Sally leapt into Miriam’s lap and buried her face in her neck. Miriam wrapped one arm around her and cupped the back of the girl’s head. She shushed Sally, whispering, “Everything will be okay,” even though she didn’t believe it.
Snot and tears dampened Miriam’s neck and ran down the front of her blouse. The nutty odor of urine was almost overwhelming. Miriam ignored it all and closed her eyes, unconsciously swaying to comfort the frightened child.
Jimmy was next. Cooper shoved him so hard the boy stumbled forward and caught his fall on the arm of the sofa. His chest slammed into it and he grunted as the air pushed from his lungs. He tumbled into the cushion and curled up into a ball, shivering.
Miriam wanted to hold him too, but he was on the opposite end of the sofa, as far away from her as he could be. She closed her eyes, shushing Sally and silently prayed.
Where was Phil? Why hadn’t he helped her yet? Was he too afraid? No. Not Phil. He wasn’t a coward. There had to be a reason. He was biding his time, picking the perfect opportunity.
“Cover them,” said Trick. “I want to look around.”
Trick holstered his handgun and swung the rifle from his back. He held it by the forestock with one hand and stepped toward the kitchen. He picked up Miriam’s gun on his way and tucked it in the front of his pants. Cooper leveled the shotgun at the sofa and stepped forward.
Trick opened the refrigerator. He closed his eyes against the cool air, took a deep breath and audibly sighed.
“That is good. Cold air. How long has it been? Coop, you gotta stick your face in this fridge. It’s heaven.”
He closed the fridge and bent over to open the freezer drawer at the bottom of the appliance. Rummaging through the contents, he whistled his approval.
“Frozen fish,” he said. “Lots of it.”
He took out a gallon-sized plastic bag containing several filets and thumped it against the countertop behind him. It was solid.
“Frozen enough we could take some of it with us. We wouldn’t have to worry about it going bad. We could also leave it here. It would be waiting when we come back.”
Miriam watched him survey their supplies. There was at least two or three weeks’ worth of dried goods and spices in the pantry. They were running low on canned vegetables. Trick commented on that but praised the inventory of paper products.
“It’s almost like they knew the Scourge was coming,” he commented. “Rich folks always get a heads-up on things, don’t they? The rest of us are stuck to fend for ourselves, make do with what little we got.”
He moved to the sink and flipped the faucet. Water pressure was low, but there was a steady stream. Miriam had noticed it was getting less reliable by the day. He ran a hand under the stream, flicked the moisture from his fingers and turned off the faucet.
“I could get used to this,” he said. “It’s big enough here we could get everyone into one house instead of two. Nice and cozy.”
Trick laughed. It was a taunt. He glanced at Miriam and then past her.
“Coop, where’s Dickie? What’s taking so long? If he’s not back in a minute, I want you to go after him.”
Cooper only grunted.
“She locks the door,” said Jimmy.
Trick frowned. “Who?”
“My mom. She locks the door when she goes to sleep.”
As if on cue, Dickie appeared at the top of the steps. He descended halfway and spouted in a whisper, “All the open rooms are empty. One’s locked though. I can’t get in. If there’s somebody up here, they’re in that room.”
Trick shot Miriam a wary glance then motioned toward a mounted hutch, which matched the kitchen cabinets. “Are those house keys?”
There were several hooks on which key chains hung. There were four sets of keys. Some of them held fobs obviously connected to vehicles.
Miriam didn’t respond. Instead, she tried to replay Cooper’s reaction to learning she wasn’t Jimmy’s mother. It wasn’t the kind of response one would have if there was no threat to their plans.
“I told you we should wait until morning, Trick. I told you it wasn’t a good idea coming into a house with people inside.”
Somehow they’d known about this house. They’d thought it was empty and then discovered otherwise. But that didn’t stop them from making a move. Miriam wanted to believe that her friends were alive, that these men had somehow stumbled here. She had to believe it. If she didn’t, she’d crumble. She wanted to yell up to Betsy, to warn her. She couldn’t do that. It would put the kids in danger. She was helpless. The sensation weighed on her, made her nauseous.
