Bad Company (Seven Deadly Sins #1) ✅ Completed

Chapter Two: Cornfields and Servitude

I stared out the bus window not really seeing the busy interstate. Once we’d passed the familiar skyline, I sort of lost interest in the scenery. All the green of New Jersey didn’t hold my interest like the gray and red brick of Brooklyn or the shiny glass towers of downtown Manhattan. Now I wouldn’t be seeing home for a long time.

My mother had managed to get me out of trouble for my latest brush with the law, but only after promising the juvenile department of the NYPD that I would no longer be their problem. I hadn’t known I wouldn’t be hers either until after we got home.

I watched in silence as she packed my bags while making arrangements to ship me off to some great aunt of hers that lived in the middle of nowhere. She was sending me as far away from her as she could get. She hadn’t even mentioned calling my dad to check with him first. She knew it would’ve been pointless.

Her great aunt was old and owned some kind of store, so I’d been condemned like an indentured servant out of the dark ages. Instead of working off my sentence on some horrible smelling pig farm in the middle of France, I would be working off my room and board in some backwater grocery store in Missouri. Blackwater, Missouri to be exact.

Charming.

You would think a woman sending off her only child would at least feel guilty enough to spring for a plane ticket, right? Then again you probably didn’t have a mom that made it a point to sleep with her landlord every once and a while to get out of paying rent – though to be fair, it was the nicest apartment in the whole building.

She dropped me off at Penn Station with just enough cash for a one-way bus ticket. She hadn’t even stuck around to watch me leave or make sure I got on the right bus. She was probably hoping I didn’t buy a ticket at all and just split, blending into the millions of bodies coming through the city every day.

Don’t get me wrong, I was tempted to do just that. But the only problem with that brilliant plan was the fact that I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Maybe if I had known I would be stuck on a bus for almost a week with some psychologically questionable people, I would’ve taken my chances.

Still, if I had to be perfectly honest, it beat rotting at home. Watching the parade of latest and not-so-greatest boyfriends trample the well worn path to my mom’s bedroom got a little old after awhile. At least the people on the bus left me alone for the most part. Well, those that didn't sit around talking about how their ungrateful kids never called and how terrible their rheumatoid arthritis was. If I had to listen to that every time I called I probably wouldn't either. 

I arrived at Blackwater late on the sixth day. As I stepped off the bus at an old gas station, the sun was just beginning to dip under the horizon. Even a remarkable sunset, totally devoid of any buildings or bridges to get in the way, couldn’t breathe life into the utterly crappy town I’d just landed in.

The service station looked like something out of an old Stephen King book – complete with decaying gas pumps from the 70’s and dead junkers missing everything from tires to windshields. Big patches of dirt where no grass would ever grow surrounded the immediate area, but behind those were corn fields. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a bunch of creepy kids start coming out of them either.

Oh, wait, that was Nebraska. Funny, that didn't make me feel nearly as good as it should have. 

After several minutes of standing around without any kids forcing me to kill an adult I took it as a good sign that maybe things wouldn’t be so bad. Actually, as I looked around again, I didn’t see any kids at all.

There was an old guy sitting on a weathered bench where the bus stop had dropped me off and a couple of dirty grease monkeys leaning under the hood of a beat up GTO inside the service station’s garage. That was it. Not exactly the welcome wagon.

Aunt Celeste didn’t believe in cell phones and since my mom had confiscated mine before leaving me at Penn Station, there wasn’t much I could do but hike my duffel bag higher on my shoulder and head into town. My mom had spent a summer with Aunt Celeste once when she was a kid. That’s probably how she got the bright idea to send me here. She’d told me I wouldn’t be able to miss Aunt Celeste’s shop – it was the only building in town that had more than two floors.

As I walked by the bench the old guy just stared at me with rheumy eyes that sent chills down my back. I nodded but he didn’t so much as blink. He just stared at me with his filmy looking eyes.

Great. Nothing creepy there.

Main Street was just a two block strip with stores that looked like they hadn’t been updated since the early 80’s. Grey signs, cracked storefront windows, and boarded up doors seemed to be the unifying theme among them. The only stores that even looked halfway decent were a hardware store called Crawford’s and a small no name pharmacy at the end of the first block.

I found the building I was looking for on the next street. A multi-level, red brick building on the corner that just screamed “abandon all hope." It was dark and creepy and seemed exactly the sort of place my mom would send me to die. It was all rather fitting really – today was my seventeenth birthday. Why not spend it in a place that looked like it ate little children for fun?

Taking a deep breath I trudged up the walk until I was close enough to make out the words on the frosted glass door: Celeste’s Gift Emporium. I looked up once again at the imposing structure, still not quite believing this was going to be my new home. At least until I’d saved enough money to get the hell out of here and figure things out on my own. Besides, I’d lived with my mom for seventeen years – there wasn’t much I couldn’t handle at this point.

Feeling a little better I took another breath and stepped inside.

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**A/N: Image is a shot from a real cornfield in Blackwater, MO. So in case you wondered, yes, this is a real town in Missouri, but the actual town is WAY cuter than the one waiting for Eliza! 

Song Selection: Magic Carpet Ride - Steppenwolf