Free The Secret: A Thriller by David Haywood Young

I was not going to willingly lead the hunters—or anyone else—back to the basement.
    Besides. I’d made a promise to what was left of Tim’s family. I couldn’t go back to them yet.
    I had to check my house for a note from Susie.
     

Chapter Seven
     
    P eering from under a bush, again, I saw no movement near the Conways’ house. Again. I sighed and worked my way around to their backyard, then stepped out of the brush and walked up to their porch. Then I crept around to check out my house across the street.
    But this wasn’t to be a repeat of my uneventful earlier visit after all: I could see bodies in my front yard.
    I stood by the Conways’ house for a long time, watching up and down the street. Nothing seemed to be happening. Eventually I started walking across the street.
    I recognized one of the bodies when I got closer—it was the scraggly-haired new neighbor who’d watched so intently as we unpacked the truck. There was another guy lying in the grass, but I couldn’t see enough of his face to identify the body. If I’d even known him.
    There was a strange pickup in my driveway, facing out and with the tailgate down. It had some tools, a wide-screen television, and a bicycle in its bed. All of which were mine.
    I was focused on the house, watching to see whether anyone—or anything—was going to jump out at me. And at the same time I tried to listen for an attack from the rear.
    But…seriously? They came to rob my house, with everything that was going on, and they took the damned TV?
     
    * * *
     
    I knocked on the wall beside my already-open front door. “Hello? Anybody in there?”
    Nothing. Silence.
    I didn’t want to, but I went inside. A lot of stuff was trashed, and somebody had taken a dump in the middle of our kitchen floor. I moved quickly, .45 in hand, but didn’t find any people inside.
    But the note Tim had left for Susie, asking her to let us know where she was…was gone. Did that mean the idiots out front had stolen it too? Or had she come in, found it, and been as leery of writing down her hiding place as we’d been of revealing ours? I couldn’t even guess.
    I searched the house carefully for the note we’d left, but found nothing. While I was there, I tried to turn on the water at our kitchen sink. Nothing.
    Outside, I found a 12-gauge Winchester shotgun but no ammunition in the idiots’ truck. Climbing back out of it, I knew what I needed to do. First I went into our backyard shed and spilled a little of the gas we kept for mowing the lawn on my fingers, and then I rubbed it under my nose.
    Back out front, I squatted next to the bodies. I didn’t want to do this. But I really needed to know whether they had the note.
    They didn’t actually smell too terrible yet. The gasoline was probably a case of the cure being worse than the disease. But when I moved Scraggly’s arm so I could check his pockets I nearly threw up. Not that I’d eaten anything today—bad planning there, maybe, but just at the moment it was okay to have an empty stomach.
    Focus, Ash. Never mind the self-distraction. I emptied his pockets, and found nothing. I moved the body around to make sure the note wasn’t underneath, and then eyed Scraggly’s buddy with disfavor.
    That one was much worse. On the bright side, some of his pockets had been ripped open already. On the other, some important parts of him were shredded or missing…parts he’d certainly have wanted to keep handy if he’d been alive. I gritted my teeth and poked through what was left.
    Eventually I sat back. All I’d found for my trouble was a rusty Ruger .357 revolver and three rounds of ammunition. The gun probably hadn’t been fired recently—I sniffed it and couldn’t be sure, but there was no used brass in its cylinder. So, whatever had torn these two idiots apart hadn’t given them time to shoot.
    Or maybe they’d had time but hadn’t used it. I figured there was no way to know. Given that they were out to steal a television,