Lifeless (Lawless Saga Book 2)

by Tarah Benner

  Simjay whimpered.

  “One . . .”

  Lark’s brain flashed through all her options. They could run, they could surrender, or they could stand their ground. There was a chance that the man was bluffing, but that was an awfully big gamble.

  “Two . . .”

  If she stalled a little bit longer, maybe it would give Axel and Soren time to come up with some kind of diversion.

  “Three.”

  Too late.

  “Okay!” Lark yelled, lifting her hands a little higher to indicate that she was going to cooperate. “I’m going to lay my gun on the ground.”

  Silence.

  She hoped that the man had heard her and that he wasn’t at that moment preparing to shoot them. Lark glanced at Simjay once again, whose face was as white as a sheet. She didn’t hear the sound of footsteps behind her, which meant that Axel and Soren either couldn’t see what was happening or hadn’t yet decided how to proceed. There was also a chance that they had been ambushed by the man’s friends, but she couldn’t think about that.

  Slowly, carefully, Lark bent at the waist and set the Glock in the dirt. Everything inside of her was screaming not to give up her weapon, but she didn’t have a choice.

  She straightened up, hands still raised in surrender, and stared up at the tiny speaker.

  “Now you,” said the man. “Indian kid. Go get your friends waiting by the truck and bring them over here.”

  Lark’s heart sank. He’d seen Axel and Soren.

  “Yes, I know about them,” the man added. “I saw you drive up the road. Tell them to leave their weapons in the truck, and we won’t have any trouble.”

  Simjay looked as though he couldn’t get away fast enough. Lark moved to follow, thinking they could just make a run for it, but the man’s voice called her back.

  “Not you!” he barked.

  Lark froze.

  “You’re going to stay right where you are,” said the man. “This ensures your friends won’t try anything . . . stupid.”

  Lark’s heart thumped loudly in her chest. Simjay threw her a terrified look and scampered back down the dirt path toward the patch of trees where they’d parked the truck.

  The man didn’t say anything else, and Lark took the opportunity to study the strange house up close.

  The front door was set into a beautifully curved archway, and there was a pattern of what looked like glass bottles built into the entryway. The bottoms of the bottles gleamed like jewels, adding to the bizarre look of the structure.

  Lark guessed that the original door had been made of birch or some other natural material to complement the artsy aesthetic of the house, but the owner had installed a reinforced steel door instead. A tiny camera glared at her from above the doorway, and she suspected that there were several more cameras hidden around the exterior.

  After what felt like an eternity, she heard the scratch of footsteps coming up behind her. She looked over her shoulder and saw Soren, Axel, and Simjay walking cautiously up the path with their hands above their heads. From what Lark could tell, they weren’t carrying any weapons, and Simjay was walking as if he feared he might trigger another booby trap

  “We didn’t come to make trouble,” said Soren in a loud voice.

  No answer.

  “We just ran out of gas along the highway, and we were hoping you might be able to give us a lift to the next town.”

  “Is that why you were planning to ambush me?” boomed the voice.

  “We weren’t,” said Soren. “We just thought it might look bad. Four strangers showing up on your doorstep . . .”

  There was a long pause.

  “We don’t wanna take your house or nothin’,” Axel shouted. “But if you don’ let us in, I guess we’ll be campin’ out on the highway all day an’ night.”

  The man seemed to consider this for a moment, and Lark pictured him zooming in on each of their faces, searching for signs of deception.

  “You may come in,” he said finally.

  Lark let out a sigh of relief.

  “Slowly!” the man barked, making the speakers crackle and pop.

  Lark glanced at Soren, who positioned himself protectively in front of her. Axel led the way up the garden path, taking in all the details Lark had noticed with an uneasy look. Several cacti were crowded around the front door in little clay pots, but that was where the normalcy ended.

  The house had a keypad where there would normally be a doorbell. There was no door handle, but they heard a dull buzzing sound, and the door popped open like a tin of sardines.

