by Dana Fraser
Just thinking Agnetha’s name caused a wry smile to surface on Thomas’s face. He flattened his lips to erase the uncharitable grin then remembered he was alone in the woods at the beginning of what could be the end of America, if not the world. There was no reason he couldn’t laugh at the May-December couple if he wanted to.
There was plenty to laugh about. Gavin’s wife was the opposite of the virgin martyr who was her namesake. The former ballet dancer had turned photographer when she aged out of the profession at thirty-two. Even after the birth of the couple’s daughter Gisa in late January, Agnetha’s only subject was herself, both in art and in conversation.
Displayed in mass quantity in almost every room of the house, the photos had been a bit eye popping on first encounter. Thomas’s grin twisted a little tighter as he remembered trying to keep his seventeen-year-old son’s gaze from constantly fixing on the nude photos that plastered the walls. He didn’t want to think about what had transpired behind locked doors in the guest room Ellis had been placed in as the teen stared at larger-than-life bare breasts framed over the mantle of the faux fireplace.
At least the uncomfortably pervasive display of Agnetha’s flesh had pushed Thomas and Becca out of the house and into the woods, where they held hands, talked, and shared the occasional eye roll at their hosts’ expense.
With a sigh, Thomas silenced the memories and stored the binoculars. Stepping out of the tree line, he pushed the large rock forward to mark his exit point so he could locate the hidden carryon even if he was running through the area at top speed.
Adjusting the straps on the CBP backpack, he swallowed then drew a deep breath. It was time to find out if Gavin knew anything. Intuition whispered through him that the man was either up the same shit creek as Thomas or he was an enemy. Either way, Thomas didn’t have time to dick around in Centreville. He had to get on the road to his family.
His gaze sweeping across the lawn as he moved, Thomas picked a route to the back of the mini-mansion that kept him out of view of the neighbors. Stepping under the covered doorway of the pool house, he looked for any sign of activity within the two-story home. At seven thirty in the morning, with the sun at or above the horizon the last twenty-plus minutes, there was enough daylight to see through the sheer curtains that covered the windows at the back of the house.
Everything inside seemed still.
Closing his eyes, Thomas strained his ears. All he heard beyond the birds and insects was the faint hum of a few nearby generators. From his summer visit, he knew most of the homes, including Gavin’s, had solar panels installed on their roofs. Whether it was sunshine or fossil fuels, whatever off-grid source powered the homes around him, there should have been the morning noise pollution of blenders and coffee grinders. There should have been yapping dogs eager for their morning walk.
Instead, there was nothing.
Leaving his hiding spot, Thomas skirted the pool and headed for the French doors that opened onto the patio. His hands patted around for a second in search of a tool to open the door and then he thought to try the handle first.
It turned and he pushed the door inward, a faint blush coloring his cheeks before the gravity of his situation returned them to a pale ash. He stepped inside, shut the door and engaged the lock.
If anyone unwelcome wanted to come in behind him, they’d have to put in a little more work and make a little more noise.
The Maxim 9 in hand, he tiptoed across the room and into the hall. He could see the front door, its deadbolt locked. He moved into the kitchen next, checking the pantry as he passed it on his way to the garage. Gavin’s Land Rover was parked in the garage, along with the silver BMW Z4 that Gavin had purchased for Agnetha as his wedding gift.
The cars were home, so where were their owners?
Leaving the kitchen, he headed back down the hall, clearing each room as he made his way to the master suite with its adjoining nursery.
The door was shut.
Grip tightening on the handgun, he rotated the doorknob. Morning light filled the room. A single form rested atop the made bed, the body dressed in a sleeveless satin gown colored a light pewter. The long skirt curled around feet clad in matching satin pumps. A triple-strand diamond bracelet glittered along the wrist resting along the canted hip. Another three strands of diamonds caged her throat.
Thomas had viewed dead bodies up close by the hundreds. He had developed almost a sixth sense about when he was in the presence of a corpse instead of a living, breathing human. The tint of the skin, the absolute stillness, all the details wormed their way through his mind before he was even aware of noticing them.
