Chapter 12 #2
Earl was pulling her along by her upper arm, deeper and deeper into the cave, but when she heard what sounded like a gunshots or small explosions, she jerked her arm free and started running back the way they’d come through pitch darkness with her arms out in front of her so she wouldn’t hit a wall.
Earl swore, caught her in two strides, and pulled her back. There was a roar and pounding outside.
“Is it a cave-in?” she almost shrieked.
“It’s a welcome I left for anyone who tries to come this way,” he said. “Seems like your boyfriend wasn’t hurt too bad after all.”
“Anyone could have wandered this way, you idiot.” He was pulling her again. She heeled off her remaining shoe and left it behind, limping along in her socks. She was running out of breadcrumbs to leave.
“You don’t understand,” Earl said. “You don’t know how things really are, but you’ll see. I’ll show you and then you’ll understand. I can’t let you die like Mary Jo.”
He wasn’t okay. In fact, she was pretty sure he was the farthest thing from okay and probably in desperate need of medical intervention. “Where are we going, Earl?”
“A safe place. A safe place.”
“A safe place in a cave?” They seemed to be moving deeper into the earth.
She’d lost all sense of direction, couldn’t judge which way they were going, other than down.
The ground was definitely sloping downward.
But eventually, it felt as if it was sloping upward again.
When a sliver of light appeared up ahead, relief washed over Camellia at the sight.
At least he wasn’t going to kill her in the dark.
He pulled her along toward the light, which grew into a tall, narrow crack in a solid stone face.
They moved through it, its space so tight the cold stone touched her shoulders.
When she stepped out into the hot sun, it warmed the cave’s chill right out of her, and she could hear the reassuring sound of the Rio Grande nearby. They hadn’t gone too far, then.
They were standing in front of a square structure whose top and sides were made of rusted steel roofing.
One section of it was hinged and held in place by a rope looped around a peg—a makeshift door.
She looked around the place, saw nobody else nearby.
There was a row of targets lined up off to the left—and pieces of tin with bullseyes painted crookedly, all full of holes.
There was a four-foot-tall tank on legs with a spigot on the front.
Water, she guessed. She looked around and then realized that the sound of the river wasn’t coming from where it should, and when she spotted it, it seemed the water was flowing the wrong way.
“Wait, wait a minute here. Are we in Mexico?”
“Like I said, a safe place where nobody’s gonna bother us.”
“Yeah, no.”
She pulled away again, but he grabbed her, threw her over his shoulder, and walked along a narrow path toward the shack amid junk of every imaginable sort as she twisted and thrashed, he stopped all at once and said, “Be still!”
The tone startled her so much she stopped moving.
“You move we both die,” he said, “I’m not kidding around.”
For some reason she believed him, so stayed still while he took her inside and put her down on her feet.
The place was a dump, with ratty overstuffed chairs, a kitchen-style table completely covered in bullets, casings, gunpowder, reloading equipment, and other stuff she couldn’t have named.
There were random tools everywhere she looked.
“This one of the places you go with your group?” she asked.
He pushed her into one of the chairs, and she was sure there were creatures of some kind nesting in it.
Then he walked away. As soon as he did, she got up and lunged for the door.
She had hold of its rope handle when he came up, bent low, and grabbed her by her ankle.
He yanked her leg right out from under her.
She fell face down on the floor and he dragged her back to the chair, bending to pick up a shackle attached to a bolted-down chain.
She panicked. “No. No. No.” She kicked with her other foot but he acted like he didn’t even feel it and snapped the metal band around her ankle, though she fought.
When the lock snapped, she kicked him right in the face and felt his nose crack under her heel.
Blood exploded from his nose, and he staggered backward and fell on the floor.
She scrambled to her feet, grabbed the chain attached to her shackle, and yanked hard. It didn’t budge, so she started working on the lock, but that was no good either.
Earl got up, hand to his bleeding nose. He walked away like he was no longer worried she might escape, and when he came back, he had a wet rag on his nose and a thick folder in his other hand.
“Here,” he said, and he dropped the folder onto the little table beside the probably rodent-infested chair. “Read it. The whole thing. Then you can go.”
