenny’s arm around her biceps and wrenched it up into the socket. He heard a pop, then a piercing wail. Jenny’s body curled in like an injured animal. Chance could tell she was trying to stifle her cries, but her body jerked with sobs, as if being punched.

  “Jesus, Chance,” spat Tahoe. “What happened to counting to 10?” She slid across the ground and wrapped her arms around Jenny’s heaving body.

  “I needed her muscles to be loose,” he explained. “If she tensed up, I might not have gotten it to pop back in place.”

  “Is it?” Tahoe asked. “Back in place?”

  “I think so.”

  “I think so too,” she croaked. “It actually feels better.”

  “Yeah, well it’s gonna hurt like hell tomorrow,” Chance warned. “We just need to—”

  Something slammed against the ceiling. The metallic sound echoed in the pit, tolling like horrible church bells.

  “They’re trying to get through the floor,” Chance said. “I don’t think they’ll be able to.”

  “How did we manage it?” Wolfie asked. “The floor just started moving on its own.”

  “Not on its own,” Chance said. “I think it must’ve been voice-activated. Some kind of sophisticated voice recognition.”

  “It probably picked up on something you said,” Kate contributed. “The floor started moving right after you said ‘before the common era’ — the answer to the riddle.”

  “We might have bought ourselves a little time, but we can’t waste time congratulating ourselves,” Tahoe said. “From where I sit, we just fell from one box into another, larger box.”

  Chance probed the walls. They were made of metal and cold to the touch. And they weren’t flat, but folded up and down like waves. Corrugated steel. Wolfie took back the flashlight and struggled to his feet, wincing when he put weight on his knee. He held the flashlight over his head, illuminating the space. They were at the bottom of a rectangular-shaped box. The base was perhaps 12 feet square, but the roof was taller than that. The dim blue light did not reach the top.

  “I think we’re in a shipping container,” said Chance. “I saw a bunch of them on my way to the escape room.”

  “Shipping containers under the building?” Wolfie questioned.

  “Makes sense,” Tahoe said. “The building was probably an old loading dock at one point. Storage space above, like a silo. Haul the containers underneath: Load ’em up, ship ’em out.”

  The industrial shipping yard had been filled with cranes and shipping containers. It stood to reason that some of the outbuildings would be used for loading cargo. But still, something about it didn’t ring true to Chance. It sounded just a little too convenient. An empty shipping container just happened to be located under a false floor in an escape room? He didn’t like it.

  Before he could consider it further, the cargo container jolted. The sudden concussion wrenched the flashlight from Wolfie’s grasp, and it skittered across the ground. A grinding noise filled the air, like the meshing of metallic gears. It was loud enough to make all of them cover their ears with their palms. With another convulsion, the cargo container started to pull away from the ceiling. Light mercifully leaked in through the gap at the top of the steel box.

  They all looked at each other. The ragtag group looked like the war-wounded. Jenny’s shoulder had swelled visibly beneath her shirt. Wolfie’s pant leg was torn and bloody at the knee. A smear of blood marred his forehead too. Kate and Tahoe looked shaken, but otherwise intact.

  They braced themselves as the container drifted away from the retractable floor in metallic jerks. The grinding whirred and clanged.

  Chance resisted the urge to call out for help. Desmond and Scarface could be right outside the crate, even now. Chance bit down on his bottom lip.

  When the container had swung away perhaps a dozen feet, a set of metal double doors slammed shut in a cacophonous clang above their heads. They were once again cast into darkness. There was another sound, a whir of something mechanical, like the sound of a giant bolt sliding into place.

  A half-second later, the entire container started to tilt on its side. For a fleeting moment, it hovered there, balanced precariously on its edge.

  “Hold on!” Chance yelled.

  With a wrenching groan of metal, the container toppled over with a deafening bang. Five bodies tumbled across the metal floor. The long side of the container was now the floor and ceiling. Chance scrambled quickly to his feet and made his way to the door. Bracing himself with his feet, he heaved on the door, but it did not budge.

  “Hey!” he shouted at the locked door. “Hey! We’re in here!”

  “Chance, keep it down,” hushed Tahoe. “Those two guys could be out there right now.”

  Chance shook his head. “I don�
��t think so. Judging by all those gears, it sounds to me like the whole thing is automated. There’s nobody outside doing this.”

  “How can you be sure?” Kate asked.

  “I can’t be sure,” he admitted. “I’m going on gut here.”

  “I think Chance is right,” said Wolfie. “I don’t hear any voices out there. No workers, no yard foreman. This whole thing just seems like it is on autopilot now. Probably some kind of weight sensor triggered a crane.”

  “That just seems far-fetched to me,” said Kate.

  “I can’t see a damn thing,” said Tahoe.

  “Wolfie, you still got that flashlight?”

  “I dropped it,” he said. “But it’s in here somewhere.” He dropped to all fours, started searching.

  “These things are built to be waterproof,” Chance said. “I don’t think they have a lot of ventilation. We need to conserve air. Keep talking to a minimum. Breathe slowly and calmly.”

  “Jesus, Chance, how long do you think we’re going to be trapped in here?”

  “That’s just it, Tahoe. We don’t know.”

  “Got it,” Wolfie said. A blue glow appeared, but it did little to soothe their frayed nerves.

  “It’s hot as hell in here,” Tahoe said.

  Something loud clanged down on the top of the container. The drone of gears once again spliced the air.

  The container lifted into the air.

  THIRTEEN

  “We are all going to die in here,” said Tahoe. “This is how it ends. I can see the headlines now, ‘Young prodigy suffocates in shipping container just before her new revolutionary paintings stun worldwide art market.’”

  “I don’t know,” said Wolfie. “I mean, we’re definitely going to die in here, but that headline seems a little long.”

  Chance appreciated the attempts to keep the mood light. For six hours now – at least, it felt like six hours, none of them wore a watch —the five of them had been trapped in the stifling shipping container. It was suffocatingly hot, the air damp and rank. Their skin glistened with a thin sheen of perspiration that stained their shirts in darkened blotches. Jenny could not find a comfortable position due to her injured shoulder. Tahoe and Wolfie leaned against one another in the corner. Kate rested her head against the side of the crate, her eyes staring vacantly. Nobody said much.