You know those decorator shows where the people leave home, and when they come back someone has replaced their funky old bedroom with a fancy new one, but instead of saying “Gee, thanks,” they burst into tears and bawl hysterically? I never really understood that. I always felt like, “Come on, you’re crying over curtains and a new bedspread. Your life must seriously suck.”
What I never got, until that moment, was what it really meant to find a room like that, made especially for you. It wasn’t about the furniture, or the colors, or even the design. It was the realization, hitting you like a Mack truck to the heart, that someone had truly thought about you. They’d thought about what you love, and what you don’t, and what you want, and what sort of place you need, down to the minutest detail. And then they’d gone that one step further, as so few people ever do, and they’d actually made it a reality.
I turned to Marcus, and he had this nervous look on his face, like he thought he’d messed up because Passion and I weren’t saying anything.
And that’s when I burst into tears like those idiots on television.
Both Marcus and Passion stared at me, stunned.
“I’m sorry,” I said, turning away in embarrassment. I do not cry. I am not a crier.
“Thank you for the room,” I heard Passion say to Marcus. “It’s perfect.”
“It really is,” I said, trying to pull it together.
“Yeah, okay, no problem,” he said, looking at me worriedly. “I’ll let you settle in and get comfortable. Oh, and the closet should be full of clothes.”
I hadn’t noticed a closet, and Marcus must have seen my confusion, because he stepped to one wall and pushed something. A panel slid aside, revealing the doorway to a huge walk-in closet, the fully mirrored wall at the end of it making it look twice as big. The hangers and shelves were full of designer labels: jeans, dresses, tops, bras and underwear. Shoes of every shape and style lined the racks underneath.
“I hope they fit,” Marcus said. “I hired this fashion consultant online and told her I was surprising my sisters who weren’t happy about the family move.”
Passion and I looked at one another, eyes wide. The closet was jammed full of thousands of dollars’ worth of clothing. I didn’t know much about fashion, but I did know that much.
“Well, you probably want to get cleaned up,” he said, crossing to the door and pulling it closed behind him, one last glance in my direction as he left.
As soon as he was gone, I knew I should have said more. I should have thrown my arms around him and planted a big, wet, wonderful kiss on those generous lips. Especially after the way I’d acted in the kitchen.
But there was some part of me that couldn’t even fathom what he’d done. Why all this luxury and opulence? Why go to all this trouble to deck out a rental house that was essentially a stake out, just a temporary place for us to stay while we tried to get Samantha out of her high school and away from the CAMFers? Yes, it was part of our cover. I understood that. We were supposed to be rich kids, so we needed to act and dress the part. But how could he waste all this money on a dream bedroom and wardrobe for Passion and me? A dream bedroom and wardrobe we were going to have to leave behind in a matter of days anyway.
And that was going to royally suck, because we’d most likely go back to camping from the back of our wheelers, dressed in a coat of dust, on the way to wherever we had to go to find Kaylee Pasnova, the next girl on the CAMFers’ list. It didn’t make sense. Marcus was a smart guy. Why would he squander our resources like this?
But I knew the answer, even as I asked myself the question.
This bedroom wasn’t only for Passion and me. It was for Danielle. This whole house was for her. And for him. And for us. His new family—his chosen family. This was the home he was carving out for us, no matter how briefly, in a world that had destroyed any family and home he’d ever known. Marcus was staking his claim to a new life, a real life. We all were. That’s what we were fighting for, armed with the weapons of sheer will, hope, and even guns, if that’s what it came to. That was why Passion and I had to get Samantha to join us.
She was a part of our family too.
She just didn’t know it yet.
5
SLEEPING BEAUTY WAKES
I sat up, completely disoriented, wondering where I was and what had woken me. I was in a huge bed shrouded in curtains like something out of a fairy tale, a dim strip of light cutting between the gap in the material and falling across my face.
I pulled the curtains aside and looked around the dark room. The Other Olivia, tattered around the edges but as eternal as ever, was leaning against the nearest wall, staring back at me. Passion’s gentle breathing whispered in and out, in and out, from within the billowy enclosure of her pink canopy bed.
That’s right. It was our first night in the McMansion, and after everyone had settled in, cleaned up, and unpacked their stuff, it was as if the spell straight out of Sleeping Beauty had descended upon us. We had walked around yawning at 8:00 p.m., our eyes held open to bare slits. Yale had almost fallen down the stairs, and I’d run into a doorjamb with my face.
I reached up and felt the bruise on my cheekbone. At least the swelling had gone down.
Anyway, after the doorjamb incident, Marcus had suggested we all go to bed. There had been protests, of course, because we’d wanted to enjoy all the luxuries of the McMansion right then, tired or not. But Marcus had argued that we were experiencing physical exhaustion from all of the running and fighting and surviving we’d been doing, the side-effect of something he called sustained hyper-vigilance. In other words, there’s only so long you can run, and then you have to crash. And now that we were surrounded by four walls, a roof, and a semblance of normalcy, that’s exactly what our bodies were doing, like it or not.
