FLOOR 21: Judgement (The Tower Legacy Book 3) Read online

  So, armed with that little pleasant thought, the first thing I do is start checking out the other rooms in the apartment. For security reasons, obviously. Again, everything’s super clean. The first bedroom’s pretty sparse, just the bed and a few dressers. Say what you want about plastic, but the stuff lasts, and none of the furniture looks bad. Normally, it’s the Creep that starts rotting stuff away, but again, there’s none of it here. I give the room a shakedown and pop open the dimensional window of a Pocket Space generator I find, but it’s as empty as my stomach. Whoever lived here took everything with them when they left.

  Anyway, the next room’s a little more interesting. It’s another bedroom, just a bit smaller. Again, all the dressers are emptied out. Something on the nightstand gets my attention though. It’s this . . . I don’t know how to describe it. Like a metal plate, I guess? Anyway, I start to lean in real close when suddenly it starts buzzing. I literally slide back ten feet as this blue image starts to burn into the air. It’s a lot like that screen at the mall, only this one’s a lot smaller. When it finally stops charging, there’s an image left just floating in front of me, like some invisible hand’s holding it. It’s two people, both about my age. One’s a boy, and the other’s a girl. Both of them have their arms around each other, and actually it looks like they’re standing in the kitchen outside. Difference is, there’s a cake on the table. Birthday, I guess. What gets me though is just how happy they look. Not a lot of families in the Tower have twins, or at least, not in the Tower I know. These guys look like brother and sister though. I can’t figure out what else they could be because they really don’t look like they’re boyfriend and girlfriend. It’s a real ‘family’ kind of hug, if that makes any sense.

  So, I finish up and move to the last room. Pretty much like all the others, it’s in good shape. Nothing falling apart, but things look . . . interesting. First, there’s a string of lights on the wall. The bulbs died a long time ago, so it’s not like they’re lit, but you can tell it’s in the shape of a heart. The bed’s got these sheets hanging above it, like a canopy. I don’t know, this might be stereotypical, but it feels like a girl’s bedroom. Don’t get me wrong, if a boy wanted to have a room like this, then that’s none of my business.

  I’m just saying, you know?

  Anyway, just like everywhere else, the clothes are gone, dressers are emptied, basically the whole room’s been sacked. Still, I just have this feeling in my gut that I’m missing something. So, I keep scouring the place, like a starving man looking for lunch. Anyway, I wind up just standing there, waiting like something’s going to happen. That’s when I look at the bed and realize how dumb I’ve been. Because, when I look underneath it, there’s this book. I have a feeling I know what it is, and when I yank it out, it’s 100 percent confirmed.

  “Diary,” I just mumble as I stare at the cover. It’s pretty, I guess. Someone decorated the front with roses, and even the cover’s a shade of rosy pastels. Inside, the front page has a picture of a girl, and I immediately recognize her as the same one from the picture I saw next door. It’s a totally great picture though. It’s just her standing under some blue skies, wearing this flower print dress. I don’t go around complimenting other girls too much or anything, but she does look really pretty, not to mention happy. They all do. Every picture is filled with her hugging that boy. Sometimes they’re in the halls, and sometimes they’re outside, but they’re always smiling. In one picture, they’re surrounded by what I think’s their family. They’re all standing around with a bunch of balloons everywhere, squeezing together as they look at the camera. The one picture that really makes me stop though, is of them outside. They’re obviously not in the Tower. You can see a city way in the background, and she’s got him wrapped up from the side. The girl’s holding onto him tight in her arms, and he’s got his face resting right below her chin. And, all around them, everything is just grass and roses, just nothing but a sea of sea of rosy hues running to the horizon. Looking at the picture, I can feel my chest starting to hurt. My eyes are actually stinging as I shove the diary into my satchel, but I can’t get the picture out of my head. She was with the person she loved more than anything, and here I am, without anyone. And that’s when I think . . .

  Can I ever go back?

