Chapter 7: I don't know what to say
Bring Me The Horizon
-Nick's POV-
I read the paper a few more times in my mind, telling myself that it isn't real, that none of this is real.
The anger builds inside of me as I read the note again. The thought of being betrayed by my own job only fueling the rage even more.
I crush the paper in my hand and turn around to look at Judy.
"The ZPD!? Are you serious?" I asked in disbelief. "They are the ones doing this!?"
"Nick, I don't have any idea why they would do this! This can't be the ZPD, they wouldn't do this to somebody!" She says back while waving her arms around at the burned house.
"Then why does it say ZPD on the bottom of it?" I say, only to have her look away with no answer.
"Let's go, Jackson's waiting for us."
I head out the door and start walking down the steps with Judy falling close behind.
"So how are we supposed to get to where he is?" She says from behind me. " Because we can't take the bus or train. Heck, we can't even cross the border because of the ID cards."
Up until now I hadn't thought about traveling. We can't take anything publicly for we might get spotted, and the stupid ID cards will give us away any other way.
"Wait, my dad should have an ID card right? What if I pretended to be him to get across the border?" I say, as my anger from begins to subside.
" Well I guess that might work, but do you look like your dad? I mean I didn't really see what he looked like before he was taken." She says back. " And trust me, they really make sure you look like the picture."
"Let's find out, I think I remember where he kept his wallet. Let's just hope it's not burned." I say running back up the stairs into the house.
I take a few steps down the hall when suddenly my foot goes through the floor. I fall through it up to my knee and my leg gets cut on the broken boards.
"Nick!"
Judy runs up beside me and grabs my hand. She lifts me up out of the hole and thats when I feel it. I feel something warm running down my leg and look down to see a big tear in my pants. Through the tear I can see my orange fur quickly growing red.
"Oh god, I can't deal with this right now." I say as I grab my leg to help stop the stinging, but to no avail.
Judy grabs her new jacket that she had and wraps it around my leg. As she does so the stinging gets worse, but at least it will help the bleeding.
Now that I have something covering the gash In my leg, I try to stand up.
I stand on my good leg first, then onto my hurt one. At first it stings pretty badly but as I walk further the pain begins to subside.
I take the rest of my steps carefully walking to my parents bedroom, so as to not hurt my already hurt leg or fall through the floor for a second time.
As I walk in I look around, the memories of when I was a kid start to flood in. I start to remember the times I used to sleep in my parents room when I was too scared of what was in my closet, and the many times my dad would read stories to me in here before we went to bed.
Realizing that it is all gone, I feel a sharp pain inside of me, like someone took a knife and stabbed me in the chest. But instead of simply leaving it, they decided to take a hammer and bound it in.
"…Nick?"
I look at Judy, the memories still swirling in my head.
"So where is the ID?" She says, reminding me what we had come looking for.
Pushing the thoughts Im having aside, I point at a dresser in the corner of the room.
"It should be in this dresser over here" I say half limping over to an old looking dresser.
The dresser itself is relatively intact, with only a few burn marks near the bottom and the back of it, where the wall and floor had been. However, there is lots of ash and fallen debris on top and all around it.
I brush off the ash on the top drawer and open it to find my mom's Jewelry. Scanning through it and not seeing what I want, I go to the next drawer down.
I look through the second drawer but still don't find it, so I go to the next. I open it to instantly find exactly what I was searching for. I grab the wallet and quickly look through it to find the card. Once I find it, I pull it out and study it for a minute.
I definitely look a lot like my dad, but do I look enough like him to have it work?
Not sure if I am close enough, I give the card to Judy, who this whole time has been watching me patiently go through all the drawers.
She looks at the card then back at me, then back the card and then at me again.
"Well?" I say, wanting to know.
"Ummm well, I think you might just be able to do it. But your dad has a few gray hairs on the top of his muzzle that you don't." She says looking skeptically at me. " But I think you could pull it off."
"That's good enough for me." I say grabbing the card and putting it in my pocket. "Now for the transportation part, we want to avoid as many places that use these cards. We could walk, but it would be tiring."
"Do your parents have a car?"
"Wait, they do! How could I forget about that." I say walking out of the room. I take my steps carefully as I go over the hole in the floor again. When entering the living room, instead of going towards the front door, I head towards the kitchen.
"I hope this old car still runs, it was having problems even when I was a kid." I say opening the back door in the kitchen.
We walk out into the yard and start heading towards the garage.
"It's not the nicest car ever, but I wouldn't say it's too bad. It will definitely work for what we need it to do, butagain that's if it even runs anymore."I say opening the door on the side of the garage.
I walk inside to find the old car I was thinking about, not here at all.
"Woah."
