There was no SUV in the garage, but there was an old, faded Subaru station wagon. The amount of dust on the windshield indicated it hadn’t been driven for a while.
Along the wall nearest the door was a workbench with tools packed neatly on the shelves beneath it. At the back end of the garage were larger shelves filled with boxes, each carefully marked to identify their contents—“Books,” “Files 2010,” and the like.
On the other side of the Subaru, between it and the wall, was a four-foot-wide area with only a few boxes at the back end. Plenty of room for his sleeping bag.
As he was taking off his pack, he glanced through the windshield of the car. The backseat had been lowered, creating a long, flat open area.
He paused for a moment, thinking.
The interior surface would be a lot more comfortable to lie on than the cement. Given the dust, chances were the owners wouldn’t be using the vehicle anytime soon. Besides, he planned to be up and out of the building before the sun rose, so they would never know he’d been here.
He opened the rear door of the station wagon and climbed in.
Three minutes later, as his sleeping bag warmed to his body temperature, he fell asleep.
A beep woke Lizzie.
She blinked her eyes, not registering the sound at first.
As she did most evenings, she’d fallen asleep in her favorite chair, the book she was reading—The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton — lying open on her lap.
She was putting her bookmark between the pages when the beep sounded again.
She immediately snapped her head around to look at her computer on the desk by the window. The screen was dark, the computer still in sleep mode. What was on was the smaller computer sitting on top of the short filing cabinet. Her brother’s computer. Even from her chair, she could see that the window for his security software was front and center.
She stood and whirled around, worried that someone had entered her house while she was asleep.
There was no one else in the living room, but that didn’t mean they weren’t somewhere else in the house. She listened for creaking floorboards and sounds of movement.
Nothing.
Still leery that an intruder was inside, she eased open the drawer of the end table, and pulled out the 9mm Glock pistol lying inside. There were guns hidden all over the house. Again, her brother’s doing. At first she had planned on getting rid of them, but the longer she stayed in the house, the more she was comforted by their presence. The truth was, she was beginning to think her brother’s concerns about the world weren’t entirely off-base. Though she didn’t have a television, she watched the news on her computer, and could see that the planet was falling apart.
Gun in hand, she tiptoed over to the computer. There was a warning flashing on the screen.
UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY — GARAGE DOOR #2
Not her house. Her garage. Someone’s trying to steal my car!
She went over to the window next to the fireplace, and pulled back the blackout curtain just enough so that she could see the other building. The area between her house and the garage was empty, and the side door — garage door #2—was closed.
It would be, she thought, since they were already inside.
She let the curtain drop back down, and ran over to the closet by the door. She grabbed her jacket, gloves, and hat, and put them all on. Once outfitted, she traded the Glock for the Mossberg double-barreled shotgun from the rack on the wall. There was no need to check if it was loaded because it always was.
The final things she retrieved were in a box at the bottom of the closet. So far she’d seldom had any use for them, but they were her brother’s pride and joy — a pair of ATN Generation II Night Vision Goggles with head mount. Three grand, he had told her they cost. She couldn’t believe the expense at the time, but she was glad now he’d spent the money.
Instead of exiting through the front door in full view of the garage, she used the back, and made her way to the corner. There, she studied the garage long enough to be satisfied that no one was waiting outside. Then, keeping in the crouch, she ran toward it.
She was three-quarters of the way to the other structure when she heard a noise. Maybe a scrape or a step. One thing was for sure — it had definitely come from inside.
She paused in the no man’s land between her two buildings, unsure what she should do. Despite the shotgun in her hands, she wasn’t a violent person, and didn’t know if she could shoot someone. Even if she could, she didn’t know how many of them were there. One, she might be able to scare off, but two? Three?
This is our home. You can’t just run away and hide, Owen’s voice said. She didn’t hear him all the time, but on occasion her brother would speak to her.
She nodded, and told herself he was right. She needed to protect what was hers, what was theirs. But she also had to be smart about it. She couldn’t just burst into the garage without knowing what she was up against. At some point they would have to come out again. That’s when she’d do something.
She angled toward the front of the garage. If they were going to steal her Subaru, they’d have to come through the big door. Just to play it safe, though, she found a spot where she could watch both the main door and the one on the side. She settled in to wait.
Ten silent minutes went by, then twenty.
What the hell were they doing in there?
When a half hour was gone, Lizzie decided to move in closer so she could hear better. She knelt down in front of the roll-up door and listened. Absolute silence. Thinking they might have heard her walk up, she stayed there for several minutes, sure she would hear something, but the garage remained deathly still.
She sat back up, frowning, and tried to make sense of things.
Maybe she’d been wrong about the noise. Perhaps it had come from the woods beyond the barn, a deer or an owl or something like that. Because winter was so late in coming, a lot of the local wildlife had been acting strange lately, like they didn’t know what they should be doing.
The more she thought about it, though, the more she was sure the noise had come from the garage. Besides, the alarm had gone off.
You’re going to have to check, her brother said.
“I know,” she mouthed silently.
She moved around to the side door. As she reached for the knob, her eyes strayed to the ground. Footprints. One pair, it looked like, and not as large as she would have expected. A woman?
She listened again at the door, and again heard nothing.
You’re stalling, her brother said.
“I’m not,” she whispered. “Leave me alone and let me take care of this.”
Then take care of it.
Not wanting to give him any other reason to doubt her abilities, she grabbed the knob and began turning it. Once the latch was free, she froze for a moment, then gave the knob a gentle push and let the door swing slowly open.
Both hands on the shotgun now, she tensed, fully expecting someone to start scrambling on the other side. But not a step or even a gasp of surprise.
What the hell?
If she didn’t know any better, she’d think whoever had been there was gone.
She gave it a full sixty seconds, then, staying low, stepped inside.
She swept the room, her goggles more than adequate in the darkened space. No one was there. She leaned down and looked under the car, but was equally disappointed.
She looked around again, and paused on the shelves in the back. It was really the only good hiding place, so that’s where her intruder must be. As she took a step in that direction, the Subaru creaked.