Chapter 7
The Lights Go Out
"Not a storm," Damen breathed against his wife's ear. "Don't speak. Nod."
She nodded. He felt it against his palm, a small hard movement, and took his hand away. In the absolute dark of the stairwell he could hear her breathing, quick and shallow, and he could feel the heat of her body through the thin cotton of the yellow dress, and the strength of the hand that had closed on his wrist and was gripping, hard, like a vise.
He counted four seconds. Nothing moved. The refrigerator was dead, and the house, which has a hundred small voices, had gone silent as a held breath. Outside, through the open window at the head of the stairs, he could hear the crickets going on. The moon was a slim crescent behind clouds and gave no light. A dog barked once, a long way off, and stopped.
Cut at the pole, he thought. Not the breaker. The breaker's in the cellar. They'd have to be inside for that. Someone's climbed the utility pole at the end of the street with a pair of bolt cutters and taken out the main.
Which means they've been here an hour. They did it while you were washing the glasses.
"Upstairs," he whispered. "Ivy's room. Get her. Don't turn on a light, don't use your phone. Take her into the bathroom and lock the door. Put the pillows in the tub, put her in it, lie on top of her. Whatever you hear. Whatever it is. You stay there until I say your name."
"Dean. Sofi—"
"I know. I'll find her." He held her eyes in the dark. "My name isn't Dean. Not tonight. Go."
She went.
He heard her go up, fast and silent, on the outside edges of the treads, as he'd shown her, and heard the faint click of a door. He stayed where he was, in the dark, with his back against the wall and his hands open. In the hush, in the stillness, in the black, he felt it arrive: the thing he'd put away in the drawer for nine years. It rose in him not like rage or fear, but like cold water filling a basin. His pulse slowed. His eyes, which had been wide, narrowed and grew still. The tight knot of his shoulders went loose. He took a long breath and let it out, and the world, which a minute ago had been a dark house full of noise, became a clean, flat, perfectly legible map.
Seven doors, he thought. Two you can see from the table. One you can't.
They'll take the one you can't.
He went up first, because he had to.
Ivy's door was open its usual hand's width. In the dark he found the bed by the pale square of the pillow, and the small shape under the blanket, and he knelt beside her and put his fingers lightly on her wrist. She woke at once. She woke the way he'd taught her, without a start, with her eyes opening and her breath staying even. In the faint gray light from the window he saw her turn her face to him, and the compass on its string catch the glimmer, and her lips shape a word with no sound.
Test?
He closed his eyes for half a second.
"Yes," he whispered. "It's the test. Do you remember the rules?"
She nodded.
"Mom's here. You're going with her. You get in the tub, you stay in the tub, you keep very, very quiet. And you do the five things. Every minute. In your head. Don't stop."
"What's the first one?"
"Anything. Anything that's true."
Her small hand found his sleeve. She said, with no breath at all, "Dad, you're not smiling inside."
"No," said Damen. "I'm not."
"Is it the man in the blue shirt?"
"It's the man who sent him." He bent and kissed her forehead, quickly, hard. "I love you. Go."
Naomi was in the doorway, a pale shape. She took the child up in her arms, blanket and boots and all, and was gone. He heard the bathroom door close at the end of the landing, and the soft turn of the lock, and the small sounds of a tub being made into a nest. He waited until they ceased.
Then he went downstairs again, in his socks, without a sound.
The kitchen was the only place that mattered.
He knew it as he knew his own hand. The back door opened inward, hinged on the left; behind it, in the corner, stood the pantry, a deep narrow closet with a door that swung out into the room. A man coming in at the back would step onto the mat, then take one pace to the right, toward the hall, because the table stood in the way on the left. At that point the pantry door would be at his shoulder. He'd have his back to it for about a second.
A second, thought Damen, is enough.
He opened the pantry without a sound. He stepped in between the shelves, among the cans of beans and the jars of Mrs. Okafor's pickled beets, and drew the door to, leaving a crack the width of an eye. In his right hand, by the handle, he held the iron skillet from the stove. It was nine pounds. It had belonged to Naomi's grandmother. He'd fried a thousand eggs in it.
He set his feet.
He stood in the dark and waited.
It took them six minutes.
He'd known it would be about that. They were good. He'd have been disappointed in anything less. He heard nothing at the front. Nothing at the porch, nothing at the windows. The first sound, when it came, was so slight that he would not have caught it in a house with a refrigerator humming: the soft, deliberate scratch of a pick in a cylinder lock, at the back door, a foot from his head. A pause. A tiny click. And the door, drawn open with infinite care, on oiled hinges, and the faint cool breath of the garden coming across the kitchen floor like a tide.
Somebody stepped onto the mat.
He saw the man through the crack, in the dark: a bulk, a shape, bulkier than a man should be, with a strange squared head. It turned. The head was a helmet with a pair of tubes jutting forward like the eyes of a beetle, glowing very faintly green. The man held a pistol in both hands at eye level, a long slim thing with a fat silencer on the end. He moved like a dancer. He took one pace to the right, toward the hall, exactly as Damen had known he would, and presented his back to the pantry.