She blinked in shock. “That’s all you want? For me to read this?”
“Once you do, you’ll change your mind. So yeah, that’s all I want.”
“You shot Wolf—”
“I did not!”
“—and kidnapped me just to make me read this?” she said. “Earl, you’re not okay right now. You need help.”
“What I need is for you to read the manifesto.”
She blinked at the word, and realized he was further gone than she’d even suspected.
“Read it!”
“Okay, okay.” She kicked the chair twice, hoping to scare out any residents, sat down, and picked up the folder.
Wolf
As the avalanche of boulders descended on Wolf, something else hit him first. The big guy, Ethan Brand, in a kind of flying leap, took him out of the path of those boulders and onto the ground, where he landed on top of him. It hurt like hell.
Ethan got up as the final few rocks fell behind him, forming a neat pile where Wolf had been standing. From amid a cloud of deep brown dust, his cousin reached down a hand. Wolf clasped hold and was pulled to his feet.
“Thanks.”
“De nada,” Ethan said. You okay?”
Wolf put a hand on the front of his bandaged shoulder. From beneath the shirt and bandages, fresh blood warmed his hand. “I’m good.” Then he looked around as the others joined them.
“We’ll have to watch for booby traps from here on,” Ethan said.
Willow came and clapped Wolf’s uninjured shoulder. “That means we’re close.”
“Yeah, but where are they?” Maria asked, skimming the area.
“I’d say they went that-away,” Drew all but sang, and when Wolf followed where she was pointing, he saw the dark shadow between two boulders and realized it was a cave.
“Let’s go.” He headed for the entrance
“Slowly,” Willow said. “Watch for booby traps.”
“Booty taps,” Baxter said, but his chuckle cut off when nobody appeared to get his joke. “What? Nobody saw Goonies?”
“Use references from the current century, cuz,” Drew said.
Wolf slowed his pace, made himself check carefully before each step, and yet going slow was the last thing he wanted to do. He used his phone for a flashlight, aiming the beam in every direction around him as he led this team of newfound kinfolk deeper into trouble.
Maybe his ma had picked the right surname, after all.
“Are you absolutely sure they went this way?” Willow asked.
“They came in here,” Maria said. “They left clear footprints near the entrance.”
“Then where did they go?” Willow whispered.
Wolf’s light fell on something. He hurried to retrieve it. “It’s Camellia’s other shoe.” He held it up.
Eventually, they emerged from the cave and into blinding sunlight and their goal—a rusty tin shack with targets set up to the left, no trespassing signs all around, and a junkyard for a dooryard.
“Okay,” Willow said, crouching low. “We haven’t found another booby trap yet, but up near that place, I can see three from here, and I haven’t even got around to looking very hard.” She pointed. “He has hand grenades hidden like easter eggs along the path to the front door.”
Wolf looked where she pointed. One was duct taped to an old metal birdbath, another to a discarded toaster just lying on the ground.
Each had a string through the loop of its pin, which led to a trip line in the path.
If you tripped the line, it pulled the pin, and three seconds later something near you exploded.
“Camellia said Earl got with a group of radicals. All about guns and survivalist shit. Said they went all over the state for what they called training weekends. Described sites like this.”
Willow sighed. “Does anybody have a cell signal?”
A lot of checking was followed by a murmur of nopes.
“I’m going around the back,” Wolf said. Willow moved with him. They gave the place a wide berth, circling it while staying behind boulders, brush, rusty barrels, and those crooked targets.
They reached the back of the place. No windows, no openings, no way to see inside, and the thought of what the brute might be doing to Camellia was torture.
But the place was silent. Not a sound came from within.
There was a door in the back, if you could call it a door.
It was the same as the one in the front, a cut out section of the tin-sided wonder with a rope through it.
This one’s hinges were strips of rubber nailed to the frame on one side.
“I don’t see any trip wires this time,” Willow said. She took a step forward. The ground cracked open and she dropped into it.
Wolf lunged, caught her forearm, and held tight.
She looked up at him and smiled. He smiled back, but it died when he looked past her and saw spikes in the bottom of the grave-sized hole in the ground.
