Page 110 of The Chain House

Another gunshot sounded from somewhere in the house.

Beth flinched at the sound, and for the briefest of moments must have eased off on her grip. The chain slipped in her hands. He moved his right hand far enough to grab the wine bottle beside his chair, and then it came out of nowhere, crashing across her brow like the impact of a car wreck, and the bottle shattered and blood, mixed with merlot, sprayed across the floor.

CHAPTER63

TREVOR KNEW INSTANTLY that the house wasn’t right.

The inside appeared as meticulously kept and clean as the grounds outside. Not a crumb graced the shiny marble countertops. Not a grain of dust touched the baseboards or ceiling fans or the dozens of bookshelves that filled nearly every wall, inside the dining room and living room and study. The air smelled of potpourri and fresh chocolate chip cookies and flowering indoor plants.

But the chains connected to the walls weren’t right, the way they lay, meandering, around the floors of each room like heavy lifeless snakes, the end of each chain marked by distinct ankle bracelets.

Lizzie had shot two men dead already, with no hesitation, as they’d emerged, one from a stairwell and the other from what Trevor assumed was a garage. It had been thirty seconds since she’d shot the second one and so far, no other captors had come at them. The rest, they assumed, had all left in the caravan.

But neither of the two men had been Justice Minks.

Perhaps he’d been in one of the fleeing caravans, but Trevor didn’t think so. They heard a man scream, somewhere inside the house, soon after they’d entered it, and now, the walls seemed to be whimpering.

“You hear that?” Lizzie asked, gun poised. “Voices.”

“Yeah,” said Trevor, his bloody bat over one shoulder as he eased toward a room and nudged the door open with his foot to see a vast, high-ceilinged bedroom with a four-post king-size bed, the bedspread made and tucked, pillows stacked to perfection, the entire room like something out of a magazine.

“Trevor,” Lizzie said from outside the bedroom.

Trevor ducked back into the hallway, where Lizzie had opened another door that led to a long hallway marked by numerous doors on either side.

And the whimpering grew louder.

It wasn’t coming from the walls.

But the rooms.

So many rooms.

CHAPTER64

“DEAD MAN WALKING!” shouted a guard.

Sam stood with Jennifer at the window inside Warden Wren’s office overlooking the yard, where guard towers cast angled beams of light toward the center of it all.

Two guards escorted Sal Batise toward the stone wall that bordered the basketball court and turned him to face his four executioners, four guards who stood fifteen paces away holding, what to Sam, looked like machine guns.

Words were exchanged between Warden Wren and the four executioners, and then between Warden Wren and the news crew, and then finally Warden Wren approached Sal Batise, and the two of them stood talking.

Batise looked up toward the center tower, toward the warden’s office, toward Sam and Jennifer and Agent Givens and Governor Hawthorne at the window, and Sam froze.

Jennifer, beside him, grabbed his hand and held it.

Carl, behind them, didn’t want to watch, and was still bringing in news of more diversion fires across the country. “ADX Florence in Colorado, the Alcatraz of the Rockies. Fires near USP Atlanta, San Quentin, Sing Sing …”

Agent Givens checked his watch. “Two minutes. Governor, you need to stop this.”

CHAPTER65

TREVOR AND LIZZIE opened one door after the next, and to their horror, every room held a captive—male, female, didn’t matter—with each one not only alive and in various conditions of declining health, both mental and physical, but chained to more than one anchor.

Each prisoner was shackled by chains that burrowed through walls and ceilings and floors, and they all begged for help.

Trevor and Lizzie promised they’d return, but first, they had to find Beth Hawthorne.