15

            From outside, home appeared as Anthony had left it.  Soft light glowed at the windows, and the porch lamp was on, fat moths batting against the fixture.

            Anthony parked in the garage, but left the door up.  He’d left the driveway gate open, too.  Planning ahead.            

            Before going inside, he looked toward the front of the house.  There was nothing out of the ordinary, just sporadic traffic breezing past on a Friday night.

            Driving back, he hadn’t noticed a tail.  But if these people had the technological resources that Bob claimed, they wouldn’t have needed to trail him.  A run against his license plates, which he was increasingly convinced was why the Latina woman had followed him to his truck, would give up his street address.

            Gun drawn, he rushed inside.  No signs of forced entry downstairs.  Good.

            Upstairs in the master bedroom, Lisa lay atop a blue exercise ball, mechanically burning through the set of three hundred crunches she performed each night before hitting the sack.  She was something of a fitness fanatic, doing her Pilates and running on the treadmill and working out on the exercise ball, determined to beat back the inevitable pull of gravity and age. 

            He hoped she had some gas left in her tank, because tonight might get hairy.             

            He holstered his gun.  “Lisa, we’ve gotta talk.”

            Fingers interlaced behind her head, she twisted around to look at him, short of breath.  “Hey.  Heard you come in.  How’d it go?”

            He hadn’t called her during his drive home.  He’d driven so fast that speaking on the phone might’ve distracted him, led to him wrapping the SUV around a tree.  Besides, this was the kind of conversation they needed to have face-to-face.

            He said, “I need you to do something, right this second, and we don’t have time to go over lots of questions.”

            “Huh?”  She bounced off the ball.  “What’re you talking about?  What happened at The Varsity?”

            “I need you to get dressed and pack a suitcase with enough clothes for a couple of days, stuff for the both of us.  Pack only the necessities.  Light clothes we can move fast in.”

“What?”

            “Bob is legit, Lisa.  Some big, extremist religious organization, a cult or whatever, is at the bottom of things.  I noticed two of the members there—they saw me, and I think they’re coming here.”

            “Baby, please, slow down—”

            “We don’t have time!  Don’t argue with me, okay, just trust me and do what I say.  I’ll explain everything later, but we have to get the hell out of here.”

            She stared at him, as if convinced that he was playing a joke and she was waiting for the punch line.  When he didn’t laugh or smile, her gaze faltered.

            “You aren’t kidding,” she said.

            “No.  We’ve gotta get moving.  Now.  Please.”

            “This is nuts.”  But she made a beeline to the walk-in closet.

            He opened the nightstand drawer on his side of the bed and dug out the Smith & Wesson .357 he kept stored inside.  He swung open the cylinder; the five-shooter was already loaded with hollow-points.  As Lisa came back into the bedroom dragging a piece of carry-on luggage, he handed the gun to her.

            She hesitated.  “Is this necessary?”

            “It might be.  Take it.”

            Reluctantly, she accepted the revolver.  She knew how to handle firearms—at his insistence, she accompanied him to the firing range every month—but she’d never been a big fan of them.  She seemed offended by the idea that ordinary civilians would want to keep guns in their house, and she merely tolerated his preoccupation with them.

            “Keep it close while you pack,” he said.  “I’m going to the basement to grab a few more things.”

            “Okay.”      

            He could read from her eyes and voice that she didn’t believe they were in danger, that she might have even worried that he’d finally gone over the deep end.  That was fine with him, so long as she did what he asked.

            On the way downstairs, he looked outside a front window.  The only person on the street was a neighbor of theirs who liked to walk with his German Shepherd at late-night hours. 

            He turned a dial beside the doorway to brighten the porch light.  Anyone creeping outdoors would be caught in the glare, might be less likely to boldly approach the house.

            In his office, he unplugged the laptop, wrapped the power cord around the machine, and thrust them both into a large canvas satchel that hung on the back of the door.  He dropped the satchel on the floor and he went to the electronically secured door at the far end of the office. 

            He punched a six-digit code into the keypad.  There was a beep, and the lock disengaged with a click.

            The custom made oak door, reinforced with a steel core, was heavy.  When he pushed it open, the familiar fumes of metal, oil, and gunpowder met his nostrils. 

            He switched on the overhead fluorescents.  The room was about the size of the walk-in closet in the master suite.  It contained a few items of clothing, but mostly it contained guns.

            A stainless steel rack on the left held a collection of six rifles and shotguns: two Winchester rifles, a Mossberg twelve-gauge shotgun, a Remington, a Weatherby Athena, a Springfield tactical rifle. 

            On the right, six handguns hung from hooks, an assortment of revolvers and semi-autos: a Glock 19, a Walther PPK, a Beretta M9 like the one he kept in his car, a Colt .45, a Heckler & Koch 9mm, a .50 caliber Desert Eagle.

            Assorted Ka-Bar knives were arrayed on a stand beneath the handguns.  A large metal cabinet in the corner of the space housed ammunition for every firearm. 

            His Marine Corps saber, sheathed in its leather scabbard, occupied a prominent spot on the far wall. 

            Another metal case contained night vision binoculars, a utility flashlight, and other accessories.  The pieces of clothing, dangling from hangers, included his Marine dress blues, concealable body armor, and a camouflage outfit.  His olive-green duffel bag lay on the concrete floor, beside a pair of well-worn combat boots.

            He’d only ever allowed Lisa and his closest friends into the room.  Only those in his inner circle understood his interest—perhaps it had become his obsession—in amassing weaponry like a survivalist living in a remote mountain-top cabin and awaiting Armageddon. 

            Although Bob had warned him to keep moving, he could have opted to load all his weapons and turn his house into a fighting hole.  But he didn’t know enough about who he was dealing with, and if they were as well-equipped and ruthless as Bob had suggested, they might drop a nerve agent in the ventilation system and render him helpless, cut the power to the house and break in under cover of darkness, or flush him out with a series of hand grenades.

            Going on the run was, at the moment, the only strategy that made sense.

            He selected three different handguns, shoved them into the duffel, and dragged the bag to the ammo cabinet.  He unlocked the doors and pulled out dozens of rounds of ammo for each firearm, dumped them in, too.

            From the accessories bin, he took night vision binoculars, a flashlight, and other equipment that might come in handy.  He grabbed the body armor vest off the hanger.

            Lastly, at the far end of the closet, beneath his saber, he knelt to what appeared to be a large air filter grille set in the wall near the floor. 

The aluminum grille was actually the front of a wall safe, and opened like a hinged door when he pulled a miniature lever at the bottom edge.

            He swung out the front panel, did three quick twists on the combination lock, and opened the safe.

            Rubber-banded packets of cash, in denominations of twenties, fifties, and hundreds, lay stacked inside, totaling approximately twenty thousand dollars. 

            Every day that he left the cash in the safe, the relentless march of inflation nibbled away at its value.  Keeping the money in a high-interest bearing savings account would have been the financially savvy move. 

            But in a desperate situation, he wouldn’t have immediate access to the money.  In a world where computer viruses could sucker-punch financial systems, where Category Five hurricanes could tear through cities and send hordes of people swarming to banks to fund their escapes, you couldn’t count on an ATM or a financial institution to save you in a tight spot.

            Paranoid?  Yeah, he’d known that it was a bit crazy even as he was socking the money away.  But now he was glad that he’d done it.

            He removed five bundles, about five thousand dollars worth, and dropped them in the bottom of the duffel.

            His watch read twenty past eleven.  He’d been home for only fifteen minutes, but the seconds were advancing at hyper-speed.

            After securing the closet door, he hustled across the office, grabbed the satchel off the floor, and ran upstairs.