The Executioner at the Institute for Contaminated Children (23 page)

My head lowered to the microphone yet again, my face unreadable. “Not guilty.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO—By My Side

B
ack in middle school, we all had a love-hate relationship with the bell. It either signified the start or end of class. At LeJeune, bells didn’t ring through the halls. Wristwatches did.

But at that moment, it seemed just as if a bell
had
rung, because those students who thought me guilty far outnumbered those who thought otherwise or just weren’t sure, and nearly mauled me, binding me and shouting, “Get him out of here!” “Lock him up and throw away the key!” “He killed them, he’s a murderer!”

It was almost as if they were afraid to let my voice have the silence it needed to have an effect. Fear. Pure, unadulterated fear. That’s what drove them. They were scared of me. They had every right to be.

The mob swept me up, my hands bound behind my back, my head pushed forward, until it carried me down to the underwater freezer, that basement where we had held the previous event.

They brought down the bars which separated the stairs from the basement. Perfect. A literal cage for a beast. Some still spat curses through it while others left without looking back. I paid them no mind and just stood staring at the underwater lake through the frosted glass. The place where it all began. I felt like this was where I needed to be. Cold. Good space and the right temperature to think. I had to do a lot of thinking, a lot of plotting if I was going to weasel my way out of this one. No, not weasel. Bite.

Hours passed in silence while I conducted my plan and all possible alternatives, from demanding that Hailie take the stand to claiming that I had absolutely no motive to kill. Which was true, I didn’t. If anyone, at least she’d defend me. Maybe she really was the only person in this world on my side. The awful thing was…I didn’t want her to be. It was like a question of who you’d want by your side when the world ended. But the person I wanted had played me. She played me well.

I scoffed. The irony of it made the bitter tears clouding my eyes swell. It was the very reason I started to like her in the first place.

I tried to think otherwise, to imagine that Donna had really done all this to somehow, in some twisted way, help me. What was it she said? For us to both pretend to die… And I had shown her. I showed her the blood and the serum. I ground my knuckle against my forehead. I was so stupid! I showed her everything! I trusted her completely!

God, I really wanted it to be true. I really wanted to believe her. And I did. But at the moment, it hurt. It hurt because I was alone, and all I could see was how guilty her face had looked in the infirmary when they came for me. Like the face of Judas, only gentler. So gentle. And I was no Jesus either.

My breath appeared before me as I sat and encased my own body, frigid. If I didn’t end up an icicle by the end of the night, I figured I still stood a chance.

A clang came from the stairs and I looked over lazily. I swallowed the cold like a scoop of ice cream. My brain nearly froze over. There she stood, but she didn’t look guilty. In fact, her stance was relaxed, tilted to one hip. One hand propped her against the bars, and a smile spread on her lips.

“There are no bugs here, so we can talk freely. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you everything,” she said as she sat down on the stairs, completely casual, and crossed her legs, “but I had no choice.” Her voice echoed through the basement. “If I did, your reaction may not have been genuine. It would have been harder to believe. They could have thought you were part of it. And…I’m not so sure you trusted me. You said so yourself, remember? That I still had to earn your trust. I hope this is enough for now.”

Her hand slipped through the bars and rolled a vial in my direction. The sound of glass against stone rang through my ears until it slowed down and I reached for it. A vial of blood.

I looked up to Donna in surprise.

By the time I did so, she held a gun at me. My heart stilled. Where had she gotten a gun?! She only laughed.

“Don’t worry, it’s not loaded. They gave this to me along with a letter claiming I was the next Executioner. And my first job was to
kill
you. Kill
you
! Dan, can you imagine?” Tears tore at her throat. “I unloaded it, of course. But we still have to do what we promised. It’s the only way…”

“I don’t understand.” I finally got to my feet, my voice raspy, and took several steps towards her. “The bomb…”

“Oh, that.” She breathed out. “Remember when I left last night? I went to find Jackson Tech and Wayne Tricity.”