  The thought just grinds my entire world to a stop, and I can feel my stomach starting to flop up and down. It’s like I forgot why I jumped in the first place. It goes back to what David Marshall said, about how the Creep would keep chasing me. To be completely honest, I don’t think I really expected to survive that fall. It felt like I was doing the last good thing I could for my friends. I lived though, and now? Now, I’m by myself. The Creep’s still going to be targeting me. If I go back to the team, I’ll just drag the Creep with me and put them all at risk again. There’s just no way I can go back and still be sure they’ll be safe.

  My legs feel shaky, and I brace myself against the wall because it starts to really dawn on me that, if I want my friends to be okay, I don’t think I can see them again. Tommy can hold them together without me. I don’t doubt that. I mean, outside of his claustrophobia, there’s nobody better to lead the team. That’s not the point. That’s not why I suddenly feel the crushing sensation of a panic attack. The point is I’m suddenly realizing how much I want to see them . . . and I can’t.

  Thinking about it makes me feel like I’m choking, and I can feel my chest complaining like it wants to split apart. Like it or not, even if I never dreamed of it happening, the truth is that I’ve gotten used to everyone. I mean, it’s not just that. I . . . I really like them. I didn’t even think twice when I decided to jump down that hole. I was doing it for them. I was . . . I was ready to die for them. Yeah, I actually decided that dying was better than putting them at risk. But this? Being alive, and not being able to see them? Suddenly, I realize that, as much as I got worn down by all the fighting and talking, as much as I’d felt like Mike was pushing me to my emotional limit, and as much as I worried about keeping them all alive . . . I’d honestly rather have all that back than be down here by myself. The thought of never seeing them again keeps building like a pressure in my head, to the point that I think I’m going to pass out, so I get back into the living room to try and settle down. I mean, how can I start thinking about what to do next without even knowing where I really am? I can’t start having a total meltdown before I even know where I landed. So, I go to the front door, not even really thinking about what I’m doing, and just bust out into the hallway.

  I don’t know how the apartment I’m staying in hasn’t been infested yet, but the lights are almost completely out outside, with maybe like one or two bulbs burning down the entire stretch of hall. The walls are papered with Creep, so the infestation’s pretty bad here. There should be some sign of it inside the room, but there just isn’t. Somehow the apartment got skipped, which is unimaginably impossible. Still, at least for now, it’s a place to sleep and plan my next move from. The halls are going to take some navigating, but it’s nothing I’m not used to. I can deal with the Creep. I can handle Creepers. I don’t care about any of that. What really bugs me is that this is the first time I’ll ever be doing any of this by myself.

  Being alone.

  I never wanted to feel this way again.

  Jackie’s New Recording: Two

  You know, being human’s funny. Irritating, actually. Sometimes I’m wandering around the halls down here, freaking out about surviving. Other times, I can’t get out of my feels, and that typically happens when I get back from exploring. There’s a reason for that. See, the apartment I landed in’s so clean that I stuck with it for my command post. I’ve actually been spending my nights by passing out in that girl’s bedroom. I’ll tuck a pillow under my head and just lay there for a while, staring into the dark and just trying to get my head together. The good part about the apartment is how calm it is, even if that’s weird to say about a place this far down in the Deep. It really feels like nothing can get to me. It�
�s a lie to think that, and I probably shouldn’t feel that way . . . I just do. Anyway, the downside of not having to worry about surviving is all the thinking I have time to do. Most of the time, it’s about mom and dad. I’ll just sit there for a while, wishing I’d had more time with the parents. Honestly, I just kick myself about being such a raging jerk to them before I headed out on the Scavenging. I avoided them a lot even after we were able to act like a family again. After the listeners were taken out of the apartment, mom and dad started acting like themselves again. Hugs. Gifts. Actual conversation. I don’t know, I guess I just wasn’t used to, well, being loved.

  Man. That sounds so pathetic.

  Not that it isn’t true. When the surveillance systems first got installed in the rooms, mom and dad became completely different. Being a kid was pretty good, but being a teenager? I’m not going to say it was the highlight of my relatively young life. You spend a few years with your parents treating you like a stranger, and it really starts to mess you up. For one, it made it disturbingly easy for me to cut off my feelings. That’s why I made such a great Scavenger in the first place, and at the same time a monumentally horrible friend. Still, it’s funny how being in the bowels of a monster like the Tower can lead to some pretty quick bonding experiences with your team. It’s kind of like that when you’re constantly having to save each other’s lives.

