Lexx and Black returned hours later. Jeremy and
CJ were sitting on the hood of the truck as they walked back up.
“Did you find anything?” Jeremy asked.
Lexx shook his head and he sat down on the
ground in front of the truck.
Jeremy was not surprised. He did not expect the
men to return with anything. If Josh and Tori made off on the ATV as they
thought, then most likely, there would not be much to find.
“They broke through the fence,” Lexx said.
“What?” Jeremy said, sitting up straighter.
Lexx looked up from his spot. The man looked
tired.
“Yeah, that’s what I said. They must have been
going pretty damn fast to break through that thing.”
“I guess the wall wasn’t as solid as we
thought,” Jeremy said.
“No,” Black said. “It was solid. They must have
had no other choice. I’m surprised they survived a collision like that. We searched
the surrounding area, but found no trace of the ATV or them.”
Jeremy looked at CJ. The boy shrugged.
“I’m telling you guys,” he said. “My uncle will
come back here. We just need to wait.”
“Yeah, but for how long kid?” Lexx asked.
CJ shrugged again.
They had no shelter except for the truck. No
weapons except for Black and White’s pistols, the few bullets shared between
them, and Jeremy’s machete. No food. The water pump was still there of course,
but with no way to contain the water, they were stuck with drinking straight
from the pipe. Not ideal.
“Where’s Mike?” Black asked, noticing his
partner’s absence.
“Bathroom,” Jeremy answered, jerking his thumb
to the woods.
Right on cue, White emerged from the woods,
buckling his belt. He waved and walked back over to the group.
“I’m guessing you didn’t find anything?” He
asked.
Lexx relayed to him the information about the
fence.
“Damn. That’s crazy. So, how long we gonna wait
here?”
“Until they get back,” Lexx said without
hesitation.
“We’re gonna need better shelter than just the
truck. We’re sitting ducks out here and I don’t want to sleep in the road
again,” Black said.
White eyed is partner.
“Will, can I speak to you for a minute?” he
said, motioning for his partner to step aside.
Jeremy watched as the two officers discussed
something. Black at first was against whatever White was proposing, but
eventually seemed to cave and agree. The two of them walked back over.
“We can go back to the police station in
Statesboro,” White started. “It’s not ideal, but it’s better than here. Plus,
we still have the cache of weapons there locked up tight.”
He held up the keys attached to his belt.
“That sounds great,” Jeremy said, CJ nodding
beside him.
Lexx stood up.
“What if they come back here and we’re gone?” He
asked.
“We’ll wait until this evening. If they’re not
back by then, we’ll leave them a note saying where we went,” White answered.
Lexx shook his head.
“And they’re just supposed to drive the
four-wheeler all the way to Statesboro? C’mon, that’s just not gonna work.”
White looked at Jeremy.
“Lexx is right. We can’t just expect them to get
there from here,” Jeremy said. “We’ll have to come back daily to check.”
“Jeeze kid,” Black said. “You know how much of a
pain that’s gonna be? And the gas that’s gonna use? Not sure if you noticed,
but the gas stations ain’t getting any more anytime soon.”
“Oh, really? I haven’t noticed,” Jeremy shot
back. “What do you suggest we do then?”
Black said nothing.
“I didn’t think so. For now, that’s the plan.
Take it or leave it.”
***
Josh and Tori moved through the rows of
cannabis, the sweet, sticky smell wafting heavily through the air.
“I think I’m getting high just being around this
much pot,” Tori joked.
Josh laughed.
“I know right. I feel like I’m in a High Times
photo shoot.”
“Have you ever seen this much before?” Tori
asked as she gawked at the height of some of the plants.
“Not in real life,” Josh said. “Certainly bigger
than anything I’ve ever grown.”
Tori stopped walking.
“Huh? What?”
Josh turned to look at her, a devious smile on
his face.
“I thought I’d get that reaction.”
“You grew pot?” She asked.
“Haha, not really. I once grew a seedling on my
windowsill as a teenager. Told my mother it was a seed I found in my shoe and I
wanted to grow it in order to find out what it was. I called it my
‘shoe-plant’.”
“Was your mother dumb?”
“Ha, no, just a little naïve I guess. I think
she eventually figured it out and told me to get rid of it. It was my first and
final attempt to grow.”
He smiled again and Tori could not help but laugh.
“I’m assuming this is before your holy-roller
stage?”
He nodded.
They walked up to the outside of the little
shack. It was not much to look at from the outside, four walls, a roof, and one
door.
“You see that pipe over there?” Josh said
pointing towards a lone steel pipe sticking up from the earth.
