If we made it through the night and managed to take out Luke once and for all, all of his shares would finally be bequeathed to Jay, who was the rightful owner of the company… and I had a feeling if I wanted to spend the rest of my days tinkering in one of his labs, there would be no resume required.
Feeling shockingly devoid of any anxiety, a smile broke out on my face as I was filled with a new sense of purpose.
“Let’s get Neurovance back,” I whispered, and NOVA made a small sound of approval.
“If anyone can do it, it’s you two,” she chimed, and as Jay returned with rolls of blueprints under his arm, I grinned.
She sure was right about that.
NOVA play: This Is War by Thirty Seconds To Mars
The blueprints of the cabin just further solidified my theory that Jay’s father had suspected Luke might one day be a problem. He’d built this place to beexactlythe type of safe space we were currently using it for.
The cabin was designed in such a way that the rock of the mountains around us offered us quite a bit of natural cover and would make it difficult for even professionals to ambush us without us knowing about it.
There were only three ways to access the cabin without needing to scale down a literal cliff to get to us.
There was the gravel road we’d taken to get to town, another narrow footpath that led to the garden in the back, and then there was the open air that the glass wall of the cabin looked out over.
I’d almost made the mistake of overlooking that side as a viable entry point until Jay had assured me it was more than possible that Luke would equip his team with at least one chopper.
Despite the natural defences the environment offered us, I still had my work cut out for me when planning our traps. We only had so many bombs, and I knew we’d need to use them strategically.
I wasn’t exactly trained in military strategy, but between Jay and me, I felt like we had a pretty good advantage by the time we were done.
Jay said that with twenty guys, they would likely break up into teams of five or more and come at us in waves. This would increase the likelihood of success on their end. If the first team didn’t make it, maybe the second one would, and so on.
So, we made our defense plan based on that assumption.
There were a couple of Bluetooth speakers in the house, and Jay had some tactical strobes that I spent some time syncing with NOVA.
I hid one of the speakers in some overgrown brush in the mountain paths while Jay lined the enclosed rocky space with four of the six bombs he had left over from infiltrating Neurovance.
NOVA recorded my voice so we could play it on the hidden speaker, hopefully tricking one or more of the teams into thinking I’d escaped the cabin. Then, once they’d gone to intercept me, I could detonate the bombs from the lab.
We also laid several rows of retractable spikes across the wide driveway. We hid them with a loose layer of dust and gravel so they wouldn’t be spotted before I had time to activate them. This would hopefully take out the tires of any vehicles they might use to drive up, and force the men inside to approach on foot instead.
If that happened, the plan was to detonate the remaining two bombs and set off the strobes, blinding the shit out of the men and driving them toward the cabin so Jay could take them out with his MP5 from the house.
Our weakest point of entry was still the glass wall overlooking the cliff.
If they came in with a chopper, we didn’t have anything high-powered enough to take it out, and we’d be forced to wait for it to land before we could do anything offensively.
Jay told me they would likely rappel down onto the roof and use the skylight over the den to get inside, and it was a massive weak spot in our plan.
Jay couldn’t be in two places at once.
If he was busy on the porch taking out the teams stuck in the blind traps there, and another team hit us from above at the same time, we would definitely need to freestyle a little bit and do some on-the-spot thinking.
Jay spent some time teaching me how to use a handgun, but it wasn’t exactly just ‘point and shoot’. It took a lot of training to be able to confidently handle a firearm… training that I just didn’t have, but Jay insisted I still keep one on me, saying it just made him feel better knowing I was armed.
I had agreed, though I hoped I wouldn’t need to use it. For some reason, I didn’t have a problem with remotely blowing up a bunch of dudes on a screen. I could trick myself into believing it was one of those violent video games Jay and I had always avoided.
But sighting down a gun and shooting someone right in front of me?
That was a little too personal for my nerdy ass.
Though if I needed to do it to protect Jay, I would. He’d been through enough, and there was nothing I wouldn’t do at this point to make sure he was finally free from the monster that had kept him as a prisoner for such a large portion of his life.
