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.”
Or she might be humping Bradley, I thought viciously.
“Won’t she be mad about having to come all the way out here to rescue us?”
“Oh yes,” he said with a fake smile. “There will be hell to pay later. But I’ll pay it.”
He let it ring a few times and then left a voicemail telling her to call us back and that it was an emergency.
He gave me back my phone. We both leaned against the wall again and sighed in unison.
“Well, this really sucks,” I said, trying to make some sort of small talk so I didn’t have to really think about the situation we were in. “At least we’ve got some footage.”
He reached into his pocket and stuck some gum in his mouth. He chewed it a few times, the smacking noise reverberating in the room.
“What good is the footage,” he said, “if they are running their episode tomorrow?”
“Well…”
He leaned his head back against the wall with a thump that made me wince. In the dimness I could make out the waves of frustration and anger swarming his eyes and brow.
“I should have worked more on the stuff we had. I should have…uploaded the EVP, at least listened to it. I should have done the score, I should edited what we had, I should have at least uploaded the interview with the doctor and-”
“Dex,” I interrupted him, laying my hand on his knee. “It’s been a distracting week. You didn’t have time to do any of that. It’s my fault. I’m the one in your office, messing up your routine.”
He rolled his head to the side to look at me. “I invited you.”
“Not really. Jenn invited me,” I pointed out. “You were smart. You wanted me to stay in the hotel.”
He stopped chewing for a few moments, keeping his eyes on me. From the angle, I couldn’t see them properly. They looked like mysterious, fathomless holes, which wasn’t much different from how they looked half the time anyway.
“I’m glad you’re with me. Messing up my routine,” he admitted. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
The way he said it, the gentle sincerity in the words, tickled little pleasure spots inside my skull but I couldn’t let myself dwell on it.
“You probably wouldn’t have to contend with your ex-girlfriend haunting your place.” I gave his knee a little rub.
He moved his head over, his attention now on my hand.
I should probably stop rubbing him like this, I thought. But I didn’t listen.
“What are we going to do if this is the end of us?” he asked in a small, tired voice, watching my hand curiously.
I stopped massaging him. “What do you mean?”
“If people like those fucks are going to beat us at our own game. What chance do we have?”
“That is not a very Dex-like thing to say,” I muttered, feeling strangely upset at his admission.
“I know. But I’m serious.”
I sighed and took my hand back, crossing my arms. I didn’t want to think about life without Dex, without the series. It meant so much more to me than I’d even admit to myself. “I don’t know. I guess I’d have to get a proper job.”
“You wouldn’t want to do anything with me?” he asked, sounding surprised.
“What? Of course I would. But what?”
“We could have our own music show,” he mused. “Act really pretentious and talk about bands that nobody likes.”
I smiled at that. “Yes, we certainly could. Though we wouldn’t have to act pretentious…just be ourselves.”
“Or,” he said with a higher tone of voice, “we could form a band!”
This time my smile broke wide open. “You want to start a band?”
He looked at me. It was hard to tell if he was joking. His features were stern but his eyes twinkled like shiny coffee beans. “Only if you’ll be in the band with me.”
“My guitar skills are pretty sucky,” I confessed.
“I know. You’d be the singer.”
“Me?” I exclaimed. Dex was the one with the voice. “I can’t sing.”
“I bet you can.”
“Well I guess I can do a wicked Chris Cornell impression,” I conceded.
“Oh really? Let’s hear it.”
I shook my head. “Maybe one day, if you’re lucky.”
“Tease,” he said.
I ignored that. “So if I’m the singer, what are you?”
“Drummer.”
“Let me guess…you can play the drums too.”
“I can play everything, kiddo,” he stated. Somehow it didn’t come across as boasting when it came out of his mouth. It was just fact and I believed it. “Actually, I always wanted to be a drummer. Played in high school. I mean, I tried to. A friend of mine had a set so I learned on that. Of course we had no money after my dad left, so having my own set was out of the question. But yeah, that was my goal. It just never worked out that way. Even when I joined Sing Sin I tried it out but…something about my rhythm being off. This was before mathcore got huge, mind you.”
“I don’t see mathcore drumming and a lounge act band really melding together.”
“See, that’s where people go wrong with their thinking. If there are things you don’t think will mesh, you should at least try to see if they do. You might end up with something…life-altering.”