If they got hungry enough, they would eat it. But theywere still a few days away from that.
Without ceremony, the door was yanked open, spillingbright electric light onto them.
"Alright, get on out of there," the bull-neckedman said.
They stepped into a wide open kitchen, the floor set inblack and white tiles. The two men stood back and looked at them.
"What do you want?" Katie said, still holdingthe can of meat spread in her hands.
"We want to know who in your group kicks the mostass," the bull-necked man said.
Clara's only response was a confused, "What?"
"We want you to do something for us, and then we'lllet you go on your way. It's not a cakewalk by any stretch of the imagination,but we're in some dire straits here, and we just do this ourselves."
The words were ominous. Whatever these men wanted, it wasgoing to mean that they would have to head out somewhere, into the dead, and dosome sort of task. Katie didn't like the sound of it.
"The way I see it, right now we need eachother."
"We wouldn't need shit if you assholes hadn't shotup our SUV in the first place," Clara said.
The bull-necked man gave the man in the FBI hat a dirtylook, an "I told you so" look. "Yeah, we're sorry about that.But look at it this way. Maybe it was fate."
"Fate didn't have shit to do with it. It was atrigger-happy dumbass looking to shoot anything that moved," Claracontinued. "And who the hell are you to lock us up?"
Katie let Clara take the lead. Well, there was no"let" about it. Clara was going to do what she was going to do, butKatie was all too happy to keep quiet. She looked at the situation throughsurvivor eyes. They were standing in a kitchen... with men... with those menwere guns. It didn't take a math wizard to do the calculations on that. Theywere only a few quick bursts of fire from things going drastically wrong.
"That was for our protection as much as yours,"the bull-necked man droned on. "I know if some dumbass opened up on melike that, my first instinct would be to kill them." The FBI man's facewent red at the word dumbass. "We just wanted you to cool down a bit, soyou could actually listen to what we have to say without thinking about ramminga shovel in our face."
It made sense, but Katie could still sense Clara tryingto choke down her witty comebacks. She decided to jump in. "So what do youwant from us?"
The bull-necked man looked at her, his ruddy face seemingimpossibly pink underneath the kitchen's fluorescent lights. "I need toshow you something."
They followed the man through the mansion. The FBI man,chastened and embarrassed, followed along behind him, a rifle held low in hishands. They trekked across the glossy wooden floors until they hit a large,ornate staircase that led up through the middle of the house, creating a symmetricaldivide where the eastern part of the house was a mirror image of the west partof the house.
The floor of the stairwell was furnished with a blackcarpet shot through by golden threads to create a swirling design punctuated byfleur-de-lis. Up the stairs they went.
"Is this your house?" Joan asked the man.
"No. We just found it... at a time when we neededit. It's got a good view of everything around here, and a generator out backfor electricity. The treeline is a little close, but from the second floor, youcan see a long way. Only one way in for vehicles, and as soon as you turned onthat road, we knew you were on your way up."
"Any idea what happened to the originalowners?" Katie asked.
"Most likely dead," the FBI man said, "butno one was here when we got here. Place seemed like it had been closed up for awhile."
"This place got a wine cellar?" Joan asked.
The bull-necked man stopped at the top of the stairs andturned to regard Joan. "We ain't had the time to look yet, but I'll put iton my to-do list."
They walked through the hallway, admiring the littletouches here and there. An antique table in the corner, an expensive andintricate-looking vase perched on top of it. Paintings, expensive and unique,hung perfectly on the walls. Crown molding that in itself was a work of art.
They passed many doors, most of them closed, and stoppedoutside another closed door. The man hesitated and then reached for thedoorknob. Katie felt a sense of anticipation, and as the man swung the dooropen, she knew that they were coming to the heart of the situation. This waswhy they were still alive; this was why they hadn't been killed.
A lamp glowed dimly on a nightstand in a large bedroom. Abed, an antique fancy thing like you would see in an old black and white filmfrom the '20s, dominated the room. It had a pink satin skirt around it, and ontop of the mattress, lying on the bed was a child, a damp rag held to his headby a woman with the eyes of a crow, beady black orbs ringed by dark circles.She had a mouth like a slash, as if none had existed there before, and someonehad taken a butcher knife and slid it through the skin to make a stark line.
"That's my boy," the bull-necked man said.
"So?" Katie.
The bull-necked man clenched his jaw, while Clara and Joancursed Katie's adroitness silently in their heads. "So that's why you'rehere," the man said.
"Let me guess. You want us to risk our lives and goon some sort of mission to save your boy."
The man smiled. "That's exactly what I want."
They were silent a bit, the mother of the boy, looking upat them with bleak expectation on her face.
Katie sighed. "You might as well lay it on us beforewe say no."
The man just grunted and said, "What makes you thinkyou have a choice?"
"There's a always a choice," Clara said.
The man's face became red, even redder than it had been."Let's step outside."
They backed out of the room. The man closed