  It took a few seconds for Lark’s eyes to adjust to the dim interior lighting. They were standing in what looked like a small mudroom. Directly in front of them was a narrow spiral staircase, but immediately to their left, natural light spilled in from ceiling to floor, bathing the house in an airy, inviting warmth.

  The room with all the windows was a little wider than a hallway, but it looked like some sort of atrium. Plants of all shapes and sizes spilled from shallow clay troughs beneath the windows, stretching toward the glass to capture every ray of sunshine.

  At the other end of the atrium was another arched doorway. Lark squinted to see what lay beyond, but a harsh, familiar voice made her jump.

  Lark looked up in time to see a man crouched at the top of the stairs, glaring down at them like an overgrown bird of prey.

  “Stay right where you are.”

  The man sounded much less threatening than he had over the speakers, but there was an off-putting quality to his voice that set Lark’s nerves on edge.

  Slowly, he rose from his crouched position and started down the steps. As the light from the tall windows spilled over him, Lark saw that he was in his mid- to late-forties with fair hair and pale skin. He walked with a stooped posture and wore an overlarge white Oxford shirt and plain black trousers. His round glasses and goofy haircut gave him the look of some nerdy middle-aged bus boy.

  “Just —” He turned and rummaged around in a brass umbrella stand. “One moment.”

  He held out a finger to signal that they should wait and then produced a clunky handheld metal detector. Lark forced herself to breathe normally as he waved the wand up and down her torso and moved to probe the others under their arms and between their legs.

  When he got to Axel, the little light near the handle turned bright red, and the device emitted a frantic beep, beep, beep, beep!

  Axel let out a huff of annoyance, as though this happened to him every day.

  “Against the wall!” the man screeched, sounding even more nervous than Lark felt. “S-spread ’em.”

  Soren and Lark gaped at him. This man was obviously in over his head.

  Axel let out a contemptuous groan and turned to face the wall. He put his hands on either side of the door and spread his legs as the man patted him down.

  When he got to Axel’s right ankle, he lifted his pant leg and withdrew a shiny piece of metal. It was a snub-nosed revolver roughly the size of Lark’s palm that looked as though it belonged in some old lady’s purse.

  “C-care to explain this?” stammered the man, standing up and holding the revolver as though it were a live grenade.

  Axel glanced over his shoulder. “Oh.”

  “Oh?” said the man, blinking furiously. “I told you to leave your weapons in the truck!”

  Axel rolled his eyes. “I forgot I had that one on me.”

  “You forgot —” The man’s eyes bugged out, unsure if Axel was lying or if he was the most deadly sort of thug to forget that he had a gun concealed on his person.

  “I always carry stuff in my boots,” Axel explained. “Cash . . . cigarettes . . . dime bags . . . knives . . .”

  The man looked a little faint. “Well . . .”

  “Sorry about him,” said Soren quickly. “He’s harmless, really.”

  The man looked quite beside himself. “I hope this is the last surprise,” he said, forcing an uncomfortable laugh that made Lark’s insides r
attle. “I wouldn’t want to have to kill you.”

  Simjay raised his eyebrows.

  “Isaac Griffin, PhD,” he said, extending a hand to Soren, who shook it reluctantly.

  “Soren,” he said.

  “Lark,” said Lark, suppressing a shudder as she took his soft, clammy hand.

  “Simjay.”

  Dr. Griffin turned to Axel last, who stared at the extended hand for several long seconds before consenting to shake it.

  “Axel,” he mumbled.

  “I apologize for the somewhat strained introduction out there,” said Dr. Griffin, tilting his head to the side and rolling his eyes in a nervous sort of tick. “I don’t get a lot of visitors, but lately . . .” He swallowed. “There are a lot of very desperate people out there, and many of them want what I have.”

  “Is this a greenhouse?” Simjay asked.

  He was already wandering into the atrium, examining the troughs of plants with unrestrained enthusiasm. For the first time since they’d been there, Lark noticed that each plant seemed to be fed by a thin black tube protruding from the wall.