"Oh my god, I should have known you would do something like this. Nick, you told me itwas old!" Judy says excitedly beside me.
Instead of finding an old car I thought my parents still had, we found a bright red Ferrari. The windows were tinted black in contrast to the bright red, and they were just enough you couldn't see through them. To make it even more incredible to look at, car had no dirt whatsoever on it, making it look like it had just been from the dealership.
"I'll be honest with ya fluff, I was not expecting this." I say completely baffled at what I was looking at. Can't believe they've had this and we never knew.
I walk around to the drivers side door and try to open it.
Of course it's locked.
"Looks like we are going to need to get the keys. I bet they're still in the house."I say disappointed that I have to wait to drive the car. I walk around the car and out the door. We then quickly make our way across the yard and into the house, leaving the garage and house door open.
"So your just going to take it then?" She says behind me. "That doesn't really seem right to me."
"Well I'm pretty sure that they don't care at the moment, and I can take it because I'm part of the family. Even if they didn't want me to drive it, how would they stop me?" I say looking back and smiling at her.
"Well I still don't like it."
"You don't have to like it, but you still have to do it. Simple as that."
In the kitchen I see the rack where they keep all the keys, burned laying on the floor. All of the keys from the rack are laying nearby in random piles.
"Can't be too hard to find a Ferrari key right?" I say bending down and start to dig through one of the piles.
"Yea not very hard," she says walking over to one of the piles. " bet you could find it just from the fact that it has a Ferrari keychain on it." She says bending down and coming up with the keys.
"Oh," I say fake laughing because I didn't think of that.
"I was just letting you feel special at the moment by letting you find them." I say as I grin at her while a smile breaks out on her face.
"Sure you were, now let's go. I'm just dying to go for a ride in this Ferrari." She says tossing the keys to me.
I catch the keys and head back out the door. We run back across the ash covered lawn and into the garage. I quickly get to the driver's side and unlock the car.
" I can't believe I'm actually driving a Ferrari. I mean, I've always dreamed of it but now it's actually happening!" I say getting in and closing the door.
"I think I should be driving, I'm a lot better than you are and we DO NOT want to wreck this car." She says pointing at me with a scowl.
I point at myself and try acting innocent, "Look, I'm not as bad as you think. Just because I just about ran a red light or two… or five, doesn't mean I'm bad." I say starting the car and hearing the engine roar to life.
"Nick, you didn't almost run it, you did. In fact you've ran several, and that's just while on patrol. We really can't afford to be in a crash in this car, especially since as soon as the ambulance would arrive and find out who we were, we would go to prison. That is if we're not dead from the crash already." She says while checking out the insides of the car.
I push the garage door switch in the car to open the door.
"I know, you've said it like 30 times, don't crash. I really don't plan on crashing a $200,000 car. Besides, my parents would be pissed, and I would rather die in the crash than see them after wrecking this." I say backing the car out very slowly. "Either way, they much bigger problems to be worrying about right now than a stupid car."
I notice I'm not even pressing the gas and it's moving fairly quick, even so that I have to hit the brake a little to slow it down to a manageable speed. Once out of the garage I remember that I was supposed to call Jackson to meet with him.
"Hey carrots can you call Jackson to find out where he's hiding, and to let him know that we're coming." I say as I get to the edge of the driveway and stop, " because right now I have no idea where I'm going. I don't even know where he lives anymore."
"Oh yea, what's his number?" She says pulling out her phone.
"Just go to the recently called, it should be the top one."
"Oh right, stupid me." She says hitting her head with the palm of her hand.
We're both having one of those days. I think as I put the car in park.
She taps her phone a few times and it starts to ring. She hands it to me and I put it on speaker so she can listen. A few seconds later he answers.
"Hello, Jackson? Are you there?"
"Yea I'm here" he says as I sigh in relief to know he's still safe.
"So where exactly is here? We need to find a place to hide and plan our next move because we apparently aren't safe out here in the open."
"I'm hiding in that place we used to go to when we were kids. You know that amusement park, Wilde times. It's kinda falling apart since it closed." He says as if looking around at his surroundings.
"Really? You chose there out of all places?" I ask surprised that he even remembered being there since last time we went, he was only about 4 years old. I was only 7 and I barely even remember being there.
"Yea, its was close to my apartment and nobody ever comes here so I thought it would be fine."
"Ok, ummm We'll be there as soon as we can. Don't panic if I don't show up for a few hours, we might get held up in traffic or something."
"Ok, I'll just be waiting here for you then."
"Ok bye," I say, hanging up the phone and handing it back to Judy. I then put the car in reverse and pull out of the driveway and on to the dirt road that eventually leads to the highway.
She sighs then says,"Well looks like we're gonna be crossing the border for the first time."