Forest Shroomy's Arc

Chapter 9 of 10

Forest Shroomy watched the locked garage from the tree line. The padlock held, but the buyer would come. She could feel it in the quiet. Somewhere a truck was already turning down the access road, and she had only minutes to decide how to meet it. She slipped to the far side of the concrete pad and crouched behind a massive boulder near the rear vent pipe. From here she could see both the garage doors and the soft dirt where the copper piping bent into the ground. If the buyer could not get through the doors, the vent shaft was the next way in. She gathered loose stones and packed them tight around the pipe's base. An engine rumbled up the access road. A faded delivery truck rolled to a stop, vines still clinging to its tires from weeks of waiting elsewhere. A figure climbed down and tried the garage handles. The brass padlock did not budge. He circled the building, eyes scanning the brick stack and the dirt around it. Forest Shroomy pressed flat behind the boulder and watched his boots stop three feet from the vent. She rolled a fist-sized stone hard against the truck's wheel well. The clang echoed across the pad. The figure spun, hand on his belt, and jogged back toward the sound. He saw nothing but vines and rust. He stood there a long minute, then climbed into the cab, slammed the door, and drove away empty. Forest Shroomy stayed crouched until the engine faded. The buyer was gone. But he had seen the vent, and he would not forget it.