After a beat of silence, I turned to Benji. "You need to get yourself under control," I ordered, my stern words undermined by my shaking voice. I was obviously in no sort of control over myself, either - at least, emotionally.
"They kidnapped and tortured my little sister and you expect me to control myself?" Benji snapped, and I flinched. Blinking back tears, I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak without crying. I wished KC and her calming playlist were here - I could feel my panic rising, constricting my throat and making it difficult to breathe.
I kneeled beside Jared. "Is there anything that needs immediate attention?" I asked, my hands hovering above his bruised body hesitantly. I didn't want to hurt him more than he was already in pain.
"No. I don't think so. I'm still breathing, so I'm good."
I tried not to feel too put off by this strange side of Jared. This side that was sarcastic and morbidly humorous, the side that talked back and seemingly didn't feel fear.
"First thing's first. We need to get out," I said after another moment of tense silence. "We know that Dr. Morte has Lydia, Reggie, and Daisy. We know that he doesn't want us to get the cure to the zombie disease, maybe because he wants to take credit for it or something." I felt sick with the thought of a man so power-hungry that he was willing to kidnap, torture, and harm others to get the information that would lead to his hypothetical fame.
"Who is this guy?" Jared asked with a note of...not awe, but close to it. "He has this huge lab...thing that's built in a cave, for Christ's sake. He has people - healthy humans - working for him even after the zombie apocalypse has been raging for months. He's obviously very skilled at what he does, whatever it is that he does, and there is no way that his real name is Dr. Morte."
I remembered Benji's incredulous translation - Dr. Death? "How do you know Italian?" I thought to ask him.
"Believe it or not, an old video game I played a while ago." Benji frowned. "Couldn't remember the title to save my life."
The words "to save my life," although they were a common enough phrase, only served to remind me of our dire situation. I nodded, breathing slowly, and attempted to calm myself. I had to focus on the task at hand - escaping.
I rattled the door handle, to no avail. I hadn't truly thought that it would be that easy, but it was worth a shot. Glancing around, I took stock of the room. I hadn't been paying full attention when we had first arrived, for many obvious reasons.
There were four cots. So maybe they had been expecting to capture KC? The fact that she wasn't here with us gave me a spark of hope.
"Help me," I ordered the boys as I moved to one of the cots and started tugging at it. Benji came to help, glancing confusedly at me, and Jared moved to another cot, not seeming to care about my motives.
There was nothing underneath our cot. I hadn't honestly expected something as useful as a trapdoor or some kind of tool, but there had to be something.
Nothing underneath Jared's cot.
Nothing underneath the third cot.
My heart beating fast, crossing my fingers, I watched as Jared and Benji yanked the cot away from the wall.
Nothing.
I sighed, my spirits sinking even lower. I sank to the floor and buried my face in my hands.
The door opened and I shot to my feet, pressing an arm over Benji's chest instinctively to hold him back.
One of the men who had carried us stood there. He ran a hand over his short, cropped, black hair and set his jaw tensely. I could see the nervousness in his eyes.
"Where's the doctor?" Jared asked after a beat of awkward silence.
The man shifted his weight from foot to foot. He seemed legitimately terrified. "Don't ask any questions. Just follow me. I'll take you to your brother," he promised, looking at me. "And your sister," he added, turning his gaze to Benji.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked suspiciously, obviously not daring to believe that the man would actually help us. I didn't believe him, either. It was too good to be true. I had thought that my luck had turned up in the past few months, but I was wrong. It had gotten so, so much worse. Why would this be any different? It was far more likely that the insane doctor was testing us in some way.
The man glanced down the hall before returning his gaze to us. "Dr. Morte's a monster. He's crazy. He has my wife and daughter - that's the only reason I'm doing these...these awful horrible things for him. Come with me now, please. I can't be here for long."
I hated all of the shadowy parts of this strange alliance, but I also didn't see any other escape opportunities jumping out at us. "Fine," I muttered, walking forward.