Damen came out of the dark like a door slamming.
The skillet took the man's forearm just above the wrist, with a flat dull crack like a broken branch. He grunted. The pistol dropped, caught on its strap, swung. Damen's left hand had already closed on the back of the helmet and was twisting it, hard, to the side, and his right brought the iron round in a short vicious arc into the side of the exposed jaw. Something cracked. The man's knees went. He folded without a sound and Damen caught the weapon on its sling, ripped the strap clear, and went down with him in a single motion, lowering the weight to the tiles rather than letting it fall.
The man's mouth was working. His eyes, large and bright behind the visor, rolled up to Damen's face. A thread of blood ran from the corner of his lip. He did not make a sound.
Damen put the muzzle of the pistol under his chin, and fired once.
It made a noise like a cough. The man's head jerked back and settled, the green glow on his helmet fading from his eyes. A warm wet spray touched the pantry door. Damen knelt with the dead man's pistol in his right hand and his left flat against the floor, listening.
One.
It was a Glock. Seventeen rounds, minus one. A suppressor. A weapon laid out neatly and carried well. He took the spare magazines from the man's belt, three of them, and a flat black knife, and the night-vision goggles, which he did not bother with. The thing had a strap. He tore it loose and slung it round his own neck, and settled the mask over his eyes. The kitchen sprang into a bright flat grass-green. The overturned chair, the cake plate, the pale stain on the floor. The body.
Three more, he thought. At least. One in the front. One for the windows. One for the cellar.
Lead with the cellar.
The hatch was under the pantry rug, a square of old oak, and it moved.
He saw it through the green glass: a hairline of black at the edge, widening. A gloved hand came up and laid itself flat on the floorboards. A second followed. A head, in a helmet, rose out of the floor like a drowned man out of a well. Damen stood against the wall by the stove, in the dark, with the pistol held low along his thigh, and let the man climb all the way out.
He wanted to see how many there were.
The second man emerged, then the third. They were younger than the first. They moved with less certainty, a little too close together, one hand on the other's shoulder. Brothers, he thought. They had the same walk. The tallest turned toward the hall, scanning with his rifle, and the glow of the goggles lit the underside of his chin.
Damen shot him in the chest, twice, through the heart.
It was fast, clean, and loud as a clap in a well. The tall man spun against the table and folded onto the oilcloth, and the other, with a hoarse cry, whipped his weapon up and fired blind. Plaster burst from the wall above Damen's head. A line of bullets stitched across the cupboard door in a spray of splinters. Glass broke, a plate, a cup. Damen had already moved. He was low, rolling, behind the island, with the muzzle flash printing a white fan on the inside of the goggles, and he came up on one knee and shot the young man twice in the thigh and once, as he fell, in the throat.
Silence.
A cup rolled off the counter and shattered on the tiles.
Three, he thought. Where's the fourth?
He heard the answer a second later, from the front of the house, in the form of a very quiet sound: the soft creak of a heavy man's weight on the third stair.
The third stair creaked in G. It always had.
It was the sound of a tall man, an enormous man, shifting his weight on a board that did not like him; and in the kitchen, with the smoke drifting in the green glow and the dead on the floor, Damen understood two things in the same instant. First, that the man was already halfway up. Second, that he was not going to the bedroom.
He's going to the bathroom. He was told which door.
Somebody in the house told him.
It was not a thing to think about. He ran.
He went through the hall in three strides, across the front room, past the ruins of the party, the banner hanging by one corner, the balloons pressed against the ceiling like a cloud of pale fruit. He saw the stairs through the goggles in a glare of green: the treads, the rail, the flat black silhouette of a giant going up, slowly, one hand on the banister. A man six and a half feet tall, wide as a door. He wore no helmet. His head was shaved, and shone. He was carrying nothing in his hands at all.
"Hollis," said Damen.
The man stopped.
He did not turn at once. He stood on the fifth stair with one hand on the rail, breathing slowly, like an ox, and then he looked back over his shoulder with a face so broad and calm and expressionless that Damen thought for a moment it was a mask. Small pale eyes. A scar through the left eyebrow. A mouth like a closed purse.
"Knox," said the big man, in a voice like gravel in a bucket. "Mercer said you'd be quick."
"Come down."
"Can't. Got a job."
"I'll shoot you."
"You'll shoot me in the back." The giant's lips moved in what might have been a smile. "I've been shot in the back before. It never took."
He turned, and went up the stairs two at a time.
Damen fired.
He fired three times, at the center of the broad back, from twelve feet, and saw the shots strike; saw the dark cloth jump; saw the big man stagger, once, and catch himself on the rail. A scrap of black fabric flew up from the shoulder. Under it Damen caught a glint, a flat dull shimmer, like the lid of a pan, and understood that the man was wearing plate armor. Three rounds, centered. Not a mark.
Then Hollis was on the landing, and he was running.
