The Rapture: A Sci-Fi Novel Read Online Free Page B

jewel—the well-manicured hedges outside are even watered, evergreen, like something you’d see in a model.
    Lenny jimmies the lock open. No alarms sound; the watchman didn’t take care of it. For the past three weeks I’ve seen his routine and he didn’t break form tonight. He never has.
    I’ve been in here before, but the sleek wooden countertops, the polished marble floors and the strong incandescent lights all seem foreign. A little slice of civilization dropped in the midst of a mad, dusty world. I step back outside and lean against the glass. I stare into the blackness. The lookout. Nothing moves, like a temporal lock has been put in place.
    I burn cigarette after cigarette.
    “Damien. Hey, Damien!” I turn towards Isaac’s voice.
    “What?”
    “You going to take a couple steps back daredevil? Let’s go.”
    I’ve zoned out. I can feel my legs moving across the street, but it’s surreal. I see the vault all wired up inside, something way too complex for Mitch, a guy who didn’t even remove the tags from his clothes, to pull off.
    Mitch presses the trigger, and for a moment nothing happens and there’s still hope. I’m going to walk away, go back to my old job and everything will be fine—but then a violent boom shakes the ground, strong enough to send me into the bushes. The glass cracks under the weight of the explosion, and I can hear the supports give way inside, right before the loud crash and grind of metal disrupts the midnight quiet.
    When it’s over—and it only takes a minute, maybe two for it to become a pile of rubble—I hoist myself off the ground.
    “Holy shit, Mitch,” Lenny says, “I think I broke my ass.” He touches the seat of his pants, hopping about.
    “Mitch,” Isaac says, “that wasn’t what was supposed to happen.”
    “No.” Mitch shakes his head.
    “We wanted to blow the door.”
    “Yes.”
    “And you just blew up the entire bank.”
    “Some of it’s still there.” He isn’t being fresh, just literal. I can’t help but laugh; I can see clean out the other side now, through a truck sized hole in the back wall. This wasn’t in the plans; time to improvise.
    Not that I need to. Something tells me this always happens.
    “Maybe we can get in the back,” I say, and by the crew’s reactions, they haven’t noticed that Mitch’s homebrew has blown a chasm straight into the vault. “Look.” I point and Lenny races off.
    “We can walk right in,” he calls from afar, so we follow his voice to where we can see a hole leading to the dull metal safety deposit boxes inside.
    “I’ll check it out,” Isaac says, “safety and all.” He grabs the bag and steps inside. I hear the crowbar clang and some muffled scrapes. I know what he’s doing, and I look over at Lenny and Mitch. They’re flotsam, I guess, but we’ve known them for a long time. I hear Isaac’s words in my ears: sacrifices are necessary . I say nothing, just stare at the sky with a grim smile.
    After a few minutes he comes back out. “All right, let’s hop to it.” We start popping the boxes out of the wall. They hiss when we open them, like little cans of cola.
    “Goddamn, look at Jason Arthur,” Lenny says, holding a fragile snapshot in the air, “still has all his teeth in this one, the son-of-a-bitch.” Arthur’s been cutting his teeth on whiskey and chew at the local watering holes for years.
    “Keep it moving,” Isaac says, and Lenny tosses the photo into a corner. Cash, jewels, broaches, earrings, engagement bands; they all go back in the bag where, just before, explosives and cold black steel sat. Then I’m aware that no one else is opening anything, so I turn to find the three of them huddled in a tight circle.
    “The hell are you slackers doing?”
    “Come check this out, Damien,” Lenny says, “frigging unbelievable. It’s the real deal.”
    Gold bricks. I’m pretty sure stacks of these don’t exist outside of movies. Or, rather, I was. There’s some other stuff in