Housebroken (26 page)

He slammed it, throwing the door wide. Flames leapt above his head into the open corridor in a scorching fireball, rushing and consuming the oxygen in the fresh room. Blake dropped to the floor, sure he would be aflame. To his surprise only his hand had caught fire—the hand that had held the nozzle of the tank. Unnatural blue flames flickered behind the orange glow covering his right hand like a glove.

Stumbling to his feet and keeping his head low, he ran toward the end of the corridor. He pulled his sweatshirt over his head, wrapping his hand in it and squelching the flames. He burst into the loading area at the rear of the building, no fireballs following him out. His run was now the staunch gait of an injured animal, kept in motion only by the instinct to survive.

As Blake poured out from the back door, he expected Joje to be gone, was almost certain he would be. This was a suicide mission, a sacrificial offering to an orange-haired devil in exchange for the life of Blake’s son. Not a rule for a rule, but a soul for a soul.

To his surprise the Escalade was there, idling in the loading dock. A cry escaped from Blake that sounded almost like a laugh. He ran the final steps across the dock, ignoring the stairs, and hurtled onto the top of the Escalade’s roof. He gripped the bike rail with his good hand as he tapped the top of the roof with a furious thump. The SUV leapt backward, and Blake barely managed to keep from toppling off.

They shot across the rear parking lot until the Escalade came to an abrupt stop. Blake rolled backward over the roof, his body spilling onto the pavement in a drop that left him mostly breathless. Police sirens were no longer in the distance, they were coming at Blake from every direction.

Surrounded.

“Bwake, you do it?” Joje asked, leaning out the driver’s window.

Blake sat up, looking for the cruisers that should have been closing in. Through the far, shaded gate he could see siren lights whirling. He made out the shape of at least three cop cars.

They had gone to the wrong building?

Confused, Blake moved to the door behind Joje, opening it and climbing into the backseat. He lay across it, looking up at the ceiling.

He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see this next part.

“Did it work?” Joje asked.

Blake held up his quivering hand. The outer layer of skin had completely melted away, leaving a mucous-like membrane covering the pulsing pink-and-burned flesh beneath.

“You weren’t supposed to light yourself,” Joje said.

“There’s a janitor . . . inside,” Blake said. “Just a kid . . .”

The car was moving, the motion lolling Blake further into darkness.

“Dumbass just doing his job, huh?” Joje said.

Before Blake could answer, his thoughts were lost in the sheer force of the explosion behind them. It felt like the world was caving in, the car caught in a whirlwind like Dorothy’s crippled house. Windows shattered, a violent gale rocking them back, tires screeching at the unexpected thrust. And suddenly the explosion doubled, tripled in size—a nuclear detonation, the fiery glow coursing into the vehicle a preview of hell.

Joje laughed, the cackle of a psychopath, as their vehicle increased its speed. Blake glimpsed out the shattered passenger window at the building hidden behind a rumbling thunderstorm of black clouds. The sight was more impressive than he could have imagined, in the most disturbing of ways. Within that churning smoke, another blast ignited, house-sized chunks of concrete and rubble spewing out as if a volcano had erupted.

And somewhere in that building was the body of a stubble-faced youth who had probably been working for eight bucks an hour. Blake could almost see the janitor’s face, still unable to make a sound. The janitor and building weren’t the only things burning back there—a part of Blake’s humanity had been torched, a piece of his psyche that he would never get back.

Because this murder—this death—was on him.

He let his head fall back to the seat of the car. Joje would take him wherever he intended to, Blake only knew where that road wouldn’t lead: redemption.

Sunlight leaked through the edges of boarded-up windows, scuttling beneath the wide gap at the bottom of the door. A flurry of moths and mosquitos bounced in the air, the occasional wanderer causing Adam to slap at his own face or arms. Bites covered his exposed flesh, the only really bothersome one at the corner of his lower lip like a pimple, causing his lip to hang slightly down.

If he could figure out how to twitch his left eye, he might really look like Joje.