Benji grabbed my wrist immediately. "Are you serious?" he hissed.
"I don't know about you, but I want to see my family again," I replied quietly without turning around. My words were meaner than they needed to be, but I didn't particularly care. At first, Benji's grip on my wrist didn't loosen, but after a moment of tense silence, it slid down to my hand so he was gripping it tightly. He walked forward to stand next to me.
Jared placed a hand on my shoulder. "I'll ignore my bruised ribs. Let's go."
"Oh, I forgot that you're hurt," I said apologetically, paused.
"We need to get out, Lilith, and we've stalled long enough. Let's go," he said firmly, and I turned back to the man and nodded.
"I'm Ken," he told us as we were led down the hall.
"Where are you taking us?" Benji thought to ask - something that we probably should have checked before following Ken.
"There's one room from which pretty much everything is controlled and monitored," Ken explained quietly. "There are working computers and a lot of handwritten files in there. I may need to shoot some people." The apathy of his voice made me shiver. If we somehow got on his bad side, he could be casually filling us with bullets as well.
Benji squeezed my hand comfortingly and I returned the gesture. I had to be brave. This was for all the souls that had been lost to the zombies. They could be saved now.
"Is that a silencer?" Jared asked breathlessly as Ken pulled out his gun. There was something strange on the end of its barrel.
"Yeah." He glanced over his shoulder. "You know guns?"
"I have to," Jared replied darkly, and Ken nodded understandingly.
"Now, have any of you shot with silencers before?" he asked. We all shook our heads silently.
"Okay. Silencer's don't actually completely silence the gun - I know, stupid name. It muffles it and throws the sound so that people can't tell where the gunshot came from. Oh, also - I might not have time to tell you to plug your ears if I need to shoot."
"We haven't exactly been using ear protection over these past few months," Jared assured him dryly, and I realized that I had never even considered it in the six months I had been using guns to protect myself. Then again, I had known next to nothing about guns prior to the apocalypse.
"Get behind me," Ken suddenly hissed, and we lined up behind him. I tried to align myself with his body as best I could so as to make myself more difficult to see. I could only hope that Benji and Jared had thought to do the same - they were standing behind me.
"Hey, Ken," a strange male voice called from down the hall, sounding casual and friendly.
"Hey, Mark. Listen, could you come check my gun out? It's jammed - I don't want it to explode."
"Sure thing." Footsteps walked down the hallway towards us. Then Mark's voice sounded again, this time much closer. "Okay, give me - "
There was a sickening sound of two hard things striking together and I watched Mark's body come into view as he crumpled to the side of Ken. I refrained from stepping out from behind Ken until he said we could, however.
"Is he dead?" I asked timidly, seeing a small pool of blood beginning to gather underneath Mark's skull.
"Probably," Ken replied dismissively, racking his gun. The sound echoed around the hallway. "We're almost there. Come on." Swallowing down my nausea, I followed him, careful not to look at Mark again.
We stopped at a turn. "The door is around this corner," Ken whispered to us, so quietly that I missed some of his words and had to fill them in for myself. "Stay here."
He rounded the corner and we were left alone, shoulders pressed together and our hearts beating frantically.
"Hey. Boss said you need to clear out," I heard Ken say. There were a few more quietly muttered words before footsteps clattered down the hall in the opposite direction. A door opened and closed. Unsure if we were supposed to follow, we continued to stay put.
After a few more seconds, the door opened again. A figure suddenly came into the corner of my vision and I opened my mouth to scream instinctively. Ken's large hand clapped over my mouth, cutting the cry short. He glared at me and I guiltily whispered, "Sorry," as soon as he moved his hand.
"I am really glad I didn't have to use this," Ken noted casually, waving his gun in the air once we had entered the room. He turned on the safety and shoved it back into its holster.
I was too busy looking around the room to reply. Filing cabinets lined two of the walls, each drawer neatly and carefully labeled. One wall held several state-of-the-art computers on a desk that also held a handful of notebooks, stray writing utensils, and a few empty coffee mugs. Against the final wall, a couple of desks held half-filled pages of paper and there was a small bookshelf with many boring-looking books.
