Page 45 of Wandering in Darkness
“I vaguely remember no such thing.” I give a little grimace, but it really is nice seeing those abs. It’d be a crime not to see them.
Lane reaches down and feels around for Brigs until he manages to find the sleeping swine. Brigs snorts a little when he’s suddenly airborne but not a single squeal escapes him as Lane hefts him up like he’s weightless. I feel like the pig might crush me if I did that, but I would never admit that to anyone.
The pig utters not a sound while we head toward the door. Maybe he’s realized the same thing I have when it comes to being lazy. One doesn’t need to use their legs when they have Lane to carry them.
Honestly, I’m a little jealous. I would very much appreciate him carrying me through enemy territory.
Assuming that our phones haven’t been tossed in some random shit pile somewhere, I start back toward the building that Ned’s office is in. Hoping he doesn’t notice, I hurry inside while Copper dutifully follows after me.
It has to be hard for Lane, who is busy holding a pig and probably unable to fully feel Copper’s tug, but he manages to keep up with me. I swear that man would let me lead him anywhere without a second of hesitation.
“You’re da best,” I whisper.
“No, I’m not carrying you too.”
“I wasn’t meaning that. Was I thinking it? Maybe. Maybe not. But mostly yes.”
Lane grins. “I knew you were.”
I push the door open. “Doorframe here. Watch your elbow.”
“Got it,” he says as he slips inside. The first room I find is rather empty, and I debate whether Ned would keep our information in his office or somewhere else. My guess is somewhere with a computer to look us up. How long before he finds out that Lane was a police officer—albeit not an active one?
I guess… it’s an easy enough place to look.
“Lane, I’m going to leave you in this room here. There’s a closet. It looks extremely unused. Like there’s not a place that doesn’t have a layer of dust. I know Brigs gets antsy when I’m not around, but he likes it when you sing to him. So just sing to him and he’ll be calm.”
“I’m not singing to your pig.”
“Then tell him a bedtime story! He likesThe Three Little Pigs. But he likes it best if you modify it so the pigs win every time.”
The expression on Lane’s face tells me that he’s not going to do a single thing that I just suggested.
I just mentally wish them the absolute best of luck. I’m not sure I’d be leaving them like this if I felt like the group was planning on murdering us. But so far, they all seem pretty low-key—not really too focused on our deaths, and their ability to keep track of us is lackluster at best.
Closing my loves in the closet, I take a hasty look around the room to see if there’s anything I might need. It mostly appears to be planting supplies, and I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with some fertilizer unless I can fling it in their faces like badass fuckers do in the movies with sand.
Deciding I’d rather not carry around a handful of fertilizer, I slip out into the empty hallway. I quickly make my way over to Ned’s room, which they thoughtlessly showed us when they led us in here twice already today.
I listen against the door for a moment, unsure if Ned is back inside. I can hear people outside the building I’m in, but currently I can’t hear anyone inside. I knock, and when no one calls out, I push the door open just a little and peek inside. Seeing that it’s empty, I slip in and glance down at the doorknob to check whether there’s a way to lock it. Not seeing anything, Ihurry over to the desk, hoping our phones are just lying on top. Of course they’re not, so I start on the first drawer.
Since we haven’t been here long, I can’t fathom they got buried, but I still do a brief lift through the junk in the drawer to make sure our stuff didn’t get shuffled under anything. Not seeing anything, I move to the next drawer until I find myself at a locked one. The lock on this one is a little more finicky than the one on the door I just unlocked, but it takes me no time at all.
At the top of the pile are our wallets, but I don’t see our phones. He probably took the wallets to look up our names and left the phones somewhere else. He really wouldn’t have much use for our phones since he can’t get in them without consulting us.
I grab the wallets, but when I do, I realize I’ve accidentally grabbed the edge of an envelope. Pulling it up, I see that it’s full of photographs.
Curiosity getting the best of me, I slide the pictures out, careful to keep them in order so when I put them back later, he doesn’t realize I messed with them. The first one is a woman who is lying on the ground, wrists handcuffed together. In the next picture, she’s bloody and her face is covered in red and purple bruises. I’m not sure I even want to flip to the next picture. I hesitate and slide it up just enough that I can see her splayed out on the floor, blood pooled beneath her.
My stomach tightens as I quickly slide the photo back behind the other.
Maybe she wasn’t dead. Maybe she just looked that way from the abuse she’d endured. I examine the first photo for a long moment, but she’s definitely not in the same room Lane and I were held in, so I don’t feel like this was a victim of Ned’s that he’d taken pictures of to enjoy at a later date.
I really feel doubtful that these guys did this and Ned kept the photographs as trophies. But if it was someone he cared about… why would he keep them here?
I flip the pictures over and discover there’s writing on the back of the very last photograph that says: “I warned you. Do I need to warn you again?”
I hurriedly slide the pictures back into the spot I’d found them. Then I decide that maybe I shouldn’t take the wallets. Yes, it’d fucking suck to lose our wallets, but if he sees that they’re gone, then we could be in a whole lot of trouble.
