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ONCE KEVIN AND BOND had entered the house, Kevin clapped his hands together, and announced, “Millwood somehow traced Bond and then us to all the houses. He sent out that tactical team to help us. He also intercepted Humberto’s team, which was supposed to meet us here and got lost instead. They are all waiting for us at our house.”
“I don’t know. We survived this long. I don’t want to jump into a hail of bullets. Why is Millwood involved in this?” asked Melissa.
Maggie paced back and forth running her fingers through her hair, “I agree with Melissa. What if this is a trap? I wish there were a way to see what is going on over there. Now I regret vetoing Danny and Kevin’s idea of cameras in the house.”
“Yes, I’m sorry that Maggie, and I voted against you two,” agreed Melissa.
Danny and Kevin had moved away from Melissa and Maggie and were having a very animated nonverbal discussion with much head nodding and shaking. Finally, the standoff ended with Kevin asking, through gritted teeth and much to Danny’s amazement without moving his lips, “What this comes down to is who are you most afraid of, Maggie and Melissa, or Mr. Millwood and what he is up to?”
Danny paused to look at Melissa and Maggie, who had noticed Danny and Kevin’s furtive discussion and were now staring at them, arms crossed. Danny took a deep breath, held it, looked at the ceiling for advice, apparently found it, exhaled, and said, “Ladies, this is not the time to discuss what was agreed upon by whom, when, and by how many. Now is the time for action. I suggest we find out what Mr. Millwood is up to and that time is now. At a later time, far off in the future, we can revisit this conversation and decide on any, or possibly no, recriminations.”
Maggie, who was used to Danny speak, was already advancing on him, while Danny was backing up. Kevin had slowly been moving away from Danny during his little speech. Melissa was trying to figure out what Danny had just said.
“Kevin Montgomery, Daniel Kensington, where do you two think you two are going? Stop right where you are,” Maggie said. “So you two did put video surveillance in the main house, specifically knowing that Melissa and I vetoed the idea. I am beyond angry.”
“Sorry, babe. Like I said kill us later, but now we have to see what’s going on,” Danny said in a rush as he climbed over a recliner and dashed into the study. There Danny opened the casing on a barometer sitting on a bookcase against the wall and turned the hand to the right, then to the left, and back to the right again. When the hand rested somewhere in the fair zone, the bookcase slid apart revealing a circular stairway.
Melissa uttered a faint, “Son of a bitch.”
Kevin pushed a button on the wall, and the stairway lit up. “Follow us to our man cave.”
Maggie had recovered from her initial shock and was in full rant, “Man cave? How in the hell did we not know this was here? When did you build this man cave? Melissa, we really need to keep a closer eye on our men.”
“Actually this area was already here. We just put a staircase down into it. Once we cleared it out, it turned out to be quite nice,” Kevin said, shot Melissa a look, and hurried down the steps.
“Cleared what out?” Melissa growled as she poked Kevin repeatedly in the back, following him down the winding stairs to the bottom of a rather spacious underground room.
“Umm, you know, just stuff. Somebody ages ago had used this for storing things. Ow, Melissa, stop! Ow! Geez, I don’t remember this stairway being so lengthy or painful” Kevin yelped as he jumped down the last three steps.
“Like what? I want details.”
“Just stuff, old equipment, ammo, baggies, scales, a couple of skele....” Kevin’s voice trailed off he saw that Melissa had turned her attention to the actual room.
Danny, who’d reached the bottom step first had flipped a switched and turned on a series of overhead lights.
“Holy moly, it’s like Spectre’s lair in here,” cried Melissa whose fingers had frozen inches away from flicking Kevin’s ear. She spun slowly to take in the room, which was approximate size of a roomy, three-car garage. At the bottom of the stairs, was a pair of game playing video chairs sat across from a massive flat screen TV attached to the wall. Numerous game controls and opened game boxes littered the floor in front of the chairs. A mini refrigerator sat alongside the TV, along with a microwave. A generator sat in a corner of the room. Several thick patterned throw rugs covered the dirt floor. Support beams had been covered in light tan paneling, with the walls covered with, something Melissa recognized.
