Chapter Nine: Up, In

Zoro is smart. I give him that. Sometimes. He is excellent with improvision and has his own, je ne sais quoi, strength, I suppose.

But he cannot take a direct order from someone he considers below him, in a sense.

Now, he was hotter under the collar than I'd ever seen him -- stoned, drunk or sober. All because he just had to nip the flashlight and take off on his own. He had predicted the dark, the underbrush and the bugs, but not the quicksand.

So now he was short one combat boot and a flashlight ( he'd saved the knives ). He was in a peachy mood. Just peachy -- and now wearing one of my sneakers.

"I hate everyone." He was glowering, looking pointedly at the house in the distance. "I hate every fucking one of you. God damn, why am I here?"

Nami cracked him upside and head; he, in turn, swore eloquently, with a few new ones I didn't quite understand. Flipped everyone off for good measure. I stretched lazily where I was propped up against a maple tree. I think it was one of those fancy Japanese maples that people use to landscape -- another sign of the past wealth of the place, silly as it seemed.

Nami was deep in her consult work with Usopp as he attempted to determine the lay of the property. He knew things about the woods that the rest of us didn't consider, like quicksand and just how quick you sink in it. I lost track of their ramblings as the heat picked up and the cicadas began to sing their metallic song. My under-armor grew heavy and irritable as the humidity swelled. We would need to get moving soon.

The two, however, still needed to mash out as many details as they could. She couldn't take this on unprepared. I checked our water supply again. It worse came to worse, we would have to haul water from the river half a mile behind the house and boil it. If we needed to. If we got that far. If, if, if, if.

If only last night hadn't been so odd. Luffy had disappeared without leaving a trace. Zoro, oddly adept in looking for clues, came up with nothing, as did Usopp who plotted the other boy's trajectory with his marksman precision. If we followed the line of the orchard, it was a clear shot to the pavilion front of the wrecked mansion. It was the most obvious path and it was probably the safest. So why hadn't his footprints appeared in the surrounding muck? Or why hadn't he lost a sandal or his hat?

Nami was fighting a battle with her logic. It told her that Louis, she was no absolutely refusing to call him Luffy, was simply light-footed, perhaps using his gymnastic movements over some of the more tricky parts. It refused to let her believe that there was any other explanation, like the one Usopp was fervently insisting on; he and Luffy had heard voices -- a party it seemed.

While he hadn't seen anything, Luffy had insisted he could see and smell the celebration, quickly gallivanting off to join. It was at this time that Zoro left Nami asleep by the dying fire to wake myself up with his walking. We calculated that Luffy must have departed shortly after Zoro moved away -- the paranoid stoner wouldn't let something like that slip his attention so easily. If anything, Zoro was inexplicably furious that it had. I was just worried that this new event was straining us all.

"We're going." Nami had the map and her notebook in her hands. "We have eight hours to get him back. We need to be back here by nightfall as a group. It doesn't do us any good if we lose another person." She was calm as she spoke, shouldering her backpack. "We're going to try the orchard route first. If that doesn't work, a portion of the main road exists, but it is riddled with quicksand since it appears to have sunk into the swamp."

We nodded silently. There didn't seem to be much reason to be talking. We three boys fell in single file behind Nami. The air seemed again stagnant as we moved closer to the house, not helped by the cloying scent of the rotting fruit from the orchard. I felt a portentous air following us. Some warning that this was something more than we thought it was. I shifted my pack. I hoped not. I still had to go to college.

The walk there was rather uneventful, taking only an hour to travel roughly a half mile due to underbrush and various other obstacles. We stood on the cracked cobblestone pavilion, looking up as the bared trusses of the second story. Nami swallowed hard, taking a deep breath and pulling out her references, her solid facts. We circled, now left to figure out how we were supposed to go about rescuing our captain.

"I say we track the outside first." Zoro traced the lines of the foundation. "If there's a spot that's loose, uncovered, whatever, any place where he could have gotten in, we should be able to see it."

"He right." I conceeded, "It's not structurally safe, most likely, it's not the best idea to take the chance of bursting right in when we could just as easily coax him out."

"If he's concious." Usopp said in a flat tone. "His head was killing him last night."

"And you feel the need to mention this just now?"

"So sue me, I didn't think it was important."

"Important?"

"His head hurts all the time. It's really not a good indicator of anything wrong anymore."

"I think -- " Nami cut in, "That we check the perimeter first, then test the structure. If it's safe, two of us go in . . . with tethers."

"Fine by me." Zoro grunted, loosing one of his knives. "We'll head to the left, you two head to the right."

"Eh?"

"You and golden boy take the left, me and the fuzzball will left. We should meet half way. Yell if you find anything."

"Yell what?"

Zoro gave a crazy smile. "Olli-olli-oxin-free."

o-o-o

Want to know what a rose trellis looks like after a century of neglect?

Hideous. And prickly.

Nami refused to walk over it. Period. I had to carry her. And, not that any chance to get on her good side is a bad thing, she weighs something terrible. I was actually straining as I picked delicately across the broken arch, the thorns tickling my ankles through my socks. She sighed as I wobbled, trying to step over another piece of wood.

"Can't you go any faster?"

"I'm. Trying." I gasped out. "This just. Isn't ideal. I can't see. The ground."

"So?"

"I don't want. To. Break an ankle."

She pulled forward and rested her head on my shoulder. "Go faster."

I shot her a look. "I do need. These feet. They. Are paying for. My schooling."

"Don't you need your hands to go to chef school?"

"Yes." I said around my gritted teeth as I focused on my next move. "But I need. My whole body. For it all."

"Faster."

I humored her, jumping over the next bit, ultimately sending myself face first into the overgrown roses. I moaned as she slammed into my back, pushing me further into the thorny limbs. I opened my eyes warily and surveyed the situation. I slip of red winked at my through the rough green and brown. I sat up carefully, giving her time to move aside before I reached for the object in question.

A sandal with red bottom.

"Olli . . . " Nami began. "OLLI-OLLI-OXIN-FREE!"

o-o-o

Zoro and I were tearing through the roses, throwing the pink blossoms aside with little regard for them. We wrenched them free from the frame that still hugged the house, shoving aside the parts that had fallen. Nami clutched the sandal in one and and assessed her information again and again, trying to determine where we would end up if we went it.

I took another swipe with Zoro's bowie, deftly cutting the plant. The naked wooden lattice soon stared at us with little remorse. There was only one way to go that made sense. And that was up.

Note: Ha ha. This one makes me laugh. It hated me so much. I wrote it FIVE TIMES because every time I started, something went wrong. The power went out, my brother deleted it, I lost it, ect, ect. HA HA. That and I realized that wearing under-armor around, while extremely cool looking, is also extremely uncomfortable.