Chapter 11: The Trap Door
The heavy steel hatch in the ceiling above them groaned under the weight of someone kicking it from the upper level. Dust and flakes of rusted paint rained down onto the concrete floor as Tyler’s desperate efforts intensified.
"Maya! Grab the ladder! Someone's in the hall with me!" Tyler screamed down into the dark shaft, his voice cracking with sheer panic.
Maya scrambled to her feet, ignoring the burning pain in her scraped hands and bruised shins. She looked toward the vertical access ladder dangling twenty feet above her head, then glanced back at the duplicate standing motionless beside the glowing mainframe terminal. The duplicate made no move to stop her; it only watched with those dead, milky-white eyes, a chilling smile plastered across its face as if it knew something she didn't.
She sprinted across the concrete floor, grabbed the lower rungs of the ladder, and began climbing upward as fast as her exhausted muscles would allow. Every muscle in her arms protested, burning with fatigue, but adrenaline kept her moving. Below her, the hum of the mainframe spiked into a deafening shriek of electronic feedback, and the duplicate's laughter echoed up the shaft, multiplying into a chorus of dozens of identical voices shouting her name.
She reached the top, slammed her hands against the underside of the heavy steel hatch, and pushed with all her might. The latch gave way with a loud metallic snap, and she tumbled headfirst out of the sub-basement hatch, landing hard on the dusty floor of the hallway outside the radio studio.
The heavy wooden door of the studio was standing wide open, its reinforced glass shattered into a thousand tiny fragments across the floor. But Tyler wasn't standing anywhere in sight.
Instead, the hallway was lit by a harsh, flickering emergency strobe light mounted on the ceiling, casting long, frantic shadows across the empty corridor. Maya got to her knees, gasping for breath as she looked around the deserted hallway.
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"Tyler?" she called out, her voice echoing hollowly against the bare concrete walls.
From the end of the dark corridor, half-hidden in the shadows near the exit stairwell, a pair of bloodstained white baseball jacket sleeves lay discarded on the floor, perfectly arranged as if someone had just stepped right out of them and vanished into thin air.