Trick took four steps to the hutch. He plucked a set of keys from one of the hooks and faced Cooper. He held them up, the ring looped around his middle finger and he jingled them like a child taunting a dog with a treat. A thin key hung lower than the others. It was an interior door key, the kind that fit into tiny holes at the center of handles.
“This’ll work,” he said. “Once you find her, take your time. If she fights you, put a bullet in her. Then dig around. Look for cash, jewelry, weapons, things we can use or trade.”
Trick tossed them to Cooper, who reached out with one hand and caught them without taking the shotgun off its intended target. Cooper pivoted and threw them underhanded to Dickie. The chubby one tried to catch them. They bounced off his chest and fell onto the stairs.
The other two intruders grunted at Dickie’s ineptitude while the red-faced cherub climbed the stairs and disappeared.
Trick stared at Miriam as he crossed back into the kitchen. His steps were deliberate. Confident. Taunting.
Miriam didn’t want to look at him. She looked at the floor-to-ceiling windows that led out to the dock and water beyond. With the sun having set, she couldn’t see outside. Instead, she saw the reflection of the horror playing out inside the house. Miriam swallowed against the thick lump in her throat.
“You’d best hurry and take what you can now. Our friends are coming back. They’re armed. You don’t want to be here when—”
“When what?” Trick was at the island in the kitchen. He spun around, leaning his hip against the edge of the counter. From his hip pocket, he pulled out a worn notebook and flipped it open. Without looking up from the page, he said, “Your friends. The heroes. You mean Barry Miller? Brice Booker? Mike Crenshaw? Or are you talking about Kandy Belman?”
He looked up at her. A sinister smirk spread across his face. Miriam was dumbstruck. How did he know their names? What happened to them? Were they hurt? Trick flipped closed the notebook and slipped it back into his pocket. The smirk was a broad grin now.
“How do you know them?” she blurted. “Where did you get that?”
Trick tilted his head to one side and his neck cracked. A sickening cascade of pops repeated when he twisted his head to the other side. The man was sadistic, playing with her and there was little she could do to stop him.
“I don’t think we have to worry about them,” he said. “And I don’t think I need to be in any hurry to do anything you tell me to do.”
Miriam sneered. “If you hurt them—”
“If we hurt them, what? What are you going to do? What’s done is done. We have the guns.”
Miriam opened her mouth to say something but stopped herself. There was no use in arguing, in provoking them. A vision of Mike bloodied and dead on the side of a road materialized in her mind. She tried to shake it. The others were dead too. All of them lay in a heap, their eyes fixed and devoid of life. She pushed the images away and focused on the children. She had to stay strong for the children.
Trick walked back to the hutch mounted next to the cabinets. He pulled another set of keys. These had a large black fob attached. He turned it over in his hand, then held it between his thumb and forefinger like a prized coin.
“Hey, Coop,” he said, “we might have some wheels. I think—”
There was a percussive explosion followed by a scream. Bloodcurdling and pitched high, it preceded three more
pops. They were gunshots. Loud. Unmistakable. And they’d come from upstairs. Sally jumped in Miriam’s arms and wrapped her arms tight around her neck, squeezing. Jimmy jerked with surprise and coiled into a ball, his hands over his ears.
The adults looked toward the stairs. A third shot. A fourth. Sally squealed.
Jimmy cried out, “Mom!”
CHAPTER 22
MARCH 13, 2033
SCOURGE +163 DAYS
COCOA BEACH, FLORIDA
Mike heard the gunshots from inside the house. From the others’ expressions, he knew they’d heard them too.
All of them were bathed in sweat. Barry complained of a cramp in his side; Kandy had blisters that hampered her movement; Brice’s neck and shoulders were rubbed raw from the pack he carried; and Mike’s foot forced him to limp.
But they’d run most of the way home. They were three houses away now. Somehow, above the low rumble of the generator that told them how close they were, the succession of shots cut through the air.