Stepping close to Agnetha’s body, Thomas glanced cautiously around the room in search of a bogeyman dressed in Gavin’s skin.
Nothing jumped out at him or skittered from beneath the bed to a dark corner, so he pressed his fingers to the cold flesh of her throat and confirmed what he already knew.
Wasting a few precious seconds, his gaze swept from the stylish braid of blond hair to the satin pumps in search of the cause of death. There were no wounds that he could see. The dress looked like it had just come off a hanger. She hadn’t been shot or beaten.
The lips were purple, so were the tips of her fingers. Leaning over, he simultaneously saw and smelled the vomit that stained the pillow where her head rested.
Poison.
Stifling a grunt of surprise, he moved on to the nursery.
Gisa was dressed in what was likely the gown in which she had been christened. If she had vomited, someone had cleaned it away. But the purpling of her lips and fingers pointed to the same cause of death.
Face and chest hardening, he left the baby and went in search of the monster who had murdered her.
THOMAS HEADED DIRECTLY where monsters like to lurk—underground. He found Gavin in the home office that took up half of the basement, all the lights downstairs working and on.
In his late fifties, the former soldier turned military lobbyist had his hand wrapped around a bottle of aged scotch when Thomas stepped into view. Gavin’s brows lifted slightly then he took a swig from the open bottle.
“Weren’t you in Brussels yesterday?”
“You received my email?” Thomas asked. For one irrational second, he entertained the possibility that his email had caused the dead bodies upstairs. But Gavin had been politely dismissive of the project’s concept. He wasn’t about to murder his family because of a link Thomas had sent.
Snickering, Gavin saluted him by raising the bottle in the air. “Nice job on that. Little late, though.”
Keeping one eye on his ex-colleague’s hands, Thomas looked around the room. Like the rest of the house—minus the corpses—there was no sign of the impending chaos. No survival bags being packed, no weapons or boxes of ammo.
“You know what’s going on?”
Another snicker was followed by the wet smack of Gavin’s lips against the bottle before he answered. “Damn straight I do. Fucking project managed its ass.”
His gaze lifted briefly toward the ceiling, the master bedroom and his dead wife directly above his head. He exhaled with a harsh blow then rubbed at his chest before offering the bottle to Thomas.
Remembering the deep cyanotic stain on Agnetha’s lips, Thomas shook his head.
He didn’t understand. It had been a bad year politically, hell, a bad eight years. But something like a military coup? Was that it?
“What did you project manage?” he asked, taking a seat across from Gavin and continuing to watch the man’s hands while keeping a firm and ready grip on the Maxim 9.
A drunken, lunatic smile plastered itself on Gavin’s face. He lifted both arms as if encompassing the universe.
“The Gilded Age? The Greening of the World? Eden’s Restoration?” He barked each question then reclined deep into his chair, tilted his head up and glared at the ceiling. “And because of one fucking bitch, I won’t get to see it.”
Thomas stared, numb at the response and trying to pie
ce an answer out of everything Gavin had said.
“Correction,” Gavin chuckled, leaning forward and pointing the tip of the bottle at Thomas. “Two fucking bitches. My crazy bride with her packets of rat poison and Becca with her damn Stability and Behavioral Predictive algorithms.”
Every muscle in Thomas’s body snapped to attention at the mention of his wife, his mind only faintly registering that it was Agnetha who had killed the infant before committing suicide.
Gavin’s grin became more malicious. “Oh, don’t blame Becca for what follows—if you ever lay eyes on her again. She merely provided a number of tools over the years.”
Thomas had dealt with drunken soldiers before, but he had never needed to interrogate one. Drunk or sober, he knew he had to feed Gavin’s ego without being blatant.
“Tools for what? Seems pretty widespread. You put all of DC in the dark.”
Gavin took another drink, emptying the bottle, then leaned back and dropped his hands to his lap. Thomas’s pulse kicked up a couple dozen more beats per minute. His grip tightened on the Maxim 9.
