“Hey,” he said reaching for his weapon, knowing something strange had happened. “How’d we get in the hallway? What’s going on?”
Damn! Allie leaped back again into the left guard—she never even had the chance to put the right guard to sleep, and he knew something had been possessing his body.
“Something’s wrong here!” he said.
There was no time to think now, so Allie tried something she had never done before; she leaped from one guard to the other and back again, over and over, back and forth, staying just long enough to keep them from doing anything she didn’t want them to. Faster and faster she bounced, until she was seeing double—two separate images from two pairs of eyes. She kept increasing the speed of her jumps, images flickering like a projector getting up to speed, until she couldn’t tell whose body she was in anymore. Then she realized that she was skinjacking them both at once! Allie settled into the rhythm of this alternating current. It was exhausting, but she had no choice.
“What’s going on?” Seth asked.
“Move it,” she said and found that the words came out of both men’s mouths simultaneously. Striding in unison, they came to the first set of security doors, and punched in the code, bringing them one step closer to escape.
They needed to be buzzed through the next door, and the guard on duty asked,
“Where are you taking this prisoner?”
Both guards said in unison, “Prisoner transfer.”
The guard on duty chuckled at the apparent coincidence, and buzzed them through. Allie realized that both men were sweating profusely, but she couldn’t do anything about that. They were also fully awake, and knew everything that was happening to them—and although they struggled to get control of their own bodies, they had no experience with such a thing. As long as she kept hammering them down, she would stay in control.
They made it through one more door without incident. Ahead was one more guarded door, then they’d be in the prisoner admissions area—kind of like a criminal’s lobby. After that they would be home free.
But before they got through that last security door, from an adjacent corridor came a small, bald man with an unforgiving face.
“What are you doing? Why isn’t this prisoner in his cell?”
Allie’s hearts sank. This was the warden. She couldn’t bluff her way past him, because any transfer would have already gone through his office, and he would know about it. And so she did the only thing she could. She began leaping into him as well, turning her two-step dance into a waltz.
One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three . . .
The warden tried to speak, but it came out as a stutter. “Uh . . . Uh . . . Uh . . .”
Left-right-forward, left-right-forward . . .
And in a moment, Allie was seeing through three sets of eyes instead of just two. It was the hardest thing she had ever done. It was like juggling, body-juggling, and if she bobbled any of them, it was all over. But perhaps it was worth the risk, because the guard at the admissions door wasn’t going to question the warden.
“Good evening, sir,” said the guard as they approached the door.
All three skinjacked men nodded, and the guard buzzed them out to the deserted admissions area, watching with only mild interest as they strode out the front door into the chilly night.
“I’m gonna get shot now! I know it!” Seth said in a panic.
Allie had all but forgotten Seth, the single member of the foursome she wasn’t skinjacking. “Quiet!” she said in a three-voice chorus. It took even more energy to speak with three sets of vocal chords under her command, so conversations had to be kept to a minimum. She reached into her pocket, all three men mimicking the same exact motion. While the guards came up empty-handed, the warden had his car keys in his hand. He hit a button and the Lexus in the warden’s parking space unlocked.
Seth, who took the passenger seat, mumbled to himself all the things that could go wrong as they drove out into the city, and Allie simply could not deal with the distraction. “Stop! Talking!” her three voices told him.
She hadn’t lived long enough to get her license, and on top of it, it was near impossible to drive when she had three points of view, but with the aid of the warden’s muscle memory she managed to keep the Lexus on the road, and mostly in her own lane. Soon she was able to narrow her focus, and make the warden’s eyes her primary ones, although the two guards in the backseat perfectly copied the motions of the warden’s hands on the wheel.
She drove down a frontage road, afraid to get onto the freeway. Then, when they were about ten miles out of the city, she turned onto a residential street, dead quiet at this time of night. She pulled over to the curb, turned to Seth, and struggled to say, “Get! Out! Good! Luck!”
Seth hesitated for a moment. “Right here? But—”
“Go!”
He didn’t need another invitation. “Well . . . Thanks. I mean . . .” And since there was nothing he could say that would be adequate, he gave her a genuine smile, then opened the door and ran, disappearing into the dark neighborhood.
Once he was gone, Allie turned off the headlights, turned off the engine, and continued to jump. Guard to guard to warden; guard to guard to warden.
There would be a manhunt. Seth would be hunted down like an animal—and with those bandages on his face he’d be easy to spot . . . but Allie suspected he was streetwise, and much smarter than people gave him credit for. With any luck, they’d never catch him. And if they did, she could free him again.