David Kent - The Triangle Conspiracy

By the time she reached the top, there was very little light. Her arms exhausted and aching, she put on one last burst of strength and pulled herself over the top.

She’d heard of the capricious nature of tornadoes, but had never lived through a major one herself. There were famous stories of a tornado making its way down a street, destroying one side completely, flattening everything in its path, while the other side of the street was completely intact, nothing out of place; or about how some tornadoes “skipped” houses, plowing through a neighborhood destroying every other house, leaving the ones in between alone.

What she saw was a microcosm of the stories she’d heard. The kitchen of the old farmhouse was nothing but rubble-two floors worth of rubble. The kitchen sink was upended a few feet away from the opening that led to the basement where she’d been. A toilet wasn’t far away, sitting upright but not connected to anything.

There was no wall. The southern wall was simply gone, whisked off the house’s foundation. Bricks and lumber were everywhere, housing fixtures no longer recognizable. Faith looked to the left, back toward the living room where she and Sean had found Isaac Smith.

The east wall-the front of the house-was still there and completely intact, standing as if in silent protest against the storm that dared to threaten this place. The north wall, at Faith’s back, was standing, but with giant gaping holes. Now that the storm had passed, there was a bit of natural light in the early evening, a tiny bit of sunlight peeking into the ruined house. Faith could see Isaac Smith’s rocking chair, sitting upright without a scratch on it, right where it had been.

She cleared her throat. “Sean?” she called. “Sean, are you here?”

Now that she was out of the hole, Faith began to hear sounds. A bit of wind, dripping water, and strangely, birds singing.

Something made a noise to her left, in the direction of the living room. Faith dragged herself a few feet, but it was even slower going than coming out of the hole, as she had to clear a trail through the debris, using her hands the way a swimmer parts the water ahead. Periodically one of her feet would glance off something-a brick, a piece of lumber-and pain would shoot from her toes all the way up to her neck, stopping her in her tracks.

Still she dragged herself forward. She heard the noise again.

Someone else was alive in here.

Faith blinked against pain and rage, trying to remember the last seconds before she and Sean had clasped hands and he had directed her toward the basement. Britt had been standing on the stairs, aiming the shotgun. Smith was urging her to shoot Sean, Sean had told her to shoot Smith instead, and Faith had dived across the floor for her Glock. Britt had looked confused, doubtful, panicked, as if things weren’t as black and white as she’d imagined them to be.

The lights had gone out. They’d found each other and Sean had taken her to the basement door, then practically pushed her through it. He’d turned away from her. She fell. The shotgun roared. The tornado slammed into the house.

Britt had shot someone.

Faith’s heart began to hammer. “Please, God,” she whispered. “Please, please, please.”

There was the sound again, someone moving.

Faith dragged herself past the rocking chair, in the direction of the stairs, or at least where the stairs had been. The second floor had collapsed on that side of the house, tons of rubble on the floor. But again, it was surreal in that there were places where Faith could see the actual floor, areas where there was no rubble at all.

Where the stairway should have been, she saw a pair of bare feet sticking out from under some debris. She made her way toward them, her heart still triple-timing.

Dammit, why can’t I go any faster?

Who did Britt shoot? Faith thought as she moved, the thoughts torturing her.

“Please,” she said again, her voice a rasp.

She froze when she saw the bright red nail polish on the feet.

She pulled herself next to the body and managed to raise herself into a sitting position. Her arms felt nearly as useless as her feet now, from dragging her dead weight all the way through the ruined house.

The lower half of Britt’s body was buried in rubble, only her feet visible. Her torso and arms were intact. One hand was still wrapped around the shotgun, her red-nailed hand curled around the trigger. The back of her head was gone, blood and brain tissue sprayed on what was left of the wall behind her. The barrel of the gun was still in her mouth.

“Oh God,” Faith muttered. She lowered her head to her hands and wept.

She cried not just for the destruction of this young girl, but for the destruction-in a very different way-of her own brother, of her own family. She wept for the way Daryn McDermott had been used. She’d been a willing vehicle, and it all came down to an elaborate and spectacular suicide for her, but she’d still been used. And she wept for the hole ripped in her own existence by Scott Hendler’s murder. Faith cried and cried and cried, becoming oblivious to the external pain, blinded by the pain inside.

“They were cowards,” Smith’s voice said.

He stepped out of the small closet that had been beside the stairs. The stairs were gone, but the closet enclosure still stood. He’d found the only other safe place in the house. His left arm hung bloodied and limp by his side. His shirt was ripped, a collection of rags. There was blood on his face.

Faith could barely find her voice. “What?” she said.

“Britt and your brother,” Smith said, and his voice sounded very far away, as if he were at the bottom of a well. “The stupid girl, she couldn’t figure out which one of us to trust, so ultimately she trusted no one, not even herself. A lesson of the streets, I would presume.”

“Sean,” Faith croaked.

“He turned out to be a coward as well. He turned and ran. He pushed you into the basement, then took a giant leap out the back door. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to see what happened to him from there. I suspect he’s buried under a few tons of this house, don’t you?”

“You… bastard. ”

Smith bent over and picked up a brick in his good hand. He started toward Faith.

“Name calling doesn’t suit you, Officer Kelly,” he said. “It is down to you, and it is down to me now. The way it should be. Can’t run, can you?”

Smith took a few more steps. Faith pushed herself away from Britt, but there was nowhere to go. Britt’s body and the front wall blocked her on one side and behind, debris on the other. Smith was directly in front of her.

Faith couldn’t make herself speak. She began digging at the pile of rubble beside her.

“Think you can tunnel through it in the next five seconds?” Smith taunted. “No, no, no. Never happen.”

He knelt beside Faith’s legs and dropped his voice to a whisper. “As long as I’m alive, you’ll never have peace, Officer Kelly. I’ve done everything I could to you in this round of the game. Nothing about your life is what it was. And now I’ll simply disappear. I’ll gather up a few personal belongings and I’ll just go away. I already have my identities in place. You know that, don’t you? Your friend Yorkton won’t find me. No one will find me, because I don’t exist. I’m John Brown’s Body, remember?”

Faith remembered his DOJ code name, the moniker that had been given to Smith before they unearthed his real identity last year. She nodded, still scrabbling with the debris.

“I win,” Smith whispered, raised the brick over his head, and brought it down on Faith’s left foot.

Faith screamed in unimaginable agony as the pain rocketed through her. She saw him raise the brick again, saw it coming down toward her right foot.