Nobody's Home

Harmony House: Episode 34

“Harmony House” is a serial novel with episodes released every Tuesday morning. You can read the setup for the story or start from the beginning. Each episode comes with high-quality audio narration for you to enjoy on the go with the Substack mobile app.

Previously…

In the last episode, Deepu broke through a wall in the basement room where he was being held hostage. In an attempt to evade Mark, the terrorist who turned on the group and murdered Schultz and the group’s leader, Darrow, Deepu hid in the replica of Houze. He discovered that Freja, the third member of the group was still alive. He attempted to save her only to find out that Fitzpatrick, GreenerTech’s rogue AI tipped his location to Mark who burst in with a gun to finish Deepu. Deepu fought back and managed to kill Mark only to discover that he was now faced with a much bigger threat with Fitzpatrick.

Jayden sat on the floor in front of the enormous picture window in Houze, her forehead pressed to the glass. She was thinking of the aquarium the last family she nannied for had in their living room and how over the course of a couple of weeks, four of the eight exotic fish had been flushed down the toilet with progressively less ceremony.

Life did not flourish in a tank. Sooner or later, no matter how beautiful the aquarium, no matter how well-designed the features within it, the walls would close in, and death would come for its inhabitants. Jayden felt like one of those last four fish in the tank.

They had been trying to break out of Houze for the past three hours since Riley had woken them up before sunrise. Nothing had worked. The windows were tempered glass at least a quarter-inch thick. The door, unlike a normal door, had no handle. There was no way to get a grip to try to force it open. There was nothing in any of their possessions that could function as a pry bar.

They were trapped.

There was only one reason someone would want to trap them. Jayden kept thinking about Jessie. Had he suffered? Did they torture him? She had not known him well, but she understood him to be a fighter. That’s likely how he died. She wished she was a fighter. But what good would that do here? There was no one to fight. There was only the waiting.

Fran had finally stopped crying. She wore herself out. A person can only maintain hysteria for so long. She was curled up on the couch in the fetal position.

Riley and Cam were still talking through possibilities and scenarios. They were both fixers. They seemed to believe there was a solution for everything if you thought hard enough.

Jayden knew otherwise. If she had a gift, it was acceptance. People made themselves miserable who could not accept things. She didn’t think it was arrogance exactly to believe you could overcome any obstacle, but it required a confidence bordering on delusion.

“Alright, so we’ve tried force,” Riley said. “But these windows are too thick. There’s got to be some other vulnerability in the structure we’ve not thought of…”

“Well, I don’t what the fuck that would be,” Cam said, pacing back and forth in the kitchen. “Why are they doing this and where is our team? Where’s Schultz?”

“I don’t know,” Riley said. “We’re cut off from everything here. They must know we’re in trouble because they can’t reach us. They’re probably trying to get to us now…”

“Really? You believe that?” Cam’s face was drawn, his eyes sallow. “The command center is less than two miles away. Kyle would have been here hours ago if…”

Cam didn’t finish the thought. Jayden watched him sit back down in the chair opposite Riley and put his head in his hands, a mirror image of his housemate. It was silent for a few minutes and Jayden wondered if they were beginning to accept that there was no way out. A soft, steady whistling sound arose from the couch where Fran was curled up. Jayden wished she could fall asleep and be somewhere else.

She turned and stared out the window at the open field. Someone would come for them, surely. One way or another, someone would come riding out of the woods either to kill them or set them free. Her mouth felt dry and her eyelids heavy. She yawned and turned to look at Riley and Cam. Cam blinked one, two, three times, and each time his eyes closed, the heavy lids struggled to reopen. He put his head down in the crook of his arm.

The cold glass of the window was numbing Jayden’s forehead. She felt a sudden, strong desire to be comfortable. Rising to her feet, she nearly fell. Her tongue was numb, and her vision dipped to black with swimming stars. She steadied herself and took a deep breath. Low blood sugar, she figured. She couldn’t remember when she ate last. The dizziness cleared and she made her way to the back bedroom. She had a powerful urge to lay in the bed where she had shared that tender morning with Jessie.

