A week before their high school graduation, Ellie's boyfriend walked her to her door and kissed her goodnight, just like any other night. But there was nothing ordinary about what followed. Austin disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again...
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The state of our grandparents' farm was not what I had expected, and not what I remembered about it, either. To say the place was in a state of disrepair was to be kind. It needed an entire overhaul. Every single thing appeared to be in need of some kind of repair.
The main house was small and dilapidated, with missing roof shingles and boarded-up windows. The front door hung half off the hinges and the barn wasn't much better. But at least that door was closed.
"Damn, this is sad," my brother exclaimed.
"Yeah," I agreed.
Alex had insisted we'd bring equipment with us, so we'd bought shovels, buckets, hedge clippers and a saw, and I was glad we did. I hadn't thought we needed to, as I figured everything we'd require would be at the farm, but there wasn't much left at all.
The place was isolated. The closest neighbor was a deserted junkyard about a mile away. And from the look of it, our grandparent's place had been ransacked a long time ago.
"This wasn't exactly what I expected," Ellie commented. "Everything around here seems to be prickly."
My brother snorted. "Yeah, there's a shit ton more cacti than I remember."
"I'm pretty sure there is more," I said. "It's like they've taken over the ranch." And it was. Cacti and other vegetation had invaded the driveway and the yard and completely taken over my grandmother's carefully weeded gardens.
"Great," my brother muttered while Ellie squared her shoulders like she was getting herself ready for battle and grabbed a hold of a shovel.
"We're here, so let's get to work," she said.
We were all dressed in pants and long sleeve shirts despite the heat. We'd brought a temporary canopy and a shitload of water bottles to help protect us from the sun and the cacti, but I wondered how long we'd last in the desert sun?
"Where exactly was grandma's garden?" my brother asked once we walked past the house.
"It should be around here somewhere," I answered and took in the space behind the house that used to be my grandmother's pride and joy; her vegetable garden. It was long gone, and so was the small fence that had surrounded it. Instead, there were low-growing shrubs, tufts of wild grass, some flowers and, of course, cacti.
"Let's look for large rocks," Ellie suggested and squinted her eyes against the Nevada sun.
"Yeah, that's a better idea," Alex agreed.
"There's a few of them," I noted sarcastically, because the entire left side was lined with overgrown rocks, which separated the old garden from the wooded area. Or used to.
"Oh wow," Ellie sighed.
And that about summed it up. There were at least twenty boulders, and what felt like a million smaller ones, which varied from basketball size to slightly smaller than a football.
