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“More coal!” I called. “We have to get through the gates.”
“It won’t be enough,” Stellen said. “We need more fuel. The coal takes too long to build speed.”
“Any suggestions?” I asked.
He tipped his head toward the door. “Fat is fuel.”
I gritted my teeth and turned to Wu. He raised his brow, leaving the final call up to me.
Suddenly, I realized I had a lot more in common with Matri than I’d expected. Because faced with my own death or making another person suffer, I took the easy road. “Throw him in.”
Twenty-Three
Zed
The lab looked like something out of a horror film. Corpses hung from hooks and were laid out on metal slabs. One whole wall bore shelves filled with body parts floating in colorful liquids. Along another wall, a row of dog-sized cages held the meek forms of prisoners too broken from pain to call for help.
Everything in me yearned to help them, but the sounds from the room we’d just fled indicated the guards had finally managed to break through the other door. If we didn’t move quickly, we’d be praying for the luxury of dog kennels.
Carmina barely spared the prisoners a glance as she ran through the lab. She was mad at me, but I found myself struggling to feel guilty. Once we escaped—if we survived, that is—we had one hell of a fight waiting for us. But until that happened, we needed each other to survive, whether she liked it or not.
She reached the door on the far side of the lab and inspected the panel. “This one’s easier,” she said. “Just have to hit this button to open it.”
“Wait,” I whispered. “What if there are more guards out there?”
“You got a better suggestion?”
I pointed over the metal tables. A ventilation shaft hooked down from the ceiling. “That’s got to lead to the top.”
She glanced from the door to the shaft, and given her mood, I expected her to argue. But she must have come to the same conclusion I had about working together because she nodded. “Hurry.” She ran and leapt onto the table. She was just tall enough to knock the vent cover off the tube. Her hair flew behind her as fresh air spilled out. “Give me a hoist, will ya?”
I joined her on the table and all but threw her up into the shaft. She didn’t hesitate to pull me in after her. I pulled the vent cover up with me and and just got it snapped into place before the guards ran into the lab. We sat quietly as they ran to the other door and opened it. As I expected, a trio of guards rushed forward to meet them. As they shouted and argued, Carmina took the explosive Tuck had given us for the job and laid it beside the vent cover. She carefully pushed the button that would activate the timer. In ten minutes, the lab and everyone in it would be destroyed.
That done, we crawled as fast as we could through the tunnels to the outside. As we moved, I prayed that nothing delayed us on the way out or our ashes would spend the rest of eternity mingling with those of the monsters we’d come to kill.
* * *
It took three minutes to reach the ground floor of the building. The vent opened into a washing room. A couple of prisoners looked up from their work of sorting through laundry, but didn’t react to seeing two humans crawl out of a ventilation shaft.
A human guard stood just outside an open door, smoking a cigarette. As we approached, his walkie-talkie let out a gasp of static. A voice shouted to be on the lookout for two prisoners. He turned down the volume and took another drag of his cigarette. It turned out to be his last.
Then we were running across the main plaza in front of the commander’s building. On the large banner, Carmina’s image watched us run for our lives.
On the far side of camp, the train’s whistle shouted into the air. The clock in the center of the plaza showed it was two minutes after six.
“We’re late,” she yelled over her shoulder.
“Train’s taking off late too. We can still make it.”
We dug in and pumped our legs faster. Behind us, the sound of the prison alarm squawked over the loudspeakers. Ahead of us, the sun slipped below the horizon. The vampires in the bunkers below our feet woke from their sleep, and the first thing they’d hear upon rising was that the legendary Dr. Death had been murdered by two prisoners. There would be hell to pay. I just prayed that by the time they mustered themselves for the hunt, we’d be safely on that train.
“Faster,” I shouted. “Faster!”
Twenty-Four
Matri
“Faster, faster,” I whispered, urging the train to gallop. We’d pulled from the station so slowly that the guard Bravo had kissed didn’t even have to jog to keep up with our car as he shouted for us to halt. Luckily he didn’t have a gun, nor enough to lose to try to jump onto the car. When he reached the end of the platform he spun and ran to the phone by the office door to call in reinforcements.
