Page 98 of Lake
None of the rooms had doors. It was hard not to turn my head and peer in as we passed each one. Trash and debris littered the floor. The air was bone-chilling and it was strange that it almost felt colder in here than it had been outside.
There were so many people I lost count. A few of them tracked our movements curiously until we were out of sight.
“Monty,” Sketch gritted out as we reached a room on the third floor.
The man, Monty, was on his back on an old mattress in the corner of the room, but he wasn’t sleeping. A girl, or woman, it was hard to tell, was curled up into his side, her brown hair covering her face.
“Well, I never thought I’d see the day,” Monty said as he knifed up, throwing the woman off of him in the process.
She sat up as well and rubbed her eyes.
“Sketch? Is that you?” she asked and her voice was soft and light.
There was something that came crashing down on her and it was swirling in her eyes. A coldness. A bitterness. Something that washed away the sweetness she’d held when she said his name.
“Why the hell are you here?” she spat out.
“Vess, really?” Sketch let out a sad sigh.
His eyes cut to mine and it was almost as though he’d forgotten about me for a moment.
“I’m not here to revisit the past. I just need to know about the girls gettin’ snatched up.” He was blunt, all business, even if it was clear there was a history there.
Both of their faces paled.
Monty brought his knees up and wrapped his arms around them, the cocky, little shit attitude long gone.
“It’s bad, man,” he started, shaking his head. “Got three of my own before I even knew what was going on. Has us all scared shitless. Ain’t no one want to work or even go outside. You know what the fuck that means. It’s fuckin’ cold, man, and now we’re starving. Everyone’s too afraid to even walk over to the shelter.”
“Fuck,” Sketch said then blew out a long breath. “Why didn’t you come to me?”
Monty looked at Sketch like he’d grown two heads.
“Claire tried to find you a while ago. Drove herself fuckin’ crazy lookin’ all over for you. Knew she wouldn’t last long at that house and when she came back, you were already gone. You figured your shit out and did what all of us only dream of doing. Good for you.”
He didn’t sound like he meant that, not even a little.
“You always said if she needed you, you’d be there. But you weren’t. I tried to tell her, but that didn’t stop her. Night after night she’d go out. She checked the church, the rooftop, under the bridge. She even checked the old container yard once but she got run off. Seems like the place has been taken over… well, lookie there, by your kind. Didn’t know you was a biker. Could have fooled me. I seem to remember you crashin’ that one that we stol—”
“Not here to talk about that shit,” Sketch reminded him. “All you had to do was ask around, you would have found me. But you didn’t.”
“Whatever. She’s gone again, so I guess it don’t matter now,” Monty grumbled. “Look, from what I hear, it’s a group of men. Big, like bodybuilder types. They drive fancy cars, all black. Take the girls before they even see it coming.”
“Fuck,” Sketch said.
I studied the woman while they talked. I’d put her somewhere in the mid-twenties. Her eyes were distant and I couldn’t tell if she was shaking from the cold or the subject matter.
“That’s all I got for you. Now that you’re a badass you think you’re gonna fix this?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Then get gone and fuckin’ do it then. I don’t have the luxury of having a buncha guns at my disposal and an outlaw army to back me up. Or did you forget about that? Can’t do much to these guys with a switchblade and a buncha kids.”
“Yeah, Monty, I hear ya.” Sketch turned, not even giving me a glance as he passed by me. “Let’s go.”
And so I went.
“Hey,” Monty called out right as we hit the hallway. “Words gettin’ around that they drug them when they take them. Like needle to the neck type of shit that knocks them out. Just what I heard.”
