The Tempest by A.J. Scudiere (story read aloud .txt) 📗

“Izzy’s not here either,” Dev said, tapping into Cage’s thoughts as surely as he was tapping his finger on the list.

They stepped back to get out of the way for the next desperate searchers. Cage knew that the longer they went without finding Joule, the more likely it became that they never would.

52

Joule woke up warm, but when she rolled over, she crinkled and it smelled far too earthy to be home.

She wasn't home.

Not yet, she told herself.

She moved a little more and felt a sharp jab in her side that reminded her she was sleeping on hay bales under a stolen horse blanket. The scent around her bloomed into easy recognition beyond animal to horse, hay, barn, loft.

Slowly, she reached out and felt around her. The hay extended a little beyond her head but was too narrow to hold even her tiny traveling companion. Where was Toto?

Her initial assessment of the space didn’t find him. She would have scrambled to search and call out, but she couldn't be noisy. There had been no way to corral him at night, nothing she could safely put him in. Had he wandered off?

Slowly, she sat up, listening to the horses shuffling in their stalls below and waiting. As she moved, she spotted Jerry tucked up against the wall on his own hay bale bed. The blanket over him didn't move, but there was enough light in the barn that she could see his eyes were open.

“Toto?” She mouthed the name to him and was relieved when he pointed toward his feet. It took a moment, but she spotted her kitten attacking the corner of his hay bale. It was absolutely not the time to play, but Toto was romping about, squatting down, wiggling his butt until the wave followed all the way to the end of his tail. He went in for adorable hay bale murder before romping off to tackle something else that caught his eye. Joule didn't know what he’d seen—a grasshopper? Hell, it might be a roach. She didn’t want to think about that.

They both watched the kitten for a few moments and again, she realized how much she needed this. She needed the injected humor of a kitten at play. She needed the small, soft, warm body curling up next to hers. She put her hand down, dangling her fingers quietly near the floor and watched as Toto romped over, stopped, and dropped into tiny attack mode to get her fingers. He did so with such a gentle bat of his paw that Joule felt her smile form at the soft touch.

She and Toto and Jerry had made it this far.

In the dark of night, they'd run from the Larkin farm. At the first flash of the headlights, she’d busted up through the carpet, leading Jerry through the unfamiliar living room and out the back door. They’d bolted across the yard, protected from view by the bulk of the house.

With only the dimmest light from the sky to navigate by, they'd moved as quickly as they could, but not fast enough. They’d still been close enough to hear every word as the Larkins arrived at the house and discovered things were very wrong.

A woman’s voice had screeched with anger and fear. “Somebody was in the crawlspace! They saw it!”

The sound had spurred Joule to keep running. She had no idea if the family had gone down into the cellar, or into the crawl space themselves, or if they'd counted their bricks of cocaine. Had they seen that their stash was all still there?

Her heart had pounded the whole time, waiting for a shot to ring out in the dark. While Joule thought she was doing a relatively decent job of being stealthy, Jerry had crashed through the forest like a Sasquatch.

“Running” was too strong a word for what she and Jerry had been doing. The night was pitch black, and though he carried the phone, she’d batted his hand quickly, making him put it out. It was a beacon to their location. When the light went out, she breathed a little easier that she hadn’t made it easy for the Larkins to pick them off—but she still didn’t breathe easy.

Her heart had pounded for possibly two solid hours as they slowly and quietly picked a path away from danger and hopefully toward safety. At least, that’s what she hoped. Joule didn’t know where they were going. She wasn’t even confident they weren’t scribing a circle through the woods and heading straight back to the Larkin Farm/Drug Ring.

But after a few hours and who knew how many miles of dark path—maybe only a few? She wouldn’t be surprised if they’d covered virtually no ground—they’d found the big red barn.

It looked to Joule like every other one she’d seen when she drove the back roads. But Jerry said he knew this farm, too, and he deemed the Wilbert family almost definitely safe from the plague of drug running that had hit the area some years ago. Joule appreciated now that the barn smelled of manure and hay. That meant there were animals in it. And it meant that the farmland was functioning as a farm—unlike the Larkin place.

Though she'd managed to get some sleep once they’d laid down with the hay and blankets, her tension was back with a vengeance now.

As Toto romped around the loft they’d secreted themselves in, her brain ran wild in a way her cornered body couldn’t. She'd wanted to leave another sign for her brother, but she couldn’t leave any path for the Larkins to follow. Now, she even regretted the first four she'd left.

If the Larkins found one, they had her initials. They probably wouldn’t immediately think of her—she wasn’t even sure if she’d ever met them—but it would make it much easier for them to track her down in the future.

She’d not left an arrow at the Larkin farm, thank God, as both her entrance and exit had