The silence was devastating.

  “We need to stop the US military industrial complex,” Harry Junior said.

  “Defense contractors shouldn’t be allowed to lobby Congress,” Sam agreed.

  “That’s very insightful,” I told the fourth graders. “It’s important to be aware of things.”

  “When I eat corn it comes out of my butt looking the same,” Harry Junior said.

  Sam laughed at that.

  “I’d like to declare the dad joke-off a loss…” I said, then did the requisite pause. “For everyone in the room.”

  No smiles. Maybe this dad joke thing was tougher than it looked.

  “Let’s get back to the escape room we paid forty bucks each for,” I said.

  “Which is more than you spent on your entire wardrobe,” said McGlade. “Where’d you get those stylish Velcro shoes? Did you give a crack whore fifty cents?”

  My back had been hurting since Lake Flathead, hence the laceless gym shoes. I’d somehow aggravated an old injury.

  But I couldn’t remember how.

  What happened to me up north?

  Why did my back still ache?

  And how did I escape?

  CAPTIVE #82 / JACK

  I closed my eyes, then opened them, and couldn’t tell the difference.

  The darkness of my concrete coffin remained the same.

  I shivered, cinching my bathrobe tighter around my waist, the bed of rock salt beneath me getting under the fabric and pressing into my back, my legs, my ass.

  I was going to die there.

  Die in this awful, cramped position, my back in agony, my mind lost to dehydration, panic, and madness.

  And after I was dead, I would be encased in cement and made into one of those creepy statues with the blue-green glass eyes.

  I’d never see my family again. Mom and Dad. Phin. Sam.

  I’m sorry I won’t get to go to that escape room with you, Sam. I bet it we would have had fun.

  You’ll get your own solo adventures now. I hope they turn out better than mine.

  My eyes were closed, or maybe they were open—it didn’t matter—and I could picture us, at the Escape Room of Terror, talking to some unemployed actor who worked there between auditions, explaining the rules.

  Or maybe he didn’t explain the rules. Maybe he just left us there to figure it out for ourselves.

  Just like I’d been left here to figure it out for myself.

  I tried to adjust my position, the concrete block jabbing into my spine, pressing on my old injury.

  Broken back. Never fully healed.

  I was shot by a psycho named Wyatt, assisted by his sister, a freelance torturer called The Cowboy.

  Both long gone. But their legacy persisted.

  Aging was more than a collection of memories and experiences. It’s also an accumulation of injuries. The past came back to haunt us, and the pain compounded. We don’t really heal from anything.

  We just learn to live with it.

  Or we die from it.

  My mouth had gotten cotton-dry, and I’d lost sense of time.

  How long had I been imprisoned? Hours? Days?

  How long could I persevere?

  Was I even sure I was persevering?

  This was torture. I was being tortured.

  Minds break under torture.

  Am I broken?

  Am I dying?

  Am I dead?

  I had a brief but intense talk a while ago with a scientist named Dr. Frank Belgium and his wife, Sara Randhurst. They’d both had several near-killed experiences, maybe even more harrowing than the ones I’ve endured. They’d both survived a notorious serial killer named Torble, and Frank had an encounter with a demon (I could never figure out if that demon was figurative or literal) and Sara had escaped from a cannibal island run by Dr. Mordecai Plincer, a madman who used chemicals to enhance the strength and capacity for evil in human beings. His sick experiments resulted in a monster named Lester Paks.

  Sara told me Lester had his teeth filed to points so he could eat people better. Terrifying stuff.

  Our free-flowing, booze-enhanced discussion had encompassed many topics, including death.

  “Science still can’t define what death is,” Frank said. “Or why death occurs. Think about it. When you are pronounced dead, every single cell in your body is the same as it was a moment before. Every molecule is the the the same.” Frank had a stammer that was more endearing than annoying. “But they are no longer working like a synchronized symphony to keep your vital functions going. Respiration stops. Circulation stops. Digestion stops, or more correctly your microbiome begins to digest you. But to me, a molecular biologist, what happens in the brain as it dies is the most interesting.”

  “What happens?” I asked.

  “As hypoxia sets in, and the brain is starved of blood and oxygen, consciousness gets wonky.”

  Sara laughed at that. “Is wonky a science term, Frank?”

  “You may may may have read my book, Dissecting Wonkiness,” he joked. “It won a Wonky Award.”

  “How does consciousness get wonky?” I asked.

  “Time is relative, Einstein proved. And more science is is is being done to show that reality is subjective. We create spacetime by by by observing and interfacing with it. If you’ve ever engaged in a pleasurable activity you can feel as if three hours passed in three minutes. Or if you’ve ever been in pain, or taken a difficult test, or been stuck at a stoplight when you’re late for a meeting, you you you know thirty seconds feels like an hour. When you are in deep meditation, or in the process of dying, your concept of time gets wonky. Or or or it vanishes completely.”

  “My aunt hallucinated when she was in hospice,” Sara said. “Saw people who had died years ago. Had conversations with people who weren’t in the room.”

