✅ Younger Than You Think?

"Z: Suburbia"

This chapter is dedicated to Ddude, and is an extra chapter posted to thank the people supporting me on Patreon. Thank you!

Three days were the longest of their lives for Cal and Jess Blake. They stayed at a cheap motel, and spent every hour of the day walking the streets of the area around Iriña's new home. They couldn't pay too much attention, because they didn't know if the people in there would know what they looked like. But Cal hadn't shaved in two weeks, and Jess was already looking gaunt after the worry had destroyed her appetite and sleep cycle. People who had only met them once probably wouldn't even recognise them.

The coordinates they could see on their phones clearly indicated a single, suburban house. They couldn't keep walking around the same neighbourhood without attracting suspicion, so they had only walked past once or twice. They had seen that it looked like a typical home for a couple of young professionals; with a moderately expensive car in the driveway, and some outdoor toys scattered beside the path. It was the kind of neighbourhood where you couldn't imagine anything bad happening, and where everybody would have known each other. They had seen the lights on inside the house, and a woman coming out once to visit a convenience store at the end of the street. Jess thought the woman didn't look like someone involved in child trafficking, but she also had to admit that she didn't know what she thought a criminal should look like.

They had also spent a couple of hours sitting on park benches, watching the world go by. There was a play area there with a whole variety of things for young children to climb, slide, or swing on. They speculated that if the kidnappers thought Iriña was a real child, they would want to bring her to the park at least occasionally. Any family who had a small child but wouldn't let her play outside was bound to generate some suspicion among the neighbours. Maybe they would have her restrained in some way, or they could have threatened her to keep her from making a fuss. But the Blakes knew Iriña, and they were sure that if she saw any opportunity she would be making a break for it. Especially if she saw her parents there. But in three days, they hadn't been lucky. There had been no sign of Iriña at the park.

On the day of the raid, they were allowed to sit in one of the police cars. There were a dozen of them, along with police officers on foot, both in and out of uniform. The first to approach were a couple of local cops; specialists from the nearby city. They didn't know this particular location, but they had done everything they could to familiarise themselves with the location. From the area's neighbourhood watch program, they had familiarised themselves with the people living in that particular house, as well as their neighbours. The police were considering the possibility that the GPS had given them only an approximate address. But yesterday, a technical specialist had arrived and had asked Cal for the access codes for the GPS device they were using. He had handed over the same codes that had been in his email from Chad's mysterious friend, and the cop had said that he could do much better with that. Once they were within range, they could trigger the device to broadcast a direct beacon, giving them a much more accurate representation of its current location.

It was finally time to go. Cal and Jess were sitting in the back of a police car, with a young man they didn't recognise in the front. There were a dozen other cars ready to swarm into the neighbourhood, covering every possible route of escape by road as well as disgorging enough officers to cover the pedestrian paths as well. There were hostage negotiators just entering the estate from the far side in an unmarked car, and tactical officers sitting across the road from where the nervous parents sat. They could see how much effort the police were putting in to get Iriña back, but this was a situation where any normal parent would be on the edge of their seat. It was hard to believe this was happening to them, but there was nothing they could do now but hope.