How the heck did they keep changing rooms like that?

  “Merry-go-round horsies!” Harry Junior correctly declared.

  In the carnival-themed room, I counted seven full-size carousel horses, each on its own flat wooden base with rollers on the bottoms. They were various different colors, with various patterns and designs painted on them.

  Elsewhere in the room were seven horse stalls, large television monitors on all four walls, and an enormous cylindrical metal tank with a big skull and crossbones poison symbol painted on the side.

  “The horsies have spikes on their saddles,” Harry Junior said, running his hand over it.

  “That’s so no one tries to ride them,” Sam told him.

  “I still want to ride them. Dad, boost me up.”

  “I’m not paying for another colorectal surgery,” McGlade said, offering no further explanation. “What are we supposed to do here? Push them back into their pens?”

  Everyone agreed that seemed like the obvious move. Though detailed, the horses were made of hard plastic rather than carved from wood, and lighter than they looked.

  We spent a few minutes getting all the horses in a row. When each was shoved into a stall their tails clicked into a compartment, which was a hint that we were on the right track and something was going to happen when we finished the task.

  Phin pushed the last horse into place—

  —and nothing happened.

  “Well, that’s horseshit,” McGlade said.

  The kids laughed.

  “Maybe the order is wrong,” I suggested.

  I pulled the horse nearest to me out of its stall and began to examine it closer. Over the base color of red there were small abstract squiggles and symbols, each a few centimeters tall. Dozens of them, all over the surface of the animal.

  Sam, scrutinizing a blue carousel horse, announced, “This orange horse has the letter B on it. On its mane. It’s bigger than all the other designs.”

  I checked my horse’s mane and found no letters.

  “Got the letter M over here,” Phin said. “Blue horse, letter on the right front leg.”

  “On this green one I found an upside down V with line going through it,” said Harry Junior.

  “You mean an A?” Sam asked him.

  “I found an A,” said Harry Junior.

  I finally found an R on mine, on the underside of its chin, and announced it to my fellow escapees.

  “On this yellow horse, I found its dick,” McGlade said. “This thing is hung like a horse.”

  The kids laughed again. Sam went to him and said, “There’s an N here, Uncle Harry. By the tail.”

  “I found an N,” McGlade said. “By the tail.”

  Sam found the letter I on a light purple horse, and when we all searched the last equine Phin found an O.

  Sam said, “The letters are A, B, I, M, N, O, and R.” She made a face. “No words can be made out of that.”

  “Abimnor,” Harry said. “Try that word.”

  “That’s not a word, Uncle Harry.”

  “Sure it is. As in; Abimnor, brother of Traydorn, of the Barbarian Viking Planet.”

  Traydorn?

  Harry scratched the stubble on his face. “Traydorn was that missing persons case from Lake Flathead. Hey Jackie, did we ever save that kid and his fiancée?”

  Did we? Did someone?

  I couldn’t remember.

  JACK

  I can’t remember,” McGlade said, “when I’ve been this tired. Probably never. Or maybe that time I worked for Michelin. Now that job was tiring.”

  “I’m not a huge fan of dad jokes, Harry. Especially right now.”

  “Have you heard that one before?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I was worried it was a retread.”

  I heard Traydorn moan, and wasn’t sure if it was from the hell he’d gone through, or McGlade’s terrible puns.

  “I really am out of steam. Jackie, can you take over the digging?”

  “I don’t have a prosthetic limb,” I reminded him.

  Something hard dropped onto my chest and I yelped.

  It was Harry’s detached prosthetic limb.

  “Don’t say I never gave you a hand,” he said.

  “How long have you been waiting to use that joke?”

  “Fifteen years. Now climb over me.”

  I did. McGlade was still damp in a bad place. And, oddly, warmer.

  “I peed myself again,” Harry said.

  “It’s okay,” I reassured him. “You couldn’t help it.”

  “Oh, I could have helped it. I did it because my crotch was cold. From the previous peeing.”

  Traydorn, so dehydrated he was nearly dead, made a soft sound like a chuckle.

  Guys and their potty humor.

  McGlade’s hand had locked into an open palm position, and I used it like a garden spade, repeatedly striking at the hole he’d already made.

  Time passed. Or maybe it didn’t. I went to a place in my head beyond meditation.

  All that existed was me, the dark, and the wall.

  All I wanted was to get through the wall, and get out of the dark.

  The progress was so slow it didn’t feel like progress, but I was going to bust that concrete even if it was the last thing I—

  Harry shook my shoulder, “Jackie, I have an important question.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, I can’t see you, but I’m listening to you grunting, so I have to ask.”

  Here it comes.

  “How many of my fingers have you got in your hole?” Harry said.

  “I got the whole hand in there, McGlade. I got the whole damn—”

  And then I was through the block, and a weak female voice said, “Tray?”

  “Mia!” croaked Tray.

  “Hiya, Mia,” Harry said. “Welcome to the party.”

  JACK

  Dad, it’s not an M,” Sam was examining the blue merry-go-round horse. “You had it upside down. It’s a W. So the letters are A, B, I, N, O, R, and W.”

