Hideout

by Jack Heath

  Zara looks pleased, her hand fluttering over her breastbone. ‘Thank you.’

  The others cast a nervous glance at Fred, to see if he’ll allow this. Maybe he and Zara are together. He keeps his eyes on his food, shovelling it in like a kid just home from school. He’s filled both bowls, but left the second one untouched.

  ‘Do me, do me,’ says Cedric. Joking, but not joking.

  ‘Lux would already know what you looked like,’ Donnie objects, not in a friendly way. ‘You’re a celebrity.’

  ‘Our famous writer,’ Zara says, tousling Cedric’s hair, which is too short to actually tousle.

  Cedric looks pleased at the acknowledgement of his fame, but disappointed that there’s nothing left to say about him.

  ‘What about me?’ I say, trying to head off further questions. ‘Am I like y’all expected?’

  ‘I didn’t expect any y’alls from you,’ Samson says, and Donnie laughs. Cedric laughs louder, like they’re competing.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘My inner redneck momentarily emerged from under my sophisticated exterior.’

  I’ve overcorrected now. Lux’s language wasn’t that fancy, and I’m still wearing the ill-fitting clothes from the charity bin. But they seem to buy it.

  ‘It’s all good, man,’ Donnie says.

  ‘Yeah, you don’t have to hide here,’ Kyle mumbles, his mouth full.

  Fred raises his glass of club soda. Everyone else has wine.

  ‘To being ourselves,’ he says.

  The others all hold up their glasses.

  I follow suit. ‘Cheers.’

  Clink.

  The wine burns its way down my throat.

  Cedric smacks his lips and sighs. ‘So. Who’s ready for karaoke?’

  Everyone helps out with the washing-up. There’s a friendly bustle of hands on lower backs, of ‘Thank you’ and ‘Can I just squeeze past?’ and ‘Here you go’.

  After the dishwasher is stacked and the pans scrubbed, there’s karaoke. Cedric wasn’t kidding.

  In the living area, Fred flicks on the TV. It’s huge, with a resolution approaching reality and colours exceeding it. Maybe this was where they all watched the videos of Abbey, Lux’s prisoner.

  Fred brings up YouTube. The others shout requests, mostly on behalf of each other. ‘Put on “Call Me When You’re Sober” for Donnie!’ ‘Hey, Zara, are you gonna do “Fergalicious” for us?’ ‘Anything by Avril Lavigne works for me.’

  Fred quickly throws a playlist together while everyone piles onto the sofa.

  ‘What have you got for us, Lux?’ Samson asks.

  ‘Yeah, what’s your go-to song?’

  Cedric answers for me. ‘“I Try” by Macy Gray.’

  He sounds like he’s kidding, but I can’t admit that I don’t know the song, just in case the real Lux was famously fond of it.

  ‘You folks have fun,’ I say. ‘I’m going to bed.’

  ‘No!’ Donnie and Samson both yell.

  Zara grabs my hand and drags me down onto the sofa. ‘Everyone must sing,’ she says, halfway between a threat and a joke.

  I laugh nervously. ‘Okay, okay.’

  ‘Macy Gray it is,’ Fred says, and adds another video to the playlist.

  The others can tell I’m anxious. Hopefully they can’t tell why. Could the real Lux sing? Would they know?

  Samson takes the microphone first. He sings ‘Beautiful’ by Christina Aguilera. His voice comes out of hidden speakers in the corners of the room. It’s not good, but he makes up for it with enthusiasm, hamming it up, closing his eyes as he hits the high notes. Donnie slaps the table in time with the beat. The others applaud wildly. Zara tops up my wine.

  Samson passes the microphone to Fred, who is expertly polite—he pretends he doesn’t want to perform, but only for a few seconds. He doesn’t make the others beg. His chosen song is a cover of ‘Uptown Girl’, and he sings it more or less in tune, bobbing his head to the thumping bass, glancing at Zara from time to time. She smiles and sips her drink.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ Kyle mutters. He leaves the room, possibly wary of getting dragged into the spotlight.

  Zara’s Texas accent disappears when she sings. Her chosen song is ‘Teenage Dream’—the reference to ‘Fergalicious’ must have been a joke, or related to something I wasn’t present for. She sings without once glancing at the screen to check the lyrics. All her focus is on the audience. It’s as though we’re on stage rather than her. I shrivel under her scrutiny.

