Red Awakening (Red Zone 2)

“They’ve got to be here somewhere.” A voice came from beneath them, making Keiko hold her breath.

“They’ve got to be hiding,” another voice said. “You, guard the stairwell. The rest of you, spread out, check everywhere—including the elevator shaft.”

Heavy footsteps ran off, but still they didn’t dare move, unsure who remained beneath them. The hum of the air-conditioning pipes seemed to grow louder as Keiko’s hearing became more focused. The air was thick and musty, filled with the dust whipped up by their presence.

“You think they’ve found the panic room?” a voice said.

Mace tensed and shot Keiko a look. She arched her eyebrows. It was the first she’d heard of it, too.

“I doubt it,” someone else said. “Shepherd keeps the locations of those things to herself. I’d be surprised if they even knew there was one.”

“Where do you think it is?”

“My guess? The office, probably.”

Keiko’s mind raced. Panic room. A safe place to hide. Somewhere to ride this whole mess out. But where? Not the office. They were wrong about that. The office was the place Miriam would have felt most secure and was also the room that had the most security attached to it. No, a panic room would make the most sense in a place where Miriam felt vulnerable. Her eyes snapped to Mace. The bedroom! It had to be.

He pursed his lips and made a soft shh noise at her, which made her glare back. Of course she wasn’t going to make a noise. She didn’t want to die. They lay there for what seemed like hours, the steel beams, mesh, and cables biting into their bodies as they listened to the Freedom fighters moving about beneath them. The dust grew thicker, as though attracted to them, and the air became dense.

Keiko’s nose twitched, and she slowly reached up to rub it. Mace’s eyes snapped to her, and he frowned. She was about to smile at him, to silently signal that everything was fine. But it wasn’t. Her nose began to tingle, and she knew what was coming. She was going to sneeze. And there was no stopping it. He opened his mouth, probably to warn her to be silent. But it was too late. She rammed her face into the crook of her arm.

And sneezed.

…

Mace saw the sneeze coming and sent out sound waves to counteract the noise, but he was still new to this noise-dampening thing, and he didn’t quite get the frequency right. Although the sneeze wasn’t as loud as it would have been, it could still be heard.

“What was that?” a voice barked.

There was nothing they could do but lie still and hope they weren’t found.

“Check the elevator shaft again.”

“We’ve been over it twice. There’s no way they could have climbed out of the elevator and into the shaft without us spotting them. There’s no place to hide in there.”

“What about the ceiling?”

Keiko’s fingernails dug into Mace’s arm, and he clamped his hand over hers, holding it tight.

“I can’t see an access panel,” someone said.

“Yeah,” another voice chimed in. “You’d need to crack open one of the ceiling tiles to get into the crawl space. It was done in my apartment. They had to replace the tile when they were through ’cause they broke it to bits getting in there. Cost me a fortune.”

“My apartment has access built in,” the first voice said.

“You see any access?” the other guy demanded.

There was silence as Mace quietly released Keiko’s hand and inched his way down toward the gun at his side.

“There’s no way they’re up there,” the second voice said. “Even if there was an access panel,

there’s nothing around here they could climb on to get up there. No chair. Tables. Ladders. There’s no sign anyone stood on something to reach the ceiling.”

Those words made Mace insanely grateful that he was freakishly large and able to access the crawl space without help.

“Where the hell are they, then?” The first voice again. “We saw them on camera walking through the apartment. There’s no way they could have slipped past us. I want these two. I want them bad. That asshole killed two of our people. He isn’t getting away with that. Not on my watch.”

“Maybe they went out on the ledge again?” a woman said. “There’s balcony access. They wouldn’t need to break a window.”