“Some chains, big metal clamps, something that looks like a cattle prod…”

I reached under the visor. There were two garage door openers. I pressed the button on the first one, and the door behind us began to open with a loud hum. It opened slowly, almost maddeningly so.

“Come on…come on…” I whispered, because you never know when a slow-moving garage door will hear comments like that and decide to speed things up a little.

“I’m not seeing anything good back here,” Roger said.

“Come on…come on…” Charlotte said to the garage door, obviously working under the same theory I was.

I expected a pair of legs to become visible in the gap any second. Or, more likely, for the white door to fly open. I revved the engine. The door was about three-quarters of the way up.

The white door flew open.

I slammed my foot on the gas pedal. The tires squealed and the van shot forward. There was a horrible screech as the roof scraped against the rising door, but then we were outside the garage. I turned on the headlights and kept the accelerator floored.

I pressed the button on the second remote, praying that it opened the gate. Nothing happened. I pulled it from the visor, and then slammed on the brake. “It’s got a code!”

“Just ram the gate!” Roger shouted. He scurried to the back of the van and peered through the rear window. “The front door’s opening!”

The rest of the fence looked quite a bit less sturdy than the main gate, but I couldn’t exactly work up any speed plowing through a couple of feet of snow. I fastened my seat belt, and then turned the van toward the main gate, backed it up about ten feet, and then floored the gas pedal again.

“Hold on!” I warned. Roger and Charlotte both grabbed something to brace themselves. I gritted my teeth, waiting for the impact.

The van smashed into the gates, safety glass from the windshield flying everywhere. The air bag inflated in front of me. The gates didn’t budge.

I put the van into reverse and backed up again. “Three of ‘em are coming out the front,” said Roger. “And another one, the one whose nose I broke, he’s coming out of the garage!”

“That’s the whole party,” I said.

“I’m not a weapons expert,” Roger admitted, “but the things they’re carrying look a lot like machine guns.”

At that moment, there was a loud series of clanging and shattering sounds as machine gun fire ripped through the side of the van. Roger and Charlotte dove for the van floor, glass raining down upon them.

I returned my attention to the gate, ducked down as far as I could, and then floored the accelerator. It was hard to steer the van with the air bag in the way, but I managed as well as I could.

As machine gun bullets continued to hit the van, it struck the gate a second time. I heard Charlotte grunt as she smacked against the back of my seat. The gates held firm.

Then the machine gun fire ceased. After a moment, Roger peeked through the broken rear window.

“I don’t want to be Mr. Doom and Gloom,” he said, as the van’s engine began to sputter and it began to sink on its deflating tires, “but they seem to be passing out grenades.”

Chapter 21

I PUT THE van into reverse again. Even though I had the accelerator against the floor, it seemed to be struggling to hit five miles per hour. I wondered what my chances were of taking all four of our pursuers out via vehicular homicide.

Something slammed against the side of the van, followed by Daniel’s charming voice shouting “You idiot!”

There was a huge explosion that rocked the van.

I kept the accelerator down, and by some miracle the van kept moving.

I heard something land in the back. Something rolled along the floor.

“Move your head!” Charlotte ordered.

I did so. She flung the grenade out where the front windshield had been. It struck the gate, and for a heart-stopping instant I thought it was going to bounce back at us, but it dropped straight down to the ground and exploded.

No damage to the gates.

I swerved the van to the left, steering it back toward the garage. I couldn’t run anybody over going this slowly, and the gates were a hopeless cause.

In what remained of the rear-view mirror, I saw another grenade fly into the back of the van.

Then a second one.

A third one sailed in as Roger grabbed for the first. Charlotte scooped up the second and threw it past my head again. It landed on the ground and exploded, sending a huge blast of snow into the air.

The van was picking up speed. Not much, but a little.

Roger threw his first grenade out the window. Charlotte began to frantically look around the rear of the van. “Where’d the other one go?”

“By your foot!”

Charlotte grabbed it and threw it again. But she was so frazzled that the throw went wild, hitting the top of the windshield, bouncing off the dashboard, and into my lap.

I’d played Hot Potato many times as a kid, but never a version with such high stakes. I grabbed the grenade and whipped it out the window. It exploded in mid-air, barely clearing the front of the van.

Then the machine gun fire started again.

I ducked down and blindly drove the van, hoping I wouldn’t go off the mostly-cleared path and get us stuck. I was amazed that the van was still functioning, even at this fairly pitiful level. Another grenade exploded, but this one hadn’t made it inside.

The machine gun fire didn’t stop, so I couldn’t tell if we were leaving them behind or they were running after the van. I sort of hoped they were running after us. Slipping on a patch of ice while firing a machine gun could cause one heck of a nasty accident.

After an endless minute, the van reached the garage. I attempted to turn into it, but instead crashed against the side of the doorway. While Roger and Charlotte climbed over the seats toward me, I grabbed the machete and scrambled through the front window and onto the smashed hood.

More machine gun bullets hit the van as the three of us hurried through the garage. I opened the door and we rushed back into the hallway. As I pulled it shut, the door began to twitch with the impact of machine gun fire.

“Any great ideas?” I asked.

“Run between the bullets,” Roger suggested.

“How can you be a smart-ass at a time like this?” Charlotte demanded.

“We could die at any second,” Roger explained. “I’d like my final words to be something clever.”

We swerved down another corridor just as they began firing again. It was readily evident that this had been one of my typical bad decisions, because the corridor had a door at the end but no other options.

“Piss,” Roger remarked.

I unlocked the door, flung it open, and we rushed through, finding ourselves in a small, dimly lit room. A small room with a bearskin rug on the floor, and nothing else. No windows, no doors, no portable teleportation devices, nothing.

“Piss, piss,” Roger added.

“Okay…problem…” I mumbled, shutting the door. Maybe we could smother them with the rug.

“I hope you’ve got your clever comments ready,” said Charlotte.

Why was there a bearskin rug in an otherwise empty room anyway? I slid it aside, half-expecting it to try and bite my foot off. There was a trapdoor underneath.

Bullets began to tear through the door. The three of us dove to the floor. I unlatched the chain on the trapdoor and lifted it. It was too dark to see anything but a slide leading down.

“Looks good to me,” said Roger.

Then I remembered what Daniel had said about his latest project, the underground one that wasn’t completely functional but would be amazing.

“You know what, I don’t think we want to go down there.”

More bullets tore through the door.

“Okay, yeah, we do.”

Roger jumped down into the trapdoor and vanished from sight. Charlotte followed. Just as the door broke apart from a violent kick on the other side, I went after them.