“Go back and change, okay?” I said, shooing her forward on her own. She nodded and scurried around the building, where I lost sight of her.
The only time I knew of Drake visiting the gardens was when we got our tour from Fern. That meant there’d be no reason to find him there, so my guess was that no one had looked for him in amongst the citrus trees, cabbages and tomato plants.
With the first frost, Fern and the other garden tenders had activated the massive greenhouse covering. Thick sheets of plastic attached to a retrievable frame covered each roof. I hadn’t even noticed the contraption on our tour. Made up of two parts, they both retracted behind planter boxes, hidden from view unless you were looking for them. They were shut tight, capping off the top of each garden like a giant shower cap.
I took the closest stairway to the top till I reached the flimsy metal landing. There was a soft vinyl door shut tightly closed before me, and when I pushed it inward, the smell of food, fresh and earthy, drifted out around me. I quickly stepped inside, pushing the door closed to trap the essence from escaping into the cold afternoon.
“Drake?” I called just above a whisper. After walking down the aisles and checking behind the planter boxes, I found no sign of him, or anyone else.
I left the south garden and hurried through the mud the few steps to the north garden. After letting myself in, I was greeted by a different kind of scent - smoke. Alarmed, I ran down the center aisle, tripped on the water sprinklers twice, then flailed ungraciously through the air, toppling over a pile of manure bags. With a loud crash, my arm knocked a table of gardening tools over in the spill, and a trough was still spinning in mad circles when a voice from the corner startled me back up to my knees.
“That has to be the greatest entrance I’ve ever seen,” Drake said.
My mouth hung open at the sight of him lounging on a padded bench with a book in his hand, a small makeshift fire burning in a blackened pot at his side, and a large bowl of recently picked food balanced on his stomach. He was laughing at me.
“Have you been in here all day?!” I snapped.
He moved the bowl to the ground and sat up with a stretch. “Seriously. That was epic. I mean…best laugh I’ve had in a long time. Could you go back and do that again? It was awesome.”
I picked up the first thing my hand could find and threw it at him. A cotton glove with rubber fingertips sailed through the air and landed with a soft thud three feet from my target. Drake laughed again.
“That…was pathetic.”
“Damn it, Drake,” I said, as I struggled to stand without tripping on the mess I’d made. “Have you been up here all day?”
He shrugged. “It was nice and peaceful till you decided to plow through here like a bulldozer.”
“Shut up,” I snapped again. “I smelled smoke and thought the damn garden was on fire!”
“Yeah, well, it’s not. You can relax now.” He returned to a reclined position and bit into a partially peeled orange. “So, you found me. What do you want?”
I wandered over to him and slapped his leg until he moved it enough for me to sit. After taking the orange from his hand, I sat still and listened to the orchestra above my head. The sound of water hitting the plastic covering was deafening, but somehow pleasant. I wouldn’t call it relaxing, exactly. But there was a sort of meditative state to it.
“Kind of nice, isn’t it?” he asked. He sat upright and pulled his knees in so he could use them as a prop for his arms.
“Sure.”
With a loud exhale, he twisted and dropped his feet to the ground. He missed kicking over his fire by an inch. “Fine. You’re still mad. I get it. Feel free to wipe that look of concern off your face - I’m not going to kiss you. See?” He put his hands up and leaned away.
“Something serious has actually happened. Can you stop with the joking for five minutes?” I sighed.
“Uh-oh, wait, lemme guess. You caught Kris and that Cole kid getting nasty, didn’t you? No, wait…you caught your boy Jacks and Winny getting nasty, right?”
“So, that would be a no,” I said slowly. “You can’t stop joking.”
“Damn, Riley. You tell me one minute I need to loosen up, and when I do, you get ticked and expect me to be hard as hell again. I can’t win, can I?”
“Stop,” I said, while I gripped his arm and tugged on it until he looked at me. “There was a murder here this morning.”
That got his attention. “A what? Here?”
I nodded. “Yeah, and no one has seen you all flipping day, so of course they’ve assumed you had something to do with it.”
He chuffed. “That’s ridiculous.”
With a shrug, I tried to ignore the shiver from my wet clothes. It was getting harder to do so, and though I fought to keep my lips still, they began to tremble.
“Well, what happened? Who died?” He stood up and poured a small cup of water into his burning can, extinguishing it almost instantly.
“I don’t know her. A Justine someone or other. She worked in the kitchen. They found her out back with her throat slit.”
“Christ,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, and Ryder is gunning for you. He says you were talking to her this morning.”
Drake paused in a bent over position and looked across his shoulder at me. “Is that so? Well, I don’t know a Justine. And I have no reason to slit someone’s throat. Not yet, anyway.”
I let his words linger for several seconds before I responded. A mixed look of relief and concern flooded his face. “I know you didn’t do it, Drake. But someone did.”
“Then I suppose we should find out who, before they string me up for the gallows. Or firing squad. However they roll in Arizona.”
With a nod, I stood and grabbed a second orange. “Yeah, well, like you said, things aren’t the way they used to be. All it would take is one finger pointed in your direction to convince the leaders to load up those rifles.”
“It’ll take a lot more than one firing squad to take me down.”
