Fiction: Deathtrap!

Icons

I thought I had posted this, but no. So here.

Deathtrap!

I ignored the knock at the door, because the guy wasn’t due to come round for rent for two weeks. Since meeting Dracula, I had practiced ignoring things.

Again a knock. Again I ignored it. I had some pretty vital cat videos to watch while my dog, Slobberkin, whined beside the bed.

The door opened and I heard a sound of disgust. I dragged my gaze from my phone and saw Shelley and Betsy there.

Betsy said, “Hey.”

Shelley said to me, “She was concerned, and you left me a key—”

I shrugged.

Shelley said, “I’ll open a window.” On his way to the window, he said, “And bring over a fan.”

Betsy came and sat on my futon. “You didn’t answer my texts.” I shrugged again. “Last time you ate?”

I went for the hat trick and shrugged a third time.

She turned to Shelley. “Any food in the fridge?”

“Nothing useful,” Shelley said.

“I’ll take her out for dinner while this funk clears out.” To me, because I hadn’t moved: “Shower. Dress.”

Shelley said, “I’ll take care of Slobberkin.”

During dinner, Betsy’s Shame-O-Vision triumphed over my baleful gaze. I tried words. I hear they’re harmless. “Money’s tight. I should go back to accountancy.”

Betsy said, “If you don’t want to talk about the real problem yet, Okay. We can do something else.”

“Something else” turned out to be an escape room. “I always wanted to try one,” said Betsy, “And you...well.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“The way these things work,” Betsy explained, “is that there’s a chain of puzzles. You unlock a box that provides a mirror that lets you see hidden numbers that unlock a second box, which contains the door key.” Betsy loves puzzles.

As last-minute joiners, we were added to a team whose fourth hadn’t shown up. As we introduced ourselves, I sized up the other three players. (Habit.) Two men and a woman, maybe old as twenty-one. Chad, a wad of muscle; Steve, a lithe mesomorph; and Kate who moved like a dancer despite being improbably top-heavy. Betsy gave Kate the hungry eye; I thought Kate might be fine (if you liked that type). What made her unattractive was she had that cop look: she wanted to arrest me right now and worry about cause later.

The three of them moved with an awareness of each other that said “team.” Betsy saw me looking at them and whispered, “Chad wants Steve, Steve wants Kate, and Kate registers on my gaydar.” Kate probably wanted Betsy.

From the way they talked, they were going to win in spite of us.

A video played the premise. Some un-named villain (shown only in silhouette) had placed nullifying lamps in the area that would take away our powers. We were a team of superheroes who had—

Yadda yadda yadda. We were going to be in a room. There was a bomb at the center of the base; we had an hour to get to it, without powers, and disable it.

“The voice. Is that—?” Kate said softly.

“A voice actor,” Chad said.

“He is on parole,” murmured Steve back.

“Why would they imitate him?” Kate asked.

Betsy looked thrilled. I probably looked sullen. The woman from the escape room — Lucy, I think — apologized for the acting in the video, then gave us a timer.

“Intercom?” asked Betsy. To me she said, “To contact the front desk, In case there’s a medical emergency.” She did not add out loud, You’re not exactly well.

“Microphone in the ceiling,” Lucy said. “We’ll hear you. Red buttons are clue help.”

Betsy was satisfied.

“Henchmen” in sweat-stained costumes came and blindfolded us and led us to another room. Somebody wore too much Old Spice.

I was peeking, and memorized the route. New room smelled of ozone and was vaguely military.

Then Lucy said, “Your time starts now," and we heard the door click shut.

Steve and Kate beat us getting blindfolds off, but Chad was just standing there. “I can't see,” he said, and then took off his blindfold.

Steve and Kate looked at each other.

I looked up. The room had that sort-of Cherenkov radiation tint of power sponges. The area kind.

I looked them up once. There are two flavours, touch and area. Touch ones are manacled to you and can handle just about any power but with limited effectiveness. Like, they make Devilboy vulnerable to a nuke but he’s still bulletproof. The area ones are used in prison cells and are tuned specifically to your powerset. Total shutdown on the powers affected, a tiny effect on other powers. Chad wasn’t wearing manacles, so if his powers were gone, then someone had tuned the power sponges for Chad.

