Free Jacob's Odyssey (The Berne Project Book 1) by Russ Melrose Page A

crossed my mind that maybe I should knock softly on the door once to see if anyone was home. But it wasn't a serious thought. I was just stalling. A stinging pain pulsed near the surface of my left cheek and I gingerly brushed the wound with the back of my hand. It hurt like hell and part of me couldn't help but wonder what my face looked like now. I was shaken and a bit of a mess, but at least I was still alive.
    After a few more minutes of stalling, I knelt down by the back door and took the backpack off and removed the bat and set it down next to me. The bat would be for protection. I fished the lock pick set out of my pocket and opened the tri-fold and grabbed a tension wrench and the rake pick. The articles I'd read suggested the rake pick would be the easiest pick for amateurs to learn to use. And I'd probably watched the various how-to-pick-a-lock videos fifty or sixty times, so I felt pretty comfortable about what was supposed to happen. It was quite dark in the backyard and I suddenly wished I'd thought about packing a penlight. But it worked out. I managed to fit the tension wrench in the bottom of the keyhole and remembered to maintain a slight amount of tension on the wrench. The wrench would turn and open the lock once the pins were all pushed up. I inserted the rake pick in just above the tension wrench and felt for the pins. I jiggled the rake pick upward again and again. Quite suddenly the alarm stopped and there was just the sound of the rain and the moans. And while I played with the pins, I wondered what a homeowner would do if they knew someone was trying to break into their home. And what if they had a gun? But I knew no one was home here. The tension wrench moved slightly and I kept moving it clockwise just as if I were turning a key to open the door. And then I turned the knob and I was in.

Chapter 4 – Gabriel and Lucifer
    A fragile and disquieting stillness hovered over the valley. For once I didn't hear the ubiquitous moans drifting through the air. And their absence made for a remarkably quiet morning. I couldn't remember it being this quiet since the crisis began and I didn't trust it. It was an anomaly, a counterfeit calm, like dwelling in the eye of a hurricane. And I knew the eerie silence was nothing more than a temporary reprieve. I found the silence more foreboding than calming.
    I sat on a cement back porch underneath a roof-extended awning and waited. A little over a week had passed since I'd first broken into someone's home, and I'd become quite proficient at it. I'd already laid the gun next to the back door and had taken my backpack off. And I'd set the tension wrench and rake pick in the keyhole. Now all I had to do was wait for the air conditioning to come on.
    The shade on the porch was a welcome relief from the late morning sun. And while it wasn't eleven o'clock yet, the temperature was rising quickly. Quite a change from yesterday's dry wind storm. It had been a bizarre, threatening sort of day. Plenty of roiling clouds along with random thunder and lightning, lots of wind, but not a drop of rain. Today was utterly silent. I was a little surprised the air conditioning unit hadn't switched on yet, and I wondered if it was even working. But I realized none of the other air conditioning units in the neighborhood had switched on either. I was simply being impatient. I would use the hum of air conditioners to mask the tinkering sounds I made whenever I picked a lock. And even though I was fairly certain there weren't any infected in the vicinity, I wasn't about to take the chance of them hearing me when I picked the lock, no matter how far away they might be.
    The winds from yesterday's storm had cleared out the hazy valley air and had left today's sky an incredibly pristine blue. It was the kind of beautiful day that would prompt college students to play hooky and drive up one of the canyons with a six pack or take a ride up to Park City. That was before the virus had turned the world