AllFreeNovel
Share Us
TWENTY-TWO
Decima
I askedthe cab to drop me at an address several blocks from the geocoordinates. It wasn’t the greatest part of town, a lot of the shops around me were closed up with FOR RENT or old CLOSING SALE signs hanging in the grimy front windows.
As I strode along the sidewalk, careful to keep my head down, I watched for other activity on the street, but no one much seemed to come out this way. Even in the few stores that remained open, I didn’t spot any customers.
None of that detracted from my mission necessarily. The factory where we’d found the first match for the symbol had been rundown and abandoned too. But the quiet felt a little eerie. I wasn’t sure I’d been in any part of the city before where there hadn’t been at least a little more traffic just passing through.
The coordinates led me to a massive storage facility surrounded by a chain-link fence. I studied it from off to the side, not spotting any guards standing watch near the gate and only a few dingy looking cameras mounted on obvious posts. Several of the garage-style doors I could see had padlocks on them. Shouldn’t there have been more security here if this facility was still active?
Maybe the owners were too lazy and their customers not concerned enough to hassle them about it, but I didn’t like that either.
I obviously wasn’t going to break open the gate and waltz in within full view of the main camera. Instead, I scaled the fence where it veered closest to one of the rows of storage lockers. In a matter of moments, I’d scrambled over the edge and was crouched on the building’s flat, corrugated-metal rooftop.
I scanned the area again, taking in the aisles of matching buildings with their rows of doors and the utter stillness of the scene. In the middle of the day, no one was monitoring the gate in person, and no one was bringing stuff to or from their unit. I had no idea how normal that was, though.
Checking my phone, I determined that the exact geolocation from the image must be one of the units a few rows over at the dead end of the aisle. If I dropped down to the pavement below and walked over, I’d be boxed in once I reached it, with no easy avenue to climb to a better vantage point. Thankfully, I should be able to make my way over there across the rooftops. Most of them were connected, and those that weren’t had only a narrow walkway separating them, which would make for an easy leap.
I started over, walking around one aisle and making my way along the far end of the facility toward the one I needed. The whole time, I kept searching my surroundings for other security measures.
As I came up on the one camera at the back of the facility, I slowed, preparing to figure out a way to avoid it. It was hard to tell from this distance, but it might have captured an angle that would show the unit I needed to get to.
I eased closer, careful to stay out of range for now. If I blocked the view, there was always the chance that would alert an off-site security force that something was wrong—not that it looked as if the storage company cared enough to have hired someone for constant surveillance. I might be able to duck under the camera’s view with a quick roll and stay out of its sights the rest of the time…
As I drew closer, my forehead furrowed. I paused, studying the camera—and in particular its lens—more intently. There was something odd about the glass. It looked… smudged, or wet?
I edged even closer, and my pulse kicked up a notch with a surge of apprehension. Someone had sprayed a liquid on the camera’s lens that’d left behind a thick film. It would be blurring the view and making any recording taken useless for identifying the figures it captured.
Normally, that would have worked in my favor. I could sashay right by and no one would be the wiser. But the film had clearly been purposefully added. And…
I knelt down and touched a droplet I’d noticed on the roof beneath it. My finger smudged the damp spot. Still wet. The substance had been sprayed on the camera recently.
Why would someone else have been here, in this desolate area of town, wanting to obscure the cameras on this exact afternoon? Where were they now?
None of this felt right to me. Every aspect of it was starting to scream setup. Someone had ensured there’d be no staff on site and obscured the camera lenses so they could get away with something awful.
After the way we’d been attacked at the meat factory, I couldn’t help suspecting it was something awful they wanted to do to me.
This was a trap. I didn’t know why the teardrop symbol was here, but the people responsible must have known about it too and realized we’d come here soon. Maybe I’d slipped up somewhere along my journey and they’d figured out I was headed this way right now.
It didn’t matter which was true. The only important thing was getting out of here before that trap was sprung on me.
I turned, intent on marching to the closest spot where I could easily leap to the fence and vanish without a trace, but at the same moment, the thump of several footfalls reached my ears from the direction of the front gate. With a hitch of my heart, I ducked as close to the roof as I could get.
There was a rattling sound by the gate and a murmur of low voices. I flattened myself, braced to make a run for it as soon as I was sure I had a good opening. Then the gate swung open, and it wasn’t enemies but the men I’d left back at the apartment who strode into the storage facility.
They didn’t throw caution to the wind. I saw Blaze make a gesture toward the nearest camera and them all adjust their course to avoid it, and their heads swiveled to watch for any threat around them. But they marched quickly toward the aisle with the unit I’d already determined the geocoordinates pointed to with less stealth and wariness than I wished they’d used. They didn’t notice me where I was crouched on the roof a few aisles away.
I straightened up and waved my arms, but they didn’t glance my way again, already finished with their scan of the rooftops. They were focused on the environment at their eye level now. My chest itched with the urge to yell, but if this was a trap, that would only alert whoever was waiting to spring it that I was on to them. Shit.
Continuing to gesture in the hopes of getting the crew’s attention, I darted along the roof with feet set as silently as I could manage. If I could just get in front of them instead of off to the side, they’d have to notice me. My pulse thudded through my veins.
Maybe I was wrong about the trap. Maybe there was a normal explanation for everything that’d unnerved me. I desperately hoped that was true—but I couldn’t stake their lives and mine on that hope.
Why weren’t they picking up on the same clues? I guessed I couldn’t blame them for missing the cameras, since I hadn’t spotted the oddity with them until I was up here. But coming through the front gate had been a bold move. It was as if they were in so much of a hurry that they’d set aside caution for haste. What was so urgent about this investigation?
Me, I realized with a jolt of shock. That was the only conceivable explanation. They’d obviously realized I’d come here following the alert on Blaze’s computer, and they’d rushed after me. The bigger question was why exactly it’d mattered so much to them, but I could ask them that after we were all out of here safely.
