No Escape by Julie Moffett
Chapter Twenty-Five
Slash
I readied myself for a target. When the first door popped open, I shot and was rewarded with flashing lights around the door, indicating a hit.
Easy. Too easy.
I quickly got into a rhythm of shooting at the targets. However, as the game went on, the doors opened for less time and were widely separated. It became much harder for me to hit all the targets.
Suddenly two doors opened at once, and I could only hit one target at a time no matter how fast I pivoted. The pace continued to pick up until three and four doors were opening simultaneously, making it impossible to hit everything.
The game abruptly ended, with the light bar displaying a simple message.
NO WINNER.
I looked around, realizing everyone had gathered behind me, watching. Winston looked especially stunned. “That was incredibly accurate shooting. Aren’t you a computer guy?”
“I am,” I confirmed. “But, as you know, I’ve had some training in other areas as well.” It was a huge understatement, but now wasn’t the time or place to go into that. Still, if I wasn’t mistaken, he looked slightly impressed. It wasn’t much, but I’d take it.
“That was incredibly intense, Slash,” Alessa said. “What do you have to do to win?”
“Hit all the targets, I guess,” I said. “Which is technically impossible for me to do alone.”
“I’ll help,” Gio said. “Remember, marksman is my profession.”
He sat down in the chair next to me and inserted his ticket. It was sucked in by the chair but rapidly ejected. “Hey, why can’t I play?”
“I had to try a different chair before I found one that worked,” I said.
Gio tried another chair with the same results. “It’s still not working.”
“What if the number we got from the scale corresponds to the seat you have to use in order to play?” Clarissa suggested.
I looked down at my seat and realized she was right. The chair sank when you sat in it, which meant it could be recording our weight. The chair that had worked for me was the farthest away from the scale. I was number six, so Seat Six was mine.
“That’s exactly it,” I said, impressed with her observation skills. “The seat sinks down when you sit in it, so it must be activating a hidden scale that weighs the individual to make sure the right person is in the right chair. I suspect that means we’re all going to have to play the game to win.”
“I’ve never played a shooting game before,” Mia said, throwing up her hands. “What if I can’t hit anything?”
“Just aim, fire, and do your best,” Gio said. “You’ll get the hang of it after a few shots.”
“Gio is right,” I added. “We have to try. Everyone, please get your number out. If you don’t have a number yet, go to the scale and get one. I’m sitting in Seat Six, so Seat One must be at the far end of me. Gio, you are number one, so go see if the first chair works for you.”
Gio sat in the chair and slid the paper in. After a moment, his gun lit up. “It worked.”
“Good. Everyone else, seat yourself according to your number.”
“I told you we should have bought the body armor before we got to the castle,” Winston said to Clarissa in an exaggerated whisper as he headed to the scale.
I pretended not to hear.
When everyone had sat down and inserted their papers, I began a countdown. “On the count of three, I’m going to shoot the start button and the game will begin. One, two, three.”
Everyone started blasting, with us easily hitting all the targets, some taking multiple hits. But as we progressed through the game and the pace intensified, we began missing too many targets while hitting many of the same ones.
I swore beneath my breath as the game came to a crescendo and ended with a displayed message on the panel bar.
NO WINNER.
“We didn’t win?” Clarissa said, sounding surprised. “Why? We shot so much stuff.”
“We didn’t hit all the targets,” I pointed out. “Or at least, not enough of them.”
“That’s because we need to coordinate our efforts better,” Gio said. “Like everything else, we need a strategy.”
I nodded, so Gio continued. “How about if Slash and I take two targets apiece, and everyone else be responsible for just one target? Ignore all the other targets, no matter how tempting they are. But when your target shows itself, shoot everything you’ve got at it.”
Gio and I took the top and bottom targets on the sides, as they were the most difficult. We assigned everyone else the remaining targets.
“Is everyone clear which target is yours?” I asked.
The team nodded, so we retrieved our papers that had been ejected from the chair slots and inserted them again.
