The Secret: A Thriller (16 page)

She turned and smiled. “Is there a way out down there?” she asked.

“Nope. Just storage,” I told her, wondering where the question had come from.

She tilted her head to the left and frowned. “I like having a back door,” she said seriously.

We had one. But I knew what she meant. I walked over and gave her a one-armed hug, gazing out the door. “Me too, hon.”

Come to think of it, not having some hidden means of egress might be a bit strange, for a survivalist type. At least…if I were one of them, I’d want a tunnel. Which, if it existed, wouldn’t be immediately obvious. Except, possibly, to Abby. She hadn’t even gone down to the basement, but…

After a moment I let go of my daughter. “Be right back,” I told her.

I found it behind a set of shelves, once I knew to look for it. The shelves swung open to reveal a dark tunnel. At first I could stand, crouched slightly, but it turned to the right and shrank in diameter as it led me down the mountainside.

Soon I found myself beneath the boulders adjoining the cabin. It was a maze down there. Better to scout it out now than during a frantic escape from…whatever was going to happen next…later on, I figured, and kept going until I found an exit to daylight.

I looked out into the bright blue sky from beneath a boulder, listening to the birds sing.

Something was going on with Abby. But whatever it was, she seemed to be coping with it. Better than I was. But I wasn’t going to ask until I could be calm about it.

Not yet.

* * *

W
hen it got dark I lit the oil lamp again, sealed the cabin’s windows with the blackout curtains whoever had owned this place had installed, and went outside to have a look.

No light visible. But it occurred to me that I might need to stay outside to let my eyes adjust to the darkness before I could trust that, so I sat on a rocking chair on the porch. “I’ll be out here for a bit, Abby,” I called. “You okay in there?”

“’Course I am, Daddy!”

Yeah. Of course she was.

We’d never talked about her coma, if that was what it had been. Obviously she’d woken up at some point. She, Rebecca, and George had had time to establish some sort of understanding. So she must have been awake and alert for a couple of days at least by the time I returned.

But Tim had told me about prison inmates in a coma, too. Had Abby…changed, while she lay there unconscious?

Well. I knew she’d changed, didn’t I? No way she’d felt that trap door under her feet, and finding the exit to a tunnel that led under the tumble of boulders was…well,
not
an accident.

She still seemed like my daughter, though. Calmer, maybe. Able to deal with the new world.

After a while I relaxed and admitted the truth to myself: this wasn’t just about Abby.

I’d passed out in the broom closet, hadn’t I? Maybe that was because of my wounds. Maybe it wasn’t. And then Abby told me I’d done it again after arriving at the basement. Of course, that time I was
still
wounded. And I might still have had whatever drugs Tim gave me in my system. And, after all, George had hit me on the head and knocked me out.

Plenty of reasons for me to be unconscious for a while. But…maybe there was something more to it.

I rocked on the porch.

* * *

A
fter an hour of pointless musing, I decided I felt fine and wasn’t going to figure it all out sitting there in the dark. If I sprouted fangs, what the hell, maybe it’d mean we could get something other than canned food to eat for a while.

And the cabin didn’t leak light. So we could leave the lamp burning for a while.

* * *

A
bby
shrieked!

I rolled off the recliner I’d been sleeping on, grabbed the lighter I’d stuck in my shirt pocket, and flicked it to life. She was sitting straight up, clutching a blanket to her neck.

“Bad dream?” I asked.

She shuddered. “Sorry, Daddy,” she said. “I guess…I guess it was about vampires.”

I sat next to her and gathered her up in a hug, then lifted her to my lap. “It’s okay, hon,” I told her. We sat like that for a while.

“Daddy? Will you sleep on the bed with me?”

“What? Don’t you like me anymore? How come you want to beat me up?”

She giggled. “I just want to cuddle.”

“Uh huh.” I’d been kidding, but she really did whirl, kick, and flop her arms around when she slept. But I figured we didn’t have anywhere we needed to be tomorrow, so what the heck. We (or at least I) could sleep late.

