as well as a breadwinner. Not the main breadwinner, but translation—scientific, multilingual—did bring in a good amount, even if it was irregular. And it afforded me time and cover for my other activities.
My world-saving activities.
There were six of us in Colorado Springs. We called ourselves The Mom Squad. All of us had kids. Only one of us had a day job away from home. And she’d been involved in the original fiasco that had caused our group to come into existence. I mean she’d been one of the scientists. The only female.
Look, I’ve nothing against men. Heaven love them, they’re no worse than women, but they’re . . . different. One of the ways in which they seem to be different is that they’re better able to concentrate on tasks or details, to the exclusion of the big picture.
This is an advantage in some ways, but also a problem that afflicts scientists with peculiar intensity. If they’re pursuing the millionth digit of pi, or better rocket fuel, or a way to open a portal into another dimension, that’s all they’re pursuing, and they’re not likely to realize the consequences of their discovery. So, if they starved while calculating pie to the one-millionth digit, they just did, and if the rocket fuel would poison the crops in half the world, it didn’t matter, provided it could still power rockets. And if portals into other dimensions allow creatures to come through that could lay waste to humanity, or at least seriously wreck a half-dozen cities, well, that wasn’t their business. They’d been tasked with opening a portal to another dimension, and that’s what they’d done.
So, five of us women had had husbands who worked at Cheyenne Mountain, back when it was an active missile silo and a center of research. And Alicia had worked there herself. As had her ex-husband. She’d been unable to convince him, or any of the rest of the team, that it was a very bad idea to do what they’d been tasked with doing. But after the incident of the lizard people, she had become a whistle blower. Which had caused her marriage to implode, but had kept the world safe from lizard beings from the dungeon dimension.
Or at least we had kept the world safe from lizard beings from the dungeon dimension after we’d been caught in a battle with them.
After that, we’d saved the world from other things, too. Since the five of us had been pitchforked into that first battle, we’d formed The Mom Squad. No one knew except the three men who’d also been involved in that battle. And none of them were any of our husbands.
Which was the problem, when the alarm sounded. You see, my husband, Wayne, was also home for the snow day. After Cheyenne had closed, he’d found a job in a local research facility. But the facility was closed for the day, and, what was worse, Wayne was sitting in the living room sofa, hacking and coughing, as he suffered through a massive cold.
When the alarm sounded, he said, “Honey, I think the washer is done.”
Thank heavens he didn’t actually have the slightest idea what the washer alarm sounded like. I put down the ice cube I’d been applying to the wad of gum in my son Tim’s hair. I shot a dirty look at my daughter, Jennie, who was coloring a princess book at the kitchen table. I had an idea that the gum hadn’t so much drifted onto Tim’s white-blond hair as it had been carefully applied there. And if I had to cut his hair to remove it, he was going to be mostly bald. But if there’s one thing most mothers learn about early, it’s the perfidy of angelic-looking little girls.
And I didn’t have time to deal with her, right then. Instead, I edged around her, past the family room, where Wayne was blowing his nose loudly, and into the laundry room, just to the left of the basement door. The alarm was there, but it wasn’t coming from the washer. Instead, it emitted—sharp whistle and red lights and all—from a panel behind the cat box. Because no matter if the cat box caught fire, no one else in the house would go near it.
I shoved the catbox away with my foot, then tapped a rhythmic code into the wall behind it. The weird light stopped shining behind what appeared to be perfectly normal wallboard, and the whistle cut off.
“Anne?” a voice said from