by Blake Pierce
When they got to the bottom of the stairs, she looked back up. The entire second floor was now consumed in flames. The fire was already licking at the top of the banister. Paint peeled off the stairwell walls. She turned back around to see that the others were already to the front door. She rushed to catch up.
“Go all the way out to the street,” Kat yelled as they stepped over the threshold and out into the comparatively clear night air.
Jessie had just stepped onto the lawn when she had a flash of recognition. The Fergusons hadn’t left this house in weeks. That meant that whatever explosive had been used to blow up Ty’s study had been planted a long time ago.
And if Setts had planned that far in advance, he’d almost certainly done other things to the house. He would have probably set up cameras and listening devices so he could enjoy hearing Brenda’s suffering in the weeks following her escape. That meant he would have known about all the security procedures the family had added after she “escaped,” including the panic room.
“Kat,” she called out to her friend, who was doing her best to haul the 200-pound police officer across the expansive front lawn to the street.
“What?” Kat asked, glancing back over her shoulder but not turning around.
“I know where Setts is,” she said. “I know where he took Brenda Ferguson.”
“Where?”
“To their panic room,” she told her. “I’m sure of it. The explosion was just a distraction so he could grab her.”
“Okay,” Kat said. “Let’s get these people to safety and then you can show me where the room is.”
Jessie looked back at the house. The entire second floor was alight. Much of the first floor was too. Soon she wouldn’t be able to get through the front door. She could hear sirens in the distance but knew the fire trucks would arrive too late to help.
“There isn’t time,” she yelled back. “I’m going back in.”
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
She couldn’t see a thing.
For the first few seconds after returning to the house, everything was acrid blackness. Then Jessie dropped to her knees and found that lower to the ground, she could see a bit better.
She crawled down the hallway in the direction of the bookcase that served as the hidden door to the panic room. It was hard to be sure where she was and she thought she might have gone too far when her shoulder slammed into the edge of the bookcase.
Taking a moment to gather herself, she tried to ignore the stifling heat and sucked in three quick breaths of stinging, ashen air. Then she held her breath and stood up, fumbling around in search of the red book that would open the door. She was just starting to feel the burn on her lungs when she found it. She pulled it and stepped back as it snapped forward and back, all the while pointing her gun at the space beyond the retracting bookshelf.
The fluorescent light was already on. In front of her was Brenda Ferguson. She was seated in one of the room’s two chairs. Her hands were tied behind her back. Next to her, with a knife in his right hand, was Joseph Setts. The blade was about six inches long and gleamed when the light above flickered. Setts stared at Jessie with a mix of surprise and amusement.
“I know you,” he said, sounding unexpectedly casual, considering the situation. “You’re the racist profiler lady I saw on the news. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
As stunned as she was, Jessie preferred this to the alternative. At least Setts was engaging with her rather than plunging the knife into Brenda. She decided to respond in kind.
“You’re calling me out?” Jessie said disbelievingly. “The guy who kidnaps and kills innocent women for kicks?”
Setts looked much as he had in his law firm photo, with the same brown hair and eyes. But now the hair was sweaty and plastered to his forehead. His eyes had a wild, frenzied look. He was of average size, maybe slightly shorter than Jessie with only about twenty pounds on her. In an unarmed, close combat situation, she thought she could hold her own. But the man was only about two feet from Brenda and he was not unarmed.
“Innocent?” he repeated, disgusted. “These women aren’t innocent. They’ve all committed the sin of faithlessness. They’re as guilty as you say I am.”
Jessie tried to ignore the flames in the hallway behind her, lapping at her back and making her skin swelter. She needed to keep the man’s attention focused on anything other than killing Brenda, at least until she could think of a plan. She knew she had to come up with one quick, as the smoke from the hall was fast permeating the panic room too.
“Are they really as guilty as you?” she asked, trying to keep the urgency out of her voice. “Because it seems like we’re talking apples and watermelons here.”
Setts re-gripped the knife and almost spat as he spoke.
“I’m not surprised that you would mock my mission. You’re probably a betrayer too. You all are.”
Though her heart was pounding, Jessie forced herself to project calm.
“Actually,” she told him, “I was betrayed. My husband cheated on me with a cheap, dime-store slut.”
She saw his eyes widen in astonishment. Before she could say anything else, there was a loud crash. She glanced over her shoulder to see that a large section of the second floor had collapsed in the hall behind her. Sparks flew into the panic room along with waves of smoke.
“It looks like we’re not getting out that way,” she said jadedly. “If you don’t mind, I’m just going to close the bookshelf door before we roast. It would be a shame if we all burned to death before we cleared this mess up.”
She stepped over to the wall and pushed the button Brenda had used the first time Jessie visited the house. The bookshelf door swung closed, creating a barrier from the hallway but trapping in the enormous cloud of dark smoke. She could barely see Setts or Brenda now. She also observed that even with the door closed, a thin carpet of smoke was snaking in underneath the bookshelf. Soon the entire room would be consumed by it. She pretended not to notice.
“So you see, betrayal takes lots of forms,” she continued. “But I didn’t kill my husband. I divorced him. And there are other paths for you too.”