The sound froze them for an instant. Barry was a step ahead of the others and he looked back at them over his shoulder. His pained expression made him look older in the pale light of the waxing gibbous moon rising from the east.
The frozen instant passed and the foursome simultaneously launched themselves toward the house. It was the only one in sight lit from the inside. When they reached the front of the house, Barry made a wide arc to the side entrance.
Mike followed Barry’s lead. Adrenaline fueled renewed energy and he forgot about his aching foot and the flare of pain it caused in his ankle.
Kandy and Brice were on their heels and all four of them reached the side door together. It was already open, the jamb splintered and the locking mechanism broken. Barry started into the mudroom that led into the kitchen and the rest of the house. Mike put a hand on his shoulder and stopped him.
“We’re with you. Everything is going to be okay.”
Barry’s eyes welled. With the rifle’s butt pressed to his shoulder, he slipped into the dark mudroom.
Mike lifted the pneumatic spear gun, which felt ridiculous in this space and followed Barry into the darkness. He sensed Kandy, armed with her nine millimeter and a shotgun-wielding Brice behind him. Mike made an adjustment to the gun. It was a risk and it took a second in the dark, but he managed.
Muffled shouts leaked through the closed door that led into the kitchen. Mike couldn’t make out the halted, desperate-sounding conversation, but he sensed the panic. He heard crying. Children’s crying. That was a good sign.
Miriam had a handgun similar to the one Kandy held with both hands in the dark, but he couldn’t be sure the shots fired were from a handgun. His ear wasn’t good enough for that. He didn’t know guns well enough to distinguish their reports aside from the differences among the explosive boom of a shotgun, the crack of a rifle and the pop of a handgun.
They huddled close to the door, their collective breath and sweat heightening the intensity. Barry motioned to the door and stepped to the side. Mike took a hand from his spear gun and gripped the handle. He checked with all three, their dark forms signaled their assent and he pulled open the door.
Barry swung around to the open door and stepped across the threshold. Kandy followed, Brice at her back.
Before Mike slid into the kitchen, he heard more shouting. Barry’s voice rose above the others. A little girl shrieked. A boy called for his father.
Two other voices shouted back. There was cursing. Mike entered the kitchen and stepped into the gap between Kandy and Brice.
The kitchen was bathed in light. Mike’s eyes squinted in adjustment. The forms in the living room took shape and their features came into focus.
One of the men from the bridge stood in the middle of the family room. He was the older one and he had a rifle aimed at Miriam, who was on the floor. He wasn’t sure if she was conscious or alive.
The two children were huddled together in the far corner of the sofa. Jimmy and Sally clung to one another as if they were trying to climb over each other to get away but couldn’t.
The other man was near the top of the stairs. He held a shotgun or a rifle, Mike couldn’t tell which, aimed down at the children.
Barry stood at the island. His voice was a raspy growl Mike didn’t recognize. “Put down that gun or I’ll blow a hole in your face.”
The older man, the one who called himself Trick when they were on the bridge, didn’t flinch. He jabbed the rifle at Miriam.
“Not before I kill this woman right here, the babysitter. Then my man Coop is gonna send your little angels to heaven. You might get me; you might not. But your world is over either way.”
Mike moved forward toward the island and Barry, aiming the spear at Trick’s midsection. The way the intruder was standing, it gave him the biggest target.
Kandy was at the refrigerator. She had her gun aimed at the young one on the stairs, but she was scanning the place. She glanced at Mike and mouthed, “Phil?”
Mike didn’t see him. He wondered where Phil had gone. Was he upstairs? He shrugged.
Brice moved to his right near the kitchen cabinets along the eastern wall of the house, also aiming at the man on the stairs.
“There’s four of us,” said Barry, “two of you. Either way, your world ends tonight. That’s a given. You’re not leaving this house alive.”
Trick grinned. “There ain’t four of you. One of you has a shotgun that can’t do much from that distance. One of you’s a woman. Look at her hands shake. She ain’t never fired a gun before. I could show her the broad side of a barn and she’d miss.”