My brow furrowed. “The students who were supposed to get sent away?”

She nodded. “You know why? Because if they were able to tap the wristwatches, then surely they’d be able to find the bomb. And we did!”

“Y…You found it?!”

“Well, not exactly. Part of it. The part we needed. The part that we could take apart and disable. Of course, the one thing they couldn’t know is which wire to cut. The red or the blue.” Her lip curled into a smirk. “You wanna know how they found out?”

Something soared in my chest. I couldn’t explain it, but it was an elation I couldn’t remember feeling for the longest time, as if I had scored the winning goal to a championship game or fallen in love at first sight. “You guessed.” She and I grinned and we laughed together. I walked up to her and gripped the bars, rested my head against them, and stared into her victorious eyes.

“We won, Dan,” she said softly.

I nodded. The freezing metal in my hand felt like a trophy.

“But it’s not over,” she said and her smile fell slightly.

I nodded again. “You’re right, it’s not.”

“This is our only chance to find out where they took them all.” She bent down and picked up a spray paint can. I watched in curiosity as she wrote something on the wall, the hiss of the spray buzzing in the walls.

It read: THE EXECUTIONER IS DEAD

She put down the can and also gripped a vial of blood, along with the paralyzing serum.

“I’m ready if you are,” she said.

I nodded for the third and final time, and she handed me the gun.

PART III
THE EVENT

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE—Top Floor

N
umbness spread through my body from the left arm like a thousand insects that covered me whole. I only had enough time to toss the syringe, after which I shortly heard Dan throw his in the water, where it would sink to the bottom of the lake.

My body must have lain still on the hard stone steps for a few hours, or at least it seemed that way. How long would this paralysis last? The sound of footsteps finally came, likely one of the students, because a scream followed that echoed throughout the spiral staircase. They must have seen our bodies and the message and quickly concluded that Dan killed me and then took his own life, which is what I’d planned. Of course, the probability was high to begin with.

Some time later, a rush of footsteps came down the staircase yet again, with shouts of, “No students are to descend to the basement until the bodies are removed!” likely from Lenora. Which meant Von and his men were on his way. This was it. Wherever they’d take us, we’d find out once and for all where the others had gone. Lauraline and her friends, Eva, and Mom. Where had they taken them? I almost attempted to form a fist when my rigid muscles reminded me I couldn’t move. Still, I felt the firmness in my mind. It didn’t matter how helpless I felt physically. What mattered is my mind was assured that I would know the truth. And I don’t know how, but I’d get them all back. Because if I didn’t, who would? We didn’t live in a comic book. Superheroes didn’t exist in real life.

The footsteps grew louder and stopped right above my head. A sigh came half a dozen feet above me. “Dammit,” Von growled. He bent down and checked for my pulse and a low guttural murmur came from his chest. “Still alive, are you, Ms. Wright? Though maybe not for long. I guess we’ll find out, shall we?”

My heart rate instantly picked up and I swore I heard him smile. What did that mean?

“And Daniel as well, I see. I suppose they had this all planned out.”

“Sir?” said one of his men. “What do you want us to do with them? Take them to the vans or…?”

“No,” said Von and rose to his feet, his voice carried away from me. “Take them to the elevator.”

If my heart raced before, now it nearly stopped. Did he just say…the elevator? The one we weren’t supposed to ride? Wait a minute, what if he wasn’t taking us to the others? What if…?

My thoughts stopped as two man lifted me; one held me under my arms and the other my legs. They tossed some kind of sheet over me that smelled of feet. Gross.

There came the creak of the bars as they unlocked them and walked us through. A ruffle of fabric; they must have picked up Dan.

Ding! I never thought I would despise the sound of an elevator arriving as I did in that instant. Yet in that cramped moving box with strangers holding us, I knew Dan was with me. Somehow, that made it all okay, even in this twisted, horrible circumstance. I would have probably died by now without his support. And he probably almost did before I told him the truth. It felt awful, lying to him. But my gut told me that had to be the way. He had to trust me just as much as I’d trusted him. And with those thoughts, I somehow calmed my heart, and began to count the number of floors the elevator went up. I almost passed out when it went above 14. We were headed for the off-limits floors! Except it then passed 15, all the way to 16!