“Yeah. What about it?”
“It’s a vent,” he said. “A lot of times these
grow operations have underground rooms. Gives the farmers a place to hide from
authorities. I bet the entrance is in the shack.”
“How do you know that?”
“Dateline,” he said with a smile.
He reached for the doorknob and opened the door.
Inside, a lone cot sat on a box. A small, card table sat next to the cot, dirty
magazines spread open across the top. Tori noticed that Josh looked everywhere
except for the table.
Strange,
she thought.
They entered and Josh immediately walked over to
the cot, avoiding eye contact with the table. He kneeled down and began to
inspect the ground around the base of the box.
Tori walked over to the table and began to flip
through the pages of the magazine on top of the stack. Pages stuck together as
she turned them, making her wish she had just left them alone.
“These people were into some hardcore stuff,”
she said.
Josh looked up, and after realizing she meant
the porn, looked back down.
“Yeah, okay. I think I found the switch.”
He flipped something and then lifted up the cot.
It opened and revealed a ladder leading down into the box. Josh was right;
there was an underground level.
“Oh wow,” Tori said. “Are we going down there?”
Josh looked down the hole. Light shone below.
“Hello?” He called out.
No reply.
He looked back at Tori.
“There might be food and water down there. It’ll
be worth it to check it out.”
She looked hesitant, but her stomach began
growling.
Some food would be nice.
Her dry mouth reminded her that they both needed
water. Badly. She sighed.
“Fine. But you’re going down the rabbit hole
first, Alice.”
“Fair enough,” he said.
Josh climbed into the box and began his descent
down the ladder.
“Okay. Looks clear,” he said.
When she reached the bottom, it surprised Tori
how much cleaner it compared to the living quarters upstairs. It looked like a
hospital with its white walls and clean countertops, except that instead of
medical equipment lining the walls, there were shelves of various glass and
acrylic smoking pipes.
A couch and recliner sat in the space near the
ladder, a large flat screen TV on the adjacent wall. Several gaming consoles
and a mini-fridge sat underneath it. Whoever ran this operation sure was not
roughing it.
“Jeeze,” Tori said. “You think these guys had it
rough?”
Josh laughed.
“No, I don’t think they did, Tori.”
He pointed over to another table.
Tori looked and was not sure how she missed it
when she came down.
On the table was several bins filled with
harvested marijuana.
“Holy shit…” she said.
They walked over together and stared at the
massive amount of grass. Tori reached out and grabbed a hand full, letting the
excess fall from her fingertips. She held it up to her nose.
“OMG, smell this!”
She held up her hand to Josh’s face, not giving
him a chance to respond. He breathed in, inhaling the sweet odor. He nodded and
pulled his head back.
“Wow,” he said. “That is intense.”
“I know right? It’s almost a shame it’s all
gonna go to waste.”
She laughed, but Josh continued to stare at the
bins. He turned and walked over to one of the shelves full of bongs and pipes.
He picked up a glass bowl pipe and turned it over in his hands.
“What are you doing?” Tori asked.
He came back to the bins and began to pack the
bowl with marijuana.
“You’re right. We shouldn’t let it go to waste.”
“Huh? You’re going to smoke pot right now?” Tori
said, shocked.
He looked up at her. She could see the emotions
flooding to his eyes.
“I just lost my wife, my family, everything.
Yeah, why the hell not?”
Tori stretched out in the recliner. She felt
good. It had been years since the last time she was high.
When was it? High school?
She thought.
She took another swig from the beer they found
in the mini-fridge. The cold liquid felt amazing as it washed over her dry
tongue. The cottonmouth on top of dehydration had been quite irritating, but
the beer made it much better. She tilted the can back and finished it off,
crushing the can when she finished. She threw it to her pile of cans on the
ground and burped, which made her break out into a hysterical laughing fit.
Josh sat on the couch across from her, his eyes
glazed red and barely open. His smile widened at her burping and her finding
humor in her burping.
“Nice,” he said slowly.
“I’m a fucking lady, Joshua,” she said,
hiccupping.
He laughed by breathing air in and out of his
nose quickly, his body bouncing with each breath.
“What about you?” She asked.
“I’m not a lady, Tori.”
She leaned forward in her seat and her face got
very serious.
“No, stupid! That’s not what I meant. I mean,
like, what about you smoking and whatnot?”
Josh leaned back on the couch.
“What do you mean? You’re not making any sense,”
he said.
She pressed her fingers into her temples and
furrowed her eyebrows.
