Wallace, page 6
She’d had food brought in, just another simple sandwich and a bottle of water, but she was grateful. They had also removed the poor snake. She missed him. He’d been a companion, both of them caught in the same situation. She hoped they hadn’t hurt him. As she sat here, huddling in the darkness, wondering at the dank cold around her, she heard a muffled sound, then what she envisioned as harsh jolts of movements outside her door. Then suddenly she had this inner sense that she was alone.
She didn’t know why and didn’t know how, but she felt a weird emptiness. She walked up to the door and called out, but she got no answer. She hadn’t really tried to do that before, so she couldn’t tell if silence now was a different response. As she stood at her door, she called out again and again. When she tried the doorknob, it was locked. Swearing to herself, she settled back into her bed again. Yet, for the first time, she wondered if they would really leave her here. And for how long would they abandon her?
She had no answers, but, if this was their way of disposing of a troublesome person they didn’t really want to kill, maybe they wouldn’t be back. If she was stuck here without food or water, how long could she last? Three days maybe? What was it for water, four?
What a terrible way to die. Not that there was ever a good way to die, but this was not how she wanted to go out. She wanted to do too many things in life. Just then she sensed something rummaging around outside. She hesitated, then walked to her door again and called out, “Hello? Hello?”
Again all she heard was silence. Then somebody tried the doorknob, but it was locked from their side too. Then came a voice, a voice she recognized, calling out, “Amy?”
“Wallace,” she cried out. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Hang on. And stand back.” After a sharp series of kicks, the door came down.
She burst into tears when she saw him and threw herself into his arms. He wrapped her up tight and just held her close for a moment. “I don’t know where they are,” she muttered. “A little while ago I heard a noise, maybe a silent alarm or something. Then it seemed as if everybody just left. I called out several times, but nobody answered.”
“Yeah, I wondered if somebody had caught sight of me,” Wallace admitted, “but I couldn’t stop looking for you.”
“I can’t believe you found me,” she murmured, tightly wrapping her arms around him.
“I did, but I am not at all comfortable staying here,” he shared, pulling her toward the doorway. “I don’t know if they’re coming back or if they have set a trap. However, I do know that, if they were alerted to my presence, … there’s no reason for them not to come back after us.”
“They’re looking for you,” she stated. “Although I don’t know that they came right out and confirmed that.”
“I know they are,” he murmured, as he pulled her closer and out of the room she had been held in.
As soon as they stepped outside of this general area into another hallway, she gasped. “What is this place?”
“Sewer lines,” he told her. “A whole city is down here, and your kidnappers have been using these rooms quite freely. So let’s get you out of here quickly. Are you able to run?”
She stared around, taking in the toxic smell and nodded. “The faster, the better,” she muttered. “God, this is gross, and we need to leave.”
“Yeah, I don’t know if your room was a control room, a meeting room, a staff room, or what. I have no idea,” he noted, “but that little area was a whole lot cleaner than the rest.”
“This explains the dampness, the chill,” she shared.
He gave her a smile and reached out a hand. “I do know of a couple other tunnels to get us out of here fast. I just don’t want to go out the way that they’ve been using.”
“Just go,” she urged. “I’ll follow along.”
He gave her a bright smile. “You’ve always been such a trooper.” With that, he picked up the pace and started to run.
She ran at his side, sometimes barely managing to stay on her feet because the ground underneath was so slippery. Several times she thought she would fall, but Wallace managed to hang on to her and to keep her upright. When they finally came to a stop, she gasped. “Oh my God, this place seems to go on and on forever.”
“It does,” he confirmed. “It goes on for a long way, but …” Then he looked around. “I think a Y is up ahead, and they’ve been taking the one to the side, so I want to go in the opposite direction.”
“I want to go wherever they’re not,” she declared in a harsh tone.
“Yep, you and me both. We just have to make it to the Y.” He gave her a smile and squeezed her hand. “Come on.” Almost immediately they came upon it. He pointed at the footsteps and shared, “They’re all going out that way. It is a faster route. But …”
“No, no,” she said, hating everything about that path. “Let’s go the opposite way.”
“That’s the plan.” He pulled her along in the opposite direction.
She asked, “How did you even find me?”
“It’s a long story, but we found another man who pointed us in this direction, who had been held by the same group of kidnappers. At least that’s what we believe.”
She gasped. “Is he okay?”
“Yes and no. He’s been badly injured, so we took him out of here, and Riff headed up top with him. We had to carry him because he had a lot of broken bones, but he should be at the hospital by now,” Wallace added. “I figured after I talked to him that you were still out here because they were talking about grabbing you. He was unlucky enough to be mistaken for me and suffered terribly for absolutely nothing. I knew then that his kidnappers were most likely the ones who had taken you.”
“All they could talk about was this new government agency,” she muttered.
“The new MI6 group?”
“Yes, and it’s attracted quite a bit of interest, but it’s BS because they want to start their own group.”
“Do they know that you can do some of this stuff?” he asked, casting her a glance.
“I can’t do anything, as you very well know,” she muttered.