  “We all have heard that your whole whole whole life can flash before your eyes right before you die. What if that’s real? What if your aunt was really seeing and talking to people who really were there? What if brain death is your consciousness escaping its mortal shell and becoming one with all aspects of reality? Unbound by subjectivity, time no longer matters. The past, present, and future all happen at once. Our souls merge with eternity. Not just in this timeline, but in all possible timelines, according to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Or…”

  “Or?” Sara and I both asked at the same time.

  “It’s just a last-second neurotransmitter dump by the body to protect the brain from the encroaching inevitability of non-existence.”

  “So we aren’t eternal souls,” I said. “We’re just hallucinating before we die.”

  “We don’t get high on morphine,” Frank said. “Morphine activates morphine receptors that release dopamine, which is a thousand times more more more powerful. Our bodies evolved cannabinoid receptors, because humanity and marijuana use go back hundreds of thousands of years. THC doesn’t make us high. It tells our body to to to make itself high.”

  “So death is our brain taking us on one last trip,” I said back then.

  “So death is taking us on one last trip,” I said now, in my dark, cold, black tomb.

  I could be insane.

  I could be dying.

  I could be dead.

  I could be a soul a billion years in the future, revisiting this moment.

  I could be a computer program. Ending. Rebooting. Being deleted. Being reinstalled.

  I could be imagining everything. Hallucinating everything.

  I could be cursed by a witch.

  I could have hypoxia, oxygen deprivation, killing my brain cells.

  I could, right now, be in the Escape Room of Terror with Sam and Phin and Harry and Harry Junior.

  And I might not ever escape.

  JACK

  We’re never going to escape,” Phin said. “The clues are too hard.”

  “There has to be an idiot protocol,” McGlade said.

  Phin nudged him with an elbow. “You’d be the one to know.”

  “I’m serious. People are idiots. Many won’t be able to figure this out. So there has to be something in place to help the idiots move along. Or else they’d be stuck in this room forever.”

  “Like hints or cheats,” Harry Junior said.

  “Or maybe it’s timed,” I offered. “A door will automatically open if we don’t solve it after half an hour or so.”

  “It’s only been eight minutes,” Phin said. “You can check your phone to confirm.”

  I did check my phone. Phin was correct about the time, but I realized I didn’t have a signal.

  “I have no service,” I said.

  My four companions all pulled out their cells.

  “Me neither.” Harry frowned. “Must have a jammer, so no one can search the net for answers.”

  “Or,” Sam said, “it’s all a trap meant to kill us.”

  I couldn’t tell if my daughter was joking or not.

  “Wow, Mom. I’m kidding.”

  “I knew you were kidding.”

  “You looked at me with that mom face.”

  “You do have a mom face,” Harry said. “And mom jeans.”

  I looked to Phin for support. He shrugged. “It’s an escape room, honey. The kids know the difference between real and pretend.”

  That was probably the case.

  But did I know the difference?

  My lack of conviction reminded me of my ongoing issues with memory loss. Which, ironically, was comforting. If I remembered I was having memory issues, maybe my memory issues weren’t so bad.

  Unless it wasn’t dementia.

  Maybe it was something else.

  Maybe I was dying.

  I had a brief but intense talk a while ago with a scientist named Dr. Frank Belgium and his wife, Sara Randhurst. They’d both had several near-death experiences, maybe even more harrowing than the ones I’ve endured. They’d both—

  Wait? Wasn’t I thinking about that same exact thing recently? About death taking our brain on one last trip?

  I was thinking about that, I know I was, to take the mind off the pain in my back.

  My… back.

  “Battleship,” I said.

  “Your ass isn’t that big, Jackie. I’m just saying you could drop a jeans size or two.”

  “How do you win at Battleship?” I pressed on, ignoring McGlade.

  “You call out rank and file locations to your opponent,” Sam answered. “A-1 to J-10.”

  “Compare that with spines,” I said.

  “Your posture isn’t the best, Jackie. I didn’t want to say anything since Chandler called me a grammar Nazi.”

  I remember her saying that, at the bar.

  Or maybe I’m making made-up connections in my own head. Answering my own questions. Solving my own riddles.

  Either way, the made-up connection I was currently making felt extremely satisfying.

  “Vertebrae are numbered,” I explained. “C, T, and L.”

  “And the C matches a Battleship board,” Sam nodded, getting it. “C1 through C7 are vertebra numbers, and also Battleship numbers.”

  We all turned toward the X-ray of the skeleton. Phin reached for the spine.

  “The Cs are at the top, Daddy.”

  When Phin’s finger hit C5, he found a hidden button. He pressed it with a satisfying CLICK, and the door opened.

  I waited for congratulations that didn’t come. Instead, McGlade rudely pushed past and opened the door the smiling guy had originally locked.

  “Weird. It’s different than the lobby we entered through.”

  I exited the fake office last, and the room had indeed changed from a lobby area to what looked like an abandoned church, complete with pews, stained-glass windows, an altar, and an organ next to the choir risers.

  How was that possible? Did they completely strip the previous room and put together a whole new one?

  It was either the mother of all magic tricks, or I was losing my mind.

  I sidled up to McGlade. “Am I losing my mind?”

  “Can’t lose what you never had.”