With the light creeping into the otherwise dark storage shed, Adam could finally make out some of the objects he had lain against. Sealed wooden crates were stacked to the ceiling along the walls of the shed, covered in dust as thick as sand. The wing of a small airplane skewered through the boxes, its end terminating in dangling cables and bent jagged metal like a limb that had been torn free. Discarded seats from a car and other pieces of machinery and rusty antiques that looked almost petrified in their disuse lay in heaps, a large metal chain coiled on top, flakes of red rust shedding like a second skin. Cobwebs, broken light bulbs, and an abandoned water heater so full of holes it had clearly served its life sentence as target practice.

There wasn’t a lot he could use here, but he also had the feeling he wouldn’t need to. Joje was showing off to his father, strutting his feathers in a display that had little to do with Adam.

And if I’m wrong?

Footsteps approached from outside, the soft crunch against trodden dirt. Adam remained quiet, listening to a padlock disengage. Blinding light rushed in as the metal door flung wide. Adam’s eyes were accosted at the sudden change. When they had partially adjusted, he saw one of the men standing before him, the one with the thick beard.

“If you want breakfast, follow me.”

Adam fell in step behind the man. It was impossible not to notice their surroundings, but he tried his best not to look like he was noticing. The property was huge—Adam couldn’t see a fence or wall, and the abundance of trees and smell of juniper reminded him of their home in West Virginia. The ground was covered with dried leaves, needles, and bullet casings, as if they too fell from the surrounding trees.. The cabin they walked toward was certainly no luxury rent-by-the-week model and had the look of a house that held the stories of generations within its walls.

They passed a well covered with wooden planks and continued toward the cabin entrance, or exit, considering they were entering through the back. The smell of fried meat and potatoes brought moisture to Adam’s mouth.

“This way,” the guy with the beard said. He wore a beanie today with flaps that hung down around his ears, knotted cords dangling beneath. A flannel shirt and jeans that certainly could have stood on their own.

The kitchen was small and quaint, a gas stove, washtub sink, tiled dark blue counters with a swirly cream-colored pattern none of these men would have picked out. The grout between them was a dark encrusted black. Adam recognized the older lanky gentleman at the table as the one who had driven their arsenal on wheels, the one who had taken him at first. He was halfway through his plate, steam still rising from every forkful.

“That’s Gary,” the bearded man said pointing to the gray-haired man with the ponytail. “I’m Stu. The one you hit over the head is Milton.”

Adam thought better than to apologize. Hopefully, they would take his actions as a normal response to being kidnapped and instead harass Milton for letting a kid get the better of him.

He loaded a red plastic plate up with the stringy meat-and-potato concoction out of the pot on the stove. “So what’s the plan? How long will I be here?”

“I told you I like this kid,” Stu said.

Gary grunted. “We ain’t no babysitters, so stay outta the way.”

Adam nodded, sliding onto the bench across from Gary. “How well do you know Joje? Or George, I guess.”

Gary held his fork halfway to his mouth. “An’ don’ talk.”

Adam continued, feeling emboldened. “He’s putting you in a lot of jeopardy right now. It’s obvious you’re not kidnappers. So what, you sell illegal arms—not like people wouldn’t get them somewhere else—but why do this? You owe him a favor? Is it the money?”

Stu pulled up a tall stump to the table that had been carved into a seat, a grin spreading across his face. Gary shoved his plate back into the center of the table and stood. “Put him back in the shed when he’s done. I don’ need more bullshit.” After walking from the room, he came back to retrieve his plate and fork, carrying the food out with him. “An’ wipe that damn smirk off your face,” he shouted back.

Stu burst into laughter.

Blake took the stairs with a cautious limp, clinging to the railing with his left hand. His other hand was brought in close to his center, as if he expected an attack at any second and needed to protect it. It shook like a metronome on its fastest setting, the flesh wet and red, raw hamburger or chewed meat. How Jenna had managed the pain for so long was beyond him, though he was certainly looking forward to uncapping one of her pill bottles and swallowing them dry.

Joje stood at the bottom of the steps, and the comical idea of him tapping his toes sprang to mind. The dead-eye look on his face kept Blake from laughing.

