The Secret: A Thriller (17 page)

I walked through the rest of the house, checking for any obvious danger, then went back out to get Abby.

“It was empty?” she asked.

I sighed. “Their dog died upstairs. You should probably stay away from that. But otherwise, yeah, nobody home.”

“Okay. Where do we go next?”

“Not so fast, kid. Let’s both go in and look a little more carefully. See if there’s anything we can use.”

* * *

T
he worst part of that had been the suddenly
much
stronger stench when I opened their refrigerator. A smarter man would have waited until he was done checking out the house.

We’d found some canned goods, and plenty of things like blankets and pillows that we didn’t really need.

I decided to leave it all where it was, except that I wrapped the dog up in the bedspread and took it outside.

Abby watched me, then tilted an eyebrow. “Are we going to bury him? I’ll bet these people loved their dog.”

I’d thought to clean up a little just in case we ended up using the house as a shelter ourselves—it never occurred to me to bury the damn dog. But with Abby around, what else could I do?

* * *

I
t was getting dark by the time we got to the other house we’d found on the way back to our cabin. The ground outside the first house had been rocky, so I’d ended up building a cairn for the dog. Abby had helped.

The strange thing? It felt good to do it. Just a dog, and one I’d never met. But…my daughter was right. Survival wasn’t our only priority. A strange word to use, maybe, but:
humanity
was important too.

We might need to preserve whatever we had left of it.

* * *

I
got the same sense of emptiness from the second house. With less apparent reason—no broken windows. But again there was no car in the driveway. This one didn’t have a garage, so…

I told myself to quit making assumptions. The inhabitants’ car might have died when everyone else’s did, back when this all started. Maybe one or more of them had walked home, after. Or ridden a bicycle. Or a horse, or a helicopter. I needed to look and see what was
there
, not stand around making up theories.

I didn’t smell cooking food or anything else that would have told me people were around. But how much did that really mean?

Wherever the strange certainty had come from—the absolute conviction that the house was empty—I knew it would be beyond foolish to trust it.

I walked up to the front door again. This one had no glass panels—and I still didn’t want to go through a window. Especially since none of them were broken yet, here.

Shrugging, I tried the knock-and-call routine again, and got the total lack of response I’d expected.

But when I tried the door it opened easily.

I stepped inside, onto a tile floor with an adjoining living room, and flicked my eyes between the open doorway from the living room on my left to what seemed like a kitchen and a hallway, straight ahead, which had doors on my right side. Bedrooms, probably.

Nothing and nobody jumped out at me. I checked the place out, again, this time stopping to look under beds and even disturbing what looked like a pile of dirty clothes on the floor of their laundry room.

Nobody. I made sure of it.

But…why hadn’t I been just as careful at the
first
house we’d checked out? Had I seriously brought my daughter into a house without checking
carefully
to be sure nobody was hiding inside? Possibly terrified at the intrusion, clutching a gun, ready to kill if disturbed, out of a completely reasonable and predictable terror of strangers?

What was wrong with my head?

But I couldn’t stop to think about it now—since I’d at least checked
this
place out more carefully, I needed to bring Abby in with me.

Outside, I found her already starting toward the house from the hiding spot I’d found for her.

“I heard you coming, Daddy,” she said when she saw my face. “It’s okay. I was being careful.”

Yeah. Maybe. But was I?

We checked the house out thoroughly. I liked it—it was much larger and more comfortable than the cabin. This time I left the refrigerator closed (what was I going to find inside that we could possibly want?) and…well, the place just felt welcoming to me.

No running water, though, and of course no electricity. And…maybe the place was too big for us?

I liked the space. But with all these rooms, Abby would be out of my sight a lot of the time. If we used them. And it would be a lot harder to try to listen for anybody approaching, because if they were on the far side of the house I’d never hear them coming. Plus? No convenient outhouse, and I was pretty sure building one would be a lot of work.

