Pride, Mates, and Past Mistakes

Casey Enjoys Hiding In Boxes

 

*Sierra*

I blinked at the building in front of me.

One Shot Indoor Shooting Range, the sign read.

“Are you sure that’s the one?” Nolan asked in a hushed voice beside me. He reached up and wiped off the mud on his face.

“It has to be,” I replied softly, looking around us for any more potential threats, but I didn’t see any.

After taking out that wolf-stalker that was on our heels, Nolan and I hijacked a shipping truck that was leaving the factory we were supposed to be getting into. It made more sense to hijack the shipping truck than break into some weapon making factory that was probably surrounded by a million levels of security.

 Unfortunately, the workers in the car had tried to run off, and we’d had to stalk them down—the last thing we needed was people alerting the authorities that teenagers were hijacking shipping trucks leaving an artillery factory—but somehow we managed to land ourselves inside some muddy ditch in a forest-like area right outside the city. After we had the terrified workers cornered and tied down, we pressured them (‘threatened’ them would have been a better adjective) for information about where they were taking the boxes, to which they both replied that they were taking the boxes to some One Shot Indoor Shooting Range.

In front of which Nolan and I, mud-stained, dirty, and scratched up, were standing right now.

It was a long, concrete building, set right outside the city, where the trees were beginning to grow. The outer walls were stained with brown and were beginning to show signs of old age and decay—the place seemed almost abandoned, had it not been for the old-fashioned ‘open’ sign made with neon lights on the door. In fact, the area itself seemed abandoned. Not a person was in sight, with the exception of two cars in a parking lot—on silver and had a brand-new shine to it, and the other the exact opposite: old, black, and rusty.

It was strange to see such an old building. Most of the buildings in the UWA nowadays were usually always quite new, and most of the old ones that had been here during the human era was torn down to make more space and buildings for the werewolves. It had been years since I’d seen a building that’d looked as timeworn and run down as this.

Nolan gave a low whistle. “What was this, made before the Great Divide?” he joked. “This place looks ancient.” He looked to me. “So, what’s the plan?”

“The plan is simple,” I told Nolan. “We go inside, we look for anything suspicious. If we find anything, we contact the others. But for now, I think it’s best not to bother them. They’re probably busy breaking into their own factories, I don’t want to distract them.”

Nolan nodded. “Okay…but—how do we get in?” He pointed at a sign on the door that read,

MUST BE OF 18 YEARS OF AGE TO SHOOT

I looked at Nolan. “You’re eighteen, right? We should be fine.”

Nolan shook his head, pointing underneath the age requirement sign. In a smaller font, it read,

MUST HAVE I.D. PRESENT FOR LEGAL PROOF

I frowned. “Well, that’s not helpful. Then we’re going to have to sneak in somehow…” My eyes went up, above the building. If we could somehow sneak in from the roof…

“Why don’t we just use the front door?” Nolan asked bluntly.

I blinked at him in surprise. “What?”