“Hey, are those our Egyptian cotton 1800 thread count sheets? I’ve been looking everywhere for them. You said you spilled something on them.”
Kevin, thinking madly, blurted out, “Well, er, I did, I spilled a large coffee on them. You can still see the stain, which is why I used them in here. Spectre’s lair? Really? Hey, thanks, it is kinda cool, isn’t it?’
In the far corner of the lair, a dozen small monitors and one large monitor were arrayed. Maggie walked over to them fell into one of the two chairs that faced the monitors and keyboard. In a very calm even voice, she said, “This is the main house. The house that we agreed was only to have exterior cameras. No interior cameras. We all agreed to that, remember?”
“Oh crap, Maggie’s using her calm voice. We are so very, very dead,” Danny whispered to Kevin who had ducked away from Melissa and huddled with Danny.
“Do you see any armed tactical people in or outside of the house?” Humberto asked as he approached the monitors. He was cleaning his glasses on his shirt, forgetting how filthy he and his clothing was, and flung them off his face when he saw only mud through his lenses. “You would think that if Mr. Millwood were going to harm anyone, he would’ve gotten rid of my people as soon as they entered the house or as they arrived.”
Kevin cautiously approached the monitors and stood clear of Maggie. He checked the exterior cameras and motion detectors. The motion detectors hadn’t gone off for any large man-sized mammals. Kevin explained to Humberto that he had rigged the system to put out an alert anytime the perimeter had been breached. So far all the warnings had been for all those accounted for inside the house.
“Speaking of everyone accounted for, where’s Bond?” asked Melissa.
Kevin looked around. He moved to the foot of the staircase and shouted for Bond realizing he had found the passageway. “He’s coming now. Hey, if you are going to make a sandwich, you can make them for everyone!” he shouted up the stairs.
Bond had made himself a sandwich while everyone else had made their way into the man cave, and then wandered around until he had found the opening in the bookcase. As Bond descended the staircase, he saw the man cave/lair and became so excited he ran down the stairs. He stood awestruck in the middle of the room. Melissa grabbed him and sat him down in the second chair in front of the monitors.
“Of course Humberto’s people could just be bait for us, so we would give him the formula we sold to the Chinese. Or he made the same mistake that those mercenaries did and thought those rejects are real formulas rather than the Jekyll/Hyde mess they are. I don’t know how he would know about those formulas unless he was either monitoring or working with those crazies. It seems we are back to not really knowing what Mr. Millwood wants of us.” Melissa said. She planted her hands on the arms of Bond’s chair and looked him in the eye. “What have you told him and did you contact him or did he contact you, and how much does he know?”
Bond had been happily enjoying his sandwich and ogling the man cave when the wrath of Melissa turned on him. The soft bread defied gravity and clung to the roof of his mouth, making it nearly impossible for him to speak or swallow. “Missa, uv got it all bwong,” Bond mumbled and tried to remove the bread with his tongue, succeeding only in getting a tongue cramp. He put up his finger in the universal, “Hold on one goddamned minute” sign, turned his head to the side, and plucked the challah bread from the roof of his mouth. With a universal groan of disgust, the group turned away. “Well that’s better,” Bond sighed. “Now, Melissa, you’ve got it all wrong. Mr. Millwood contacted me much to my surprise and horror. He felt that all our lives, not to mention billions of others, were at stake. He said something about a Malthusian catastrophe. It’s...”
“Yes, yes, get to the point, we know all about that,” snapped Humberto who had retrieved his glasses and was searching his pockets for an eyeglass cleaning spray and cloth. He knew he packed them in one of his numerous pockets.
“Okay, don’t get all snippy. Mr. Millwood is looking out for all our best interests. You know that quote, ‘the good of the many outweighs the good of the few or the one’? Well, in this case,..”
Danny interrupted Bond. “I don’t like where this is going. Are we part of the many or the few? Self-sacrifice is always cool and noble in movies, but in reality, it would really suck if it was us who had to do the sacrificing.”
Bond glared at Danny and continued. “Let me finish. Mr. Millwood was talking about the mysterious people from whom we can only assume are from our and other governments who wish to take out large numbers of people in the hope of restoring the population to an acceptable level.
