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MAGGIE LOOKED AT HER leg and made a pact with herself. If I survive this, Danny will not. I’ve told him at least a hundred times to organize this mess in the garage. I even put up pegs on a board for him to put away all the tools. Apparently, it was much easier to throw them on the garage floor for anyone to get impaled on. When Maggie had fallen backward, she had fallen onto a pile of lawn maintenance tools, one being a pickax, the nasty end of which now protruded from her thigh. What in the hell did we need a pickax for anyway? So we had a few large rocks in the yard that Mr. Lazy got tired of detouring around in our golf carts. Geez, he even named the golf carts. Ha, haha. Wait a minute. Stop thinking fondly of him, Maggie girl. First think of a way to remove, ugg, the pickax from your thigh without your femoral artery-spurting everywhere. Stop looking at it. Every time you look at it, you want to barf.
Danny and Kevin reached the garage at the same time panting and sweating. “Oh, shit, the security doors are down. What caused them to close?” gasped Kevin.
“With all the explosions and shooting, the house may have gone into security mode or partial security mode. Damn it. Damn it. We will have to get inside and go to the control panel. Where the hell are Humberto and Cathy?” Danny said.
“I’m checking. Cathy just texted back that she and Humberto are with Maggie in the garage. Suzanne and the other hired guns are in the laundry room. The entry from the laundry room to the house is sealed off from an explosion. They are trying to hold them back from entering the garage. Oh God, they found the other formulas. Shit, shit, shit.”
At “they are trying to hold them back,” Danny grabbed Kevin by his collar and started dragging him around the house to the second master bedroom. Melissa was the first to enter it and told the boys that she would take the tunnel and head for garage entrance and help out at that end.
Peering out of the second master bedroom, Danny and Kevin began to slowly exit it. When they saw the carnage the grenade launcher and submachine gun had wrought, they froze in mid-stride, looked at each other, then at the mess at the laundry room entrance and the new skylight in the laundry room, and back at each other. They saw their distraction still standing in the entryway to the laundry room. It would go through several movements. Right now it lunged forward into the kitchen area, almost reaching the kitchen island, which was now on its side.
“Fuck me,” Danny breathed out. “I don’t know if our homeowner’s policy is going to cover this. Let’s go get Maggie. Wait. Did you ask Humberto if they can get Maggie out through the secret passage?”
“God damn it, no. Why can’t I think? Hang on, I’ll call Humberto. See if you can open the garage door remotely from the control room.”
“I think our brains turned to jelly somewhere around the time the kitchen developed a large hole.”
Kevin whipped out his phone and called Humberto. “Secure the door with the truck, Humberto, and get everyone to a place of safety away from stray bullets.
“Kevin, Kevin!” Danny shouted and threw a can of pop at Kevin’s head. “For some reason, the garage door isn’t opening remotely. The mechanism must be damaged or the door is fried. Can they go through the passageway?”
“ Ow, what the fuck, Danny? They are securing the door with the truck, but they don’t know how much firepower they have in there. Due to that being the only exit, it doesn’t look like they are going to give up. Maggie’s leg is in bad shape and she is just oozing blood now, but every time they move her, it starts squirting blood. They are afraid to move her too much. And even with the effects of the formula, they are afraid if they remove the object from her leg, she would have major blood loss before the wound healed. It doesn’t sound like she was shot, more like impaled. What could she have gotten impaled on?”
“Impaled?” Danny squeaked and went pale. “Can’t imagine what she could’ve been impaled on. Right now we need ideas. Ramming the door with the super Merc truck?”
“Would be like ramming a concrete wall. Even our six-wheel silver beast can’t plow through that door.”
“We need more time to open the door or get Maggie into the passageway. Fuck, we are going to have to do it and do it now before the crazies make entry into the garage. They have the other formulas, and you know they will kill everyone in the garage.”
“What do you mean, do ‘it’? Oh, you mean it. Oh, Christ, I don’t know if I can do it, but Maggie, oh, God. We have to do it.”
“Check with Humberto one more time. See what’s going on.”
“ Hello? Humberto? What’s...Fuck. Okay Humberto, look in the cabinet above the weed killer and grass seed on the bench. You see what’s in there? Good, don’t ask questions, just make sure everyone wears one including you. Never mind, just do it.” Kevin turned to Danny, “He heard they are going to blow the door. We have to do it now. Here’s mine. Put on yours.”
“Is this necessary?”
“The door closest to us might not be airtight due to that last explosion. Do you want to take a chance?”
“Right, right, gotcha. Good thinking.”
“Danny took a key he had on a chain he had been wearing around his neck since they first showed Humberto the “Q” room. He locked eyes with Kevin, made the sign of the cross, and, said, “I wonder if it’s lava hot in hell or absolute zero mind-numbing cold,” and entered a sixteen-digit code, which opened a panel on which he placed his thumb. He closed his eyes and said, “We are truly fucked.”
“You can remember a sixteen-digit code but can’t remember anything else. Oh, wait, that was the code. I guess that was appropriate, wasn’t it?”
Kevin had pulled up two screens on the monitors. One of the monitors showed the garage and the other the laundry room. He put his hand on Danny’s shoulder and told him in a somewhat muffled voice, “Well, Danny, we will just have to pack for either climate, and you know you won’t be alone. We both designed this room, and we knew in the back of our minds that it might come to this, although not with people inside. Well, we hoped there wouldn’t be people inside. But look on the bright side. At least we are not the ones inside.”
They both looked up at the monitor for the laundry room.
Danny and Kevin told Humberto that in a few minutes they would try to make entry through the overhead garage door. Danny would come through the tunnel with some C4 and anything else he could think of to blow the door, and Kevin would try to blow it from the outside.