Havoc by Shannon McKenna

 

 

1

Mace Trask lowered the binoculars, and followed the swiftly moving splotch of lavender with his naked eyes. The mysterious woman wandered behind the fire-blackened ruins of the GodsAcre Great Hall and out of his field of vision. Moving so casually, as if the place weren’t the scene of a mass murder. As if it didn’t hide deadly secrets that could kill in ways that no one could even yet begin to understand.

This woman just strolled around, poking here and there, taking pictures, kicking rocks and dirty clumps of melting snow. No clue. Lah-di-dah.

And there she was again, on the other side of the Great Hall. Who the fuck was she? And what was she doing here?

GodsAcre, Mace’s childhood home, was officially considered to be a death trap. The authorities had gone to insane lengths to keep people away from the place. Every local ordinance forbade coming near. No one had been up here in months, other than Mace himself, not since the winter snows had sealed it in and the CDC had put off their investigative efforts until the following spring.

Spring came late up here. It was almost April, and up here, there were still snowbanks hanging on.

Could she be a lost hiker? She was dressed for it. Stretchy sports pants showed off a memorable ass, and the sweatshirt hugged her shapely torso. She wore muddy lace-up hiking boots, a featherweight backpack. Classic hiker’s gear.

He focused the lenses once again as she shrugged off her backpack and took off her jacket. It wasn’t warm this high up in the mountains, but the sun was high right now. Under the sweatshirt, she wore a fitted sports top that showed off strong looking shoulders, and clung lovingly to the curves of a truly spectacular rack. Not thin. She was sexy-strong. Toned, muscular legs. An athletic hair band around her forehead held back a halo of tight black ringlets, just short of shoulder length. Her hair had lots of bounce and flop to it. She had golden-brown skin, and her face looked pretty from here. Big, striking eyes. Too far away for detail.

Not that he cared about detail, for fuck’s sake. Eyes on the ball, Trask. The hiker’s gravity-defying tits were irrelevant. It had been a while since he’d blown off any sexual steam, so of course he noticed. At this point, a pitched fight with blood, carnage and mayhem would be a welcome relief to this strained, aching tension of constant battle readiness.

But so far, nothing. He’d missed all three of the big battles that asshole Redd Kimball had inflicted upon Mace’s two older brothers and then upon his best friend, Nate.

Mace wasn’t going to miss another one of these fights. This next one would be the final and definitive battle. That motherfucker Kimball was done tormenting Mace’s family. He’d been hard at it for a decade and a half. It stopped now.

He found himself fiddling with the detonator, which hung around his neck on a long cord, safely tucked into its smooth, oval steel case. He could bring that cavern down at any time, right on Kimball’s head. If he could just get that son of a bitch to crawl back inside.

Where the hell did this woman fit in? She didn’t strike him as one of Kimball’s people. She didn’t fit the mega-sleaze profile. And after all that had happened, it seemed strange for Kimball to send someone like her to do recon. Knowing she’d be seen, and remarked upon.

Then again, maybe that was the whole point. Who better to send than someone who looked so innocent and random?

She was dressed for hiking, but there were no public hiking trails nearby. There were no state or national parks within miles. The single road that led up to GodsAcre had been blocked miles down the canyon, and there was no approach from the other side. There was nothing out behind GodsAcre other than increasingly desolate and inhospitable wild country at higher and higher elevations.

So whatever her reasons, this woman had deliberately meant to come here. It was a long, cold, muddy walk, in a not-ideal season, so she was highly motivated. And she was wandering around the ruins, taking pictures. Not of flowers or birds, but of wet holes in the ground, burned, collapsed buildings, unsightly scorched rubble and garbage. The hell?

Even the way she walked struck him as suspicious. She didn’t look lost. She didn’t look aimless, or confused, or hesitant. She looked curious. Focused. Purposeful.

Or maybe that was just her personality. Maybe she always looked that way.

Mace was acquainted with every member of the CDC team that had studied the living shit out of this big hole in the ground last fall, as well as the local, state and federal police officers who had showed an interest in the case. She wasn’t one of them.

He would have remembered anyone that hot.

No one had made much headway on figuring out what the fuck Kimball was digging for in that cave. The CDC, after studying the info that Fi had decrypted, had several disquieting theories, but so far, nothing actionable. Mace craved action.

One thing was sure. Whatever devilish bullshit Kimball was planning, he was insanely, murderously committed to it. He’d killed upwards of fifty people over the years, and those were just the ones Mace knew about.

And to make matters worse, now Kimball was furious about his friend Nate’s desperate gambit a few months ago. Nate had tricked Kimball and his henchmen into hammering his girlfriend Elisa’s homicidal ex-husband into the ground. It had been a slick and desperate move. Bugfuck crazy, in retrospect, but hey. Nate and Elisa were still alive.

So far, anyhow.

So Kimball was not only furious, but also humiliated. He had GodsEye under constant surveillance, a huge budget, an army of killer goons, cutting edge murder-drones he’d used to strafe the shit out of Elisa’s ex up at Beecham Lake a few months back.

Enter a brand new enigma; a hot girl with mysterious eyes, trotting down the hill toward the excavated cavern, tits bouncing cheerfully. Like she had no clue where she was, and who might be watching. How fucking dangerous it was for her.

She shrugged off her knapsack again and rooted around in it, pulling out an object about as long as her hand. She fiddled with it for a couple of minutes, and then started walking slowly, steadily toward the cavern, holding the device in front of her.

She was following an electronic signal. And she was following it right to the front entrance of the cavern, which had been enlarged and reinforced to permit the investigation.

Oh fuck.

His heart revved in alarm. What was the signal? Where did she get it? And what the hell was she looking for?

Kimball was asking the same questions, right now, in real time.

Possibility A) She was Kimball’s, and she needed to be stopped and interrogated.

Possibility B) She wasn’t Kimball’s, she had some entirely different mysterious agenda, and she needed to be rescued before she got herself captured, tortured and killed.

Either way, he had to get to her fast. Before Kimball did.