by D C Young
Sometimes it was the little things that we depended on to hold our shit together.
Thinking about Betty and the clan of old folks that hung out at her house made me think about my sales team. I wondered how they were all doing stuck at home with a whole lot of spare time and a significantly lower income stream.
I picked up the remote control, turned off the TV and picked up my phone. I called them all and even made plans to visit each of them in the coming week. Most of us were beginning to look at our stockpiles with feelings of panic. I decided I would be the shopping mule wherever possible. Most stores were still taking coupons but finding new ones was a different story altogether; they were rare and even if you found them, nothing was on sale at the moment.
Most of my girls needed diapers, but wrangling all the kids in the store while concentrating on not busting a very strict budget was proving to be way too challenging for most of them. Husbands were beginning to feel the stress. So I went to 5 CVS stores armed with Huggies coupons and then made delivery rounds. During my visits, I found out a couple of my former sales people were actually visiting food pantries in order to keep their families fed. Needless to say, that hurt my heart and soul to the core. I could feel the stresses I’d felt the first week returning, and the anxiety that comes with this level of unsureity was mounting.
But wait… there’s more.
The following week, I arrived at Gina Holmes’ house… my former senior sales representative at Astoria Myrtle Beach. She had five kids ranging in age from 6 months to 6 years. I knocked on the door and Lara pulled the curtain aside and looked at me through the window. A few moments later, she opened the door.
“I wanted to stop by and see if you need me to get you anything from the store,” I said.
“I appreciate you, Alyssa, but it doesn’t seem like this economic crisis is leaving us anytime soon. In fact, have you heard that South Carolina is like top of the list for new unemployment filing cases every day? I’m taking the mayor’s advice seriously and putting the whole house on a very strict budget. I’m just so thankful that Ben got that new position a few months back, otherwise we would literally be going broke right now. I really appreciate your help the last couple of weeks, but we’re gonna have to somehow do it on our own from now on.”
My heart fell. But I was exhausted from trying to live in peace with The Downturn.
“I understand, Gina. Take care of yourself and Ben and the kids. I’ll see you when all this mess is over with.” I turned away before she could say another word.
Slowly, I drove back to my house. I’d given up. I didn’t even stop by to check in on the others. It would just be the same thing from each of them. They would be trying to spend as little money as they could and be sick with worry about how to maintain some kind of normalcy for the people in their immediate households. I was mad, but I couldn’t be mad at them.
When I pulled into my driveway, I saw a pink bike thrown down beside the house. I looked around slowly, wondering if I should get out of the car or not. I felt like I was in a TV crime show; the one where you watch the dumb person fall for the decoy, walk into a situation that should have been obviously wrong and then get snatched or robbed or shot or something.
Shaking off the paranoia, I shut the engine off and stepped out of the car. As soon as I did, I saw her run from behind a bush, across the driveway and behind the house. Without even a second thought, I took off after the bouncing blonde curls. When I made the corner and looked into the backyard, there was no sign of her. I walked slowly towards the back porch, as I got close to where my corn was getting tall in a planter beside the house, I saw her dart from behind the green stalks towards the wet marshes that bordered the property line.
That was no good.
From day to day, there was no telling what could be moving around in that tall grass and boggy ground. I ran after her, ignoring the possibility of meeting a copperhead or even an alligator in the marsh. As soon as I broke the tall line of broom straw bushes and marsh grass I saw her; lying faced down, blood soaking her hair and shoulders. I dove at her. When I landed there was nothing, my arms were empty and I was left sitting in a pool of muddy marsh water.
I got up, tears flowing again. Soon my face was as wet as my jeans and boots were. Defeated, I walked up the stairs of the back porch and pulled the wet shoes and socks off my feet. I stepped inside and made my way to the bathroom, stripping the wet muddy clothes from my body as I went. I showered, dressed in dry clothes and like a zombie made my way to my laptop perched on the kitchen counter.
I took it to the dining table, opened it up and turned it on.
Fighting back the tears, I opened the internet search engine and typed, ‘blonde haired girls missing in Ringgold, Georgia’. The results sent me into some kind of shock. My teeth clenched so hard that I couldn’t move my tongue. I had to make a conscious effort to keep it placed flat and forward in my mouth so as not to cut my windpipe off.
I fell from the chair and began seizing.
My ankle hit the leg of the table; a sensation that should have jolted me with pain each time, but all I felt was the dull thud of the impact. I shut my eyes against the ordeal and white light spread across my eyelids. This time I leaned into the experience instead of fighting it. The way I figured it, there was a reason I was having visions of a kidnapped girl from my hometown that I had never met before. She was ‘visiting’ me for a reason, and I needed to know what that reason was.
Please, God, don’t let her be dead. Please don’t let it be too late.
Psychic Express
is available at:
Amazon Kindle * Amazon UK
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About the Author
D.C. Young was born in Kingston, Jamaica, spent her teenage years growing up in Nairobi, Kenya, and returned to Jamaica in 1997. For fifteen years she worked in hospitality and retail and traveled as often as she could . In 2014, she wrote three novels under a popular pen name and quickly became the 'voice' of the series' lead character; solidifying the trilogy as a well loved storyline.
After a year, she has put her creativity and her keyboard to approximately 50 novellas, ten different book series and created hundreds of characters for readers to enjoy. Vampire Abduction is her first publication in her name.
DC Young has a passion for the outdoors and classic motor cars. She is also a self proclaimed fan of the History Channel. She lives in Savannah, Georgia with her husband, daughter and their dog, Shadow.
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