James Patterson - Gone

He suddenly ran back toward the gun room, where he began flipping through a CD-filled shoe box.

“Give me five,” he said, suddenly handing Mary Catherine a disk, “and then put this on the CD setup there and crank it!”

“What? Why?”

“I got speakers strung up in the trees all along the slope, strobe lights. We used to use it for parties, drop a couple of tabs and go on nature walks. We were really into mind expansion for a few years. Anyway, we can use it now. It’ll wake these murdering bastards right up! Ha, damn right this’ll teach them!

“Remember, lock the door behind me, now,” the merry prankster called as he ran off and disappeared around a corner of the tunnel.

Mary Catherine closed the bus door behind him before she looked at the CD case.

AC/DC.

Highway to Hell.

It took them twenty minutes to find the clearing with the double-wide trailer. Looking down at it from the rim of a ridge, Vida found the pale, low structure, sitting there all by itself in the center of the flattened hillside clearing, strangely iconic. Like a temple. Like a tomb.

It’s a tomb, all right , she thought, going down the pitch-black slope on the rocky, narrow trail behind Eduardo, Estefan, and Jorge. The Bennett Tomb.

It was when they neared the bottom of the trail that she felt it. There was something subtle and subliminal, like a kind of ground hum in the air. Or is it me? she thought. Some kind of pressure change on her eardrum from the altitude?

When the sound came a moment later out of the dead silence, she fell immediately to her knees, thinking she’d literally been hit with something, a rocket or a bolt of lightning. Then, from all around her, the buzz-saw electric guitar chord repeated again, speeding faster as drums kicked in.

Living easy, living free, season ticket on a one-way ride , shrieked a rough, joyously unhinged voice.

Rock music? But from where? she wondered, trying to think. She scanned around. Were there speakers in the trees? In the ground?

The first “Highway to Hell” refrain had just started when the lights came on. Floodlighting from the trees beside the trailer suddenly bathed the entire slope they were standing on, completely exposing them. Then the lights started to strobe. It was like the whole desert hill had suddenly been moved to the middle of a dance-hall club. What the hell was this?

She was flipping up the now-useless night-vision goggles when the gunfire erupted. Estefan, in a crouch at the front of the line, suddenly dropped forward and slid down the trail face-first. Eduardo, behind him, starting to backpedal, suddenly sat down and began rolling after him.

“Back! Back!” Vida screamed, pushing Jorge behind her.

She could feel heavy slugs slam into the dirt at her heels and off the rocks beside where she’d just been standing as she retreated back up the hill. As gunfire popped up dust on the trail, she looked around for muzzle flashes to return fire at, but she couldn’t make out a damn thing because of the strobing lights.

She dove over some rocks at the top of the trail and lay flat, gasping, her heart trembling. The hard-rock music chomped on like a chain saw carving at the night. She knew it was just a tactic, but it put a chill through her just the same. This was no pushover they were going up against!

She cursed herself as she crawled through dirt toward the grass berm where her last man was hugging the ground. She’d gotten sloppy, and two of her best soldiers had paid for it with their lives. It was just her now, and Jorge, the young up-and-comer in the group. Just great.

She had to think. The trailer sitting there in the middle of the clearing with only one way down to it had obviously been a decoy, some kind of trap. There would be others.

She scanned the ridge above the clearing for the next logical point at which to take up a firing position on the trailer. She found it thirty seconds later. Off the trail to the left, about twenty-five yards through the brush, was an outcropping of rock that one could lie on and from which one could fire down on the trailer with pretty good cover.

She grabbed Jorge and pointed at the flat rock.

“Crawl over to that ledge and lay fire on that trailer and keep position until I tell you otherwise!” she screamed over the music.

Vida watched him go over the sights of her machine pistol. Jorge had emptied a magazine out of his AK-47 and was putting in another when it happened.

A clump of grass on the hill behind him suddenly, incredibly disappeared. From where the grass had been, a silhouetted figure rose up. He bobbed straight up out of the ground, silently, like a carnival-game Whac-A-Mole.

Only this mole was holding a rifle.

The shadowed figure and Vida fired simultaneously. Jorge pitched forward and off the outcropping as the figure disappeared.

Vida arrived out of breath at the spot where she’d seen the figure and looked down and stood there, gaping. She clicked on her flashlight. There was a hole in the ground with some kind of trapdoor attached to a chimneylike passageway with a ladder. At the bottom of the ladder lay a squat, gray-haired man, staring up at her with the side of his head shot open.

Vida laughed. The hippie! How do you like that? She’d done it! She’d truly whacked the mole!

Vida let out a breath as “Highway to Hell” ended. So that was where they were. The hippie had hidden the Bennetts literally underground.

No matter. She’d grabbed victory from the jaws of defeat. Even with her two friends dead, she could still pull this off and get back to Mexico with her twelve little boxed presents.

Vida changed the magazine in her pistol and slung it over her shoulder as she grabbed the ladder’s first rung and lowered herself. Slowly, ever so slowly, Vida made her way along the low-ceilinged corridor. It was strung with lights and had wooden loading skids for a floor. It looked just like the tunnel under the border at San Diego that had brought her into the country.

She turned a hard right-hand, ninety-degree corner, and there was a door. What the hell? The door was yellow and had rounded edges, like the door of a school bus.

Before Vida could take another step, the bus door opened inward.

Vida gasped at the young woman standing there. Her pale face, her blond hair. It was the nanny! The nanny, with a black gun in her hands.

Vida raised the machine pistol. She had brought it as far as her waist when the deafening shotgun blast sounded, taking off most of her left shoulder and the left side of her face.

Suddenly, Vida was sitting on the tunnel’s floor, still gripping the pistol. But, try as she might, she was unable to lift it. It was too heavy.

It was kicked out of her hand.

“Why?” said a voice.

Vida looked up with her good eye. The blond woman, Mary Catherine, was above her. So pretty, so American looking. Like a girl in a Coca-Cola ad.

Blood from the open artery in Vida’s neck sprayed softly against the dirt wall in a pinkish mist. She could actually feel the life going out of her, her heart slowly losing whatever magic it was that made it beat. Her soul was slowly losing its grip on her body, like a man hanging off the edge of a cliff. She was dwindling now, winding down.

“For money?” Mary Catherine said sadly.

Vida could see that she was crying.

“They’re just kids, you know. Kids. Don’t you remember being a kid? Don’t you have kids where you come from?”

Vida put her good hand to her belly, cupping it. Her baby. Her prince. The bright, searing pain of it all spiked through her. What would be, what would not.