Forsaken An American Sasquatch Tale - By Christine Conder Page 0,46

night. Her nostrils flared as she controlled the instinct to flee.

She looked back to the kitchen window and Sage was gone.

She wasn’t sure what happened next. Whether he dog barked and lunged at her. Or maybe it was the sound of footsteps pounding directly behind her. But in the midst of activity, before she even had a chance to turn around, she realized she’d been struck.

She looked down at her right thigh and saw a cylinder of some type lodged into the fur, the meat, and as she reached down to grab it, someone flung a thick, weighted net over the top of her.

Yanking out the cylinder, she fell to her knees. A thick needle attached to the tube had plunged deep into the muscle. And it stung when she removed it. She clawed at the netting with arms that weighed as much as boulders. A light shined in her face. Her lids slammed shut. Hard as she tried, she couldn’t open them again.

A male voice calling out, “Dad, I got another one!”

Chapter Fourteen

Her mouth ached. Hurt, actually. When she opened her eyes, she realized a hood of some kind covered her head. Rough material had been stuffed in her mouth so hard it pushed her tongue back toward her throat. She concentrated, breathed through her nose, so she wouldn’t gag.

She sat in a straight back chair, her wrists bound to the arms of it, upper chest to the back, and her ankles lashed to the heavy legs of it. Her bare feet rested on cold concrete. She was in human form.

She wasn’t alone. A man, somewhere past the hood, hummed along to a song on the radio. It buzzed and crackled, but didn’t hide the other sounds. Paint remover, smoke, and decomposition assaulted her senses. She needed to focus on one thing. She tried to turn her head, but the binds around her arms were attached to the one around her head. She was trapped, unable to move.

One thing at a time.

Where was Nathaniel? Gabriel? She’d gotten a whiff of death when the garage doors opened. Were they here, too? In a chair next to her? She couldn’t see. The fabric on her head was too black, too solid.

Glass tinkled, metal shuffled, and then some solid item pushed along the floor, causing vibrations beneath her feet. She counted slowly with each inhale, reaching seven before her lungs started to shake, and she exhaled.

Sage. She was in this house somewhere. She concentrated, tried to listen beyond the room. She couldn’t hear the television she’d heard from the yard. There was too much, and yet not enough, to take in. She counted to ten.

“Liberty,” a man said in a sing-song voice, like a mother playing hide and seek who already knows where you’re hiding.

She was at the Jenkins’ house. There was only one man it could be. Russ. Though he tried to sound harmless, the inflection in his voice gave him away. Becky was right. Liberty felt the sound of her own name twist in her gut like a fist.

Her breath hitched. How did he know her name? She tried not to believe Sage would play a part in this. But how could he possibly know?

His turned, his words carrying away from her. “I apologize about your mate here, I do.”

Nathaniel? Had she sensed him when the garage first opened? She moaned beneath the hood.

“I know. But in all fairness, he went after my son and well…you don’t go after a man’s child and expect to live.” He sighed, metal clinked in a glass like he stirred a spoonful of sugar into tea. “Your mate wasn’t any interest to me, anyway.” He gulped in swallows, exhaled, then spoke again. “You’re why we’re here. Me and Victor.”

Her? She pressed herself back into the chair and felt cloth, flexed her thighs and felt some on her legs. She was dressed, something flimsy like a tank and boxers. She trembled. He’d dressed her?

“See, I’m a hunter. But all this here, this taxidermy thing, it’s not the game I’m into. I’m a treasure hunter.”

Clink, clink, swallow. A click silenced the radio.

“I’m not alone out here, there are a lot more of us. But we don’t work together, not really. We learn from each other, that’s it.”

She heard him set the glass down, and then the sound of a door closing overhead.

“We follow the websites, watch for sightings of Sasquatch. It’s a pretty big business. Anyway, I’ve been doing this for some time, and I found