“I drop,” she said.
“Good.”
I checked the corners one final time, strained to catch any sound on our level, and started toward the exit ramp with the gun up and Fiona’s footsteps falling soft two feet behind me.
The alarm wailed on.
Below them, we moved through the dark—two people, four blocks of open city, a house on Hanover Street.
The Navy had built something in me that most people never needed.
I intended to use every second.
Four
Behind The Water Heater -Libby
“Mom! Mom!”
The scream came from upstairs. I straightened from the couch, hands still braced against its back. I’d been at it for ten minutes and hadn’t moved it an inch. Three years ago, I’d gotten it through the front door by myself. Apparently, that was a different couch, or a different me.
“What?” I called back, breathless.
“Open the door! Hurry, Mom—hurry!”
Lily came barreling around the corner from the staircase, bare feet skidding on the hardwood. She caught herself against the wall with both hands, eyes huge, chest heaving.
“Fiona’s on the stoop,” she gasped. “Those things are right behind them!”
Them.
I lunged for the front door, threw the deadbolt, and fumbled with the security gate beyond it. My nails slipped under the latch, lost it, then found it again. My hands shook so badly I could barely work a lock I’d opened a thousand times.
Footsteps thundered up the outside steps. Heavy. Fast.Two sets.
Fiona burst through the doorway, stumbling over the threshold. She nearly went down, breath coming in ragged gasps, hair wild and plastered across her face with sweat.
A man came right behind her, so large he had to duck his head to clear the frame.
He filled the doorway, one hand gripping the molding, the other holding a handgun low at his side. He looked as if he’d covered hard ground through hellish trouble—shirt soaked through, dark blood spattered across one sleeve and up the side of his neck. A vein pulsed hard in his throat. His eyes swept the room in a single, sharp pass.
“Shut it!” he yelled.
I didn’t need to hear it twice.
I slammed the door and threw the deadbolt home just as something crashed into the security gate outside with a deafening bang that rattled the hinges and shook dust from the door frame.
The man didn’t hesitate. He holstered the gun, crossed to the couch I hadn’t moved an inch, and shoved it across the floor in one powerful drive of his legs. The feet shrieked against the hardwood as the frame hit the door flush.
Another impact hit the gate outside.
BANG.
Plaster dust drifted from the ceiling. Something on the other side shrieked—a ragged, inhuman sound that climbed in pitch and scraped against the inside of my brain—and then came the scratching, slow and deliberate, nails dragging down steel in long strokes. A guttural growl seeped through the cracks.
The man stood in front of the barricaded door and faced it, perfectly still. His eyes were closed. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
Listening. Waiting.
