Subject 624

by Scott Ferrell

  “What if we don’t find anything here?” That was my real hesitation. I was scared. Scared that we wouldn’t find anything. Scared that we wouldn’t find out what was going on. Scared that we wouldn’t find my family and Nathen. This house felt like our last bet. If nothing turned up here, we would be out of options. I couldn’t punch my way to answers.

  Then again, maybe I could. And I would. Whatever it took to get my family back. I’d tear those three companies down to the studs if I had to. I rolled my hands into fists. Anger crawled up my spine like a parasite creeping into my brain. My thoughts shifted, swayed, and scattered. I couldn’t grab on to them. As soon as I’d try to focus on one, it would wiggle free and another would try to take its place.

  My breathing came quicker. I felt my fingernails digging into my palms. If these people hurt my family, I would tear their heads off. I would pound every last one of them to a paste. I would…

  “Are you okay?” Carina laid a hand on my arm.

  The anger snapped and broke like a rubber band stretched too far. Rational thoughts returned and I could breathe again. I pulled my aching fingers out of their ball and gave them a quick flip.

  “This ends tonight,” I said softly.

  “What do you mean?” Worry creased her voice.

  “I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s gone too far.” I glanced sideways to find her looking up at me with concern, her hand still on my arm. “They took my family. They took Nathen. They did something to your dad.”

  “What if he’s involved?” she asked.

  That was a thought I hadn’t considered. “Do you think he is?”

  “I…” She shook her head slowly. “I don’t think he would willingly get in involved with something like this. All he ever cared about was his science—his next discovery. He didn’t care about all this.” She waved her free hand at the house before us. “Not the money. Not the fame. Not the recognition. Being the first. That’s what he cared about.”

  “Well, we’re going to figure it out. Tonight.” I clipped the word off sharp. “I’m not going to leave my family and Nathen in their hands a minute longer than I have to.”

  She nodded, slipped her hand into mind, and gave it a quick squeeze. That small gesture let me know she was with me through whatever we had to go through to end the chaos that had settled over the city. It was a huge relief. I didn’t mind busting a head or two, but I really didn’t want to smash everybody to a bloody paste and having her with me seemed to have at least a tiny amount of calming influence.

  Don’t get me wrong, if it came to Conor Smash, I would do it. But if we could get everybody back without it, that’s what I preferred.

  “We better get started, then.” Carina let go of my hand and opened her front door.

  Chapter 25

  11:08 p.m.

  The house looked exactly as it had when we left earlier in the day. Nighttime made a difference, though. An eerie silence lay over the place like a blanket. The destruction took on a creepy feel. The destroyed pieces that used to be a living room were nothing more than dark shapes that seemed like places monsters would hide in waiting to snatch up any kid that might wander too close.

  I put a comforting hand on Carina’s shoulder when she hesitated in the entryway. Before, I could only imagine the pain and fear she must have felt when she discovered her father missing. Now, I knew all too well what it felt like.

  Carina glanced thankfully over her shoulder and dug her cell phone out of her pocket. She thumbed to the widget that turned her flash on like a flashlight. The broke furniture and clutter cast misshapen shadows as she swept her light around the room.

  “So, what are we looking for?” I asked.

  “Dad brought his work home all the time,” Carina said. “He always said stuff about secrecy before going up to his room to work on it. So, I guess there.”

  She opened a drawer on a small stand beside the door; one of the few pieces of furniture hadn’t been destroyed. She grabbed a small flashlight out and stuffed her phone back in the pocket.

  We navigated around the mess to the stairs and made our way up. I put my hand on the railing. It nearly gave out on me, sending me tumbling over the side to the floor below. I hadn’t noticed it was partially broken when I hurried to catch up with Carina earlier in the day.

  The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced all this was done by Marc, Carina’s dad. There was the possibility of somebody looking for something, maybe the information we were searching for ourselves, but I didn’t think that search would include breaking handrails.

  The top of the stairs opened to a wide sitting area where the plush chairs had been tossed around haphazardly. Two were tumbled together in the corner. A third lay on its side halfway down the hall. We slid around it and went to the end where a set of double doors were askew on their hinges. Marc’s bedroom was inside. We stood just inside while Carina swept the light across the room.

  “Look for a laptop,” she said. “Or papers. I don’t know. I never saw what he worked on. He always carried everything up here in his shoulder bag and never worked with these doors open.” She handed me the flashlight and grabbed her phone to use the light again.

  We spread out. She moved off to the left while I took the right.