  “Winorba,” McGlade said.

  “That’s not a word, Uncle Harry.”

  “Winarbo.”

  “Not a word.”

  “Ramboner.”

  “That’s the wrong letters,” Sam said. “And it’s not a word.”

  Harry leaned over and whispered to me. “It is a word. I used to own that on VHS. Same director who did Sperminator 2, Spoogement Day.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I whispered back.

  “Because if I think of a joke and I don’t say it out loud, they build up inside me and I might explode.”

  “For the sake of humanity,” I told him, “explode.”

  “It spells rainbow,” Sam declared.

  So we pulled out all of the wheeled horses and rearranged them in the proper order—

  —and nothing happened.

  We made sure all of their tails were in their proper sockets, but not a single thing in the room changed. And the self-opening and closing door didn’t open.

  “Maybe the puzzle is broken?” Phin asked.

  The giant flat screen monitors on all four walls blinked to life, and the smiling guy in the lab coat stared down at us.

  “It isn’t broken,” he said from the multiple televisions. “And in exactly five minutes, I’m going to release the gas. Then I’m going to harvest your organs. It doesn’t matter that you refused to sign the consent form. I’m going to find out your blood type all on my own.”

  He began to laugh.

  Then one of the screens became a countdown timer, beginning at 5:00.

  The other three screens…

  Operating room footage of organ replacement surgeries. Real surgeries, in graphic detail.

  “I already had a heart transplant,” McGlade said. “I want to hold onto it, for at least a few more years.”

  “Dad, this is fake, right?” Harry Junior asked.

  The smiling guy came back on all four screens. “No, it isn’t fake. You have four minutes and forty-nine seconds to escape. Forty-eight, forty-seven…”

  The images flipped back to the medical procedures, and the timer.

  I looked at Sam, wondering if she was enjoying this.

  Her expression told me she was just as freaked out as I was.

  JACK

  I’m freaking out,” I said.

  Being confined alone in one concrete tomb was awful. But somehow being imprisoned with three other people made it even more claustrophobic.

  “Do you want me to take over digging?”

  “It depends. Did you piss yourself again?”

  “Maybe.”

  I continued to chip away at the wall. The literal fourth wall.

  One of McGlade’s metal fingers bent backward.

  I kept chipping.

  Another finger bent.

  I kept chipping.

  I was doing it for my family.

  I was doing it for Tray and Mia, who clung to life while they also clung to each other.

  I was doing it for Harry.

  Well, maybe not for Harry.

  But I was doing it for me. Whether any of this was real or fake or whatever it might be, I wasn’t going to let it continue for one more goddamn—

  The hand broke through.

  And a stream of light came in.

  It was a tiny trickle, but so bright it blinded me. Every color of the spectrum, a complete and glorious rainbow of pure energy, red and orange and yellow and green and blue and indigo and violet all blending together into a heavenly luminescence, so bright it hurt my ears.

  Wait… why did it hurt my ears?

  Light doesn’t make a noise.

  What I heard was something different.

  What I heard was the distinctive sound of gunshots.

  CHANDLER

  Forty meters away from the men, Zeke turned and saw Chandler sprinting.

  He yelled to the others, and at thirty meters away he lifted his rifle.

  At twenty-five meters away, Chandler dropped to one knee and brought up her Beretta, as Vern and Toddy raised their weapons.

  Zeke got off one shot.

  Chandler got off three.

  Zeke missed.

  Chandler did not miss.

  Three men slumped to the ground, leaking brains.

  Chandler got up and continued her sprint, slowing down enough to shoot each fallen man three more times in their skulls, quickly replacing her magazine, and then coming in on the passenger side of the tow truck as Mick got out of the driver’s side.

  Chandler shot him in the shoulder, through the cab. Then she scrambled up and in, over the seats, and launched herself at the man as he fell down, pinning his shoulders to the dirt, sticking the hot barrel of her subcompact behind his ear.

  “Entrance to the pole barn,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “I ain’t telling you shit.”

  It took forty-seven seconds for Chandler to prove him wrong.

  JACK

  The Escape Room of Terror was living up to its name, and as the timer counted down past three minutes and no one knew what to do I kept eyeing the fake giant metal container of poisonous gas and kept thinking that maybe it wasn’t fake after all.

  The transplant surgery videos were graphic and huge and overwhelming, and I wondered how feasible it was that a black-market organ harvesting operation could actually exist in a strip mall in Thousand Oaks, California.

  I stared at the carousel horses, and then felt Sam’s tiny hand grip mine. Tight.

  “It has to be rainbow,” she said. “There are no other clues anywhere.”

  But rainbow wasn’t the answer.

  If it wasn’t the answer, what was it?

  And that’s when everything came together in my head.

  I knew.

  I knew everything.

  And I understood it all.

  I opened my mouth to make the announcement, but right before any sound got out of my mouth I stopped myself, and stared down at my daughter.

  Then I crouched so we could look at each other, eye-to-eye.

