Shallow Creek

by Alistair McIntyre

  It was a nice day for a jog, but the dry dust eventually clogged his throat. His time in the sandbox now seemed even better spent. Who’d have thought running around in Desolation, Afghanistan would help him sneak up on his brother in the middle of Nowhere, Texas?

  He found the turnoff easily since it was the only turn, right where the road dead-ended. A peek around the tall grass running along the barbed wire fence revealed a straight shot up a dirt road to a large barn and a farmhouse. Both were offset to one side of the road, so he could probably get halfway down the path before he needed to climb the fence and cut through the fields to avoid detection.

  Ah, to hell with it. He darted across the road entrance and hopped the fence into some tall, dried grass. Apparently the landowner didn’t keep up with his fields, because even Brendan could tell they looked rough and neglected. He trudged along, keeping low to the ground, and staying close to the fence, which gave him an easy reference point for his location.

  When he eventually ran out of field and found himself looking at the barbed wire fence dividing his field from the buildings dead ahead, he paused and counted six vehicles, including his brother’s truck. That meant quite a few people were around. He couldn’t see or hear any, which was strange, because the place wasn’t that big. A shiny new tractor stood at attention outside the main doors to the barn, but it didn’t even look used.

  Brendan kept watch from a low crouch until he was satisfied no one was outside. After taking a few steps slowly away from the fence, to get more grass cover in front of him, Brendan cut to his right and then followed the fence around to get a view of the back side of the barn. All was clear, so Brendan settled in to wait, something his time in Force Recon had taught him well. The first time they’d done extended reconnaissance training, him and a buddy had traded twelve-hour shifts for days, lying perfectly still, not even moving to piss. And all they had to do was watch. Most people would think that was easy enough, but try watching the same damn thing for twelve-hours every damn day.

  Afternoon gradually turned into evening, and finally Brendan spotted someone. A lone man exited a small side door near the back of the barn and lit a cigarette. He stood close enough that the faint hints of secondhand smoke eventually reached Brendan’s nostrils. After a few rapid puffs, the man ground out his nicotine fix on the ground and went back inside. When the door opened, Brendan didn’t see any kind of internal locking mechanism, not even a latch for a padlock, like the outside of the door had. Over the next few hours, while night drew close, the same man repeated this process every fifteen to twenty minutes. Having established this routine, Brendan skirted around so that now he was looking directly at the back of the barn.

  From this perspective, Brendan had a clear view of the space between the farmhouse and the barn. No electrical cables ran overhead between the buildings, so either they’d taken the extraordinary measures to bury them, or they hadn’t hooked up any power in the barn. That would mean no alarm inside the barn either, unless they used a battery-operated, wireless setup.

  Brendan lay down in the grass and waited for night to fall completely, praying no copperheads or scorpions decided to check him out. Humbly asking his brother to call an ambulance for him wouldn’t look too good right now.

  Chapter 31

  Brendan stifled a yawn and listened to the steady rhythm of the crickets weaving a symphony of monotony on this cool Texas night. Initially he’d thought this stakeout would be fun and nostalgic, but now he remembered it was never that fun as a Marine either. Even the modest temperature drop had him wishing he’d worn something more insulated than a long-sleeved flannel shirt. Another ten degrees or so and the crickets would probably die off, too.

  He yawned again and closed his eyes for a second, resting his forehead down on his arms. Sound sleep had evaded him for days, but now fatigue assaulted him relentlessly. Wouldn’t it be funny if his peaceful snoring gave up his position?

  No, probably not.

  The smoker hadn’t appeared in about an hour, which was a mild concern considering how regular the guy had been for hours on end. It could be that he ran out of smokes. Depleting your supply this far from civilization probably meant facing a night of withdrawals and irritability, so at least one person was going to be a crabby bastard if Brendan ran into them.

  Brendan’s head jerked up suddenly. Crap, how long had he been asleep? His last watch check had been an hour ago, so no more than that. Everything looked the same, but now he could hear muffled voices from inside the barn. A light came on above a door on the opposite side of the barn from the smoker’s door. The voices grew louder now. The door swung open and seven men exited, talking and laughing like a group of guys not too worried about being watched. Lots of jokes and chants for beer flowed between the men, so apparently quitting time had arrived at long last.

  One man waited until the rest cleared out of the barn, and then closed the door and padlocked the latch. From the light shining above the shaved head, Brendan easily recognized the giant he knew only as Serge. Maybe he should’ve been surprised, but he wasn’t. He’d cultivated a hunch about that man ever since their encounter with his sister. At least now Brendan had some vindication for deciding to spend the night under the pretty Texas stars with all his favorite critters.

  The gaggle of laughing idiots slowly made their way into the farmhouse, and Serge followed them stoically. Lights flared all over the inside of the long, ranch-style building, illuminating the whole yard through the windows. Silhouettes walked back and forth for a few minutes, but eventually movement was only visible at two large windows at the far end of the house. Brendan guessed that was the kitchen or living room, which would be the most common places for a bunch of dudes to congregate when beer is involved.

