Page 2 of Ravaged With You

Like, for example, catching up to his elusive partner.

With a sharp tug, he pulled open the main door to the distillery and stepped over the threshold and into the rickhouse with its racks of aging bourbon and rye, including Cooper’s Slow Burn Rye. A great label, if Red did say so himself.

He saw Mel’s table right away, a few papers scattered on top, held down by one of the Swift Red paperweights that Jo had given each of them as a grand opening present.

Mel, however, was nowhere to be found. And he still hadn’t answered Red’s text.

Again, Red reminded himself that he was the one who’d arrived late, and he set out in search of his partner. He passed through the aisle formed by two racks, then hooked a left toward the long hall that led to the stillhouse. He passed through the series of doors that helped regulate the temperature, then entered the room itself. Immediately, he started sweating, the heat all part of the process.

At first glance, everything in the room looked just fine. The three stills were doing their thing—the Millennium Falcon, the Enterprise, and Firefly. The only thing missing was either Mel or the floor manager, because their number one rule at Swift Red was to never leave the equipment unmonitored.

Frowning, he checked all the gauges himself, saw that everything was well, then shot off a text to Jessn, the floor manager on the schedule for Monday, the one day of the week they were closed to the public.

You with Mel?

Jessn’s reply came quickly: He gave me the day off. Said he wanted to hang at work and catch up on stuff. I’m at the beach. You didn’t know?

Red’s fingers hesitated over the phone, trepidation rising. But all he wrote was, Crossed-wires. It’s fine. Have fun.

Crossed-wires indeed…

They’d agreed to always discuss any kind of personnel shift, something Mel clearly hadn’t bothered with today. Still, Mel must have had his reasons, and Red was pretty damn anxious to hear them. And since Mel clearly wasn’t in the stillhouse, Red exited the room, then followed the maze of racks to the fermentation room, also set off by a series of halls and doors.

This was the room where yeast was added to the crushed grain and water mixture, then left to ferment in a process that increased the alcohol content, but also released carbon dioxide as a byproduct. Because high levels of the off-gas were potentially deadly, this was the most highly monitored room, with a complex series of vents coupled with a monitoring system that not only visually showed the level of the gas in the room, but also sounded an alarm—and automatically texted all personnel—whenever anything wasn’t within the proper parameters.

Red had received no such alert and the building was not rocking from the deafening sound of an alarm—which was why the fact that the visual indicator above the door was now showing a deadly-level concentration in that room scared the shit out of him.

Immediately, he grabbed an emergency breathing apparatus from a hook by the door. There were windows on either side, but as the gas was invisible, nothing seemed out of sorts, and he saw no sign of Mel. He pulled down on the lever designed to evacuate any gas from the room by increasing the suction from the constantly working filters while increasing the flow of clean air. An expert in all the ways a project could get fucked up, Red had insisted the distillery have safety protocols even beyond those that were required or typical in the industry.

He checked the gauges, saw that neither the filters nor blowers had kicked in. That’s when he aimed his gaze upward and was horrified to see that the ventilation system had been manually closed. And now, as he looked around the room at the floor-based scrubbers, he saw that each and every one of them had been unplugged.

Without hesitating, he donned his mask and rushed into the room. Right away, he plugged in each of the scrubbers, their noise immediately filling the space. He looked around, searching for Mel among the dozen waist-high tubs filled with bubbling mash. Not because they were sitting on heat high enough to boil, but because the yeast was doing its job.

He found no sign of his friend, though. He started to pull out his phone and call, then hesitated. Safety first, and he used the ladder to climb up and manually reopen every air vent.

Next, he went to the control panel, only to see that the alarm had been turned to mute, a feature that required the admin password that only he, Mel, and Jo had access to.

What the hell?

Worried and confused, he pulled his phone out again, then checked the gauge. The level was still too high to take off his mask, but was dropping rapidly. He called anyway, intending to talk through his mask. He anticipated hearing either Mel’s voice or his damn voicemail message. Instead, he heard an echoing sound. The distinctive refrain of Willie Nelson’s Whiskey River.

The song that Mel used as his ringtone. And it was coming from among the maze of tubs.

Something dark rumbled in his stomach, churning there like a living thing. Dread, rising and falling. Teasing and taunting. And before Red even knew that he was moving, he’d walked three lines of the grid of tubs that covered the cookhouse floor. He found Mel’s phone in the middle, wedged down near the base of one tub.

And there, marked on the tub’s plastic outer wall was scrawled a single word: Sorry.

Red’s chest tightened, fear stealing his breath. The phone’s lock screen showed messages from both him and Jo. And still, there was no sign of Mel.

“No. Oh, no, buddy. Tell me you didn’t.”

Moving as fast as he could, he raced to the wall where they kept the sterile stir sticks. But this wasn’t for stirring. Instead, he returned to the tub, then slowly prodded. And—as he’d feared—he hit something solid before the bottom of the tub.

Carefully, he used the stick to hook the solid thing—please don’t be Mel—of course it was Mel—and ease it up far enough so he could grab the familiar blue shirt with the Swift Red Distillery logo.

Forcing himself to stay calm, he hauled Mel up far enough to check his pulse. It wasn’t necessary, though. There was no doubt that his friend and partner was dead.

Despite the urge to pull his friend free, Red released the body, letting it slide back into the mash. He’d already disturbed the scene, and even though every sign pointed to suicide, Red knew enough about the process to know that there would have to be an investigation.