Page 86 of Unloaded
“Well get going so we can get inside before we get soaked,” I call up to him. “I don’t want to be wet and cold for hours.”
“All right, already, I’m going,” Ricky yells back. “You are such a girl sometimes.”
“It’s not being a girl to not want to catch pneumonia, asshole!”
Ricky laughs as he climbs inside the opening, only to peek down at me once he is inside. “You are too easy, man. It takes nothing to get you riled up.” More laughter filters down to me as I pull myself up the last couple of rungs. He moves back out of the way so I can crawl through the narrow opening.
Once inside, it takes some time for my eyes to adjust to the darkened space. The small crawl space has a musty odor. The ceiling and floor both have several dark stains indicating the roof has been leaking for some time.
Ricky, on his hands and knees, crawls farther inside to where we’d made a hideout of sorts all those years ago. I follow along behind him also on my hands and knees.
“So much for staying dry when the rain comes,” I comment, pointing toward the ceiling stains. As if I’d called the it, rain begins to come down in a torrent. The sound is overwhelming in the cramped space. Within minutes, I begin to feel drops hittingmy back and the plopping sound of water. I really hope the room is in better shape than the crawl space.
After crawling several feet through old ductwork, we reach our well-hidden room. We’d built it inside the attic space of an old office building, using some drywall that had been stored in the attic. We’d portioned off a small alcove and gathered some meager belongings.
It doesn’t appear that anyone has found it, but very little of what we’d left behind appears to be usable. Mice have had made nests with the cushions we’d used for seats and they’ve chewed into the trail mix I’d left. Not that I’d expected it to still be edible after all this time.
“I sure hope the mice haven’t chewed up the money we left,” Ricky murmurs as he removes the loose floor board that covers our hidey-hole.
“Oh, shit!” I exclaim. “I hadn’t thought about that. I hope they haven’t either. I’m starving.”
“Me too,” Ricky agrees. “I didn’t want to eat or drink anything while we were with dear old dad. I wouldn’t put it past him to drug us so we couldn’t get away.”
“My thoughts exactly,” I say, leaning over Ricky’s shoulder to peer into the hole he has uncovered. He reaches inside and pulls out the old Gameboy box. Relief washes over me when I see him pull out a stack of bills. “Hell, yeah! Finally something is going our way.” Ricky grins at me and bends down to the hole once more.
A clap of thunder sounds so close it jars the building. “Fucking hell!” Ricky exclaims. “That’s one hell of a storm. Looks like dinner will have to wait since you’re so worried about catchingpneumonia.” He draws out the last word and gives me a smirk. I roll my eyes but otherwise choose to ignore him.
“Okay, so when the storm lets up, we’ll head to the public library,” I say. Ricky gives me a confused look. “Remember whatthe guys told us to do if anything ever happened to us and we needed help? Jason reminded us the other night to send an email if we got separated from him.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ricky nods. “I’d forgotten all about it after everything that happened. Wait! We don’t even know if Jason is alive.” His voice drops to almost a whisper.
I swallow hard around the lump that forms in my throat as I recall the last time I saw Jason. His body was lying in the hall outside the room Ricky and I had been sleeping in. Blood was pooling around his head, and he wasn’t moving. I hadn’t been able to tell if he was breathing or not as we were herded out of the room.
A man, I now know is our father’s half-brother, had shoved me out the door before dragging me down the hall and out the front door. Another man had Ricky at gunpoint, ensuring we would cooperate.
“We still need to do what he said,” I counter after clearing my throat. Ricky gives me a knowing look, but doesn’t say anything about the tears in my eyes. I suppose it’s because we are twins or because of all the shit we’ve lived through in our almost eighteen years, but he’s never given me shit over being emotional. Our father used to beat me when he’d see me cry. He’d say how it was a sign of weakness, that I needed to be tougher like Ricky.
Ricky has always been more like our father and much better at hiding his emotions. Yet he isn’t anything like our father. He’s never teased me or made me feel less than for having feelings that I couldn’t hide. “Jason said that Kelvin monitors that email address, too. We just need to send an email with the code word.”
“Do you really think Kelvin will be able to find us?” Ricky questions an hour later as we are climbing down the still wet fire escape. “How is sending a one-word message going to help him know where we are?”
“Kelvin is a whiz at tracing stuff on the internet,” I answer while making sure to place my feet in the middle of the next rung. “He can hack into security cameras, traffic cameras, and easily trace where an email is sent from, especially since we are using a public computer.”
“How do you know all of that?” Ricky asks, sounding almost awestruck.
“Kelvin has been showing me how to do some stuff,” I inform him. “I’m nowhere near as good as he is, but I’ve learned a few things.”
“Where was I when you were learning all this?”
“You were out with Sonya Mitchel.” Ricky comes to a complete stop for a moment. He glares up at me, then continues to climb down. I almost feel bad for reminding him about the school tramp who he’d believed wasn’t like what everyone had said she was. I guess he still hasn’t gotten over catching her in the locker room with the captain of the football team in a rather compromising position.
“Anyway, yes, Kelvin will be able to track us once we send the email,” I say. Ricky jumps to the ground, and I follow a minute later. “Once the email is sent, we are going to find some food. My stomach is starting in on my back bone.”
“So dramatic!” Ricky teases, in an obvious attempt to distract himself from feeling too much. “Are you turning into a sissy?
“First, you’re worried about getting pneumonia. Now it’s your body eating itself from lack of food. What’s next? You going to have leg cramps from climbing ladders and walking twenty blocks to the library?”
“Fuck you, asshole,” I grumble, giving his shoulder a shove. “You’re starving, too. Don’t deny it.”
