Survival of The Fittest | Book 2 | Shallow Graves

by Fawkes, K. M.

  But I sure as hell wanted to hear the real story about what had happened here. I wanted to know exactly how much danger I was in—and how worried I needed to be about Sally and company.

  “You guys weren’t working for the same company as the CEO who owned this house, were you?” I asked sharply. “You didn’t know him at all. And he never agreed to protect you.”

  The guy—Will—stared at me for a long minute. Then, he nodded and started speaking, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper.

  “Keep your voice down,” he said first. “I don’t want them to know I’m in here telling you all their secrets. I’ve been guarding the stairs up from the kitchen, and I’ve had to stop them from coming up to ‘talk’ to you multiple times. Believe me, you do not want to have that conversation.”

  Right. Well, that matched up with what I’d already thought I knew, which was that they were planning to kill me. So I guessed I could at least console myself with the fact that I’d been right not to trust them.

  That didn’t mean I wanted to die.

  “So I guess you’d better tell me that story quick, eh?” I asked. “And then get on to what you’re planning to do to get me out of here.”

  Another nod, and then, “We weren’t associated with the guy who owned this house, no. I’d never even seen him before. He wasn’t home when we got here, and he definitely never offered us shelter. We just… found it.”

  “You just found it?” I asked doubtfully. “Stop leaving out details, Will, or I’m going to rethink the idea of trusting you. Or working with you.”

  That seemed to get his attention, and he finally started at the beginning.

  “I haven’t been running with this gang for long. Don’t hardly even know them. I’ve been working as a freelance lockpicker for a couple years, though, and when they decided they needed someone who could pick any lock they came across… well, word got around to them that I was one of the best in the area, I guess, and they contacted me.”

  I gave a soundless whistle.

  “One of the best in the area, wow,” I said wryly. “And at lockpicking. Your mother must be so proud.”

  He gave me pained look.

  “I haven’t seen my mother since I ran away from her when I was fourteen. So I wouldn’t know.”

  Then, he shook his head and got back to the story.

  “Turned out they had a specific job they wanted me for, and that was why they’d put so much stock in my reputation. A safe they wanted to break into. A safe that had a whole lot of really high-tech protections on it.”

  “A safe in a fancy house, in a rich neighborhood, where the guy just happened to be at work in a neighboring city all day, leaving the house open and vulnerable,” I guessed.

  He nodded.

  “Exactly. A safe that they thought would reap them really big rewards. Jameson had been hired here to do some landscaping at some point—I don’t know the details of that—and he’d been invited inside to have lunch. He’d seen the guy fiddling with his safe to pay him cash for his workday, and it was the first thing he shared with Sally and Bruce when they recruited him into their gang. They decided they’d get into it during the day, when the rich guy was at work.”

  I put up a quick hand, already finding a hole with the plan.

  “That makes sense. But what about the family? This is a little girl’s room, and I’m guessing that means there was also a wife, maybe even other kids. A housekeeper, a landscaper… How the hell were they going to get around all the extras?”

  Will nodded.

  “Exactly. The guy had the whole spread here. A family, including wife and daughter. Property caretaker who lived in a little house out back and two live-in maids-slash-nannies. But Sally had inside info on them, as well. She knew that the wife and kid were going to be traveling to another state, to see the wife’s mom. And the maids and landscapers…”

  He abruptly stopped talking, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened to the help.

  “They were going to rob the place, anyhow. I’m guessing they didn’t care about a couple of murders on top of it,” I said.

  Will nodded miserably, and my heart started to soften, just a little bit. He was so obviously unhappy with the way things had gone, and I was guessing he hadn’t known up front what they were going to do. It had probably never occurred to him that there might be killing. He looked almost… wounded by the admission.

  That didn’t change the fact that he’d obviously stayed with the gang after they had done that murdering, though, presumably in cold blood. He might be telling me the truth, but I still wasn’t budging on the whole trusting him scale.

  “So, the help is dead and the house is yours…” I pushed. “What’s the rest of the story?”

  “They wanted me to break into the safe, but it had locks on it that I’d never seen before. Look, I’m good with locks. I’m good with most safes. But this one had a layer of glass inside the door that shattered the first time I got the combination wrong, and that shattering triggered another safety mechanism. One that I couldn’t even reach.”

  I nodded. I’d never really thought about it, but breaking a safe sounded a whole lot like trying to hack into a system. One wrong move and you trigger additional safety measures that you don’t even know about—and probably can’t get to.

  “So, you screwed up once and the safe was completely inaccessible,” I said. “And the attack…?”

  “The CEO caught us in the office with the safe,” Will said, his voice turning tense again. “We were all crouched around the thing when he got home. I don’t know how he knew the attack was going to happen—or if it was just dumb, stupid luck—but he walked right in on us, dropped his bag, and ran for the stairs. He had one of the paintings pulled to the side and was fussing with another door—looked like another safe—in the entryway when we found him again. Sally shot him in the head before he could even tell her what he was doing.”

