Money Back Guarantee

by Hunter Shea

  Rosemary had to hold the phone with both hands to keep from dropping it.

  “Now…that…makes…two,” he repeated.

  “That’s very good. You can count.”

  “Oh, but can you? Ta-ta.”

  She slammed the phone down with a primal scream. She had to compose herself and call the police. There was evidence right on the fucking porch.

  Just as she slipped her finger into the round slot for nine, the man’s words repeated themselves.

  Now…that…makes…two.

  The phone slipped from her fingers and she ran upstairs. “Dwight! Dwight!”

  His room was empty. His Luke Skywalker figure stood on the floor, facing her, lightsaber extracted.

  “Dwight?”

  Just as she’d done earlier searching for Gavin, she went from top to bottom of the house, only this time weeping and crying out her son’s name until her throat was raw.

  “My baby. They took my baby.”

  She collapsed on the foyer floor, feeling as if every bone, every scrap of muscles and sinew had been sucked clean from her body.

  When the phone rang this time, she had to crawl on her hands and knees to answer it. She felt drugged, wasted, soulless.

  “Call the police and they die.”

  “What…have you done… with them?” she said through hitching breaths.

  “Thank you for choosing AdventureCo, where imagination becomes reality. Have a wonderful day. Fucker.”

  Chapter Nine

  Rosemary lay curled in a ball, the phone by her head, the monotonous, shrill tone of the disconnection sounding miles away. She cried until her eyes were dry, until her stomach cramped and her chest hurt.

  How was any of this possible? How could they have snatched Gavin and Dwight right out from under her without making a sound? It almost seemed supernatural.

  She wrestled with herself about calling the police. It seemed as if AdventureCo could see and hear every move she made. They’d know the moment she dialed 911. And then what? Would they actually kill her son and husband?

  Yes, she decided. Yes, they would.

  These people were monsters, if they could even be called people.

  Dragging herself into a standing position by gripping the front door knob, she opened it to see if they’d taken the box away, too. It was still there, soaked through from the rain. She dragged it inside, shutting the door with her foot.

  The label didn’t reveal any more than the name of the company and the town and state. A town where even the mayor refused to acknowledge that the company existed.

  What the hell was AdventureCo? They weren’t just a toy manufacturer, that was for sure. If anything, they had all the abilities and influence of a secret government agency.

  But why would the government want to hurt and kidnap kids through the false front of a shitty novelty toy company?

  Nothing was making any sense.

  She stared at the label, fingers pushing through the wet cardboard.

  There was really only one thing to do.

  She had to go to Tegan’s Mill, South Carolina, and find her family. It was a long shot, but it was all she had.

  Fearing that her house was somehow bugged, she didn’t bother packing anything. She simply grabbed her car keys and left. She had a very important stop to make. It was one she’d hoped to never revisit.

  * * * *

  “Am I hallucinating?”

  Rosemary sighed and pushed her way through the steel door. “Trust me, this feels just as strange for me.”

  “I’d hug you but I’m afraid you’d knee me in the nuts.”

  She put her hands on her hips and stared at her brother. Five years older than her, he looked triple that, his hair gone mostly gray, unshaven, a bit of a paunch, his badge of honor from being a member of the six-pack-a-day club.

  “Now why would I go and do that?” she said.

  He scratched at the salt-and-pepper whiskers under his chin. “Because that’s exactly what you did the last time I saw you.”

  “I was just a kid and if I recall correctly, you earned it.”

  He let out a laugh bordering on a guffaw. “I think you might be right. Big brothers are supposed to push their little sister’s buttons. Come on over here.”

  As he held her tight, all she could fixate on was the smell of grease and cordite coming off his clothes and skin.

  “So, what brings the black sheep back into the fold?” he asked, eyeballing her from head to toe. “You been a redhead for long?”

  “Only since I left. Look, Rob, I need your help.”

  Her brother raised his hands in the air and staggered back, pantomiming someone at a faith healing show. “Lord, today must be thy day of judgment, for you have performed great and mighty miracles.”

  Rosemary cocked an eyebrow. “It’s good to see you haven’t changed a bit. Personal growth was never one of your strong suits.”

  He gave her a wink. “Maybe not, but when it comes to personal protection, I’m the master.” He offered her a seat in the sparsely furnished shed, a battered chair he must have plucked from a dumpster. Taking one opposite her, their knees almost touching, he grew somber. “I know this has to be something serious to get you all the way the hell out here. You’re my sister. Not seeing you for a decade doesn’t change that. What can I do to help?”

  Rosemary had to fight back tears. Her emotions were riding so high, she wouldn’t be able to see the crest with a telescope. Seeing Rob now sent them to the stratosphere.

  So much bad shit had gone down between them… but she had to admit, there had been good times, too. Despite their age difference, they’d been pretty much alike growing up. So much so that it frightened her to think back on it. He’d just taken his own path, and maybe it was time to forgive and forget. After all, it was his life choice that might get her family out of this jam.

  “Somebody kidnapped my family,” she said into her lap, biting her bottom lip hard.

