Page 57 of Forget That Guy
Maybe if I had, the old man wouldn’t have reacted the way he did.
Maybe if I had, he wouldn’t have bent down, held a gun to my head, and said, “Guess if you can’t save him, I’ll just have to use you as bait instead.”
I felt bile rise in my throat.
“I’m sorry, what?” I feigned ignorance.
He leaned forward, all but standing over me.
“Can you save him?” he asked.
I shook my head no.
Because I wasn’t going to lie. Not when it came to animals.
“Do you know how he was hurt?” he asked, his dead gray gaze penetrating deep into my own.
So,somuch evil there.
I couldn’t hide what I knew from him, though.
This dog wasn’t hurt by wolves.
This dog was hurt by the man in front of me dog fighting him.
I blinked furiously, trying to hide that I had that knowledge, but the man only smiled.
That’s when the punch connected with my temple, and the lights went out for me.
I woke up in a cage.
A small one, about three by three.
My knees were tucked up to my torso.
My face throbbed, and when I pulled my face away from my knees, I realized that it wasn’t due only to the awkward position that I’d found myself in.
I slowly sat up and tried to make sense of where I was at.
My gaze caught on the area right outside the cage I was in. Dirt.
Wooden walls that were barely adequate to be called a shelter seeing as I could see straight through in some places.
The tin roof was also pretty sad looking. I could see the sky through several holes.
And the sky above was a swirl of black, making me realize that either I’d been out of it for so long that it was now dark, or the Montana sky was about to bless us with the storm that the weathermen had talked about all week.
Fuck.
Neither one was good.
The distant rumble of thunder had my eyes closing, and I prayed that whatever hell I’d just woken up in was just a dream. Maybe the creativeness of my brain, paired with some of my worst nightmares.
The whimpering of dogs momentarily pulled me out of my morose thoughts, and I squinted through the hole in the nearest plank of the shed I was in and froze.
Dogs.
Everywhere.
