Twenty-Two
Dwight was dead, and he was on the tenth floor of an organization house with a woman who insisted on shouting at the top of her lungs and didn’t look all that interested in getting out of the building anytime soon. He guessed things could have been worse. For instance, the two remaining men (or “meatheads,” as Dwight called them) that guarded the building could have been five, or ten, or more. As it stood, there were just two guns still unaccounted for, and while that didn’t sit very well with Reese, it could have been much, much worse.
Then the girl who looked like Faith — and could very well have been Faith, but wasn’t, because obviously his luck wasn’t that good — poked her head out of one of the rooms.
“Faith’s gone,” the girl said. “But if you take me with you, I know where you can find her.”
Reese was going to say “Hell no,” but Alice beat him to it. “Come on!”
The girl came out of her room in jeans and a T-shirt. She was so skinny Reese thought she might trip over her own legs, but she was surprisingly athletic and ran past him without a look, clearly having decided that Alice was in charge of the situation.
Well, she’s not wrong.
“What’s your name?” Alice asked her.
“Iris,” the girl said.
“Where’s Faith, Iris?”
The girl shook her head. “Get me out of here first and I’ll tell you.”
Reese thought Alice might argue, but instead he saw the relief on her face as she nodded and looked over at him. “Let’s get out of here.” Then, to Iris, “Stay next to me and go where I go, understand?”
Iris nodded. She looked scared, but also resilient. Reese couldn’t help but be impressed by that.
“I got point,” Reese said, and hurried past them.
“I’m Allie,” he heard Alice tell the girl behind him. “That’s Reese.”
He smirked to himself and thought, Great. She won’t tell me her real name but has no trouble telling a perfect stranger she only met a few seconds ago. I should be insulted, right?
He decided to think more on that later (if there was a later), but right now there were still nine floors to get past before they were safe. Or as safe as you could possibly get once you crossed people like his former employers, anyway.
The apartments to both sides of him were dead silent as he walked past them, and he couldn’t even pick up shuffling from behind the doors like earlier. Alice (Allie) and the girl were wisely keeping quiet behind him, the soft tap-tap-tap of their footsteps, along with his, seemingly the only sound in the entire building. The girl was barefooted for some reason, which contributed to the quiet.
Reese wasn’t too surprised by the absence of police sirens outside the building. The organization had chosen their tenants well, because cops meant questions that not everyone could or wanted to answer. He’d been to too many ghettos around the world to think this was out of the ordinary.
He was a third of the way down the hallway when he noticed the camera perched above the elevator in front of him. Reese stopped and turned around and looked for the girl. She was so small that Allie dwarfed her. “Iris…”
The girl stuck her head out from behind Allie.
“Where’s the surveillance room?” he asked her. When she didn’t seem to understand his question, “The bad guys. What room do they usually stay in?”
Iris didn’t have to think about the question for very long. She pointed down the hall to their right. “The first door.”
He turned back around and hurried over, stepping over the dead man on the floor. He gave Allie a look, and if she didn’t understand what he was doing, that didn’t stop her from understanding what he needed from her. She nodded back and Reese turned around, opened the door, and went inside, the MP5K swinging from side to side.
The apartment was heavily lived in, the living room turned into a monitoring station with LED screens arranged in a semicircle. Reese was greeted by two empty chairs and no signs of occupants. He swept the back hallway, just to be sure, before coming back out and focusing on the monitors. There were five in all, and they switched between camera feeds every five seconds, showing all ten stairwells and ten floors.
If he didn’t know better, he’d think the building was empty, that there wasn’t a single soul in the entire place. Of course, he knew better. The residents in the other seven floors were staying indoors to wait out the chaos, which was smart of them. He searched for signs of the remaining two goons but didn’t see them anywhere, either. There was also something else missing that was harder to explain: a receptacle for all the footage being recorded by the cameras.
“Well?” Allie said impatiently, poking her head through the door behind him.
He sat down on one of the chairs and used a keyboard to switch between the monitors, stopping only when he found the lobby camera. Like the hallways and stairwells, it looked empty. Looked, anyway. Reese didn’t believe it for a second, especially with two more meatheads running around out there somewhere. Unless, of course, the caretaker had lied to Allie. That was entirely possible, too.
Reese took the opportunity to dig out the pill bottle from his jacket while he was scanning the monitors. Now that all the shooting had stopped and the adrenaline had ebbed, the throbbing pain had returned with a vengeance, and Reese swallowed down two more pills in an effort to stave them off for just a little bit longer.
“Reese,” Allie said behind him. “What are you looking for? You were the one who wanted to get away from here as fast as possible, remember?”
“I’m looking for the remaining two meatheads.”
“Do you see them?”
“No.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Maybe. But there’s also the other thing…”
“What other thing?”
“Where does all the footage go?”
“What footage?”
“The ones being recorded by all the cameras.”
“So? Who cares where they go?”
“You should care. Our faces are all over them, not to mention all the killing we did.”
He heard Allie whispering to Iris before she said to him, “Iris doesn’t know where the footage goes. Maybe they don’t want anything recorded, either. All of this might just be for surveillance only.”
“Must be,” he said, though he didn’t fully believe it as he got up from the chair.
“What now?”
He stepped out into the hallway and glanced toward the elevator, then the stairwell with its bullet-riddled door. “There’s only one way out of here, and that’s down. And they know that, too. Unless the caretaker was lying about their numbers.”
“Why would she lie?”
“She’s a criminal, and criminals lie. I should know.” Then he looked over and smiled at her. “So, Allie, huh?”
“What?”
“Your name.”
She nodded. “Yeah, it’s Allie.”
“Alice, Allie. You couldn’t have told me that the first time I asked?”
She flashed him an annoyed look. “Can we talk about this later?”
“Is that short for Allison?”
“Later.”
He chuckled. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and took the lead up the hallway once again.
“Are we taking the stairs again?” Allie asked behind him. He thought she sounded almost pained by the question.
He didn’t blame her; the prospect of doing ten more floors was like a physical hammer slamming into his side.
“I have a better idea,” Reese said.
Instead of going down the stairs, Reese opted to take the elevator. The only reason he hadn’t let them take it before was because the house could remotely control it from the monitoring station. That risk was now gone, with the remaining two (if there were even two more) somewhere below them instead of on the tenth floor.