He was right about Brice. He was too far from Trick to do real damage and certainly couldn’t hit the man on the stairs. Kandy was tougher than she appeared, but she was trembling. There was a good chance she’d miss the man on the stairs from that distance.
“Then there’s your hero over there. Muscle boy. He’s got a spear gun with a line on it. That thing can’t go more than twice the length of the gun. So what? Ten feet? He can’t hit from there. It’s mano a mano, brother. You and me.”
Mike scanned the room for signs of the gunfire they’d heard from outside. There was no evidence of it. Then he remembered Betsy. She was upstairs when they’d left. She was always upstairs when she wasn’t in the kitchen pouring another drink.
Had the man on the stairs killed her? Was she dead? Was Phil up there too?
The revelation must have hit Barry at the same time. He growled again, the venom thick in his voice. “Where is my wife? What did you do with my wife?”
On the floor in front of Trick, Miriam groaned. She moved, lifting her head. Trick put a boot into her side and she cried out. “Stay down.”
Mike tensed and moved his finger to the trigger. “Don’t touch her.”
The children’s whimpers blossomed into crying again.
Trick gestured upstairs with his head. “Momma’s taking a nap.”
Barry’s jaw clenched. His face reddened. “Betsy! Betsy, where are you?”
Mike remembered there was a third man on the bridge. He was overweight and exhausted. Mike remembered him now. Where was he? It was hard to think, to process everything. All of this was happening so quickly. His heart thumped in his chest; his eyes burned; his throat tightened. None of this made sense—the kids on the sofa, Miriam on the floor, Betsy, Phil and the overweight intruder missing. This was too much.
During their months on the water, Mike had seen what was coming. As a group they’d planned their defense, their attack. There was time to calculate the odds.
Here in this house, in the midst of an armed standoff in which there could be no winners, there was no time to prepare. There was no time-out. This was happening in real time whether he figured out a plan or not. Many variables. Many weapons.
“Come on down, Coop,” Trick called out to the man on the stairs. “I need you here.”
Coop started down the steps, keeping his weapon aimed at the children. Trick turned hi
s back on Coop and faced the kitchen and all four threats. There was a calm about the man that unnerved Mike, an unnatural swagger he guessed was born from confinement.
“Here’s how this is gonna go,” he said as dispassionately as if he were explaining the rules of a board game. “See, you got more to lose in this here fracas than I do. Yeah, sure, you could gun me down. You could kill Coop. But that’s that. Once it happens, I don’t know no better.”
“Betsy!” Barry called out again. His voice quavered, the rawness of his nerves exposed.
Trick ignored Barry and expounded on his theory. “You, on the other hand, got so much more on the line. Am I right? You got your little children here, the crybaby and the bed wetter. Not the kind of kids I’d want to raise, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m thinking worse than killing you is just killing your kids and leaving you alive.”
There was no equivocation when Trick spoke. He shared his thinking as if it he’d said it aloud a thousand times and it made sense without explanation.
Cooper joined him at the sofa.
“If you don’t all drop your weapons,” said Trick, “I’m gonna have Cooper shoot your kids. I’ll give you five seconds.”
Sally and Jimmy curled into a tighter ball if that was possible, crying out to their father. Barry raised a hand.
“Shhh,” he told his children. “It’s okay. It’s gonna be fine. Calm down. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
Trick laughed. “It’s funny how everyone keeps telling these kids that everything’s going to be okay when it’s not. I’m the only honest one in this house. When I tell you your world is gonna change tonight, I mean it. One way or the other it’s gonna happen. Just the facts.”
“We can put down our weapons,” said Barry. “You can take what you want. Just don’t hurt my kids.”
Trick laughed again, shaking his head in disbelief. “There must be something in the water here, because everyone likes to give me permission to take what I want.”
He paused and sucked in a deep breath. His jaw flexed. “I don’t need permission!” he yelled so loud his body shook. “I’m taking what I want and there’s nothing—”
The Scourge (Book 2): Adrift Page 23