Page 73 of The Texas Murders

It’s hard to see because my eyes are streaming water, but I search for windows high on the walls. I don’t remember seeing any low windows along the base of the building, and I don’t find any here, either.

There’s no way a building like this would pass fire code without two exits from the basement. So there must be another way out. The question is can I find it before I pass out?

As I try to take my first step, I collapse onto my hands and knees. I retch thick soapy bile.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Ava and Carlos are out there—I refuse to believe that Carlos is dead—I would just take a deep breath and fall asleep. But as long as my partners are still at risk, I can’t give up.

I crawl forward through the tables. When I get closer to the kitchen, I notice another door. It’s one of those kitchen doors that swings either way, and I put a weak hand against it. On the other side is a long hallway and at the end, a short staircase runs up to what I assume is an outside door. Although I can only see the bottom foot or so of the exit, it looks like another set of double doors.

I rise to my feet and stagger down the hallway, falling on the steps and crawling upward.

The gas is so thick that every breath hurts my lungs. My brain feels like it’s on fire inside my skull. I reach the doors and rise to my knees to find the push bar.

But the doors are chained together.

If the doors budged an inch, I might be able to wedge them open and at least put my face to the crack to inhale fresh oxygen.

But the doors won’t open at all.

It’s over.

I’m going to die.

CHAPTER 63

AVA HAS MADE it all the way around to the lobby again when she hears shouting. She can’t quite make out what’s being said, but she can tell by the tone that something is wrong.

She draws her gun and runs, aiming her flashlight ahead of her. A figure appears in the beam, backing up the stairway with a gun in one hand and some kind of canister spraying liquid in the other.

She doesn’t know who it is, but she can at least tell it’s not Carlos or Rory.

“Freeze!” she shouts.

The man turns to her, wearing a gas mask of some kind. Something in his body language and the cut of his hair makes her suspect it’s Llewellyn Carpenter. The snake tattoo on his forearm verifies her suspicion.

He doesn’t look particularly alarmed by her presence.

“Can you smell it?” he asks, his voice distorted from the mask.

For a moment, Ava doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but then she smells a sulfurous rotten-egg odor emanating from the stairwell.

Now that she notices it, the air is thick with the stench.

“If you squeeze that trigger,” Carpenter says, “the whole basement of this building is going to be one hell of an inferno. Your Texas Ranger buddy is at ground zero. He’ll be dead in an instant. But you,” he says, nodding into the flashlight beam blasting him in the face, “it won’t be quick. You’ll run out of the building engulfed in flame, with your eyes melting in their sockets like butter.”

“You’ll die, too,” Ava says.

Carpenter shrugs. “You’ve got a few options here. Run out now and save yourself. Or try to save one of your friends. The white guy’s downstairs breathing gas. Your Indian buddy is upstairs with a cracked skull.” Carpenter takes the bottle and starts spraying the liquid again. “Or,” he adds, “you can pull that trigger and we all get a taste of what hell feels like before we go there.”

The smell of gas is thicker now, nauseating Ava.

“I’m not going to hell,” Ava says, and she lowers her gun and runs back down the hall the way she came.

Instead of running outside, she turns into one of the rooms she and Carlos and Rory explored when they first came into the building. She holsters her gun and sprints past the archery targets they saw earlier. In the corner, she finds the bows and quivers of arrows. She snatches one bow, butthe string is broken. She tosses it aside and grabs another, taking a second to run the flashlight up and down it to make sure it’s functional. Then she yanks an arrow out of a quiver and slides the nock over the string.

It’s not a particularly good bow, and the aluminum arrow isn’t the quality she normally uses—and it certainly isn’therbow, which she’s used for years and shot thousands of times.

But it will have to do.

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