* * *
—Manny gasped and snapped his eyes open as he suddenly sat bolt upright. He was sitting on the floor of the warehouse office as the others stared down at him. He looked at his own hands, which he opened and closed experimentally, wiggling the fingers.
“I’m back!”
“What…?” It was the guard. A shocked expression was on his face as he stared at the group of teens.
“That’s not me!” Manny said, pointing at the guard.
Before any of the teens could stop him, the guard made a desperate lunge toward the stairwell doorway. He slapped at the keypad beside the door, striking the red alarm button. A claxon immediately sounded as red lights began flashing around the room. The door at the top of the stairs slammed closed and the deadbolts thunked solidly back into place. At the front of the room steel shutters slid down to cover the trio of windows that looked into the warehouse and locked in place. The office had been transformed into a fortress.
Tom lunged after the guard, grabbed him and spun him around, holding him by the front of his uniform in an iron grip. Manny climbed to his feet and wrapped his good arm around Amanda who returned the hug enthusiastically.
The guard meanwhile was trying to pry Tom’s hands loose—without success. Tom looked hard into the guard’s eyes and cocked his fist back.
“Good night,” Tom said.
The guard’s eyes went wide as Tom’s fist drove forward, knocking him cold for the second time.
Dropping the unconscious guard to the floor Tom turned and led the others through the office to the trap room. The inner door still hung askew on its broken hinges but the outer door was closed. Tom rushed at the door, leaping up to kick it with both feet. A loud boom reverberated in the room, but the door held. Tom rebounded from the door and fell hard on the floor.
“It must be reinforced like the stairwell door,” Reed said.
“You think?” Tom said as he climbed back to his feet.
Reed brushed his fingers across the surface of the door. “Feels like solid steel. I’ll bet they secured it with deadbolts along the edges. You’d need to drive a truck through this to open it.” Reed frowned and closed his eyes in concentration. “And they put an electro-magnetic field around this door too so I can’t manipulate it manually.”
Tom punched the door in frustration. After thinking for a moment, he turned and led everyone back into the office area. There were no windows in either the side or back walls and the ones that looked into the warehouse were sealed.
“Can you do anything with those?” Tom asked Reed, pointing at the steel shutters.
Reed probed the windows with his senses, then shook his head. “No. They have an EM field around them too.”
They were trapped. Tom looked around quickly and the beginnings of an idea started to take shape in his mind. He started to say something, then he remembered his mistake in the stairwell. He did not want the people that were coming after them to know what they were doing. Glancing up into the room’s corners he saw several unobtrusive little cameras just like the one in the stairwell. They had been positioned to cover the entire office area. He realized that must have been how Dr. Brooks knew they were coming down in the elevator the first time. Well, screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice…
“Danny, I need you to shut down any surveillance equipment in this room.”
“You got it,” Danny said.
He closed his eyes as he sent his perception into every part of the room.
“Done,” he said less than a minute later.
Tom called everyone together. “They’re going to be coming for us soon. We can’t get out so we need to set up a defensive position.”
He paused and looked around at what they had to work with. The partitions were useless. The guards’ machine guns would shoot right through them. Then his eyes fell on one of the desks. To give the pretend office the feel of a business struggling to make ends meet, they had furnished the space with outdated steel furniture, things you might pick up at a government surplus sale. It was utilitarian furniture, heavy and ugly, but it might be just what they needed.
He grabbed the nearest desk, pulled it toward the shuttered windows and flipped it onto its front with the desktop angled toward the elevator. He studied his handiwork briefly and nodded.
“The steel in the desk should protect us from gunfire,” Tom said. “While I make the bunker larger, you guys barricade the doorways. Grab anything that isn’t nailed down and pile it in front of the elevator and stairwell exits. We need to slow them down as much as possible.”
The teens spread out and began dragging everything they could move into position in front of one of the hidden doorways. Chairs, partition walls, photocopy machines, desktop computers—everything they could find was being heaped into two piles. In minutes they had built two chest-high barricades that anyone coming through either entrance would be forced to climb over to get into the room.
While the others worked on the barricades, Tom dragged a second desk into position and flipped it over, facing this one toward the stairwell. He had created a V-shaped bunker they could shelter behind. They had to assume that the guards would eventually find a way to get into the observation room and make their way up by that stairwell as well. They had to be able to defend themselves from both directions. He didn’t know if the steel in the desks was strong enough to stop a bullet but he hoped it might at least deflect them. In any case, it was the best he could do. Satisfied with the basic set up, he stacked two more desks on top if the first pair, raising the level of their defensive barrier.
In a short time the office had been completely transformed. Two piles of random furniture and equipment had grown in front of the secret entrances to the underground base. Facing the barricades on the other side of the room was a steel-walled defensive position from which the teens would stage their final stand.
Once everything was set the friends found places for themselves behind the bunker. Magda and Reed positioned themselves to sight at the elevator with their guns while Shay and Danny would cover the stairwell with theirs.
Then the waiting began. That was the worst part. They had no way of knowing when the guards would emerge from the hidden entrances, nor which entrance they would come through first. Maybe they would come through both doors at the same time. It was the not knowing that ate at them the most and each of them could feel their nerves beginning to fray. As they hunkered down behind the desks Shay turned and stared at the steel shutters on the wall behind them. Something she had noticed about the shutters had been bothering her.
“These shutters were designed to keep people out,” Shay said suddenly.
“Yeah, and they’re doing a pretty good job of keeping us in, too,” Danny grumbled.
