The Secret: A Thriller by David Haywood Young Read Free Book Online Page A

sleep.
    On the other hand I wouldn’t want the kind of nightmares he might have.
     
    * * *
     
    A fter they left I got more supplies ready for the next trip but mostly sat around—playing word games with Abby, who had stayed with me, and feeling grateful that my family was still okay. I wanted to feel worse about Susie than I did. This situation was awful for Tim and his daughters…and maybe for Susie too. If she was still around.
    Mostly I was just relieved, though. And quietly desperate to get away from all this with my family as soon as I could.
    And I still wanted to get online. The rest of the world had to have been told some sort of story. For all I knew it could even be the truth—I could use some. Terrorists? Quarantine? Bombs? Prison riots? Weird mutant ninja monkey-people? What was really going on?
    Come to think of it, if that EMP had come from a nuclear weapon, however small…and another explosion had gone off in the direction of the prison this morning…were we in danger from radiation? If so, what should we do about it? I looked around my living room. Right over there, on the south wall, we’d had two complete encyclopedia sets when I was a kid. These days, who bothered? All that stuff was online.
    Man. I needed Google. Tomorrow, I decided, I’d see what I could do about that. Though Tim ought to know about radiation.
    I didn’t get out to the basement until evening. Tim was still jittery and manic, busily reinforcing its door with some pressboard he’d had in his garage. The door was counter-weighted: it leaned into a slight hill, all that was left of what had by all reports been a huge house, at about a thirty-degree angle. You had to lift it to get inside, and descend a set of concrete stairs.
    Rebecca gave me an unreadable look when I arrived. But I was pretty sure she hadn’t been out here in years. So, my guess: It was a dirt-and-bugs thing.
    I grinned at her. “Bright side? We might not have to stay here too long.”
    Robbie snorted. “If we do, at least there’ll be plenty of little critters to eat. Dibs on the spiders!”
    I beamed at him. “There’s a good boy.”
    None of the females laughed. But even Tim snickered a little.
    Still. It really was pretty messy. The floor was dirt…dank, damp dirt. Not much we could do about that. The basement was divided into two rooms. The door between, if it had ever existed, had been removed before I first saw the place. But I’d forgotten about the two windows on the east wall, the side furthest from the entrance. They were only about four inches tall, and only about two inches above ground outside. From their reasonably-clear appearance, Rebecca had probably been cleaning.
    I nodded at the windows. “We’ll have to cover those, at night. Or do without lights inside. We’re on a hill here and people might see a light for miles.” Or things other than people might see it.
    Tim turned around. “I have some steel brackets. I wasn’t thinking about light, but I want to put something solid there.”
    In case we were attacked by four-inch monsters? I stopped before I spoke, though, and thought about it—mocking Tim might be my normal mode of operation, but today wasn’t the time for it. Besides, I realized, he was right. People out there might be fairly desperate. And bullets could come in easily enough through a four-by-twelve window. Once I thought of it, I got itchy.
    “Yeah,” I said quietly. “Where are the brackets?”
     
    * * *
     
    W e agreed to split the night into three shifts—me first, then Rebecca, then Tim. Robbie got restive at being left out, but I told him he could take a turn after dawn and he seemed to calm down. He and Rachel sure seemed to be all over each other, though…I knew he was comforting her, and it was from genuine feeling. But I also remembered being a teenager. I decided to have a talk with him tomorrow if we could be alone for a minute. This was not a good time to push Tim’s tolerance.
    I woke Rebecca at