Right. I’d forgotten that Cameron had already mentioned my name.
“What’s your name?” I asked, my full stomach lurching as the Audi sped into a curve.
He considered this while I gulped the takeout back down my throat. “You can call me Sexy Bull.”
My head was buzzing, and a bead of sweat lined my forehead. We were going to bond whether or not he wanted to.
“My mom’s name is Isabelle and my dad’s name is Burt; it’s short for Bernard. And I had a teddy bear called Booger when I was a kid—he lost an eye after I tried to flat-iron his fur. And my middle toe on my left foot is longer than my big toe. And when I was four—”
“Jesus, what’s wrong with you? Are you still high?” There was incredulity mixed with an edge of worry in his voice.
“And when I was four—” I continued, but the Audi was rushing through curves and up and down hills. The shadowed landscape was flashing by. Suddenly, as the car aggressively looped around a cliff, I felt a knot in my throat; my heart started racing, and my body temperature went up a thousand degrees.
“Oh God!” I yelled.
“What now?” he sighed, annoyed.
“You need to stop! I’m going to be sick!”
“Stop? We’re in the middle of the mountains! There’s nowhere to stop!”
I started heaving, my hand in front of my mouth.
“Hold on! Keep it in!” He swore and, in flailing panic, blindly fiddled in the backseat with his free hand, his eyes never leaving the road. He pulled out a plastic bag, emptying its contents before throwing it at me.
I pulled the bag open and I threw up immediately, repeatedly.
“That’s so gross!” he gasped, opening his window and sticking his head out. “It still smells like chow mein.”
The fresh air rushing in from his opened window made me feel better—and I had nothing left in my stomach to puke up anyway. After a few minutes, I pulled my face away from the bag and glanced up.
He was glaring at me, holding his nose and wincing. His face had gone from rosy-cheeked to pale and sickly.
“Throw the bag out the window,” he ordered.
“I can’t do that!” I said. “It’s a plastic bag. It will take over a hundred years to disintegrate. I don’t want to pollute.”
“Emily,” he said, carefully enunciating every syllable, “if you don’t throw that bag out the window in the next second, I’m going to be sick too.”
I sighed and reluctantly threw the bag out my window. But I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty as I watched him breathe through his nausea.
“Sorry,” I said, trying to not mock him, “I guess my bruised head’s still not quite right.”
He looked at me with revulsion. “That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever seen. Now I’m kinda glad we didn’t take my car. Who knew one girl could be such a pain …” His voice trailed back into his head.
“Ugh!” he groaned dramatically a few seconds later, “It really stinks in here.” And he stuck his head out his window again.
I’ve never had an iron stomach. Once a guy on his bike crashed next to me, and a broken bone in his right calf pierced through his skin. As any Good Samaritan would do, I insisted on waiting with him until the paramedics showed up. He spent the next twenty minutes holding my hair back while I puked on the side of the road. I couldn’t remember if he ever thanked me for waiting with him.
I thought about telling Kid about this life event to further solidify our kidnapper-hostage bond, but I was worn out. I let my head fall back into the seat and closed my eyes.
Chapter Five:
The Farm
I was awakened by the sound of gravel crushing against the Audi’s tires.
Kid glimpsed at me from behind the steering wheel.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” he muttered.
We had turned off the country road onto a narrow, gravel, side road where the blackened branches of trees hovered too close, trying to grab hold of the Audi, trying to consume us. Kid was absentmindedly drumming his fingers against the wheel to a Britney Spears tune that was cracking through the radio in broken waves. The darkness beyond the headlights … it besieged us.
He was wrong. This wasn’t the land of the living. It was a dead zone.
“Where are we?” I croaked.
Kid stretched his arms, pushing against the steering wheel, and sighed, “Almost there, thank God. Cam totally owes me for this.”
My throat was raw, and my body emotionally exhausted. I could feel the dark isolation seeping into the car like a deep depression. I just wanted this to be over, but he seemed to be going through great lengths to drag out the inevitable. Maybe breaking my spirit first was part of the preparation.
After a while of the tires bouncing us around on the road, the trees moved away, and Kid slowed down. My eyes were beyond tired; I was even starting to see man-sized shadows stirring in the woods. I focused on the speck of light that shone ahead. I couldn’t have imagined that—it grew bigger as we drove closer.
The car came to a stop. Kid turned off the ignition and was out in a flash, breathing in the fresh air repeatedly, overdramatically. I waited, rubbing my eyes, forcing them to adjust to the refrigerator-sized light that had come on inside the Audi.
Kid eventually came to rest his hand against the frame of his opened car door. “I don’t know how you can stand being one more second in that car. It really reeks in here.”
I glanced up through weary eyes. “Am I supposed to get out of the car?”
His face scrunched. “You’re so … weird,” he mumbled, shaking his head and walking away. His kidnapping methods were confusing to me; or possibly, most people would already know what to do in these types of situations. I took his obscure response as a yes and climbed out of the vehicle.
The air outside the car was crisp and clean—too clean; I wasn’t sure my city-infected lungs could handle the pure stuff. The night sky was unbelievably clear, which I guessed was how it must always look when the city lights weren’t there to distort it. Of course I had seen stars before, but not like this. It was like every imaginable constellation was shining above. It took me a while to find the dippers—big and little were the only ones I knew; but in this perfect sky, they weren’t the only superstars.
The sound of a door creaking open and the flood of light that followed knocked me out of my reverie. A man walked through the earlier guiding light that, as it turned out, was a door with a window of carved glass.
My legs went numb when I noticed that he was carrying a long-barreled shotgun over his shoulder.
