by Michael Todd
Chapter Twenty-Three
Anja peered out the small window and tried to make something out—anything would do at this point. She wasn’t sure of the time and was too scared to look at the watch on her wrist. Whether she was afraid that it would tell her that days or hours had passed, she wasn’t sure, but one thing was certain. She wasn’t sure how long she would last in there.
Normally, she would have been more comfortable in closed, tight spaces than vast, open ones. She wasn’t sure if it was possible to develop claustrophobia or if it was something that you were born with, but she could swear that she could actually feel it grow in her little by little with every second that passed while she remained enclosed in this metal coffin on wheels.
The first couple of hours had gone by in constant worry about her cousin. She had tortured herself with speculation about what kind of trouble he would be in for losing a prisoner and half a vehicle out in the Zoo. Then she’d remembered that he his supposed purpose was to leave her out there to die, their own twisted manner of execution. And, since the jungle was reputedly full of monsters that were able to tear shit up, the missing piece of the ATV would probably be easily blamed on one of them. She doubted that he would need to come up with a better excuse or even that he would need to put on too much of a show.
Her eyes opened—which made her realize that she’d actually closed them in the first place—when the vehicle jolted with some kind of impact. She hated to remind herself that it was only the back of the vehicle because it increased the sense of vulnerability.
On to more important questions. Had she fallen asleep? Was that even possible?
What had made the vehicle move?
She shifted closer to the window and tried desperately to see something other than her breath fogging the glass. There wasn’t anything out there. For a moment, there wasn’t even any movement—until there was.
Not movement, not really. It was weird that it took this long for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but as she looked out into the Zoo, tiny little pin-pricks of light drew her attention. Blue light gleamed impossibly in the darkness. It was hard to make out exactly what it was. Maybe she simply had a problem with her contacts, or maybe she had finally gone crazy. There really wasn’t anything that shone the light, not that she could see, and it was so tiny that she couldn’t make out what it was at all.
Anja froze when something moved and a shape blocked out the small lights. It drew closer and nudged the vehicle again. A low growl prickled the hairs on the back of her neck and more lights appeared. In a second, a line of blue lights moved and sidled around the back of the ATV that she was trapped in.
It was beautiful, she realized. Like she was out in space and the stars had drifted close to her.
Suddenly, two lights came right up to the window, bright enough that there was a reflection on the glass. They vanished and appeared again, one after the other.
It took her longer than she wanted to admit to realize that they were eyes. Only when a row of teeth gleamed with that same beautiful blue glow did she realize that they were part of something that was very big and quite probably very, very hungry.
“Oh, fuck,” she gasped and stood instinctively as the teeth lashed toward her. They hammered hard into the ATV and she stumbled back into the seat from the force of the blow. The whole vehicle rocked. With another roar, the monster attacked once more and the ATV shook and shuddered. This time, it didn’t stabilize but tilted over and groaned loudly before it fell on its side.
Massive claws scratched at the outside and her skin crawled as she curled up and covered her mouth to suppress her scream. She didn’t want to cry, but hot tears already tracked down her cheek and she whimpered. Chills raced down her spine as the eyes returned to the window and flicked from right to left.
“Shit…shit…shit…shit,” she whimpered into her hand between deep, ragged breaths as if the air had suddenly been sucked out of the cabin and she couldn’t get enough into her lungs.
Where were the people who were supposed to pick her up anyway?
“What’s taking you so long with that fucking lock?” Al snarled when he returned after successfully deactivating the alarm. “I’ve had time to cut the alarms and the landlines and you’re still tinkering with the back fucking door. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“This is a delicate process, you moron,” Kelson protested and remained focused on his work.
“It’s the back door to some rich woman’s house,” his partner said with a chuckle.
“Wrong,” Kelson said and smiled when he heard his picks find the right tumbler. He twisted and pried the door open. “This was the house of a very paranoid security freak.”
“How do you know?”
“Nobody installs a three-thousand-dollar pin lock on their back door unless they are really terrified of who might use it without a key.” He pulled the door open slowly. “That is unless they’re really paranoid.”
“Are you really paranoid if there’s actually someone out to get you?” Al asked. He hefted his gun and grinned behind his mask. “Someone being us, in this case.”
“Shut up,” Kelson admonished him as they slipped into the house. “We’re supposed to be in and out without making a mess. The cops need to think that it was an accident.”
“Do you really believe we need four people for that?”
“I assume that the client doesn’t want anything to be left to chance,” he responded, his tone curt. He’d helped to run a job in this house a couple of months ago which sent an old man to his death a little faster than nature wanted. Everything had gone according to plan that time and he’d only had a security specialist with him. He wasn’t sure why the client had switched it up to four this time. The target was younger and apparently had some combat experience, and thus would probably be a bit more difficult to put down.
Still. Four seemed like overkill at this point.
