Security(57)

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What’s actually happening is that Tessa is clinging to Brian, whimpering, and Brian is trying to stay between Tessa and Vivica’s body. He’s telling Tessa, “Don’t look at her. Keep it together. Keep it together, Tess. I need you here. Little Tasmanian devil. Right? Like fourth grade all over again.” Brian is checking her shoulder and shaking his head. And the secret elevator is opening into the walk--in refrigerator, where Delores boarded several hours ago, leaving the juice concentrate shelf wide--open. Brian is guiding Tessa out of the secret elevator, manually keeping her lines of sight to the front of his chest and walking sideways. He clears the disheveled barricade Delores erected and the Killer shoved past at the walk--in refrigerator door. Tessa jumps when the secret elevator hums alive and sinks out of sight.

Brian turns to her. “Tess? Are you here? Are you with me?”

She nods and makes a glugging sound.

Brian takes a rope of her hair just in time as Tessa aims sideways and vomits. She hasn’t eaten much today. Bile sprinkles the red and green peppers on the walk--in refrigerator’s floor. When she’s done, Brian takes a corner of his shirt and cleans her mouth.

“How are you so calm?” Tessa says.

“I don’t know,” says Brian.

I’d hazard flying through the air with a running motor vehicle that you have to land on two wheels requires a certain stress tolerance.

The Thinker flicks blood off his thigh cantankerously. The Killer unbuttons a few buttons on his coveralls and palpates a gouge well below his right kidney. It’s regrettable—but, come on, understandable—that I never taught Tessa how to inflict stab wounds for maximum damage. She asked for self--defense training, not kill tactics.

Brian and Tessa cross the kitchen. Tessa sees the cell phone and runs to it. She reaches for it, or tries to, but her right arm won’t lift. She looks at it, away from it. She sways as if trying not to pass out.

“I’ll do it, Tess, siddown.”

“No.” She’s dialing with her left hand. “They’ll ask for a security clearance code.”

Brian checks her wound again. The knife slit her shoulder blade like an envelope. The bone is visible through a tear in her wife--beater. Brian goes to get the first aid kit, pauses by the knife block. He takes a big butcher knife and a meat cleaver.

The secret elevator is sinking past the fifth floor. The Killer and the Thinker stand ready on the fourth floor. They are angry. They are agog with anger when the secret elevator sinks into view, and in it, only the pile of Vivica. The Thinker turns to the Killer, and the Killer shrugs. The Thinker points to him, to the secret elevator, and the Thinker himself goes to the stairs. The Killer is getting on the secret elevator. Why would he check his hip for a controller that, until now, has reliably been there? He wouldn’t. He doesn’t. But if he did, he would see that it unclipped from his hip pocket when Tessa leaped on him and that it fell to the carpet, where it still lies.

The Thinker takes his time coming up the stairs. He believes this will be simple now, with the element of surprise and the Killer arriving ahead of him, doing most of the work.

Tessa is whisper--shrieking into the phone, “This isn’t a scenario! People are dead!” while Brian puts a large bandage on her bleeding shoulder and watches the ballroom’s stairway door and the walk--in refrigerator’s door simultaneously.

Why would it be a problem that the Killer doesn’t have his controller? If Brian and Tessa successfully gained the nineteenth floor, then the juice concentrate shelf must be opened aside—goes the logic, and the logic is correct. It wouldn’t be a problem, except the controllers work like garage door openers. There have been issues with garage door openers being coded too alike and opening other garages if they’re in close proximity. This has been a problem, sometimes, with the controllers in the hotel. Specifically, with the head of security’s controller, which was scheduled to be fixed this week. My controller sometimes opened the door on the floor I was on, as well as the door on the floor below me (which is currently the nineteenth floor’s shelf of juice concentrate). It was frustrating.

It was frustrating to feel a knife sever my spinal cord while I was in midreach for my gun, on my hip, where my controller is clipped. It is a physical fact that parts of the brachial plexus attach higher than the third vertebra.

It’s impossible. But try. Move your finger. Find where it is in space—there. It is visibly moving, on the monitor for the twentieth floor. The Killer is passing the twelfth floor. He’s angry; he’s trembling with anger. Tessa is on the nineteenth floor, slapping the dishwasher and yelling, “He hung up! He said he’s sending one unit and it’ll be ten minutes and he f*cking hung up. Brian, Jesus, Jesus Christ, what now?”

And Brian is taking her face in his hands. “Now? We live.”

Tessa is breaking down.

“Tess? Say it to me.”

My finger is wiggling an inch and a half from the button of my controller. The Killer is passing the seventeenth floor. The Thinker is climbing past the tenth floor, on the stairs, and Tessa is saying, “We live. We’re gonna live,” but she doesn’t sound convinced.

Brian is saying, “Like you mean it.”

Mean it. Reach. Remember diving underwater and swimming until you fell unconscious, brother SEALs dragging you back up to air, and seven--minute miles for ten miles, and rappelling out of choppers with a rifle already aimed, and loving her, you loved her, you still do. It’s folly, but so what. She’ll visit you in the hospital when all this is over, when you’ve rasped to the men who find you that you’re alive, I’m alive, and she’ll weep on your hospital sheets and you can know, then, that you did this, this inch and a half. You won’t tell her, but you’ll know.