After a few minutes, we saw a light appear in the stairwell outside the door window, and G.J.’s stupid smug face appeared on the other side. It was too bad the glass was seven layers thick and layered with wire, otherwise I was pretty sure Dex would have punched right through it and grabbed the douchebag’s face. He looked angry enough to do it.
“Hey!” Dex yelled, pounding on the window. “The door’s locked. Let us out!”
G.J. laughed, the sound dim through the door. Then he shook his head. “This is just perfect. Why would I let you out?”
“G.J?” Annie’s muffled but still annoying voice came from the top of the stairs, and she joined him at the door window, peering at us through the glass.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“We’re locked in here and your fuckfaced partner won’t let us out,” I said, hoping that Annie was the reasonable one.
Annie and G.J. exchanged a look and smiled at each other. Annie fixed her attention back on me and crossed her arms.
“You know, it’s not very nice to have a monopoly on everything ghostly in Seattle.”
“What?” Dex sneered. “We don’t have a monopoly. This is the first fucking thing we’ve shot in this city.”
“Yeah, it’s not very nice. All bragging about this institute the other day,” G.J. said. “You shouldn’t have said anything at all but you couldn’t help it.”
“And now we’ve got your scoop,” she added.
“Did you follow us here?” I asked incredulously.
She shrugged in such a casual way that I was afraid I was going to try blasting a hole through the window.
“We might have. Doesn’t matter though. We would have shared this place with you but since you’re being difficult and you seem to be stuck, well, perhaps not.”
“The doctor, Doctor Hasselback, he’ll find out,” Dex said through gritted teeth.
“Oh, of course he will. He’ll see it when it airs tomorrow. Yeah, tomorrow. We work fast. But he doesn’t know us and if anyone is going to get in deep shit, it’s you. For telling other shows where you are filming. Maybe even inviting us? How else would you explain all the footage we are going to get, uninterrupted.”
“You bitch,” I scowled.
“Whatever. This is the big leagues now,” she said, and turned around, heading back up the stairs.
I pounded on the window again and yelled, “You can’t leave us in here! We are seriously locked in! This is…this is…”
“Unfair?” G.J. filled in. “Maybe for you. Not for us. All is fair in television. Oh wait, I forgot you two are on the internet. Good luck with that.”
And then he turned and headed up the stairs as well, taking the light with him.
Dex and I took to bellowing and hitting the door again to no avail. The last thing we heard before the fuckface disappeared into the darkness was, “Keep on screaming. It’ll add to the atmosphere.”
I pounded even harder, flinging my fists hard into the glass like a kid throwing a cartoon tantrum on the ground. My wrists were growing numb, the fleshy side of my fists felt bruised but I couldn’t stop. It was all the fear, all the adrenaline coming out, and the door was taking the brunt of it.
Finally Dex stopped pounding himself and he grabbed both my arms, holding me still. “Come on, stop that.”
“Dex,” I said breathlessly. “We’re locked in here. They’re going to steal our show…they…”
“I know,” he said gruffly. “But they aren’t letting us out. I should have known we weren’t done with them.”
He exhaled long and hard and walked over to the middle of the room where the most light from the windows was. He eyed a clear spot on the ground and sat down with a groan, leaning against the wall. He patted the ground next to him.
My shoulders slumped. I felt so defeated. From everything we had just gone through, nearly being scared to death, finding untold horrors upstairs, and now we were just giving up while some other team was going to get all the credit for it.
“Sit,” he said, more sternly this time.
I did so, sitting beside him, shoulder to shoulder and leaned back against the cold wall, which luckily wasn’t as gross as it was near the boxes and the zombie rat.
I looked up at the windows to the outside. So close but so far. “What if we try to break out through there.” I pointed at them. “I might be able to squeeze through, if my boobs let me.”
“It’s not so much your boobs but your ass that won’t let you.”
I shot him a terrible glare. “Thanks, asshole.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. That’s a small window. I don’t even think your head could fit through it and besides, that glass is unbreakable.”
“Are you sure?”
“Do you want to waste your time trying to hurtle things through it?”
“Kind of. Do you have a better idea?”
He didn’t answer me but he brought out his phone. I frowned at it, his brows almost touching. “Oh, of fucking course. That’s just great.”
I peered over at it. “No service?”
He shook his head. “What about you?”
I pulled my phone out. There was half a bar, which was something, but the batteries were almost dead. I hadn’t charged it in a couple of days. Aside from texting my family, there was no real need to use it.
I gave it to him and he dialed on the keypad.
“Phoning Jenn?” I asked, trying not to sound funny about it. She was our lifeline now, like it or lump it.
He nodded, holding the phone to his ear. “She should be at home.”