When No One Is Watching(84)
As their doors open, the cries and moans of the people VerenTech has been using as test subjects—strangers, neighbors, and friends—fill the hall.
I want to close my ears. I want to run away from all of this. But I just unlock the doors and swing them open, one by one.
By the time I make it back to Theo there are only two streaks of blood leading into an empty room next to Mr. Perkins’s.
“Do we go ahead or go back?” he asks grimly as I hand him the card.
“We can’t go back,” I say, even though my mind is screaming at me to do just that. “Moving those people ourselves could kill them. We can’t call the police. We lose the element of surprise, and these people will get away with this. I need to end this shit.”
Theo doesn’t say anything. Just checks his clip, then waves the ID card in front of the sensor next to the double doors that lead out of the wing.
I step through them as they swing open.
Chapter 24
Sydney
“YOU EVER PLAY A FIRST-PERSON-SHOOTER VIDEO GAME?” Theo asks. “War games where you move room by room, picking the enemy off to advance?”
“I hate games like that,” I say. “I can never figure out the damn controls and always freak out and get mowed down. A real gun is—”
Easier. Easier, and a million times harder because these aren’t pixels on a screen. The people we’ve shot, we’ve killed, are real. Oh god, they’re real and somehow I can’t even make myself feel that anymore. I’m not a hardened killer—I think my brain has reached some kind of overload point and the choices are curl up or keep it moving.
I grip my gun tightly, my eyes darting back and forth as we enter a lobby space. Looking for more people we might have to shoot.
“I’m selling my PlayStation after this,” Theo says darkly as he peers around.
The lobby we’re passing through is a small one, with the same yellow-and-beige color scheme as the first part of the tunnel. This area is slightly nicer than what we’ve seen so far.
Instead of holding cages with test subjects, there are normal-looking offices behind the glass in these rooms. Plants sit on desks and hang from ceilings. Pictures of children and families are in frames of all shapes and sizes.
It could be any workplace, quiet on a Saturday night because everyone is off for the weekend. No. Two people, four people, had been working, and now they’re . . . not.
Theo walks ahead of me, peering into offices. He stops in front of one, so suddenly that I’m sure someone is inside, but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t raise his gun. His jaw works and his Adam’s apple bobs.
When I move beside him, I look into an office that belongs to one of the people who is no longer working. A piece of patterned purple cloth that you can buy from one of the tiny Indian storefronts around Nostrand—well, you could before they got shut down—hangs on the wall. The room smells of lavender and sandalwood, and crystals of all colors and sizes sit on shelves and most available spaces. Instagram-meme-style affirmations written in calligraphy like Rise and shine! and Just Breathe and Kindness is the key are framed on the walls, and on the desk is an eight-by-ten of Julia laughing in a wedding photo with a slim, beaming Black guy. Beside it, a picture of her with two brown kids.
“Jesus,” Theo says.
I can’t absorb this. Did her husband know what her job was? How will her children feel when their mother doesn’t come home? Because of me.
I look away and my eye catches on another affirmation.
The only way forward is through.
I shake my head and continue the sweep of the offices—that’s what this is.
Theo peels away from the window and walks along beside me, and when I glance up at him, his expression is blank, his complexion chalky.
We pass down the corridor back to back, the glass making it easy to see that no one is inside, and no one is hiding under desks or behind doors. Interspersed with the offices are examination rooms like you might find in any urgent care center—somewhere in my head, I’d disconnected this section from the other, but the people sitting here would have seen the test subjects brought through, would have heard their cries.
They were the ones doing the testing.
Theo stops and scrubs a hand through his hair in agitation. “Do you think they were the only ones here? The people we already encountered?”
“There’s the meeting,” I say, trying to figure out how much time has passed since he stripped my assailant of his phone and we scrolled through the private group. Since the police started their siege of my neighborhood. It could have been minutes or hours. “Maybe that’s where everyone is.”
“I guess we keep going,” he says flatly.
We reach the next set of double doors without encountering anyone, and swipe through; they lead us into a stairwell that’s creepy as shit. A metal cage separates this level from the stairs, the gray paint peeling to show the rust beneath, but the door is ajar. The stairwell itself is concrete, dank, and dimly lit, lined with random clusters of pipes and HVAC tubes. We begin to climb, expecting to find a doorway at each landing and being met with blank wall.
“Theo?” I don’t mean to say his name, don’t mean for my voice to be breathy and panicked, but the dimness and the silence start to press in on me, a claustrophobic nightmare. Part of me wonders if there are any doors. Maybe we should turn back—if we do, will we find the door to the metal cage locked? Is this a trap? Maybe we should have turned back. Maybe I’ve chosen incorrectly, like I always do.