Page 49 of Creed
I couldn’t go to sleep, since someone had to keep a look out in case our pursuers caught up with us. Kayden had agreed to switch off with me halfway through the night so I could also getsome sleep, but that still left me with many hours where I had nothing to do but obsess over Lisianthus’s writing.
And the story contained within her journal had just taken an interesting twist.
Our luck heldout for the next few days. There were no signs of our pursuers so we’d moved to traveling during the day instead of at night. The weather remained calm, without a hint of rain or other conditions that could slow us down. Plus, Mavis’s cold finally broke. We still had to carry her. She wasn’t back to full health yet, and even if she was, a six-year-old couldn’t keep up with our hiking pace. However, it was still good to see her awake and conscious for most of the day.
She was a calm child, always sitting still and content to be carried most of the time. That might have been due to the leftover fatigue from her illness, but there was an alert curiosity in her eyes as she watched the forest passing by around us.
As we traveled, I asked Robyn about his community. He told me about the people he’d grown up with, mostly adults. It was a varied mix. Some were kind, others not so much. Mostly interestingly, however, was the fact that, despite the Grieve family running the cult, there were only two Grieves left. Chester Grieve, the man that had imprisoned Kayden and me, and the man’s son.
Chester Grieve’s son was already approaching middle age, and so far, he hadn’t managed to have any children, despite having several wives. If he didn’t manage to reproduce soon, the Grieve family might be coming to an end, and there had been a lotof squabbling among the adults about who would take over leadership if that happened.
As far as I was concerned, that bloodline couldn’t die out soon enough.
We passed the next two days of our trip without much trouble. When we reached a break in the trees, and the town of Whimborne came into view, I dared to feel hopeful.
If we could just find a phone in town to call Brody and Magnus, then we had a good chance of getting out of this without encountering our captors again.
Whimborne was a small place, barely worthy of being called a town. Most of the roads weren’t even paved, and the buildings looked like they hadn’t been properly refurbished since the pioneer days. It was our best chance of going unnoticed by our pursuers, who would likely assuming we were headed for one of the larger towns nearby. However, in a small place like this we were also more likely to be noticed by the locals.
“Wait here,” I told Kayden, who was crouching with the children in the shadows at the edge of town. “I’m going to go find a phone. I shouldn’t have to go far, but if I don’t come back in the next few minutes, find a place to hide yourselves and wait for Magnus and Brody to come get you.”
Just as I turned away from them, a hand tugged at my sleeve.
“Mister Creed,” Robyn said as he looked up at me, his voice small but steady. “Let me come with you.”
Although he was twelve, just one year from being a teenager, Robyn was small for his age. I had to kneel to be on level with him.
“It’ll be safer for you to stay here with Kayden.”
He immediately shook his head. “No, I should come with you. I know all the people from my community. I’ll recognize them easier.”
The kid had a point. Other than the individuals who kidnapped us, I hadn’t met most of the members of the cult.
With a sigh of resignation, I nodded. “All right, you can come with me. But if I tell you to run, then you run, all right?”
The boy nodded and stood up as straight as he could, like he was about to charge into battle. “I got it.”
“All right. Let’s go.”
I shared one last look with Kayden as he cradled Mavis in his arms, then turned and left with Robyn right on my heels.
The two of us slunk up to the backside of a building at the very edge of town. Made from old brown brick, it looked like it would fall down at any moment, but from the activity I could hear just out of sight, the place still seemed to be functioning. It was a post office, as far as I could tell, with several large garage doors in the back for accepting deliveries.
More importantly, however, there was a ladder just off to the side of the garage door that led up to the roof.
“Come on,” I said to Robyn, pointing at the ladder. “Up here. We’ll be able to get a better look at the area from the roof.”
The first few rungs of the ladder had rusted away, so I had to pick Robyn up for him to reach the higher ones. I kept him in front of me as we climbed, making sure he didn’t fall. When we reached the roof, we found one of the first signs ofmodernization on the town. The roof was metal, instead of the worn tile that I had expected, and a satellite dish stood proudly pointing toward the sky.
That was a good sign. A satellite dish meant the building was connected to the rest of the world. We had a good chance of finding a phone to use here.
After instructing Robyn to stay low, the two of us crawled on our stomachs to the edge of the roof. Most of the buildings in the town weren’t more than a couple stories high, so we had a good view of everything. The roads of the town had a circular design, like the spokes of a wheel radiating from a central point. A few people walked along the street, ambling casually as though they were in no rush to get wherever they were going. One person was talking on a cellphone, waving animatedly with their other arm. I was half tempted to climb down from our hiding place and steal the phone from them.
No, that wouldn’t be a good idea. Not only would it draw a lot of attention to us, but most modern phones required a passcode anyway. I could bypass the average phone’s security system, but it would require tools I didn’t currently have. Unless I got lucky enough to grab the phone right out of their hands while they were still using it, stealing the cell phone wouldn’t do me much good.
A sharp poke against my arm caught my attention.
“Mister Creed,” Robyn said as he urgently jabbed at me. “Look.”
