Page 99 of The Auction
“Okay. But nothing sounds sexy about a cave. When you got tested it was for like bat STDs too, right?”
He laughed. “I didn’t fuck the bat.”
“Just sayin’,” I mumbled. My last thought before drifting off to sleep was who he was with in a cave and was she prettier than me?
Hours later, everything would change.
TWENTY-FOUR
JULIETTE
“Jules,wake up. Something’s not right.”
I stirred underneath the blankets and tried to blink myself into awareness.
“What time is it?” I asked, my voice cracking.
I could feel him slipping out of bed and immediately AP voiced his disapproval.
Oh, shit. Was Creed dreaming again?
I sat up and pulled AP onto my shoulder. He was alert now as if sensing something. Noise. A loud noise.
“What is that?”
“Rain,” Creed said. He bent to turn on the bedside lamp, but it clicked over twice with no light. Then he picked up his phone from the charger which was dark. “Check your phone. See how much power you have left.”
Okay, he was too lucid for this to be a nightmare. I reached for my phone on the opposite nightstand and also saw the charger was dead. I checked my battery life.
“Sixty-two percent,” I told him and saw him nod.
“Stay here,” he said. Thunder broke over us as he said it, but I wasn’t someone who fretted about storms.
I got out of bed, Creed’s t-shirt falling to my knees, and pulled Patch off my shoulder, setting him back down on the bed. “Stay here,” I told him. He meowed profusely but proceeded to make biscuits with his paws in the sheets.
Phone in hand, I hit the flashlight feature and made my way out of the bedroom, down to the foyer. When my foot hit the runner, I felt the problem.
The rug was wet.
Shit, was there a leak in the roof? Lifting my phone towards the ceiling I ran it down the hallway but the ceiling was dry as far as I could see. I kept walking toward the living room, but I was trying to imagine a hole in the roof large enough that rain would be pouring through into the house to cover the floor.
The house didn’t sit on a traditional foundation. They didn’t build basements back when it was built. There was a three foot crawl space that ran the length of the house and a small five foot cellar that was dug out just under the kitchen, which had been used to keep things cool back in the day.
I ran my flashlight over the house, looking again at the ceiling first, when Creed burst back through the front door. He must have been on the porch.
“Come here,” he said, taking my free hand and dragging me outside with him. The rain was pouring down in sheets so that it was almost impossible to see anything. “Is there higher ground than where our trucks are parked?”
“Higher ground?” I repeated, my brain not processing what he was trying to tell me.
“Rain’s coming down too fast. The valley’s flooding. If I can’t move them to higher ground, water’s going to take them.”
“Oh, shit! The chickens!”
I bolted off the porch in the direction of the barn. I didn’t need to see to know what direction I was going. I felt the water cover my feet, and I trudged through what was now grass, water, and mud.
“Jules! Stop!”
Except there was no stopping me. They were animals trapped in a coop and water was rising. They had to be scared. They had to feel betrayed that we’d just left them like that.