  I’ve obviously learned to appreciate all the bonding, but it’s still been pretty weird for me. I’ve done my fair share of self-loathing in my life. Allison used to hear me complain all the time about how everyone hated me and thought I was strange. So, once the parents started treating me like a daughter again, it made me really uncomfortable. I wasn’t used to it, so I tried my best to dodge them. After years of wanting my family back, I didn’t have a clue about how to deal with it actually happening. Now, I just wish I could go back and tell old Jackie to stop being a jag and just enjoy her time with them. In this hypothetical world where I have time traveling powers, I’d probably go back and tell her to do the same with the team. It took a long time for Tommy to really win me over, and I mostly hated Dodger for the first half of our trip down into the Deep Creep. The fact that she was crushing on Tommy was particularly revolting. One, I still thought Tommy was basically the worst. Two, I couldn’t understand how anyone could like him. Crushingly ironic, considering I’m here now, wishing he was around so we could talk.

  Which is funny since I always thought that Mike was going to be the guy I spent my time wanting to talk to. I mean, we met when I was twelve. He was four years older and rescued me from having a panic attack when I grabbed a handful of Creep. The guy basically saved my life, since Security would’ve arrested me if they’d found me tripping out from the hallucinations. So, yeah, I was instantly in ‘love.’

  We got older, it got okay for him to like me back, and the day I rescued him from David Marshall, I still had that idea of him in my head, you know? He was still the cool, calm guy that I really connected with, the guy who’d run his fingers through that silky hair of his and make me feel like the world was okay. That was my headspace version of him, anyway. The reality hasn’t been that. I think, if he hadn’t gone through what he did, maybe we’d still have some kind of connection. I just . . . I don’t want to be his mom. I feel guilty, but can you make a relationship out of that? How would I know if I’ve never been in one? I mean, I need someone too, someone that I can talk to, and Mike needs to vent so much that he doesn’t have time to listen.

  So, Tommy became the guy I’d go to. Maybe not, like, romantically, but he was the best friend I’d had since Allison. Now, not even he’s around anymore. I spent a lifetime blowing off everyone else, and now I just wish I had someone. That’s how I fall asleep every night, just hating my lifetime of poor decisions and wishing I hadn’t been so stupid with 95 percent of my choices. How ironic, the girl who hates people now whining about not having anyone around. Let’s not talk about the fact that I’m not sure I can go back to them, even if I do figure a way off this floor. By the way, that happening isn’t a guarantee at this point. So far, I’ve found no elevator shafts I could use to climb up and definitely no stairs. It’s weird. I’m not sure if the Creep’s so thick that I can’t see anything, but there are stretches where there just aren’t any doors, like all the apartments have been swallowed up. I can’t be completely sure about this, but I think the Creep’s hiding the elevator shafts from me. It’s too risky to start cutting into the walls with my flame gun when I’m alone and ankle deep in mucus, so really, the only thing I can do is keep looking for a clean exit.

  Speaking of looking around, I don’t have a lot of rounds on me. I ate through a lot of bullets keeping those Cultists off my back, and I’m not purposely trying to waste the few rounds I have if I don’t need to. Let’s just say that it’s making life a little bit tougher than it should be. Thing is, there are Creepers everywhere down here. I’ll turn a corner, and what little light’s on in the hall will spark up. Then, once in a while, I’ll see a figure. I can tell what they are at this point, I mean, what else is going to have tumors growing down its arms and claws jutting out of its fingers? Normally though, these things are pretty alert. I’m not sure if it’s a good sense of smell or night vision, but the Creepers I’ve typically seen have all been pretty good at spotting me. The ones down here though? Just, I don’t know what’s wrong with them. They stand there twitching, like that’s the thing to do. They kinda just march back and forth, like they’re patrolling, and it takes a lot to get them to notice me. I’m not saying they can’t. I’m saying it’s harder.

