Exit 9 by Brett Battles

a…lightweight mask, with a small circular opening where the mouth would be.
    Murphy disassembled the other padded earpiece, this time removing a plastic oval ring, then the speaker itself. He mounted the speaker in the ring, and attached the ring to the opening in the mask, closing it off.
    “This is the best part,” he said.
    From the headband he removed three thin flat containers. Each seemed to be divided in the middle, with a clear liquid on both sides.
    “Can I use this?” he asked, reaching for Lancer’s coffee mug. “Thanks.”
    He seemed to glance around, and Lancer heard him dump the remaining coffee on the floor before setting the mug back on the desk. He wiped the interior with a tissue, then poured in the contents from one side of one of the containers.
    “I promised you it wouldn’t be long.”
    He donned the plastic mask. Lancer immediately saw it for what it was—a gas mask.
    No! No! The scream in his head wanted nothing more than to pass his lips, but his vocal cords didn’t even quiver.
    Murphy opened the second side—
    No!
    —and dumped it into the mug.
    __________
     
    O LIVIA SILVA LAY on the bed of her cell, her eyes closed. She’d been this way for over an hour, and most observers would have thought she was asleep.
    They would have been wrong.
    She was in a meditative state, one that allowed her to conserve her energy while maintaining complete awareness of her surroundings. She floated on a sea of nothing—recharging and refreshing her mind.
    But most of all, preparing.
    When the alarm beyond her cell door went off, she opened her eyes.
    __________
     
    T HE GASEOUS NEUROTOXIN created by the chemicals Murphy had combined was cloudless, lethal, and, in the enclosed space of the control room, extremely fast-acting. It worked so quickly, in fact, that the two guards who were inside the control room hadn’t even had time to know something was wrong before they fell to the ground, dead.
    As pleased as he was with the results, Murphy’s initial concern was that the sudden deaths would be noticed by the guards on the other side of the glass wall, but as his contact had predicted, unless someone had collapsed right next to the wall, the other would never notice. Most of those in the control room were sitting behind larger monitors, and were already hard to see.
    Murphy returned to his own station, and accessed the controls to the Bluff’s numerous security systems. He couldn’t take them all off-line. That would trigger the master alarm, and seal everyone inside until reinforcements arrived. What he could do was set up a rolling blackout of the zones across the property, timed to match the progress of the assault team as they approached the house, and make it look like a systems test. He slotted the thumb drive into his terminal and uploaded the program that would trigger the progression.
    Once the program was ready to run, he tuned to the radio frequency the assault team was using.
    “Control down,” he said. “Beginning blackout sequence on my mark. Mark.” He clicked the switch, starting the program.
    He then switched to the terminal in the back row that controlled the detention cells. The woman who’d been manning the station was slumped forward, dead like the others. Murphy pushed her to the floor and took her chair. Removing a second thumb drive, he mounted it in the appropriate port, and used the program it contained to bypass the security alerts and disable the automatic locking feature on the door leading into the detention wing. Though the monitors would still indicate the door was locked, it wouldn’t be.
    He brought up a view of cell number eleven. The Silva woman was lying down, apparently asleep.
    Not for long .
    He triggered the switch that unlocked her door, and accessed the alarm controls, hovering the cursor over the one for the detention wing.
    Now it was time for part two.
    Chaos.
    __________
     
    T AYLOR HAD BEEN stationed at the entrance to the detention wing for