I’m not hungry… She glared at the creature in the mirror, its eyes still puffy. Girl… you better make an effort of it.
GRANDFATHER MADE NO attempt at conversation. The only sounds in the kitchen were the clinking of silverware on plates. Neither of them seemed to have much of an appetite as the silence between them hung as a dark cloud of gnats. He didn’t even bother looking at her. Only had set the table and doled out bowls of stew and potatoes. Regardless of how delicious it really was, she’d only managed a few bites before simply stirring it absently, staring into its depths.
“Thank you for dinner,” Aidele said flatly and stood up.
Before she could get far, Grandfather spoke, “I know I said I would not say anything if you did not wish it, but I almost forgot that I found something of your father’s you might want.”
She paused looking back at him as he rose and went to a drawer. He pulled out a strapped leather-bound journal. He approached her and held it outward.
“Cooper wrote much. This was hidden in a wall panel behind his bed. Wish he’d asked me first before putting holes in my walls.” Grandfather offered a wane smile.
Aidele hesitated, then took it from him. She ran her hand slowly across its smooth surface. It was dyed brown and was hefty, as if the words inside had their own gravity.
“I don’t understand everything within its pages,” Grandfather continued. “There are descriptions and drawings throughout that seemed important to him. I’m sure you’ll have a deeper insight into their meanings given how often you worked with him out in the workshop. I figure that, if you’re feeling lost, maybe his words will help you find your way back.”
Aidele’s jaw tensed and her eyes narrowed. A knot welled in her throat and she offered the journal back.
“It’s fine. Ah already know all ah need ta know ‘bout mahself… An’ mah father.”
Grandfather held up his hands and looked away. “No, Granddaughter. Those are your father’s words. And, just for the record, no matter how you protest, I will never stop worrying about you.”
Grandfather left heading down the hall to his room. A short time later, she heard the door to his bedroom click shut. It took a few moments longer for her to pull her eyes away from the bend in the hall and down to the journal. Slowly she pulled the journal to her chest and stared out to a distance beyond the walls of her home.
After a moment longer, she forced her feet to move and headed to her own room near the end of the hall and stopped. The very last door, standing closed, was her father’s. An eternity seemed to pass before she was able to tear her eyes away from that door and reach for her own doorknob. Entering her room, she nudged her own door closed with a muffled click and tossed the journal onto her bed. It made a heavy thump.
At the dresser near her door she sat down heavily and unwrapped the towel around her head. Her mind was blank as she reached for a brush and tested her hair with her other hand. Only a few spots were still moist. She allowed the raven black bunch of hair to fall to her midback and tenderly ran the brush through matted locks. Working through them her gaze fell onto her own eyes. A haze fell over her like a blanket and her hand stopped in mid-stroke as she saw the journal through the mirror.
Dad…
THERE WERE FIVE regions that made up the Wastelands: The Spine in the north, which was a mountainous zone with its centerpiece being the main skeletal range running east to west for nearly a thousand miles; The Deltas, the zone that started at the edge of the Spine, ran all the way from the north down and around to the east until it collided with a series of tall valleys known as the Reach of Vales, and also far to the south where the Wastelands ended. There, great forests, and lakes, and marshes were the main features of interest; The Crags far to the west that were a wall of collapsed stone and hazardous terrain that collided with the very end of the Spine and ringed around to the southernmost region; The Dustlands. A massive funnel of wind and dust made up a constant storm blowing across from a western canyon beyond the Crags and far to the east where a small desert divided the end of the storm’s influence from that of the southernmost reaches of the Deltas.
