even a rash of young adults who would break into homes during the day and clean up, just to freak people the hell out. But not everyone was so lucky as to find a few missing bottles of whiskey or the dishes mysteriously cleaned and put away.
Some folks found themselves at the hands of the violent. Assault, rape, even murder rates increased dramatically. And the news outlets, especially the ones that opposed the idea of UBI to begin with, had a field day with it. Widespread panic swept the first world, and in the most disparate of chasms between the haves and the have-nots, it became not only fashionable but socially pressured to install a panic room in the home.
In certain zip codes, you didn’t construct a home without one; it would impact your resale value for the worse if you didn’t. And the Reinharts lived in one of those zip codes.
Neither Bradley nor Sylvia particularly wanted one. They’d giggled about it when they first moved in, joking about all the entirely nonthreatening things that might make them hide in the panic room. Whenever Sylvia would get frustrated with Bradley, he would joke that he was going to need the panic room, and as silly and stupid as that was, it always made her laugh.
At least that’s the story they told me.
It’s a nice story, a sweet one. One that predicted them explaining how that all changed after Ezra was born.
Three weeks after they brought him home, three young men broke into their house at night. Wearing masks from an old movie, they proceeded to spray-paint you’re next on the living room wall before running through the house, screaming, brandishing kitchen knives, filming it all the while.
You see, with nothing but spare time on their hands, a subculture arose addicted entirely to old media: music, movies, television. One of the greatest currencies was unearthing a new gem that would get passed around, everyone crediting you with the find—you’d become a mediarchaeologist. One of the other currencies was reenacting scenes from some of those lost gems—the riskier, the better.
People would film themselves reenacting the fight scene from They Live or the baby carriage scene from The Untouchables or the “I’m flying, Jack!” scene from Titanic. One couple actually fell to their death trying that one.
In this case, the youths in the Reinharts’ home were reenacting an old horror movie and thought it would be funny to scare the dickens out of some wealthies.
Needless to say, a naked, howling Bradley swinging a baseball bat chased them clean out of the house at high speed while they screamed, “It’s just a prank, bruh! Put down the bat!”
But that incident scared the Reinharts to their core.
They didn’t own a gun and never wanted to. So the next day, they did two things: they stocked the panic room in case of emergency, and they bought me.
They told me this story the first time they prepped me on how the room worked, when to use it, and under what conditions to grab Ezra, lock him in, and open its door for no one but them.
One of those conditions had just been met.
Sylvia and now likely Bradley were dead.
If anything ever happens to us, you grab Ez and you run. You get him in that room as fast as you can.
Ezra was asleep in bed when I scooped him up in one solid move. I knew how many steps there were to the room. I knew how to close the door. And I knew the code needed to lock the door from the inside. I quickly calculated the smoothest execution for getting Ezra locked safely inside. Seconds were everything here. If Ariadne decided to kill Ezra as well, she would be only a few steps behind me.
I swung around the corner and could feel Ezra begin to stir from his sleep.
I lifted my foot and sailed into the wall where the door was secretly hidden, pushing with just enough force to open it, but not send it flying so I could grab it on the way in. I caught the handle on the inside and swung the door shut behind me, turning immediately at the panel to type in its code—Ezra’s birthday.
It beeped and a hydraulic lock ka-chunked closed.
We were locked in.
The panic room was sparse, a six-by-ten-foot space, carpeted, stocked shelves of sundries on one side, two cots and a toilet tucked away in a tiny room with a sliding wooden door on the other.
Ezra stirred