Chapter Four
October 23rd. 8:42 PM.
"God. Damn. It."
Erin tugged on the thorn embedded in the rubber of the wrist of her glove. She pulled, and then released, and watched as the branch slowly dragged back her arm to where it had been snagged. She repeated this process again, and then lost patience, ripping the glove away from the thorn and leaving a small tear in its fabric.
"Damn this forest," she thought.
Erin had no problem running half a mile in the city. Heck, she loved to run. She could run ten or fifteen miles if she needed to, and in good time. But it had become immediately clear as she had stepped away from Margot's car that she was not in Kansas anymore.
It was a slog. There were logs to climb over. Mud to slip in. Dense thickets of branches to cut through. And all of these damn thorns.
Worst of all, there was barely a path in sight. The route that Margot had traced on her phone map was completely arbitrary. It had no respect for whatever was going on in any given square foot of the forest. So Erin had had to huff and puff and deal with every little obstacle that nature threw in her way. And in this forest, there were many, many obstacles.
But suddenly, there was light. A blinding dot of white in front of her. Erin removed her glasses. She could see, faintly, the outlines of buildings. The trail of a fence running around the property. Puffs of smoke coming from a chimney. And she could hear something. Music. A fiddle whining. The low thump of a stand-up bass.
"I guess this is the place," she thought. She tucked the glasses into one of the empty pockets around her belt. "Finally."
She thought about radioing back to Margot. But what was the point, really? Margot had been tracking her this whole time. She knew that Erin had arrived, was waiting in the forest near the perimeter of the property, plotting her next move.
Erin didn't hear voices, and she couldn't see people. But the place was clearly occupied. She saw lights coming through a large building, a farmhouse. She also saw, unlit, a smaller, square building. A barn, maybe? So where were the animals?
A pickup truck sat in a dirt driveway. She followed the drive from the house and into the woods opposite where she was standing. It was a narrow, tree-lined dirt path. Where did it lead? How did anyone get out here to begin with?
Erin breathed deeply. The scene was... Eerie. She had infiltrated creepy buildings before. One of her first really big nights she snuck into the basement of a frat house and, one by one, silently incapacitated the fraternity brothers. It was a truly epic operation. But that time, she had known the layout of the building. She even recognized the faces of her targets, knew what to expect if they happened to catch her sneaking around. Here, standing just a hundred yards away from a dimly-lit, ugly black farm in the middle of a massive, seemingly uninhabitable forest, she knew next to nothing. A cold wind blew through the trees, and Erin shuddered.
But she couldn't stop now. She had trekked for half an hour through that stupid forest: the least she could do was take a damn picture of a pill jar, or something. And even if she didn't know what was going on in that farmhouse, well, they didn't know much about her, either. She still had the element of surprise on her side. Right?
There was no use thinking about it. She just had to do it. So Erin took off. She scampered from the woods, low to the ground, feeling the tall grass kiss her ankles and lower thighs. She looked ahead at the truck, then to her right at the farmhouse. Still no movement, no voices, no anything. In seconds, she had arrived behind the pickup, where she squatted to the ground, breathing heavily.
She peered from the corner of the truck. She was now just twenty-five yards from the long front porch of the house. The porch was unlit, but light still streamed through the windows. She could see now pieces of the house's interior. Something that looked like a refrigerator. She could see light peeking through the front door, which was slightly ajar.
Almost as if to say, "Come on in."
"I'd better not," Erin thought. She crept around the other side of the truck and looked around the house. She saw more dense, black forest behind it, and the fence enclosing in some kind of a backyard. There was a window on the side of the house, a large one with more light. She dashed toward the window and sunk underneath it, pressing her spandex-clad body against the wood panels of the house. She could hear the music more clearly, now. Bluegrass music. And she could hear a small voice in a thick accent saying something.
Erin turned around and slowly lifted herself up. She inched her eyes over the pane of the window and looked in. It was some kind of a den. And old-fashioned, self-standing lamp. Next to it, a small radio on top of a small table. A long, filthy, unoccupied couch on one wall, and a medium-sized TV on the wall opposite. Between them, on the floor, a large rug. And on the rug, a pair of empty syringes. She saw an open doorway, and through the doorway, she saw a long shadow running across the den floor. And she could suddenly hear what the voice was saying.
"Dammit, Clayton, just fuckin listen to me."
She heard another voice, too. Lower and deeper than the other.
"Fuckin listenin to you, Jackson, but yer just not makin a damn lick of sense."
"Nah man, you're not fuckin listenin to me."
Erin slid back down the wall. Two men. And they didn't sound very smart. Maybe this would be easy.
She unbuttoned a flap on her belt and pulled out a handful of small, white pellets. Smoke bombs. A girl's best friend... Aside from the small taser Erin patted in a different pocket.
