Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

tubs filled with Tupperware, silverware, picture frames, clothes, cans of food. Against the walls, rolled-up rugs and strips of carpet leading to a canopy of broom and mop heads, ladders, kites and clocks of every conceivable shape and size haphazardly hanging, some working, some not. I smelled rotten meat and curdled milk as I passed the kitchen, which was covered in knee-deep debris. I spied three fridges, a table turned on its side. A fly or moth batted weakly against my cheek as I walked into a second hallway, the insect drunk on the endless spoils around it or exhausted from trying to find a way out through the blocked windows.

The lit room was crowded with a sea of books, clothes, shoes numbering in their hundreds, twisted and dry models that made me think of collections I had seen in photographs of concentration camps. In a filthy bed in one corner lay an ancient man, buried under blankets so that he was almost invisible. I pushed past Ada and Mike and rushed to him.

“Oh god.” I reeled at the smell, brushed damp hair from the man’s forehead. “Sir, are you okay? Oh, Jesus. Jesus.”

I peeled the duct tape from his mouth. His eyes were huge and wet.

“Help me,” he rasped. There were no teeth in his mouth. “Help. He-elp.”

“It’s okay. We’re here now. I’m going to lift you—”

“Put the tape back on,” Ada commanded. She pulled my arm back and made me face her. “Leave him.”

“I can’t leave him like this,” I pleaded. “He’s severely dehydrated. Look at the whites of his eyes. Look at the color of his skin. At any moment he could go into cardiac arrest.”

“I said put the tape back on.” Ada’s eyes were burning in the light of the lamp on the floor beside the man’s bed: two distant gold flames. “He’ll still be here when we get back. He makes a fuss now and he’ll blow our cover.”

“There are … t-two m-men,” the old man wheezed. The blankets sank and rose as he drew ragged breaths. “And a wo-o-oman. They c-came and … I’ve been h-here, trap-ped, and … I don’t know h-how many days…”

“The woman,” I said. “Young blonde? Curly hair?”

The man nodded.

“Where is she? Is she alive?”

“She stop-ped c-coming,” the man said.

Fred appeared in the doorway, murmured to Ada. “Tunnel’s in the kitchen. No sign of anyone.”

I turned and saw Mike raising his gun toward the old man’s face. I slapped it away without thinking, an electric pulse of terror hitting my heart like a punch. The big man grabbed a hank of my hair and I felt the sharp edge of the square gun barrel in my throat.

“That was a stupid thing to do,” Ada said, stepping close to me. Her face was expressionless, like a wax mask, only the eyes alert and following mine closely, curiously. “Swiping at a man’s gun like that.”

“He was going to—”

“Yeah.” Ada nodded. “He was going to waste the old guy. Are you catching on now, Blair? We’re not here for Dayly. We’re not here to rescue filthy old coots from their reeking beds. We’re. Here. For. The. Money.”

Mike’s gun was crushing my windpipe. It was impossible to swallow. I looked at Ada and eased out pained words. “Jessica warned me about this,” I said.

“And you should have listened.” Ada tapped my nose with the end of her pistol. “You’re too trusting. Smart, yeah. Capable, of course. But way too trusting. And for god’s sake, you eat up a bleeding heart story like no one I’ve ever known.”

“Just leave me with the old man,” I said. “Do what you’ve got to do. I’ll stay here. I won’t make a sound.”

“You’re as bad as Dayly, trying to save your dying, dirty animals,” Ada knocked a naked Barbie doll off a cluttered shelf. It cascaded down a mountain of trash, dislodging magazines and paper cups, wooden toys. “This man is a pig.”

“Please let me go.”

“I don’t know if I’ll need you down there or not,” Ada said, nodding her head the way we had come, toward the kitchen. “So for now you’re coming with me. But as a favor to you, because you’re a good person, I’ll leave the old man alive. How about that? See. I can be good, too. Mike?”

Mike moved the gun away from my throat and pushed me aside. He took a roll of duct tape sitting on the dusty carpet by the bed and grabbed a handful of the old man’s lank, greasy white hair, lifted, rolled the tape around his head twice as if he were binding up a leaking pipe. I watched Mike drop the man’s head back on the pillow and brush his hands off.

Ada pushed me toward the kitchen. Shielded from view by a pile of debris, a hole in the linoleum floor gaped four feet wide, leading to blackness as pure and impenetrable as ink. Fred climbed backward into the hole ahead of me, and I heard his feet hit the rungs of a ladder.

“Get down there,” Ada said, prodding me in the back with her gun.

JESSICA

“I saw it coming from pretty far off,” Tasik said. They were rolling slowly now along the cresting road, looking for something. “If there’s one thing a practiced liar like you would know, it’s that you find a story and you stick to it. Dayly’s story started wavering. Suddenly she couldn’t tell me how much money was supposed to be under the police station. Was it ten million or fifteen? Then, what do you know? She’s suggesting it might only be two. She wouldn’t answer her phone. Wouldn’t let me speak to the old man, Fishwick. I wanted to talk to Lemon and Ramirez, become a full partner in this thing, but she’s telling me if they find out about me they’ll flip. I’ve only got her word on everything that’s happening, and I’m starting to discover that she’s lying. She would tell me she was alone, when there I am sitting