The Blood Guard (The Blood Guard series) (8 page)

C
H
A
PT
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10
:

UP THE CREEK

A
n hour and a half later, with the sun sitting on the horizon, Greta steered us into the parking lot of an empty rest area.

“Why are we stopping?” I had no idea where we were. Somewhere near the border of Delaware and Maryland, maybe, but I hadn’t been paying close attention to the signs. “They could be right behind us.”

“If I don’t pee soon, I’m going to explode.” She looked embarrassed as she turned off the engine. “Also? We’re basically out of gas. They were so busy kidnapping us that they forgot to fill up the tank.”

“Great,” I said. The rest stop was nothing muc
h
—
a
little brick bathroom on a big slab of concrete, surrounded by a grassy area, some picnic tables, and a dozen big streetlights that would probably kick on once the sunlight was gone. The grass sloped down to a narrow, reed-choked river, and a long way downstream a bridge spanned the water. It was almost peaceful.

I was as depressed as I have ever felt in my life. Here I was, out of gas at an abandoned highway rest stop with a girl I barely knew, handcuffed to the backseat of a car stolen from the people who’d kidnapped my dad, chased my mom, and killed the one person in the world who could explain to me what was going on. How long would it be until they caught up to me and Greta and killed us, too?

“There’s a pay phone on the wall over there. We’ll use it to call for help. But first,” Greta said, holding up the bent pin she’d used on her cuffs, “let’s give you your freedom.”

I checked out the pay phone while Greta used the bathroom, but it wasn’t going to be any help to us: there was no handset on the end of its cord.

So we searched the SUV’s glove compartment to see if there might be a cell phone there, but it held only a couple of parking tickets and a manual for the car. Greta flipped through it, looked closely at the inside front cover, and coughed. She showed me a bright red sticker reading
THIS VEHICLE IS EQUIPPED WITH
L
O
J
ACK
.

“So what? What’s that mean?”

“It’s a tracking device for stolen cars. Basically it sends out a GPS beacon so that the car can be found by the police.”

Suddenly I was all too aware of how alone we were. “That means they ca
n
—
”

“Find us, yeah. They’ve probably already activated it.”

“But that would take a while, right?”

“It would take a phone call. And a smartphone.” She swallowed and looked around us at the deserted rest stop. “They’re probably not that far behind.”

“What should we do? Run? Go on foot?” We were trapped. There was no place to walk, just a thin line of trees along the highway. “Hitchhike?”

“Calm down, Ronan,” Greta said.

“I’m calm!” I yelped, then realized she was right: I was panicking. I took a few deep, slow breaths. “Okay, sorry. I am totally calming down now.”

“Hitchhiking is way too risky. They’d probably be the ones to pull up and offer us a ride. We need to find a way to escape them so that they can’t follow, and we need to call my dad and tell him exactly what is going on.” Greta dropped the manual on the front seat. “Let’s see what they’ve got in the back.”

The storage compartment was packed. On the left was a long green trunk banded in steel, and snug against it were the two zippered black bags. Both were about as long as a person and lumpy. “Body bags,” Greta whispered, stepping back. “They really are body bags. I didn’t want to believe it.” She leaned over, her hands on her knees, and breathed loudly. “Oh, man, I think I’m going to be ill.”

“I don’t get it: Why would they pick up the bodies?”

“There’s nothing to get, Ronan. These people are sick. Sick, sick, sick.”

I didn’t want to think about that. “At least now we have some money,” I said. Sitting on top of the green trunk was the satchel Dawkins had given me. Inside was the Tesla gun (the woman must have put it there after she took it from Greta), the wad of cash, and the Zippo lighter.

“What’s this?” Greta pulled out something I’d forgotten: Dawkins’ cheap spiral-bound notebook.

We flipped through the tattered pages. His scribbles were tough to decipher. Some pages we just gave up on entirely. Toward the back, there was a note describing m
e
—
“
black hair, short for his age, dark blue hoodie, yellow backpack; looks like Bree
”
—
t
hat made a lump form in my throat.
Bree
is my mom’s first name. And on the facing page: “3:41 southbound out of Stanhope.”

“There’s the proof that he did come because of my mom,” I said, tapping the page.

“So he was telling the truth,” Greta said. “Sorry I didn’t believe you.”

“It’s okay. I wouldn’t have believed us, either.”

There were sketches of various things and people, and lots of drawings of dogs. All kinds of dogs. We couldn’t quite figure out one creepy illustration of a spiky mask with three eyes, but the sketches of the blonde woman and two of her gang of thugs were instantly recognizable. On the last page Dawkins had written the words MOUNT RUSHMORE all in caps.

He’d drawn a picture of the four sculpted president heads on the mountain, along with a fift
h
—
h
is own grinning face, his long hair looking greasy even when carved in stone. Etched into the mountain below the heads were the words
Nunquam mor
i
—
w
hatever that meant.

The rest of the pages were blank.

“What’s it all mean?” I asked.

Greta threw the notebook and everything else back into the satchel. “That he’s a bad artist? That he likes dogs? That he was completely nutso? Who knows.”

Greta tried each of the keys on the green metal trunk. The fourth slid in effortlessly, and the lid opened on well-oiled hinges. She peeled away a big piece of foam packing material, and for a few seconds, we just stared.

“Ronan,” Greta finally whispered, “what exactly are your parents mixed up in?”

Inside the trunk were gun
s
—
n
othing like any I’d ever seen before. I counted eight big black rifles and, tucked between them, pistols in holsters and other dark metal things that looked like weapons of one sort or another.