  “Come again? I didn’t know you have a family.”

  When she looked up, she saw his incredulous face through a haze of tears. “I married Gavin after college. We had Dwight nine years ago.”

  Rob took her hands in his own calloused paws. “I’ll be damned. I have a nephew named Dwight. I just never heard of a father and son being kidnapped. Usually it’s one or the other.”

  She took a deep, tremulous breath. “This is going to sound insane, but I swear to you, it’s all true.”

  His eyes locked on hers. “Tell me. I believe you.”

  It all came out, from ordering the submarine from AdventureCo after her Tupperware success to what had happened earlier in the day. To Rob’s credit, he didn’t once interrupt her, never questioned a single thing. His jaw just got tighter and tighter the more she talked.

  When she was done, he sat back in his chair and wiped his brow with a bandana he had in his back pocket. The air in the shed was stifling. “You said Tegan’s Mill, South Carolina?”

  “Uh-huh. Except no one in that town has ever heard of the place.”

  He got up and offered his hand. “Come with me. You can settle down a bit while I make some calls. You okay with ladders?”

  “I think I can handle it.”

  They went to the back of the shed where he pushed an old wood pallet aside, grabbed an iron ring in the floor, and pulled a hatch up. They descended to his underground bunker using the rungs positioned along the sheer steel wall.

  “You’ve gone even deeper,” Rosemary said, her voice echoing in the narrow tube.

  “The commies keep making those nukes bigger, which means I have to get farther away. Shit, I’m so far down now, I don’t even think I’d hear a bomb if it dropped on my head.”

  They finally came to a round chamber made of discarded metal. A series of tubular passageways bran
ched out like the spokes on a wheel. Years ago, Rob had bought used yellow school buses, burying them deep and using them as the foundation for his growing fortress. He removed the seats, sealed up the windows, and filled them with all of the supplies he felt necessary to ride out a nuclear apocalypse. Everyone thought he was crazy. Cold War fever had driven him mad with paranoia. Their father had similarly gone off the deep end after the whole Bay of Pigs near-fiasco. He’d eventually left the family to go live in the woods somewhere in Canada. When they were kids, Rob blamed their mother for not supporting him and letting him leave. In hindsight it was ridiculous, but at the time, Rosemary sided with her brother. As they got older, they each took an interest in post-war survival, though for Rosemary it was just a passing thing—boys and clothes and schoolwork took precedence over bomb shelters and gathering stockpiles of supplies.

  Rob’s obsession grew and grew until it drove a wedge between them. Rosemary saw the same strange glimmer in his eyes that their father had when he used to lecture them about rationing or where to go if the bombs started dropping and they weren’t close to home.

  He’d changed. He was no longer the fun-loving big brother who beat up Steve Grasso for poking her in the boob or begrudgingly took her to see Snow White at the Kendall Theater. Self-preservation became his only concern. Survival at all costs. She got tired of defending him to other people, of fighting with him because she didn’t share his bleak outlook for the future.

  They hadn’t seen each other since their mother’s funeral. Without her around, there was no reason to keep up the appearance of being a loving family. Rosemary had wept many nights over it, but what was done was done. Seeing her brother would only open the old wounds that had never properly healed when their father left.

  She always figured it would take a catastrophe to bring them back together.

  She’d been right.

  “I’ll be right back. Feel free to look around,” he said, hustling down one of the old buses to make his call. She wondered what kind of people he knew. Were they other paranoid mole people? How could they possibly help?

  She walked down one of the corridors. It was lined with folding tables—jugs of water on one, old board games on another, unmarked cardboard boxes everywhere. He’d installed low-wattage bulbs in the ceiling. It gave just enough light to see things clearly, but also created sharp shadows and dark, foreboding corners. Rosemary could feel the weight of the earth pressing down on her.

  I hope he reinforced the hell out of these buses, she thought, walking back and down another corridor. She couldn’t get over how quiet it was here. It truly was like being buried alive.

  Now this corridor, this is the one that would get him on an FBI watch list. It was stacked from floor to ceiling with guns of every make and model. He had enough here to outfit an army. He used to tell her that when the dust settled, if the damn Ruskies dared to claim the land for their own, he’d be there to plant them.

  This is exactly why she’d come to Rob.

  Her fingers were gliding down the cold barrel of a rifle when her brother came up behind her and said, “I got that from a German guy out of Sarasota. I don’t know where he got fifty of them, but I was glad to take them off his hands.”

  “Where did you get the money to buy all this stuff?” She couldn’t believe how much his armory had grown. It must have cost a fortune.

  “I have my ways. Your big bro is pretty damn smart when he’s not sitting on his brain.”

  Rosemary chuckled.

  “I’ve got good news. I called a guy I know down in the Carolinas. He’s a former government employee from a place with some familiar initials. He got me the address for AdventureCo, no problem. But there’s a catch.”

  Rosemary’s heart skipped a beat.

  “Go on.” She didn’t care what the catch was. Once she got that address, nothing and no one was going to stop her.