Kid greeted this armed man nonchalantly as they met in the middle.
“Why are you back so early?” demanded the gunman.
Kid shrugged his head in my direction and explained, “Pain-in-the-butt delivery.”
The gunman did a once-over in my direction. Then he parted ways with Kid to make his way toward me.
I held my breath and closed my eyes, listening to the shuffling of his feet against the loose gravel—I didn’t want to see the bullet coming. The footsteps approached and shuffled on, past me. I opened one eye in time to see him disappear into the darkness of the surrounding woods. I heard his footsteps crush against the grass, until I couldn’t hear anything else but the wind rushing through the darkened trees.
I turned my eyes to the sky again. I was looking for them—my lucky stars—but it was early still and there were just too many stars to find mine.
Kid had been watching me go through my rush of emotions from the opened doorway. With the same look of mystification on his face, he hollered, “Hey, freak, are you just going to stand there all night—or do you plan on ever coming in?”
The doorway where he was standing was attached to a large building that, from the darkness, looked like a barn. There were tall cedar shrubs that lined the face of the edifice, with the door being the only shrub-free space. The moon’s shine reflected off the tin roof, and I couldn’t tell if the building had any windows because of the cedars that hid its exterior walls.
Inside the barn was a foyer with a vaulted ceiling. The beige, tiled floor of the foyer merged with dark, ancient-looking hardwood floor. Half-mooned stairs led to a second-level hallway with an unencumbered white wall and wood rail. Through a side doorway, another set of stairs led down to a floor below. I could see the flickering of images from an unseen downstairs TV bouncing off the plain stair walls.
Kid kicked off his shoes onto the pile of huge man shoes that were strewn by the front door and disappeared through an arched doorway that was at the far end of the foyer, next to the curved staircase. Getting used to his unspoken commands, I did the same and followed him through the archway. By the time I made it down the two steps that led to a living area, he was already sprawled in front of the TV on one of the two couches, remote control in hand—it was like we had never left the apartment in the city.
I sat on the edge of the other couch and waited, carefully examining my surroundings.
It was one big open space that connected a living room to a kitchen to a large, pine-colored dining table. I could see now that the barn was a home. The living room had brown leather furniture—the soft kind that seemed to form around your body as you sunk into it. There was a fireplace made of stones stacked to the high ceiling, with an oversized flat screen television that hung above its mantel, which Kid hadn’t taken his eyes off of.
A humungous kitchen separated the living room from the dining table—it had two of almost every appliance: two restaurant-sized refrigerators, two microwaves, two toasters, two dishwashers, but only one oven. And the dining table looked big enough to seat twenty people. To the other side of the living room was a small hallway.
While Kid settled on cartoons, I nervously kept my eyes on him. I was trying to decide which one was worse: not knowing how I was going to die, or not knowing when it was going to happen. I was weary, impatient.
After a few minutes of my stare, Kid diverted his attention from the TV and sighed loudly, “Are you always this uptight, or are you just like that with me?”
“No, I’m usually a lot more fun when I get kidnapped and brought in the middle of nowhere against my will,” I snapped. His indifference to my plight was maddening to me.
His eyebrows furrowed. “Hey, don’t get upset with me. I’m just following orders.”
“What are your orders, exactly?” I took the chance of asking, just in case he obliged me with an actual answer.
“Weren’t you right there when I got them?” he questioned in answer to my question.
“All I heard was that you were taking me for a drive to the farm. I don’t know what that means, but this place doesn’t look much like a farm to me.”
“It does when you know the animals who live here,” he said, laughing.
My eyes swept the room again and rested back on his face. “This place is what Cameron meant by taking me to the farm?” I had noticed his face flinch when I said Cameron’s name, but he didn’t say anything about it.
“What else could it mean?”
I gulped. “Death,” I admitted. And then I clarified, “My death.”
Kid seemed to consider this. “You mean you thought that Cameron would send
me
to kill
you
?”
I nodded, though I thought that I had already made this clear enough to him.
“Really?” he insisted, his voice pitching on the last syllable.
I nodded again, but with less certainty this time.
“Wow!” He grinned from ear to ear. “Thanks!”
“So you’re not going to kill me?”
He shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
“Why am I here then?”
Kid shrugged with dispassion. “Beats me. Nobody ever tells me anything around here.” He leaned his body forward, his grin picking up again. “Were you scared of me when you thought I was going to kill you?” he continued.
I let my shoulders relax and roll back into the comfy couch. “I guess.”
He was watching me excitedly.
“What scared you the most? Was it my voice?” he asked, his tone noticeably lowering as he said this.
“Your driving skills,” I answered. My mouth still had the aftertaste to remind me of this.
His smile turned to disappointment. “I guess it explains why you were acting like such a freak. I was beginning to think Cameron was bringing home mental patients.” His eyes veered back to the TV screen.
Now that I had opened my eyes to see that this kid was called Kid because he was, indeed, just a kid, I felt a little braver. He was no doubt a big boy who could probably crush me with one hand, but he was not going to be the one to kill me.
Yet, with the knowledge that there was some man walking outside with a very large gun, I didn’t take more than a little comfort in that. At least, for now, we were alone, and as far as the kid and I were concerned, there were—currently—no plans to kill me.
When I snapped out of my daze, Kid was snoring on the couch. With the threat of imminent death temporarily off my mind, the rest of my senses had kicked in—like the taste of regurgitated takeout in my mouth and the feel of the crusted tears that had dried on my face. All of a sudden, finding a washroom was bumped up to first place on my mental survival list.