Kate got a faraway look. Steve’s power look made him seem constipated. Then they both looked up at the ceiling and nodded.

Interesting, I thought. Three superheroes neutralized, possibly by someone who might be on parole and have a grudge. I hadn’t paid attention to news for days, so I had no idea who might be out.

Real superheroes without civilians nearby would try breaking the power sponges, but Betsy and I counted as civilians.

Oblivious to all of this, Betsy was doing inventory. Good for her. The room was sort of a barracks room, with a bathroom off to the side.

"We've got three locked boxes here: the two footlockers and the gun case on the wall there. All combination locks. Footlockers are four numbers, gun case is five. The door has an electronic combination lock with five numbers."

Kate tossed the three beds and got a magazine, a metal box purporting to be mints, and a journal. Chad caressed one of the footlocker locks as if twenty minutes ago he could have crushed it.

Steve checked the bottoms of the beds. He came up with a series of five numbers, two in blue, three in red.

I did nothing for about a minute, when Betsy’s Shame-O-Vision spurred me into the washroom. Sink, toilet stall (clearly meant for men), shower, and a poster with four steps for hand hygiene.

Normally we wet our hands first, so the steps were misnumbered. I memorized the order presented. The toilet had a tank. Inside it was a key in a sealed bag, but no water: the toilet and shower weren’t functional. (The bottoms of the toilet lid and seat had “Non-working toilet” written on them.)

I unscrewed the shower head because I could and found a wireless camera, about the size of a watch battery. I poked behind it as if I didn’t know what it was and put it in backward so it looked up the pipe instead of the room.

Somebody who wants to hide their own cameras buys in bulk because the field of view is limited, half the room or less. (Also, you buy two styles so maybe they find the one kind and overlook the other.)

I looked for the others and found it by the mirror over the sink. Different style and model number, but all I could make out was an x or cross or chi or something and a plus sign. That one went in my pocket.

I went back and found Betsy, Kate, Chad and Steve with one footlocker already open. It had a men’s grooming kit and Steve was holding another lockbox with a padlock on it.

I tossed him the key. “Try this.”

It fit. The box held an electrical multimeter—volt, ohm, ampere. That kind of thing.

“For defusing—“ Kate started.

“—The bomb,” I finished. Kate glared at me.

“We have to work together,” Betsy reminded us.

I tilted my head back in exasperation and examined the ceiling. I spotted the microphone and two cameras. One camera was like the one in my pocket.

“All right,” I said. If I was right about field of vision, there had to be another camera about... There.

“Betsy, do you have any gum?” She looked exasperated then fished some from her purse. Sugarless. I chewed it for a moment, made a face, said, “Bad flavor,” and stuck it against the wall, covering the camera.

Steve looked at me with disgust and reached for the wad of gum. “Leave it,” said Kate. “We don’t have time.” The way she looked at me told me I’d overplayed it.

“There’s always time to be neat,” he said.

“Priorities,” she said sharply and she shook her head no. He didn’t press it. Then he sized me up again. Chad was busy with the gun locker and the five numbers.

That grooming kit held a toothbrush, mirror, and a weird comb with teeth of different thicknesses. Betsy got an inspired look and grabbed the comb and magazine. When the comb was laid to match the stripes on the UPC code, it blocked out all but four numbers.

Those opened the other footlocker.

Betsy and I had now solved two puzzles and they had solved only one. Not that I was keeping score, but: boo-yah.

Footlocker number two held another locked box, with a pair of sunglasses.

Chad got the gun locker open. That gave us the key to this locked box and a date book.

Kate figured out that if you looked at the datebook with the sunglasses on, you saw instructions to subtract one from each digit of the hygiene poster.

I knew the hygiene numbers, so into the next room. Fifteen minutes down.

Next room was a mess or kitchen. I spotted the three cameras but they were up on the ceilings so I couldn’t do anything about them.

“Man, this is like the Brown Boggler in the 1960s,” I said without thinking.

“That’s a deep cut,” asked Kate. I could see gears moving in her head. The key, the camera, knowing about the Brown Boggler...

“He went to my university. They talk about him,” I said.

“She knows stuff,” said Betsy, who (bless her heart) was defending me.

