Hideout Jack Heath (reading the story of the .TXT) 📖

up, Lux,’ Fred says instead. There’s something I haven’t seen on his face before—anger. The old Rick is coming back.

I don’t shut up. ‘But your site was too successful. The CIA noticed what you were up to.’

The other Guards look alarmed—especially Zara. She reaches into the front of her dress, where she keeps her gun. I don’t know if it’s just a threat or if she actually intends to shoot me before I expose her.

I talk faster: ‘So a CIA agent shows up one night, and accidentally walks past one of your cameras. He has a dossier, which ends up in Samson’s possession. It’s full of profiles—not just of the Guards, but the prisoners, too.’

‘This is all complete fantasy,’ Fred says. But I can see that the others don’t believe him.

The van is accelerating, the whine of the engine building to a crescendo.

‘According to the dossier, all the prisoners are innocent. Samson doesn’t trust any of the others, because it seems like one of them is a CIA spy. Not you, though, since you’re the founder—you wouldn’t infiltrate your own organisation. So early the next morning, he shows you what he found. He tells you Druznetski has been lying, and the prisoners aren’t guilty.’

‘But they were,’ Donnie says to himself. ‘They must have been.’ He tortured innocent people. Murdered them. Put them through a meat grinder. He can’t bear the thought of it.

‘You ask Samson if he’s showed the dossier to any of the others. He says no—he’s not sure who to trust.’ I meet Fred’s gaze in the rear-view mirror. ‘And you kill him.’

Donnie looks from me to Fred and back. He’s like a casserole dish about to bubble over. Too soon to tell who’ll get burned.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Cedric says. The anger has reached him, too. It’s like an airborne pathogen, infecting everyone in the van.

‘You made it look like a suicide,’ I say. ‘But you could tell I didn’t believe it. You thought maybe I was the CIA contact. So you took me aside and asked me to investigate the murder. You tried to make me suspicious of everyone except you. Fed me some bullshit about seeing Samson on the cameras that morning—’

‘Don’t you remember?’ Fred interrupts. Veins stand out in his forehead and neck. His jaw works back and forth. He’s losing it. ‘I was with you when Samson was shot.’

He must think I haven’t figured that part out yet. He doesn’t know about my backyard autopsy. The bullet I couldn’t find—the bullet that had never existed.

‘He wasn’t shot.’ I raise my voice, making sure Donnie and Cedric hear this part. The two men who both loved Samson. ‘You stabbed him in the head with a screwdriver.’

‘You son of a bitch!’ Donnie snarls.

Zara whips out her gun and points it at Fred. ‘Pull over.’ But Donnie is already in motion. It’s like sharing the van with a charging rhino. He barges me aside on his way to the driver’s seat. Fred lets go of the wheel, flapping both arms, trying to protect his head as Donnie reaches him. He only partly succeeds. Donnie’s meaty fist glances off the top of Fred’s skull. The van starts to veer sideways.

I don’t even brace myself. I’ve done my job. I told the truth. We’re all going to die, but Fred’s going first.

Zara is out of her seat. She tries to grab the wheel. But Cedric tries to attack Fred at the same moment, and he accidentally backhands Zara. She grunts and stumbles backwards, tripping over my legs and landing on Kyle’s corpse.

By accident or design, Fred’s foot is still on the gas. The van zooms faster and faster through the streets of Houston. Streetlights strobe the interior. The wheels on the passenger side bump up onto the kerb. I can hear screaming from outside.

‘You fuck! You sick fuck!’ Donnie bellows, still trying to hit Fred.

Zara is on her feet again. She fires a deafening shot into the roof, trying to get everyone to freeze and shut up. It has the opposite effect. Cedric lunges for the gun, but Fred spins the wheel at the same time, trying to get Donnie away from him. Everyone hits the wall except Fred, who’s still strapped in. The van drifts, tyres screaming, before it hits a bump in the road and rolls over—

The world spins, and for a split-second there’s no gravity, all of us hanging in the air—

Then the side of the van hits the ground, and we come crashing down. As the metal grinds along the blacktop, I bounce off the roof, my arm covering my head, and then hit the floor—formerly a wall. Kyle thuds next to me, and Cedric lands next to him. A bone snaps. Not mine.

The van collides with something else and stops suddenly. I can’t stand up. Can’t even tell which way up is. It’s like being inside a shipwreck, on the ocean floor.

Something gets jammed into the flesh under my jaw. A gun barrel. No—two fingers. Zara is checking my pulse.

I try to turn my head and look at the others, but she grabs my skull and twists it back to face her. ‘Hold still.’ My vision stabilises enough to see that her hair is all over the place and that blood has trickled into one of her eyes. It blooms pink around the retina—she’s wearing a contact lens.

Finally she lets me go and I can look at the rest of the van. Donnie is retching on the floor, clutching his junk, his face pale and sweaty. Cedric isn’t moving. His face seems to be on the wrong side of his head. Kyle is nearby, still dead, yet somehow looking healthier than all of us.

‘This is Cassandra,’ Zara is saying from somewhere nearby. ‘I’m going to need extraction.’

Donnie mumbles something incoherent.

‘No,’ Zara says. ‘He got away.’