So, we’d all shambled off to our beds. I hadn’t even had enough energy to insist Marcus explain the whole incident at the gun club. It could wait until after my first night’s sleep in a real bed since forever. And when Marcus offered to take the first security shift, it was proof of exactly how tired we’d been that none of us stopped to think he probably needed rest more than anyone. I’d been sustaining my hyper-vigilance for a little over three weeks. From what I’d gathered, Marcus had been sustaining it his whole life. But maybe it was something you got used to.
The clock on my nightstand said 3:36 a.m. Marcus’s shift was long over, and one of the other guys would be staked out in the security room. They hadn’t scheduled Passion and me for shifts, since we’d need to be alert and well-rested when we started school on Monday. But, despite the early hour, I was definitely awake. I might as well go see who was on duty. Maybe they’d want a snack or some company until I got sleepy again.
I slipped my legs out from under the plump down comforter and buried my feet in the plush rug next to the bed. It was warm, like it had just come out of the dryer. I slid my toes onto the wood floor, expecting it to be cool, but it was warm too. The floor was heated. Damn. A girl could get used to living like this.
Except this girl shouldn’t. This wasn’t really our house or our life. I had been happy living in a tent with Marcus, and I would be happy that way again.
I got up and pulled on some sweatpants, but I didn’t bother putting anything over the tank top I’d slept in. The house was the perfect temperature, not too cold and not too hot. Maybe that was the radiant floor heat. Or maybe it was simply the feeling of home and safety and the indoors we’d all been missing. Another thing I’d been missing was a bathroom that wasn’t a hole in the ground in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night. Oh God, I loved this place. I tiptoed to the door of the bedroom’s adjoining bathroom and took a much needed pee.
When I came out, I crossed to the bedroom door, careful not to wake Passion, and slipped into the hallway. I had the glow of my hand, so I didn’t bother with any lights as I made my way across the balcony hallway to the bedroom on the other side—not the master, but the one that was serving
as the upstairs lookout.
The door was ajar and I pushed it open. The light was off and the curtains and blinds were pulled back from the large central window. The guys had removed the beds from the room, so no one would be tempted to sleep on duty, and there were two chairs positioned for optimum viewing of the street below, but no one was in them. No one was in the room at all.
I walked to the window and looked out, surveying the neighborhood from one end to the other. It was bathed in eerie bluish streetlight. And it was dead out there, all the suburbanites tucked away in their temperature-controlled fortresses, exactly like we were. Good thing too, because the wind was gusting, whipping the newly planted saplings that lined the street back and forth. As I watched, the neighbor’s trash bin blew over, a loose, black, plastic bag escaping from it and skimming across the road and into our side yard like a runaway ghost. Now that I was more awake, I could hear the wind whistling over the top of the house. Perhaps that was what had woken me.
Anyway, it didn’t really matter. But I was beginning to feel kind of freaked out that no one was on duty. Maybe they’d gone to the security suite to check something on the cameras.
I headed down the hall to the master bedroom, which I’d have to go through to get to the camera room. If Marcus was asleep, I wouldn’t wake him, but at least I’d get to see him sleeping. Just thinking about it made my steps quicken and my heart race. Those softened lips. That innocent boyish face. The way his forehead sometimes scrunched up as if, even in his dreams, he was hard at work strategizing how to save the world. My head was resigned to rooming with Passion, but my heart missed sleeping next to Marcus already.
The bedroom door was closed, and I pulled it open quietly. There was no one in the bed, and it was still made. Marcus hadn’t slept yet? Was he trying to pull an all-night shift on his own? Idiot!
I crossed to the security suite, which had once been another huge walk-in closet, and slid the door open. Twenty display screens blinked back at me from the far wall, a built-in desk positioned below them, its chair empty. Where the hell was everyone?
Thankfully, I’d arrived at the best place to find out. I sat down in the chair and started scanning the screens. The array was easy enough to read. The top row of monitors showed the upstairs feeds, one in each bedroom, and one each in the hall and the entry to the stairs. That was the reason Marcus had gotten Passion and I canopy beds with curtains. That way we could still have some privacy even though there was a security camera in our room. Anyway, I’d just walked through the rooms upstairs, so I skipped those, going straight to the main floor monitors one row down.
Nothing and no one in the kitchen, dining room, piano room, or the garage, but the living room feed clearly showed Marcus completely zonked out on one of the leather couches. He must have finally succumbed to the sleeping spell, just like the rest of us. But that also meant that no one was on security duty and probably hadn’t been for hours. And that was bad.
My eyes dropped to the third row of screens, which covered the basement. The game room and home theatre were empty, but each bedroom had a dark sleeping form on its correlating bed. It was confirmed; I was the only one awake in the whole damn house, and suddenly I felt like I had been injected with a gallon of Red Bull. It was me; I was our security. Then again, nothing had happened since Marcus had fallen asleep, and it wasn’t likely to happen now, simply because I was awake and watching for it. Besides, the cameras weren’t our only protection. There was an alarm system on every door and window of the house. It didn’t link to the police or anything though, because Marcus didn’t trust the authorities.