“Enh,” I said. Betsy looked at me, hurt that I’d contradicted her. “You do as well as I do at trivia night, Bets.”

This was a palpable lie because we’ve never gone to a trivia night. Also I’m trivia, Betsy’s puzzles. Her expression changed like clouds passing before the sun. Sullenly, “Better, sometimes.” She still looked hurt. Secret identities suck sometimes.

#

“Betsy, tell me about rules. What are the rules of an escape room?”

She tried to erase her pout. I was, at least, paying attention. “You don’t break stuff, they told us that. You’ll get all the clues you need, like an old-time murder mystery. Some clues are red herrings and something significant might be carried through, like the electrical meter, but usually everything to solve a room is in that room. The deadline is the deadline, because it’s a business and they have to get the next people in.”

However, a supervillain did not have to stick to the rules. He probably would—most supervillains understand that sticking to the unwritten rules is all that keeps them from being turned into bisque.

I didn’t say this aloud.

Of course, I didn’t have to stick to rules either. Former supervillain, right? I didn’t think my Crappy Sonic Powers™ would be useful here, though.

Chad and Steve were going through the cupboards saying what they found. I was curious about what group these three might be from, so I said, “Kate, your fourth, the one who couldn’t make it? Who was that?”

“Why?”

“Just curious.”

She wasn’t going to answer but fortunately Chad answered absently. “Our boss. It was a team-building thing. He got called away.”

“For business,” Steve added.

Steve could have been anyone but you couldn’t hide Chad’s width or Kate’s need for cantilevering Add an older male as their “boss” and you still got no group I could think of. So when masked up, at least one of them looked different.

But: was this a setup to catch some kind of super group? And if so, would Betsy and I be collateral damage?

Who knew?

If I broke the rules of escape rooms, say if I popped a lock, a real escape room company would suck it up. However, a supervillain would try to get the revenge back on track.

So I popped the door lock. (None of the locks were high quality.)

Without proper tools, it took me two minutes to pop the door lock, but we were able to bypass all the puzzle stuff that Betsy likes.

I slipped the lock off and pushed the door open.

Betsy upped her Shame-O-Vision to 11. “That’s cheating.” She looked at everyone else for support, but they just hurried into the third room.

Kate was last, “How?”

I shrugged. “I was a juvenile delinquent.” When Betsy finally came, I caught her elbow. “I didn’t cheat. I just…took advantage of meta-rules.” I didn’t know what to say when I couldn’t say anything. “I’ll tell you afterward.”

Her eyes widened and I leaned in close so the cameras couldn’t see her mouth. She mouthed “Microphone?”

I nodded and then I needed an excuse for leaning over like that so I kissed her.

She kissed back, which I hadn’t expected. I’m not sure I expected anything because I had been working at not-thinking for days.

Eventually we broke apart and looked at the next room.

This room looked like a computer room, with a big cabinet in the middle. The cabinet’s readout showed the remaining time, which was 40:00.

It suddenly jumped to 10:00.

It looked like someone was responding to the way I changed the game.

Supervillain?

#

Chad and Steve anointed me with dirty looks as if I had done it, then turned and looked at Kate for instructions. Kate was busy chewing her lip. Betsy whispered in my ear, “Is it bad?”

I nodded.

The exit door was locked (in violation of fire codes, I might add).

“Inventory first. What do we have to work with?” said Betsy.

“She’s big on inventory. Paramedic,” I told them.

Betsy nodded. “The painting on the wall is unusual. What’s behind it?”

Chad had the decency to blush while he checked the painting; Steve and Becky checked the rest of the “office.” Kate started examining the maybe-a-real-bomb. She kept splaying her fingers wide. That hand gesture—you saw it with telepaths, with telekinetics, some sorcerers, and with technopaths. Most of them I could rule out.

Most people figured that Tech Next was a man from the armor, but it occurred to me at it might be a Junoesque woman.

Tech Next was an armoured technopath withthe group X+ (or Ex-Plus). Other members included an ice guy, who was about Steve’s size, and a bruiser with animal powers, Menagerie. Ex-Plus was a new ethnic rights group that mostly dealt with issues in the transformed community. Second generation; X-First disbanded when a member died in an explosion caused by “natural causes” which we normally spell F-O-E. Tech Next would normally be their bomb person.