“Sure,” I told her. “We can do that. If you promise this isn’t a trap.”

She giggled, then waited until we were settled and I was almost asleep to ask if we could light the lamp again, and leave it burning.

Yep. Still my daughter.

I slept very well.

* * *

I
n the morning I didn’t see Abby in the cabin and sat up quickly, panicked.

I wanted to call her name but if somebody outside had her…I moved to the front window and slowly lifted the blackout curtain.

There she was, sitting in the rocking chair. Close by, and not in danger. I let out a slow sigh, then went out and asked her to let me know before she did that again.

She quirked a quizzical eyebrow at me. “Daddy? You were still asleep.”

All Abby’s life Rebecca and I had encouraged her to be as independent as possible. I still thought that was the best way to raise a kid. But…“Just until we figure things out, hon, I’d like to know where you are. All the time. Okay?”

She considered this. “What if we figure it out and it’s still dangerous?”

I leaned on the porch rail and thought about that. My little girl still needed to grow up and deal with the world on her own, didn’t she? “We’ll figure that out too, if we need to,” I told her. “Meanwhile, can you humor me about this?”

“I guess, Daddy. If you’ll let me know where you are too.”

I didn’t plan to be more than a few feet away. Maybe not ever again. “Deal,” I told her. We shook on it.

* * *

W
e ate more cold canned food, not wanting the smell of cooking food to draw anything—or anyone—to our new home. Then Abby wanted to play under the boulders.

It was obviously a challenge to my overprotective daddyhood. Which was probably overdue. “Go to it, baby girl,” I told her, and handed her a lighter. “Use this if you can’t see, and give me a call if you need help. Uh…you do know it’s really really dark down there, don’t you?”

She scoffed. “I’m not afraid of the dark!”

Okeydokey then. I just smiled and wished her luck.

I wondered just how comfortable we should let ourselves become in the cabin. It was a fully functional home, and well-stocked, and as far as I knew leaving Henge wouldn’t make us any safer. So…it made sense to stay.

But in the long term, what kind of life was this for my daughter? She’d do better if she had friends, or at least someone besides her dad to play with.

On the one hand I was glad we didn’t seem to be in a lot of immediate danger. On the other…

It struck me that I needed to check out the area anyway. We might even have neighbors. They might be friendly.

Or they might be a reason for us to move on very soon.

But…not today. We’d take a day of playing, eating, and relaxing.

Tomorrow we could worry about tomorrow.

* * *

T
he next day I still didn’t feel like exploring—but I knew I needed to.

Abby didn’t want to go either, but I wasn’t going to leave her behind. “Come on, hon. We need to see who’s living around here. Maybe we’ll make friends with them.”

“Daddy? I don’t want to go to other people’s houses. It’s scary.”

She was near tears. “I know, kid. Look, we’ll be careful. We’ll hide in the woods and watch, okay? Maybe we won’t need to talk to anybody.”

* * *

M
uch later—I’d guess it was a couple of hours’ worth of discussion involved—she agreed to go with me. “But only if we hold hands, Daddy.”

Well, okay. That worked for me too.

Standing on the porch, though, armed with a .45 in a shoulder holster, a .38 shoved in my belt, and a shotgun in my left hand…the world outside our little cabin in its clearing seemed both distant and hostile.

And: vigilant. I’d been feeling eyes on us for the last half hour or so. Ridiculous, I knew. I tried listening for birds, telling myself they’d let me know if someone was coming…but would they, really? Here Abby and I were, standing on the porch. We’d been walking around all morning. The birds sang just fine.

Maybe I needed to give the bird thing a rest. Though if they
did
shut up, or a bunch of them took flight, it’d probably be worth seeing if I could figure out why.

I figured our best bet was to head uphill to the road and follow it in whichever direction gave us the most cover. Southeast or northwest to start with, though I expected it to change direction often.

I took Abby’s hand and we climbed the mountainside. Both sides of the road looked rugged, and would provide pretty good cover. If we were careful, and if we didn’t break a leg or sprain an ankle. “Which way, Abby?” I asked her.

