The Unseen (35 page)

“Well,” she said. “I guess we'd better get off this porch.” She turned and went back into the house, and they followed. He saw Leila hadn't been kidding about putting away her gun; she had two pistols and a shotgun, along with several rounds of ammo, sitting on the floor of the living room.

Leila obviously noticed the two of them staring. “Either of you fired a gun before?”

Lucas was surprised when Sarea nodded her head, went across the room to pick up one of the pistols, and released the clip to check the cartridges.

Leila turned to him. “You?”

“I have my own,” he said, retrieving the pistol his Bad Twin had given him after the accident.

Leila picked up the shotgun, loaded a few shells into the magazine, and pumped it once to chamber the first round. “You go do what you have to do,” she said to Lucas. “We'll be just fine here.”

“Okay,” he said. He turned, started to go back out the door, then stopped and faced them again.

“I'm sorry,” he said abruptly.

Both of the women stopped, looked at him. “For what?” Leila asked.

“For getting both of you involved in this,” he said. “I'm putting you in danger, and you could die, just for knowing me.”

Leila bent and picked up the other pistol. “Lucas,” she said. “I was already dying. Just doing it slowly. This way, maybe I get to make up for not doing anything for so long. For believing I couldn't do anything.” She held him in a strong gaze. “This isn't all about you. It's something I have to do too.” That said, she walked into the next room.

He looked at Sarea. She smiled.

“We ain't dead yet, Lucas. Let's not act like it.”

He nodded, closed the door, knowing it was the last time he would see either of them.

THIRTY-THREE

01:44:25 REMAINING

Back on the road, Lucas sped toward the District again, ready to head for the church.

But after a few miles, he pulled to the side of the road. It was time to die, he knew. He just wasn't sure how it was going to happen yet. Somehow he had to stop Saul, Viktor, and Hondo in the next few hours. All that before he could turn attention to the bomb on his leg.

He dialed Sarea's phone number. As he expected, Hondo answered.

“Is your girlfriend missing her phone yet?” Hondo said when he answered. “I hope I'm not using up all her minutes.”

“Are you gonna tell me what this is all about? Why you stole Sarea's phone?”

“I want a new project. We all do. Do you know none of us—none of us in the Creep Club—has ever caught a murder on video? Not a real one. A shame, really. That's why we were all excited when Kennedy and Clarice were going to catch you on tape. But then . . . well, I guess you took care of them, didn't you? Along with Snake.”

“That wasn't me.”

Hondo laughed. “Hmmm. That's not what the news channels are saying. You telling me I maybe shouldn't trust big media?”

“For someone who's lost a few friends recently, you don't seem too broken up, Hondo.”

“Oh, you got me. You really got me. Donavan, Snake. To tell you the truth, I'm glad to see them dead—all the better for me. Sorry to see Clarice and Kennedy go, though. They had possibilities.”

Lucas closed his eyes. He listened to a few moments of silence before Hondo spoke again.

“Well, this is indeed a wonderful conversation, but I need to get going.”

Lucas's eyes flicked open immediately.

“Where?”

“Where do you think? Gonna drop by and see your gal friends.

Dilbert remembers the way there, of course, but we also have GPS coordinates.”

“How?”

“You're kinda slow today—sure you got enough sleep last night?

If I managed to get into her bag to take her cell phone . . .”

“You put a geopatch in her bag.”

“Ah, now you're catching on.”

Lucas swallowed hard, then put the car in gear and swung back the opposite direction on the street he was driving down, cutting off several cars in the process. “But if you wanted to kill me, why not just do your setup at Sarea's apartment—jump me there?”

Hondo laughed. “You ever hunt?”

“No.” Lucas thought the longer he kept him on the phone, the more distracted he would be. And maybe, the longer it would take them to get to Leila's house.

“Well, you ask anyone who hunts about their favorite hunting story, you know what they tell you?”

“No.”

