Slow Burn(53)
“Stupid?” I demanded. “It’s Stacey and Jack.” I wriggled into a pair of jeans and threw on a shirt.
Griffin stood in the doorway to the bedroom. “Doll, we might get there, and they could be...”
“What if they aren’t?” I said. “What if we can save them?”
He fished a shirt off the floor. “If we’re going in there, you are going to listen to everything that I say. You’re going to do what I tell you, and you aren’t going to ask questions. You got that?” He pulled the shirt over his head.
“I got it.”
“Go find the guns and make sure they’re loaded.”
“All of them?” I said.
“Yes, all of them.”
Griffin kept guns hidden all over the apartment. Inside the couch, behind the toilet, under the bed. I began gathering them up. The ammunition was in the kitchen. Once I had all the guns, I sat on the couch, loading each of them with shaking hands.
Griffin sat down next to me, handing me a pair of sneakers and a roll of socks. “I’ve got this now. You’re going to need good shoes.”
“Okay,” I said. I started to pull them on. Everything seemed overly bright for some reason, kind of washed out. And Griffin’s voice was a little bit far away. It sounded like he was talking to me through a tunnel. I couldn’t quite grasp the fact that something was happening to Stacey. Not Stacey. She didn’t deserve that. She was my best friend, and this was what my friendship had brought her.
“They wouldn’t hurt them,” I said with conviction. “They’re keeping them alive to lure me there. When we get there, Stacey and Jack will be fine.” I turned to Griffin. “Don’t you think?”
“Sure do, doll,” he said, loading the last gun. But he sounded distracted, and I wasn’t sure he’d even been listening to me.
I followed him out of my apartment. We made our way down the rickety stairs. They groaned under our weight.
We got in the car, Griffin in the driver’s seat. He handed me a gun. “Keep your eye out, okay? They could be anywhere.”
I swallowed, struggling to remember how he’d taught me to hold it.
He pulled the car out of the parking lot. We drove in silence. Stacey and Jack lived about a ten-minute drive away. It was still dark outside, but it was the wee hours of the morning, so it was silent and still. There wasn’t even a breeze ruffling the new spring leaves on the trees.
I gripped the gun tightly, gazing out into the black early morning. The moon hung low in the sky, tired and bloated. The stars looked faded as well.
Griffin parked the car on the side of the road about a quarter mile away from Stacey and Jack’s house. He got out and motioned for me to do so as well. “Walk behind me, doll, and try to stay quiet.”
Stacey and Jack’s house was in the middle of the woods. It was on a hill (of course) and the driveway wound down the main road. We climbed up the hill, into the woods. We were going to walk down on the house from the opposite direction.
The woods were difficult to navigate in the dark. There were sharp branches sticking out every which way, clinging barbs that stuck to my clothes, keeping me from moving forward until I detangled them.
“Quiet, doll,” said Griffin. He seemed to move like a cat, silent and fluid. And it wasn’t fair, because he was so much bigger than I was.
I did my best to go more quietly.
We crossed over a tiny stream. It gleamed through the branches, reflecting the night sky in a speckled pattern. My shoes got wet.
Griffin’s didn’t.
Shortly after the stream, we came to a rusty barbed wire fence stretching through the woods. It was probably an old property marker. This all used to be farmland a long time ago. This might have been the edge of some farmer’s land.
It might have still been the edge of farmland. It wasn’t like there weren’t still farms around here.
Griffin halted when he saw it. He carefully stepped on the bottom line of wire, making sure to avoid the barbs and lifted the top wire, making a gaping hole. “Climb through.”
I surveyed the gap. “I don’t know.” It didn’t look big enough to fit through. I was afraid of getting punctured by the rusty barbs.