  Okay, bloodstain in the entryway explained. And that was definitely the CEO in the fresh grave outside. I was glad to hear that his wife and kid were…

  Well, they might not be safe. But they weren’t buried in graves on the grounds. And given what my life had been like for the past week, that alone was a small mercy.

  “We ran past him and figured out that he’d been trying to get through a door that had another combination lock on it,” Will continued. “We had no idea what was behind that door. But then everything went haywire. We'd had the radio on, to make it sound like the maids were still in the house and alive and working, just in case…"

  "So if you had the radio on, you heard about the attack," I supplied.

  "Yeah. We heard the people on the radio screaming—and we figured out that whatever the CEO had been doing, we needed to start doing it. Because something out there was going completely off the rails. Three seconds later, I got the lock open and we found a panic room inside. Fully stocked. Big enough for all of us. It didn’t take much for us all to realize that if there had truly been an attack, like people on the radio were saying, and like the screaming seemed to indicate, then that panic room was our only shot at living. And we took it.”

  I stared at him, my mouth hanging open in surprise at that abrupt ending. It fit. I mean, all the things could actually have happened, and they were all way too… well, realistic, I thought, for it to be some made-up story.

  Rich people definitely had panic rooms.

  If the CEO knew that someone had broken into his house, it made sense for him to run for the safe room. It had probably seemed like the only option.

  Only they’d caught him and shot him, and then broken into his safe room and used it for themselves, emerging only when the rations inside had run out.

  That didn’t explain why Will had suddenly decided that he was ready to part ways with the people who had been through the last week with him. Perhaps even longer.

  “So, you’ve spent that much time with these people, and yet now you’ve decided i
t’s time to sell them out?” I asked, my eyes on his face to see whether he would lie about this. “You’ve worked with them as a team, survived something that might have killed the majority of the population, and yet you suddenly want to escape?”

  He blew a breath through pursed lips, staring at me, and then nodded.

  “I’m a thief, but I’m not a murderer,” he said. “I break into houses and safes. I don’t kill people. I never steal anything that I think will ruin them. That’s not who I am. These people… I’m not like them. I don’t trust them, and I know you don’t, either. If we can get out, if we can find a place where there are still people—where they still have society and law enforcement—maybe we can find help. Maybe we can even help them. I never signed up to watch the world end around me.”

  Well that made two of us, and though there was a chance that he was lying, a chance that he was still trying to trap me into something, I found myself suddenly leaning toward believing him. He didn’t look like he was lying, and it didn’t feel like he was trying to con me into anything.

  He felt like someone I could trust. I’d asked him for the truth, and he’d given it to me. Even when it implicated him in several murders. Even when it made him look… well, like he might not be the best person in the world.

  And it was enough for me. I’d spent a whole lot of time relying on my guts to tell me which way to go, and in this case, they were telling me to go right out the window and into the world with this guy.

  Hadn’t I just been wishing for an ally? Hadn’t I just been thinking that I needed someone else working with me? Well, now it looked like I had that.

  I stuck my hand out again and nodded.

  “That’s good enough for me. So what are we going to do about it, partner?”

  The door flew open before he could answer me, though, and someone else came barging in.

  Chapter 10

  Will and I both jerked away from the door, and in the process, knocked over the lamp, which went spiraling away from us and right under the bed.

  I jumped up into the newly dark room, my eyes hazy as they tried to get used to the darkness again, my hands up in front of me as I fell into a defensive posture. I didn’t know who the hell was at the door, but I’d heard enough from Will to realize that if one of the other thugs had come up here, it probably wasn’t to make sure I was settling in comfortably.

  And I still wasn’t ready to go down without a fight. If they wanted to kill me—or use me for some yet-unguessed reason—they were going to have to work their asses off.

  These people were just street thugs. They might have guns, but I was willing to bet that I was smarter than all three of them put together.

  Well. Maybe smarter than Bruce and Jameson put together. Sally terrified me, because she had brains that might have equaled mine. And, from what I had seen, a complete lack of humanity.

  As it turned out, she was also the one at the door. Once the lamp had rolled under the bed, she brought out a flashlight and turned it on, illuminating her face first and then the room, where Will was scrambling for the lamp and I was standing, ready to fight.

  We must have looked guilty as hell. And if she’d spent any time listening at the door before she came barging in, she would have heard us whispering together—which would have absolutely guaranteed that she considered us guilty. Of something.

  “What are you two doing in here, playing kissy face?” she asked suggestively, her eyes roving from Will to me and back again. “Or just doing some good, old-fashioned scheming?”

  Well, shit.

  As usual, I chose exactly that moment to let my sarcasm get away from me.

  “If we were scheming, don’t you think we would have been smart enough to lock the door first?” I asked, my voice absolutely scheme-worthy.

  I was also kicking myself. Why the hell hadn’t we thought to lock the door first, if we were going to start talking about things I knew for a fact the gang wouldn’t want us talking about?

