“Great, we have weapons now,” Parkowski said. “What about some ammunition for them?”
DePresti frowned. “You haven’t seen any yet?”
“Just a couple of boxes of nine millimeter, plus a few loose rounds,” she responded.
“Fuck.”
“Yup.”
“Any magazines?”
“No, none of those either.”
“Huh,” DePresti said, confused. “There’s no way that Chang doesn’t have a whole bunch of loaded mags ready in case of trouble.”
“Well, if they’re here, I don’t see them,” Parkowski said, a little frustrated. “Where could they be?”
Her boyfriend knelt beside her and they quickly went cabinet by cabinet. No magazines of any kind, rifle or pistol, could be found. “Fuck,” DePresti said quietly.
They were running out of time.
“I’m going to go check his room,” he said as he got up. “I’ll be back in a sec.”
Parkowski kept looking. Something was weird about the cabinets, she thought.
She took a step back to look at them.
They were metal, with wooden tops; probably a custom design. There had to be something in there.
Parkowski picked one of the cabinets at random and took a good glance at it. There were two rectangular drawers, a smaller one at the top, and a larger one at the bottom roughly twice the size of the top.
The top contained tools; screwdrivers, wrenches, the normal things that one would find in a workshop.
The bottom had a collection of spare stocks for AR-15 style rifles.
Parkowski closed both drawers and stared at the bottom one. It was wrong, but she couldn’t figure out why.
Then it clicked.
The interior of the drawer was half the size of the exterior.
Parkowski opened it back up and felt around for a way to open up the apparently false bottom.
At the back, she found a pair of plastic tabs that had previously gone unnoticed. She pressed them together and heard a click. Parkowski used the tabs to lift the false bottom out of the drawer and peered into the cavity below.
Inside were a horde of neatly stacked AR-15 magazines.
She grinned for the first time since they had arrived back at the complex.
“Mike,” she called, “I found them.”
He came back into the room with a pair of civilian-grade night vision goggles. “Found what?”
Two minutes later, they had a duffel bag full of magazines for their AR-15s, DePresti’s bolt-action long rifle, and a pair of Beretta pistols that they had selected from the cabinets.
“Are you sure this is all necessary?” she asked her boyfriend. “Maybe they’ll get bored and leave. I bet they didn’t even see us.”
DePresti snorted. “There’s no way they missed us showing up in Andrew’s truck,” he told her. “No, they’re going to try and grab us too.”
He didn’t elaborate, but he didn’t have to.
After watching her mentor be gunned down on the Manhattan Beach pier just a few days ago, Parkowski knew what would happen if they were caught.
DePresti quickly showed her how to use the rifle. He cleared the chamber — it was empty — and then helped her insert a magazine and pull the charging handle back to load the first round. She put the stock on her good shoulder and aimed it at the ground, making sure the safety was on.
He then put one of the NVGs on her head. “They’re already configured,” DePresti told her. “Just pull them down when we get upstairs.”
Her heart beat a little faster. She might not be overthinking it after all.
He slung the bolt-action rifle on his back and picked up his own assault rifle. “Ready?” DePresti asked as he grabbed the duffel bag.
“Ready,” Parkowski responded. But she wasn’t — how could she be? She was no soldier, no warrior. But her life was at stake. And she only saw one way out of this.
“Ok, here goes nothing,” her boyfriend said with an obviously false sense of bravado.
Parkowski followed him out of the armory and up the stairs.
Right before they reached the top, DePresti stopped and turned to her. “Take these, I almost forgot,” he said as he handed her something small. It was a pair of earplugs.
“You’re going to want them,” he promised.
Parkowski shrugged and put them into her pocket.
They had only been in the basement for eight minutes. The main level was just as dark and quiet as it had been before they had armed themselves.
She slipped to the kitchen and looked out the window at the ridge beyond as her boyfriend checked the front of the house.
The moon was a little higher in the sky, but the rest of the desert landscape, or what she could make out in the limited light, looked the same.
Parkowski peered at the ridgeline. The same bushes were there, or at least she thought they were. She heard a loud cracking sound — almost like someone snapping a large branch in two — coming from the ridgeline and then echoed off of the hills below.
The window spider-webbed.
And a large-caliber bullet slammed into the wall behind her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Parkowski dove towards the cheap tile floor.
She cursed as her rifle slammed into the ground first, followed by her hands and knees. A searing pain shot through her injured shoulder as time slowed down, much like it had on the highway. Parkowski rolled towards the refrigerator as she heard another crack of a supersonic bullet.
The glass broke again, this time in a different place, shattering it and littering the kitchen with fragments.
DePresti sprinted into the kitchen and knelt in front of the dishwasher to the left of the sink.
He pointed at his ears.
She gave him a blank look.
DePresti shrugged, pulled his NVGs down, from the top of his head to his face, and readied his assault rifle. He carefully and deliberately swept the muzzle up to the window.
He then aimed and fired three times.
Boom, boom, boom.
The report reverberated through the small kitchen.
Parkowski’s ears burned. The noise hadn’t shattered her eardrums, but they hurt like hell. She dug the earplugs out of her pocket and jammed them into her ears.
DePresti ducked, then popped back up and fired another couple of rounds.
This time, it was more of a dull roar, but still loud even with the protection.
She crawled on her hands and knees, rifle dangling precariously under her, to her boyfriend.
He didn’t speak but breathed heavily. She saw his chest heave up and down in the dim moonlight.
Parkowski tilted her head slightly, as if to ask a question, but didn’t say anything either. She probably could yell and get through to him, but she didn’t want to make any noise that would give away their position.
DePresti pantomimed his most recent action — firing into the ridge — and then pointed at Parkowski, and finally at the entryway.
She understood. Her boyfriend wanted her to cover the front of the house.
Parkowski painfully crawled out of the kitchen into the entrance.
There were three rooms located on that side of the house: one of the two smaller bedrooms, the master bedroom at the far end of the house, and the living room at the other end.
Parkowski chose the living room.
It had a large window overlooking the carport and sweeping driveway, the one direction not protected by the hills and ridges. There was less moonlight on this side of the house, and Parkowski could barely make out the road.
In a brief moment of calmness in between those of pure terror, she noticed that between the house and the road were a number of boulders and mounds, some natural, others created by the dirt removed when Chang had dug out his underground lair. She figured that if their unseen assailants were coming towards them, they would use those for cover.