“Booty taps,” Baxter said, but his chuckle cut off when nobody appeared to get his joke. “What? Nobody sawGoonies?”
“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 ledto 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 isHome Aloneon 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?—”