Their new saying is, ‘The good of the few outweighs the good of many,’ with the few being someone Humberto has met and those like him. They don’t want to work on the problem; they would rather de-populate and start over with a select few. Of course, they would be included in the surviving group. Mr. Millwood wants to protect you from these monsters and expose them at the same time while also saving a large percentage of the population. He wishes to collaborate with Danny and Kevin on a formula that can turn this mess around. He has some promising ideas but needs your specific skills from when you two worked on Lexi’s drug manufacturing side. With a new formula and Mr. Millwood’s evidence exposing these monsters, a catastrophe may be averted. He has compiled evidence against various government figures on their heinous plan, and he believes they will be too busy blaming each other and covering their own asses to annihilate the world.”
“How do we know, we can trust you, and what’s the proof you are talking about?” asked Melissa.
“I asked Mr. Millwood the same question. Humberto, did you report to someone regarding scenarios?” Bond asked.
“Yes, I reported to the boss of one of the guys that tried to kill us that ended up in the laundry room,” Humberto said and shivered. Cathy squeezed his shoulder gently. Humberto turned, gave her a crooked smile, took a deep breath and continued, “Joe that was his name. Joe was the number one guy of the individual I just knew him as the Boss. I never knew his name. He wanted worst case probabilities on how the formula would affect the world and the world population, and then ideas on how to control said population.”
“Well, your meetings were being overheard by people all over the world in positions of power like that boss. They all had the same agenda. They all wanted to find scapegoats for the horrible mess the world had gotten itself into. Guess who they picked?”
Humberto had found his glass cleaner and wipes and was in a much better mood. He put on his clean glasses and replied, “Yes, we know that’s what Joe and Suzanne’s little visit was all about. Laying the blame and then eliminating us to make the governments look good, like they were on top of the situation and were handling the crisis.”
“Mr. Millwood has some unusual friends apparently, and he was able to take part in these meetings, and record said meetings,” Bond informed. “They thought they were careful, but the society of sociopaths got pretty graphic in what it wanted to be done and how to go about it. During one of these meetings, heck, during most of these meetings, there were screaming arguments about what should be done and how large segments of the population should be annihilated, and high-level names were dropped as well as what countries to start with. People are going to be extremely eager to make sure these recordings never get out in full. According to Mr. Millwood, all your family members will be protected as part of the deal regarding holding portions of the recordings back. Mr. Millwood has been worried about everyone’s safety for some time now. It was Mr. Millwood’s team that came to Maggie’s rescue. They had been in the general area in case they were needed. He also says he has a yet unnamed person who will take the fall for this whole mess regarding the leak of the formula and the fact that it was poorly tested. Apparently, the first responders at the house found some poor schmuck they caught red-handed with evidence in hand.”
“Who could that be? All our people are accounted for. What do you guys think? A few of us could go to the main house and feel things out, I suppose. I will go. Who else wants to go with?” Melissa asked and heard...
Deafening silence
“Oh my God, stop, all of you. One at a time, I can’t hear because all of you so-called friends are volunteering all at once.”
“It just occurred to me, love of my life, glorious creature with whom I could not live without, whose beauty rivals.” Kevin began.
“Oh for God’s sake, Kevin, just spit it out!” shouted Melissa.
“Yes, well then. Something occurs to me about what Bond said earlier about Mr. Millwood knowing the location of all our houses. If that is true and if Mr. Millwood had nasty intentions, he would’ve had people waiting for us here or dispatched here by now to eliminate us. I say we bring along necessary precautions and head on over to home sweet home. Cathy, you have been watching the monitors and listening in, have you heard anything sinister at the house? Cathy! Cathy, why are you drooling?”
“They are just about to sit down in your dining room to have steak, ham, garlic potatoes, pasta salad, and Caesar salad. Wait, I’m zooming in. And it, also looks like rolls fresh out of the oven and pretzel bread.”
Joshua and Anthony, who had been sitting in the video playing chairs, were nearly trampled by the hungry herd racing for the circular staircase.