“Mike,” Parkowski called out. “Come here and take a look at this.”
DePresti entered the room a few seconds later. “What’s up?”
“Do you know what this is?”
He squinted, then stepped back in shock. “Grace, get out of here!”
Her lizard brain fight-or-flight reflex kicked in. Parkowski stood up and sped out of the room, followed by DePresti a moment later.
Nothing happened.
They stood, panting, for a minute in silence.
She yawned and turned to her boyfriend. “Care to explain why the fuck we just ran out of that room?”
DePresti frowned. “Grace, that’s a grenade. It’s going to explode.”
“It doesn’t look like a grenade.”
He sighed. “It’s a smoke grenade.”
“Oh.”
“And,” he said, peering back into the bedroom, “it looks like it already went off.”
“Why would there be a smoke grenade in Chang’s house?”
“I’m not sure,” DePresti said as he scratched his head, then yawned. “It’s cold to the touch, so it’s been here for a while.”
“Is it his? Do you think he dropped it or it went off by accident?”
“I said, I don’t know,” he repeated.
Parkowski was tired — suddenly really, really tired. It had been a long day and her shoulder hurt. “I think I’m going to lie… down…” she said as she leaned on the bed.
Her boyfriend’s eyes, which had also been closing in a fit of drowsiness, went wide again. “Fuck,” DePresti said as he slowly stepped towards the still-open window. He tried to push the grenade — if that’s what it was — out of it but failed.
She shook her head to wake herself out of the stupor she was mysteriously in and watched as he expelled the object out into the cold desert night.
“What the hell…” Parkowski said, her voice trailing off.
DePresti frowned. “I think that had some kind of incapacitating agent in it, not smoke for concealment.”
“What?”
He tilted his head, then cracked his neck, trying to get out of whatever fugue he was in.
“It’s a common trope in movies,” DePresti began, “some kind of gas that can incapacitate people in seconds to minutes without killing them. In reality, that’s supposed to be impossible — it can’t work that quickly. But there are rumors that the intelligence community developed something that was fast-acting enough for a snatch-and-grab operation.”
“And they used this grenade to put it into the house?”
He nodded. “Precisely.”
“But why would they want to grab Chang?” Parkowski asked, keeping the “they” vague, and almost not wanting to know the answer.
DePresti shrugged. “Honestly, there’s a ton of things, and not just related to what we’re working on,” he said carefully. “As you’ve probably figured out, he does some shady stuff here. I know for a fact that he buys drugs and weapons through less-than-legal methods, and he’s also got some enemies within the government for his work in the Space Force. And on top of that, he’s been looking into Bronze Knot stuff from here. And who, I have no idea either. It could be the same people who have been tracking us or it could be the FBI or someone else entirely.”
Parkowski sighed. “Sorry, I know I’ve been asking you a lot of questions knowing that you don’t have the answers.”
DePresti smiled weakly. “It’s ok. I’m worried now; it’s becoming pretty obvious that he didn’t go out for a walk.”
“Same,” she agreed. But Parkowski didn’t like where this was going. She was tired, even without whatever lingering effect was still in the house from the grenade.
“I’m going to go grab a soda too,” she told her boyfriend.
“Grab me another one too,” DePresti asked.
Parkowski went into the small kitchen and took two Diet Cokes out of the refrigerator.
She snuck a peek out of the window over the sink.
The sun had completely set, but the full, bright moon was up over the desert. The rays from the sun bouncing off of the moon bathed the area in a silvery, almost ethereal glow.
As she opened her can of soda, Parkowski took in the hills surrounding Chang’s complex again, just like she had before they had reentered the house. It was fascinating how well it fit into the natural surroundings.
The hairs on the back of her neck all stood up at once.
Some part of Parkowski’s brain alerted her to danger.
But what was it?
The engineer listened for movement, some kind of danger outside of the ranch house.
It was eerily silent. The only sound was a slight breeze outside the open window in the bedroom down the hall.
She peered up at the ridgeline off in the distance. It was littered with brush and tumbleweeds.
Then, one of them moved.
That was normal, she thought. Tumbleweeds blew in the wind.
Then, as she watched in horror, a tumbleweed stood up.
Illuminated by the moonlight, Parkowski saw the figure of a person against the slightly lighter night sky behind them.
And they were carrying a weapon.
“Fuck.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“Mike!” Parkowski yelled as she ran from the kitchen into the hallway, spilling her Diet Coke onto the cheap laminate floor, “Mike, they’re here!”
“What?” DePresti yelled from the living room.
“There’s people outside. Up on the ridge.”
“Shit,” he said as he ran towards her.
“What do we do now?”
“Fuck, I don’t know,” DePresti replied quickly.
“How much time do you think we have?”
“Maybe ten minutes before they’ll be at our front door.”
This was not good. Parkowski thought for a moment. “Doesn’t he have an entire arsenal downstairs?”
If whoever took Chang was going to storm the house again, they needed to be prepared.
He nodded. “He does. Let’s go.”
They hurried down the stairs. Parkowski opened the handle on the large metal door and swung it open. The room beyond was small, maybe twice as large as the bathroom back in Parkowski’s apartment.
But it had exactly what DePresti and Parkowski needed. Weapons were everywhere.
It was a gun-lover’s paradise.
Most surprising to Parkowski was how clean and organized Chang’s arsenal was. Despite his careful planning of his complex, he was a slovenly man. However, he kept the most important things to him — his guns and his computer setup — meticulously clean.
DePresti swooped like a bird from weapon to weapon.
“Who are they?” Parkowski asked.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he grabbed a long black rifle off of the rack on the wall and tossed it to Parkowski. “Here, catch.”
She grabbed it by its three-point strap.
“What is this?” Parkowski asked.
He laughed. “To be honest, I don’t know what it is exactly,” he told her, “but it’s some kind of AR-15.”
Parkowski looked at it in shock. She had held a weapon once in her entire life, on a skeet-shooting trip in high school. Now, the rifle was going to be crucial to her survival.
She checked the rifle. The weapon was seemingly unloaded — there was no magazine inserted into it — but she still treated it like it had a round chambered, pointing it at the ground and away from her.
DePresti grabbed a rifle off of the wall that looked like a twin to Parkowski’s and set it down. Then, he took a second rifle, a longer bolt-action one with a large optic on its top, and set it down next to the first one.
“That should do,” he said to himself.