  The first time I saw one, I had my bat out and ready to go. I’d just pulled around a corner, and there was one literally standing ten feet from me. Its head jerked left and right, like it was having a seizure or something, and it took me a second to realize that it wasn’t going to come after me. At least, as long as I didn’t make any noise. It kept stumbling up and down the hall, its mouth hanging open like it was having a hard time breathing. At the time, I was scouting the halls, first looking for an escape but also for something to eat. I didn’t have a lot of food stored in Pocket Space, so I had to get past this thing. I stayed closed to wall as I crept by, watching it appear in flashes as the lights overhead flickered on and off. As I slid by, there was a second when its face turned and seemed to stare straight at me. If these things had eyes, its stare would have sliced right through me. The next second though, everything went black again, and I could only pray it couldn’t see me. So, I kept inching along, literally blind and listening to the sound of this Creeper exhaling just feet away from me. It felt like the only noise you could hear was its breathing, and it didn’t help that I could feel globs of Creep sliding past my shoulders and down my back. I’m always worried about how that could make me hallucinate, but it’s not like I wanted to go into a blind fight, either.

  Anyway, as it turned out, almost all the Creepers down here are like that. It’s like they can’t think straight or something, so it’s easier to wander around without having to fight. Thing is, once in a while, they will get aggressive. You can’t predict when it’s going to happen though. Case in point? Today. I’m pushing through one hall and just trying to stay quiet, when one of the Creepers suddenly jerks its head my way and starts charging for me. That sets off a chain reaction, and two others start screaming and running down the hall. That’s one of those things that’s hard to ignore. The screams. It’s almost like they’re in pain.

  Anyway, I’m forced to go all in. One second, I’m batting one across the skull, and the next, I’m whipping out my pistol and firing into the kneecap of another. Soon they’re all down, but then I’m having to run for my life because I can hear the sounds of more of them in the darkness. Now, I’m a lot of things. I mean, I can definitely fight. I can’t outrun a Creeper though. So, I end up tucked into a shadowy corner of an alcove with what’s left of a chair pushed up against my shoulder. I can hear a dozen of those monsters screeching, and all I can do is sit ther
e and listen as feet pound the ground. I’ve gone up against these guys plenty of times before, but it’s just different to be by yourself, in the dark, with a mob of them screaming for your blood. All I can do is hold on until they’re gone. What’s left of their voices shakes the wall behind me as I wait there with my bat clutched in my hand. Then? It’s over in seconds. Everything goes quiet, like none of it ever happened. Not that I can’t still hear them. I can definitely hear their breathing, and I know they’re still out there somewhere, so the best I can do is just slink away and find another place to explore.

  Actually, I just come back to my excuse for a home. Getting chased by a pack of lunatic cannibal half-humans kind of takes the energy out of you, and I try to make it back every night before I get too tired. It gives me a chance to check all the places I’ve explored. So, by now I’ve put together a pretty thorough map of a lot of the surrounding hallways. Or, at least I think I have. I really feel like I’ve been doing a good job of mapping, but it’s weird because sometimes places don’t seem to line up. It’s pretty dark around here, so it’s probably just me marking the directions wrong or something, but there are definitely times when a hallway doesn’t go where I think it’s supposed to, like it’s changed direction or something. It’s a problem because I have to be better about keeping track of where I am if I don’t want to end up dead. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do once I find a way off this floor, but the one thing I can settle on is the fact that I don’t want to die.

  At night, before I fall asleep, I usually read a few pages of that diary I found. It was written by a girl named Anna, and if I’m reading it right, she was writing a pretty long time ago. Like, at the start of the Tower, which is mind blowing. I guess it makes sense since the lower floors are the oldest and haven’t been really explored. If anything this ancient was going to be lying around, it’d be down here. I don’t know if reading it makes me feel any better though. From what I can tell, she was really close to her brother, some kid named Johnny. She was close to her whole family, actually. Her dad was an engineer here, working on what she calls “the engine.” I think she’s talking about that big engine we found in Polar North, the sealed northern wing of the Tower we found while looking for Mike. Back then, Commander Abbott was pretty convinced the engine was how the Tower was still staying powered. So, I don’t know what else this girl Anna could be referring to, unless they keep another gargantuan sized power source somewhere in the building.