Still. The place just
felt
comfortable. I liked it. Maybe part of me just wanted to pretend the world hadn’t changed, that we might be able to live in peace for a while.

Of course I knew better. But when we left I stuck a little piece of a leaf in the front door—leaving it unlocked as before, but if anybody opened it the leaf would fall. As long as nobody figured out I’d put it there deliberately I’d at least know, if we came back, whether anyone else had used the front door. I’d found the house’s back door locked, and I left it that way. But with another leaf.

We headed back to the cabin. I realized, just before we got there, that for all I knew its owners had shown up. Or someone else had moved in. So I had to hide Abby, walk up carefully, knock, and wait. Again.

After a while I opened the door and looked inside. Nobody home, and the rug was still over the trap door where we’d left it.

Next time we went exploring we’d have to figure out a better system to let us know if anybody had come by.

Meanwhile, though…it was getting late. I was tired, hungry, and thirsty—and I couldn’t see how Abby had kept going through all this. She was just a kid, and I was used to her sudden collapses when she decided she was tired. Not today, though. Maybe she was done with that. Which should have been a happier thought than it was.

So we went in, leaving the door open again so we could hear what was going on outside, and ate.

Okay. I knew we were just beginning to figure this stuff out. But…would we ever again be able to relax and know what to expect from a new day? We were alright, so far, but I felt very much as if that was pure luck.

On the one hand, checking out our neighborhood made sense, and we needed to do it. On the other, it felt to me as if we were mostly flailing about.

When would all this start to make sense?

T
hat night we slept with the windows partly open, for sound, and with the trap door also open. I blocked the front door somewhat with the rocking chair I’d brought in from the porch, but didn’t plan to defend the cabin if we heard anyone coming—we’d head for the tunnel and crawl out under the boulders, closing the hidden door behind us, and taking our chances outside.

* * *

I
didn’t sleep much that night. Abby did, and her small snores comforted me. If she suffered a return of the previous night’s nightmare, she gave no sign of it.

Lying there in the dark, I wondered just how much else I should have been doing to protect my daughter. Set traps in the woods? Not that I knew how, and if I tried to figure it out I might just be making it obvious that there were suspicious people nearby. I could at least have done the leaf trick before we’d left the cabin to let me know whether someone had been inside, though.

I tried to calm my mind. It was still spring, and summer would follow. We had plenty of canned food, and there would be game to hunt—maybe not with a gun, because that would advertise our presence, but I could probably find a bow somewhere. Out here in the mountains, come to think of it, it was at least a little strange that out of three houses—counting the cabin—I hadn’t found any sort of archery equipment yet.

Something to think about, anyway. And our winters were cold, but not so cold we couldn’t get by on warm clothing alone. The cabin’s woodstove was probably more than adequate, if we were still here by then, to keep the place toasty inside…though I didn’t think using it would be a great idea. The smell of burning wood would, again, let people know we were here.

Maybe an alcohol stove would work? If we could find the alcohol. And if we could rig enough of a draft that we wouldn’t have to worry about carbon monoxide poisoning. Fortunately the cabin’s walls did seem fairly thick—built, I guessed, with 2x6 boards rather than the usual 2x4’s. So…I should check out the insulation sometime. It might be pretty thick. Or if the walls
weren’t
insulated, I would have plenty of time to fix that before winter.

And all the time I planned and schemed to make our new little home worked for us, I wondered when we would have to leave it. Something was bound to happen.

The world just wasn’t
static
anymore.

* * *

“A
bby! We need to get inside!”

My daughter stood, glanced my way, and pocketed two of the rocks she’d been playing with as she moved toward the cabin.

All day long I’d felt as if we were being watched. But I couldn’t see anything unusual. And the damn birds weren’t giving me any clues either.

But I’d just realized I was starting to hear a humming sound. Nothing I recognized, but lately
new
meant
dangerous
. Maybe it always had, but I’d been too insulated from the world to notice.

Also, I couldn’t hear any birds. Of course the humming was getting too loud anyway, but still: something else to think about.

