Light zaps the room. Red. A single, violent pulse from the panel on the east wall. Then two. Then it holds, steady and silent and absolute.
Every muscle in my body locks and then releases in the same half second. Cold clarity snaps through me. I’m at the panel when she asks, “What is this? What’s happening?”
The silent alarm has been activated. That’s what’s happening. There’s a breach. Someone is here. Someone has found this place.
The monitoring station in the corner blazes to life. Twelve screens illuminate the darkness, showing every angle of the area above this tunnel, above us.
Her sharp intake of breath echoes behind me. She can’t see it, what this room actually is. She only sees the pale light flooding the floor. “What are these lights? Are these computers? Security feed? Are the police here?”
She can’t see it, but she’s smart enough to know exactly what is happening. I don’t care. I don’t have time for this.
On the screens, three vehicles on the access road, lights killed early. A fourth car behind, the passenger door opening before it fully stops. The man that gets out moves toward the property at a pace that isn’t procedure. It’s personal. Ten, eleven, maybe more men still in the vehicles. My jaw tightens so hard it hurts.
My fingers work fast on the computer as six officers bust the door of the house on top of the tunnel. “Don’t worry, my queen. They won’t get down here. I won’t let them.”
“BIRDIE ABEL! THIS IS THE OAK BLUFFS POLICE!” The voice streams from the feed audio.
“BIRDIE! BIRDIE!”
“Jacob,” Reagan gasps. “Is that Jacob? He’s here. He came for me. He’s here. Oh my God. HELP! HELP! I’M DOWN HERE! RJ! I’M DOWN HERE! HELP!”
She squirms against the straps and screams with everything she has, raw and ragged and furious. It screeches through this room and goes absolutely nowhere. The walls take it. The acoustic board behind the rock walls swallows it whole, the wayI designed it to. She should have known that by now, and yet she screams again, harder, as if sheer desperation can push sound through six feet of earth.
The motherfucking detective swarms into the house, kicking each door, screaming her name. How the fuck did he get here? The police should be hunting him, not raiding my place with his help.
On the east exterior feed, two men break from the group. One of them carries a sonar wand. He crouches. The first impact of the wand ripples through the floor and into my feet. I can read his body language. He’s hit the density differential. The police know there is a void.
“Fuck.” I move swiftly and pull my go-bag that’s always been packed with weapons for exactly this scenario. AR-15. Glock. Spare magazines.
She stops screaming. “What sound is this?” Her voice fractures at the edges as the second wave hits. Then she howls his name again.
“If you don’t shut up, I’ll shoot him in the head.”
“What? No. Please. Just…just run, okay? I’m sure you have an escape plan. Just do it before they break in.”
I do have a plan, and it involves me and Reagan and no one else. “I’m not going anywhere without you, Reagan. Don’t even try.”
“Please. I don’t know anything about you. I can’t tell them who you are. Just go save yourself. Start a new life somewhere else, away from all this.”
A new life without her? How can she not understand by now that there is no life for me without her?
I let the table rotate back to its original position. Something slams against the panels. The impact reverberates through the walls. I check the feed. They’re trying to break through.
SLAM. SLAM. SLAM.
“Battering ram. First a sonar wand and now a battering ram.” The police came in suspecting there’s something underneath the house, which means they’ve been tipped. The list of people with that specific information is very short.
I will deal with that later. Right now I have a sequence to run and approximately four minutes before everything I’ve built comes crashing down.
I take a pre-loaded sedative syringe from the bench and go to her.
“No, please, no more drugs,” she begs.
“I’m sorry. We have less than three minutes to get going. I can’t deal with your useless fighting right now.”
The detective keeps shouting her name through the speakers, and she screams back. I roll my eyes and push the syringe into her neck.
Her head lolls to the side, and her eyes flutter closed. Time to evacuate.
