“Then we have to get him out of here!”
“You’re kidding me, right?” Alden gave her a helpless look.
“We can do it.” She dropped the Taser, ran to the crumpled Craig and grabbed one of his arms. The flashing red light added to the surreal sense of danger as Alden grunted—there was a world of disbelief in that grunt—and helped haul Craig to his feet. They manhandled him past the table, dragging him across the floor.
Alden muttered, “Twenty-five … twenty-four …”
Roz cursed when she realized what he was doing. Counting down.
Then Alden did the most amazing thing. All in a moment, he yanked Craig’s dead weight away from her so the assistant fell to the floor, pulled on both his arms and hoisted him up onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.
“Run, sweetheart,” Alden said, breathing hard, “or we’re all dead.”
So Roz ran down the stairs ahead of him and looked up as she hit the outside door. Alden was right behind her, huffing as he hauled Craig. She held the door open, and they sprinted across the front lawn through the palms and bushes, past the house, where Enolia stood on the front steps, looking anxious.
“Oh, my. Is Craig all right?” she called.
“GET INSIDE!” Alden screamed. “And get down!”
There was a note of terrified command in his tone that foiled any thought Enolia might have had of questioning him. The door slammed as she ducked inside.
Roz wondered if they should’ve gone inside, too, but distance seemed more important than negotiating the front door. So they kept running across the yard, trying to get as far as they could and —
BOOM!
The air shattered.
The shockwave literally blew Roz over. It knocked them all to the ground. Roz gasped for breath. It felt like a giant had boxed her ears.
She looked back in time to see what was left of the garage roof—which had launched upward—crash back down into the wreckage of the garage, whose upper floor had collapsed in on itself. The lower walls were still there, but surely the rubble from above had fallen into the first floor. It was hard to tell, since the remains were shrouded in billowing dark gray clouds of smoke and debris as orange flames twisted against the twilit sky.
“Look out!” Alden shouted as something hit the grass a few feet away.
It took her a second to grasp that objects were plummeting from above—pieces of ceramic roof tile—and thudding into the lawn. She curled up and covered her head as more debris plunked around her. She closed her eyes and hoped, hoped, hoped Alden was OK … until finally, the noises more or less stopped, except for the crackle of the garage fire and the wail of sirens.
She lifted her head. Only gray ashes and the occasional pink bougainvillea blossom fluttered to earth around them.
Alden sat next to Craig, keeping half an eye on the prone assistant, who seemed unconscious but breathing. The man’s glasses had been lost somewhere along the way, and his few remaining hairs stuck up every which way.
“You all right?” Alden asked her.
“I think so. You?”
“More or less.”
“What about him?”
“He’ll live,” he said. “Unfortunately.”
Roz sat up, too, and turned at the sound of a fire truck pulling into the end of the driveway. Enolia must have called and opened the gate.
The house looked OK, maybe a little scarred, the landscaping a little charred. Some of the windows on the corner nearest the garage were broken. Chunks of blackened beams and concrete block littered the ground around the garage. It could’ve been a lot worse.
Then she remembered her hybrid. She looked to where she’d parked her car. All she could see of it under pieces of debris was dented metal and broken glass. It might as well have tumbled down a cliff.
Now it was worse.
“Roz!” Alden exclaimed. “Please go tell the firefighters that Craig used C-4, OK? I’m not letting him out of my sight.”