  The walls of the house must’ve been substantially thicker than those of the barn, because Brendan couldn’t hear a thing now. He waited for fifteen full minutes to see if anyone from the house would run out to the barn because they’d forgotten something, or to see if anyone was still left in the barn and would leave to join their buddies.

  Brendan burst from cover, staying low to the ground and keeping the barn mostly between him and the house. He kept eyes on the main entrance to the farmhouse, in case someone had found their reserve cigarettes and needed a hit. Once against the back wall of the cheaply made barn, Brendan slid down the corrugated siding towards the side door he knew to be unlocked, the one the smoker had used earlier.

  Despite his strong suspicions that the door wouldn’t be locked, Brendan breathed a sigh of relief as he slowly drew the door open. That done, he gently closed the door and then bolted back over the fence, leaping the barbed wire in a single bound and fading into concealment.

  And nobody appeared. Apparently there really wasn’t an alarm system in place. Brendan cautiously made his way over the fence again, using one of the posts for balance. After successfully not snagging his pants on the barbs, he glided across the dirt and reopened the door. Inside, all the lights were off, so Brendan pulled a small LED flashlight from his pocket and ran it around the room before shuffling in and gently easing the door closed behind him.

  It was difficult to get a full impression of the place with his small light, but after a few minutes of roaming around, he didn’t see anything of note. In one corner of the barn lay a jumbled stack of hay bales, but the rest of the barn floor was clear, except for some stainless steel hoses and hose clamps lying off to one side.

  Brendan found a ladder leading up to a loft. He carefully ascended, his boots noiseless on the rungs. At the top, he peeked over the edge with his flashlight to find an expanse of industrial-looking plastic bottles. Someone had taken all the labels off, but they’d stored like colors together, forming groups of white, blue, red, and pink jugs all over the place.

  After finishing a perimeter check from the top of the ladder, Brendan turned his light to the center of the room and noticed a small U-shaped protrusion sticking up in the middle of the concrete floor. He pa
dded down the ladder and approached the oddity cautiously. When he got closer, he could make out an incredibly thin set of hinges running along one side of a camouflaged door set in the floor. The hoop sticking up looked like something a padlock would go through, but there was no mechanism to keep the door closed.

  A boot crunched on the gravel by the side door. Brendan’s heart tried to escape his chest by jumping up into his throat.

  “Oh, shit,” a muffled voice said. “I forgot to lock the other door. Boss will kill me if he finds out.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just go round there and fix it now,” said another voice. “I won’t tell him if you don’t tell him I drank the last beer.”

  The first voice laughed and someone walked around the back of the barn.

  With no time to spare, Brendan grabbed the hoop on the trapdoor and raised it up. He noticed the door was actually very thin metal of some kind that had been painted to match the concrete. Someone fumbled with the locked padlock on the side door as Brendan made his choice.

  He slipped down a flight of concrete steps and lowered the trapdoor silently.

  Chapter 32

  Realizing time was at a premium, Brendan crouched on the stairs and quickly ran his light through the extensive basement. Fearing his new friends would come down here for some reason, Brendan scooted to the bottom of the steps. His boots splashed in something, but he didn’t have time to check it out. He ran down the length of what looked like a commercial kitchen. At the end of this long aisle stood a wide, stainless steel gas range. Brendan ducked behind it.

  He killed the flashlight as soon as he heard the barn door creak open. He reached for his knife when the drowned-out voices suddenly became clear.

  They’d opened the trapdoor.

  “Dude, we didn’t install the lock for the kitchen door,” came one voice.

  “Shit, do we really have to do that tonight?” asked the other, whom Brendan now assumed was the smoker from earlier.

  “Normally I’d say no, but Jasper was in a pissy mood earlier. Probably would cut our balls off if we forgot.”

  “Yeah, and so was Serge. Don’t know what crawled up his ass, but I guess we shouldn’t piss him off either.”

  The door closed again and the two voices drifted away, now nothing more than a mumble to Brendan’s ears, but they’d already said enough. Was Jasper here? Was it too much to ask for a little alone time with that bastard who’d help jump him and Michelle behind Trish’s? For some reason Brendan had figured Mohawk was the pack leader, but maybe this Jasper character was the real enforcer.

  Left alone in the dark while the two upstairs drilled the lock’s latch into the concrete, Brendan now noticed a smell that was growing with time. It was eerily familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

  He crept back along to the stairs, knowing that he couldn’t let these guys lock him down here. What difference would it make if they found him now, or inevitably later? He could probably burst out from the basement and take both of them out before either could even scream. Earlier when he’d seen them leave, no one was obviously wearing or carrying a weapon. That didn’t mean there weren’t any, but they probably didn’t have any at the ready.

  The drills continued to drone as Brendan reached the steps. He mounted the first one as the drills stopped suddenly. A gut-wrenching click was followed by one of the men saying, “Done.”

  Frantic now, Brendan realized he’d missed his chance. Banging on the door now was just going to bring a world of hurt down those stairs. His only chance now would be to wait out the night and hope only a couple of these guys came by first thing in the morning to start work again, whatever that “work” was.

  He listened dejectedly as the men left and locked the barn’s outer door. After it was clear that they’d really left this time, Brendan clicked his flashlight back on and inspected his new accommodations for the night.