  Because a locked door would have been even more suspicious than finding you two in here alone, in the dark, whispering, my inner voice told me bluntly.

  Well stated, voice, I answered.

  If she had tried to barge in here and found the door locked, she would have flat-out known that we were doing something we weren’t supposed to be doing. As it was, she was just guessing. And that meant I could talk her out of it. Maybe.

  Though, I was starting to wonder if I was even going to get the chance. Because Sally didn’t seem to be thinking there was any good reason for us to be in here alone, whispering. At least, not one that left our clothes still on. She had a gun up and aimed at my head already, and with a quick movement—the light of the flashlight spinning dizzyingly around the room as she did it—she had another gun in her other hand.

  This one was aimed at Will.

  And that, I thought, told me everything I needed to know about how deep her loyalty went. I’d seen her earlier, threatening Bruce, and hadn’t thought she’d given much of a damn about keeping her team together, but I hadn’t realized she’d be this willing to actually kill one of them.

  Then again, for all I knew, she’d had Will on her list already. Maybe she’d known that he was flirting with the idea of leaving them—and taking their names and a memory of their faces with him. True, we didn’t even know if there was still such a thing as civilization out there, and the chances of there actually being law enforcement were slim. Even if the cops or the FBI did still exist, they were probably dealing with things of substantially more importance than petty criminals.

  But that wouldn’t mean she’d let him go and take the chance. If she’d known that Will was thinking of leaving them, I guessed she’d kill him without a second thought.

  The three of us stared at one another for what felt like an entire lifetime, and I didn’t know about Will, but my own heart was thudding heavily in my ears, drowning out almost everything else. I could actually hear the blood thumping through my head as my heart worked hard to keep it moving, seeming to somehow know that at any moment, it might no longer have the ability to do so.

  I glanced at the guns, and then up at Sally’s eyes, which were darting back and forth between Will and me, cold and hard as stone. It wouldn’t matter to her if she had to kill us, I realized. Hell, maybe she’d already been planning to do that anyhow. Maybe it had always been a part of her plan, and this was just the time she’d chosen to deal with it.

  We’d get blood all over the glittery wallpaper, I realized suddenly. This little girl’s room would never be the same.

  And that was just completely ridiculous. Who knew if the girl was ever coming home at all? If she did, her life would never be the same. Her dad was dead and the world as she knew it was over. Who gave a flying fuck about her wallpaper?

  It’s weird what your brain gives you when it thinks you’re going to die, though, because the next thing I thought about was what a sparkly purple pencil would look like sticking out of Sally’s eye. Though, I guess that was at least sort of along the lines of self-defense.

  After all, she’d have a harder time shooting us if she could only use one eyeball.

  A moment later, though, she dropped the guns to her side and gave a sharp, bitter bark of laughter.

  “You should see your faces,” she said, smiling. “I don’t know if it means you’re guilty or innocent, but you both look like you’re ready to drop dead on the spot, out of pure fear.”

  Her eyes fixed on Will, and she used her head to gesture toward the doorway.

  “Will, we need you downstairs. Leave Sleeping Beauty here alone. She’ll do okay in her room for the rest of the night.”

  He took a stumbling step forward, then another, while I did my best to keep myself standing, part relieved that Sally hadn’t shot us and part terrified that she was going to do it later, when we weren’t together. The fact that she was calling Will downstairs made me nervous as hell, especially after what he’d told me.

  And he mu
st have been thinking the same thing, because after she disappeared from the doorway, he paused next to me, his own eyes enormous.

  “A bell from the old clock tower in town tolls every night at midnight. Regular as… well, clockwork, I guess. You know that big, old-fashioned thing? You can hear it from here. Don’t let it scare you.”

  Then he was gone, straightening his shoulders and striding through the door like he was actually walking to his death, his back ramrod straight and his hands clenched into fists at his sides.

  He’d left the lamp, and I righted it and then sat down with my back to the wall, listening closely for any sound from downstairs.

  Listening—though I didn’t want to admit it to myself—for the sound of a gunshot, and a body falling to the floor.

  An hour later, I still hadn’t heard anything like a gunshot or a body falling to the floor. I’d heard plenty of voices drifting up from the first floor, though, and although I couldn’t understand what they were saying, it wasn’t hard to guess that they were planning something. Something that required a lot of discussion—and probably a lot of coordination.

  I wondered what the hell they could possibly be planning, when the world itself seemed to have been knocked on its ass. What else was there for them to do, except go through whatever houses or stores tickled their fancy and steal whatever they wanted?

  More importantly, what had they done with Will? Was he still alive? Was he still planning on helping me? Because his remark about the clock tower had been weird, but also very, very obvious.

  I knew the clock tower. My apartment was right next to it, and the damn thing had woken me up every single night at midnight when I'd first moved there.

  It was a random thing to have told me about, but it was also a very clever comment. To anyone else, he would have sounded like he was just warning me not to be frightened by the sound.

  To someone who knew that we’d been planning an escape, it was a timeline for when it would happen.