They had to clamber over the blockade in the foyer to get to the front door. Blake looked up at the remaining end of chain still dangling from the ceiling. Crystal and glass cracked beneath their every step. They opened the front door just as the chimes rung a second time.

Jing Jong.

The sound of death.

It wasn’t the police as Blake had thought. Officer McClellan and his gangly partner were out doing what they did best—protecting the residents of Malibu from Looky Lous and purveyors of celebrity maps. Instead, it was a delivery guy. Two of them actually.

“Shouldn’t you have been here yesterday?” Joje asked. “Twenty-four hour delivery?”

“You want it or not,” one of the men said.

It took several minutes to clear a way through the front room, several more to come up with a story about the chandelier. Joje joked that they were doing a reproduction of
The Phantom of the Opera.

They wheeled the ginormous screen encased in cardboard and plastic into the family room, the wheels catching on the groove from Drew’s sword in the hall. They were professional and courteous, accepting waters when asked, mounting the screen where the previous one had been and even configuring Blake’s electronics and remotes to the new TV. One of them had tattoos stretching down below his rolled-up sleeves all the way to his wrists. Had the sleeves not been rolled up, no one would ever know his body was covered in ink.

We all hide who we really are from each other
, Blake thought.

As the one with tattoos showed Blake the functions on the new remote, his gum doing little to hide the bitter aroma of cigarettes from his breath, Blake noticed the scene being displayed. Channel Seven News on the bottom of the screen, an aerial shot taking up the wide expanse of eighty-five inches above it.

The picture was of the remnants of the warehouse they had destroyed last night.

Pieces of the building had spread in a quarter-mile radius; debris, concrete, and the charred remains of server-related equipment looked like the fallen corpses of a robot war. The scroll at the bottom of the screen read,
“Two deaths reported in bombing of tech firm’s storage facility. Police citing a ‘deliberate act of terror.’”

The camera switched to a different location, outside the glass building of Symbio’s headquarters in Westlake Village, their logo brightly lit. JT walked from the parking lot to the front of the building, a swarm of media around him. He spoke rapidly into a microphone, distracted and in a hurry.

“Turn up the volume,” Blake said.

The delivery tech raised the remote, and JT’s voice went from a whisper to a shout from the surround speakers in the family room. “. . . of the event is something we have no doubt. The launch of our OS is going to revolutionize the industry—obviously there are those who stand to lose from that. But if anything, this gives us the confidence we’re so far ahead of our competition they have to resort to terrorist-like attacks to try and derail us. The tragic part isn’t the loss of data and equipment, however, it’s the loss of innocent lives.”

The female reporter in the brown fashion-less suit jogging alongside JT pulled the microphone back. “Do you have anything to say to your attackers?”

JT stopped just before the door to the building, two security guards stepping from off camera to the door and holding it open for him. He pulled the small mirrored shades from his eyes, heavy bags displaying the long night he must have had. He looked right into the camera.

“We know who you are. And you’ll wish you could invent a time machine to make sure your parents never met when we’re through with you.”

JT’s face and the Symbio office disappeared, replaced with two news anchors behind a long desk. The anchors began explaining that Symbio’s lawyers had clarified JT’s statement, emphasizing it wasn’t intended as a threat but rather a business reaction to the legal ramifications of such sabotage. Despite JT’s statement, no suspects had yet to be arrested; the authorities were actively investigating several leads.

“Turn it off.”

The screen went close on one of the anchors, a male with hair so stiff it could have been thrown like a Frisbee, the space next to him displaying information on Symbio as he began to highlight the company’s profile. Then the television burst into a digital implosion ending with a blank black screen.

“Everything all right?” the tech asked.

Blake looked at the delivery guy as if seeing him for the first time.

“With the picture and color?” the tech added.

Blake signed paperwork awkwardly with his left hand and walked the two men back to the door. Jenna had oddly been absent from the couch, the revelation of the deaths Blake was responsible for yet to add to her already tainted view of him. She wasn’t in the living room, nor had she been upstairs, but Blake knew better than to ask when in company.