He froze when the power was suddenly cut to the rest of the building. His nerves taut, he looked around and blinked quickly to force his eyes to adjust to the blackness that had blanketed them.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” a voice said from the loudspeakers on the walls. A young woman’s voice.
Al looked at him as the second team moved forward hurriedly to coordinate with them.
“There are four of you,” the voice said softly like she whispered into the microphone, “and one of me. We can play hide and seek, but only if you hide. I’m not my father, you sons of bitches.”
“Oh…not good,” Kelson stated and adjusted his grip on his weapon. It was one thing to clamp down on an old man’s mouth and nose until he died. But it was another thing entirely to make a kill on someone who knew they were coming and seemed determined to put up a fight.
“We have four minutes until the cops get here,” she continued and even seemed a little excited. “Let’s see how long we can play.”
“Well, there’s something seriously wrong with this bitch’s head,” Al muttered. One look revealed that he was as uncomfortable with this as his partner was.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kelson hissed. “We’re on a timetable. We need to find and kill her before the cops get here. Let’s go hunting.”
If she thought that they would simply run and hide because some crazy rich lady wanted to play mind games, she would be sorely disappointed. He made a quick gesture to the other two and directed them to stick together and take the second floor while he and Al would cover the first. They nodded and made a beeline for the stairs.
Courtney had spent literal days poring over all the records of the money that her dad had put into converting the house—secret stairways, hidden passages, and more panic rooms, one for each floor. The one in the basement seemed to be the master room, but her dad apparently didn’t want to risk having to go all the way down should something like this happen.
That and he wanted to leave a way open for himself to go down there should the situation call for it.
All
of which worked out rather well for her. She wouldn’t hide out in some room while there were men in her father’s house. No way in hell would she give them that satisfaction. She had made up her mind not to be the prey anymore. For once, she was the huntress.
She found the staircase that brought her to the second floor without having to openly follow the two men who had gone up there. As she climbed the stairs quietly, she wondered if the cops would give her enough time to play with the home invaders. If they wanted to complain about what she was doing, she would make sure they had a nice long conversation with her lawyer about personal property.
When she reached the second floor, the walls were thin enough that she could hear the men’s footsteps as they moved through the living room which had been styled as some kind of oriental peace garden or something. She pushed the secret door open and took a breath as it moved without a sound. The coast was clear, so she stepped out, closed it again, and kept to the shadows behind the two men who tramped across the polished oak floor.
Courtney gripped her baton firmly in her hands as she snuck in behind them. Her bare feet moved silently, unlike the racket that their combat boots made on the timber.
The first man screamed as she hammered the baton across his knee. A soft crunch confirmed that there were broken bones and torn soft tissue as he dropped and gave her the perfect opening to slam the baton across his jaw. She leapt over him and closed quickly on the second goon.
He had only half turned to try to find his comrade in the darkness when she took hold of the barrel of his gun and brought the baton down hard on his wrist. Another crunch was followed by a satisfying scream and he stumbled and almost fell over his partner on the ground. She quickly reversed her strike to drive the steel pole firmly against the man’s temple. The scream cut off abruptly and he dropped without a sound.
Courtney quickly disarmed the two unconscious men, kept one of the guns for herself, and tucked the rest hastily behind the door of the secret staircase. She moved to the intercom system and keyed the microphone.
“Two down, two more to go, with two minutes and twenty seconds left,” she whispered, unable to keep a grin from her lips. “And now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho.”
He should have been excited by this. They were supposed to respond to every call like it was a life or death situation.
Still, they got prank calls from this neighborhood all the time, so even though they weaved through the heavy traffic in LA on a Monday night, sirens blaring and lights flashing, it was all Officer Williams could do not to yawn.
“Come on,” Officer Keno admonished but without aggression. “You could at least act a little more interested.”
Williams looked at the younger man. Six months out of the academy meant that the guy had already begun to struggle with his sense of identity in the force. He still believed that he could make a difference, but he had been knocked down a few times by the red tape involved and the hordes of rich pricks and their complaints. Every now and then, he had second thoughts about his choice of career.
“Yeah, about that,” Williams said as he steered the patrol car up onto the sidewalk to get around a red light. “This isn’t the first time we’ve been called to this address. The other two times were merely an old man off his meds. Sure, the guy died, but lung cancer does that to a guy. And now, his daughter moves into the place and two weeks later, we get another home invasion call to the same house? It’s hard not to think that this is merely another wild goose chase.”
“Have you always been so cynical?” Keno asked with genuine curiosity.
“Hell no,” he exclaimed and grunted as the squad car lurched back onto the road and picked up speed. “You have to work hard to be as cynical as I am. And if you plug away and keep your nose to the grindstone, maybe one day, you’ll get here too.”
“You should write inspirational speeches,” his partner said with a sarcastic chuckle.
