TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 Read Online Free Page A

nicely printed guidebook to tell Kaz the history of the building he was walking towards, he would have learned some very interesting things indeed. He might even have thought twice about entering. But there was no one and nothing to warn him about the house’s bloody and mysterious past, so he pushed open a rust-hinged door and walked across the threshold without a second thought.
    The room that had once been the beating heart of the manor lay under a thick layer of dust and cobwebs abandoned by spiders that had moved on in search of richer pickings. The furniture had been removed long ago. Only the presence of a brick baking oven built into the chimney breast revealed the room’s original function.
    Kaz sniffed the air. The house smelt of mould and damp and crumbling plaster. Still, it beat sleeping on the cold, wet earth. He walked across the room, brushing away the cobwebs that snagged his face and hair, and pushed open a thick oak door into a wood-panelled corridor.
    The bright moonlight barely penetrated this far into the house. The thick darkness and utter silence would have been enough to give most people pause, but Kaz was practical and unsuperstitious. He didn’t believe in ghosts and wasn’t afraid of the unseen things that lurked in the gloom. He knew that the scariest thing this house was likely to contain would be a few rats, scurrying around beneath rotting floorboards.
    He moved deeper into the decaying building, not noticing a cellar door on the right, secured with a padlock. Neither did he register the tiny red light in the far corner of the ceiling, hidden behind layers of cobwebs, that denoted the presence of an active infrared camera transmitting his every move back to unseen eyes.
    At the end of the corridor stood two tall, wide doors. They were warped and stuck, half open. Kaz squeezed through the opening into a large room, lit by a beam of moonlight that cut across the blackness through a gap in the window boards. This would do.
    In one corner of the room a dim grey mound revealed itself, on closer inspection, to be a pile of discarded curtains. They were musty but Kaz arranged them into a makeshift mattress and lay down.
    He was bone tired, emotionally drained, unsure what tomorrow would bring. The only thing he knew for certain was that he would be better able to face his problems after a good night’s sleep. Having identified that as his top priority, he banished all thought from his head and closed his eyes.
    He opened them again immediately as the room crackled and burned. A circle of firework-bright crimson snapped into existence near the ceiling and spat out a young woman, who crashed to the floorboards with a heavy thud.
    The fire vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Silence and darkness reclaimed the room. The only evidence that something unusual had occurred was the fading patterns that danced on Kaz’s retinas, and the swirls of disturbed dust that billowed in the single shaft of cold, blue moonlight.
    Kaz’s exhausted body had been sinking into sleep but now it flooded with adrenaline. He leapt up and stood ready to defend himself from … what? He forced himself to take a few deep breaths and relax. He wasn’t under attack, not as far as he could tell. But what had just happened?
    A groan from the centre of the room reminded Kaz that he was not alone. He ran to the girl, who lay on the floor. He reached out to touch her, but as his fingertips approached her they crackled with sparks of crimson, and he leapt back in alarm. The sparks vanished.
    ‘What … happened?’ gasped the woman on the floor.
    Kaz had no idea how to answer that, so he said nothing.
    The woman slowly raised herself up on her arms and glanced around the dim grey room. Kaz could see that she was dressed in a plain shirt and trousers. When the woman noticed Kaz she jumped, startled, and quickly tried to rise to her feet, but her legs gave way and she crumpled to the floor in a heap. She swore.
    Kaz felt he’d