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Dr. Griffin with a nervous cock of his head. “The earthship is completely self-sustaining. It was designed to use the sun and the earth to maintain a comfortable ambient temperature all year round. It’s powered by solar energy, and all the rainwater it collects gets used twice.” He made a noise like a tremble of excitement, smiling at the ingenuity of it all. “We’re completely off the grid here, so we’ve been virtually unaffected by all the . . . all the madness.”

  “We?” said Axel loudly.

  “Me and m-my wife, Penelope. Dear, sweet Penelope.”

  “What about sewer?” asked Axel. “You have to have a septic.”

  Dr. Griffin looked relieved to have something else to talk about. “You would think so, but the bathroom is equipped with a compost toilet, and what little waste we produce goes right back to the earth to feed the plants.”

  Axel’s lip curled in disgust, but he didn’t comment on the Griffins’ compost toilet.

  “You grow all your own food?” asked Simjay in a tone of awe. Clearly he wasn’t put off by Dr. Griffin’s awkwardness. He seemed right at home with the nervous, blundering doctor.

  “Most of it,” he said. “When we first moved here, it was just a hobby, but now . . .”

  “Why did you move to Texas?” asked Axel in the tone of a police officer interrogating a murder suspect.

  “I had a very lucrative job offer at Texas A&M,” said the doctor. “We moved down there to be close to the university, but it just wasn’t for us. Fortunately, I recently had a patent purchased, and I was able to leave my post at the university and move somewhere a little more . . . private.”

  “What sort of patent?” asked Axel.

  “Oh, I don’t want to bore you with the details,” said Dr. Griffin. “It’s exceedingly dull if you aren’t in the field . . .”

  “Why did you decide to stay in Texas?” asked Soren.

  Dr. Griffin smiled amicably. “No income tax.”

  “So you’re rich,” said Axel.

  Simjay flushed bright red and shot Axel a “cut it out” sort of look. He was very taken with the doctor and clearly embarrassed by Axel’s rudeness.

  “Would you like a tour?” asked Dr. Griffin.

  Simjay let out a very loud, wholehearted “yes” at the exact moment that Lark said “no thanks.” Normally she would have found the earthship fascinating, but the longer they stood there in the entryway, the more her unease seemed to grow.

  There was a brief moment of uncomfortable silence, but Soren just shrugged. Dr. Griffin seemed to take this as a “yes” and led them down the hall of plants, tucking Axel’s revolver into his waistband.

  “Where’s your wife?” asked Lark, interrupting Dr. Griffin’s feverish explanation of how the hydroponics system worked.

  “Penelope?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, she went out,” he said lightly. “We got much more water than we need down south, but up here we’re catching the drought. Without water, the entire system shuts down.”

  Lark and Axel exchanged a look.

  “You need water?” asked Soren. Lark knew he was thinking about offering the doctor some kind of trade, but she had a feeling that Dr. Griffin needed more water than they could provide.

  “Oh yes,” he said, leading them through the arched doorway and into a spacious kitchen. It had a beautiful flagstone floor in muted shades of orange and green, knotty pine cabinets, and countertops with a rainbow of different-colored chips embedded in the material.

  “Recycled glass,” said Dr. Griffin fondly, running his hand over the island countertop.

  The kitchen transitioned smoothly into a small living room set deeper into the floor. There was no TV, but the built-in clay bookshelves were crammed with hundreds of volumes ranging from Atlas Shrugged to the Bhagavad Gita to enormous biochemistry textbooks. More books were piled in teetering stacks along the wall and beside the low couch.

  Beyond the living room was a bedroom and a bathroom, and a narrow wooden ladder led up to a trapdoor in the ceiling.

  “My office is upstairs,” Dr. Griffin explained. “That’s where I was when you arrived. I can see everything from up there.”

  “Can we see it?” asked Simjay with more than a hint of hero worship in his voice.

  “I’m afraid it’s quite a mess at the moment,” said the doctor. “I’m the only one who goes up there, so . . .”

  Axel wandered purposely into the doctor’s room, eyeing the decor with a clear air of distrust. Lark followed him inside, hoping the doctor just thought they were interested in the house.