He gave her a gentle smile. “And they believed you?”
“I hope so. They locked me away again and didn’t really give me any information as to what they would do with me,” she muttered. “So maybe I was just fooling myself. I can’t believe they just left me there.”
“They left you there, probably assuming that you would get found,” Wallace pointed out. “After all, I think I was spotted in their area. So I’m not convinced that their intent was to leave you to die.”
She felt a little better. “One was called Dominic. He was supposedly a mind reader, according to what he told me anyway. He kept insisting that I was thinking about you. And why wouldn’t I be when it was so obvious that they were targeting people who had been at the MI6 meeting? Dom didn’t seem to like my having answers to give back to him, but I did tell him about what had happened to me, and I think they did believe me at that point in time,” she admitted. “I also think they were a little bewildered and seemed to struggle as they tried to figure out what to do with me.”
“Of course, so maybe my coming along when I did was good timing for them to leave.”
“Maybe. It was certainly good timing for me,” she admitted, with a happy sigh. “You have no idea how grateful I am to not be in there anymore. I’m glad I didn’t realize how gross it was just outside my little area. That would have made my time there much worse.”
He squeezed her hand gently. “Believe me, that ever since we found out you’d gone missing, we’ve been on the hunt. We got slowed down when we had no idea that you’d requested a new room at the hotel.” He turned and glared at her. “You really should tell people these things, by the way.”
“I would have if I’d had anybody to tell,” she replied, “or, you know, if only I’d known I was about to be kidnapped.” She snorted.
He nodded. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? We never really know when shit is about to happen.”
“Exactly,” she agreed. She kept hanging on to his hand as they made their way, quickly walking farther and farther down the tunnels. “You sure you have some idea where we are?”
“Can you see my footprints?” he asked.
“No, I can’t see anything,” she said in exasperation.
“Use your other eyes,” he invited.
“Oh.” She stopped in place for a moment, then shifted her perception and almost laughed. “My God, they’re practically glowing.”
“Pretty much,” he confirmed. “It’s a bit of a trick I learned a while back for finding my way around in the jungle. I managed to get my footprints to fluoresce, so I can follow them in and out again.”
“That’s amazing,” she cried out.
He laughed. “I don’t know about amazing, but it sure helps in these situations, although all we’re really doing is walking in a straight line here.” He shrugged. “We should come to the surface soon.”
“You really did come a long way looking for me,” she noted in amazement, turning around.
“Of course,” he replied, squeezing her hand. “I’d hardly leave you to these guys.”
“A lot of people would have, you know,” she murmured.
“But not me, and you know that, right?”
She gave a happy sigh, squeezing his hand. “I really, really, really appreciate it.” When he gave her a hard look, she sighed. “I know. You don’t want gratitude, blah-blah-blah.”
He laughed. “The things you remember.”
“You made it pretty clear the last time I saw you.”
“What?” he protested. “I did no such thing.”
“You told me that you didn’t want gratitude or to be seen as a hero. You didn’t want anything like that. Even though you were my hero back then.”
“BS,” he replied, with a chuckle. “Let’s face it. You were already way more adept at saving yourself than I ever would be.”
“And yet so much in my world came crumbling down very, very quickly.”
“Sometimes life is like that,” he noted, his tone calm. “And often it’s all about how quickly you can pick yourself back up again.”
“Sometimes you don’t pick yourself up at all,” she murmured. “It’s just … it’s hard. It hurts, and you can’t really move very much with all that pain, physical or otherwise.”
“Maybe so,” he agreed. “On the other hand, you’ve done phenomenally well. So don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“Sure, sure.” She moaned. “Then I lost track of you and everybody else.”
“That was by choice, wasn’t it?”
“Sure. I was dealing with some tough stuff, and … I figured that everybody was better off without me.”
Now he groaned at that. “Is that why you didn’t get back to me?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t want to be a burden to anybody. When I lost my abilities—or thought I had way back when—that’s what it felt like.”
“But when you got them back again,” he asked, turning to look at her curiously, “did you still think you didn’t have any friends?”
“Pretty much, and then I got really sick, and everything got weird.”
“When you say weird, what does that mean exactly?” he asked, curious.
Just then came a shout up ahead, and, using his flashlight, Wallace could make out Riff coming toward them.
Riff took one look at her and grinned. “Glad to see he found you,” Riff greeted her, with a smile.
“Hi. Believe me that I’m very grateful he did.”
“Yeah, that was pretty nasty,” he noted, “and you can bet that MI6 wants to know all about it.”
She groaned at that. “Of course they do.”
“What they’ll want to know is what happened, who did this to you, and what connection it has with MI6,” Riff explained.
She shrugged. “I don’t think my kidnappers have any connection to MI6, but I think they’re using MI6 resources to find people who have abilities, so they can set up their own energy-working team.”
“Which follows along with what we were wondering,” Riff agreed, with a nod, looking over at Wallace.