“It can’t be a worse paying job than the one I have now,” he said airily. His eyes turned back to the road. He would make his best attempt to reach that fucking house as quickly as possible. That was what he was paid to do but damned if he would take it seriously. The DA wouldn’t ever press charges on something like this, but it was nice to know that he could wave that story around to make sure that she never clogged the emergency lines like that again.
“Like father, like daughter,” he grumbled beneath his breath.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Courtney slipped into the hidden staircase, careful to be as quiet as possible. While she was definitely a predator there, she wasn’t the only one around. She gripped her pistol firmly and tucked the baton into her belt before she ventured down the stairwell. The second team would be on the first floor, but she wasn’t sure exactly where. It was a difficult choice to make. Logic told her to use the surveillance system, but she wouldn’t have time to locate them on the cameras and deal with them before the cops arrived. She would need to take some chances.
They had come into her father’s house with the sole intention to eliminate her. Before she’d gone into the Zoo, she would probably have followed the emergency operator’s advice, locked the panic room, and remained there until the cops arrived. Sal and Madigan had helped to transform her into something better, but out in the world without them, she wasn’t sure if better didn’t actually mean much more dangerous. Humans weren’t Zoo creatures, after all.
She moved quickly and silently to the entrance that would lead her into the first floor. A trickle of sweat traced down her spine and she dragged in a deep breath as she opened the door. Like the one upstairs, it made no sound and swung open smoothly. She stepped out and constantly checked her flanks while she moved swiftly over the stone floor, soundless with her bare feet.
The tramp of boots on the floor caught her attention and she turned, tense but ready, and flattened against the wall to peer into the shadows. Two men moved toward the stairs, the shape of their readied weapons barely visible in the near darkness. They were professionals, she mused, but not the best. They should have anticipated that since they hunted someone who was familiar with the territory, they should assume that she would know the layout better than they did.
There was the possibility that her decision to come out and fight back had knocked them off balance, which would make this more complicated than what they had signed up for. She didn’t think that was very likely, although the possibility made her smile.
They eased up the stairs and whispered urgently. She couldn’t make out what they said but waited a few seconds before she hurried in pursuit.
Kelson looked furtively around once they reached the second-floor landing. He scanned the area to make sure that nobody lurked in any crevices or blind spots as Al moved forward. It wasn’t the smoothest of coordinated room sweeps, especially with no lights to aid them, but it wasn’t bad considering that it was the first time they had worked together.
“Holy shit,” his partner said and moved forward a couple of steps after his initial hesitation. Kelson froze and squinted to see what had disturbed the man, his senses on high alert. Unfortunately, it didn’t take him long before he made out two bulky, motionless figures on the ground. He didn’t need to check to know that they were his boys. Well, on this job at least.
He cast another careful glance around the shadows before he approached the two men and dropped to one knee to check if they were still alive. The first was, although for the life of him, he couldn’t remember the man’s name. He looked up at Al who checked their second accomplice. His partner looked at him and shook his head.
“Holy fuck, she wasn’t joking,” the man exclaimed in a low tone as they stood and shifted their weapons into a ready position once more. “They’re missing their weapons too.”
“That’s not the worst of it,” Kelson said. He inclined his head toward the window, through which headlights and red and blue flashes could now be seen. “Let’s grab them and get out. We can regroup and—”
His
words were cut off when the flashing lights gave him a view of a silhouette that moved in from behind them. He thought he’d imagined it out the corner of his eye for a second, but as he turned, it stepped directly into his path.
“Too late,” the figure growled in a feminine voice. The arm raised and a swift flash and loud bang quickly followed. Something struck Kelson in the stomach and the sudden pain forced the breath out of him. He stumbled back before his foot caught on a rug and he catapulted hard onto his back.
His ears rang but he heard the second shot a split second before a body hit the deck. Al, he assumed, since the figure still stood motionless before them and there hadn’t been any of the tell-tale buzz of the sub-machine gun. The shadow moved to where Al had fallen and with a calm, deliberate movement, pulled the trigger again. Kelson flinched when she fired another two shots. She had made sure that the other two were dead before she turned her attention to him.
He tried to raise his gun, but it had somehow become too heavy and slipped from his fingers every time. His brain registered that his body armor had done nothing to stop the single round to his stomach. He wondered briefly what the hell kind of cut-rate Kevlar they’d fitted him with before he remembered that their own weapons—which was what she carried, he assumed—had been fitted with armor-piercing rounds. They were designed to shred Kevlar with ease.
“Shit,” Kelson said and gave up on his attempt to raise his weapon. Instead, he focused on the need to apply pressure to his wound. There really wasn’t much else that he could do except try to save his own life.
The figure crouched beside him. People shouted outside—the police presumably tried to get in while they called for backup after hearing the gunshots.