Total pages in book: 112
Estimated words: 106839 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 534(@200wpm)___ 427(@250wpm)___ 356(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106839 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 534(@200wpm)___ 427(@250wpm)___ 356(@300wpm)
“Well, I just got an earful. I’m supposed to take your phone and erase his contact.” This sentence starts out serious but by the time it’s over Collin is laughing. Even his eyes are smiling.
Which allows me the opportunity to release my anger and tension and chuckle back.
Because it’s crazy.
If there is one man on this earth who’s on my side, it’s Collin Creed.
“Don’t call him no more, OK? I swear, he’s like a fuckin’ child. Calling me up, bitching about you. I’m gonna lose my cool with him next time and we’ve got a good start here, Amon. We’re not gonna need him for much longer, I promise. Six months, tops.”
“Well before you just go and dismiss what he just said to me, you should know that he threatened me with those drinks.”
“What?” Collin makes a face of confusion.
“The fruity drinks that we stopped drinkin’? Remember them?”
“Oh, by the way. Any side effects presenting?”
“Nah. I feel fine. What about you?”
He shrugs. “I feel good too. Better than fine, actually. So fuck him and his threats with those damn drinks. They’re just another bullshit PSYOP, just like everything else about Charlie Beaufort. And anyway, we’ve got more important things going on out in the woods. You need to come with me right now.”
“Don’t tell me.” I roll my eyes. “It’s about that damn mine.”
“Ya know, you’re the one who got me all interested in that place. It was you who was all suspicious of Sawyer Martin, remember? This was your thing. If it were up to me, I’d have left it alone.” He pauses here to look me in the eyes. Which can be quite disconcerting, because that means I have to stare back, and Collin Creed has the most unnatural-colored eyes I’ve ever seen. Little bits of turquoise and amber all swirling together in a way that when he’s angry makes him come off as not quite human. I think ninety percent of Collin’s don’t-fuck-with-me factor is because of his eyes. “Let’s just say your instincts were spot on the money.”
“What do ya mean?”
“It’s not a mine, Amon. It’s a tunnel. And tunnels go places.”
“Where’s it go?”
“We haven’t gotten that far yet.” He claps a hand down on my shoulder. “Come on. You gotta see this.”
So we go traipsing into the woods and even though this trail usually takes twenty minutes, it only takes ten. Because while I have been falling in love, Ryan has made a road using all that heavy equipment he made us buy last spring. He’s just hopping out of a front loader when Collin and I enter the newly cleared area in front of the old mine.
We walk up to the entrance, which has been cleared and is indeed a tunnel. “Looks like a mine to me,” I say.
“It’s not a mine.” Nash is holding up maps or something. “I’ve looked into the history of this place, and there was never a mine here.”
“Well, what was it?” I ask. “Because clearly it was something.”
“According to what I could dig up,” Ryan continues, “this is a natural cave that was used as a munitions depot during the Civil War. Then it was a hideout for some outlaws called the Jesco Harmen Gang at the turn of the nineteenth century, and after that, this whole section was lumbered. There wasn’t ever a coal mine here.”
“What about the church camp?” I ask.
“Oh, that was real. But it was forty years after the lumbering, so the trees were just starting to get big again.”
“All right.” I look at Collin. “So what’s that have to do with anything?”
“Well, interestingly enough, after the deforesting the US government bought this land in nineteen twenty-one and started digging tunnels for reasons unknown.”
“Where’d you dig that info up from?” I ask.
Collin smiles at me. “Penny Rider. She’s a history buff, don’t ya know. So I called her up this morning and asked her about these parts and she went on for twenty minutes straight mentioning all kinds of places.”
“Places like where?”
“Nothing more in Trinity County. But that’s the weird part. She name-dropped Dixie Yonder.”
“Dixie Yonder? Rosie and I were just there on Saturday night for a little one-on-one time.”
“I know,” Collin says. “And the reason it’s so interesting—aside from the fact that one of our childhood friends is the events coordinator up there—is that it’s got its own secret tunnels underneath all that grandeur and the rumor is, they go all the way to Washington, DC.”
I whistle and look at our tunnel. “No shit.”
“No shit,” Collin says.
“So where do our tunnels go?” I look back at Collin to find him smiling.
“Take a guess, Amon. And you only get one.”
I point to our little hole in the mountain. “Do not fuckin’ tell me this tunnel goes to Blackberry Hill.”
“That’s what we’re thinking,” Ryan says. “We blew open that first door you and Collin saw through the rocks a few hours back, but there was nothing but more rocks on the other side so that’s what we’ve been working on this morning. There’s one more pile of rubble to get through before we break into the next open space. Give me and the guys a couple of hours and we’ll find out for sure where the hell this things leads.”