Climbing the ladder to the loft bed felt like she was scaling Everest. Her legs were heavy, and her biceps quivered under the strain. Eventually, she made it to the top rung and heaved herself onto the mattress. She rolled over and stared up into the sky so impossibly blue and far away. She felt the delicious pull of oblivion and she thought what a gift sleep was. So soft, warm, and inviting. She began to fall slowly down, down, down, like a feather borne by an afternoon breeze, meandering to the ground. To rest.

But there was a buzzing. A fly in the corner of the window. Kill it, mama. It got louder and louder, whining with an urgency she couldn’t attend to because sleep was pulling with a slow gravitational force.

With every curve up the old mountain road, Scott’s anxiety was mounting. The nagging feeling that started back on the plane had been substantiated when none of them were able to reach anyone at the command center. He had not been able to connect to the systems of Houze either.

It was like before, but this time, there was not a cloud in the sky.

“How much further?” Chris asked from the passenger seat.

“Less than a mile, I think,” Scott responded.

He looked in the rearview mirror. Eve was not staring at her phone for once but looking out the window with an unreadable expression. Who was he kidding? Everything about her was unreadable to him. She had barely said two words to him since they got off the plane.

After another two switchback curves, the gravel road widened on the right side making a shoulder. The blue dot on the GPS app on his phone was pulsing at the waypoint flag of their destination.

“This is it?” Eve asked. “Where’s the command center?”

“We have to walk up from here,” Scott said, popping the door open.

He didn’t wait for Chris and Eve but set off up the road making long strides. It was strange that there wasn’t at least one other car parked. Kyle or the BangOn! girl must have taken the rental car into town for some reason. Scott saw the break in the trees and the little trail heading up the slope to the house and he picked up his pace. He could hear Chris talking to Eve as they followed.

A couple of ATVs were parked at the edge of the clearing behind the house near the large satellite dish they had installed when they set up this temporary command center months prior. Scott climbed the riser of stairs to the back deck and made his way to the patio doors. They were locked, but the side door was open.

“Kyle? Hey man, are you guys here?” he called out as he stepped into the great room.

All the lights were off, and it was almost as cold inside as it was outside. The wall of windows made it easy enough to see everything in the room. It was, as Scott remembered it, a couple of large tables set up as computer workstations with an array of monitors. But there was no sign of Kyle or Jemma from BangOn!, at least not at first. On closer inspection, Scott saw there was a plate at Kyle’s workstation with a breakfast burrito mostly uneaten and a mug of coffee with a milky swirl of cream curdling on the surface. The computer displays were all dark. Scott felt his stomach turn over and the hairs on his arms stand up. He swallowed hard. He heard Eve and his brother making their way toward the door from outside.

“Wait!” he yelled, crossing quickly over to the door to intercept them.

“What is it?” Chris asked.

“I don’t know, but something’s wrong here. I don’t think it’s safe.”

“What do you mean?” Eve asked.

Scott didn’t answer until he had herded them back onto the deck and away from the door. “They’re not here. It looks like they just walked away from their workstations an hour ago and never came back.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Chris said, irritated. “They know what a big day this is and how much prep we have to do to get ready…”

His voice trailed off as his brain caught up with his mouth.

“Oh shit,” Eve said. “The terrorists, you think they’re here. But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t know, but something feels very wrong, and I need to find out what’s going on. It’s not smart for us to all go in. You guys move back away from the house so you can get to the car quickly if you need to.”

“No bro, we should call the authorities. This is stupid. Not worth it,” Chris said, grabbing his brother’s arm.

“There’s no time, Chris. We may be too late already. I’ve got to find out what’s happened.”

“But…” Chris started to argue but Scott shut him down with a raised hand.

“We’re responsible for those people out there,” Scott said, pointing into the woods.

He turned and walked back toward the house, stopping to take one of three hand-carved walking sticks that stood in a bark box by the back door. It was solid, maybe Hickory and the weight felt substantial. It was something at least. He went back inside. He didn’t call out again as he made his way from room to room.

