“Water under the bridge,” I said, then I looked at his wife. “You gave us quite a scare with that leg.”
She shook her head. “I’d never heard of compartment syndrome, but the surgeon said I’m lucky I didn’t lose it below the knee. How is Ali?”
I smiled. “Concussion, but no skull fracture. The gash is what caused all the blood and made it look so bad. And he was exhausted. Do you want to see him?”
“How could I not?”
I looked over at Bree, Ned Mahoney, and John Sampson, who were waiting down the hall outside a hospital room. The orderly pushed Mrs. Jenkins toward them.
Melvin Jenkins gazed at me, apparently uncomfortable. “Look, Dr. Cross, I’m deeply, deeply grateful Diane’s alive. And, well, I’m wondering if we have any idea where he put the five million dollars I borrowed?”
I put my hand on his arm. “We do. And I’m sure the person who has it will return it to you once she understands that the money went to her to throw us off M’s trail and implicate her in his crimes.”
Jenkins’s shoulders relaxed, and he hugged me. “Thank you. Shall we go in?”
I patted him on the back. “Melvin, I’d appreciate it if you’d watch on the feed. I need to do this alone.”
You could tell he didn’t want to leave his wife, but he nodded. “Right next door?”
“Right next door.”
He went to join the others inside an adjoining room set up with monitors so they didn’t miss a thing. The orderly pushed Mrs. Jenkins through the next door down. Before I entered Ali’s room, I paused outside, bowed my head, and for the thousandth time thanked God for the miracle of his survival.
They’d been giving my son fewer and fewer drugs the past day, bringing him slowly up out of a tranquilized state the doctors wanted him in while they assessed the extent of his injuries. He was semi-upright in his bed, and as alert as I’d seen him.
“Mrs. J.!” he said when he saw Diane Jenkins. “Why’s your leg like that?”
“I bashed it good enough to pinch the blood supply, and it got all swollen, so they cut it open to fix it and drain it,” she said. “It’s still draining.”
He gave her a slightly disgusted look that made her laugh.
“We’re alive,” she said. “Thanks to you, young man.”
Ali looked at me. “Mrs. J. did as much as I did.”
I held up both hands. “That’s why you’re both here. I want to hear everything. From the beginning.”
Chapter 108
Diane Jenkins said that on the day she disappeared, there had been a man hidden in the back of her car. He clamped a gloved hand across her mouth, and the last thing she remembered clearly was being terrified and getting jabbed in the neck with a needle.
She remembered being in multiple places before the anthill but had trouble recalling much about any of them or saying how much time had passed, though she did have recollections of a vehicle he used to transport her from one place to the next.
Mrs. Jenkins woke up for good in the workroom in Rivers’s bunker, her hands zip-tied in front of her, and the doors locked from the outside. There was water, food, and no way out. Her wedding and engagement rings were missing.
She said she’d screamed for a while, but no one came. Sometime later, a day, maybe two, but well after the effects of whatever she’d been knocked out with had finally worn off, she awoke to find M bringing in Ali, who was drugged, bound, and unconscious. She’d begged M to let them go, but he’d ignored her and locked them both inside.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “But Ali did.”
Ali said that he thought he was meeting Captain Abrahamsen after school, but M had pulled up in a Suburban. He was wearing U.S. Armed Forces biking gear and said he rode for the team with Abrahamsen and that the captain had had an emergency meeting and sent him.
“I know it was stupid, but he was wearing the same uniform as Captain Abrahamsen, so I got in. I was looking out the window for my friends, and he stuck a needle in my leg. That’s the last thing I remember until that room he kept us in.”
Ali said he was initially frightened and then confused and angry when he realized he’d been duped by the texts. “But after that, I was only thinking of a way to escape.”
“It’s true,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “He became... obsessed.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said, and I winked at Ali, who went on. Even with his wrists bound, Ali had managed to go through every cabinet and drawer in the workshop, and he found all sorts of things, including a hammer, a chisel, a portable drill with bits, three headlamps and two extra batteries, a hacksaw with two replacement blades, an old watch that was still running, and a new acetylene torch still in its box, along with a small tank of the gas.
Ali had wanted to use the torch immediately to cut their way out. The instructions were in the box. How hard could it be? But Mrs. Jenkins had pointed out how small the gas tank was and wondered whether it would be enough to take down the steel door.
They decided instead to first weaken the hinges and the handle mechanism with the other tools and then finish the job with the torch. Using the watch, Ali kept track of M’s comings and goings and found their captor was checking on them roughly every twenty-four hours or so, consistently between two and three thirty a.m.
With the tools hidden, Ali had asked M if they could have their wrist restraints cut because their skin was getting rubbed raw. M had done it without comment, then he gave them antibiotic ointments to dress their wounds and left, locking the door to the hallway and interior ladder behind him.
Before Ali and Diane Jenkins could start on the door, they became woozy, which made them believe that M had put drugs in their water. They decided to limit their liquid intake, but nonetheless, their ability to work was slowed.
They began with the middle hinge and the hacksaw, trying to keep the cut as inconspicuous as possible.
“We made sure everything was cleaned up way before M was supposed to come back,” Ali said. “But every time he came, we were scared he was going to see where we’d been weakening the door.”
But M did not discover what they were doing, and two days later, with the middle hinge down to two inches of quarter-inch steel, they turned to the lower bracket.
That took another two days. Cutting the upper hinge to three inches took them a day and a half. They waited for M to arrive at the usual time on the sixth morning, but he did not return until the seventh day around one a.m.
M seemed agitated, distracted; he tossed cans of food and bottles of water to them and left some two hours before he crawled out of my neighbor’s house and across the scaffolding into my attic office.
Ali and Mrs. Jenkins said that in retrospect, they probably could have escaped in that twenty-two extra hours they’d spent waiting for M to return. But they’d wanted to start the final cutting process when they knew they’d have at least a full day to drop the door and get as far away as possible from wherever they were being held.
Chapter 109
At roughly the same time I was face to face with M in my attic office, Ali and Mrs. Jenkins began drilling into the door around the handle and locking mechanism.
Dwight Rivers had built the doors by cutting them out of the sides of railroad container cars and installing reinforced locking mechanisms so, as Ali put it, “Zombies could not break through them during the Apocalypse.”
The practical result was that they were trying to drill through three-quarters of an inch of steel plate with a household portable drill that required changing batteries and recharging constantly. Progress on the lock slowed to a crawl.
While we were waiting for doctors to give us the okay to interrogate M, Ali had picked up the blowtorch and the striker and told Diane Jenkins to turn on the gas.