  As he’d suspected from his first brief glance at the long, rectangular basement, it was a kitchen. Everything was stainless steel: all the appliances, all the countertops, and all the storage bins. He was no expert, but he now wondered if people really meant it when they said meth was cooked. If it was cooked, then it would need a kitchen. If it needed a kitchen, then this was it, even if the sterile scene looked nothing like the haphazard meth setups he’d seen on the Internet. This long basement even had huge ventilation ducts and a sprinkler system.

  The faint scent that continued to permeate the whole place suddenly became apparent when Brendan saw series of gas outlets along both walls. These idiots had installed active natural gas lines and hadn’t capped them properly.

  In a panic, Brendan ran down each side of the kitchen, checking each valve was in the off position. They were.

  He followed any exposed hoses and pipes to the places they disappeared into the concrete walls, looking for more valves to shut off. There were none.

  Now his head started to hurt. Brendan staggered back to the stairs and climbed up right beneath the trapdoor. He pushed up on the door, and it had a little bit of play, but now he noticed the rubber gasket all the way around the edges. No fresh air could get in while the seal remained intact. Brendan produced his trusty knife and went to work. He sliced and poked at the rubber while the smell intensified.

  Realizing his efforts had little impact on his situation, Brendan gave up on destroying the seal. Maybe there was something in the basement that he could use to pry the door open. His first expedition through the stainless steel nightmare hadn’t revealed anything, but he had to try again.

  He jumped off the steps, landing in the puddle at the bottom. Both feet slid out from under him and the beam from his flashlight darted chaotically across the vented ceiling. His fall stopped abruptly when something cracked the back of his head with the force of a pissed-off mule. Stars filled the darkness as his eyes flittered open and closed, his body refusing to cooperate with his brain’s demands.

  Did natural gas sink or rise in regular air? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t care to move right now. He was just so damn sleepy.

  The defeat didn’t even worry him. Suddenly all the stuff with Michelle and Kim and Grant floated away into a totally irrelevant place, some place that didn’t affect him at all. He wondered what would happen in the morning when Grant’s friends found him dead on the floor, but by that point, what was the worst they could do to him?

  He allowed his eyes to close fully and embraced the thick blanket enveloping him.

  Chapter 33

  Brendan gulped huge bursts of air and tried to get up, but something heavy lay on his chest. He tried in vain to struggle against it, but he had no strength to resist.

  “Okay, he’s awake,” said a strange voice. “Move him.”

  His eyes refused to focus consistently as a dark view of shadowy figures blurred above him. Where the hell was he anyway?

  Then he remembered the basement, the kitchen where his skull had lost a battle with a concrete step. That could only mean Grant’s buddies had found him. He lashed out with what little force he could muster, but strong hands easily grappled him into compliance.

  A drum pounded furiously inside his skull, but he knew he had bigger problems now. What was his excuse going to be for why he was unconscious in a damn meth lab?

  “Get the restraints on there,” said the same strange voice. He was pretty sure it wasn’t either of the guys who’d inadvertently locked him in the kitchen.

  Straps wrapped across his chest and legs, locking all his appendages and rendering him totally useless. Escape wasn’t happening. Suddenly a bizarre combination of nausea and fatigue hit him all at once and he let his eyes sink shut.

  The next thing he knew, he was floating across the ground, staring up at the ceiling of the dark barn. There was something stuck to his face, covering his mouth, but he couldn’t shake it off no matter how hard he tried. Then a beautiful night sky distracted him, framing silhouettes of random faces as they whisked him along.

  They were taking him s
omewhere, probably thinking they’d captured an enemy combatant. Well, in fairness, they were partially right, even if Grant didn’t know the full magnitude of Brendan’s betrayal yet. This would be a really, really bad time for Michelle to confess her sins to her husband.

  He closed his eyes and lost the night sky, but when he opened them again, all he could see was a white ceiling. The straps still pinned him in place, but now he bounced all over the place, and things rattled all around him. His head was secured, forcing his face upwards, but he could roll his eyes, which caught glimpses of a few people hovering around him, reaching around and grabbing things out of little cabinets.

  A big red cross on the door to one cabinet suddenly clarified the scene. Why the hell would Grant’s men call an ambulance for him? His brain wrestled for an answer, but everything in his head was too murky to process.

  A guy’s face loomed into view from his left side. He didn’t look happy.

  “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

  And then Brendan blacked out again.

  Chapter 34

  The handcuffs were the first thing Brendan noticed when he woke up. Groggy and disoriented, he still quickly realized the cuffs fastened his wrists to each rail of a hospital bed. With that epiphany, he next wondered if he was being held prisoner in the Shallow Creek Med Center or not. It was the closest hospital to the farm, but he’d been out of it ever since they’d rescued him.

  He tugged up on one cuff, rattling it against the thick plastic railing. Maybe rescued wasn’t the right word.

  At the noise of the cuffs shifting, a nurse approached him carefully, like he was some kind of man-eating possum, and checked his vitals. When appropriately satisfied, she nodded to the cop standing by the door.