The panic room is completely buried in rubble and debris. I shiver. The freezing air around me has been robbed of every bit of heat that the bots could extract as both my bots and Jeff’s stragglers had tried to grow as fast as they could. In the distance, sirens wail as firemen, police, and paramedics start to swarm over the dozens of destroyed houses along the path of the vortex. Fortunately, it looks like we’re at the far end of their search, which gives us some time to work. I don’t know how long Jeff planned this attack, or how long it will take him to strike again, but I don’t want to stick around to find out. Not with my grandparents, Lin, and Valerie around. Trying to attract as little attention as possible, Evan and I use our bots to clear a path through the wreckage of the house to the steel vault door of the panic room.
I give the massive door a knock. I’m not sure if they can hear me.
“Come on out, we’re clear,” I say, hopefully loudly enough to be heard through the thick metal.
The heavy door clacks as it unlatches, then swings open slowly. Gramps looks around before letting any of the women out behind him. He’s old fashioned like that. They all look around at the devastation that used to be the house. Grammy looks horrified, Gramps looks shocked, Lin and Valerie take it in stride.
“What did you do to our house?” Grammy exclaims, wandering into the rubble. “We just got it the way we liked it!” She wanders around the remains of her living room until she stops in front of a broken shelf half-hanging from one wall. Small piles of broken figurines lay scattered around the floor near it. “Oh! My Hummels! They’re all gone!”
Gramps seems to be recovering more quickly. According to my index, he’s a veteran, so this might not be the first time he’s seen destruction like this.
“It wasn’t us, Grammy,” I tell her. “It was Jeff. The one that killed my father and tried to kill Mrs. Hastings.”
“Yeah,” Evan replies. “And it looks like he's learned how to play with his old toys again.”
He fills them all in on what happened.
“Well, I hope you sprung for a good insurance policy when you bought the place, Noah,” Gramps declares, his composure regained.
“I’m sure we did. I’d have to ask Alan for the details,” I answer, “but right now that’s the least of our concerns. Come on, let’s get you all back to the Butler Institute. I don’t think anywhere else on Earth is safe other than there right now.”
“We can’t just leave,” Grammy protests. “What about all of our things?”
“They’re just things, Helen.” Gramps puts an arm around her comfortingly. “At least we’re safe and we still have Noah.”
“And what about our neighbors?” She looks out through the giant hole in the house to the rest of the destruction. “You can help fix all this, right? With your little robots?”
“I’m sorry, but that’s not a good idea, and we’re not safe right now.” I reply. “He’s after us, not your neighbors. Staying here just paints a target on the whole place.”
“You’re not worried Jeff will just let loose again once we’re gone?” Valerie asks.
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“Not if we’re not around anymore.” I shake my head. “If we leave, he won’t have any reason to do anything else here.”
“You’ve been trying to track him down for months, Noah,” Lin says. “Do you want to go after him now? We’ll be OK.”
“No point,” I say. “Jeff’s both paranoid and smart. He thinks things through. He wouldn’t have put an attack like this into motion without a way to go to ground afterwards in case it failed. And that trick at the end of letting the bots run wild gave him plenty of time to make good on whatever his escape plan was. Plus, it looks like the authorities want a word.” I turn to my grandparents. “Just tell them anything you saw for yourself and we’ll be fine.”
“But we didn’t see anything!” Grammy protests.
“Exactly.”
A couple of uniformed police officers are making their way carefully through the path of destruction.
To Evan: We don’t know anything. Looked like a tornado to us. The others made it to the shelter after it hit the wall, but we were too far away. We got outside and saw it die out after it wrecked the house.
From Evan: Got it.
The two very polite police officers, one tall with dark hair, the other stockier and blond, introduce themselves and pull us aside one by one to take our statements. From the stack of papers they're holding, it looks like they’ve been doing this all across the wrecked part of the neighborhood. They give Gramps a card with their number and tell us all to call if we find out anything new. From the biometric readings of my polygraph function, they seem willing enough to buy the tornado story.
They don't seem to have recognized Evan or me from our many TV appearances. Hopefully, no one associates Evan’s last name with the Tom Butler family until after we’ve gotten safely out of state. When I moved Grammy and Gramps here, I asked them to keep quiet about their connection to us. Hopefully they did that. With luck, the shell company that Alan used to buy the house will get to claim insurance and recoup the costs. Not that any of that really matters right now.
The interviews over, one of the officers politely asks if we have a place we can go for tonight. We assure him that it would be no trouble for my grandparents to stay at my house tonight, not mentioning that my house is a walled desert compound a few states away. They seem satisfied and leave, walking back along the cyclone’s path.
The car in the garage is as wrecked as the house, and we aren’t scheduled for pickup until tomorrow, so we call a couple of cabs to take us back to the airport. While we wait for them, I call Cindy to make the arrangements for our early flight back. Grammy still looks distraught to be leaving everything behind, but I reassure her that we’ll hire a crew to get everything that can be salvaged. Once our automines start producing I might need to allocate some funds to let her replace some of her collectables.
The taxis finally arrive. At Lin’s insistence, Evan and Valerie get in one car with the little luggage we were able to salvage, and Lin takes the back seat with Grammy and Gramps in the other. The ride is uncomfortably silent for several minutes until Lin speaks.
“So, Noah told me that he grew up right near you,” she begins tentatively.
“That’s right,” Gramps says. “We lived just a few miles away. Got to see this boy grow up since he was a baby.”
Lin’s face lights up, which gets Grammy smiling too.
“You must have so many anecdotes to tell about him. Please, tell me what he was like when he was young.”
“Anecdotes, eh?” Gramps chuckles at Lin’s word choice. “I suppose we do have a few of those. We might also have some stories and maybe a tale or two.”
Lin laughs and my grandparents relax as they begin to dish out every embarrassing secret they know about my early childhood, which I think is just about all of them. I listen carefully and index the stories as they tell them. Some come back to me as I hear them. Some, I can’t remember or believe. Like the story that one time when I was two, I ate dog poop because I thought it was chocolate. I’m tempted to object and say I find that story hard to swallow, but the pun is just too terrible.
With the tension released, Lin and my grandparents laugh most of the rest of the way back to the plane. It’s so good to hear her laugh like that. I think she might finally be back to where she was before the whole thing with her Father. She reminds me that even with the worst things happening, there’s still good in the world. I love her so much.