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At the seventh, the door was closed. Lillian shook the handle. “Locked?” she said.
One of the others pulled out a long metal crowbar. “Thought we might need this,” he said. He used it, although it was loud, shoving it at where the handle was to pry the door open. When he was able to get an inch, Lillian lowered herself to stick her flashlight in where the lock was and push it back into the door. Then she paused and held the guy’s hand who was holding the crowbar. “I don’t hear anything,” she said. “No one’s stopping us.”
“Did they move them before we got here?” I asked. “Are we too late?”
“We’ll go in,” she said. “But assume they are still here. Use every precaution.”
The hallway was dark, predictably. The doors were all closed on this floor from what I could tell.
Something was off with the shadows down the hall. We’d gone in without light at first but Lillian shortly shone the beam of her flashlight ahead of us. Even as she did, I didn’t understand why some places were darker.
One of the guys with us rushed ahead of her, to a lump on the ground. “He’s dead,” he said, his face going pale.
The others rushed ahead. I froze in the door, my flashlight loose in my hand.
Dead.
They were dead.
It took me a moment to see the other lumps as bodies, with pools of blood. Maybe it didn’t seem real to me, because of the dark, but my head tingled, my eyes slid from one shadow to the other.
I wanted to throw up. We were too late.
I approached slowly, afraid to look but compelled to see, to prove to myself who was on the floor.
All of them I didn’t know, except one. “This was Joe. He was guarding the room I was in.” Because it was dark, I didn’t see the bullet holes or anything, but it was clear from the pools around them that they had been shot. No one heard the shots? The woman downstairs, she didn’t seem to have known.
“We’ll have to check the other rooms carefully,” one of the guys said. “They could still be in here.”
“I don’t think so,” Lillian said. “Too quiet.” She picked her head up, looking around the hallway. “If we had interrupted, they would have just come out and shot us by now. None of ours are out here, though. Where are they?” she asked me. “Which one were you in?”
I pointed to one of the apartment doors. “I think it was that one.”
We entered carefully. Tables were overturned, one dead man on the floor. Computers were destroyed.
“It couldn’t be the cartel,” I said. I only then noticed the smell, previously too shocked and numb to notice much of anything. It wasn’t like a long-dead rotting body or anything, just very off, gross. “They wouldn’t kill their own teammates.”
“Has to be Alice’s team,” one said.
“Check the bedrooms.”
I went to the one I’d been in. One of the guys went with me. He approached the door, telling me to step back. “On three,” he said. He motioned to my flashlight. “Shine the beam in but protect yourself with the edge of the door. I’ll cover us.” He held his gun ready. He must have been one with it loaded as he took the safety off.
I waited with the flashlight. When he wedged the door open, I stuck the light inside, sweeping the space, allowing him to be able to see in.
Two bodies on the floor. Neither moving. I almost dropped the flashlight, afraid to know.
“Who was in here?” he asked.
“Cornelius and—”
One of the bodies sat up instantly. “Present!” he said. “What happened? Let us out.”
We went to them. It was him, still bound but he’d been near Raven, still unconscious, but breathing.
“What happened to you?” I asked, kneeling while my partner helped cut his ties free.
“There was a black out, then a rush, a little shouting, but then silence,” Cornelius said. “I pretended to be passed out but no one came in. Lights came back on, then went out again and same thing only no shouting.” When his hands were free, he rubbed at his wrists.
We must have been just behind them. “What happened to Wil?”
“He was taken before it all happened. I don’t know where. But he was trying to use the camera, break it off the wall to use the wires or something. They came in and moved him to somewhere else.”
I checked Raven, opening an eye. “They’ve been keeping him under?”
“Kayli!” someone hissed from the other side of the apartment.
I left them, rushing over to the bedroom doors on the other side of the apartment, now open.
Inside was my father, a teenage girl I didn’t know, and Corey. All nude and tied up together like us, only huddled against the far wall.
“They could be tricking us again,” Jack was saying.
“Tell him you’re with us,” Lillian said.
“It’s okay,” I said. I pulled Lillian’s light away from her to shine it toward my face so they could see us. “We’re here to get you out. We should hurry.”
Corey seemed to react to this, holding out his wrists to us. “What happened?”
“We don’t know,
” I said. “But we’re here to get everyone out.”
“We have to get everyone who’s still alive,” Lillian said.
Corey retracted his hands. “What do you mean still alive?”
She went to him, a pocketknife ready, cutting his ties. “We don’t have time to explain. There’s an RV downstairs waiting for us. Someone needs to stay behind to call the police.”
“We can’t call them in,” I said.
“This is beyond us,” she said. She sniffed hard and focused on cutting Corey’s legs free. “We get our people out, we leave. Murder is not for us to deal with.”
“Who’s been murdered?” Corey asked, speaking louder.
“Joe,” I said. “The…cartel people. I don’t know who else.”
The teen girl was breathing funny, loud and fast.
“Don’t hyperventilate,” Lily said to her, working on her next. “Breathe slow, you’ll be okay.”
“Kayli,” my father said. “I’ll stay.” He was still bound, but other than the fear on his face, seemed untouched. They hadn’t been too much trouble I guessed. “I’ll call the police.”
“No,” I said.
“Kayli,” he said, more insistent, reaching for my arm to tug at it. “I understand it now. Not everything, but I know they’ve been helping me. Let me stay behind. I’ll tell them I was looking for my daughter who was in the hospital but the lights went out. They’ll ask me questions, detain me. I’ll tell them you were living here but I found the dead…called them in.”
“We won’t be able to hide from them forever,” Lillian said. “We’ll all be called in for questioning for this eventually.”
“Maybe,” Corey said. “But we can make sure we all get out and find out what happened, and not be dead in the process.”
“Someone has to stay,” Jack said. He lifted himself up after Lillian cut the binds. He crouched a bit and used his hands to hide his nudity. “That’ll be me. I won’t say anyone else was here. I promise.” He focused on me. “Let me do it.”
I didn’t know how to respond, sure that we all needed to leave. Dead…they could come back and finish this.