I glanced down at the bottom row of monitors, which covered all four sides of the house and the various entry points. Something was weird about them. They were kind of blurry compared to the indoor feeds, like someone was shaking the cameras back and forth, and then I realized it must be the wind blowing them around. Camera sixteen, the one at the front of the house, started to cut out. It went black for a minute, then came back on, then went black again, probably a short caused by the gusts. Yale could take care of it when the wind died down in the morning. Still, I felt better when it popped back on again, restoring my view of the front approach.
I sat back in the chair, surveying the view in front of me like some savvy superhero, safe in her secret lair.
And that’s when I saw it; a shadow, slipping across the lower corner of camera seventeen. It was there, and then it was gone, something moving around the side of the house, making every effort to avoid detection. Or, it was my imagination. My overactive I’m-the-only-one-awake imagination trying to freak me the hell out. I fixed my eyes on that screen and watched for it to happen again, thinking it might be the wind, perhaps the shadow of a cloud or blown branch superimposing itself on the side of the house just under the camera.
And then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught motion in camera eighteen. This time the shadow was a little bigger, and I could make out its shape before it disappeared. It had been thick and bent, like an elbow.
Shit!
Someone was out there. Someone was pressing themselves up against the walls of the house, beneath the scope of the cameras, slowly making their way to the back of the McMansion. The easiest entry into the house was the French doors off the living room that led out onto the deck. And Marcus was down there, asleep.
I looked at camera nineteen and saw the shadow move across it, bigger and bolder this time. There was no longer any question; it was a person.
I glanced down at the control panel on the desk. There was a microphone and a house-wide radio intercom system for emergencies. The only problem was Yale hadn’t finished wiring it yet. I pushed the downstairs intercom button, hoping maybe he’d done that one at least. “Guys,” I said into the receiver. “This is Olivia. I’m in the security suite, and we have an intruder. Please respond if you can hear this.”
I stared at the downstairs bedroom screens, willing the dark forms in the beds to move, but they didn’t. They hadn’t moved since I’d been in the suite. Did people sleep that soundly? What if they’d been gassed? What if we all had? I mean, we’d practically passed out earlier. Even the ever-vigilant Marcus had succumbed to it. What if everything, this whole house and our sudden drowsiness, had been rigged by the CAMFers, and I was the only one conscious enough to do anything about it? But, if that was true, why was I awake?
“Dammit, Yale,” I said into the receiver. “Nose. Jason. Wake up, please. I really need you.”
But they obviously couldn’t hear me, so I switched my attention back to camera twenty, peering at the deck and the area around the French doors. The shadow hadn’t made an appearance there yet. On the living room screen, Marcus was still asleep on the couch, his arm draping over its edge now. At least he’d moved. I had to get down there and warn him.
I scanned the room, hoping someone had left a gun or some kind of weapon, but no such luck. I wasn’t even sure where my Walther was. I vaguely remembered someone saying that the guns had been brought into the house from the van, but I had no idea where they’d been put. Passion didn’t have hers either, I was pretty sure of that. God, we were idiots. What good was an arsenal if no one knew where it was?
What the fuck was I supposed to do? Go out there and confront that shadow unarmed? What if somehow I’d missed it, and the intruder was already in the house? What if he was waiting out there in the darkness of the master bedroom for me? Or in the hallway? What if there was more than one of them, the shadow I’d seen only a single member of an entire assault team? Shit, shit, shit. Pull it together, Olivia. It was just a shadow. No one can get in without setting off the alarm.
Except alarms can be disabled.
Shit.
I looked back at screen twenty. The shadow was filling it, the head and torso of a man standing right in front of me, his arms reaching up to throw something over the camera.
The feed went dark, but not before I saw the face as clear as day, barely showing the faintest signs of the
injury and abuse Jason had perpetuated upon it three weeks before.
It was Mike Palmer’s face.
He was out there, trying to get in.
6
STEALTH R US
My eyes flew to the living room monitor. There was Marcus, still asleep. There were the French doors, but a light source in the living room was reflecting off the glass, obscuring my view to the outside.
Wait. There was movement out there. Something dark was moving across the deck. I could see the shape of rounded shoulders, like a man crouched at the door picking the lock or disarming the alarm.
I had to do something, and it had to be quick. I couldn’t just hide and watch Mike Palmer break into our house. Marcus was down there.
With one last glance at the screen to assure myself the dark shape was still outside, I darted from the security suite into the master bedroom and looked for something, anything, to use as a weapon. Pillows. Bedding. Comfy, overstuffed chairs. None of it was any good. But the wrought iron curtain rods holding up the expensive drapes looked promising. Each one had an ornate, almost spear-like tip on its end.
I jumped up on one of the chairs and pulled a rod off its supports. Another quick yank in the middle and it came away in two pieces. I ran my hand along one piece, pushing the drapery material off, and the other end of the rod went with it, making a dull thunk as it hit the material now pooled on the floor. The piece left in my hand was solid, decently heavy, and about three feet long. It was better than nothing.