  The bedroom was massive, more than twice the size of my parent’s master bedroom. On the far wall, a king-sized bed sat crookedly to the side. One of the nightstands lay on its front near the door. The other was in pieces against the wall on Carina’s side.

  There was a large, solid wood desk on Carina’s side. Mine had a sitting area where a chair lay on its side and the built-in bookcase had its guts spilled all over the floor.

  I glanced at a huge hole in the drywall suspiciously in the shape of a fist as I knelt to sift through the books and papers on the floor.

  “I got something,” Carina said.

  I turned to see her pulling a laptop from behind the desk and setting it on top. I hurried over to shine the light on the computer. A large crack ran from the top right corner down the bottom left. A few keys were missing.

  “It took a beating,” I said doubtfully.

  “So did the wall.” She turned her own light to illuminate the large hole in the wall where the laptop had apparently struck it.

  “Does it still work?”

  “Only one way to find out.” She pushed the on button. A few lights came to life above the keyboard, but the monitor remained black.

  “I guess it—” I started, but cut off when the monitor lit up.

  “Yes!” Carina exclaimed. “It’s about time something went our way.”

  “You mean besides somebody forgetting their keys in the car door?”

  “Well, there was that,” she admitted.

  The screen switched to the log in screen and my heart sunk a bit.

  “It has a password,” I said needlessly. “I don’t suppose you know it, do you?”

  “Dad might have been paranoid and secretive about his work, but he was also a little scatterbrained and predictable. He could remember theorems and formulas that would make your head spin, but that left little room for passwords.”

  She stepped back and pulled the middle drawer open. After a quick search, she closed it and tried the drawers down the right side, then the left. She stopped at the second drawer down and pulled out a piece of paper taped to the back side between the two screws that connected the pull handle. She held it up and flashed a smile. She unfolded it and laid it flat on the desk.

  I shined the light on it. “There are six passwords. Which one is it?”

  She didn’t answer. She ran a finger down the page, pausing at each one. “This one,” she said with her finger on the fourth password.

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s the only one not related to me. All the others have my birthday in some form in it. Or my favorite number. My favorite animal.” She pointed.

  “A cheetah?” I said, amused.

  “Hush. This
one is the only one that doesn’t have something about me in it. I’m willing to bet he made it that way because the IT guys at his work would flip if he used a personally related password on his work computer.”

  “Make sense. Try it.”

  She set her phone aside and I shined my light on the keyboard for her to see as she tapped in the password. She hit Enter and the screen flashed, revealing the desktop. The background wallpaper was a huge Lindström logo mostly hidden by a couple dozen shortcuts.

  I read a few of them. “Wow. Where do we even start? They all look work-y to me.”

  She breathed out a disappointed breath and her shoulders slumped a little. “This is just so overwhelming. We’re in over our heads, Conor.”

  I fought hard not to let the same disappointment creep in me. From the look of things on that screen, we could be sorting through the files all night. There were links to programs I had never heard of. There were folders with subfolders. There were folders with pictures in them. Pictures? On a work computer? I pointed at the folder with tiny little miniature pictures spilling out.

  “Try that one.”

  She used the touch pad to hover the mouse over the folder and double-clicked it. The folder opened and sure enough, it was full of images. She double-clicked the first icon and the picture opened. I leaned in closer to look at it over her shoulder. It showed a lab full of high tech looking equipment. There were lots of stainless steel, test tubes, computers, microscopes – everything you’d find in a lab, minus the people.

  Carina clicked the right arrow and another picture popped up. It was the same lab from a different angle. She clicked the arrow a few more times, each time revealing a different view of the same workerless lab. Each click came faster as she cycled through the pictures quicker and quicker.

  “Wait!” she said, quickly clicking the left arrow a few times to a particular picture. It didn’t look any different from the others. “There.” She pointed at the background.

  I leaned even closer to squint at the screen. Sure enough, beyond a wall of windows, outside the room and out of focus, a man stood left of center. “Who is that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Making out any features was hard. The man had light hair, maybe blond or gray, and wore black-rimmed glasses. By the angle of those glasses, it was very obvious he was looking into the lab and possibly right at whoever was taking those pictures.

  “I can’t really make anything out,” I admitted.

  “Me either,” Carina agreed. “Keep it in mind, though.”

  She cycled through the rest of the pictures, but they were all different angles of the lab and the mysterious man didn’t appear again. She paused on those that featured computer monitors, but the screens were off.

  I stood up straight and ran a hand through my hair. “Well, that wasn’t helpful.”

  “We’ll just keep looking,” she said with more determination than her posture portrayed.

  “I’ll get you a chair,” I said, swinging the light to the overturned computer chair across the room.