  “He said that AdventureCo has been a company of interest for years. There’s some pretty strange shit going on there, but so far they’ve been allowed to operate under the radar. We’re talking some bad hombres. So bad, even the big guns don’t wanna fuck with them.”

  Rosemary picked up an assault rifle, found a magazine, and slammed it home. It was amazing how the lessons he’d taught her in the beginning, when she thought his hobby was cool, all came back to her. “I don’t care if AdventureCo is run by the ghosts of Stalin and Hitler. I’m going down there to get my family back. I came here to see if you could lend me some guns. Now that you have an address, I just want to get on the road before it’s too late.”

  He handed her a folded piece of paper. Before she could grab it, he pulled it back.

  “Oh, there is a condition.”

  “What?” she said, feeling as if her flesh was crawling with fire ants. She wanted to be on the road, pushing the speed limit, headed south.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “Rob, no. This is my family. I’ll handle it.”

  “I know you will. You’re one tough broad. But you’re going to need someone at your back. This place spooked my contact, and he’s been in two wars. Besides, your son is my family, too. I wanna meet him.”

  She knew there was no sense arguing. And truth be told, she was happy to have him by her side.

  He grabbed several large canvas bags from under a table. “Now, let’s start packing.”

  Chapter Ten

  The drive to South Carolina would be long, but the act of being in motion made Rosemary feel as if they were making some headway. Flying would have been faster and easier, but she was pretty sure no airline would allow them to carry their arsenal onto the plane. Rob had covered the three full bags with a piece of wood that had fabric stapled onto it so that it looked, at least from a distance, like the bottom of her trunk. He then piled the usual detritus that accumulates in a car on top of that, just to cover their asses should they get stopped and some overenthusiastic state trooper decided to comb through the car.

  Despite not seeing each other for over ten years, Rosemary and Rob spoke very little. Somewhere around Virginia, he asked, “Did the man on the phone say they had taken your husband and son to South Carolina?”

  Gripping the wheel, eyes narrowed into slits, she said, “No, not in so many words.”

  “So there’s a chance they might not be there at all.”

  “No.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  She swerved around a slow-moving car in the left lane, cutting in front of the Buick so close, they nearly clipped bumpers. A horn blared and she saw the woman behind the wheel give her the finger.

  “Call it mother’s intuition. Besides, it seems like they’ve carved out a nice little hideout for themselves down in Tegan’s Mill. Where else would they run and hide where they’d be so protected?”

  Rob rolled the window down, lit up a cigarette, and took a long, slow drag.

  “Give me one,” she said.

  He lit it before handing it over to her. She inhaled. Her lungs burned and she coughed a bit. When she inhaled again, it felt like heaven. Her body tingled as smoke filled the car.

  Just like riding a bike, she thought.

  “You sure you don’t want to pull over and call the cops?” he asked.

  She glanced at him as if he’d asked her to strangle Mother Theresa on live TV. “You know I can’t.”

  Rob closed his eyes and nodded. “Just checking. We don’t need them. I want to make sure you haven’t changed your mind.”

  They might not need the police, but it would be nice to have some forces on their side. If this AdventureCo was big enough to command the silence of the mayor, what could Rosemary and Rob possibly do to them?

  “Take them by surprise and piss in their Cheerios,” she mumbled, sucking the final embers of the cigarette and tossing the butt out the window onto I-95.

  “What did you s
ay?”

  “Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”

  * * * *

  They stopped for gas in North Carolina. Rob suggested they go to the diner across the street and grab some grub.

  Rosemary had unfolded the map Rob had brought along—it turned out he had drawers of maps, of not just the entire United States but every developed country in the world—and estimated how much driving time until they’d hit Tegan’s Mill.

  “It’s just another four hours or so,” she said, eager to get back on the road.

  “All the more reason to fortify ourselves while we can. You never send an army onto the battlefield on an empty stomach. Even if you’re not hungry, force yourself to eat. You’ll be thankful for it later.”

  Kathy’s Diner had two long counters and ten booths along the windows, all with a lovely view of the gas station and entrance ramp to the highway. The overwhelming scent of coffee and grease set Rosemary’s stomach to grumbling. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. It might have been the night before.

  The waitress, a young pregnant girl with a faded name tag that said Katie showed them to a booth. The menus were encased with crackling plastic that left her fingers sticky.

  “Don’t order anything crazy like ravioli or scrod,” Rob said, grinning. When they were growing up, Rosemary ordered ravioli every time they went to a diner, and it was always terrible. “Stick to what a greasy spoon like this knows best. And no salads. Those are nothing but empty calories.”

  She was suddenly so hungry, there was no way in hell she’d waste it on a salad. She had a patty melt with fries, coleslaw, three pickles, and a chocolate shake. By the time she was done, her stomach was bloated. It was the best damn meal she’d ever had.

  A wave of guilt washed over her. How could she have enjoyed a meal when Dwight and Gavin were God knows where? Were they being fed, or did the creeps at AdventureCo lock them up and starve them? Before she knew it, tears were cascading down her cheeks.

  Rob put his cigarette out in the remaining french fries on his plate and moved over to sit next to her.