  Donnie hands the microphone to me. ‘Your turn, Lux.’

  I hold up my glass. ‘I’m still working up the courage.’

  ‘It’s your song,’ Donnie insists, his breath smelling strongly of courage. ‘Come on.’

  Reluctantly, I stand up. I should have pretended that I was already drunk, to explain away not knowing the tune. Too late now. Maybe I’ll recognise the song when it starts.

  Violins fill the air. On the screen behind me, the singer is geting out of bed. Nothing sounds familiar yet, and the lyrics are already appearing on the screen.

  I’m opening my mouth to sing in front of this group of killers who think I’m their friend when Kyle bursts back in. His eyes are wide under his fringe.

  ‘Fred,’ he hisses. ‘There’s someone outside!’

  CHAPTER 6

  I am a drop, a braid, a kiss. Where am I from?

  Suddenly Donnie’s huge hand is on my shoulder, just close enough to my neck to be a threat. I can smell the veins in his wrist. It’s hard not to imagine ripping them out.

  ‘You bring anyone with you, Lux?’ he asks.

  ‘No.’ I try to brush his hand off, but he squeezes tighter.

  ‘I’m serious,’ he says. ‘Because whoever’s out there—’

  ‘They’re not with me.’

  ‘No one followed you?’ Fred asks.

  I think about it. Miles of dark, winding roads, checking and memorising the licence plate of every car I saw. No one I saw twice, and nothing at all for the last few turns.

  ‘No one followed me,’ I say.

  Fred turns to Kyle. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I got a notification—there was movement on one of the cameras.’ Kyle holds up his phone. ‘I figured it would be an animal, but I checked the feed just in case—’

  ‘Which camera?’

  ‘R3. A hundred yards north of the house.’

  ‘What about the driveway sensor?’

  ‘It didn’t go off.’

  It takes a moment for this to sink in. The woods surrounding the house are filled with cameras and sensors. My plan to sneak out in the dead of the night would never have worked.

  Cedric is checking his phone. Seeing the same notification Kyle received.

  ‘I freeze-framed it downstairs.’ Kyle looks nervous but also eager, like he’s hoping Fred will scratch him behind the ears and call him a good boy. ‘He’s about five foot ten, wearing hiking gear.’

  ‘You get many hikers around here?’ I ask.

  ‘We do not,’ Fred says.

  He leads us all back to the corridor where the bedrooms are, and tosses his keys to Donnie, who unlocks the armoury while everyone else goes downstairs.

  I hesitate before following. Nothing good ever happens in a basement.

  ‘Lux?’ Zara calls.

  ‘Coming.’ I force myself to walk down the stairs.

  The basement floor is unsealed concrete and the walls are tightly packed dirt, holding up a low ceiling crisscrossed with wooden beams. The cramped space is bathed with light from dozens of screens subdivided into hundreds of rectangles, all showing different parts of the woods. None showing the house itself, I notice. A huge server hums in a corner, protected from the dust by plastic sheeting.

  ‘Welcome to the editing room,’ Cedric tells me quietly. ‘This is where we cut the subscriber videos. Remove cross-set voices, erase anything incriminating, you know.’

  Everything in the videos is criminal, but he doesn’t seem to be kidding.
He must mean anything that might expose the location of the house.

  He seems like the kind of guy who talks too much when he’s nervous. Could be useful.

  ‘Where’s the intruder?’ Fred is looming over one of the desks, the glowing screens reflected in his eyes.

  ‘Hang on, it’s gone back to the live feed. Let me bring up the screenshot again.’ Kyle grabs a mouse and starts clicking his way through some menus.

  ‘Is R3 one of the cameras we moved this morning?’ Fred asks.

  ‘Right. Lucky, otherwise we might have missed him completely.’

  I’m scanning the screens, trying to get a sense of the distances between the cameras. But without any recognisable landmarks, it’s impossible to tell how the pieces fit together.

  ‘It’s probably a hiker,’ Zara says.

  Fred looks doubtful. ‘At this time of night?’

