22
The ‘off’ feeling doesn’t leave me when we enter the house because I immediately search for the rose stem and don’t see it. My rational mind tries to make sense of it all. Maybe whoever typically leaves the rose stem got sick of us rejecting it. Fair enough. But also, because it’s still reasonably light and we can see without using the light on our phones, maybe the different time is upsetting my inner bearings.
We wheel the trolley to the basement door, and a pungent gas stench strikes me. “Do you smell that?” I whisper to Z, who pauses at the door and screws her face up.
“Yeah,” she replies, gazing down the hall to the empty bedroom at the end. “Maybe they’ve already done some cleaning.”
“That doesn’t smell like cleaning chemicals,” I argue as my feet refuse to budge because my instincts work overtime. The time is wrong. The SUV is wrong. There is no rose. The smell is wrong. If nothing is right, the best option is to flee, even if I’m proven wrong. “Z, I’m just getting bad vibes right now.”
“Eh? How can you get good vibes from cleaning up a fucking bloody murder?” she exclaims, and I flinch at the sharpness of her tone. I know she’s not being deliberately rude, but this situation is making both of us uneasy.
“I know. I know,” I cave to her commonsense. “You’re right, Z.”
“I know I’m right,” she answers, but her hesitation is evident when she doesn’t open the basement door. “That stench is pretty strong.”
“What should we do?” I ask as my skin prickles, and I keep looking behind me, expecting someone to be there.
“Um,” she dithers, pressing her against the basement door. “Stand back.” I do as she suggests and return to the kitchen while removing the mop from her trolley. “On three, I’ll push the door open with this, giving us time to duck for cover.”
“What are you expecting to be in there?” I enquire as my nerves rip my stomach lining to shreds.
“Ah, maybe a ghost. A fanged monster. Smiler himself. Greta Thunberg,” she replies comically, placing the mop head on the door. Z often uses humor to deal with stressful situations, and I laugh at how ludicrous this is.
“Greta Thunberg?” I exclaim as Z pushes the door open and hesitates as if waiting for an explosion.
“You have stolen my dreams,” Z does her best Greta impersonation. “How dare you.” Her demeanor changes when she peers behind the open door, shrugs, then glances back at me. “It’s dark but doesn’t stink as bad as down here.”
“Doesn’t it smell like blood and feces?” I enquire, finding that peculiar.
“Maybe there’s less blood this time,” she argues, opening the door wider and placing the mop back in the trolley to drag it down the basement stairs.
I feel a little better, but I am still not satisfied. “I’m going to ask Blake to come down,” I tell her, finding my phone in my pocket under a layer of PPE.
“Okay, ruin our girl’s night out, why don’t ya,” she jokes and steps down the wooden as I quickly flick Blake a text: can u come down here, please? Doing a job for Smiler. Things r weird.
I sent him the address before following Z down the stairs into the dank basement. The scent of gas is definitely fainter down here, so someone must’ve had a spill upstairs. What’s even more concerning is-
“I think you’re right. There’s something weird going on,” Z states, standing in the middle of a clean floor. No blood. No guts. No smiley face in the blood. Nothing. “Why the fuck did they message us to come here when…” she finds her phone as I walk down each step onto the floor, carrying the cleaning supplies. “Did I make a mistake?”
When movement catches my eye, I glance up at the narrow window, but I may have been mistaken. Honestly, I’m relieved if Z has got it wrong because then I can go home, and maybe Gabe will be there. That explains why there was no rose stem and the wrong vehicle parked down the road.
Her mouth drops open, utterly perplexed, holding her phone out, then glancing about the floor as if searching for something, my guess, blood. “This is bizarre,” she exclaims confused. “Correct address. Correct time. But not a speck of blood.” She turns around in a circle, searching for a splash of scarlet or even a wet patch. “Nothing.”
“Good,” I sigh, eager to leave. “Shall we grab a drink in the bar?”
She barely hears me, as it’s obvious this is haunting her, and I know why. We can’t get it wrong, we have to obey Smiler, or we’re screwed. But we can’t get paid for cleaning up blood, guts, and feces when there’s no blood and guts and feces to clean.
“I…” She is dumbfounded and dithered a few beats before concluding, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do. We’ll clean the floor and walls and then leave. If Smiler’s men ask questions, we’ll tell them the truth, right?” She looks terrified, which makes me even more nervous.
“Right. Let’s get to work,” I exclaim, forcing a cheerful tone to affirm her decision. “And then we’ll go to a bar afterward.”
“Okay,” she answers, pouring disinfectant into the bucket, then hands it to me to run back up the stairs to fill it with water from the kitchen sink.
Heavy footsteps on the floor above us force me to freeze dead on the second step. “We’ve got company,” I glance back at Z, who’s staring at the basement door, waiting for it to swing open.
Z swallows as she raises the mop to use it as a weapon. FFS. Why the fuck didn’t I bring my Glock. Every single fucking time.
“Blake?” she whispers hopefully, checking my phone to find he hasn’t replied.
“I don’t know,” I answer quietly. “You know it’s easy to break into this place, so…it could be nosy troublemakers.”
“Well, I hope Smiler’s lackeys can see the house has an invader,” she says as her eyes remain fixed on the door, expecting it to open.
The heavy footsteps stop and fade as if moving further away toward the front door. “Maybe it is Smiler’s lackeys casing the joint.”
We stare at the basement door as the footsteps stop dead, and I run back up the stairs to level with the narrow window cut into the wall that sits just above the ground. Unfortunately, I can only see my reflection because it’s pretty dark outside, but something smells like burning wood.
“Fuck,” Z snaps, pointing to the basement door, and I drop my eyes to the sight of smoke streaming through the seams.
