“I’ll have the security team send it over.”
“What’s been done to capture the men that broke in?”
“Security enacted our protocols as soon as we knew there was a threat.”
“Any word yet on if they’ve been captured?”
“I know they called in the air squadron.”
“Shit.” They’d better get these fuckers or there could be hell to pay. It was one thing to capture them quietly. It was another to have to bring in such a lethal team that could bring attention to us.
“Sir, our whole operation could be compromised. There’s so much in the journals, so much information that they could use to stop us.”
“Then we’ll have to move up the timeline. Get me that video feed. I need to do some digging and find out who’s looking into us. You just keep working and get the final product finished.”
“There’s one more thing that you’re going to have to consider, sir.”
“What’s that?”
“When this is tested, it’s going to come out that this was created in a lab. And if you don’t get the journals back, it’ll only prove it.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I smirked. “I have that all covered.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Blake
“Hang on. I need to stop for a minute.”
We had been walking for what felt like hours. My feet were killing me because my shoes were soaked and my socks were rubbing against my feet. It felt like my feet were bleeding, but I wasn’t about to take my shoes off to find out. There was nothing I could do about it anyway. Parker leaned against the rock wall and slid to the floor. I followed suit and sighed when my feet finally had a reprieve.
“This was not the way I thought our day would end,” I muttered as I closed my eyes.
“Really? You saw this going differently?”
I rolled my head to look at him. “Yeah, walking around a mine was not part of the plan.”
“Huh,” he said, his shoulders shaking slightly. “I didn’t really see us jumping out a window of the research lab.”
“That was the strange part to you?”
“Well, to be fair, I’ve already been thrown through one window. I wasn’t really expecting it to happen twice in one week.”
“I didn’t throw you through the second window. You jumped through that all on your own.”
“Still, you can’t seriously think that this is normal.”
I shrugged. It didn’t really seem that odd to me. “Well, it’s not something that’ll happen every day. I’ll give you that much, but I think you’re going about this all wrong.”
“Is that right.”
“Yeah, you should be happy. This is an adventure.”
“In a mine. That’s the kind of adventure you would go on,” he said slowly.
“Well, not purposely, but you have to admit that it’s original,” I said with a grin.
“Okay, maybe, but that doesn’t mean this is my idea of a good time.”
“But think of all the stories we’ll have to tell. When I go home at Christmas, I’m definitely going to beat my brothers out for best stories of the year.”
“If we get to go home at Christmas,” he reminded me.
“Alright, if we get to go home at Christmas. Still, my brothers always beat me, but this will definitely put me in the number one spot.”
He stared at me strangely. “Sorry, but your family sounds kind of weird.”
“You would get it if you met them. We’re all very competitive.”
He chuckled slightly, his face almost sad.
“What?” I asked, wondering what had changed his demeanor so much.
“Nothing. I just…I was wondering what it would be like to be around my family again and have that kind of closeness.”
“You don’t have that?”
He shook his head. “Nah, not anymore,” he said quietly. “A few phone calls to my baby sister is about all the contact I have with them.”
“Why?”
“No one wants to hang around with a rapist.”
I sat up and twisted to look at him. “But they’re your family. They have to know that you didn’t do that.”
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “They do. That’s the problem. Everyone wants to fix everything, but this isn’t something they can fix. They all looked at me with pity and wondered how I was doing. I couldn’t take it, so I walked.”
I couldn’t imagine what it was like for him, to be made to feel like he was a rapist to the point that he would walk away from his family. It had to be a very lonely life.
Parker stood and held out his hand for me. “We should get moving. We can’t stay here too long.”
“Do you think we lost them?” I asked as we continued down the tunnel.
“I don’t think so.”
“What makes you say that?”
“They fired an RPG at us. They’re not likely to walk away until they have our dead bodies.”
A shiver ran down my spine at his words. It wasn’t like I was clueless as to what I was getting into when I started this, but having just come so close to death, I didn’t relish thinking about it any further.
“We need to have a plan for when we get out of this tunnel. If they’re waiting for us, we can’t go out with what little we’re armed with.”
“We have no way of calling Reed Security, or making contact with anyone else. Our only chance of getting out of this alive is to take them out before they take us out.”
“The good news is that this mine shaft is taking us all over the fucking place. With any luck, we’ll be able to pop up somewhere no one is waiting for us,” I said, trying to convince myself that’s what would happen.
An echo sounded down the tunnel and I stopped, placing a hand on Parker’s chest. We flattened ourselves against the wall, straining to hear anything we could. The voices were growing louder, but the echo was distorting the sound, making it impossible to understand what they were saying. It sounded like there was a fork in the tunnel up ahead, and they were coming from another direction.
“I’m going to move to the other