  I chew my nails. If it’s not a hiker, it could be a cop. The FBI hadn’t made much headway investigating this group—we didn’t even know it was a group—but maybe the county sheriff’s office was having better luck. I don’t want to be mistaken for one of the bad guys and arrested or shot.

  I am a bad guy, of course. But I’m a different kind of bad guy. It feels like the distinction should matter.

  ‘Well, maybe it’s Druznetski.’ Zara is absent-mindedly tying her hair into a French braid.

  Who’s Druznetski? I want to ask. But the question might expose me as an impostor.

  Fred hesitates. ‘Why would he show up?’

  Zara shrugs. ‘Something he wanted to tell you in person, maybe? No one else knows we’re here.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be sneaking around in the woods.’

  Kyle has found the screenshot. One of the rectangles enlarges—a shadow between two trees. The image is monochromatic, and blurry, but it does indeed look like a man in hiking gear.

  ‘Is that Druznetski?’ Kyle asks.

  Fred stares at the image for a long time. ‘No,’ he says finally.

  ‘How can you tell?’ Zara says. ‘That could be anybody.’

  The man is still frozen on the screen.

  ‘Well,’ Fred says, ‘let’s get out there and ask him.’

  Donnie comes down the stairs carrying the guns, a Bowie knife and six pairs of night-vision goggles.

  ‘I’ll take a rifle,’ Zara says, holding out a hand.

  ‘Me too,’ I say quickly. I don’t know how to fire it, but there are only two long-range weapons here; if I have one of them, I’m half as likely to get shot in the back.

  Donnie passes the rifles to me and Zara. I keep mine pointed at the floor, trying to look like I know how to hold it. Fred takes the SIG Sauer pistol. Donnie gives one of the Remington shotguns to Kyle and keeps the other for himself. Samson gets the knife.

  Cedric holds out his hand for a weapon and realises there are none left. He drops his hand, embarrassed.

  ‘You should stay here and protect the house,’ Donnie says.

  ‘With what?’ Cedric asks.

  The rest of us are already headed back up the stairs. ‘Use your imagination.’

  ‘Is there a prize for whoever bags him?’ Samson asks.

  ‘The prize is we get to keep doing our work.’ Fred pulls a pair of goggles over his head and turns to me. ‘Sorry to drop you in the deep end, Lux.’

  ‘I’m good,’ I say. An untrue statement in every sense. ‘Let’s do this.’

  In the alien light of the night-vision goggles, I can see tree branches bristling with flakes of sleet. The ground is a mixture of rock and muddy slush. If the guy is a hiker, he picked a hell of a night for it. It’s the kind of cold that dries out my lips, and leaves my knuckles cracked and bleeding. There’s a distant moaning that I hope is the wind but might be wolves. I’m wearing a thick coat from the wardrobe, but it doesn’t protect my legs from the frosty air.

  We’re clustered on the front porch. Fred has switched off the security lamps. He points at each of us in turn, and then jabs his finger towards a different part of the forest. Apparently we’re splitting up.

  Works for me. If the hiker is a cop, and I have to explain that I’m not a psychopath—just an FBI consultant who eats psychopaths—I’d rather the others weren’t within earshot. I just hope I find the guy before anyone else does. And that I see him before he sees me.

  ‘Try to get him alive,’ Fred murmurs, then he sneaks off the porch into the darkness of the woods.

  I move in the direction he chose for me. There’s no trail. I’m wading through thigh-high brush, in shoes that are more suitable for a funeral. With the goggles I have no peripheral vision, but I can see a good distance. Fifty yards away a withered pine leans at a severe angle, threatening to fall. I recognise it from one of the screens inside, so I know there’s a camera up ahead, but not the right one. The camera that caught the hiker was pointed at a birch tree with a distinctive wedge taken out of the side, like someone started trying to chop it down and then gave up. I suspect that when Fred was dividing up the search area, he sent me in the direction where the guy was least likely to be.

  This is your chance to walk away. I ignore the voice as I creep through the woods.

  They don’t know who you are. You can sneak back to the house, find a key to one of the cars and drive home.

  I rap my knuckles against the side of my head, as though I can dislodge the thought. The goggles flicker for a second. It’s not like I can just pretend I never found these guys.

  You can call in an anonymous tip. The cops will get them.

  And then what?

