Sitting down with a grunt, I crossed my arms and stared at the building in front of us. “When we rescue Rachel, I’m going to tell her about how scared you were of the dark neighborhood as we scoped out the place. I’m sure she’ll get a kick out of it.”
“Fuck you, Kash. We should just get back in the truck.”
“We can’t see anything from the truck. The building is too far from the street.”
Mason grumbled but didn’t argue anymore. He knew I was right.
The power had been out when we’d gotten here early yesterday morning, and other than a handful of minutes of flickering on and off yesterday and today, it’d mostly stayed off. It had been pouring rain up until this afternoon, and the lightning and thunder had been insane yesterday. But it was already down to barely sprinkling, and Mason was just being a bitch. I wasn’t about to leave.
I knew Rachel was in that building. I could feel it. I could fucking taste it.
And I needed to pace some more before I took off running inside.
“Sit. Down,” Mason growled.
“Just keep watching to see if anyone comes out of that door. I’m going to go check around the building to see if anyone is using the other doors.”
“Kash . . .”
“Don’t start with me, Mason. I need to move or I’m going to go crazy. I won’t go in there without you, I don’t have a death wish.”
Grabbing two handguns and holstering them, I took off in the dark and tried to keep calm as I made a wide perimeter around the building. I strained to hear anything coming from inside, but there was nothing. And, unfortunately, with the power being out, I couldn’t see the activity with lights or electronics I normally would watch out for.
The quiet and darkness continued to put doubt in my mind that anyone was there. That we would go in and it would be empty, just as the first house had been. But something was telling me Rachel was in there, and I couldn’t ignore that. I also could not get past this fucking stupid bad feeling. It hadn’t been there yesterday, it just randomly started this morning and had steadily gotten worse as the day had progressed.
As soon as I finished walking the perimeter, I turned and went around the other way, making a wider berth and weaving in and out of other buildings around. I looked for buildings that were abandoned, and when I finally found one, forced my way inside. It had the same setup as the one we were watching, a few doors of entry, but there was practically nothing inside.
I made my way past remains of a squatter camp and rodent nests, and walked straight to a random room sta
nding in the middle of the massive space. As I got closer, I withdrew one of my guns and turned on the mounted-on flashlight. I kicked back the door that was barely hanging on its hinges and flashed the light down the steps. Taking a deep breath, I walked down and stopped when I hit another door. Mason is going to kill me when he finds out I cleared a building alone. Preparing for anything, and hoping for nothing, I grabbed the knob and shoved the door open.
“What the fuck?”
As soon as I was out of the building, I quickly made my way back to where Mason was sitting and dropped down on the ground next to him.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“I found a building that’s set up the same as this one. There was nothing upstairs except for these four walls pretty close to the main door. At first I thought it was a room, but it just held stairs that led to a basement. Down there, there are no doors to get in or out, except for the stairs. This basement was as empty as the upstairs, but these guys live here, and it’s Juarez’s main house. So I know they had to have done a lot of construction inside. But I’m betting they have the housing downstairs.”
He looked over at me, and then back at the building. “Why?”
“Because the buildings around here are all abandoned or closed up because of the storm. So they’re dark anyway, but all the houses on the other side of these buildings? There are flashlights, candles . . . you can hear people talking. There’s nothing in there.”
“Maybe there’s nobody in there then,” he said softly.
“No, she’s in there, I’m just betting she’s downstairs. But we need to do this tonight, Mason, like, now. I’m not shitting you, I have a really bad feeling.”
He took in a deep breath, held it for a few seconds, and then released it in one hard rush. “Okay, get ready and let’s go get her then.”
After putting on our bulletproof vests, we quietly opened up our “oh-shit” bags and took out zip ties, magazines, boxes of ammo, glow sticks, and extra cuffs. After loading extra magazines with ammo, we started putting everything on us, and looked at each other.
“You ready?” he asked.
“You have no idea.”
“Let’s do this.” He put his fist out, and just as I went to slam mine down on it, my cell phone began vibrating in my pocket. “Is yours ringing?”
I nodded. “Yours too?”