Something in the garden-turned-greenhouse was blooming. I knew this because there was a sweet smell that followed us out. A smell that burned itself into my mind. Because it was the last pleasant thing I remembered from that day before a metal object rolled by my foot and a blinding light pierced my vision and then…then it just all faded to black.
* * *
I woke in an eerily dark space. It was as cold as a freezer, damp as a creek bed and smelled of uprooted russet potatoes. My senses were overwhelmed with input I couldn’t decipher, and initially I thought I was paralyzed from the neck down, because my arms and legs weren’t working. But then a pain in my abdomen consumed me for a full minute and I could think of nothing else but the ache that reached from my side around the front to my gut.
Once certain that I didn’t have a gaping hole in my stomach, I realized I couldn’t move my arms. “Oh, God,” I cried. “They’ve cut off my arms…my arms are gone! And I think I’m blind!”
A low guttural sound came from my left, and I flinched. Someone spat, moved around on what sounded like a dirt floor, and groaned again. “They’re just tied down, Riley,” a scratchy and irritated voice said.
“Drake! What’s happened, where are we?” I couldn’t keep the panic from coating my voice. It was still dark, but the tiniest crack of light had found its way to where we lay on the ground, and I began to see the dark outline of shapes. The closest one to my side moved again, and the cursing made it easy to identify. Drake was tied up beside me.
“Hell if I know,” he wheezed. Then he spat again. The faintest whiff of iron mixed in with the lingering scent of dirt, and I realized it was blood he was spitting from his mouth.
“You okay?” I asked, tugging upright with my arms. They didn’t budge from my side.
“Me? Never been better. How about you?” He began to rock back and forth on the ground.
The ropes around my wrists twisted up my arms and around my waist. And as I kicked my feet, I realized the
ties also ran down the length of my legs and bound my ankles together.
“I can’t get free,” I said.
He continued to rock. Back and forth. Back and forth. Each time be came back, he would grunt, and each time he went forward, he would exhale loudly.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Hold on,” he said breathlessly. “Just another inch…just one more…gotcha!”
Something hard struck my shin and I cried out. And then hands were on me, working their way up my legs, and over my side until they came to rest on my shoulder.
“Stop yelling,” he hissed. “It’s just me! I didn’t mean to kick you.”
His hands quickly went to work at the rope I was encased in, but after ten minutes, they felt tighter, not looser.
“It’s not working,” I said. He pulled me into an upright position, then leaned backwards so far I could barely see his outline.
“Rock back and forth,” he urged. “It’ll loosen the rope around your legs, stretch it out a bit.”
While I did as he instructed, feeling like a fool rolling around in the dirt, he crawled on all fours to investigate our surroundings. He came back just seconds later, empty handed.
“I think we’re locked in some sort of storage room,” he said.
“Great. How do we get out?” I continued to rock, using my stomach muscles to keep the momentum going as I stretched out my legs. The rope felt exactly the same five minutes into the squirming as it did when I woke. And I had a new pain radiating out from my tail bone.
“Don’t stop,” he ordered. His hands came down on my thigh, then moved to my wrists. He tugged, testing the knots. “It’s still tight.”
“I know that.”
“Who the hell tied this shit?”
It was probably the same person who’d ambushed us on the garden top, though I didn’t have a clear memory of the incident yet. As Drake fussed with the ropes around my arms, I struggled with my memory, hoping to push a tidbit of something helpful to the surface. The feeling of being blinded quickly popped up, but other than that, nothing else explained to me how we had gone from the roof to locked in a windowless room.
Something large creaked and boomed. A door. A heavy outer door, I guessed. We turned our heads to the right and followed the sound of approaching footsteps as they moved steadily closer.
“Drake,” I whispered.
“I know.”
“Hurry up,” I hissed.
“I know.”
“Now…untie me now!”
It seemed like the footsteps stopped almost directly in front of us behind a thick wall, and were replaced with the sound of men talking. At least two, perhaps more. Their conversation was just above a murmur but several words stood out perfectly clear. We weren’t in the company of friends.
“Drake.”
“I’ve almost got it,” he snapped, and with a hard tug, he yanked on my left arm. It flew free from the rope with such momentum that I punched myself in the mouth. With one arm loose, the rope was easier to unravel from the rest of my body, and within a minute, I was out of my restraints. My lower lip had already begun to swell and I tasted blood, but at the very least, I was no longer stuck in a helpless position on the ground.
“Now what?”
He kept one hand on my shoulder as he moved with me toward the closest wall. “We wait.”
“For what?”
A small hatch opened, spilling bright yellow light around us. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to go.
“We just found the way out,” Drake said.
A dark figure filled the doorway, blocking out the light. Then a man spoke. “Well, damn. I told them you wouldn’t be able to get out of those ropes. Seems I’ve been surprised twice today. You know, that doesn’t happen very often.”
“Keel.”
He stepped inside two feet, making himself visible. He nodded down at me and laughed when I crossed my arms. “What, aren’t you happy to see me, Riley?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The sound of metal scraping against metal made my entire body twitch, and I backed up against Drake. Keel had kicked the inner door open. The exit was within reach, but neither Drake nor I made a move.
