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“Kind-of. I was coming to score some shrooms from my buddy,” a guy with long black hair answered.
Lovely. I’m pretty sure we had chemistry together my sophomore year because he’d been held back for skipping the class so many times two years before.
“So, someone made sure that all…” I trailed off and counted how many people were inside the barn. There was the curvy blonde. She probably had people looking for her. There was a tall brunette wearing some type of chic cultural dress. A guy with glasses, a redhead, and another dude with a man-bun.
“Eight of us got locked in. Does anyone know why?” Multiple looks were exchanged, but no one seemed to have an answer.
“Do any of you have someone else at the party we can call?”
“You can’t use your phone inside here,” the guy with glasses answered. His dark eyes peered at me from behind their thin rims.
“Why not?” I checked my network bars and saw he was right. The same cellphone that got me all the way here no longer had a signal and had gone into ‘searching’ on the app.
I laughed despite nothing about this situation being remotely funny. Was I dreaming right now?
“Someone’s using a jammer. They let the phones work off and on.” Glasses held his phone up for me to see we had the same issue. “We were sent to get more beer.” He motioned towards the dude with the man-bun.
I belatedly realized their shirts correlated.
The revelation that they walked through a cornfield in the middle of the night for beer they’d have to carry all the way back to the house when there were already cases of it stacked all over the place could only mean one thing.
“You’re pledging?”
“Kappa Azathoth,” his friend cupped his hands over his mouth and hollered in a theatrically deep voice.
“I have officially entered hell,” Mel mumbled.
Azathoth? These two were connected to the same circle as us then. That frat belonged to Apollon University, which meant they were ridiculously gifted in some type of academic field to be attending there in the first place.
“I’m Dion, that’s Max,” he put forward.
I nodded and forwent doing the same. In any other circumstance, I would’ve loved to sit and pick his brain, right now we needed to figure out how we were going to get out of here.
“Unless the plan was to lock us away to die, there has to be something inside this barn that will help us get out.”
“Yeah, because we didn’t think of any of this shit already, newbie,” the guy with long hair retorted sarcastically. He made it sound as if they were an exclusive clique I’d requested to join.
Mel turned on him with a glare. “Look at that, the guy who was damn near crying in the corner has suddenly decided to dig deep within himself and find his tiny little balls. Maybe you should thank her for helping you with that.”
“Hey. It’s fine, he’s no one,” I said softly.
Despite him saying they already had, I searched the room anyways with fresh eyes. It was close to empty. There were a few bales of hay stacked in a corner people had turned into seats.
An old car was parked off to the left. A heavy-duty tool bench was to the right. Another set of doors was on the back wall but seeing as they’d all been stuck in here longer than I had it was safe to assume they were locked too. My attention slowly drifted back to the dusty Station Wagon. It didn’t fit in. Everything around us looked new, including the plain-looking building itself.
“That shouldn’t be here.”
“Cooper just checked it and said there wasn’t anything inside,” Dion replied, implicating the guy with long hair.
“I’ll check it again then, just in case.”
“You do that sweetheart, kill some time,” he responded with a forced laugh.
I ignored his petty sarcasm and walked over to the car, yanking open the driver's side door, causing the hinges to groan in loud protest. I stuck my head inside and was immediately smacked with a smell that reminded me of eraser dust.
All the leather was cracked and had foam spilling out.
“I’ll re-check the back,” Grace volunteered. She climbed into the rear seat and began to diligently look over the faded yellow and cream exterior.
I opened the glove compartment and then ran my hands over the ruined seats. It was the passenger one where my palms skimmed across something hard. I pressed down lightly and felt the outline of a rectangular object.
“Did you find something?” Mel asked in a whisper, watching over my shoulder.
“Maybe…” I didn’t want to say for sure until I saw what it was. There was no point in getting everyone excited over nothing. Slipping my fingers beneath the torn leather, I started to pull and pluck.
Chunks of yellow foam fell to the floor as I burrowed deeper into the inner workings of the bucket seat.