“They’re not mixed up in anything,” I said. “I mean, Dad’s basically a big-deal accountant, and my mo
m
—
”

“These are modified SG 550s,” Greta said, lightly touching the thick stock of one of the rifles, “and these look sort of like M14s, but these modifications
”
—
s
he tapped the bulbous plastic swellings above the trigger guard
s
—
“
I don’t even know what those are.”

“They look like that Tesla gun.” I pulled it out of Dawkins’ satchel, and we compared them. I thought about those sideways lightning bolts shearing through the Cadillac’s windshield and shuddered. “Did you see what this thing did?”

“Yeah. Scary.” She slammed the lid down and stepped away from the truck. “That is really evil stuff, Ronan. Guns? Body bags? We need to get rid of this.”

“We don’t have time,” I protested. “Why can’t we just leave it in the truck?”

“Because when they catch up to us, they’ll get all that evil junk back.” She took my hands in hers. I don’t know what I was expectin
g
—
g
irlishly soft fingers, mayb
e
—
b
ut her grasp was firm. “No one should have weapons like those things, Ronan. They’re
horrible
.”

I turned to look out at the deserted rest stop. It felt like we were the only two people alive, like a horde of zombies might come running out of the bathrooms at any moment.

But here we were, stuck in the middle of nowhere, without any gas or a phone or anyone to help us. And a case full of scary-looking weapons.
What would my mom tell me to do?
I wondered.
What would Dawkins do?
The answer to that was easy: He’d help Greta.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s hurry. Grab the handle on the front end, and I’ll get the back.”

The case was heavy, but it turned out to have wheels in the corners like a suitcase. We were able to roll it down the grassy slope to the bank of the river.

Greta slipped off her shoes and waded backward into the water up to her knees.

“Can’t we just throw it in here?” I asked, but from the look on her fac
e
—
h
er brows knotted together, her jaw tense
d
—
I
knew I’d have to wade in, too. “Okay, okay!”

On the first step, my foot sank in past my ankle. “Gross. There goes a good pair of sneakers.”

“Should have taken them off before you got into the water, you big dope.”

The case bobbed in the river, not floating exactly, but it didn’t totally sink, either. We just kind of steered it in the current.

At the halfway point, where the water was up to our armpits, Greta said, “This is good. Let go!”

The case drifted for a second before taking on water and vanishing. A fat air bubble rose up and was gone.

Greta said, “Just a sec.” Then she took a deep breath and dove under.

I stood and waited. The sun sat on the horizon, and it made the water glint and twist around me like molten gold. A ways upstream was a huge grassy meadow shifting in the wind, and farther away, a tiny, weather-beaten gray cottage. Nearer to the river was a ramshackle white gazebo, with what looked like an old overturned canoe beside it.

Greta popped up with a gasp, then squeegeed her hair with her hands. “I opened the li
d
—
w
anted to make sure it stays sunk. And, you know, if those guns get ruined, all the better.”

“That looks like a house over there.” I pointed to the tiny cottage. “Maybe whoever lives there can help.”

She stood in the water beside me, shading her eyes, and said, “That place looks like it hasn’t been lived in since the Great Depression.”

I squinted. Now I could make out the gaping black holes of the windows. “Okay, so that wasn’t the best idea.”

“Why don’t we take that canoe? Those people from the truck stop won’t know where we went.” Greta was dripping wet and shivering, her hair a soggy knot behind her head. She looked like a little kid, skinny and vulnerable.

“You’re right,” I said. “The canoe. Good idea.”

“Duh, of course I’m right.” She punched me in the arm, and that whole vulnerable thing evaporated. “I’m
smart
, Ronan. One of us has to be.”

Aluminum canoes, despite being made of the same stuff as soda cans, are pretty heavy. It’s a wonder they even float. We gave up trying to carry the canoe and instead just flipped it over, threw the satchel and the only paddle inside, and dragged it to the water’s edge. Greta got in front while I held it against the dock, and then I let go, hopped in the back, and just like that we were floating.

The current caught the nose of the canoe and turned us downstream. I picked up the aluminum paddle and slowly steered us toward the middle of the river.

“Check it out,” Greta said, pulling a dinged old hubcap from where it had been wedged in the frame. “I wonder why this is here?” It was as big around as a chip bowl but shallow, a hubcap for a very old ca
r
—
p
robably the same vintage as the abandoned house.

A trickle of water was filling the space in the bottom of the boat. “Probably for scooping out wate
r
—
i
s this thing even seaworthy?”

Greta dipped the hubcap to the floor and raised it back up full of water. “You paddle and I’ll bail.”

The noise of an engine caught our attention. It wasn’t quite dark yet, but the car that turned into the rest stop had its headlights on. We were still a hundred yards upstream.

“Shhh,” Greta said. “Let’s just be quiet and drift past. Maybe they won’t see us.”

“You’d have to be blind not to see us,” I said.

“Shhh,” she repeated, tucking the hubcap under her arm and sliding down. “Maybe we can just lie inside and they’ll think no one’s in it?”

I scooched down, to
o
—
i
nto the water that was slowly flooding the canoe. “I’m getting
wet
,” I said.

“You’re already wet. Be quiet!”

We peeked over the canoe’s edge as we drifted.

The car was a dark sedan with smoked-glass windows, like a million other cars. It circled the lot twice, finally pulling up beside the SUV. Doors opened, closed; I recognized the stiff gait of Mr. Four, and the woman with her helmet of blonde hair. They came around the SUV, touched the hoo
d
—
s
till warm, I be
t
—
a
nd then walked toward the rest stop bathroom.