  “Samantha Adams Troutt-Daniels,” I said. “You’re the smartest one in this room. If rainbow isn’t the answer, why would they put those letters on the horses?”

  Her little nose crinkled up. “It’s not the answer. So… so it must be a clue.”

  Sam closed her eyes, her face as serene as when she was asleep. Phin came over.

  “You guys okay?” he crouched down next to us.

  I put my finger to my lips to shush him.

  Come on, Sam.

  Figure it out.

  You can figure this out.

  You can—

  Her eyes popped open, and she said, “It’s the colors.”

  “What colors, pumpkin?” her father asked.

  “The horses, Dad. They’re all the colors of the rainbow. I learned them when I was a kid. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. It’s an acronym. Roy G. Biv. It’s Roy G. Biv, everyone!”

  We rearranged the horses in their pens, lining them up according to the spelling of Roy G. Biv while I beamed with pride that my brilliant daughter solved—

  “Nope,” McGlade announced. “That didn’t do shit.”

  I checked the ticking clock on the monitor.

  Fifty-six seconds left.

  “Uncle Harry, you got indigo and violet backwards,” Sam said. “Indigo is the dark purple horse, violet is light purple.”

  Harry and Harry Junior quickly pulled both carousel horses out of their pens, and then played horse bumper cars, banging their heads together like stags during rutting season.

  “Giddy-up!” Harry Junior yelled.

  “Quit horsing around,” McGlade countered.

  Thirty seconds on the clock.

  “Rein in the horseplay,” Phin said.

  “It’s my son,” said McGlade. “He’s trying to stirrup trouble.”

  Boys will be boys, but I still wasn’t sure if this escape room was make-believe or actually a plot to steal our organs.

  With ten seconds left the finally sorted our their horses and returned them to their pens in the proper order.

  I spun to watch the door we’d entered and exited through so many times, knowing for sure it would open automatically.

  But it didn’t open automatically.

  Instead, the giant metal cylinder with the skull and bones poison symbol on it emitted a low, rumbling noise, and began to shake—

  —falling onto its side and revealing a small, dark opening.

  Only high enough to crawl through.

  Crawling. Ugh.

  As a group we hurried to it, and Sam gave me a nudge.

  “Go on, Mom. You’re the bravest.”

  I shook my head. “You’re the bravest, baby. This is your adventure. Go for it.”

  Sam hesitated. She looked at her father, who nodded, looked at me again, gave me a thumbs-up, and then darted into the hole.

  “Go protect her,” I told Phin.

  “On it.”

  He ducked in after her. Then I squatted down, ready to crawl forward into the darkness—

  —and I became paralyzed.

  I thought I’d figured it all out.

  I had figured it all out.

  But the fear was still there, holding me back.

  JACK

  What are you waiting for, Jackie?” Harry said.

  For some reason I couldn’t go through the hole that we’d just cleared of blocks enough to squeeze through.

  He gave me a shove, but I pushed back.

  “There were gunshots.”

  “And in here we’re an easy, defenseless target. We need to get out. Move it.”

  But I couldn’t move.

  JACK

  Twenty seconds left on the clock, Jackie,” Harry said. “What are you waiting for?”

  But I couldn’t move.

  THE ARTIST

  The Artist Knows Something Is Wrong.

  He Hears Gunshots.

  He Hears Screaming.

  Screaming Is Normal From Inside The Barn.

  But This Is Coming From Outside The Barn.

  The Artist Leaves The Secret Art Room.

  The Artist Listens.

  The Artist Listens Harder.

  The Artist Hears One More Gunshot.

  The Artist Walks Between The Stacked Blocks And The Side Of The Barn, To The Tractor That Holds The Wall.

  On The Back Of The Tractor Is The Chainsaw.

  The Artist Picks It Up.

  The Artist Listens.

  The Artist Hears Something.

  The Artist Hears Something Horrible.

  The Art To Be… Has Gotten Out.

  JACK

  I knew what was wrong.

  I’d been locked up in the dark so long I was afraid to leave it, because then I’d find out the truth. Whatever the truth might be.

  Dying. Dead. Hallucinating. Tripping. Imagining. Remembering. Fantasizing.

  The answer was through that hole in the blocks.

  Going through wouldn’t just free my body.

  It would free my mind. And my soul.

  I was afraid. And I hesitated.

  But it was only a hesitation.

  I didn’t know the answer. But Chandler was mostly right when she went on that rant in the bar.

  Nobody knows anything.

  But I had the courage to face anything.

  So I crawled through the blocks, off of the rock salt, onto a cold concrete slab.

  Ahead of me, a wall of aluminum.

  We’d gotten into the pole barn. That was a plus.

  I didn’t know if there was any way out of the pole barn. The garage door was walled off with concrete blocks.

  That was a minus.

  And the wild old man who’d imprisoned me here was likely nearby.

  That was an even bigger minus.

  I helped Harry out, and gave him the finger over the lips sign for staying quiet, returned his fake hand, cinched the belt on my tattered bathrobe, and then we helped Mia and Traydorn out, and the four of us walked between the metal wall and the concrete block wall, slowly and carefully and quietly.