“Just remember, focus on your target of responsibility and don’t look at anything else,” Gio cautioned us. “Also, the doors seem to open and close to the beat of the music. See if you can anticipate when your door will open by syncing your shots with the music. It might help you with your aim.”
I started the game again, and we began firing. All seemed to be going well until the game, and by extension the music, began playing frantically. The targets came fast and furious, keeping me focused exclusively on my targets. Things were moving so fast I had no idea how everyone else was doing.
Finally, the game ended, and we lowered our guns. I glanced down the row of chairs, noticing everyone looked completely wiped out.
Suddenly Mia leaped from her chair, pointing at the message bar beneath the panel. “Look! We won!”
WINNER—TOTAL SCORE 6370. TAKE YOUR CARD.
A credit card-size piece of plastic popped out of the slot to the right of the display bar.
Mia danced around, high-fiving everyone in the room, completely pumped by the win. “That was more fun than a barrel of orangutans. Who knew I would take so well to shooting?”
“I’m just glad we don’t have to do it again,” Winston said, reholstering his gun. “That was more stressful than a week of cross-examinations in criminal court. Plus, I couldn’t help but notice my wife hit every target. Remind me not to piss you off any time soon, dear.”
“Good plan, sweetheart,” Clarissa said, batting her eyelashes at him.
I couldn’t help but be amused—and maybe a little comforted—by the thought that the in-law who liked me the least was the worst shot.
I glanced at the clock to see how much time we had left. Thirty-seven minutes. I walked over to the panel and retrieved the card that had been spit out near the display panel. Alessa joined me there.
“What does it say?” she asked, looking curiously at the card.
I examined it carefully on both sides. “Nothing as far as I can see.”
“Put it in the ATM. Let’s see what happens.”
I didn’t have a better idea, so I walked over to the machine and inserted the card. The screen leaped to life and asked for a PIN. Everyone crowded around trying to see.
“A PIN. Really? Is nothing ever straightforward around here?” Clarissa said with a sigh.
“Maybe we have to solve another puzzle in order to get it,” Alessa suggested.
“Possibly.” I watched the blinking message asking for the PIN. “Unless someone recalls seeing a four-digit number somewhere.”
“Four digits,” Mia said. “The final score. Wasn’t the final score a four-digit number?”
“Si, it was,” I said. “Is it still displayed on the panel?”
Mia ran over to the panel. “Oh, no! It’s gone. The number is gone.”
“I remember the first two numbers were six and three,” I said, “but I’m not sure about the rest.”
“It ended in a zero,” Clarissa said. “I’m pretty sure of that.”
“Well, that gives me a place to start,” I said. “I’ll take this from here. But we’re running out of time, so everyone else, please get back to your puzzles. We need them solved as soon as possible.”
As everyone dispersed, I methodically went through the numbers for the PIN until I arrived at the right number—6370. The machine flashed, and to my relief, the cash slot opened. However, instead of cash, a tray popped out holding two metal darts about eight inches long with plastic feathers.
I picked the darts up carefully, examining them. I wasn’t sure what to do with them at this point, so I headed over to see how things were going at the puzzle table.
“What are those?” Alessa asked, pointing at the darts.
“That’s what came out of the ATM.”
Mia held a palm-size puzzle piece in her hand for a moment before Clarissa reached over and snatched it from her, sliding it into place.
“Do you know what to do with them?” Alessa asked.
“Not yet,” I admitted. “I’m hoping you’ll give me a clue.” I took a closer look at the puzzle, realizing they’d finished more than half of it. “Good work.”
“It’s mostly Clarissa,” Alessa admitted. “She has mad puzzle skills.”
“That’s kind of you to say,” Clarissa said, not lifting her eyes from the puzzle. “Although I’ll admit this one is tougher than most. It doesn’t have a lot of pieces, maybe thirty-five or forty, but there are no straight edges, and we don’t know the shape of the assembled puzzle. It isn’t square or rectangular, I can tell you that. That means we have no edge or corner pieces to provide reference points.”
Interesting how Lexi and her mom weren’t as different as she believed.
