Alistair McIntyre - Shallow Creek

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 padded 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.