Page 87 of A Future To Remember

“Let’s go get these fuckers,” Candice growled.

“We should alert local law enforcement,” Oscar replied.

“No,” I said, reaching into the glovebox where I’d stored my gun.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” Candice asked. “We can’t go in there alone, Dutch. There’s no telling what kind of an arsenal these guys have.”

“You want to stay in the car, Candice, you do that, but law enforcement out this way is infested with these racist, Three Percenter fucks, and I’m not gonna risk having one of them tip off the brothers, who’ll murder Abby and make a run for it.”

“You want to go in with just the three of us?” she asked, her expression incredulous.

“No. I definitely don’t want to go in with just the three of us, but it’s gonna take us an hour to get there, and backup from any other Bureau is at least three to five hours away. I’m not letting my wife suffer one minute longer than she has to. Like I said, you two want to stay in the vehicle, fine. But I’m going in, and I’m not coming out without Abby.”

Oscar glanced over his shoulder at Candice. “I’ll cover him. It’s okay, Fusco. We can take these assholes.”

She crossed her arms and seemed to think about that for a second. At last, she said, “How much firepower have you got between you? I only brought along my Glock.”

“Fantastic,” I said with a grateful smile. “That means that between all three of us, we’ll have three Glocks and a whole lot of rage.”

“Ah,” she said. “Then those motherfuckers don’t stand a chance.”

Oscar drove like a bat out of hell, and the sun had already begun to set by the time we inched up the dirt road toward a structure at the top of a hill that was definitely a log cabin.

There was no light coming from it, which made it look creepy as hell.

Oscar had mentioned that the cabin had no running water or electricity, and I wondered if that meant that Abby had no ability to clean herself or keep warm at night while the cabin’s fire burned low.

Oscar parked, and I once again bundled up Eggy in his blankets, then we got out of the truck, closing the doors softly, then crept low up the hill toward the entrance of the cabin.

There was an old pickup parked nearby, as well as a grungy camper with a stripe along its side.

We were definitely in the right spot.

My heart pounded in my chest as we inched closer. If the truck and the camper were here, odds were that the brothers were too.

The light was dim, and it bothered me that the cabin was dark. Did the brothers know we were here? We hadn’t had the truck’s headlights on as we approached, and we’d parked a half mile down the road. If there was no electricity to this cabin, then they wouldn’t be running satellite surveillance, either.

I motioned to Oscar to take the rear of the cabin, and when I turned to Candice, she indicated that she’d be covering my back. Oscar peeled off, and I approached the front door.

We stayed low and moved to the side of the door. There was a window to our right, and I kept well to the side of it while I inched up to take a look inside.

A bit of light was coming in from another window at the side, and I could see a pair of legs poking out from behind a Barcalounger in such a way to indicate that someone was lying on the ground.

I ducked low again and signaled to Candice that there was someone inside.

She nodded, and we eased over to the door. I tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. I turned it very, very slowly and tapped the door open with my foot.

The smell hit us like a punch. The scent of rotting flesh seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the space around us. I tightened the muscles around my rib cage to prevent myself from gagging and parted my lips to breathe only through my mouth.

I looked behind me, and Candice had an arm across her nose and was squinting at me with watery eyes.

The implications of that smell weren’t quite hitting me yet, but there was something dark at the back of my mind. Something that threatened to end me.

I used every ounce of willpower and training to focus on the task at hand. I moved through the doorway and came upon a scene that was as gruesome as it was nonsensical.

There were two bodies on the floor. One was at the far right of the cabin by the chair and the fireplace, the other at the far left near a makeshift kitchen.

Digging my flashlight out of my pocket, I turned it on, my eyes desperately searching the blackened corpses for signs that one of them might be Abby.