I studied the puzzle further, noting another difficulty. “There are only black pieces on a white background, so you can’t even assemble the puzzle using the background. That has to be extra difficult.”
“It is,” Alessa agreed. “But we’re making progress.”
They were, but clearly because of Clarissa’s wicked puzzle skills. I had a feeling there was a lot more to my mother-in-law than I, and possibly her daughter, knew. I put the darts aside and helped them work the puzzle. It was assembled quickly with five of us working on it. When it was finished, we stepped back and studied it.
The message was clear. An arrow pierced the outline of a balloon.
“We have to shoot the balloons with the darts,” Alessa said, looking up at the ceiling. “I presume the gold disc is hidden in one of them. But there are only two darts and a lot of balloons.”
I looked at the clock. “And only twenty-five minutes to go. I don’t see how we could pierce all of them in that time frame with just two darts.” I walked over to Winston. “How are you doing on the chess game?”
“I have the solution—checkmate in two moves. It was the only possible solution, and I checked everything I could think of. But I don’t know what to do next.”
We all gathered around the chess table. “Can you show me your solution?” I asked.
“Should I move the pieces?” Winston asked. When I nodded, he picked up the queen. “The first move is the queen to the F6 square, putting the black king in check from the white bishop. There are only two moves black can make at this point, but if he makes either one, the knight to E7 produces a mate.”
“Well done,” I said and was rewarded with a smile from my father-in-law. Was I sensing a slight thaw in our relationship or was it wishful thinking?
Winston moved all the pieces until he was able to checkmate the king. He clicked the timer when it was each player’s turn to move and brought the game to a close. We all looked around the room, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did.
I rechecked the chessboard, the table, the timer, and flipped through the pad of paper, but found nothing. What was I missing?
“Why is there a pad of paper here?” I murmured aloud.
“Maybe we need to write down the solution,” Clarissa said. “Can you write down the solution, Winston?”
“Of course, if someone could hand me a pen,” he said.
“There’s one at the Scrabble table,” Mia said, racing over to pick it up.
Winston took the pen and wrote down QF7+, KD8, BC7#.
“The box combination lock,” Alessa said. “This could be the combination.”
I took the paper from Winston and headed for the box. I examined the lock and determined that Winston’s solution matched the lock options on the pedestal box. “The solution works, with one caveat. There are only eight digits on the lock, and there are eleven in Winston’s solution.”
“Try using just the white moves,” Winston suggested. “That should equal eight.”
“OK, I’ll set the combination as you read me the white moves,” I said.
Winston listed each character, and I entered them on the lock. As I entered the last digit, we were rewarded with a clicking sound. To my surprise, Winston grinned, slapping me on the back and giving me a high five. That might have been the most positive interaction we’d ever had.
I carefully lifted the lid. A small green metal crossbow lay nestled on a white velvet cloth, along with another dart. I gently lifted the crossbow from the box and handed it to Gio.
“You’re the man for this job,” I said. “So, from this point on, it’s your show.”
“Fair enough, but what’s the plan? Which balloon do I shoot? All of them?”
“There wouldn’t be time,” I said. “We have seventeen minutes left. By my calculation, there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to pop them all in time, even as good a shot as you are.”
“Well, we can’t just give up,” Mia said, putting her hands on her hips. “Not after going through all of this.”
“Perhaps we should look and see if there’s anything else in the room that might pop the balloons,” Winston suggested.
We did a quick search but found nothing. Inspired, Gio grabbed a laser pistol and started the shooting game again, this time firing at a balloon. When he shot at the balloons, it caused them to glow slightly but didn’t pop them.
“That’s strange,” Alessa commented.
“Maybe we can stack the tables, stand on them, and pull down the balloons?” Mia said.
A quick examination of the game tables proved all were too low and anchored solidly to the floor.
“What about the Scrabble game?” Clarissa asked. “It’s the only puzzle we didn’t solve. I bet the answer to this resides at the Scrabble game.”