  She minimized the folder and looked over the desktop as I went to get the chair. “There’s another folder with pictures.”

  “Might be worth a look.”

  I crossed the room and grabbed the overturned chair.

  “There’s just one picture,” she said. “It’s a hallway. It looks like a hospital.”

  “A hospital?” I turned to look across the dark room. “Wasn’t there something about tests at the hospital on Mr. Walker’s—” I cut off as a sound reached my ears. I stepped to the window facing the front of the house and peeked out of the blinds.

  “What is it?” Carina asked.

  The roar of a vehicle grew louder and headlights turned onto Carina’s street. “Cut the lights.” I flicked off the flashlight.

  Carina slammed the laptop shut and turned off her cell phone light. “What is it?” She asked again.

  I waited a moment to make sure. Another set of headlights came onto the street. Both large black shapes slowed as they neared her drive, confirming my suspicion. “They’re here.”

  She snatched the laptop off the desk and headed for the bedroom door. “Come on.”

  We hurried down the hall, took the stairs as quickly as we could without relying on the compromised railing, and she led me towards the back of the house. We went through a formal dining room and a kitchen that looked like it belonged on a Food Network cooking show.

  A set of French doors led out of the kitchen onto the patio. We slipped through, closing the door behind us and crossed the lawn to a high stone wall.

  “What are we going to do?” I whispered as we listened to the two Hummers pulling into the drive, no doubt blocking in our stolen car.

  “We have to go to the hospital,” she said just as softly.

  “That’s the obvious choice,” I agreed. “But, we can’t walk there and I don’t think we’ll get lucky enough to find another car with the keys in the door.”

  “Let’s get over this wall,” Carina said.

  I nodded and crouched beside it. I laced my fingers together and held them out for her. She planted a foot in the finger basket and I boosted her up so she could grab the top of the wall. I waited until she made it to the top before taking a couple of steps back. I judged the distance, bounded forward, and stepped up the wall to propel myself to the top.

  I dropped to the other side and helped her down. We knelt on our haunches against the wall.

  “Now what?” I hoped she was the one with the plan.

  She shrugged. “Most of the houses around here have these high walls. We won’t get anywhere trying to climb every one.”

  “To the front, then?”

  She looked around her neighbor’s yard before nodding.

  “Then what?”

  “We wing it,” she breathed.

  We slipped across the incredibly maintained yard and pushed against the house. She put a finger to her lips. I nodded and she led the way toward the front.

  She stopped at a bay window and knelt down. The spot offered a view of her front yard and the Hummers parked there. At least seven black-clad men took up positions around the vehicle, eyeing the house and clutching automatic weapons.

  I tugged a wordless question on her sleeve. She shook her head.

  We couldn’t wait around for long. We had to get out of there. If one of them turned a pair of night vision or heat signature goggles our direction, they would see us. I felt exposed and, at the very least, I wanted to put something solid between us and those goons.

  I was about to tug another question, but the men exploded into action, storming Carina’s house. Several ran up the front steps while more circled around both sides.

  Once three barged through the front door, Carina sprang up. “Come on!”

  I had no other choice but to follow. We crossed the neighbor’s yard, hopped the low fence that separated the lawns, and ran for the driveway.

  “The car is blocked in,” I hissed as we neared it.

  She skidded to a halt by one of the Hummers. “We’re not going for the car. Get in.”

  “You can’t be—”

  “Get in!” She opened the door, tossed the laptop in, and climbed into the monster SUV’s driver seat.

  She was serious! I didn’t take the time to run around to the passenger side. I opened the backseat door and dived in behind the driver seat. We closed the doors as quietly as possible and I climbed into the front passenger seat.

  “You can’t be serious!” I finished.

  The massive vehicle absolutely swallowed her whole. She looked like a toddler pretending to drive Daddy’s truck.

  She jingled the keys left in the ignition. “Very serious,” she said. She reached to the side to click the button to move the seat forward and up. It still swamped her. “Ready?”

  “No,” I said honestly.

  “Too bad.” She grabbed the keys and turned them. The engine roared to life. She jammed it
into reverse and gunned it.

  I braced myself to keep from being flung face first into the dash.

  We bounced out into the street and she forced the SUV into drive. She must have slammed the gas pedal to the floor because the Hummer absolutely roared down the street.

  “There’s no way they didn’t hear that!” I yelled.

  “Probably!” she yelled right back.

  She took a hard corner. The tires squealed and I had to grab the bar on the dash to keep from spilling over into her seat. She floored it again before taking another too-fast turn.