The hole had been covered with a paper-thin layer of pre-cracked plywood, which was then scattered with pebbles and dirt to make it look like the ground.
He pulled her out before her cousins could even make their way in to help. When she was on solid ground again, they both examined the garbage strewn between them and the building ten yards away, realizing that every scrap in the yard and the yard itself were potential death traps.
Wolf wanted to roar in frustration. To be this close to Camellia and unable to see her, to even know if she was okay, much less get to her—it was maddening. And his damn wound was bleeding more than before.
Camellia
“There’s something alive in this chair,” Camellia said, having determined that there probably wasn’t.
Still, she slid out of the chair and onto the floor, sitting so that her knee blocked Earl’s view of the place where the chain was bolted to the floor.
She started scraping at the wooden floor around the bolt with her fingernails, whenever he wasn’t looking.
She tried to read some of the pages of his manifesto, but there were eighty-two of them, single spaced, and so far, it was one long run-on sentence, written with extreme urgency and zero logic.
She recognized the themes of a few Q-anon theories, but they’d been enhanced and embroidered with tales of his own about how birth control pills were controlling the minds of women, which explained why they wanted careers and independence instead of the comfort and security inherent under the guardianship and rule of men.
Obviously, she was supposed to see the error of her ways and throw herself on his mercy.
So she skimmed, taking a long time to turn each page, peeling away a splinter of floor at a time.
It was taking too long, however, and she looked for another option.
There were tools tossed around the place every which way, and after a bit, she noticed a crowbar in the corner.
She got up to her feet, and paced while she read, to see how far she could reach.
It caught his attention, and he looked up at her, watched her, but she pretended not to even notice and just kept pacing back and forth, her eyes glued to his pages.
Her chain didn’t reach the crowbar, but if she could lie down and extend her arms all the way, she might.
A bell jingled violently, and she dang near jumped out of her skin. “What the hell was that?”
“Hehehe. Somebody fell in the pit.”
“The pit?”
“Spikes in the bottom. Nothing survives the pit. I tell you, this place is impenetrable.”
“This place is Home Alone on a fifty-dollar budget.” She said it before she could stop herself. Then she threw the folder back toward the chair she didn’t want to sit in. “I’m not reading another word till you go out and check and tell me who you just killed.”
“I didn’t kill anybody. There’s signs everywhere. If you walk past a no trespassing sign, I’m within my rights to—”
“I don’t give a shit about your rights. Get out there and tell me who’s in your pit, or I’ll shred that manifesto instead of reading it.”
“All right, all right.” He went to the back door, rather than the front. She had not spotted it, so it was helpful to know it was there. He stepped out and closed it behind him, so she couldn’t see outside. No matter, she had to move fast.
She went as far as the chain would reach, then laid on her front and stretched her arm until her fingertips brushed against the crowbar. She scrambled them against it, but she couldn’t get a hold on it.
Then genius struck. She yanked out her jade hairpin and used it to extend her reach.
She pulled the bar the slightest bit closer with the hairpin, then grabbed it in her hand, ran back to the spot where the chain was bolted down, and pried.
The bolt in the floor rose a little. She pulled the crowbar back and jammed it in, pried again, and the bolt rose a little more.
One more try. She removed the bar, jammed it even deeper into the floor, and pried.
The entire bolt popped out of the floor, with its nut still attached on the other end, tearing the wood as it came free. Good.
Earl was coming back, opening that door.
She kept the crowbar in her hand, grabbed her jade hair pin, and ran to the door carrying the chain so it wouldn’t rattle.
Then she stood just inside. When Earl stepped back through it, she swung the bar like Alex Rodriguez swings a bat, hit Earl upside the head as hard as she could, and hoped it wouldn’t kill him.
She didn’t want him dead, but she wasn’t holding back.
He went down in a heap. She jumped over him, still clutching the crowbar as she lunged out the door, he wailed, getting up again, two steps behind her. “Camellia, no! You’ll die like Mary Jo did!”
She spun around, so startled by him bellowing from right behind her that she whipped the crowbar. It nailed him right between the eyes, and he dropped.
He stayed down that time.