  Lark studied the room closely, wondering why she felt so on edge. The bed was piled with beaded throw pillows and made up with a silky duvet. Half a dozen yellowing perfume bottles were arranged on a silver tray on the dresser — old fragrances that had gone bad after months or years of disuse.

  The closet was little more than a cutout in the wall, covered with a bohemian-print curtain. Lark heard Dr. Griffin’s voice fading into another room, so she yanked back the curtain and took a peek.

  The rack looked oddly sparse — even for an awkward intellectual living off the grid — but Lark couldn’t help noticing that none of the clothes belonged to a woman.

  “Psst,” she hissed, turning to point this out to Axel.

  But he was already striding out of the room, looking primed for a confrontation. Lark darted out after him, hoping he wasn’t about to do something stupid.

  “Would you like a bite to eat?” asked the doctor from the next room. “I’m sure you must be hungry. I could heat up some chickpea burgers. The flax buns might be a little stale, but they’re really not so —”

  “We’re fine,” said Axel, striding into the kitchen like a homicide detective at the scene of the crime.

  “Some tea, then?” asked the doctor in a falsely cheery voice.

  “We really should get going,” said Soren. Perhaps he, like Lark, was starting to sense that something wasn’t right.

  “I’d like some tea,” said Simjay, oblivious as always.

  “Very well,” said the doctor, his eyes darting nervously from Axel to Soren. “I’ll heat up the water. Why don’t you all go down to the cellar and grab a tank of gasoline? I have more than I need right now, and honestly —”

  “You keep gasoline under your house?” said Axel sharply.

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “The ventilation is very good down there, I assure you. I’ve never had any trouble with the fumes.”

  Lark tossed Axel a half-exasperated, half-knowing look. She was starting to think that his suspicions and her bad vibes might be justified. She tried to catch Soren’s eye, but he was already disappearing around the corner to open the trapdoor, which was located inside the pantry.

  She wanted to say something — scream something — but they were so close to walking out of there with the fuel they n
eeded to continue on their journey that she didn’t want to put a sour note on things in case she and Axel were mistaken.

  It was quite possible that Dr. Griffin’s wife kept her clothes in the dresser or another room altogether. Maybe she never wore perfume anymore now that they were living out in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps Dr. Griffin just seemed off because he was one of those awkward academic types.

  But then she heard something coming from the vent above them — the garble of a radio that sounded strangely familiar. Dr. Griffin was busy banging around with the tea kettle, noisily filling it from a water tank on the counter.

  “This goes through a filter,” he said over the slosh of water. “Better to be safe than sorry . . .”

  Lark strained her ears. She was sure she hadn’t imagined the sound of the radio, but maybe she was just being paranoid.

  “May I use your restroom?” she asked, hoping he couldn’t hear the tremor in her voice.

  “Of course,” said Griffin, firing up the stove and setting the kettle on the burner. “I’m sure Simjay and I can entertain ourselves.”

  Lark was gone in a flash. She tore out of the kitchen without a backward glance, but instead of heading for the bathroom, she climbed the wooden ladder leading to his office and poked her head through the narrow trapdoor.

  Dr. Griffin hadn’t been lying about the state of his office. Most of the available floor space was taken up by stacks of files, loose papers, and technical manuals. The walls were covered in maps and charts and complicated-looking spreadsheets, but a spindly oak desk stood out among the mess.

  It looked out through a wide window, and perched on the surface was a police radio identical to the one Thompson had lent them.

  Lark’s stomach dropped. Blood was pounding in her ears, and half a dozen thoughts flashed through her mind at once.

  No longer caring if she was caught, she clambered down the ladder and flew across the living room. But before she reached the kitchen, she heard a loud bang! followed by a stream of muffled curses.

  “Open the fucking door!” yelled Axel.

  Lark’s breath caught in her chest. Dr. Griffin was still standing at the stove, but he had turned to face the doorway. He was holding Axel’s snub-nosed revolver, and it was pointed at Simjay’s chest.