The fifth region that sat pretty much in the middle of all of this was called the Sutures. An arid, cracked zone full of ragged, difficult to navigate terrain with a collection of tortured, bumpy dunes. Scattered sporadically were patches of stiff, hair like brown grass common to this region known as ‘pissweed’, though its official name was Hynlineum. There were very few other instances of vegetation, but most of it was either hard, stonelike wood rising up as leafless trees sporting spiny needles and looking like claws reaching out of the lifeless earth towards the unforgiving skies, or clumps of desert grasses that were quick to cut if one wasn’t careful. What wildlife was to be found was as vicious as the denizens who called the Sutures home. And towards the northern half of the Sutures, just twelve miles away from the Spine, was a sunken depression that looked like a shallow crater or a former lakebed. This half mile wide isolated place played host to the home of Garret Lester, Aidele’s grandfather. It was here that he’d built his ranch so many decades ago. Aidele and her father lived here in relative peace (the loss of her mother five years earlier not withstanding). Until that fateful day three months past.
Aidele had been coming out of the barn where she was tending to the Marsets, when she saw her father’s buggy zooming up to the house. He looked frazzled and didn’t bother parking in the lot beside the home. Instead, he leapt out just after a skidding stop and raced up the short stairs and inside. He was yelling something almost immediately causing her to frantically cross the yard in a run and followed him inside herself. His voice was echoing down the hall and she knew then he’d gone straight to Grandfather’s room.
She hurried through the kitchen, around the first bend of the bedroom corridor, and towards the first door on her right. Voices became more distinct rather than the mumbled disembodied sounds they’d been moments earlier.
“—ting for me, Garret. I already said no, but I don’t know that they’ll accept that as an answer! I never should have invented the damn thing!”
“Now hold on, Coop. You don’t know that’s what they’re after. They’re only talking about one journal.”
“Of course, it is! What else could it be? How do they even know about it?”
Aidele came to the doorway and looked in. Her father was pacing the center of the room, his hands clawing at his short, brown hair with touches of gray around his sideburns. His glasses beamed reflected light as Grandfather sat in his rocking chair leaning forward and watching him with furrowed brows.
“I don’t know. What do you think the Union wa—” Grandfather saw her standing there, hand to chest, panic evident on her face. “Granddaughter, I didn’t see you there. Was there something you needed?”
Her father stopped, ran his hand through his hair to straighten it, and looked to her with a smile. Seeing the wiry thin man standing there in his tan tweed jacket and blue jeans, wearing a nervous, fearful expression, filled Aidele with a welling trepidation.
“Aidele! Honey, sorry to worry you. I should’ve come and said ‘hi’ first.”
“What’s wrong? Is something the matter?”
He raised his hand to rub his temple. “It’s nothing. Nothing to worry about. Just, work related issues.” His thinly mustached lip quivered and then his smile grew brighter. “That’s it! You can help me!”
Grandfather frowned as her father snapped his fingers. “Are you sure about that, Cooper? You were just expressing your own… concerns.”
“I don’t see much other choice. I don’t know who spilled the beans, but…” he sighed. “It isn’t relevant. It just has to get moved, before words are the last thing that they’re after.”
Her father rushed past her and out into the hallway. She looked to Grandfather and furrowed her brow. Grandfather shrugged and stood up. He said nothing as he followed Cooper to his room at the end of the bedroom corridor.
“How long do you pl
an on being gone, Coop?” Grandfather asked entering his bedroom.
Her father was busy throwing clothing into a duffle bag. He didn’t look at them as they stopped before his bed.
“Uh, maybe three or four days,” he said and looked over at Aidele. “You should pack too. …Oh, I’m sorry. I never asked if you would go with me. I just assumed…”
He stood straight and walked towards her, hazel eyes bright with his question. She shook her head, still confused. “I don’t even know what’s going on, but yeah. I’ll go. All you had to do was ask.”
He went back to the task of packing. “Excellent! I’ll fill you in on the details once we’re on the train.”
“The train? Where are we going?”
“To the labs.”
“Why are we going to the labs? I haven’t been there since I was like twelve.”
“Don’t worry, all will be revealed.” Cooper looked to Garret. “You still have the place in Kanaza?”
“Kanaza? Yeah, but why do you want to go all the way out there?” Garret questioned, crossing his arms.
“Out of the way. Nobody would think to look for me there.”