  “Seriously, McGlade. I haven’t been the same, mentally, since Lake Flathead.”

  “I’ve never been good mentally. What’s your point?”

  “I think I might be losing my grip on reality.”

  “So grip it harder.”

  “I don’t know if this here and now is actually here and now.”

  Harry made a face. “Jesus, Jackie. It’s not all about you. There are other people in the world, you know. Maybe give them a chance to shine…”

  CHANDLER

  She dreamt vividly, lucidly, flying over a lush, green landscape unlike any she’d ever known.

  The sense of freedom, of liberation, of complete lack of responsibility, exhilarated Chandler in a way she’d never known.

  A rush of curiosity for curiosity’s sake, of unexplored realms and discovery, filled her with joy more than she had ever known.

  And that was the tragedy.

  That this silly pot dream was better than anything she’d ever experienced, and will likely be better than anything she ever will experience.

  The reality within the fantasy sent Chandler plummeting to the ground, picking up speed, the sensation of falling so acute and terrifying that right before she splattered onto the ground she opened her eyes and woke up, gasping.

  Morning had arrived, sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window.

  Chandler had passed out on the floor.

  I’ve slept in worse places. Much worse.

  Jack had provided a pillow and blanket. But during her dream/nightmare Chandler had managed to kick the blanket off and push the pillow under the table.

  She sat up and checked the clock on the oven. It read quarter past eight.

  I need to ask Jack where she got those edibles. That was intense.

  Chandler faced the floor and knocked out fifty push-ups, getting her heart going, her blood flowing. Then she stood and walked to the counter, reaching for the coffee, and a jolt of memory from the drug trip flashed in her mind.

  Something to do with a wendigo? And telephone poles?

  She couldn’t pinpoint it, and the more she tried to remember, the more elusive the memory became.

  Chandler made a pot of joe, extra strong, and went into the fridge for butter, ham, cheese, and eggs. She scrambled enough eggs for herself, realized that she had a housemate, and decided to see if Jack was awake and wanted some breakfast.

  Death at the window.

  What does that mean? Death at the window?

  Chandler walked into the great room and paused, mid-step.

  Gunpowder. I smell gunpowder.

  She had her Beretta out of her hip holster snake-strike fast and did a quick sweep of the room, focusing in on the hallway, finding two bullet holes in the ceiling next to the closed attic entrance hatch. No brass on the floor, but some rock salt that wasn’t there previously.

  Jack’s bedroom, empty. Bed, unslept in. Bathtub, a film at the bottom Chandler assumed was some kind of soap.

  I remember talking to Jack about taking a bath.

  Chandler quickly checked the other rooms, and stopped at the corner wall where the hallway began.

  Chips of paint, dotting the floor.

  They weren’t there previously.

  Chandler went to the front door, opened it, seeing the rental truck still in the driveway.

  Jack is gone. She didn’t drive off.

  Were there intruders?

  Maybe Jack scared them away, firing warning shots into the ceiling?

  Were they warning shots? Or was she aiming at a target?

  Could there be other places to hide in this house?

  She turned back to the hallway. The ceiling stealth access panel above her had a small plastic knob on it, and Chandler did a vertical jump and pinched it, pulling out the attached retractable cord and then pulling down the folding wooden ladder.

  She ascended like a cat, quick and sure-footed, and did another quick sweep with her weapon before taking out her EDC flashlight to penetrate the depths of attic darkness.

  Rough plywood flooring, fiberglass insulation between the roof joists. She hopped up and moved in a crouch, keeping low so she didn’t bump her head on the sloping rafters, seeing pairs of small, black circles on the floor at regular intervals. She knelt next to two of them, leaning down, and realized they were an eye-width apart and not circles at all, but screen-covered holes.

  Peep holes.

  From the attic, a person could look down into the house and see every room.

  Not a promising discovery.

  She climbed down out of the attic and walked back into the great room, thinking.

  House is empty.

  Maybe Jack had chased the intruders away.

  Maybe they’d abducted her.

  Maybe a bat got in, Jack shot at it and missed. Then she got up before me and continued the scavenger hunt while I slept.

  Chandler went back into the kitchen and stared at the stove.

  Did I see someone at the window last night?

  She approached the window, seeing a smudge where someone had touched it.

  But that wasn’t what made Chandler gasp and bring up her weapon.

  The thing that surprised her was in the backyard.

  A new concrete statue on the grass, posed kneeling with front-clasped hands like a person praying, staring into the house with green-blue glass eyes.

  JACK

  Someone’s praying,” Harry Junior said, pointing to a pew.

  I looked at the figure, immediately knew it was a statue, and immediately felt my stomach sink.

  I’d gotten my fill of statues in Lake Flathead. Even if I couldn’t remember the end of the trip, I remembered those cement monstrosities.

  Sam and Phin approached it, and I wanted to warn them not to, but I just silently stood there.

  It was fine, I reassured myself. This was an amusement attraction. We’re all safe.

  Harry and his son went to the opposite side of the makeshift church.

  “I haven’t seen an organ that big since my shower this morning,” McGlade said. “Hey, Jackie, want to come over here and play with a huge organ? You can tickle it with your fingers.”