"Jared, Benji, you look in the filing cabinets for anything helpful," I instructed, snapping into work mode.
"What are we classifying as 'helpful?'" Benji asked as he headed for one row of filing cabinets, Jared for the other.
"Anything explaining how to get out, anything on any of us or our families, and anything about the zombie apocalypse."
"Everything in here is about the zombie apocalypse," Ken spoke up. I sighed.
"Okay, well, anything about the apocalypse that looks important. Ken, can you help me with the computers?"
"Sure." We walked over to the computers. I sat down at one and Ken squeezed into the chair situated next to me. Turning on the computer, I was unsurprised to be met with a password bar.
"What is it?" I asked, pointing to the screen. Ken reached over and typed in an insanely long password made up of random letters, numbers, and symbols. The system accepted it after a few tense seconds of deliberation.
"It's a completely random jumble of stuff," Ken explained. "Took me weeks to memorize. It's unbreakable."
"Smart," I murmured, opening the computer's files. There were dozens of folders. I clicked on one entitled, "The Bug," remembering what Dr. Morte had called Lydia.
There was a collection of pictures and a few documents. I clicked on the first picture and instantly felt hot anger rising within me.
In the picture, Lydia was walking hand in hand with Dr. Morte, smiling up at him innocently. In her grin, I saw the little girl that Benji had once known. Her face was open and friendly, and while tear tracks were prominent on her face, she was obviously happy, something I couldn't remember our Lydia ever being.
The next picture was of Lydia holding up a piece of paper with her name, age, and a fairly recent date scrawled on it, a date that I assumed marked the day she had been captured. It had been just a month and a couple of weeks ago. The child looked exhausted and pale, all happiness drained from her face.
The next picture was of Lydia with the all-too-familiar chains restricting her. She was sleeping curled up on a thin mat that looked like it wasn't doing much in the way of protecting her from the rough cave floor. Bruises marred her arm and she had a long, thin cut on one cheek.
There was one final picture. I was wrong, I realized as soon as I clicked on it - it wasn't a picture.
It was a video.
Against my better judgement, I clicked the play button and turned up the volume on the computer.
"What is your purpose?" Dr. Morte's voice rang through the room and Benji swore. Jared dropped the files he held in his hands. Even Ken jumped in shock.
"Sorry," I whispered, too intent on watching the video to really feel guilty for scaring them. The footage was taken in the cave where we had seen Benji's little sister. Lydia was standing at the edge of the light, her eyes squinting and her hands limp at her sides.
"I am the bug," she recited in answer to Dr. Morte's question, as if she had been forced to memorize the ominous words.
"What is the purpose of the bug?"
"Find the other children."
"And?"
"Lead them to you."
"Who do you report to?"
"Dr. Morte."
"Who do you trust?"
"Dr. Morte."
"Who will fix everything?"
"Dr. Morte." Lydia's hands were working themselves into and out of fists, over and over, no longer idle, as she gritted out the last two words.
"Good girl," Dr. Morte said darkly, and the video stopped.
Benji swore quietly and then again, louder. He slammed his hand against the cabinet. The rest of us sat in silence. This was a pain that was so private, I, for one, felt incredibly uncomfortable even merely witnessing it. However, I couldn't exactly leave the room.
I clicked on one of the two documents to distract myself from the bile rising in my throat. It was filled with dates and names of locations. Only one of them was the Costco.
"We weren't Lydia's mission," I suddenly realized, speaking without thinking, before I could fully recognize my thoughts.
"What?" Benji asked breathlessly, still sounding furious.
"Well, we were...but she had other missions, too. She wasn't tor - trained exclusively for us. There are a ton of dates and addresses here..."
I clicked on the next document and opened it alongside the first. In it, there were dates preceding lengthy reports. Even I could recognize them as mission reports.
"Lydia's been helping to take other children, too," I breathed.