“Left, Daddy. You should always pick left when you don’t know. That’s the rule.”

“That so?” I grinned at her. Rebecca had told her that, years ago, though I didn’t remember the context and hadn’t heard it since. Left was southeast. “Left it is, then.”

We crossed the road and started working our way through the woods on its other side. It probably didn’t matter, but I hoped anyone traveling on it would be less likely to spot us if we were uphill of them. And I remembered from the hunting trips I’d made as a boy that it was hard to shoot uphill and hit anything.

The road twisted its way along mountainsides. We followed, crossing whenever we needed to do so to stay on its uphill side. After about a mile we spotted two driveways, both on the downhill side of the road.

We passed them by—I figured we would either check them out or pass them by again on the way back, depending on how Abby was doing. She’d always been a tough kid, and loved to hike back…before…but we weren’t exactly strolling along at full speed. We did so much scrambling on boulders and route-finding around trees that what I guessed was two miles probably took us three hours.

She did fine, though.

* * *

“D
addy? Are we going to go in?”

We’d been circling the further-out house for a while. I saw no signs of occupancy. No smell of woodsmoke or cooking food. It didn’t have an outhouse, so it probably had indoor plumbing…which might even work. But if it didn’t…anyway, there was no obvious latrine outside.

The house had once boasted a large picture window on its downslope side. It looked like it had given a great view of the valley below, and I hoped somebody had spent a lot of time looking through it, ideally with good company. And maybe even a beer or two, or whatever their alcoholic preference might have been.

But, now? The window was thoroughly broken. From downslope we could see curtains billowing in the north wind that had started whistling by as we hiked.

I was pretty sure whoever had lived here wasn’t enjoying their view anymore. A smaller window in the front of the house was also cracked, but the big one in back depressed me.

I rested a hand on Abby’s head. “What do you think, supergirl? Do we go look?”

She frowned up at me. “I don’t think anybody’s in there,” she said. “But we
have
to look, don’t we?”

“Yeah,” I told her. “We do.”

* * *

I
t wasn’t just that the house looked empty, and I thought anybody living there would have made some attempt to block the broken windows. Or that there was no sign of a car in the driveway—or the half-open garage. The house just
felt
empty.

I’d have put it down to a general sort of fatalistic approach I’d been taking to things—what happened, happened, and it wasn’t up to me to get upset; my job was to survive. But…it was more than that.

And Abby? Did she feel the emptiness too? Or was I, just maybe, letting my imagination run away with me?

Whatever. The next step was to go look.

I stashed my daughter in a stand of trees—she rolled her eyes but I wanted to keep her as safe as I could. Then I went up to the front door, stood off to one side (thinking anybody inside would still have at least a fifty percent chance of guessing where I was standing if they wanted to shoot through the wall, because the door had glass panels). And then I knocked. Perfunctorily.

No response. Which didn’t necessarily mean anything.

So I tried the knob. Locked. “Anybody in there?” I called. “I’m coming in, and I’ll break the glass in the door to do it. But if you’re here, I don’t want to mess up your house.”

Then waited a little while, wondering just how hard my daughter was rolling her eyes at that one.

Of course I could have crawled through the smaller broken window instead. But I wasn’t in the mood. I took the shotgun and busted out a panel in the door, then reached in and unlocked it.

“Anybody here?” I called again.

Again with the lack of response. But once I stepped inside I could smell…death.

I saw a lot of dead
bugs
lying around—way more than seemed reasonable. And had no idea why they were there. But the smell wouldn’t be coming from them.

I scouted the interior, cursorily, because again I figured if anybody had been living inside, recently anyway, they would have cleaned the place up. At least enough to get rid of the stench. The smell was strongest from upstairs, so I went to check it out.

In the master bedroom I found what had probably been the family dog. He was lying on a king-size bed with a frilly pink bedspread, his belly swollen and his eyes yellow-gray with death. There was something wrong with the inside of his mouth—was that food in there?

I stepped closer to check it out, then came to my senses. It didn’t matter why or how the dog had died.