It was not a thing a man his size should have been able to do. The floor shook. He crossed the landing in three strides, reached the bathroom door, and drove his boot into it with a sound like a shell burst. The wood split from lock to hinge. Inside, Naomi screamed.
Damen took the stairs four at a time.
He caught him in the doorway.
He hit him from behind, without breaking stride, with the full weight of his body, and the two of them went through what remained of the door in a crash of splintered pine and fell across the bathroom floor. Damen's left arm was round the thick neck. His right, with the knife, was driving at the base of the skull. The giant heaved up under him, and the bathroom wall boomed; a mirror smashed; the toilet cistern came off its mounting and broke on the tiles. A sink tap tore loose and spouted, hissing, a long cold plume of water.
"Naomi!" He heard his own voice, cracked, hoarse. "Get her out! The window!"
"I can't—"
"Go!"
The knife went in. It went in at the side of the neck, above the armor, a hand-width, and the big man bellowed and twisted and drove an elbow back into Damen's ribs with a crack that he felt in his teeth. The breath went out of him. Hollis rolled, faster than seemed possible, came up on his knees with the blade still in his neck and blood sheeting down over the collar, and caught him by the throat.
The hand was huge. It closed on his windpipe like a clamp. Damen felt his feet leave the floor. He saw the pale eyes, a foot from his own, quite calm, and the dark flood pouring over the ruined shirt, and the mouth moving, almost gently, as if the man were trying to comfort a child.
"Easy," Hollis said. "Easy. It's quick."
The edge of the room began to go gray.
Damen's right hand, flung out, struck the porcelain of the tub, and slid along it, and found something soft and heavy and warm: a bundle of pillows. A small cry rose from under them. The giant's head turned.
Don't look at her.
He did the only thing left. He drove his thumb into the man's eye.
It was a thing he had not done in nine years, and he did it without mercy. He felt the wet give; the horrible, yielding, jellied collapse under the thumbnail; the giant's whole body arching in a shuddering scream. The grip on his throat flew open. Air tore into his chest. He fell, rolled, and found on the floor beside him, in the spreading water, a pistol that was not his own.
He fired six times into the face.
It was enough.
The huge head lay on the white tiles, tilted a little to one side, as if listening. The scream was still going in the walls. Then it went out, and the tap hissed, and the water ran in a long thin red ribbon across the floor toward the drain. Damen lay on his back among the broken glass and the cold pooling water with his arm over his face, gasping, and above him on the wall the broken mirror held, in a hundred pieces, the glittering image of the ceiling.
Four, he thought. Four.
And you promised.
"Dean."
The voice was a whisper. It came from the bathtub.
He lifted his head. Naomi was crouched in the white porcelain, among the pillows, with the child pressed under her, one arm round the small body and the other spread across her face like a lid. She was soaked. Her braid had come undone. She was staring at him over the lip of the tub, with enormous eyes, and he saw in them what she had seen: the corpse in the doorway; the knife in the neck; his own hands, and his own face, in the gray moonlight, spattered with another man's blood.
He did not speak.
"Is it over?" came a tiny voice, muffled in cotton.
"Not yet, sweetheart," said Naomi. She did not look away from him. Her voice was perfectly level. "Keep your eyes closed. Keep counting. Dad's here."
"Is Dad hurt?"
"A little."
"Is he smiling inside?"
Naomi's mouth moved. She did not answer. And Damen, lying on the wet tiles with the blood running warm down his shoulder, where the third man's burst had found him in the kitchen and he had not noticed it until now, closed his eyes for one second, and opened them, and got slowly to his feet.
"Listen to me," he said. "We have eleven minutes."
"How do you know?"
"Because there'll be a second wave. They'll have heard nothing. There's a silencer on every gun and a mile between us and the neighbors. But somebody's waiting at the bottom of the hill for a signal, and if it doesn't come in ten minutes they'll move." He took a towel off the rail and pressed it to his shoulder. "Ivy keeps her eyes shut. I carry her. You go in front of me, in your bare feet, and you don't look at the floor."
"Where?"
"Down the cellar. The hatch. Through the garden, and over the Okafors' wall, and down to the lake."
"The lake."
"The boat. If I get her on the water, there's nothing they can do."
She stared at him. In the faint light he saw her take it in: the dead man, the child, the open door, the whole thin ladder of his plan. And he saw her look at him, once more, steadily, for a long time, and say in her mind whatever it was that she had to say.
Then she bent, and kissed the small head under the pillow, and gathered the girl to her.
"Hold on to me, baby," said Naomi. "We're going for a walk."
"In the dark?"
"In the dark."
"That's the best kind," said Ivy, in a small, shaking, brave little voice. "That's when you notice."
He took them out through the ruins of their house. He took them through the broken door, down the stairs, through the party, past the banner and the balloons. He held his daughter's head against his shoulder so that she could not see the kitchen. And as he stepped over the thing that lay across the threshold, and felt the cool night air on his face, he heard, far off down the hill, from the direction of the lake, the soft diesel growl of a heavy engine coming up the road with its lights out.
Eleven minutes, he thought. I was wrong.
It was nine.