I can hear one of the men tromping off to my right, announcing his every step, but I don’t hear the other. Has he stopped walking? Is he just trying to listen for me?
“You can’t hide, asshole,” the loud one says.
Oh, but I can try.
I can’t hear the other guy but movement to my right tells me the loud one could see me if he just turned around. I peek to the left, wondering if I could slip to the other side of the tree. Carefully, I turn and slam right into someone. Slowly, I catch the eyes of the ninja motherfucker who was literally standing inches from me.
“Let’s go.”
He’s an attractive man in his late twenties or early thirties with blond hair and dark eyes. As he draws in close, I aim my knee right for his balls. He grabs it before yanking up and suddenly, I’m slamming down onto my back. Then he grabs my ankle and starts dragging me after him like this is everyday life for him. “Stop! Dammit! Why are you doing this?”
“Hey, Shepherd, did you find him?” the other man asks as he looks right at us.
“No, haven’t seen him,” the man dragging me says. Clearly, he’s a smart-ass, which I can’t help but appreciate, even if he’s planning on dragging me however far we ran.
“Clearly you did find him,” the other man says.
“Yes, Rod, I did. So why’d you ask?”
I twist fast, onto my stomach, and with an expert-level maneuver, he switches hands so I don’t tweak his wrist and off we go, me being dragged on my stomach. “Dammit! Let go of me! Who the hell do you think you are?”
The man casually looks back at me and I’ve never in my life seen a more nonchalant human. It’s like he’s bored. Like he’s used to dragging people around the woods after chasing them through a cornfield and tying them up in a trunk.
“Do you have a problem?” he asks.
“Yeah, I do, asshole. My father is the chief of police. He will find you and throw you in jail so fucking fast!” I growl as I grab a rock and chuck it at his back. It smacks him between the shoulder blades, but it was like I aimed a fly at him. No, a fly probably would have at least annoyed him.
“You’re an asshole,” I say as I flail, twist, and kick. Eventually one of the maneuvers works because he lets go of me but the moment I pop up, he grabs my wrist instead and starts dragging me again.
I drop all my weight as I claw and scratch at the hand around my wrist. Clearly my sniping and my fighting is getting me nowhere, so I decide that maybe tears will work.
“P-Please. I’m really scared. I just want to go home. I didn’t do anything.”
He looks back at me with dark brown eyes that seem almost amused. “Tough shit, kid.”
No matter how much I beg, plead, cry, kick, scratch, and fight, he just pulls me after him back to the road. Once there, the Rod guy calls someone and tells them where to pick us up as I realize that it’s getting less and less likely that I’m getting out of any of this. I feel a little panicked, but I know I can’t let my panic get the best of me or I’ll stop thinking rationally. The issue is that I can’t stop thinking about how I know what both of them look like, and now I know their names.
They don’t care that I know and I begin to wonder why.
When the car pulls up, instead of stuffing me in the trunk again, they shove me in the back seat between the guy named Shepherd and Rod, the loud one.
Now that I know their license plate number and all four of their faces, I realize that things really aren’t going to go well.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I’m led into the bad guy’s lair, which is really just a shitty-looking building in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. My captors continue to be rather rude as they drag me inside.
The Rod guy continually spits shit at me as I decide that my legs will no longer work so the only way they’re getting me in the building is by pulling me in there. Shepherd doesn’t seem to mind as he grabs my arm and drags me along. While he’s really not much more than an inch or two taller