The more she heard the more alarmed she became.
“You said you’d just be gone a few days. This is sounding more like a week,” Grandfather quirked a brow. “You’re just going to leave an old man alone for a week?”
Her father clasped him on the arm. “Garret, I’ve never known you to be helpless. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”
Grandfather chuckled as her father stared at the wall behind his bed. “Shit.”
He went to the bed and zipped up the duffle bag and then left it there as he turned to the two. Aidele felt her mouth go dry.
“What? Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?”
Her father smiled. “On the train. Until then, pack for a week, I guess. Along the way to the station, we’ll grab lunch. Stop worrying so much. It’ll be fine.” He walked past them and towards the front porch. “I need to head to Chesik Villa. I forgot, there’s a matter I have to deal with before we leave.”
Aidele and Grandfather followed him down the corridor, through the kitchen, past the living room, and out to the porch where he took the three steps in a single bound and hurried to his buggy. Getting into the driver’s seat he looked to them and waved.
“I’ll be back soon!”
Aidele watched him turn the little four-wheeled vehicle on, its roll cage vibrating under the strange whirring buzz it made. The two bubble headlights up front reminded Aidele of some sort of angry bug. It pulled forward and turned around to head back to the east exit of the property. A dust trail followed her father as he picked up speed and drove through the front gate.
Grandfather went back into the house leaving Aidele alone on the porch to watch in silence until the little open-air buggy disappeared around the far bend leading out towards Chesik Villa. The village itself wasn’t very far, maybe half an hour by buggy going at a decent clip. And her father was a lead foot. So, she figured maybe an hour and a half to two hours he’d be back, depending on what it was he had to do in town. She turned back to the house.
FOR THE NEXT couple hours, Aidele took her time packing and preparing for her impromptu trip. She made sure to bring plenty of clothes, basic toiletries, and her brush. When done with that, she took her own duffel bag and sat it beside her father’s then went out to the porch to wait. She pulled a timepiece out of her jeans’ pocket and saw that it was just past noon. Putting it back she looked up to a vivid blue sky and saw a light rainbow of color ripple across the broad expanse from horizon to horizon. She sighed inwardly. He’d already been gone two hours.
So much for lunch. She decided to go brush out Mesmerize. After a while, she grew bored of that and went back to the porch to read. She glanced up, saw that the sun was further along in the sky and looked at her timepiece again. Another hour had come and gone. I thought he was in a hurry?
Aidele folded her book shut, placed it on a small table by the porch swing, and stood up to walk across the yard to the Marset pen. She whistled for Mesmerize as she entered and headed towards the barn. He came bounding towards her eagerly. Grabbing his saddle and reins, she went to work gearing him up and then rode out towards the southern edge of the property. Once there she dismounted and hung the reins around the saddle horn and patted Mesmerize’s neck.
“Stay.”
Next came a grueling climb up the embankment ridge. It was twenty feet high and steeply sloped but had plenty of footholds and stone outcroppings to grab onto. At the summit, she got her balance between the sharp fall off into the ranch perimeter and the gentle sloping scarp down towards the flattish expanse of the Sutures. From here, she could see the entirety of the ranch. The house looked almost like a model from this vantage and the crops surrounding it spanned out for thousands of feet in every direction almost reaching the borders of the homestead ridges. There were only two ways in and out of the ranch that didn’t involve a steep, perilous climb: well worn paths running eastward and through a series of raggedy dunes towards Chesik Villa, and a southwestern entrance running towards the smooth plains of Trenton’s Way.
Yet, her focus was not on the ranch this day, it was out towards the north. The sun was working its way west but the day was unnaturally bright. As if someone had turned on a brilliant floodlight. She raised a hand to her brow and scanned the northern horizon. There was a shallow run of mountains so low from this vantage they might as well be a mirage of raised dirt. Closer and clearer to see was the beginning formation of the Spine, its monstrous form running all the way west to vanish out of sight. A little closer than that, and just a few dozen miles southeast of the Spine, was Chesik Villa. Here just a small speck of grey brown. Other than these sights, the horizon from east to west was the dry, torn up terrain of the Sutures.
