Chapter 2
809 Words
I stared at the message until the words stopped looking like words.
See you where we buried it.
Buried what?
The question refused to leave me alone.
I checked the message again, hoping I’d overlooked something the first time. There was still no contact name, no number, nothing that could tell me who had sent it. Whoever it was had gone to a lot of trouble to disappear.
I wasn’t ready to give up.
The message itself wasn’t much use, but phones leave traces behind. Even after conversations are deleted, fragments remain in places most people never think to look.
I started with the network logs.
Then the cached files.
When that led nowhere, I dug deeper into the phone’s background processes.
Time slipped by without me noticing.
The room had grown darker by the time I finally found something worth looking at.
It wasn’t another message.
It was a transmission record.
A small piece of location data attached to the message before it had been wiped.
I copied the coordinates into my laptop and watched the map load.
The pin landed on the outskirts of the city.
I zoomed in.
An old industrial district.
Most of the buildings had been abandoned years ago.
I frowned at the screen.
The coordinates didn’t tell me where Adrian had gone.
They only told me where the message had been sent from.
It wasn’t much, but it was the first real lead I’d found.
I looked at the time.
Just after four.
If I left now, I’d still make it back before anyone noticed I’d been gone.
—
The drive took a little over half an hour.
The roads became quieter the farther I travelled, until the traffic disappeared altogether.
When the navigation announced I’d arrived, I slowed the car and looked around.
There wasn’t much to see.
A row of abandoned warehouses stretched along one side of the road. Rusted fences leaned against crumbling walls, and patches of overgrown grass pushed through cracked concrete.
The pin stopped in front of a two-storey building set back from the road.
Its windows were broken.
Part of the roof had collapsed.
From the outside, it looked like every other forgotten building in the area.
I drove a little farther before pulling over behind an abandoned delivery truck. From there, the building was still visible, but my car wasn’t.
I climbed out and crossed the road on foot.
The closer I got, the less abandoned the place seemed.
Fresh tyre tracks marked the dirt leading to the entrance.
Someone had replaced the chain on the front gate recently.
A security camera sat above the doorway, tucked beneath a rusted metal awning.
I stopped beside a broken section of wall and looked through the gap.
Nothing.
Just an empty courtyard.
I was beginning to think I’d wasted my time when voices drifted across the yard.
A moment later, two men walked into view.
Another followed behind them.
One of them laughed loudly enough for the sound to carry across the road.
None of them looked like they belonged there by accident.
More cars arrived over the next few minutes.
Some stayed only long enough to drop people off before driving away.
Others parked inside the compound.
They walked through the gate as though they’d done it a hundred times before.
I took out my phone.
If I couldn’t find whoever had sent Adrian the message, I could at least remember the faces.
The first few photographs were useless.
Most of the men wore caps or kept their heads down.
I lowered the phone, waiting.
Another car rolled through the gate.
Black.
Low enough that it scraped slightly against the uneven ground.
The driver’s door opened.
A man stepped out.
He wasn’t dressed like the others.
No tattoos covered his arms.
No heavy chains hung around his neck.
He closed the car door, adjusted the watch on his wrist and started towards the building.
Without a word, the men nearest the entrance shifted aside to let him pass.
He walked straight through the middle of them, his attention fixed on the building ahead.
I lifted my phone again and zoomed in.
The image sharpened.
My thumb hovered over the screen before I took the picture.
Only then did I recognise him.
I’d seen him before.
He’d been with Adrian a handful of times over the years. Never for long, and never often enough for me to remember his name.
At the time, I’d assumed he was just another friend from university.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
I pressed the capture button.
A sharp click broke the silence.
The man stopped walking.
Slowly, he turned his head.
My heart lurched.
I dropped into a crouch behind the wall, my pulse pounding so loudly I could barely hear anything else.
Footsteps scraped against the gravel.
They were coming closer.
- Writer