I ran to the door, pressed my palm against the wood to see how hot it was, and then tried the handle. It was warm but not blistering hot. Slowly, I opened the door and saw nothing but smoke, but the smell of burning wood and the sound of popping and cracking as the fire ate into the building.
Pulling my PPE mask over my mouth and nose, I step out into the hallway to determine where the fire is located and immediately notice the kitchen area lit up with flickering, blight flames.
“Fire!” I scream to Z. “In the kitchen. We need to get out now.”
“The backdoor,” she yells back, abandoning the cleaning supplies and running up the stairs as I wave the smoke away with my hand, run down the hall toward the end bedroom, and turn left to the backdoor.
“Damn,’ I hit in a panic to find a discarded refrigerator had been placed in front of the door as if this was planned.
The fire is spreading fast and becoming more intense. Windows smash from the heat as the wall panels curl up and melt like ice. Together, Z and I try to move the refrigerator awkwardly in such a tight space and manage to shuffle it out of the way so that it slips behind to get to the wooden door. I seize the handle and turn it, but the door refuses to budge. Meanwhile, the fire is spreading and coming our way, consuming everything in its path.
Z attempts to kick the door open, but there’s not enough room between the fridge and the door for her to get a good enough. So, we try to drag the fridge back even further toward the empty bedroom to give us more space, but the smoke is now so stifling and suffocating, even with our masks on, that we’re struggling to breathe.
Our only option is to fall back and return to the basement and hope, like heck, we’ll be untouched since fire moves upward rather than downward. The fire is dangerously close, licking over every surface and unbearable heat; my skin feels as though it's blistering just by being near the flames.
Stooped over, we arrive at the basement door, kick it open, and run down the stairs to an untouched space. Now, smoke billows through the doorway, which will soon be burnt to a crisp in minutes.
Just as we’re composing ourselves, deciding what our next move should be, a boot smashes through the narrow window, and we scream, shrinking back to the farthest wall of the basement.
We’re completely screwed now. Our only way out of here is through a deadly fire, and once again, I scold myself for not bringing my Glock with me.
Clutching each other, I search desperately for an item to fight off the perp and grab the mop as Z picks up the large container of hospital-grade disinfectant. As soon as Bootman pokes his head through the broken window, we’ll smack him with the mop and disinfectant container.
“Ready?” Z gasps as the basement is quickly filling with smoke.
I nod. “Yes,” I say, raising the mob. We can see that someone is shuffling outside the window, and there are murmurs of male voices and distant shouting.
“Rae!” one of those voices calls out, panicked.
“Blake?” I reply breathlessly, wondering if I misheard. The crackling and snapping of the house being eaten alive by fire drown out other sounds, and maybe I’m imagining it in my desperation to be saved.
“Rae?” His voice is closer. Then I see his face, brown eyes filled with fear and relief when he spots me. He uses a jacket to clear away the rest of the glass. “I’m coming in.”
It’s a tight squeeze, but Blake manages to slide through the narrow window space, feet first and lands on the ground like he’s done this a hundred times before.
“We need to be quick,” he prompts us, grabbing the cleaning bucket and tipping it upside-down under the window. “Zara, get up.” He points to the bucket and glances up at the basement door, looking concerned. “I’ll give you a boost. Gabe is on the other side.”
“Gabe? Gabe is here?” I wheeze as I rub my stinging eyes with the base of my palms, and the smoke is irritating my throat, eyes, and nose.
“Watch where you put those hands, mister,” Z blasts Blake comically as he pushes her up and through the window space, and strong hands on the other side grab Z’s forearms and easily drag her through, vanishing from my sight.
“Next,” Blake rushes me as I step up on the overturned bucket and push my butt so I’m boosted upward into the clasps of Gabe.
I see his muscular forearms before I see his face, but when I do, those blue eyes are filled with fear. “Are you injured?” he asks, running those eyes over my body draped in PPE.
“No,” I answer as he kneels back down to help Blake.
“Good. Clear out and run to the opposite side of the road, Rae,” he demands, “furthest away from the house as possible.”
Now, I’m outside, I can see the house is engulfed in flames, and the roof is about to cave in. I find Zara hugging herself under the canopy of trees on the opposite side of the road. “I’m so sorry,” she splutters under tears.
“What? How is this your fault, Z?” I say, wrapping my arms around her short body.
“Because you said something wasn’t right, and I ignored you,” she shrills, obviously upset. We watch Blake and Gabe move quickly away from the house just as the roof caves in. Sirens bleed in the distance, coming closer as black smoke billows into the night air.
“Oh, hush,” I instruct my bestie. “You know this shit is crazy anyway. How were you supposed to know that some nutjob was going to set the place on fire?”
As we walked up the drive, I searched for the SUV parked down the road and noticed it was gone. It was not the same shiny black vehicle that we were used to seeing. Instead, it was an older model in midnight blue.
I think we were set up by who, I don’t know.
“Z,” I start as Gabe and Blake cross the road to check on us. “Was it the same number?”
“Huh?” she asks, breathing into my shoulder as her body trembles from the entire ordeal.
“The text number from the guy who informs you when there’s a job to attend to. Was it the same number as normal?” I ask cautiously as a firetruck arrives, blocking my view of the inferno.
“Yes, that’s why I kept thinking that we were being paranoid with all the weird stuff going on,” she explains, as Gabe’s gaze aligns with mine, and he smiles sympathetically.
“Then…why the fuck would our boss, Smiler, suddenly turn against us?” I whisper so Gabe can’t hear, watching the firefighters quickly pile out from the truck and get to work.
“I don’t know,” she groans, unable to lift her head from my shoulder because she feels so guilty that we almost died, and she blames herself.