I put the knife I’d been sharpening—out of boredom; I could probably have shaved with it before I’d started—back in the belt sheath I’d found down in the hidden room, picked up my shotgun, and turned toward the cabin once Abby was past me—then froze, as I heard a gunshot and saw a bullet kick up leaves about ten feet in front of me.

“Freeze!” a voice shouted helpfully from behind me. “One move and we shoot!”

I stood there, the shotgun still in my left hand, staring at my daughter’s head as she stood with one foot on the steps leading up to the cabin’s balcony. Why wasn’t I more worried?

I heard more than one set of footsteps behind me. Then a voice, sounding more cautious than angry.

“Mister, I don’t know who the hell you are, but put that shotgun down slowly, then turn around. We don’t want to hurt anyone.”

I did, turning slowly. A lantern-jawed man with white-blonde hair stood just inside the clearing, pointing some sort of military-style rifle at me. Another man, this one well over six feet tall and probably weighing close to three hundred pounds, walked out of the trees to my left and pointed a pistol at me.

“No offense mister, and no harm intended. But we need to get into the cabin
right now
,” the first man told me.

I shrugged. “No offense taken. Yet. But point one of those guns toward my daughter, and all bets are off.”

I heard a laugh behind me, and turned. Yet another guy, this one older with white shot through his black hair and beard, had come out of the woods.

The first guy was nodding at me. “Yeah. Let’s get inside.”

* * *

A
bby and I were sitting on the futon. My hands were tied behind my back. But our captors hadn’t tried to hurt either of us. The big guy was leaning against the cold woodstove, the one with the jaw and white hair squatted on his haunches directly across from me, and the older man was looking out the window.

The big guy glanced toward the floor. “Got the door down there closed up?” he asked me.

“Yeah,” I told him. So much for thinking I had any kind of edge on these guys. Had they been here before? Had they scouted the place out as Abby and I had gone exploring? I cleared my throat. “Who—?”

“Where’s Johnny?” the big guy asked me.

I shook my head. “Sorry, I don’t know…”

“My brother,” he said. “The guy who built this place. He was here last week. Now it’s you and your daughter.”

Abby spoke up. “It was empty,” she said.

I leaned a little closer to her, and she hugged me. The big guy seemed…not angry. Morose didn’t cover it either. I got the sense he’d been half-expecting to find his brother gone.

“I’m Jerry,” the white-haired guy told me, looking up from picking at his fingernails. “That’s George there,” nodding toward the big guy, “and Frank there,” this with another nod toward the older man. “George and I went into town a couple of days ago to check on…some people we knew. Didn’t find ’em, but we met Frank. What’s your story?”

I thought about it. Did I have any secrets worth keeping? I couldn’t think of any. “I’m Ash. My daughter’s Abby. The rest of our family is…missing. Did you guys go anywhere near the high school?”

All three men looked right at me. I could feel their tension ratcheting. “What about the school?” Frank asked.

I shook my head, trying to placate them. “I got grabbed near downtown,” I said. “They stuck me into…I don’t know what to call it. A room full of people who seemed to be drugged or something. I got out, mostly because a…friend…helped.” If I could call Eisler a friend. And if by “helping” I meant he hadn’t shot me. Though come to think of it he
had
tossed me some car keys…

“Your friend still inside?” Jerry asked.

I shrugged. “Probably. He’s…well, not that much of a friend. Just a guy who thought he owed me something, really.”

“That school is Ground Zero Weird, man,” the big guy said. “Bunch o’ zombies and freaks. And Captain McDermott’s guys seem to—”

“Who’s McDermott?” I asked. “In fact…who are you guys?”

“Just a couple of local boys,” Jerry told me. I could tell
that
just from listening to their voices. But I could feel a lie in it too. There was something else going on there. “And McDermott?”

“Army,” Jerry said. “Kind of running the show. Well, him and the priest.”

“Reverend Bob?” I asked. “At the high school?”