Ransom (The Unchained Omegaverse #1) - Callie Rhodes Page 0,2

still a good fifteen miles shy of the tiny town of Arrowhead, but she could already see the towering plume of black smoke billowing into the air.

Jeremy had been right—that was a hell of a fire burning out there.

Ordinarily, Gretchen would have been thrilled to get a call from her editor asking her to check out a breaking story for the paper. Until an hour ago, it had never happened, and not just because big stories were few and far between in rural Nebraska.

Since Gretchen had started at the Omaha Register sixteen months ago, every major piece had been assigned to the male reporters. Gretchen and the other female journalist on staff were relegated to covering school board meetings and human interest stories. Word was that Jeremy was even considering bringing back the Home and Garden section and the recipe column that had gone out of print back when her mother was a cub reporter—and it didn't take a genius to guess who'd get those assignments.

In fact, Gretchen had been on her way back from covering the Autumn Bridal Faire in North Platte—a hotel ballroom filled with a sea of gowns, crystal and china, and seminars with titles like ‘The Return of Modesty’—when her phone had rung.

"There's been a big explosion near Arrowhead," Jeremy said excitedly. "You know where that is?"

Gretchen hadn't, so she'd pulled over onto the shoulder look it up. While her GPS was still searching, Jeremy kept talking. "Normally, I'd ask one of the guys to go, but you're so close—can you swing by and taking a look? If it checks out, I'll see if Will or Marvin can take it, but I hate to send someone out if there's no story."

Gretchen rolled her eyes at the fact that she didn't qualify as someone. "Any other outlets on it so far?"

"I wouldn't be surprised—rumor is that the blast might have been on government property."

"Okay, I'm on it."

After two days spent staring at pastel taffeta and teacups and hope chests, tottering around in high heels and skirts, sleeping on what had to be the world's lumpiest motel mattress, Gretchen wanted nothing more than to get home, sink into a hot bath, then spend the rest of the night whispering to her down pillow that she'd learned her lesson and would never cheat on it again.

But she didn't dare say no. This might be a bullshit assignment, but if she aced it, the next one could be better. One could only hope, even when the ranks of female journalists had been thinned to the lowest numbers in half a century, and a man anchored every big-market news desk in the country.

So Gretchen had taken a detour fifty miles out of her way to cover a brush fire in the middle of nowhere.

Except that the closer she got, the more obvious it became that this was no brush fire. The smoke was too dense and too dark, gritty particulate raining down onto her windshield like black snow. To Gretchen's inexperienced eye, it had all the markers of a structure fire—a damn big one too. But what was a building that big doing out here in the middle of nothing but grassland?

It could be a granary, she supposed, or a warehouse or a processing center. Meatpacking plant, maybe, but she wasn't aware of any out this way. Not for the first time, Gretchen's city background wasn't doing her any favors, even though it was her degree from a top program in Chicago that had landed her the job.

For the past twenty minutes, she'd passed nothing but pasture, but hadn't spotted a single head of cattle. Not one barn or farmhouse. The last intersection with a rural route was miles in the rearview.

Even a city girl could tell that something was off.

Things grew no less confusing when she finally passed the sign welcoming her to Arrowhead. As far as Gretchen could tell, everything was closed up—even the gas station. The streets were deserted, with no sign of anyone gawking at the fire that was practically in their backyard.

In Gretchen's experience, there wasn't a force on earth that could stop people from rubbernecking, which meant that in the last few hours, Arrowhead had become a ghost town.

The wail of sirens came up fast behind her, and Gretchen pulled over to watch a caravan of fire trucks and police vehicles tear past her.

She followed in their wake, nearly losing all visibility when they turned onto a dirt road and sent up a cloud of