“They tell you all about the day. All about the terrain, the weather, the tracking, the chase. No one ever talks about actually pulling the trigger. Pulling the trigger isn't the fun part; it's the end of the fun part, actually.”

“So you did it all for fun.”

“Oh, I'm expecting some great footage out of this—especially because we've already got cameras all over that house. Thanks to Dilbert.” He paused. “Your first project is about to begin, Lucas. Unfortunately, it's also your last.”

The connection went silent as Hondo ended the call.

Lucas immediately called Leila's number. When she answered, he said, “They're coming.”

“I know,” she said.

“How did you know?”

“Like I said before, Lucas. This is something I have to do. So I know.”

“Have you seen anyone?”

“Not yet.”

“You're about to.”

“Why's that?”

“Because I'm heading back right now.”

01:36:25 REMAINING

Sarea met him at the door again and led him to a small breakfast nook with a computer on the table. Leila was sitting there, staring at a screen that presented six different cam shots. “The crazy thing is,” she said, “we've had security cams on the house the whole time. No alarm ever went off, though.” She stared at Lucas for a second. “Not until you tripped it.”

Lucas stared at the cam shots. “These people are good with technology,” he said. “They figured out some way to override your alarm system.”

“What was his name?” Leila asked.

“Who?”

“The guy—the one in my house.”

He nodded. “I don't know his real name. Dilbert is what he goes by.”

She nodded. “How many will there be?”

“I don't know. If it's all of them, something like twenty. Wait, make that sixteen—four of them are dead now.”

She looked at him, her eyes narrowed a bit.

“Long story for a different day,” he said.

“So what are they going to do?” asked Sarea. “I mean, how will they attack?”

Lucas looked at her. Attack. That was a good question. Right up there with:
How do you get rid of a bomb that's going to blow off your leg
in less than two hours?

But one question at a time.

He'd heard the excitement in Hondo's voice, the junkie rush of the drug pounding in the veins. And now he realized, this really
was
a project to them.

They would kill him, kill Leila and Sarea, yes. But they wanted to record it, to document it. To them, that was the most important thing. All of them were juiced up on the thought of seeing three people die on camera.

“Can we kill the power?” he said.

Leila turned and cocked an eyebrow at him. “Kill the power, shut off our security system and all our surveillance cameras. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea to me.”

“Look, you already know they bypassed your security. And I'm betting they've tapped your cameras, because they—”

“—because they want to record what the cameras see,” Leila finished.

“Exactly. That's what drives us. Them, I mean. We make it harder for them to record, none of your cameras, none of your lights, we distract them a bit.”

Leila nodded. “Breaker panels for the upstairs are right behind you. More in the basement, but just for the water heater, the furnace, and the garage.”

“Okay,” he said. “How about flashlights? I have one, but do you have a couple extras?”

“Hang on,” Leila said. She left the room for a few minutes, then returned with two flashlights, handing one to Sarea. Loaded with guns and lights, they were ready.

“Now,” Lucas said, “we shut down the power, and then we go to the basement. Not as many access points, and—”

“Harder to record in the dark basement, unless they have infrared cameras,” Sarea finished.

“They will have infrared cameras, you can bet on that,” Lucas answered. “But, yeah, we'll make it more difficult.”

Both women nodded.

“Let's go.” He turned around, opened the breaker box, and began flipping all the switches.

A few minutes later, they walked out of the office and made their way to the basement door. Light spilled through the large windows on the main floor, but as soon as they began descending the basement steps, they needed to turn on their flashlights.

They worked their way down, all of them breathing heavily as they felt the darkness—and what would soon be in that darkness—pressing in around them.

“Back here,” Leila whispered, swinging her flashlight. “There's a utility room. Only one way in—we can hold them when they try to come after us.”

Lucas began to follow, but then the enormity of it all overwhelmed him. Here they were, three of them, trying to hold out against more than a dozen. And they were going to trap themselves inside a room in the basement. Impossible. What had he been thinking? He needed another way out of this.

