“Sarah?” Leeanne said.
“She’s here,” Ben said.
I felt Fred’s hand on my arm. I could hear Leeanne’s breathing from my right. I reached for the bench and my hand locked onto the nail gun I’d placed there earlier. I didn’t know what was going on. Something was very wrong.
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“Turn the lights on, or I start shooting,” Leeanne said.
“Gladly,” Ben said.
There was a snap and the air hummed. It took almost a full minute before we could make out anything. Ben stood near the light pole. I walked toward him.
“Is she okay,” I asked.
As the lights came up further, the scene became clear. Ben stood near the light pole, his left hand over Sarah’s mouth, his right held a gun to her head.
“No!” Fred cried.
“Shut up, Fred! That’s enough! You’re so weak!” Ben snarled.
The mayor stood right beside him. Her eyes flashing.
Behind him, shadows started taking on shape. There was Hal, free and making his way out of the fight ring, followed by his brother, and sheriff Crawford, limping, but making it. They were all armed.
Through the darkness, a patch of moonlight showed the back door where they’d made their entrance. Rita had been a distraction.
“If you’re planning an ambush, choose some place your opponent doesn’t know intimately well,” Ben said. “Now, all of you, into the tank room.”
“What?” Fred said. “What’s the tank room?”
“You’ll see soon enough, my dear,” Ben said.
As the tank came into view, two of the monstrous creatures floated, peering out at us from their cozy aquarium.
The sheriff hobbled over to the lift.
“Onto the platform, all of you,” he said.
We moved into the room and stepped onto the platform.
“I’ll take that,” he said to Leeanne.
He grabbed her pistol. They had apparently already disarmed Sarah. Hal was waving the big automatic she’d been holding on him.
“I’m sorry Leeanne,” Sarah said. “They came up behind me. I was so excited about seeing him…”
“It’s okay Sarah, you still will,” Leeanne said.
“Not likely,” the sheriff said. “See those teeth? They’ll devour all four of you in less than three minutes.”
“You can’t do this, Ben, why?” Fred pleaded. “You wanted to stop them, why are you doing this?”
Ben sneered. “Please, if I’d wanted to stop them, we wouldn’t be here right now. It was me that made sure they couldn’t be stopped. I was the one tipping off the guards when inspectors came, running security for the fights here, laundering the cash. They work for me.”
The mayor stood silent through all of this. He must have been telling the truth.
Fred shrank to the back of the platform. The thick wooden floor rumbled as we climbed on and shuffled to the back. The sheriff shut the gate on the lift. He picked up a wired remote and pressed a button. The lift started to rise.
“Listen, we don’t have much chance of surviving this. When it gets to the top, the lift will tilt, the right side of the cage will drop open and we’ll be tipped into the tank. I’ve seen a fighter regain consciousness and swing themselves onto the outside of the cage once it opens, but it’s not likely,” Leeanne said. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“Don’t give up yet,” I said.
I lifted the nail gun, still in my hand. My mind was running a hundred miles an hour. I knew I could shatter the tank, but we’d be still be stuck at the top, with four armed killers below. Then I saw it, the heater cable ran inside the lift cage. Two hundred and forty volts of two phase electricity.
I knew what I needed to do. When the cage reached the halfway point, I leaned hard toward the tank, hitting the plunger of the nail gun as near the center of the glass tank panel as possible. The gun bucked, the nail jammed.
For a brief second, I thought I’d failed. It was all over. Then, with a tremendous cracking sound, the tank collapsed outward. Water showered into the lift. The tower holding it shuddered under the weight as one of the massive alligators smashed into the side of the cage, then fell to the floor of the barn.
I grabbed the cable and pulled with everything I had. It had to come loose from its connection before the heater fell.
It did.
“Let go of the rail!” I screamed.
I let the cable slide, down through the grommet in the floor of the lift. It fell, arcing the whole way. Below us, they were screaming as a solid wall of water washed over them. As I stepped back from the rail, I saw Ben. He lifted his gun, pointing right at me, just as a huge sheet of glass crashed down, cutting him neatly in half.
The cable snaked down, landing in nearly a foot of water. There was an electric crackle, and the room lit up with blue lightning. We huddled in the center of the platform, as the cage around us, hummed. It lasted about ten seconds, there was a huge bang as the heater’s transformer exploded.
It was still.