“Mike!” Parkowski yelled as she ran from the kitchen into the hallway, spilling her Diet Coke onto the cheap laminate floor, “Mike, they’re here!”
“What?” DePresti yelled from the living room.
“There’s people outside. Up on the ridge.”
“Shit,” he said as he ran towards her.
“What do we do now?”
“Fuck, I don’t know,” DePresti replied quickly.
“How much time do you think we have?”
“Maybe ten minutes before they’ll be at our front door.”
This was not good. Parkowski thought for a moment. “Doesn’t he have an entire arsenal downstairs?”
If whoever took Chang was going to storm the house again, they needed to be prepared.
He nodded. “He does. Let’s go.”
They hurried down the stairs. Parkowski opened the handle on the large metal door and swung it open. The room beyond was small, maybe twice as large as the bathroom back in Parkowski’s apartment.
But it had exactly what DePresti and Parkowski needed. Weapons were everywhere.
It was a gun-lover’s paradise.
Most surprising to Parkowski was how clean and organized Chang’s arsenal was. Despite his careful planning of his complex, he was a slovenly man. However, he kept the most important things to him — his guns and his computer setup — meticulously clean.
DePresti swooped like a bird from weapon to weapon.
“Who are they?” Parkowski asked.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he grabbed a long black rifle off of the rack on the wall and tossed it to Parkowski. “Here, catch.”
She grabbed it by its three-point strap.
“What is this?” Parkowski asked.
He laughed. “To be honest, I don’t know what it is exactly,” he told her, “but it’s some kind of AR-15.”
Parkowski looked at it in shock. She had held a weapon once in her entire life, on a skeet-shooting trip in high school. Now, the rifle was going to be crucial to her survival.
She checked the rifle. The weapon was seemingly unloaded — there was no magazine inserted into it — but she still treated it like it had a round chambered, pointing it at the ground and away from her.
DePresti grabbed a rifle off of the wall that looked like a twin to Parkowski’s and set it down. Then, he took a second rifle, a longer bolt-action one with a large optic on its top, and set it down next to the first one.
“That should do,” he said to himself.
“Great, we have weapons now,” Parkowski said. “What about some ammunition for them?”
DePresti frowned. “You haven’t seen any yet?”
“Just a couple of boxes of nine millimeter, plus a few loose rounds,” she responded.
“Fuck.”
“Yup.”
“Any magazines?”
“No, none of those either.”
“Huh,” DePresti said, confused. “There’s no way that Chang doesn’t have a whole bunch of loaded mags ready in case of trouble.”
“Well, if they’re here, I don’t see them,” Parkowski said, a little frustrated. “Where could they be?”
Her boyfriend knelt beside her and they quickly went cabinet by cabinet. No magazines of any kind, rifle or pistol, could be found. “Fuck,” DePresti said quietly.
They were running out of time.
“I’m going to go check his room,” he said as he got up. “I’ll be back in a sec.”
Parkowski kept looking. Something was weird about the cabinets, she thought.
She took a step back to look at them.
They were metal, with wooden tops; probably a custom design. There had to be something in there.
Parkowski picked one of the cabinets at random and took a good glance at it. There were two rectangular drawers, a smaller one at the top, and a larger one at the bottom roughly twice the size of the top.
The top contained tools; screwdrivers, wrenches, the normal things that one would find in a workshop.
The bottom had a collection of spare stocks for AR-15 style rifles.
Parkowski closed both drawers and stared at the bottom one. It was wrong, but she couldn’t figure out why.
Then it clicked.
The interior of the drawer was half the size of the exterior.
Parkowski opened it back up and felt around for a way to open up the apparently false bottom.
At the back, she found a pair of plastic tabs that had previously gone unnoticed. She pressed them together and heard a click. Parkowski used the tabs to lift the false bottom out of the drawer and peered into the cavity below.
Inside were a horde of neatly stacked AR-15 magazines.
She grinned for the first time since they had arrived back at the complex.
“Mike,” she called, “I found them.”
He came back into the room with a pair of civilian-grade night vision goggles. “Found what?”
Two minutes later, they had a duffel bag full of magazines for their AR-15s, DePresti’s bolt-action long rifle, and a pair of Beretta pistols that they had selected from the cabinets.
“Are you sure this is all necessary?” she asked her boyfriend. “Maybe they’ll get bored and leave. I bet they didn’t even see us.”
DePresti snorted. “There’s no way they missed us showing up in Andrew’s truck,” he told her. “No, they’re going to try and grab us too.”
He didn’t elaborate, but he didn’t have to.
After watching her mentor be gunned down on the Manhattan Beach pier just a few days ago, Parkowski knew what would happen if they were caught.