“It does, but it sucks,” Wallace noted, “because I don’t know how many other people Jonas and his guys had that they were talking to, but if it was just us? … Then the possibility exists that MI6 already had a leak in the sense that some other guy, some poor other guy named Wallace was picked up as me, and then Amy was picked up as well. She’s convinced them, we hope, that she has lost her abilities, and they think they’ve got one up on MI6.”
“I did tell my kidnappers that, if I had been a viable candidate, MI6 never would have let me leave until they had me all locked down and certainly wouldn’t have just dropped me off at a hotel. The kidnappers seemed to believe that line more than anything.”
Wallace frowned at her and nodded. “That is the truth too.”
She frowned back at him. “Really? So, I already failed then?”
He laughed. “No. It’s not that you failed. There was no failing. It seems to me that is one of those things that they’re still trying to sort out the viability of.”
“No, it’s past that,” she argued. “MI6 was already making inquiries with other people, meaning that it was well past the point of their still deciding if I was a worthwhile candidate. I think we were being actively interviewed, and I just didn’t make the cut.” She stopped and then laughed. “God, can you imagine, …. failing at that, something that’s tormented me my entire life, and here even now is still causing me hell? I wasn’t even going to talk to them about it, until I decided that I should probably reconnect with the world around me, especially after being so ill and having so many changes happening.” She shook her head. “A bloody nuisance, the whole lot of it is.” Up ahead she saw a bit of light. “Please tell me that’s daylight out there.”
“It is,” Riff confirmed. “What we can’t be sure of, though, is that we’re alone.”
At that, she sucked in her breath, stared at him, and asked, “What do you mean?” Her voice was a harsh whisper.
“If the kidnappers know you guys were being interviewed, and they also know that Wallace here was about to disturb them, what are the chances that they have been following you or us—or me for that matter—and aren’t waiting up ahead?” Riff suggested. “We can’t take a chance of running into them.”
“That’s lovely,” she muttered, as she stopped in her tracks and turned to stare at him. “What do you suggest we do then? This isn’t exactly where I want to spend the rest of the day. I want to go home and have a shower.” She sniffed the air around them and winced. “Definitely a shower.”
“A shower would be lovely,” Riff agreed. “We just have to confirm that we aren’t followed from here.”
“How do we do that, when I don’t even know where these guys came from? And they took me from my hotel. I thought for the longest time that it was some test by MI6, thinking they would get to see me use my abilities to get out of this.”
Riff stared at her for a moment. “That’s an interesting idea,” he noted. “One we’ve also been considering. I’m still not so sure these kidnappers have the brains to do something as advanced as that though.”
She snorted. “I see you’re a big fan too.”
“Not so much,” he said, with a wry smile. “I prefer private over government any day. Government does this shit all the time and never even apologizes,” he noted, with a headshake. “And, no, I don’t know that’s what this was all about. However, as soon as we get back to civilization, we’ll have to let MI6 know that we have you, and you will have to answer some questions.”
“Do I really have to though?” she muttered, with a shake of her head. “I’m not sure I owe them a damn thing. I didn’t really want to come over, but coming over is one thing, while getting kidnapped after somebody found out about their super top secret meeting is another,” she added in a mocking tone. “If MI6 has leaks like that, they surely aren’t safe enough to work for. I don’t appreciate getting kidnapped as a result of their leaky ship.”
“I agree,” Riff replied, “and I’m certainly prepared to back you, should you want to argue it. Yet I think you’ll find it a whole lot easier to just go through the exit interview process, regardless of how much information you choose to give them.”
“It’s not as if I can give them much anyway,” she said.
“Did the kidnappers keep their faces hidden?”
“No, they didn’t—or their voices either for that matter,” she shared. Then she stopped and nodded. “That just supports the idea that they probably weren’t planning to come back for me.”
“It’s possible,” Wallace interjected, as he approached the entrance of the tunnel. “I wouldn’t want to think of them doing that, but seeing their faces means either you wouldn’t be allowed a chance to confirm who they were or they had no worries about your doing that.”
While she pondered exactly what that meant, she heard a shout up ahead. As they stepped out into the sunlight, they were suddenly surrounded.
*
Wallace, Amy, and Riff were quickly placed in vehicles and escorted back to MI6 HQ. As they walked into the building, escorted by a man on either side, Jonas impatiently waited for them. When Jonas laid eyes on Amy, Wallace watched the relief cross Jonas’s face. “It’s a damn good thing I saw the relief on your face,” he snapped, “because we’re still contemplating whether you’re behind all this in the first place.”
Jonas stared at him, his jaw dropping. “What?” he cried out. “You’re still hanging on to that nonsense?”
“If you’re testing people to see what they can do, … this would be one hell of a good way to do it,” Amy stated. “So, yeah, it did cross my mind that you might have been behind this.”
“Dear God,” he muttered, “it’s not as if any government operation will sanction something like that.”
She laughed. “Are you sure about that? Seems to me you guys sanction all kinds of shit, and it’s not as if you wait or look for approval before you do.” He flushed at that and then glared at her. She waved her hand about. “Don’t mind me. I’m just a little cranky after being kidnapped, held against my will, then running for my life through the sewers.”