We gathered around the table and began to examine the game more closely. As I’d noted earlier, the game was nearly over. Only one player had letters left to play. All the other tiles had been played, leaving a crowded and nearly full board. The tray with tiles had seven letters: M, J, G, E, Z, I, H. A piece of paper with the handwritten words 48 points sat at the lower right edge of the board.
“That’s where I found the pen,” Mia said. “Lying right next to this piece of paper with these words on it.”
“Maybe it means we need to pop balloon number forty-eight,” Clarissa suggested.
“We wouldn’t know which way to start counting to find balloon number forty-eight,” Winston said. “It would take hours to count and then pop random balloons. There has to be another solution.”
I picked up the paper, making sure there was nothing on the back side. “The clue must be here somewhere. Read the board carefully and check the tiles in the last tray. Maybe something will pop out at us.”
We crowded around the board, looking for a clue. Clarissa and Winston focused on moving the tiles in the tray around, trying to form a word, since they had both admitted they were Scrabble addicts.
Time ticked past, and the pressure began to affect everyone. I’d come up with absolutely nothing, and neither had anyone else. I noted their actions had become more abrupt, almost frenetic. I felt their frustration. It was difficult to know the answer we needed was buried in the details right in front of us.
“The only words we can make with the letters in the tray are JIG, HIM, and HEM,” Winston finally said. “Clarissa and I can find places to play them on the board to make four-letter words like HOME or TIME, but nothing fits that would relate to forty-eight points or the balloons. We’re completely stumped.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Logic had to be the key. “Okay, let’s try working this backward. How can we get forty-eight points? We have a lot of high-value letters, but we would still need to use a double-word or double-letter score to reach forty-eight points, right? So, let’s look for the places where we might do that.”
Since the board was full, there were only a couple of spots where we would benefit from a double-word score. As it stood, only one of the triple-word squares was uncovered. In fact, the only place to take advantage of the triple word score was to connect it with four letters to the start of a word already played. TEEN.
Clarissa suddenly squealed. “Eighteen! That’s it! Eighteen.”
She picked up the letters and added the EIGH to make eighteen. “If you count the points, we get two points for the G, eight for the H, which is a double-letter score, and all the rest are one point each. That totals sixteen points, and if we triple that, it’s forty-eight points.”
“Good work, darling,” Winston said, kissing her on the cheek.
“I agree wholeheartedly with that,” I said. “Good work to both of you.”
“Okay, so now we have two numbers, forty-eight and eighteen,” Gio said. “How do we determine what balloons to shoot from that? Come on guys, just give me something to shoot at.”
I considered for a long moment. This decision could make or break the game for us. “I think we’re only working with the number eighteen. The words 48 points were already written out for us and didn’t require any problem solving.”
“That still doesn’t help,” Mia said. “How do we know which balloon is number eighteen?”
I strode to the base of the slide and turned back to look up at the ceiling. The balloons were divided by color and numbers. Did the colors mean anything? Those closest to me on the right were red, blue, green, and orange, in that order. On the other side of the ceiling, they were purple, yellow, brown, and black. Eight different colors.
A single width of white balloons divided each of the colored sections. I could discern no pattern to the colors. I stole another glance at the clock, noting we had less than seven minutes to finish.
Since the balloon sections were numbered, that had to be a clue. Numbers were my thing, so I had only to figure the pattern. The sections ran from one to four down the left side of the room, starting at the shooting gallery, with the right-side sections numbering five to eight back toward the far wall.
Eight was the highest number. There was no eighteen.
Big picture. Big picture. It was as if my subconscious was trying to send me an important message. It’s right there in front of you—just wake up and see it.
But there was no Section Eighteen, and none of the sections had eighteen balloons.
I let my vision and thoughts drift as I looked down the length of the ceiling balloons. After a moment, I took a deep breath and snapped back into the moment. My eyes immediately latched onto the one sign to the left, and then the eight sign to my right. One and eight. Eighteen.
The answer was right in front of me.