“Is this some kind of sick joke?” I asked Keel. He was leaning against the door frame with an expression on his face that I couldn’t quite place. Almost as if he was amused, yet also irritated and guarded.
“Nah,” he sighed. “It’s just your lucky day.”
“I don’t believe in luck,” Drake said. With a quick glance over at him, it was apparent he was waiting for Keel to make a move. Any kind of move. But Drake wasn’t expecting such a quick exit. He wasn’t sure what to do. Neither of us were.
“You can come out. We won’t harm you.” Ryder poked his head through the doorway.
The pain in my stomach returned, and I gripped at my waist. Immediately I regretted the move, because it made me appear weak. Drake stepped in front of me, assuming I was too injured to protect myself.
“Why don’t you come in, instead,” Drake challenged.
“You can either stay in there or come out. I don’t give a flying fuck either way. Just make your decision soon. It’s almost dinner time.” Keel turned and left the doorway and began talking with Ryder just out of view.
“Should we go?” I asked Drake.
“You’re hurt.”
“Not bad. Just feel like I got the wind knocked out of me. I’m fine,” I lied.
He took his eyes off the door long enough to give me a once over. “You sure?”
“I’m fine. I can take care of myself, if the need arises.”
Drake ran a hand through his hair, displacing some of the dirt that had made up residence on his scalp. “I’ve got Keel. You get Ryder.”
“Wait a minute,” I warned. “Let’s get out of here first and find out what the hell happened before you start swinging, okay?”
We inched closer to the open metal door. “They tied us up like hogs and threw us in a hole, Riley. Someone’s getting beat.” I watched him peek into the hallway before flattening against the wall. “Seems safe enough. I’ll go first, you wait here.”
I did as he asked, and waited as he stepped out of the room. Breathing was still hard to do. Standing and crossing the room was more challenging than it should have been. While I concentrated on catching my breath, Drake poked his head back into the room and nodded for me to follow.
Keel banged on the outside wall with his hand. “Let’s go, lovebirds. There’s shit to be done.”
Drake turned toward Keel with both fists balled tightly. “Yeah, like me pounding your face in,” he growled.
Keel didn’t back away, but Ryder did. He lifted his arms to diffuse the situation. “Please, let us explain. Things got a bit…messy, yesterday.”
“Yesterday?” I pushed around Drake so I was standing just in front of him. We were in an entryway, just below a solitary bulb that flickered every ten seconds or so. “How long were we in there?”
Ryder glanced down at his left wrist, where he wore his watch. “Ten hours or so, I believe.”
“Ten hours? Why? What happened? We were on the garden and there was this bright light. After that I don’t know what happened.”
“Flash bang. Was kind of fun to use, actually. Was my first time.” Keel winked at me, then dodged to his right as Drake lunged at his throat.
The two tangled together several feet, pushing, shoving and spitting insults until a deafening bang echoed through the hall, nearly dropping me to my knees. Drake and Keel, though breathing heavily, had frozen in a dancing position. At least that’s what their stance reminded me of - tango or salsa dancers. With a hefty shove, Keel pushed Drake off him and smoothed his coat back into position. Ryder stood with his legs spread wide, a pistol in his shaking hand, a look of terror and surprise on his face. It quite possibly could have been the first time he’d ever aimed his gun at a living person, and pulled the trigger.
“Stop,” he final
ly said, shoving the automatic pistol back into his waistband and covering it with his winter coat. “We don’t have time to fight amongst ourselves. Not today. If you two still want to swing dicks tomorrow, I won’t stop you. But right now our presence is needed topside. All of us.”
“You expect us to go with you willingly after what you did?” I scoffed.
Ryder squared his shoulders and looked me directly in the eyes. “I do apologize for my part in that. It was a rash decision. One we won’t make again. We were certain that Drake was responsible for Ms. Justine’s rather brutal death. Thing is, two hours ago, while both of you were most likely still unconscious, another murder was committed. Another woman, her throat slit and her body…well, she was found in the same state as Ms. Justine.”
“She was raped? You can say the word, Ryder. We’re past pleasantries at this point, aren’t we?” I grumbled.
He nodded. “It appears she did not go peacefully.”
“Murder is never peaceful,” Drake said. He was still staring down Keel, who had begun to fix his hair. It was more so to get it out of his face than for vanity reasons, and we all watched him pull his dark locks back into a man bun with a bit of fascination.
“So. You figured out it wasn’t Drake. Is that why you’ve come to release us?” I asked.
“Yes. Obviously. And again, I apologize for acting so…rashly. We have something special here. We must protect the Ark. We can’t afford behavior like this to taint our growing community,” Ryder sighed.
“Get your head out of your ass, Ryder. This place has already been tainted. You have a murderous bastard running around the grounds, and you still think you have the perfect little slice of heaven here? That’s bullshit, and you know it.” Though he spoke at Ryder, Drake jutted a finger at Keel.
“I don’t make the rules. I follow orders here. Something your girl should have considered before she tried hiding you.” Keel crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. The smirk on his face was almost begging to be slapped off.
Find Me Series (Book 3): Finding Hope Page 17