To the southeast, she saw a rising poof of dust roiling towards the Scrinton Ravine over the horizon. Whoever was riding so hard and so fast were little more than hazy black dots. She scanned back out north and her gaze fell on a spot halfway between Chesik and the ranch. An almost invisible trail of smoke was rising up from the Aldor dunes reaches. She screwed up her face.
Campfire? In the middle of the afternoon? But who’d be in the middle of— Her hand dropped and eyes widened. A pained gasp escaped her lips and a terrible fear sat on her heart. She turned back to the steep decline and skidded down towards Mesmerize who was chomping at some patches of pissweed. She wasted no time mounting up and guiding him out towards the eastern exit. Her heart ached to just tear up over the rise and ride straight across to the smoky mystery, but the terrain of the dunes was too rough and jagged. Mesmerize would surely fall or twist a foot. Sticking to the path that had carefully been dug out by her grandfather over the years was far safer. Though it meant a longer ride with that terror clawing at her gut.
Nearly an hour passed as she pushed Mesmerize as hard as she dared around the bends keeping an eye out for potholes and cracks. All the while the brief glimpses of the smoke trail grew thinner and thinner. By the time of her arrival, the smoke was practically non-existent. She pulled Mesmerize to a stop upon seeing the source of the fire. Her father’s overturned buggy. She dismounted and raced toward the vehicle.
“Dad! Dad! Say something!”
A small fire still sizzled inside the buggy as she slung herself to her knees, skidding to a stop beside the bullet-ridden hull.
Bullets? She looked inside and saw no one there. Burnt papers littered the ground all around. The roll bar over the driver’s seat was bent inward. The seats within were little more than skeletal remains. The driver side door was laying several feet away from the vehicle. Tears flowed from her eyes as smoke blasted her face. Panic wracked her mind.
Aidele stood up and cupped her hands to her mouth. “Father!”
She took in the whole scene looking for any signs of him. Debris was everywhere and some brush had caught fire. Behind her, she saw a large dune, half of it more a s
mall cliff of dirt, and raced towards it. Tracks led up to its summit, clearly indicating this was where he’d been driven off the dusty road.
Bullets… he was shot at… She grunted, clawing her way to the top. Oh, Spirits! Please! Please! Please!
A hard wind whipped at her hair and caused the remaining smoke below to blow horizontally. She looked hard at the surrounding area and froze in horror. Roughly one hundred feet away, she could see a pair of booted legs sticking out of a copse of brush.
“Dad!” She screamed and skidded down the dune.
Racing there, she found her father’s body lying on its stomach. She turned him over and saw the grimacing face of death. He’d been shot six times and she started trembling. She checked for a pulse and found none, knew none would be there. She knelt there stunned and unable to move.
Oh, Spirits… What do I do? …Dad. Her gaze fixated on the brush surrounding him, numbness keeping her from acting. Stop it… get going. Move.
Mesmerize snorted and she came out of her daze. She drew her hand back, stood up, and went to grab Mesmerize. She led him over to her father and then struggled to get his body lashed behind the saddle. Tension was already starting to take hold of his body.
Aidele finished latching her father down and then mounted the saddle. She turned Mesmerize around and pushed him towards the road and back into a run towards the ranch.
HER MIND WAS a haze. The rest of the day a blur. It was a haunting nightmare that would always be there to stir up the rage, the hate, the sorrow. And always leave her to wonder if she shouldn’t have just ridden out earlier.
Mesmerize careened through the gate and she brought him to a stop just outside the house. She dismounted and started for the door and then stopped. Her eyes were wide, her red skin pale. A hateful scream rang out. It seemed far away, but deep down she knew it was coming from herself. She forced herself to the doorway and as she opened the screen saw Grandfather racing out of the kitchen towards her.
Red Star Sheriff Page 4