His face is expressionless, but his jaw is hard enough to cut glass.
“There,” he says, pointing to a feed near the front approach. “That’s mine.”
One of his security team is on the ground near the front drive.
Another is dragging himself behind a vehicle.
Definitely alive.
For now.
My stomach turns.
More movement at the edge of the lawn catches my eye.
Not ours.
Them.
They are on my property. Marching through the garden I love so much.
Inside the perimeter of my house.
Where my siblings are. Where the children are. Where I put yellow roses on the table because I wanted to see the girls smile.
“How did they get in?” I whisper.
Adrian does not answer.
His hands move over the panel. He changes feeds, zooms, switches angles. His face is colder than I have ever seen it.
Then the monitors go black.
All of them.
The room plunges into a horrible dimness lit only by the emergency strip along the floor and the small red glow of equipment.
Adrian curses.
It is low and vicious.
He hits a sequence of buttons on the console.
Nothing.
Again.
Nothing.
“I have a backup power source,” he says, more to himself than to us. “It should have kicked in.”
He tries another switch.
The monitors stay black.
“Adrian,” I say.
He is already moving.