  The voice falls silent. It knows the hunger is already driving me crazy. My supply of cadavers has been cut off. If I go home, I’ll eventually hurt someone. If I stay here, at least my victims will have it coming.

  I recognise another tree up ahead. It has a straight-out branch supported by one at an angle, like a hangman’s gallows. I’m starting to get a feel for the lay of the land. There should be a camera … there. I see it—a deceptively small white box, nailed to a different tree. No cables, and the foliage is too thick for solar power. Fred and co must use high-quality batteries, and even so, they’d have to change them every few days.

  ‘Hey!’ A shout in the distance. A grunt and a splash of leaves from somewhere to my left. I turn my head so fast I get dizzy. Because of the goggles, the light takes a split second longer to reach my eyes, and it feels like I’m still spinning when I’m not.

  Even with the goggles, I can’t see the commotion, but I can hear it. A thud. A shallow cry. Someone is fighting for their life, but they’re trying to do it quietly.

  I head towards the sounds, my head low. The wind picks up, whispering in my ears, and suddenly I can’t hear the ruckus anymore. I keep moving. My hands are numb, clutching the gun that I don’t even know how to shoot.

  Branches whip back and forth up ahead. Someone is running towards me, breathing heavily. I try to move away, but a tree pokes me in the back and snags my jacket.

  A figure bursts out of the shrubbery. Not Samson. An older man, Black, maybe forty, with worry lines around his mouth and a wool hat stretched over his head. He’s dressed for the weather but not the darkness, his eyes wide and wild. Part of his puffy parka has been sliced open, leaving a dark stain dripping down his arm and onto his khaki trousers.

  He crashes right into me. The branch behind me snaps, and we both hit the ground, hard. I cling to the gun as I wrestle him off. He weighs maybe a hundred and seventy pounds. I can smell his blood, hot and sticky.

  I shut my eyes for a second. He’s a bystander. I can’t let myself bite him. I can’t.

  The man doesn’t attack me. He scrambles up, backs off. He doesn’t appear to be armed.

  ‘Don’t shoot,’ he says.

  I lower the gun, but not all the way. ‘Are you police?’

  ‘No.’ He doesn’t offer any other explanation for being out here, just gives a little shake of his head.

  I have a million questions for this guy, but t
here’s only time for one. ‘Druznetski?’

  ‘What?’ He looks confused, then his eyes narrow. ‘Blake!’

  Fear opens its jaws to swallow me. He knows who I am, despite the shaved head and the goggles. How? I’m sure we’ve never met.

  He could expose me to the others. If they catch this guy, I’m screwed.

  So either kill him, or get him out of here.

  Footsteps crash through the forest towards us. Someone is following his trail.

  I point in the direction Fred sent me. Hopefully he won’t stray into anyone else’s search area. ‘Go that way,’ I whisper. ‘There are five others after you.’

  The man hesitates, perhaps wondering if I’m sending him into a trap.

  I put the gun down on the dirt and hold up my bare hands. ‘Go! Now!’

  He gets moving, fighting his way deeper into the woods. I pick up the gun and wait, wondering who his pursuer is. Fred sent Samson that way. But if it’s Samson, why isn’t he hollering for the others?

  Whoever it is, their footfalls soon stop. Maybe they’re listening for sounds of the man’s escape. I bash through the undergrowth, making as much noise as possible.

  Bad idea. I shamble into a clearing only to be attacked with a Bowie knife. A pound and a half of sharp steel sweeps out of the shadows at my chest.

  I stagger backwards, swinging the gun just in time to knock the blade sideways into a tree. ‘Samson! It’s me!’

  Samson stops trying to wrench the knife out of the wood. ‘Lux,’ he says, realising. ‘You see which way the guy went? I want to talk to him.’

  He seems to have talk confused with stab. ‘He ran back this way.’ I point behind Samson. ‘Just now. Must have gotten past you.’

  Zara emerges from the woods to my left, as silently as a wraith. Her goggles make her expression unreadable. Unlike me, she looks like she knows how to hold her gun. ‘What’s going on?’

  Fred sent Zara in the opposite direction. She must have heard the fight and come running.

  ‘He’s around here somewhere,’ Samson says. ‘Did you see him?’ He’s favouring one arm, nursing the other close to his chest. The guy must have injured him.