He forced his muscles to relax. Gavin might be fingering the trigger on a pistol at that moment, might have one holstered on the underside of the desk’s surface, but ordering him to put his hands up would cut off the flow of information.
Thomas waited with forced patience until Gavin opened up some more.
“It’s global,” he answered. “At least it is if the Chinese don’t fuck us over.”
Thomas took a deep breath in, the muscles around his eyes expanding away from the sockets at the same time his mouth tightened. Exhaling, he bit at the inside of his bottom lip to keep a building tremor at bay.
“You’re saying the power is out across the world?”
“Suppressed, like how the cable company can cut you off if you don’t pay without even sending out a tech,” Gavin corrected. “Strategic and critical locations still have power even if the lights are out for miles around. Otherwise…”
His hands came up, the fingertips briefly touching together before they mushroomed outward.
Right, Thomas thought. Chemical plant explosions would quickly and indiscriminately kill plant and animal life in their vicinity. Radioactive leaks from nuclear power plants would take longer to manifest but eventually poison everything remaining for generations.
He thought of the shouted answers Gavin had given him. Eden, a green world that Gavin had expected to go on living in. A gilded world.
Shaking his head, Thomas snorted, his gun hand tracing a short circle with the tip of the Maxim’s barrel. “So any ruthless son of a bitch with enough money or needed skills gets to hide out in some Shangri La while most of the human race is annihilated?”
Gavin answered with a satisfied nod and a chilling statistic. “Roughly three hundred million will survive.”
“And I’m on some kind of hit list because why?”
“If you were merely a practical man, your skills would have been welcomed, especially since Hannah and Becca are on a retention list,” Gavin offered. “Hell, Hannah was positioned to work a few stories above one of our regional headquarters so we wouldn’t lose her in the early chaos.”
A fiery rage burned itself across Thomas’s face. They were targeting his wife and daughter to enslave while leaving his son to die.
“I know that look. You think you can save them?” Gavin taunted, his hands dropping into his lap. “Who are you going to save first?”
Thomas stared at the man he had loosely called “friend.” He wondered how long Gavin had hated him, or if this was nothing personal, just the business of self-preservation.
Not that the years of professional friendship mattered. They were enemies now. And whatever information Gavin had held back, it was irrelevant. All Thomas needed to know was that it was him and his family against the world. Everyone he would meet on the road ahead was an enemy or an obstacle.
With a shrug, Thomas answered with his son’s name.
“I see,” Gavin murmured then glanced at the ceiling. “A two-man army marching across a vast and deadly land in a vain attempt to rescue their womenfolk. Sounds like some western you read when you were a boy.”
Thomas nodded at the thoughts running through his head, the gesture catching Gavin’s attention.
“Tell me,” Thomas started. “Becca’s algorithms…they are a pain in your ass right now because they peg you as a threat after Agnetha killed herself and Gisa?”
“On the money,” Gavin answered in a tight voice.
Thomas leaned forward, his posture that of a co-conspirator.
“Well, each factor is going to have a different weight, right? Basically, you’ve got the loss of a crazy piece of ass and a helpless offspring stacked against you. Change even one of the elements and you change the algorithm’s prediction.” Thomas straightened, his index finger tapping absently against the trigger guard as he tilted his head. “So, if you didn’t report their deaths already, is anyone going to know if you go out and grab another baby girl?”
A light flickered in Gavin’s eyes. Clearly, he hadn’t considered the idea.
A drunk grin brimming with fresh hope spread across the man’s face.
Thomas returned the grin, lifted the Maxim 9, and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER FOUR
ALL TOTAL, Thomas spent fifteen minutes in the house after shooting Gavin once center mass, then again in the head. He quickly ransacked the man’s clothing and desk, taking the wallet and a key ring that had fobs for both vehicles. From there, he sprinted to the master bedroom, removing Agnetha’s diamonds from the corpse and dumping the rest of her jewelry box into a pillow case before heading to the oversized utility closet at the back of the garage where Gavin kept his golf clubs and, more importantly, most of his hunting equipment.