“Put him in the north room, her in the south,” said Von.

They carried us out of the elevator, through some very dark halls, and then I realized Dan and I weren’t together anymore. And that made it all the more terrifying.

I fell hard on the floor; they tossed me without a second thought. The door bolted shut behind them.

A few more hours passed before I was able to move again. How long had that been? Six, twelve hours? What was
in
that serum?

My head ached like a gonged bell when I regained the twitch in my fingers. I flipped over on all fours, slowly lifted my hand to my head and winced, the world disjoined and blurry all around, as if I slowly recovered from a terrible hangover. A large window faced me and the morning light blinded my eyes. I gasped at the sun rising over the lake and looked down sixteen floors, where the tree tops pointed at me like a bed of spikes. This was the topmost floor of the institute. Which meant the only way out was down.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR—Reunion

I
lay in a corpse position on a cot, the only piece of furniture in the prison-like room. All the walls were a single tone of beige. I’ve never even been in such a boring place, let alone slept in it. What was worse, I wondered: staring out into the window where the sight of freedom taunted me with flickering lights in the distance and the ground below held promise of the end, or staring at the blank ceiling that had nothing to say? At least the ceiling let me think. But I got nothing.

All my thoughts just came back to: where had they taken Dan? Was he okay? And would I see him again?

Then they’d shift: what would they do to me? Were they going to keep me here forever? Would I never really see Mom or Dad or Torrey or Lisa again?

Finally, they’d come full circle: Where was Eva now? Had she felt this lost and hopeless when they took her away? Did she hold back tears when she wrote that fake suicide note? Or what if, by some slim chance, she really had killed herself? My head shook on its own accord. No, those odds were too slim.

So were mine.

I fingered the probability bracelet Eva had given me. If only things were as simple as the marble problems we were asked on tests. “Two red, two blue, three white, and one green marble are thrown in a sac… What’s the probability of drawing a red?”

Easy one-fourth. I didn’t even have to calculate it in my head. And many students couldn’t even get
that
right. Not that I blamed them. I practically cheated.

Yet what could you do when your own innate ability told you how little hope you had to escape? How could you fight your own intuition, one you knew to be right one-hundred percent of the time? Like a life bar you watched rapidly decrease on a video game screen, and you could already tell you didn’t have enough power left to win the game.

No, something had to change. If it did, my instincts would shift gears. But I had to wait for that change.

All those thoughts, bundled together, drove me insane.

I jerked when the door slid open, the kind of start your body gives you when you’re falling asleep and it thinks you’re actually about to die. That’s at least one myth I plan to debunk in my lifetime, since I don’t plan on dying any time soon. I lay still and then slowly turned my head to stare at Lenora in the doorway. I couldn’t show her fear. If I did, she’d know she had the upper hand. They had no Lieder or Verity to test me now. But both of them, unknowingly, had helped me lie like a dog until I could stand like a wolf.

“Hurry up,” said Lenora and turned her back to me. Her large bronze curl bounced behind her. I presumed I was to follow.

I sat up and blood rushed through my body. “Where are we going?” I said, my voice heavy and morose. Just because I couldn’t show her fear didn’t mean I had to be happy about it.

“You’ll see,” she said in the same placid tone. She didn’t seem too happy either. That gave me the incentive to stand up and drag my feet after her. The door to my room shut behind us and I stared around at the dim lit corridor. The light from the window at the end of the hall flooded it with murky light.

I felt like I followed an evil spirit from a video game that led me to my doom, but at the same time a strange hopeful sensation spread through my body, like I knew if I got through this I’d reach the next level. And when we stopped before a door on the other side of the building, I found out why.

Lenora removed her glove and faced me. My throat constricted at the pale green of her fingertips. What the hell was that?!