“No, look!” Shay was pointing at the bottom edge of the nearest steel shutter. After unrolling from their concealed storage compartments in the ceiling, the bottom ends of the shutters had been secured in place by a trio of thick clamps which had latched onto the shutters from the bottom of the window frames.
“All we need to do is release the clamps and we can raise the shutters,” Shay said.
“But they set up an electromagnetic field around the windows,” Reed pointed out. “I can’t override the locking mechanism.”
“You can’t do anything, but Tom’s ability is different!”
Tom locked eyes with her for a moment then lunged for the shutter directly behind them. Three clamps had rotated into position from the bottom edge of the window frame. He grabbed the first one and pulled. For a while nothing happened. His hands started to shake as he strained, putting every ounce of his strength into the effort. Then they heard a metallic creak and the clamp started to bend back. Inch by inch Tom managed to bend the clamp out of the way until it was no longer holding the bottom edge of the steel shutter in place.
As soon as the first clamp was bent out of the way Tom attacked the second one. Sweat beaded his forehead as he fought wit
h the second clamp until it too began to bend. When it had been bent enough to release the shutter he grabbed the last one. By this time the sweat was beginning to run in lines down his face and neck, but just like the first two, the last clamp eventually succumbed to his efforts and bent out of the way.
As soon as the final clamp was released, Tom grabbed the bottom of the shutter and heaved. Small, deadbolt pins had extended along the frame of the window to help lock the shutters in place, but these were sheared off as Tom forced the shutter up.
With the thick sheets of steel out of the way, the only thing stopping them now was the armored glass. Balling his hands into fists Tom hammered the window. After the first blow a crack appeared in the glass, but it resisted shattering.
Just then they heard a crash behind them accompanied by the staccato bray of automatic weapons firing. The guards were trying to force their way through the piled furniture. They were coming through both doors at the same time.
The teens with guns immediately started to fire back at the guards while the others dropped to the floor. Unfortunately for the guards, the narrow doorways to both the elevator and the stairwell acted as bottlenecks, forcing them to bunch together and hindering their progress. Magda, Reed, and Shay began shooting at the guards, forcing them to duck their heads whenever they tried to scale the barricades. Danny however was having trouble with his weapon.
“It won’t shoot!” Danny said in a panic, pulling his trigger again and again with no effect.
Magda fired a short burst at the elevator door, then turned and reached for his gun.
“You need to take the safety off!” she said, flipping a switch on the side of the gun. She set his gun to semi-auto, limiting it to a single bullet being fired every time the trigger was pulled so he wouldn’t waste all of his ammunition in a single burst.
Beside her, Reed was firing at a guard who was trying to scramble over the pile in front of the elevator. He was shooting at the man’s legs but his shots were being deflected by the piled furniture.
“Don’t try to be fancy!” Magda yelled. “Shoot for the center of the body.”
“But they’re wearing body armor,” Reed said.
Sweeping her rifle back to her shoulder Magda loosed a three-round burst at the guard who had been Reed’s target. She hit him in the center of his chest, throwing him backward into several men right behind him, knocking all of them down.
“Don’t worry about getting through their body armor,” Magda said. “Just hit them.” Another three-round burst and another guard fell. “Even if you don’t penetrate the vest, getting hit still hurts like hell.” She fired again, knocking down yet another guard. “The rounds we’re firing carry a hell of a punch. Just hit ’em. They’ll go down.”
The combination of the narrow doorways and the piled furniture was effectively preventing the guards from entering the room. Some of them were able to fire off a few shots, but these were all wild shots taken while they tried to scramble across an unstable pile of shifting furniture. So far their shots were coming nowhere near the teens. And before they could climb through the piles, the teens were able to drive them back while staying behind the protection of their steel bunker.
Although Danny had never fired an actual gun before, he got the hang of it pretty quickly. The hours he had spent playing first-person shooter games were paying off. As soon as he was accustomed to the kick of the gun he found that he was actually a fairly good shot. It was a good thing too, because Shay’s pistol ran out of ammunition at that point and she was forced to take cover behind the barricade. She tucked herself into the smallest ball she could manage, hugging one dog with each arm.
Magda had just knocked another guard back with a short burst and switched her sights to the next man trying to climb over the pile when she pulled the trigger and nothing happened.
“I’m out!” she yelled, ducking down and dropping the now useless weapon.
Reed and Danny were the only ones with ammunition now and they would soon expend the last of their bullets. Unless something happened very soon they were going to be overrun.
Behind them Tom was still battering at the window. By this point it was covered with a huge spider web of cracks but the glass still stubbornly refused to break. He turned from the window, took in the scene in an instant, and made a decision.
“Everybody down!”
As the rest of the group dropped to the floor, Tom picked up one of the desks and swung it at the window with all of his strength. The heavy desk smashed through the glass and tumbled into the warehouse.
“Let’s go!” Tom yelled.
As his friends began scrambling through the window frame, Tom picked up another desk and hurled it at the men coming from the elevator. Seeing the massive desk flying at them the guards dove back into the elevator car. Before the desk crashed down Tom picked up yet another one and tossed it toward the stairwell entrance with similar effect.
Even though Tom was dismantling their protective bunker, Reed and Danny held their ground, firing at the guards who were trying to get into the room to give their friends a few more seconds to escape. After throwing the third desk, Tom glanced behind him and saw that everyone else had made it through the window.
“Come on, guys. Let’s go.”
Danny and Reed lay down one last round of fire at their respective doorways, forcing the guards to keep their heads down, then dropped the empty guns and scrambled through the window.
Chapter Fifteen