Perfect (Rewrite)

Chapter Seventy Eight

Chloe sulked into the living room and threw herself onto the empty couch. Margaret entered the room and handed the recently fed Collin off to her. She laid beside him and rolled the stuffed rabbit up and down his stomach in an attempt to keep him happy. It worked, being with Chloe always worked. He giggled and slobbered on the stuffed creature as if he was back home with his loving parents and not in this house.

Jacob came downstairs with his bag around his shoulders; the two of them made eye contact for a moment and then he entered the kitchen and disappeared from Chloe's line of sight. She didn't crane her neck to follow him, even though she wanted to. It didn't feel right to watch him like a hawk, not after what she'd almost done.

The room started flashing red, and then Chloe sat up as the slight sound of an alarm rushed into the room. Collin whimpered and began making disgusted faces. She picked him up and hurried into the kitchen to meet the others. Then the baby started fussing.

"What's happening?" Margaret asked, frozen in place. The alarm got louder by the second. By the time David was running up the stairs to grab their bags, the sound was almost ear drum bursting loud. Chloe held her hands over Collin's ears and kept him close to her body, bobbing him up and down, but it didn't calm him. She knew nothing would for a while, especially not with the alarm and red lights flashing, scaring him half out of his wits.

The lights on the ceiling were the source of the newly formed colored rays. They spun around from the ceiling in a hazy glow, blinking every few seconds, darkening the room to almost a pitch black considering there were no real windows to let sunlight into the room. The old lights had disappeared into the ceiling, gone the moment the red ones had appeared. Where had they gone to? The only thing up was their rooms.

David barreled down the stairs, and handed Margaret's to her. Then he handed Collin's to Jacob and swung Chloe's around his own shoulder. "Ready?" He asked. No one answered; this wasn't the plan. They were going to wait at least a couple more days to prepare themselves. "It's now or never."

Chloe gave Collin to Margaret and hunched over after the boys scooted the table out of the way. She ripped the key from her pocket, jammed it into the hole, turned it, and pulled upward. The floorboard opened the small, dark, hidden room. Without a moment to spare, Chloe hopped down into the darkness, not even caring to bother with the stairs. Her ankle buckled beneath her and she stumbled to the ground. It didn't take her more than four seconds to get back up and pull the string to illuminate the room. Margaret lowered Collin down to Chloe, and then her hands went back to covering his tiny ears from the harsh sound of the alarm.

The ticking of the old clock in the room helped to muster the sound of the alarm, but it was still mind shatteringly loud, and very dangerous for a baby to be exposed to for such a long period of time. It wouldn't be long before Collin would go deaf.

Margaret came down next and then David with ease. A door slammed against a wall, and  Jacob looked back. "Shit," He managed before stepping forward and tripping on the first step. He fell to the ground, landed on his left arm. The floorboard above closed itself swiftly and loudly. The alarm was almost unhearable with the floor shielding its damaging sound, but they knew it wasn't enough to keep the guards out. Surely they had a key, and it wouldn't take them long to open the hidden door and capture them all. They needed to work fast.

David tried the door, no luck. Margaret helped Jacob to his feet and then glanced around the room. "Everything's gone."

The others looked too, everything had been wiped clean. The notebooks, the papers, all the small trinkets that had been lying around before were gone with the wind. No wonder the door hadn't opened, someone was busy moving everything out. Someone deliberately removed them, but why? What good could it have possibly done?

Chloe looked around the room again; there had to be a key. It was their only way out. He must've provided them with a key, the only way out was nowhere to be found. Time was running out, tick tock. She looked to the clock. "The clock," She repeated her thoughts aloud. "The key is in the clock!"

David opened the glass door to the clock and messed with the pendulum, felt around for any secret spaces that hid a key. He gave up after a few minutes. "There's nothing."

"Wait," Margaret said, staring up at the ceiling. "Do you hear that?"

"No."

"Exactly," She replied. "You would think we would still hear the alarm or at least footsteps above us, even if they were faint. You would think we would hear something, anything from above."

"We don't really have time to worry about what's happening over our heads," Jacob said, taking his turn to search the clock for a key. Nothing, the clock meant nothing. A waste of space. Tick tock.