Stepping forward, I pointed at the signs. “While there isn’t a Section Eighteen in here, the one and eight sections are adjacent. I bet the balloon we’re looking for is in this line of white balloons between the two sections here.”
Winston came to stand beside me. “That, son, was brilliant thinking. Well done.”
I wasn’t sure I’d kept the surprise from my face at his compliment, but thankfully he wasn’t looking at me, but at the balloons.
Gio, too, was staring at the white row of balloons. “But which balloon? There are twelve of them.”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, looking at the clock. It slipped just under five minutes. “Shoot them all.”
Gio set the dart, cocked the crossbow, aimed, and fired at a random balloon in the row. There was a loud pop and a fluttering of a tattered balloon, but nothing else, and no gold disc.
“Uh, we have a problem,” Gio said. “The dart stuck to the ceiling. That means we’re down to two darts and ten balloons.”
“That gives us less than a 20 percent chance of picking the right balloon,” Winston said, blowing out a breath. “There has to be something we’re missing.”
“If we’re trying to find a golden disc, shouldn’t we be able to see the outline inside the balloon?” Alessa asked. “Or, at least, won’t one of the balloons look heavier than the other?”
“How can we tell in this light?” Clarissa complained. “If only it were a little brighter on the ceiling.”
“That’s it!” Mia said, running to the shooting gallery.
I immediately knew what she was thinking. “Come on, everyone,” I said, following her. “We need to shine our laser guns on the balloons. Hurry.”
Everyone except Gio rushed to their chairs, inserted their number, and got their guns ready. I shot the start button to start the game. The doors with the targets began opening and closing, but we ignored that and instead aimed our guns at the balloons on the ceiling.
Two minutes left.
“Aim at the first balloon,” I instructed.
Everyone aimed his or her gun at the first balloon until it glowed. I couldn’t see anything that looked like a dark shape hidden inside the balloon. “Nothing. Let’s try the second one.”
We proceeded down the line of balloons, skipping past the popped one. When we got to the seventh balloon, it looked different, darker.
This is it.
I glanced at the clock. Fifty-two seconds.
“Everyone, keep your gun aimed on the seventh balloon. Gio, it’s on you now. Don’t miss.”
Gio inhaled a deep breath. He cocked the crossbow, stretched up, and fired. The dart glanced off the side of the intended balloon, popping the one next it.
“Oh, no!” Mia wailed.
“It’s okay,” I said, trying to assure everyone. “We have one more dart and one more try.” Gio seemed unusually nervous, not that I blamed him. It was likely why his aim had been slightly off. I needed to calm him, help him focus, and there was one way I knew would work. We’d always been fierce competitors, and although I was the older brother, I’d never, ever handed him a win. If he’d won it, he did it fair and square.
“Would you like me to take this one?” I asked casually. “I’d hate to tell Vittoria you lost her luxurious honeymoon because you missed a shot. Wouldn’t you rather I take the blame?”
Gio gave me a steely glare as he set the dart and cocked the bow. “A most gracious offer, big brother, but missing wouldn’t be nearly as bad as giving up the win to you. You’d never let me live it down.”
He turned smoothly, aimed, and fired.
A balloon popped, and a second later, a brass disc hit the floor. Shrieking with excitement, Alessa scooped it up and raced to the door. “It says forty-five,” she shouted, punching the number into the keypad.
The door opened with three seconds to spare, and we piled out of the room, cheering, hugging each other, and talking excitedly.
“That was an incredible shot, Gio,” Alessa said, handing him the brass disc. “Well done.”
“It did take him three tries,” Mia groused. “And only after Slash goaded him.”
I laughed, slapping Gio on the back. “Three tries, brother? Could this be an indicator of the systemic decline of the Italian special forces?”
“Very funny, hotshot,” Gio said, grinning. “If you’d come up with the solution just a little earlier, I could have had some breathing room.”
“What would have been the fun in that?” I answered, slinging my arm around his shoulder as he chuckled.
As we walked down the hallway, it occurred to me I hadn’t had this much fun with my brothers in a long, long time.
I had Lexi to thank for that.