“We did,” he smiled back.
Jesus, my body feels like it’s on fire.
He managed to suppress the grimace so she wouldn’t see. “See anything out there?”
“Not much. There are clothes over the peephole.”
“Can you open it?”
“I don’t know.” Sandra looked around the polished steel interior of their surroundings. “What is this place, anyway?”
“It’s a safe room.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve seen one before. Duncan, this guy I used to work with, had catalogs of the stuff. He was going to get into the business of installing safe rooms for rich people across town. Said they all wanted one after 9/11.”
“You think the other rooms have one, too?”
“Probably. Unless the daughter is just a special case.”
“How do you drag something this heavy up here?”
“You don’t have to. You can install them section-by-section. You can even expand it out the back just by buying more sections.”
“I guess that’s convenient.” She walked back and sat down next to him. “Are you okay?”
“Sore.”
“Where?”
“All over.”
“That bad?”
“I forgot my painkillers outside.”
“Oops.”
“Yeah,” he said.
She leaned against him for a moment. “Did Duncan ever get around to starting that business?”
“Nah. He decided to rob rich people instead. Thinking back, maybe he never really planned to install safe rooms for them.”
“Would Duncan know how we get out of here?”
“Turn the lever.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. It’s designed to keep people out, not to keep you in once you’re inside.”
She stood up and walked back to the door. She put her hands tentatively around two of the three handles that jutted out from the center, like a boat’s steering wheel. Sandra looked back at him. “Just turn it?”
“Counter clockwise,” he said, miming it for her.
Sandra took a breath, then turned the handles counter clockwise. They spun and kept spinning.
“Keep going,” he said.
She kept spinning until the lever stopped and they heard the three locks disengaging one by one.
“Push it,” he said.
She did, but the door didn’t budge. She stopped pushing and looked back at him, hands on her hips. “It pushes open? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. You can’t pull it, there isn’t enough room.”
“Good point.” She turned back to the door and put her weight on it this time, and the door slowly began sliding outward an inch at a time. She grunted. “There is definitely something blocking the door.”
“Probably shelves. Or lots and lots of clothes.”
“I’m going with the former,” she said between gasps. “Clothes aren’t this heavy.”
Sandra was finally able to open the door wide enough to slip outside. Blaine didn’t remember the door being that heavy, but then again, he was probably filled with adrenaline last night and everything seemed easier.
He heard heavy grunting and what sounded like metal and furniture being dragged around the room.
“It’s most of the shelves,” Sandra shouted. “And a shoe rack, I think. They brought most of the clothes down, too. Too bad everything’s for a teenage girl. It looks pretty expensive. I wonder where you buy brand-name stuff like this out here in the boondocks?”
Blaine smiled. Women and clothes…
Sandra removed enough of the closet’s obstruction that she was able to push the safe door all the way open, letting just a small sliver of sunlight inside. Immediately, Blaine knew they had overslept.
He glanced down at his watch: 12:25 p.m.
They had slept through the entire morning.
It was the vault. Being inside something that impenetrable was like being in a cocoon. Their bodies had taken full advantage of it, allowing them to catch up on sleep they had missed out on in the last few days.
Sandra stuck her head back into the opening and said, “I’ll be back,” in her best impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger from The Terminator.
He grinned, and got a smile back from her.
Sandra reached into the vault and picked up the shotgun. She turned left and disappeared from his field of vision. With nothing to do, Blaine sat back and waited. He heard her walking along the second floor, then going down the steps.
It might have been a few minutes later, or possibly a few seconds later, when she finally came back and crouched in front of him. He wasn’t even sure how she had gotten from the first floor all the way up here and back into the vault again without him hearing or seeing her coming until she was suddenly just there.
She held a water bottle in one hand and his pill bottle in the other. She shook out a couple of pills and he opened his mouth like a drowning man and swallowed. She tilted his head back to help him drink. He hadn’t realized how weak he was, how racked with pain, until he found the simple act of slurping down water such a monumental task he wanted to give up on it about halfway through. Thankfully, Sandra was persistent, and he chased the pills down with warm water and sighed with relief.
“You should see the other side of the safe door,” Sandra said. “There’s black blood and slabs of flesh and…other things all over it. They must have been smashing into it long after I dozed off.”
“They were.”
“I wonder why they stopped.”
“Losing battle. They’re not stupid.”
“I guess not. There are bones everywhere outside.”
“A lot?”
She nodded. “How’s the pain?” she asked, watching his face closely.
“Managing. The pills help.”
“Don’t take too many of them. You’ll get addicted.”
“It’s either addiction or death, babe.”
“Not while I’m around.” She took the painkillers from him before he could protest and put them away in her pocket. “From now on, you’ll only take what you need, not what you think you need.”
“You’re no fun.”
She grunted. “I already lost you once. I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose you again to some damn pills.”
Sandra drove the Toyota while Blaine rested in the passenger seat. They had a quarter tank of gas left, more than enough to get to Lancing and either find a new vehicle or siphon gas from another car. Blaine knew from experience that eventually the gasoline left behind in vehicles and stored underneath the gas stations would either evaporate or become unusable, but that was still a few years off. If they were still driving around Texas looking for sanctuary in a few years, gas was probably going to be the least of their worries.
Sandra turned left off the driveway and put them back onto US 287 heading south toward Lancing. “You still think they’ll still be there?” she asked.
“Unless they left for some reason,” he said.
Blaine glanced at his watch: 1:17 p.m.
“What time is it?” she asked.
He told her, adding, “We slept through half the day.”
“God, no wonder I feel so good. I haven’t slept that well since all of this began. Did you guys ever find out whose house that was?”
“I don’t think we ever looked, no.”
“Too bad. It would have been nice to know who to thank. I saw some of the pictures. They looked like a nice family.”
He nodded. All the family portraits he had seen in the past eight months had looked like nice families. But wasn’t that the point of a family portrait? Everyone dresses up in their best clothes and makes believe for the camera?
Blaine found that if he thought about other things besides the rippling pain coursing through his body, he was able to endure it. Or at least, that’s what he told himself as he turned toward the window, pretending to look out at the passing scenery, when he was really hiding his grimace from Sandra.