Erin counted to three in her head, and then, she vaulted through the window, somersaulting to the floor, and jumped to her feet. In a single fluid motion, she tossed the smoke bombs through the open doorway. A second later, there was a small explosion, and plumes of gas moved through the house as Erin dashed ahead. She cut through the smoke and saw the two men, both skinny and in overalls, and one wearing a hat, waving their arms and coughing. She sprang on the man in the hat, grabbing him by the neck and using all of her weight to pull him to the ground.
"Hey Jackson! What the fuck! Where'd ya go?"
Erin now sat on the hatted man, apparently Jackson, and put him in a swift chokehold. He coughed and mumbled as Erin tightened her grip. She looked behind her. The other man, apparently Clayton was still waving his arms wildly, screaming out for Jackson. Jackson struggled for a bit, then relented, and finally Erin released him. His face fell to the floor. Erin clambered to her feet and ran at Clayton. She held out an arm and caught him in a clothesline around the next, sending Clayton down hard to the floor. He wheezed and squirmed on the ground. Erin now straddled him and repeated the chokehold process. Just one minute after she had entered the house, both men were on the ground, unconscious.
Erin stood up and waited for the smoke to clear. She coughed softly. "Sorry boys," she said. "But the Blue Lynx..."
Suddenly, loud noise. Barking. And she felt something hit her, hard. She fell to the floor, the dog snarling at her, her arms trying to push it away from her face. It pawed her chest, snapped at her wrists, panted madly, and barked. Erin struggled wildly, looking for something to grab, finally finding the dog's forelegs. She snagged the dog by its front and tossed it away from her, so hard that it hit a wall and fell to the floor. Erin turned herself over and got on one knee. She looked across the room, and found the dog in an unconscious heap.
She brushed herself off as she slowly came to her feet. The dog had torn small rips in her costume, but she didn't seem to be bleeding anywhere. The impact with the floor still stung. She held her head, readjusted her mask, and looked around.
"Two men, and a dog," she said. "That better be it."
She was standing in a dining room area. The fight with the men had turned over chairs. A round table seemed unmoved. There were wooden cabinets, a sink, a fridge, a stovetop. Nothing out of the ordinary. Well, aside from the two men sleeping on the floor. But no drugs.
"They've got to be around here somewhere," Erin thought.
She wandered through the house, went into a hallway, and saw the door. A concrete door with a small metal keypad underneath its handle.
"Hello there," she said.
Erin tried the handle, but it didn't budge. She then tried pushing in the door. A similar result.
"Alright then," she said, dancing her fingers over the keypad. "If I were a hillbilly drug code, what would I be?"
She punched in a six. And a nine. And then another six. And another nine. And a small light near the keypad turned green.
"Of course," Erin grinned. She turned the handle of the door and pulled the concrete slab back.
She looked through the doorway. The light was, predictably, low. But she could see wooden stairs leading down into a basement. She stepped into the doorway and began a slow, careful descent into the secret room, which she could gradually see come into view. She saw long tables covered in white powder. Vials full of tablets. Beakers and test tubes. Empty syringes. A large furnace. Oil cans filled with god knows what. Shelves full of dirty, cobweb-strewn books. Wooden crates packed full of orange tubes with white lids. All lit by a single light bulb hanging from a chain in the center of the room.
She stepped onto the concrete floor and looked around. This was the place, alright. This was practically a factory. A factory for the manufacturing of illegal drugs. In the middle of the house in the middle of the forest in the middle of nowhere.
"Bingo," she said.
She heard a door slam.
"What?"
And then, a piercingly loud alarm. Erin held her hands to her ears. The sound enveloped her, shook her to the bone. She screamed to try to push it out.
And it stopped.
Erin dropped her hands. She looked around, and up the stairs. The concrete door was shut tight.
"Oh shit," she said. "What is this?"
Another sound came into the room, barely detectable at first. It started as a fizz, and then grew into a steady buzz. Erin looked around.
And then she saw it. Gas. Thick plumes of smoke, smoke not unlike that which she herself had used earlier. Smoke that crawled across the concrete floor of the basement and swathed itself around her ankles. Smoke that rose from her ankles and up her bare thighs and past her arms trying to swat it away. Smoke that came into her nose and mouth and that made her eyes run. Smoke that overtook Erin's entire body so that she could only see gray and white clouds.
Erin stumbled, coughed, moved toward the staircase, gripped the staircase rail, fell backward, caught herself, coughed, put her hands on her knees, coughed, batted away smoke and saw more smoke take its place, fell to her knees, fell from there on her butt, coughed, fell on her back and laid out, arms outstretched, hair flowing on the floor, knees bent, eyes closed, smoke caressing her body in every place.
She was unconscious.
On to Chapter Five
No comments:
Post a Comment