Entering the garage, he hit the remote start for the Land Rover. Nothing happened, so he hit it again, then a few more times trying different combinations of pressing the button. Next he tried the Z4. With the only sound in the garage that of Thomas swearing, he stalked over to the Land Rover, threw the driver side door open and tried starting the vehicle in the more conventional manner.
He lost ten seconds to pounding out his fury against the steering wheel then popped the hood, got out and lifted it the rest of the way open. He stared, mind numb at the jumble of slashed wires and hoses, the inner protective covering of the Land Rover’s engine missing. Spotting a note taped to the inside of the hood, he pulled it off and read, his flesh heating in rage.
Whoever you are, you weren’t meant to survive.
Your Host,
Gavin DeBerg
Even though he knew he would find the same cruel sarcasm beneath the hood of the Z4, Thomas had to check. Each step, each wasted second pounded in his chest, but he opened the driver side door, popped the hood and surveyed the carnage.
Yep, DeBerg really was a cold-hearted bastard. If the world wasn’t ending around him, Thomas would have returned to the basement and unloaded the Maxim’s remaining twenty-seven bullets into the corpse’s groin and face.
Hell, he’d grab an extra magazine and turn the body into Swiss cheese.
But the world was ending, so he kept a tight grip on his focus and turned to the utility closet. He twisted the doorknob, found it locked. He tried both keys on the ring he had taken from Gavin’s desk drawer. When that failed, he lifted his leg, took a quarter second to brace then kicked as hard as he could, his anger doubling the force of the blow he landed.
Hollow and made out of plywood, the door peeled away from its frame to expose two backpacks and a Browning bolt-action rifle in camo finish kitted out with a custom stock and a Leupold VX-6 rifle scope with a 6:1 zoom ratio.
He tested the weight of the two packs then opened the heavier one, finding two extra magazines and several boxes of ammunition, as well as all the other contents he would expect Gavin to carry on a hunting trip or in a bug out bag.
Conscious t
hat someone could show up and challenge him at any second, Thomas stood with everything but his gaze immobilized as he tried to figure out how to get the extra gear back to the Caddy. Then he remembered the separate garage, the one with the au pair suite above it.
He hadn’t asked Gavin about the girl, hadn’t even thought that she could be alive and walk in on him.
Get your head out of your ass, soldier!
With a curt nod acknowledging his own stupidity, he headed to the breezeway that joined the main house to the small wing. A glance in the garage revealed no third car, but there was a riding lawn mower. A jog up the stairs offered a self-contained suite filled with furniture, but an empty refrigerator and cupboards. He ran back down, hit the garage door opener then returned to the main garage, grabbed the two packs and the rifle and dragged them to the lawn mower.
Spotting a fifteen-gallon gas caddy, he almost pissed himself with joy.
With the mower’s key in the cupholder, he spent his last two-point-five minutes in Gavin’s house getting everything strapped onto the machine using the garden hose he found hanging in a coil on the garage wall. He took the same route from house to woods, barely slowing once he was past the tree line to retrieve his pack.
He stopped when he got close to the trail, turned the mower off and made a scouting trip to scout the area around the Caddy. When he was satisfied no one was watching, he brought the mower up alongside the Caddy, started the old beast and popped the trunk. He put the gas caddy in first. He had already tested the seal on the nozzle and fill hole in the garage, but he tested them again then grabbed the lighter of the two packs from the storage closet.
He figured the bag was meant for Agnetha to carry and dumped the contents in the trunk for a quick survey. The neutral line of his mouth turned to a frown as a couple dozen diapers fell out. Then he laughed, thinking about the NASA astronaut who had worn adult diapers for a marathon cross country drive with the intent to slay a sexual rival. If they had been adult sized, he might have entertained the idea because every stop he made on the trip home would heighten his exposure. Still, the diapers might come in handy if he injured himself. And the baby formula and jar food was worth keeping as long as he could.