Page 27 of Venom's Sting

Chapter 10

Amy

Ican’t help the frustrated sound that escapes from my lips. “My drone’s battery is depleting. I need to make it back before the battery runs out completely.” The last thing I need is to wreck one of the drones he took God only knows how long to make from scratch.

He tells me quickly, “Use the return to home feature. The drone can retrace its own flight pattern back to the basecamp.”

I glance around seeing nothing that looks like a basecamp. Maybe the drones all go somewhere else to land, kind of like a Roomba. “Where’s basecamp? I don’t see anything but us here.”

He gestures to the controller in my hand. “That’s basecamp as far as your drone knows.”

I’m so embarrassed that I blush furiously, “Oh yeah, that makes sense.”

“The return to home feature is the button on the side.”

“Is that your own invention or do all drones have that?”

“It’s a standard function, though what I’ve done is make a slight tweak. If my battery gets critically low, the drone automatically lands before reaching basecamp, but I’ve fixed it so that the moment it touches ground it’ll send a GPS signal back to the controller, so I know where to pick it up. Once the battery is completely depleted then the GPS won’t work. Usually you want to avoid getting into that kind of situation, because that’show you lose drones. But this way, at least I can get to it before some lucky fucker finds it.”

I carefully lay down the controller and move closer to him. “I can’t believe you just break things apart and repurpose them that way. I’ll bet you have a genius level IQ.”

He snorts a laugh as he gazes at his screen, still tracking the van. It looks like it’s slowly crawling along a dirt road that’s getting narrower and narrower.

“Where do you think they’re going?” I ask curiously.

“Wherever it is, someone’s been there before. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a dirt road.”

“Good catch,” I admit. “Then again, maybe it’s from the eighteen hundreds or something, like an old road to a railroad that no longer exists? There used to be lots of mines around here.”

“That’s possible. What I want to know is why they’re going all the way out into the middle of nowhere. If your grandfather is holding your mom away from the farm, then he could have another property out there.”

“It could be because they have to feed my mom and administer her meds.”

His eyes never leave the screen, even when he answers me. “It could be. If that’s true, at least we can rest assured that she’s still alive.”

Something painful and dark twists in my gut at the thought that she might not still be alive. No matter how hard I try, I can’tbring myself to believe that she’s dead. If she were dead, how is it that I still feel so connected to her?

Ven’s free hand comes out to rest on mine. “Don’t worry. If I have to move heaven and earth, I’ll find her.”

I lean over onto his shoulder and watch the screen along with him as he tracks that van. We’re tracking along and there are no problems seeing the vehicle, but then there’s a long line of trees for a mile or two that obscures the view, and we lose track of the van. Ven doubles back to look for it and brings the drone down lower and flies it along the side of the road.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he says intensely as he searches around.

We don’t see any side roads, nothing. Then he gets an alert that his battery is running low. He curses under his breath.

“Do you have enough power to get back?” I ask, worried about him losing his new drone.

“Naw, I don’t.”

“What’s the plan now? Will it land and do the GPS thing like you said?”

“I don’t want to risk it, the land here is too open, especially if your grandfather or his men use this road regularly. I’m gonna land it by an easily identifiable natural landmark and come back for it later. Make sure it’s hidden from view.” I watch him set the drone down next to a huge oak tree with a heart carved into the trunk.

When he’s finished, I say excitedly, “We could retrieve it now. I’d be more than willing to help. Why risk something happening to it?”

“I need to get together some of my club brothers because we’re going to be breaching private property, and I want to figure out where that fucking van disappeared to. If this has anything to do with your mother, we just might find her tonight.”

My hand comes out to land on his arm, and I caution him, “Please be careful. I don’t trust those farmhands slash so-called uncles of mine, not to make you disappear like they did to my mother.”

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