“I need my camera too,” I said.
“No, let’s go.”
Just then Robert came around the corner and saw Gunner. Robert threw a few punches and Gunner easily avoided them. Then Gunner threw one single punch and knocked Robert out cold.
“Gunner!” I screamed and then ran to Robert’s side. I could tell he was breathing, but he had been hit pretty hard. It wasn’t likely that he would wake up anytime soon.
“Why did you do that?” I said.
I could feel myself getting angry, but I wasn’t about to show Gunner that. Something was different about him and I didn’t know if he was on Chris’ team or if he was working for the bad guys. There was just too much unknown about this situation and I thought it would be best if I kept quiet. I had to wait and see what was going on before I started to be defiant with a man who could clearly hurt me very badly if he wanted to.
“He just tried to hit me three times. Get in the SUV.”
Gunner grabbed my arm and carried my bag in his other hand. When I got to the SUV, he put me into the back seat and I was just about to let myself out when I realized there were no handles on the doors. I looked at Gunner and he watched me through the mirror. Something bad was going on and I just landed myself smack dab in the middle of it.
He took off driving down the road and I looked back and saw Robert as he started to move around. I felt a slight bit of comfort knowing he was alright. But I certainly didn’t feel comfortable or like I was going to be alright.
Chapter 41
I didn’t know what was going on and I couldn’t scream for help. I didn’t trust my own opinion at all anymore. Nothing was as it seemed and nothing about this situation seemed safe to me. Gunner had come to take care of me after Chris was shot and taken away and I thought he was nice. I thought he worked with Chris, but I couldn’t know for sure. Now he was being rude and seemed much scarier that he had before. Perhaps it had just been the intensity of the situation, but Gunner no longer seemed like a nice person. He had a new arrogance about him that had been missing from our last encounter.
I sat in the vehicle and looked around to try and figure out what was going on. There were two other men in the vehicle and Gunner drove. When we got a few miles down a dirt road, Gunner pulled over and moved to the back seat and let the other guy drive instead. I sat quietly and looked at each of their faces. I tried not to make it too obvious that I remembered what they looked like. But the more I looked at them, the more I realized that if they were the bad guys they wouldn’t be letting me look at them so much.
Unless they didn’t plan to let me live. If they planned to kill me, I figured they probably wouldn’t care at all if I saw them.
I swallowed hard at the thought. Only a few weeks before I would have never even considered such a thought, now it seemed like my whole life had changed. Everything that had once been normal was gone and a new normal was right in front of me.
“Where are we going?” I finally managed to ask.
No one answered me. In fact, no one even turned to look at me. It was like I didn’t exist. I turned to watch the countryside go past as we moved along a back road. It wasn’t a major highway and it wasn’t a county road. Instead, we were moving down a gravel road at a speed much faster than I was comfortable with.
I knew gravel roads all too well and they weren’t meant for going 60 mph on them. These type of roads were unpredictable and way too dangerous at that speed. I tightened my seat belt and looked for something to hold onto. These guys had a much different level of comfort with speed and danger than I did. I wanted to ask again where we were going, but I didn’t. Instead, I just stayed quiet and tried to pay attention to as much as possible. We were going northeast and I could tell they seemed to know where they were going. They didn’t use directions and the driver guided the SUV along the back roads with expert precision.
The driver also looked familiar, his big build and blonde hair were very familiar to me. I thought I had seen him on the same night that Chris was shot. I thought he had been one of the men that actually carried Chris out to the SUV after he had been shot. The other person in the front seat did not look familiar to me at all. He had a reddish tint to his hair and freckles on his face. Although he looked equally built and muscular as the other two men in the car, he did not seem as stand-offish as the driver. The red haired man looked back and smiled at me a couple times throughout the drive.
Gunner seemed to be amped up and wasn’t nearly as friendly as the night when Chris got shot, but he seemed to have calmed down a bit since getting into the SUV. I still had no idea what was going on, but I started to feel a little more comfortable because they were all much more relaxed the further we got away from my house. I started to worry what Rebecca and Robert would think had happened to me. They knew things were getting crazy and they knew about Chris being shot. They knew that Chris had taken off to try and figure out who had come after him. It would be a likely conclusion that they would think something bad had happened to me. I couldn’t handle the thought of them worrying about me.
Rebecca wouldn’t sleep as she thought of all the bad things that could happen to me. I knew I needed to get word to them that I was alright. But I didn’t feel safe to say anything yet. I decided to wait until we got where ever we were going, wherever that was.
I leaned my elbow against the window and put my hand on my face. I closed my eyes for a moment out of extreme exhaustion. I couldn’t prevent my eyes from closing and my body drifted off to sleep. It seemed like a quick sleep but when I woke up, we were obviously very far from Bain. The city lights of what I thought might be Chicago flew by as we drove down a major interstate. It was late at night now and I had been asleep for several hours.
“Do we have anything to drink?” I asked Gunner.
This time he seemed to have no problem realizing I was there and he handed me a bottle of water. I guzzled it down quickly and then regretted it. We had been in the vehicle for at least eight hours and I had to use the restroom badly. When I drank the water, it just made everything worse. I couldn’t hold it another second, or at least that is what I felt like.
“Are we going to stop soon? I need to use a restroom.”
“We stopped about an hour ago, you were out of it. We will be there in an hour. Can you wait?” Gunner asked. I contemplated the question, but I really didn’t think I could wait. I wasn’t use to having to hold my bladder. It gave me anxiety right away.
“No, I don’t think I can.” I saw a look of compassion from Gunner that reminded me of the night I met him. The night Chris had been shot. He didn’t seem annoyed by my answer. Instead, he leaned forward to the driver and whispered something.
Within a minute, we had pulled into a gas station and Gunner got out and walked with me to the restroom. When a couple walked past, Gunner grabbed my hand and held it like we were a couple or something like that. I tried to hide the shock of the moment but was pretty bad at it. When the couple finally walked around the corner, Gummy let go of my hand.
I didn’t quite understand his reason for the hand holding, but it seemed that he really wanted to blend in as much as possible. Or perhaps he just didn’t want me to run away and start screaming that I had been kidnapped. I went to the restroom and Gunner waited outside, when I finished we went back to the SUV together and we quickly returned to the interstate to make our way to wherever we were going.