Strike by Delilah S. Dawson

Author:Delilah S. Dawson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

15.

I get a couple of dirty looks in the big house, but the Cranes must learn to let bygones be bygones pretty quick. That, or they’re scared of me. The dining room table is packed with thin Cranes and fat Cranes, and they stare as I pass but don’t put down their plates of spaghetti. I figure all the dangerous ones are with Leon in the taxidermy shed. The big guy at the stairs is neither Tuck nor Hartness, and he won’t let me pass unless I let him search my backpack.

“No problem,” I say sweetly, unzipping it and letting him look.

All he’s going to find are Pop-Tart boxes and sodas.

“You steal all this food?” he asks.

I shrug. “Bought it with my card. Kids like junk food.”

He points his gun up to let me squeeze by. Upstairs, I knock on the first door I see. No one answers, and I push it open and go in. It’s an old-fashioned bedroom turned into a conference room, with four card tables set up in the middle and maps and data pinned all over the whitewashed walls, just like at Alistair’s trailer. I reach into my backpack, pull a nut can out of a Pop-Tart box, and hide it in a dresser drawer.

In the next room, also empty, I find what I was really looking for: the tech room. Laptops are ranged on every flat surface, identical to the ones I brought from Alistair’s trailer—hell, maybe they actually are the ones from Alistair’s trailer. In the corner is a pile of clothes, all with ink dye packets attached, which I figured they had to have, somewhere, to test tomorrow’s strip mall inksplosion. I drape a coat over one of the chairs, put a pair of expensive panties in a corner, and take several shirts into the conference room, hanging them on coat hooks in a corner, facing out. The nut can goes onto a table covered with half-eaten snacks, where its camouflage has a lovely irony.

The stairs creak outside, and I duck behind the bed pushed in the corner, shrinking down as small as possible. Footsteps enter the room and linger near the biggest map. “You think it’s going to work?” one guy’s voice asks.

“It better,” says the other. “Where’s my damn chaw?”

They rummage around the tables, and one walks toward the bed. I flinch as his muddy work boots stop, and he says, “Here it is. We’re good. Hey, did you mark today’s blast?”

The boots tromp back over to the map, and in the silence I hear the soft punch of a thumbtack. “Wish I coulda seen it,” one of them says wistfully.

“If there’s one thing Leon knows how to do, it’s blow shit up. Now come on, before we miss dessert.”

Once they’re down the creaking steps, I creep out and inspect the map more closely. Right where my house is, there’s a shiny red tack.

Right where my house was.

The puzzle pieces fall into place with a sickening thud in my heart. I gave Leon the laptops from Alistair’s trailer, told him the password.

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