Beyond that, I didn’t know much about them.

Not particularly useful information now that I had figured it out; if I couldn’t figure out the supervillain, I couldn’t anticipate what he’d do.

Look, there were puzzles: a drawer had spare keys for the keyboard, there were numbers written on the bottoms of the spools of tape (!) that gave a combination to the safe behind the painting once you sorted the tapes in ascending order by size, yadda yadda. But I don’t have to tell you the puzzles, even though we needed to solve them.

Did I mention? Exponentially harder locks, and me without tools. (What I said was that juvenile delinquency only teaches you so much.) Not that I was keeping score, but Betsy got five, Steve two, Chad three, and Kate two.

We had one minute left when we exposed the bomb’s electronics. Betsy gave me a hug.

Steve said, “The Doctor believes in you. I—we believe in you.” There was a little eye flicker to me like he was going to say something else.

Chad said to Kate, “The Noble Mettle won’t hesitate to kill everyone in this city.”

That was the guy who had killed X-First. Then I knew what was going on.

I stepped forward, said, “You can do it,” to her, and slipped her the wireless camera.

She looked at it and then cut a wire. I don’t remember if it was red or blue.

The countdown stopped, and we had won.

#

I begged off being in the congratulatory photo at the end. Betsy followed my lead.

Kate caught up with us at Betsy’s car. (Betsy is like flyover-country pure; of course she has a car. I take Uber.)

“Can I talk to her?” she asked Betsy.

Betsy said, “Yeah. Hands off, because we’re dating now.”

“You’d be willing—” I asked Betsy.

“Go. Talk.”

At the back of the car, I leaned against the trunk. The car thrummed with music: Betsy trying hard not to listen. It kind of defeated the purpose; we had to speak up to hear. Which was probably Betsy’s intent.

And I was dating her.

Kate paced, circling around. Finally she asked, “Juvenile delinquent?”

“Do I not look delinquent enough to you?”

“How did you know it was a test?”

“Lucky guess.” She could match Betsy for Shame-O-Vision. “Okay. Chad said it was a team-building exercise. The truth is always easier than a lie, so I figured it really was a team exercise. Power sponges tuned to you guys meant it was for you. Civilians were supposed to make you have to work in secret. We got in by accident, but I’ll bet your boss had hired one or two people who were supposed join you.” I sat down on the trunk. “Plus it was supposed to look like a revenge thing, but supervillain was wrong. Quiet isn’t the Noble Mettle brand: his videos are all purity this and his name that. If you want to commit suicide, make one of his videos a drinking game and take a shot when he says his name.”

“Civilians,” Kate said. “You’re not a civilian.”

“I’m…retired.” I hadn’t said that before, but she was in the life. I groped for words. “There are...monsters.”

Kate nodded. “We get called monsters. My people.”

“Not that kind. You can take precautions against lightning strikes or supervillains or vampires, but how do you recognize the people who want to profit from them?”

“Norms are scum and I say that knowing that every one of my people was once a norm.” We were quiet for a moment, listening to the music from the car—some cover of “Don’t Stop Believing.” Steve called over; Kate indicated she was almost done. “The Doctor tells us that all we can do is try, but we have to do that.”

“You think about telling Steve.”

“You are not as people-blind as I thought.”

“Betsy noticed.”

“Of course she did.” Kate took my hand. “Did retiring get rid of the monsters? ‘Cause I’d quit tomorrow if it does. Think about unretiring.” Steve started for us again, so Kate stood.

Kate handed me the camera. “Use that to call me.” The way she said it told me that it wasn’t strictly a camera any more.

“Tell the Doctor—” I started.

She was halfway to Steve. “What?”

“Tell him not to put your logo on things that are supposed to be hidden.”

She laughed. “But you do know our logo!”

In the car, Betsy said, “Vampires? I mean, you didn’t just pick that.”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you in the daylight. Um. We’re dating?”

“I’d like to try. Even with distance and supervillains and all of it.”

”Um. I’m not good at dating.”

“Because you can’t memorize a relationship and have it at your fingertips. It’s not trivia or trivial. It’s more an escape room, with a series of puzzles that lead you farther in to more puzzles.”

“That does not make it sound good.” I managed to grin. “But let’s try.”