Winter Castle by Isla Jones

Author:Isla Jones [Jones, Isla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-02-08T22:00:00+00:00

The auto and repair shop looked abandoned from the outside.

Castle held his gun in his gloved hand and ran his gaze over the shop’s front. The doors were chained shut and the windows were boarded over.

My fingers were tucked underneath my coat, where they lingered over the handle of my gun. The holsters Castle had given me had proven themselves useful.

“One of the survivors could’ve done that,” I whispered, inclining my head to the shop’s windows. “To stop the rotters from getting in. They could be inside, waiting for the others to show up.”

“Or,” he said, “we’re the first ones here.”

I hoped we weren’t. But I wouldn’t have been surprised if no one was in there.

“There might be another way in,” said Castle. “Come on.”

His fingers lightly clasped around my wrist before he led the way down the side of the building. He didn’t need to tell me—I’d been with him long enough now to know when we were in ‘silent mode’. As he released my wrist, I slipped out the gun from my holster and shadowed his every move.

At every window, we stopped. But they were all boarded like the ones at the front. Castle and I shared a look before we crept further down the building. What was strange about the windows was that they were boarded from the outside, not the inside.

It was as if someone had wanted to keep something in, not out.

After the last window, Castle pressed his back against the wall. His free hand gestured for me to do the same. I snuck up beside him.

From his pocket, he slipped out a shard of glass. It was a fragment of a mirror; he stretched it out to the edge of the building and studied the reflection. From my angle, I couldn’t see what he did in the mirror-piece, so I waited for the next gesture; the ‘all clear’.

It came in the form of a nod.

We crept around the corner to the back of the building. There weren’t any cars parked or signs left by the group. I doubted anyone had arrived yet. We might’ve been the first, I thought.

But then Castle stilled in front of me. I stopped behind him.

He raised his gun and aimed it ahead. I couldn’t see what he was pointing it at other than the withering trees across the way.

“There’s movement,” he said in a whisper. “Someone’s over there.”

He meant the trees. But they stood against the cold far ahead; I can’t imagine how he’d seen movement from that much distance. Though, Leo had done the same once. Back when I’d first joined the group, Leo had thought he’d spotted movement on a bridge farther down the highway. And he’d been right.

As I made to step around Castle, something touched the back of my hood. But before I could lift my hand to touch it, I knew what it was. It pressed against the cold fabric of my hood, digging into my pony-tail, and sprung an image to mind. An image of Leo.

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