“Careful, the ceiling's kind of low here from the furnace returns,”

Leila said.

Furnace. The word stuck in his mind.

“What kind of furnace?” Lucas asked.

“Natural gas, but this probably isn't the time to talk about home improvement.”

“Don't go to the utility room,” Lucas said.

Leila stopped, spun the flashlight around on him.

“You got a better idea?”

“I might, if you have a set of tools down here—crescent wrench or pliers.”

“Toolbox in the utility room.”

“I'm thinking we maybe do a bit of work on that furnace.”

Leila smiled, obviously catching on. “I like the way you think.”

“Really? You're okay with it?”

Sarea spoke up. “Would somebody tell me what's going on?”

Leila looked at him. “We unhook the gas supply from the furnace, let natural gas seep into the house.”

Lucas took over. “The gas should actually rise, pool in the upstairs. Right now, all the power's off up there. But when they find the breaker box and flip the power on again . . .”

“Electricity and gas. Bad combination,” Sarea said. “Let's do it.”

“Hang tight,” Leila said. “I'm gonna go do it right now.”

“What?” Lucas said. “No way. This is on me. Bad enough we're going to blow up your house.”

Leila's flashlight wavered in the dim light, and Lucas felt her hand on his arm. “You think I'm sorry to see this place blow up? I'm doing it. You guys go open the window and we'll slip out the back. You remember where the window is, I'm sure.”

He considered for a moment, thought it best to pick his battles elsewhere. “Okay,” he said. “Just remember to flip the breakers down here too.”

She said nothing, but he felt her turn and leave.

Lucas led Sarea toward the window he'd entered just a few days before and opened it. He peeked outside, looking for activity but seeing none.

A few moments later, the rotten-egg scent of natural gas surrounded them; both he and Sarea moved closer to the open window to breathe the fresh air from outside.

Leila returned, a smile on her face. “Valve's wide open. Don't know how much gas we're pumping in here, but I bet it's a lot.”

“I can smell it already,” Sarea said.

“Okay,” Lucas said. “Now we need to get out of here. But we can almost guarantee, if they're here and getting ready to come in, they're watching all the exits—maybe not so much back here by the basement window, but we have to assume someone's going to see us and warn them.”

Sarea raised her gun, fully visible in the shaft of light coming through the window. “Then we'll shut them up before they can say anything.”

He nodded. “I'll go first. I'm gonna head for the back of the garden shed, and I'll stop there to cover for each of you. When we're all at the shed, we'll head to those trees just off the back of the property, hopefully be able to circle back around.”

“Then what?” Sarea asked. “We don't have a car or anything—the one we were using is still out front, and I doubt we'll get back to it. Even if it survives the explosion.”

Lucas shrugged. “One problem at a time. I'll just be happy if we all get out of here without blowing ourselves up.” He winced as he said it. Even if he avoided this explosion, another one was waiting for him soon.

Upstairs, they heard a scraping sound. The front door, opening. Time was running out.

“Okay,” Lucas said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Who's coming after me?”

“Sarea is,” Leila said. “Captain's the last one off the ship.”

Sarea turned and looked at Leila, but said nothing.

“Sounds good,” Lucas said. “Here we go.”

He didn't have time to think, only to act. He boosted himself through the window, stayed crouched in the shadows for a few moments, scanned the backyard. No one was immediately visible.

He sprinted to the rear part of the backyard patio, crouched behind one of the giant planters. Still no sign he'd been seen. Now it was a sprint of about twenty yards across open lawn to the shed. If people were watching, this was when they would likely shoot.

Lucas took a couple deep breaths, launched himself across the thick, lush grass. He sprinted halfway, then shifted ninety degrees for a few yards, hoping to throw off anyone who might be leading him.

Good thing. A report sounded, and he saw a small puff rise from the lawn right where he would have been if he hadn't made the unexpected shift.