Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

anonymous tip-off to the police so they can come here and let the prisoners go.

Call it an eighty per cent chance of killing Fred quietly. Then another eighty per cent for each of the others. That’s about a one in four chance of taking them all out. And I’ve already left it too late. Fred is expecting it now.

I swing the hammer. Medium speed. Not fast enough to hit him, not slow enough that he can’t make his point.

His hand shoots out like a striking snake, and suddenly I’m not holding the hammer anymore.

‘Shit.’ I’m genuinely impressed.

‘See, to get any power from the swing, your opponent needs to hold the hammer close to the base,’ Fred says. ‘But that leaves plenty of space right under the head. Easy to grab, with a little practice. And the head itself makes it easy to just rip the hammer out of their hand.’

Would he have been able to do that if I’d swung faster, harder? Maybe not. I tell myself there’ll be other chances.

‘Come with me,’ he says.

CHAPTER 5

I have five fingers but I’m not a hand. I have love in me but I’m not a heart. What am I?

Fred leads me to a door at the end of the corridor and unlocks it. The room beyond is as cramped and lightless as a basement, even though we’re still on the ground floor. It might have been a small study before someone bricked up the window. It smells like the theatre of a bad surgeon—bleach and blood.

The racks on the walls hold swords, railroad spikes, medieval maces, fireplace pokers, giant gardening shears, guillotine blades, rusty hooks, and rolls of barbed wire. Things designed to be sharp, blunt, hot or otherwise painful. There are only four guns, which rounds down to zero by rural Texas standards. But they’re big—two Remington shotguns and two Bushmaster XM-15 rifles. The Guards are prepared to defend this house if necessary.

As he walks along the racks, Fred tells me that he once worked at an electronics store. He was a pretty good salesman, always making customers think they needed a bigger screen, a faster processor, an extra warranty. He even convinced himself, squeezing a giant TV and a virtual reality set-up into his tiny living room. But he preferred working out the back of the store, with all the boxes and pallets and forklifts. Seeing all those shiny, heavy cubes be unloaded from trucks, checked off lists and stickered for sale. Good, honest work, he tells me. Except when he was assembling TV cabinets and computer desks for the displays, the tools often slipped in his sweaty hands.

There are wide gaps in this story. Things Lux would already know. He and Fred had exchanged hundreds of messages. Maybe thousands.

‘All this stuff is unnecessary, really.’ Fred is rummaging through a crate under the bricked-up window. ‘You don’t need purpose-built weapons to hurt someone. You can just use an electric kettle, or a screwdriver, or a hockey stick. But it’s all about presentation. The subscribers like … oh, here you go.’

He pulls out a hammer slightly longer than mine. A work glove is wrapped around the handle, as though the invisible man is clutching it. Fred slides his hand into the empty glove.

‘I just Krazy-glued the palm of the glove to the handle,’ Fred says. ‘Check it out.’

He swings the hammer at my head.

I duck. The hammer clangs against a battleaxe mounted on the wall behind me.

‘Dude! You were supposed to grab it, like I showed you.’

Fred swings at me again. This time I lash out and grab the shaft of the hammer.

His invention works well. I can’t pull the hammer out of his grip.

‘Cool, right?’ Fred says. ‘Plus, no need to worry about fingerprints.’

‘You use this on them?’ I jerk my thumb over my shoulder in the direction of the slaughterhouse. I watched all the videos on Lux’s hard drive, and I don’t remember seeing the hammer.

‘Nah, too quick.’ Fred slips his hand out of the glove and flexes his fingers. ‘Hit someone with this, and they’re dead. No screaming, no wriggling around … But I thought you’d appreciate it. I know you’re all about efficiency.’

Another reminder of how little I know about the guy I’m pretending to be. ‘Scammer died pretty fast.’

‘Sorry about that, Donnie can be … excitable.’ Fred sniffs the air. The smell of Samson’s cooking has wafted down to this end of the house. ‘Let’s eat, Lux.’

I didn’t, actually. I buried Lux’s body, all of it. I was being good.

As I follow Fred up the corridor, I promise myself I won’t make that mistake again.

It’s just as I feared—there’s no meat. No beef taken from the fridge and thrown into the stir-fry at the last minute. No side of roast chicken. Not even any bacon bits sprinkled through the salad.

I stare gloomily at all the plant matter on the table. The sharp smell of garlic turns my stomach.

‘You okay, bro?’ Donnie asks, sitting down opposite me. He’s changed from his tank top into a polo shirt, loose enough to hide his muscles. He’s wearing a smart watch, and from this angle I can see a stud in one ear.

I force a smile. ‘Yeah. Just tired.’

This is true. It’s only nine pm, but the drive from Houston took four hours, and I haven’t been able to rest since. The hairs on the back of my neck are constantly up, and my mind is whirling like a fairground ride, trying to guess the right answer to every question.

I was supposed to be dead by now. Resting peacefully, having murdered Fred and myself. Plus, my last meal was supposed to be tastier than this.

Not that Samson hasn’t done a great job. The food is restaurant quality. The vegetables are crisp,