The place was small as vacation cabins go and it didn’t take long to go through the kitchen, the master bedroom off the great room and then upstairs to the open sleeping loft where he found two unmade full-size beds. There was no luggage or dirty clothes piled in a corner. There were no toothbrushes or disposable contact lens packages on the counter. There was no evidence that Kyle or Jemma had been living there for the past six weeks. They had not been taken, they had packed and left on their own. That was the only explanation. But why? They had been deliberately kept in the dark about the events of the last forty-eight hours. All they knew is that they needed to prepare for a last-minute press conference later today on site. It didn’t add up. He made his way quickly back down the stairs and over to Kyle’s workstation.

When he swiped the trackpad, all three monitors blinked to life. He pulled the keyboard to him and was about to log in when he noticed a pink sticky note pasted to the bottom bezel of one of the monitors. It read: “Fuck You Scott. I want my overtime pay.”

What the hell? Scott just stared at Kyle’s message, not understanding. He focused his attention back on the screens in front of him and logged into the workstation using his credentials. The far left monitor showed the main system dashboard for Houze, the second monitor showed the logging console, and the third monitor displayed a grid of video feeds showing different angles of Houze. At a cursory glance, everything seemed normal, so he opened the panel showing his personal notifications. At the top of the list was a new email from Kyle with the subject: “RE: Your Immediate Termination.” He opened the email and began to read.

Yeah, I’ll leave immediately. This was a real asshole move. I thought you and your brother were different but I guess not. Good luck selling the rest of your soul. BTW, your Houze sucks and the software is garbage. I’ve had to do a hard reset four times in the past 2 hours. I want my overtime pay and my stock options or I’ll be hiring a lawyer. Fuck you.

On Tue, Nov 2, 2028 at 7:17 AM Scott Jenson <sjenson@futureabode.com> wrote:

Dear Kyle:

I regret to inform you that your employment with FutureAbode is terminated, effective immediately. Your increasingly poor performance has not gone unnoticed during this critical part of our mission.

You will be paid for the balance of the month provided you log out of all our proprietary systems right now and do no harm. I will be arriving later this morning with your replacement. If you have not left by 7:30 AM, you will forfeit your severance pay.

I’m sorry things didn’t work out. Best of luck to you.

Regards,

Scott

“FUCK! Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Scott yelled, pushing away from the desk and rolling back in the chair across the hardwood floor of the great room.

A moment later Chris was back inside with Eve following close behind.

“What?” Chris asked. “What is it?”

“I don’t fucking know,” Scott said, gesturing at the screen displaying the email. “But we’ve been hacked.”

Both Eve and Chris moved to the desk and leaned in to read the message.

“Who did this?” Chris asked. “Who could’ve gotten into your email? And if they’re in your email, what else did they do?”

Scott rolled forward in the chair and pushed his brother to the side. He didn’t notice the dazed expression on Eve’s face or the fact that she was slowly backing away from them. He navigated over to the dashboard screen and began digging into the detail view for each of the major systems. Water filtration was healthy. Internal temperature and humidity were comfortable. When he pulled up the air quality dashboard, he was sure there was some mistake. There was a pulsing, red alert at the top of the panel: “WARNING: Oxygen levels below 50%.”

He looked at the chart and saw where the level line started to dive and trend downward an hour earlier. He clicked into the view that showed the detailed breakdown of the air composition. His heart froze in his chest. What in the fuck? Not possible. He jumped up from the chair so fast, he clipped his brother’s chin with his shoulder and knocked him back.

“Ow! Jesus, what is it? Where are you going?” Chris said, rubbing his jaw.

Scott didn’t answer but ran for the door. Chris had never been the science geek but when he glanced back at the screen, he understood what made Scott panic. He was pretty sure the acceptable level of hydrogen gas inside Houze was supposed to be zero, not 32%.

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Who’s Who in Harmony House?

Having trouble keeping track of who’s who from one week to the next? It’s tough when you only get to visit once a week. I made a little cheat sheet just for you: