The Trial (The Tree House) (9 page)

Now suspicion and confusion flashed across his face. “Why?” he asked louder. “Who are you and what do you want with me?”

David leaned over me. “You’re in danger, Thomas. We’re going to take you somewhere safe.”

I could see the kid glancing outside. Was he going to try to make a run for it? We had to do something. We had to keep him from running. If he did, everything would be ruined. As soon as we were outside and our feet hit the pavement, David reached across me, grabbing the kid by the shirt and yanked him hard to the left out of the stream of students.

“Hey!” he squeaked as David swung him around the corner of the building. “What are you doing?”

My mouth fell open as he pushed the kid against the brick wall and covered his mouth with one hand while holding him against the wall with the other. David’s mouth was pressed into a straight line as he peered back around the corner. “We’re saving your life,” he said inches from the kid’s face. Thomas’s eyes grew wide. “You can’t scream,” David continued. “If you do, we’re all dead. Got it?”

The kid’s head
bobbed rapidly in a horrified nod. Glancing around, I saw a couple students looking our way. People were getting suspicious. “David,” I uttered under my breath. “We need to get out of here.”

David’s eyes shifted to the left and right then he looked at the kid again. “I’m going to take my hand off your mouth. You’re not going to scream. You’re not going to run,” he said. “You’re going to come with us and we’re going to keep you safe.
Alright?”

Again
, Thomas nodded and David took his hand off his mouth. He let out a heavy breath and looked over at me pushing his glasses up his nose. “Who are you guys?” he finally asked keeping his dark eyes locked on mine. I looked to David hoping he would be able to answer the kid. Who are we? Oh just a couple lab rats trying to help out a fellow lab rat.

“We’ll explain in the car,” he said and started walking in the direction of the parking lot.

I stepped aside so Thomas could walk between us, turning my head so I couldn’t see his suspicious eyes stabbing into me. The three of us made our way to the car and I kept my eyes up, searching, expecting the suits to come around the corner any second with their guns aimed at our faces. Instead, we made it all the way back to the car without even a glimpse of suits or guns. It seemed a bit odd to me. I climbed into the passenger seat keeping my eyes glued to the front entrance to the college. I didn’t even hear the ruckus on the other side of the car until I saw Thomas sprinting back toward the school. By this time all the students had evacuated and were somewhere else on the campus so we were pretty much alone.

“Jack! Help me out here!” David yelled from the other side of the car.

Without thinking I jumped back out of the passenger seat and sprinted after Thomas. His legs were shorter and he wasn’t as fast as I was so it didn’t take me long to catch up and grab the back of his shirt. I yanked him backward causing him to fall on his butt, but I didn’t let him stay there. We had to go. I pulled him back up to his feet and half dragged him back to the car. The whole time he squirmed and yelled obscenities. I kept telling him to shut up but he refused to listen.

“Let me go!” he yelled at me as he clawed at my hand clutching his shirt. “This is
kidnapping! Let me go!”

Finally, I was able to get him to the car and around to where David was. As soon as I let go of him Thomas began
calling for help and I immediately grabbed the collar of his shirt again. David scratched the back of his neck and the two of us shared a look. This was a nightmare. What were we supposed to do? How were going to get the kid to shut up?

Just then
, David opened the driver’s side door and grabbed his gun off the floor. My jaw dropped. Was he going to shoot him? Instead, he knocked the butt of the gun against Thomas’s head and the kid went silent and limp.

“Get him in the back seat,” David said wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of the hand holding the gun.

Quickly, I did as he said, stuffing the unconscious kid into the car. His body sprawled across the bench seat and I had to bend his legs so I could shut the door. As I got into the front seat and David turned over the engine, I couldn’t help but think this whole thing was ridiculous. The kid lying limp across the back seat was only one of seventy four other people Ben and I still had to find. How were we going to do this?

“We need something to tie his hands together in case he wakes up,” David said glancing in the rear view mirror as we pulled away from the school. I turned my head to look out the window and saw the two suits emerge from the entrance with a look of confusion on their faces. How
often were we going to run into these guys? How often were they going to win? How many people were we actually going to be able to save? “Jack.” I looked again at David and noted the urgency in his eyes.

“Right, sorry
,” I muttered and opened the glove box. A manual for the car and a few other papers sat in there but nothing that I could tie around the kid’s wrists. I stuffed everything back in and started on the middle console. There had to be something somewhere in this car. A string, a zip tie, anything. There wasn’t anything in the middle console. At least nothing that would work for what we needed. I slammed it shut frustrated and sat back in my seat. My eyes settled on the little air freshener tree hanging from the mirror. No, he’d break through that thing in a second. I needed something. Something strong. Something bendable. Something we could tie in a tight knot. I looked down at my hoodie. At the cinch string. Perfect. Quickly, I pulled the string out of my hood and turned around in my seat so I could bind Thomas’s hands together. After winding the thick string around his thin wrists a couple times, I tied it with a tight knot, making sure it wasn’t so tight as to hurt him. Once I was done, I settled back down in my seat feeling a bit proud of myself. “So where are we headed now?”

“Sy wanted us to meet him and your brother at the Tree House so that’s where we’re headed.”

I let out a chuckle. “So I did hear him right.” David glanced my way. “Really?” I asked him. “A tree house in Seattle?”

“It’s not quite what you think,” he replied looking back at Thomas in the backseat. The kid was still out cold. We turned a corner and David had to slam on his brakes. There was a long line of cars waiting in front of us and some construction worker was standing in the road with a stop sign. “Perfect,” David muttered letting his hands drop onto the steering wheel.
“Just what we need.”

“So then
, what is it?” I asked to take his mind back off the traffic jam.

For a second
, he just sat there glaring ahead at the construction worker and the long line of cars. I thought maybe I had lost him when he opened his mouth with a sigh. “It’s this old, condemned building Sy found a little while back,” he explained and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “He knows some of the right people and managed to keep them from knocking it down.”

“He must be loaded,” I said crossing my arms and laying my head against the window suddenly feeling exhausted and sleepy in this warm car.

David let out a small laugh. “You could say that.”

I smiled as I watched the raindrops race each other down the window. My eyelids were feeling heavy. It had been a long day. To be honest, it had been the longest day of my life and it wasn’t even close to over yet. We were probably going to be sitting in traffic for a while and after all the running and stressing I had done, I felt I deserved a little nap.

It seemed like I had just closed my eyes when I was being shaken hard. My eyelids flew open as I sat up straight with a start and David was trying to open my door and push me out. He was yelling and cursing and I was still groggy and disoriented. “He’s running!” David finally yelled at me and I twisted around to find the door wide open and the backseat empty. “Go after him!” he shouted as he tried to push me out of my seat. Still a bit unsteady, I sprawled out onto the pavement and took off running across the street after Thomas. He wasn’t too far ahead of me so I wasn’t worried about losing him. Though with his hands tied together he sure was attracting a lot of unwanted attention.

I was only a block behind him when a police car pulled
up next to him on the street. Crap. I ducked quickly into the closest alley as an officer got out of the car and approached Thomas. I couldn’t hear very well what they were saying but at one point he pointed back toward the street where the car had been. He was going to completely ruin everything. The policeman undid the cord around the kid’s wrists while he continued running his mouth and pointing frantically to the street. After a couple minutes of this, the cop put his hands up to quiet Thomas and began saying something back. Thomas nodded and the man turned around and went to sit in his car, probably to call someone. We were done for. While he waited, Thomas pulled a cellphone out of his pocket. Immediately, an idea came to me and I pulled the folder back out of my back pocket. His number had to be in there somewhere. I quickly found it and pulled out the black flip phone from my front pocket. It only rang a couple times before Thomas answered it.

“Hello?” His voice sounded confused and hesitant.

“Thomas, you can’t go with the officer,” I said frantically seeing his eyes grow wide as they darted back and forth.

“Leave me alone,” he snapped.

Crap, he was going to hang up. “Thomas, listen to me. My name is Jack,” I said hoping it would keep him on the line. “I’m in the same sort of trouble as you. Someone is after us. They want to kill you. You have to trust me.”

I watched as the kid bit his lip and clenched his free hand into a fist. “So you expect me to trust the peop
le that knocked me out, bound my wrists and threw me into the back of a car?”

“Look,” I continued. “I don’t blame you for freaking out. I probably would have done the same thing if I
was you but you have to believe me. David and I are just trying to keep you safe.”

“Safe from what?”
Thomas asked irritated.

The phone was yanked from my hand and I whirled around as David brought it to his own ear. “Listen, Thomas,” he said into the receiver. “That cop in that car is not there to help you. Any minute now a black car is going to come around the corner
. The men in that car have every intention of killing you so if you don’t run now; you’re as good as dead. Got it?”

As David talked to him, I watched his face contort into something I could only describe as sheer terror. He was saying something b
ack to David but I couldn’t tell what. As the two of them continued to argue, the black car from the school turned around the corner. Thomas’s eyes settled on the car and he stumbled back, the hand holding the phone dropping from his ear. David growled frustrated and shut the phone. Before the car could pull over, Thomas turned and pushed open the door to whatever random shop he was in front of. The suits got out of the car quickly and followed the cop in after him.

“What do we do?” I asked feeling my heart hammering in my chest. “Do we go in after him?”

David didn’t reply. Instead he dialed another number, cursing under his breath the whole time. I heard it ring a couple times then someone answered. “Sy, it’s David,” he said. “The kid has a couple suits on his tail…no, Jack and I are safe for now…Well, we can’t just leave him. We need the kid to help us find the rest…alright…no, you’re right…hang on.” He took the phone from his ear and looked at the screen. A familiar number appeared.

“That’s Thomas,” I hissed. What if the suits had
gotten him and were now calling us to get our location?

David pushed the talk button and brought the phone back up to his ear. “Thomas?” he asked
nervously. I could hear his voice shaking. Then his shoulders relaxed. “You lost them?” I felt my own body relax too. “Well, where are you?” After a long pause, David looked up toward the sky. I followed his eyes to find a shadowy face surrounded by curly dark hair peering down at us from the roof of the building we were standing next to.

I shielded my eyes from the gray sky. “Do you believe us now?”

Thomas’s voice shook. “Can you guys help me down?”

It didn’t take long to find a ladder leading down off the roof and into the alley. We hadn’t seen the suits or the police officer come back out of the building through the front so we didn’t know if they were still in there or if they had found another way out. Either way, we weren’t wasting any more time, so as soon as Thomas hit the ground, we took off running to where David had parked the car. There was no need to bind the kid’s hands this time or knock him out, which I’m sure he appreciated. Instead, he climbed into the backseat willingly.

“You need to get rid of your cellphone,” David said to him as he pulled back out onto the street.

I saw Thomas frown in the rear view mirror. “He has a cellphone,” he said motioning to me with his head.

“It’s a safe line. Yours, however, isn’t so you need to get rid of it.”

Thomas rolled his window down, muttering to himself the whole time and tossed his phone out the window. I couldn’t help but smile a bit as I watched him sulk back against the seat. His eyes met mine. “What happened to your eye?” he asked.

I had almost forgotten about my black eye and now I brought a hand up to touch it. It was still tender and I
winced as soon as my fingers hit it. “Nothing,” I muttered and turned my attention to the passing buildings outside my window.