“Ugh,” she moaned. “What I mean is you’re a ‘boy
scout.’ (She uses air-quotes.) Boy scouts don’t smoke pot and drink beer or
hang out with the girls that do.”
Josh smiled.
“What if I told you I wasn’t always like this?”
He said.
“Stoned?” she asked, completely seriously.
“No. A boy scout.”
“What changed you?” she asked, leaning forward
in her seat again.
“Well, ultimately, Jesus changed me. But he did
a lot of it through Laura.”
He sighed.
“When I first met her, I was in a pretty rough
spot in my life. I was living with a friend and his family at the time. My
parents eventually didn’t know what to do with me after catching me with pot
several times and one stupid stunt I pulled with an ex-girlfriend. So, they
asked this family to take me in. They did, and with the exception of randomly
drug testing me, treated me like one of their sons.
Part of that deal was that I worked for their
family business and until I got my grades up in school, I worked for free at
the daycare.”
“Wait,” Tori interrupted. “They let you work
with kids?”
“Haha, no. I cleaned the place. I was basically
a glorified janitor. I say glorified because I did more than clean, for
example, I filled the kids’ cups with apple juice.
Anyways, I was pretty jaded from my previous
relationship and my parents. There were a lot of chips on my shoulder. I was
just in this dark place.
But one day, this beautiful girl walks into the
daycare looking for a job.
Now, just so you know, I was pretty goofy
looking in high school. I had this thick, curly hair that I would pick out into
a kind of afro. Wore tattered jeans and a tie-dye t-shirt constantly. Not the
biggest stud, if you know what I mean.”
Tori nodded.
“It’s hard picturing you with long hair,” she
said.
She squinted, trying to imagine longer hair on
Josh than the buzz cut look he had now.
“I swear I did. There’s a picture or two on the
internet if it still exists.
Anyways, Laura ends up getting a job at the
daycare. We start talking, which is completely weird to me, cause this girl was
so out of my league. It was almost like I knew I didn’t have a shot, so I
didn’t care what I said. Well, I guess she found that attractive somehow.
So, we started talking and I go out on a limb
and ask her out. She explains that she’s on restriction for her grades and the
only place she can go is church.
I’m like, ‘I used to be big into church. I can
do it again. Especially for this girl.’
So, I go to start going to church with her and
over time, I begin feeling this tugging on my heart that this is where I’m
supposed to be. Like I picking up where I left off. We start dating and become
one of the student-leader couples in our youth group.
Over the years, I would accept the call to
ministry, go to seminary, and lead in the youth group at our church. God used
that woman greatly to mold me.
The only thing, He wasn’t molding me like I
thought He was.
You see, while on the outside, it seemed like I
was living this God-fearing life, in private I was hiding a bad porn addiction.
Nothing crazy, just normal girl/guy porn, just lots of it. I was a huge
hypocrite and continued to hide behind my religion.”
“Is that why you wouldn’t look at the magazines
upstairs?” Tori asked.
Josh nodded.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” she said.
“It’s okay. Not really something I like to
broadcast. It wouldn’t come out until a year into our marriage. I ended up
losing my job at the church I worked at and we had to move back to Savannah. It
was a hard and dark time. Eventually, she forgave me and showed me grace.”
Tears began to slide down his cheek.
“But it didn’t end there. It would take several
years for me to shake the habit finally. I caused that woman a lot of
heartache. But yet, she always stood by me. She never gave up on me. She wanted
to, but never did. She persevered with me.
And then we found out she was pregnant.
If anything was the nail in the coffin of my
addiction that was it.”
He put his head in his hands and cried.
“And now she’s gone… They’re both gone…”
He began to sob violently, his body trembling.
“Oh, the time I wasted!” He cried out. “The time
I squandered with her!”
Tori got up from the chair and went over to sit
by him. She draped her arm around his shoulder.
“It’s okay! You didn’t know this would all
happen! Don’t be so hard on yourself!” She said.
“They’re gone… They’re gone…” he mumbled,
repeatedly.
She tightened her grip on him, pulling him in
closer. He leaned in, laying his head on her shoulder. Her hand reached up and
she laid it on his cheek.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she whispered in his
ear.
Her breathing was heavy and her head light. He
looked up at her, his eyes bloodshot from the drugs and crying.
Tori leaned in and kissed him.
***
Lexx stared at the driveway, wishing for
something to appear on the horizon. Anything. The sun hung low, the sky afire
in oranges and reds.
“Lexx,” Jeremy said, his voice sounding distant
despite the fact that he was right next to Lexx. “We have to go now if we’re
going to reach Statesboro by dark.”
Lexx continued to stare at the dirt road.
Dammit.