Clothes in big sizes. Candles for light. Matches. Reading materials.
Cell phone charging cords. One for a laptop.
And that was it.
No weapons. No electronics. Nothing that offered any true identification.
Then again, the Band of Bastards had started out as nomads, so of course their personal effects were few and very portable - and this was part of the reason they were so dangerous: They could relocate at the drop of a hat and leave no meaningful footprint behind.
This definitely was, however, their inner sanctum, the site where they were relatively vulnerable during the day - and they did protect themselves accordingly: The walls and the ceiling and the back of the door were covered with steel mesh. No getting down here, or out of here, but through that opening way above.
She went around slowly, looking for trapdoors, a tunnel entrance, anything.
They'd need an ammunition storage facility somewhere in here: Even as mobile as they liked to be, there was no way they could go out night after night buying just enough bullets to get them to the dawn.
They'd need a cache.
Refocusing on the single cot, she guessed it was Xcor's,
as their leader, and it didn't take a genius to figure that if there was any hiding place, it would be in his area - he had just the kind of suspicious mind to not fully trust even his own soldiers.
Investigating the bed with her light, she searched for triggering mechanisms either to an alarm or a bomb or a trapdoor. Finding none, she sheathed her guns for a moment and lifted up the metal frame, moving aside. Taking out a miniature handheld metal detector, she scanned the dirt floor and. . .
"Hello, boys," she murmured.
Her handy-dandy piece of equipment picked up a perfectly square outline that measured about four by two and a half feet. Kneeling down, she used one of her knives to displace the soil around the peripheral edges. Whatever it was, was buried deep -
Xhex froze as her acute hearing informed her that a car had pulled up.
It was not one of the Bastards or their cohorts, however. The emotional grid was far too uncomplicated.
A doggen, arriving with provisions?
Flashing up to the head of the stairs, she shut the door as much as she could without reengaging the lock and then went back to the buried box. Moving at triple time now, she kept one ear pinned on the footsteps creaking around on the first floor. . . .
On the long side of the delineated rectangle, she used her knife point to probe the packed dirt for a handle. Finding nothing, she repeated the investigation on the short -
Bingo. Brushing the earth away, she gripped a circular ring, put the penlight back between her teeth and heaved with everything she had. The lid weighed as much as a car hood, and she had to swallow her grunt -
Wow. Talk about an arsenal.
In the large box below there were handguns, shotguns, knives, ammunition, munitions cleaning supplies. . . all of it in a well-ordered, obviously watertight environment.
Among which was a long, black, hard-plastic rifle case.
She took the thing out and put it on the dirt floor next to her. One look at the lock and she cursed. Fingerprint activated.
Whatever. The damn thing was big enough to house one or maybe two long-noses. So it was coming with her.
With quick, sure hands, she shut the lid, kicked dirt back over it, and patted the surface so it was packed hard once more. Covering her tracks took less time than she thought, and before she knew it, she was moving the bunk into place again.
Picking up the case with her left hand, she listened. The doggen was moving around upstairs, the female's grid as unremarkable as it had been when she had arrived: She had heard nothing, knew nothing.
Glancing around, Xhex thought it was unlikely that the maid had the key to get down here. Xcor would be too cagey for that. But still, it wasn't safe to just hang out. Even if they gave the doggen the run only of the upstairs, one of the Bastards could get injured in the field at any time, and though she had no hesitation in fighting any one of them, or every fucking one, if the rifle was in fact in this case, she needed to get the weapon out immediately.
Time for a meet-and-greet.
As she dematerialized up to the head of the stairs, her weight on the top step released a creak from the wood.