“It’s too late for that,” he replied, coughing as he spoke. “You’ve seen me now. I have to finish the job I started. If I don’t take out all four sinners, I’ve failed in my mission and I’m not the True Avenger.”
Jessie set aside the absurd title he’d given himself to focus on the sentence prior to that.
“What do you mean, all four?’ she asked. “If you’re here, then you can’t get to Jayne Castillo.”
Setts smiled cruelly at her.
“You think this is the only bomb I set? Don’t insult me. I had to have an insurance policy in case I didn’t get out of here. Looks like it was a smart move, don’t you think?”
Only then did Jessie comprehend that Jayne and her husband, along with the cops guarding them, were also in immediate danger. And if Ryan decided to check up on them…she refused to consider the thought. Instead she refocused on the threat in front of her.
The smoke was now so thick that the overhead light could barely penetrate it. If she waited any longer, she wouldn’t even be able to see if the man attacked Brenda, much less do anything about it.
I need to shake things up somehow.
“Here’s what I think…” she started but he cut her off.
“Enough talk. Like you said, it would be a shame to burn up before getting the job done.”
Jessie realized she was out of time. She had to act now.
“That’s not exactly what I said, Joseph.”
Even in the murky gloom of the room, she saw his head pop up at that last word. His eyes were wide with shock. Just then, she saw movement to his left. Brenda shoved him. Somehow she must have extricated herself from her bindings. Setts stumbled backward for a moment before regrouping and lunging toward her.
Jessie fired, hoping she was at least close to her target. She heard a thud and raced across the room to
find both Setts and Brenda on the ground.
Oh no! What have I done?
But a second later, Brenda looked up and Jessie realized she hadn’t been hit, but had simply tumbled off her chair. Setts however, remained still. She saw blood leaking onto the floor from some unseen wound on his body.
“Hurry,” Jessie said, pulling the woman to her feet.
“There’s nowhere to go,” Brenda exclaimed plaintively.
“Sure there is,” Jessie replied pointing to the Nirvana poster on the wall.
Just then, there was aloud groan. Jessie looked over at Joseph Setts but he wasn’t moving. It hadn’t come from him. There was a second groan and she looked up to see the roof above them buckling. It looked like it might give out at any moment.
She ripped the poster off the wall, revealing the narrow tunnel behind it. It was lit every few feet by a dull light embedded into the tunnel wall.
“You first,” she said to Brenda, just before all the lights cut out.
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE
Jessie kept bumping her head.
Even crawling on her hands and knees, she seemed too tall for the tunnel and kept banging the top of her head on the metal walls. Because it was completely dark, she had no way of gauging how high it was or how far they had to go. In addition, she feared that once the roof in the panic room collapsed, it would send a fireball after them down the tunnel, which would suddenly become a human-sized oven.
As she scurried along the tube, she felt something hard bang against the side of the metal wall and realized what it was.
“Hold on, Brenda,” she said. “I have a small flashlight in my pocket. I’m going to hand it ahead to you. Reach back.”
“Okay,” Brenda said.
With the tight quarters, it took more time than Jessie would have liked to get the light out and pass it forward. When Brenda turned it on, Jessie half-regretted the decision. Until that moment, they’d been blind to but ignorant of their surroundings.
Now they saw just how narrow the tunnel was and just how far they still had to go to get to the ladder in the distance. Jessie estimated it to be at least another forty feet. And she noticed something else she’d somehow blocked out. The tunnel was fast filling up with the smoke from the panic room that had nowhere else to go.
She felt herself start to hyperventilate. Though she’d been in many tough situations, something about being burned alive in a thin metal tube evoked an extra level of dread. She did her best to force the feeling down, trying to focus only on Brenda’s bare feet moving slowly forward.
They were about twenty feet from the end of the tunnel when she heard it. Behind here, there was a noise that sounded like a combination of grunting and scraping. Though she couldn’t look back, she didn’t need to. There was only one explanation. Joseph Setts was in the tunnel.
He must have regained consciousness and managed to climb in. Jessie didn’t know where she’d shot him, but based on the pace of his crawling, it sounded like he wasn’t that badly injured.
Just in front of her, Brenda suddenly stopped.
“What is it?” Jessie asked in a hushed voice.
“He’s back there, isn’t he?” Her voice quivered with fear.
“I think so,” Jessie said. “But it doesn’t change anything. We have to keep moving.”
“I can’t.”
“What do you mean?” Jessie demanded. “Just keep doing what you’ve been doing. You were fine.”
“I can’t,” Brenda whimpered. “My body won’t move.”
The scraping and groaning behind them was getting closer, fast. Jessie felt the sudden urge to scream at the woman. But she stifled it, partly because she knew it wouldn’t help but also because, with all the smoke, she’d probably just end up coughing.
“Brenda,” she said, her voice calmer and firmer than she expected. “You can do this. You escaped from this man once before, when you were all alone. You’re not alone now. I’m with you. And your family is at the top of that ladder, along with a bunch of cops who will protect you. You just have to get to them. Your children need you, Brenda. You’ve been so strong. Stay strong for them.”
“How?” Brenda begged.
“Just move your right arm and leg forward and then do the same with your left.”
Brenda did it.
“Good,” Jessie said encouragingly. “Not do the same thing again. And again. Keep it up. We’re getting close. Almost there.”
The truth was that Brenda was moving unfathomably slow. But Jessie feared anything but positive reinforcement would make her freeze up again. She pretended not to hear the grunts from Setts, who had used their lull to make up lots of distance. He was close now. She thought she could smell him, though that seemed impossible with her nose full of smoke and ash and her own seared flesh.
And then they were there. Brenda was no longer crouched in front of her but was upright, climbing up the short ladder. Jessie could only see her from the waist down and for now she was stuck waiting. She couldn’t go any further forward until Brenda was up the ladder. She heard the woman bang on what sounded like a metal hatch.
“Let us out,” she screamed.
“Brenda,” Jessie called out, ignoring the mumbling, incomprehensible voice that sounded less than a dozen feet behind her. “There has to be a way to open the hatch from the inside. Is there a button or a lever?”
After a second of unresponsiveness, Brenda answered.
“There’s a release lever,” she shouted. “I’m pulling it now.”
A moment later there was a loud click, followed by a whoosh as a pressure seal was released. Suddenly Jessie heard all kinds of noise above her—sirens, voices, and a loud crackling that she suspected was the burning house.
“It’s open,” Brenda called down to her. “I’m climbing out.”
“Please hurry!”
And then the legs were gone. The ladder steps were unoccupied. She scooted forward and had just let go of her gun and grabbed the metal ladder rail when she felt a hand grip her ankle. Before she knew what was happening, she was being yanked backward into the tunnel.
Only her hands clinging to the ladder prevented him from pulling her all the way back to him. A twisted, hoarse voice growled one word at her.
“Reckoning.”
Suddenly she felt a searing pain in her left calf. She knew immediately that he’d stabbed her with his knife. The pain sent a shot of adrenaline through her exhausted body. She re-gripped the ladder rail and jerked herself forward.
The force of her action pulled her all the way into the small opening at the base of ladder. She heard her gun tumble somewhere nearby but couldn’t guess where. Rolling onto her back, she saw that Setts was right behind her. He had a large lump on his forehead where he must have collapsed when she shot him. But he seemed oblivious. In a matter of seconds, he would be out of the tunnel and on her.
She glanced up the ladder. Beyond the open hatch she could see the night sky. Brenda was repeatedly screaming the words “over here.” But no one would make it to them before Setts was on her. She’d have to do this herself.
Bracing her left leg on the ground, the one with the knife jutting out of the back of it, she reared back with her right leg and kicked forward. The bottom of her foot made solid contact with Setts’s face, slamming squarely into his nose. The move seemed to stun the man as much as injure him as he lost his balance and plopped hard onto the bottom of the metal tunnel.
Jessie didn’t wait to see what he’d do next. Grabbing the highest ladder rail she could reach, she heaved herself to an upright position and turned around to start climbing. For a fraction of a second, she considered reaching down for her gun but decided it wasn’t worth it.
She stepped up with her right leg. But when she pushed off with her left, the agony that shot through her calf made her foot slip off the rail. She started to lose her balance and felt herself dropping back down. But she’d only fallen a few inches when she felt a hand firmly grasp her left forear
m and hold her steady. She looked up to see Kat right above her.
“I won’t let go,” her friend told her.
Before Jessie knew what was happening, she was being hauled upward, her feet completely leaving the ladder. A moment later she was lying on her stomach on the Fergusons’ front lawn. She’d barely had time to catch her breath when she heard a plaintive voice call out from below.
“Help!”
She pushed off the ground, scrambled over to the hatch door, and looked down. Joseph Setts was at the bottom of the ladder. Blood poured from what was clearly a broken nose. She could see that his pants were also covered in blood that seemed to be coming from his right thigh, where she assumed she’d shot him before.
“I can’t get up,” he pleaded. “Help me please.”
“Leave him,” she heard Kat say from beside her.
Jessie looked over at her friend, who stared back at her with cold conviction. Brenda lay on the ground beside her, too wiped out to even sit up. Behind her, Officer Tanner was running over in their direction.
“Do we really need this guy out in the world?” Kat continued. “Even if he’s sent away for life, these women will always be afraid he might get out. Just leave him, Jessie. Close the damn hatch before that cop comes over. Let him boil down there.”
Jessie was tempted. But before she could act on it, there was another massive explosion, twice as large as the first one. It knocked her to the ground hard. When she looked up, she saw that the entire Ferguson home had collapsed onto itself. It only took a second for her to process what that meant.
She leapt back toward the hatch.
“Give me your hand,” she shouted down to Setts. “There’s going to be a massive fireball headed down that tunnel any second.”
Setts reached up and grasped her wrist and she clamped down on his left forearm and tugged. As she pulled, she saw that he was smiling. Something was wrong. It took her a moment to discern what it was. He was hiding his right hand behind his back.
