Triple Threat - James Patterson Page 0,42

Chloe shouts again, rummaging frantically around the kitchen for anything she can use to fight back. “I’m coming!”

She uses one hand to grab the first blade she spots, a small paring knife, and the other hand to heave an old frying pan off the stove.

Not the ideal set of weapons, by any means, but they’ll have to do.

Chloe rushes toward the gruesome sounds of the struggle emanating from inside the apartment’s tiny bathroom. She charges in, desperate to save Marielle’s life.

But she isn’t at all prepared for the horrifying sight that awaits her.

A pack of feral foxes—the animals Chloe saw earlier climbing up the outside of the building—is literally tearing her elderly stepmother limb from limb.

They’re attacking Marielle ravenously, ripping her bloody nightgown to shreds, wrenching whole chunks of flesh from her body as she cries and struggles and screams.

Chloe roars with anger and snaps into action.

She clobbers the nearest fox square on the head with the heavy pan, feeling his skull crunch inward from the impact like a hardboiled egg. She hits another fox, then sinks the paring knife into the furry back of a third.

A fourth fox, realizing Chloe is both a threat and a meal, turns on her, leaping up and clamping his jagged teeth into her thigh.

Chloe yelps in pain but manages to pierce her knife straight into the animal’s eyeball, lodging it deep in the socket, before forcefully prying the creature off.

She pummels the animal with the pan, again and again, until finally it dies.

“Maman!” she yells, kneeling beside her horrendously disfigured stepmother, nearly slipping on the blood-soaked tile floor.

Marielle is mercifully slipping into unconsciousness. She reaches a trembling hand toward her stepdaughter’s face and whispers, in a haze, “Chloe…ma petite fille…my sweet girl…”

Then her hand falls to her side. Her last breath escapes her lungs.

Chloe is too shocked to cry. Too staggered to make any sound at all.

But with so much adrenaline still pulsing through her veins, she is not too stunned to take action.

“Eli! Papa!” she screams, rushing out of the bathroom into the hallway.

She finds her father standing there in his underwear, shaking like a leaf.

“Your stepmother…I heard such terrible noises. Is she…?”

“Yes, Papa. She’s—she is dead.” Jean-Luc takes a step toward the bathroom to look for himself, but Chloe stops him. “Don’t.”

Jean-Luc looks past Chloe, into the front hallway, and his eyes grow wide.

Chloe turns around—and sees three pit bulls trotting into the apartment through the still-open front door.

“Come on, we have to hurry!” Chloe implores, trying to pull her father along.

But with surprising strength, Jean-Luc resists. He grips his daughter’s shoulder tightly and looks her straight in the eye.

“Non, Chloe. I am a slow, old man. It is my time. You and Eli—you must go.”

Chloe is left aghast by her father’s command, and by the ultimate sacrifice he is insisting he make for his daughter and grandson. She wants to argue with him, plead with him, to reconsider, but she knows his mind is made up.

“I love you,” is all she says, then turns and dashes back to Eli’s room.

She makes it inside and slams the door shut behind her—just moments before she hears this second wave of animals begin brutally mauling her frail father.

She finds Eli awake in bed, cowering under the blankets, crying. Chloe rushes over and sweeps him into her arms.

“Eli, it’s okay, sweetie, Mommy’s here. We have to go!”

But how? Not through the front door: the apartment is now crawling with wild animals. But not through the window, either: even if she could break the boards, that metal grate is bolted on tight.

Are they trapped?

No. Chloe gets an idea.

She flings open the closet and pushes aside some of her old childhood clothes that are still hanging there, revealing a small trapdoor: a dumbwaiter, dating back to the turn of the century, when the apartment building was one single luxury home and Chloe’s bedroom was part of the servant’s quarters. She discovered this odd historical remnant as a girl and treated it as a secret cubby, a hiding spot for dolls and diaries.

Now, as she pries off the wooden plank she nailed over it only a few days earlier, she hopes it just might save their lives.

She opens the squeaky door and orders Eli to wiggle inside first. “I know you’re scared,” she says. “I am, too. But I’ll be right behind you. You can do it!”

The boy bravely obeys. Chloe squeezes in after him and the two carefully climb down this dark, dusty chamber, using ledges