028.1

5

The sound of the doorbell startled Wallace so much he went up the wall and once he'd recovered enough from the shock to remember what was just going on, his heart sank. From the looks of it, the elderly lady and Jean weren't doing much better. Jean was barely breathing and it appeared like she was on the verge of collapsing, whereas the lady looked like she'd almost had a heart attack.
Meanwhile, Jed was cussing his mouth off in the other corner of the room, sitting behind what was most likely to be an active bomb.
'Jed?' Wallace inquired, mentally preparing for an explosion. Fear crawled through his skin.
'I cut one wire and one finger,' Jed hissed in pain.
'Which one?' Jean snapped anxiously, grabbing Wallace's shoulder for support.
'Index finger-'
'Wires, idiot!' she screeched.
'Red!'
Jean breathed out raggedly and sank to her knees.
'Good or bad?' the lady inquired fearfully, putting a hand on Jean's shoulder.
'That lucky bastard,' Jean breathed out hoarsely, voice shaking. 'Red only registers movement, whereas blue is visual feedback from eyes to bomb.'
'Meaning...?'
'The thing can still see, but the bomb won't go off if it sees something move. If that idiot had cut them the other way around, the disappearance of the visual feedback would have caused the bomb to go off within five seconds.'
'Not an idiot, then,' Jed remarked, masking his relief behind a cocky tone as he often did.
'Fair enough,' Jean huffed, struggled back to her feet, and stumbled towards the bear. 'But by not cutting the wires simultaneously like I told you to, you've sped up the countdown to twice its speed.'
Wallace checked the timer on his wristwatch and adjusted it, subtracting a few more seconds to make up for Jean's speeches. 'Leaving us with roughly two minutes to disarm it.'
'On it,' Jean mumbled, pushed Jed aside and started working on the wires. She was back to the laser-focused I-have-a-job-to-do Jean, her hands hustling from spot to spot, all without even so much as brushing against the bear.
The doorbell rang again, more urgent this time. 'Parcel for Miss Mason!'
'Yes, yes, I'm coming,' yelled the old lady hoarsely and waddled to the front door. 'That idiot of a postman picked the wrong time to drop off a package.'
'Jean,  how're we doing?' Wallace inquired, watching his ticking wristwatch. He found it hard to calm down after everything that happened and they were running out of time. 'Jean?'
'Don't rush me,' Jean snapped. 'There's something wrong with it. Even though I took out all the sensors and severed all the connections, I can still feel the timer ticking. Must have something to do with not cutting the wires simultaneously.'
'Can you fix it?' Wallace asked, a frog in his throat. After everything they had managed, he'd hate if something went wrong now. It was unfair. They'd disarmed roughly 30 bear bombs in one morning, this one being the last of them all. Surely, it couldn't be the last one for the team, could it?
Jean smacked her lips, picked up the bear and inspected it from all angles. 'I can't seem to find out what's wrong with it. I can pick it up without any trouble as you can see, so it should be defused...'
'Should be?' the lady remarked, coming back into the living room with a small parcel under her arm.
'That's not good enough, Jean,' Wallace said quietly, having his heart in his mouth.
'Shush, Wally,' Jed interfered, somehow managing to sound like his usual calm self. The only thing that gave away his anxiety, was the nervous fiddling with the ring on his hand. 'That's not helping. You're making her nervous.'
Wallace glanced at his wristwatch. Ten more seconds and then the bomb would blow. If Jean didn't figure out what to do, they were fried. Well aware it wasn't helping, he started counting down, 'Ten, nine, eight-'