The Lair

CHAPTER FIVE

Lily

Recon, sit rep, retrieval, extraction.

Lily chanted the words in her head over and over again as she approached the house.

That’s what Stu had drilled into her ever since he’d agreed to let her come along. You get into the building and do a quick reconnaissance to secure the location. You report in to the raid commander so the rest of the raid team knows what’s going down where. You locate any valuable supplies. You retreat to the extraction point.

It all seemed simple enough when they were driving down the mountain. Now, as Jacks, Stu, and Lily approached the empty house, it seemed much less cut-and-dry. Maybe it was the adrenaline pumping through her veins or the sweat pouring off her palms. Or maybe, she’d just gotten used to the relative comfort and safety of Base Camp. Maybe the six weeks in Utah had made her soft.

As she walked up to the house, Lily scanned the area. They were on the outskirts of a tiny town tucked right up against the mountain range in a neighborhood too rural to be suburban. The lots were big and hilly and a creek flowed behind the houses because there was a dense tree line that ran parallel to the street. There were only three houses on this block and no signs that anything living had been here recently. The other team had been dropped on a different street.

There was absolutely no sign that this town had seen any Tick activity. You could always tell when a town had been hit hard by Ticks. They destroyed everything they touched. The houses on this block looked abandoned but not ravaged. Hopefully Lily and the rest of the team could load up the truck on this one block alone and head back up the mountain.

So Lily gritted her teeth and swallowed her anxiety. She wasn’t really a newbie. She knew the threats, but she also knew how to fight them. She patted the bow slung over her shoulder. She’d been practicing with it every chance she got. She had this.

They paused about twenty feet from the house. Lily swung her bow off her shoulder and wiped her palm on her jeans before pulling an arrow from her quiver. She notched it, but kept it low to the ground. Better safe than sorry on all counts. When Carter found out she’d gone on the food raid, he was going to be pissed, even if things went well. If she accidentally shot Stu, it would all be over.

“We ready?” Stu asked.

As they approached the house, Stu took point. He tried the knob on the door first, just in case. When it didn’t easily open, he moved down the wraparound porch to the nearest window. Jacks moved in the opposite direction, toward the south side of the house and Lily followed him. Jacks found a window open just a crack. While he worked to pry it open, Lily scanned the woods beside the house, paranoia dancing along the back of her neck, her fear whispering to her:

Don’t screw this up. You mess this up, you mess it up for everyone. For every Green who’s going stir-crazy in the caves. For every Elite who needs one less thing to do. Worst of all, you screw this up, Carter will never trust you again. It’s bad enough that you came in the first place, if you screw it up, it’s all over.

Her nerves were rattling so badly, her vision blurred around the edges. Worse still, she couldn’t trust herself, because her nerves were groundless.

Everything she saw, every car parked silently on the street, every tree in every pristine yard, told her that Ticks had not been through this area—at least not recently. There were no overturned vehicles. No broken windows. No deep gouges in the lawns where the long claws of Ticks’ feet might have gained purchase before they leaped for the kill. No lingering stench of rotting flesh. No smeared bloodstains on the porch. There was no destruction. Anywhere.

It was like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Like the people who’d lived here had simply walked away from their lives.

She’d once heard a rumor on the Farm that when things went bad, all the Mormons had retreated to some vast underground fortification beneath Salt Lake City. Maybe that’s what had happened here. Maybe they’d all just left. And maybe without the scent of fresh human blood to lure them here, the Ticks had simply stayed away.

It was the only explanation Lily could think of.

Jacks jimmied the window open then pulled his radio off his belt and brought it up to his mouth. “We found an open window. South side. We’re going in.”

“Copy that,” Stu’s voice buzzed through the radio. “I’m working my way over there. I’ll be around in a second.”

Jacks brushed the curtain aside and stuck his head through the window. Then he nodded back toward Lily. “Lights are off, so you’ll need your flashlight.”

Lily slid the arrow back into her quiver and slung the bow over her shoulder before pulling her flashlight out of her pocket.

“I’m going in.” The window came down low enough that Jacks was able to just swing his leg over the ledge, duck his head, and step inside. Lily waited a moment before following.

The windows opened into the dining nook in the house’s kitchen. A table was positioned right beside the windows; the seven chairs around the table were askance, as though a family had sat there just this morning. At one end of the table, there was a high chair. A lone Cheerio on the high chair’s tray was the only sign the house had ever been lived in.

She thought of the houses they had searched for supplies on their way north. At each one, she’d had this same sick feeling in her gut, like this was a horrible invasion of the homeowner’s privacy. Mixed with that was a kind of sorrow. A mourning for the lives that had been lost.

Both of those emotions flooded her now, as well as something else. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. An ineffable sense that something wasn’t right.

And that was what guilt felt like, she supposed. Yeah, you dumbass. Something’s not right. You lied to Stu to come on this food raid and Carter’s going to be pissed as hell. That’s what’s not right.

Too late to do anything about that now. She was here. She should find what she needed and get out.

Jacks’s radio buzzed, making Lily jump. “Can I have a sit rep?”

Jacks raised the radio to his mouth. “We’re in the kitchen. I’m searching the cabinets.”

“Okay,” Stu answered through the radio. “I haven’t found another open window yet. I’ll be there in a second. Start looking for a stash of supplies.”

“I’m going to go search upstairs,” Lily told him.

Jacks hesitated, but finally nodded. “Don’t leave this house.”

“Right. I’ll be careful.”

Shining her light ahead of her, she made her way down the hall. She moved the light across the open doorway of a laundry room and moved past to the stairway going up to the second floor.

There was no point in creeping around, so she took the stairs two at a time. At the top was a narrow hall, the door to a bathroom open at one end, and a pair of open doors on either side. Bedrooms, presumably.

She looked through the bathroom first and found what she was looking for under the sink. She swung her backpack off her shoulder and quickly filled it with two boxes of tampons and a package of maxi pads. Not much, but it would help. And there were surely other bathrooms in the house. Still, what they needed to do was hit a store. She found no other useful toiletries. No toothpaste, no soap, no first aid kit. Sure signs that the family had made it out, but her initial sense of unease didn’t dissipate.

The house looked too pristine. But she wasn’t sure why that bothered her. In the next bathroom she found a stash of toilet paper. Even as she loaded the rolls into her backpack, it bugged her. Why bring everything, down to the last Band-Aid, but leave five rolls of toilet paper?

Crap. This wasn’t right.

Skipping the rest of the rooms, she turned to head back down-stairs. Somewhere down below, she heard Stu’s sat phone ring and then him answer. And a second later, she heard a noise from one of the bedrooms. Probably a rat. But if it wasn’t a rat, she didn’t want to turn her back on the sound to blithely walk down the stairs. If there was something in this room, she wanted to face it head on and well armed. She slung her bow off her shoulder and pulled an arrow from her quiver before nudging the door open with her toe.

Heart pounding, she pushed open the door to the bedroom the rest of the way. It had once been a child’s room. A pair of bunk beds lined one wall. A low bookcase stretched the length of the window. There was a toy box beside the door, the lid ajar with the arm of some stuffed animal dangling out. The kid’s books, the toys, the cheerfully yellow bed linens. The innocence of the room did little to banish her terror, it only made her heart twist and squirm in her chest.

Food raids were the worst job. Ever.

Another faint sound emanated from what must have been the closet—a sound that was neither as innocent as rats nor as ominous as Ticks. A human sound.

If the person in the closet was a crazy, survivalist gun nut, wouldn’t they have already come out, guns blazing?

Unless, and the thought stopped Lily in her tracks, the person in the closet was a kid.