Page 27 of Forced Proximity
Now that he mentioned it, there was a lot of space with no trees everywhere. It looked fairly manicured, too.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“Yeah.”
He took my hand, and that was when I felt the rope still attached to him. “I should take this off.”
He looked at me then and shook his head. “Leave it. Just in case. We’ll tie ourselves together if we need to.”
I hated that he made sense.
I hated even more that we would even need to consider being tied together.
We walked for a long few minutes, and just when I was just about to give up hope that we’d ever see anything, I pointed ahead. “Look.”
The wind picked up even more, and a tree branch fell into the river with a loud crash a few feet behind us.
I ducked while flinching, my heart in my throat.
“Oh my god.”
“Hurry,” he said as he picked up his pace. “It’s better than nothing.”
The house looked like it’d taken a hit from the tornado, yet it was still standing.
The house itself was two stories, but the roof had been ripped off of the top floor.
Luckily, that meant there was still some structure.
“Do you think anyone lives here?” I asked.
“Likely not,” he grumbled. “There’s nothing personal about it. I’d bet it’s a rental or something. Summer house possibly.”
Great.
“Awesome,” I muttered. “Maybe they’ll at least have internet. We can try to hack into that iPad and connect to something.”
Just as I said that, the bottom dropped out of the sky and rain so heavy and cold fell from the sky like a bucket of ice water had been poured directly onto us.
The baby started to scream, as he should.
I was right there with him as we ran into the yard, ignoring the shingles in the yard as we moved toward the front door.
Finnian was nice and knocked.
I was ready to kick in the front door.
But he stilled me before saying, “If there does happen to be someone here, I don’t want to break in. I’ll at least ask nicely first.”
He had a point.
There was no doubt that we were in the south.
People down here had guns for their guns.
You didn’t just go barging into a random house and expect to be let inside all nice-like.
No one answered when we knocked, and I let out a relieved breath.
