Ancil“At least one of us could have gotten away and you were the best one since you were already unconscious,” Sam said.
“We didn’t leave you because we wanted to. We left you because we needed to,” Megan said
“And how did you find me again?” I asked.
“Well the Midnight Robber added us to his army. He needed more manpower after a whole lot of his minions got killed off in San Fernando and he wanted to put us to use instead of killing us off. We ended up getting access to reports that was being made all throughout the country by the……..Jumbies. The very first report that was made was on the first day of duty. The day after San Fernando. The jumbies described the intruder and it matched you perfectly. Dee Baba, the army general, was going to send some blue devils to look for you but Rajiv convinced him that he could find you faster. So he sent Rajiv. I tagged along just to make sure that he didn’t kill you. Then I saw you in Arima.”
“But how did you find me this time?”
“Well this time, another report was made that come from a school called UTW. There were a couple reports coming in here and there but things were a bit chaotic at the Red House and no one paid too much attention to it before. Dee Baba opted to find you himself after the report. He looked everywhere within the area and couldn’t find you. The Midnight Robber threatened to fire him if he didn’t find you so he got desperate. He decided to stop looking for you and just weed you out by emptying out all the groceries in towns and cities nearby. He knew that hunger would eventually get you out of your hole and well it worked because he found you, but thanks to Bookman, so did we.”
“And you’re very lucky that we did,” Sam said.
“And what happened to Ravi and Marsha?” I asked. I had only just noticed that they weren’t present.
An elephant grew in the room. No one seemingly wanted to answer as though something bad had happened to them and they didn’t want to tell me. Megan opened her mouth and was about to speak but Cornell interrupted. “I don’t mean to interrupt your little get together but we need to find a safe place to land,” Cornell said with his eyes on the stars. “It’s seven in the night and the country is crawling with jumbies right now.”
“I know a safe place,” I said, brushing off the idea of Ravi and Marsha’s whereabouts. “I was living in a house for months now without detection. We could go there.”
Everyone agreed. At first Cornell seemed unsure whether or not we should go to my house. Maybe it was just in his nature as a politician to question everyone’s decision. After a little delay he finally asked for directions. There was no possible way that he could have located the house from the sky. We couldn’t see a thing especially since Cornell had no choice but to leave the lights of the helicopter off for fear of being detected. We were swimming in a sea of darkness drowned by uncertainty. My pupils received just enough light to be able to see the others. Barely. My sense of sight failed but my hearing was perfectly fine; spinning rotors cutting the air and heavy breeze.
To find my house Cornell had to put the coordinates into the dusty and scratched control panel of the helicopter and it directed him through the darkness. If Cornell had even switched the lights on we would have been detected by the jumbies for sure. I was a bit confused about the reporting process so I asked the Bookman. He told me that the jumbies had organic chips implanted into their heads that sent messages almost telekinetically to the Red House straight from the brain of the jumbies. It was a device widely used throughout the world to replace telephones. I had never used a telekone but I heard about it in my physics class. It was one of the few times that I was actually paying attention.
We flew on and on without detection until a robotic voice from the control panel said, “Land here.” Cornell instantly reacted. He pressed a few buttons on the helicopter’s control panel, flicked a couple of switches and pulled a lever, causing the helicopter to stop moving in midair. There was a noise at the top of the helicopter that apparently came from the rotor folding into something smaller. The craft then slowly hovered down to the ground and landed in front of my house parting the bushes below in its descent. I hadn’t noticed before just how high the grass had grown in front of my house. I hadn’t cut the lawn in months and the fact made itself obvious as we landed.
We got out of the helicopter and Sam illuminated the way with a powerful torchlight which she used sparingly. She clearly dimmed it because the moment she had put it on it flashed with a powerful glow that lit up everything like day. It was dimmed to just a shadow of its true glory lighting up the area just enough for us to see our way to the door.
All the lights in the house were off and I was beginning to worry about Sara and her siblings and whether they were okay. There should have been enough food in the house to keep them sated but food was the least of the problems.
