by Megan Hart
Kodak bounced on the balls of her feet, flexing her fists. “I can take you in hand-to-hand, jerkoff. You might be bigger than me, but I can still kick your ass from here to Sunday and back. I did it before, and I’ll do it again.”
Tobin’s face was stone. “I don’t think so.”
With a roar, she launched herself at him. They came together with a thud that jarred her aching jaw, but Kodak ignored the pain. She had her hands on his throat, squeezing, loving the way his skin pulsed beneath her fingers...
And he threw her off. The bastard got his hands up between hers and tossed her off him like he was taking off a coat! Kodak sat stunned for a minute, feeling the pain begin in her back and ass where she’d hit some rocks. Then she was on her feet again, screaming, letting the fury fuel her strength the way it always did.
She hit him in the chest with her shoulder, bringing him down. They both thudded against the edge of the ramp leading to the barn. Tobin shouted as she landed on top of him, grinding her fingers into the tender spot just above his collarbone. His hands came up and found her hair, which had come down from its restraining ties. He pulled it, tugging her head back along with it, and she was forced to let go long enough to try and stop him.
He didn’t let go. Her hair was coming out by the fucking roots. Blinking away tears of agony, Kodak brought up her knee. Bingo! She hit the bastard right in the crotch. The move guaranteed to drop a man, she thought, waiting for the pain in her head to stop as he fell away.
Tobin didn’t let go. His breath whooshed out of him in a faltering gush, but he still held on.
“Try again,” he wheezed.
Kodak’s fury rose a notch, something she wouldn’t have thought possible. The pain from her tortured hair was making her crazy. She couldn’t think. She’d never dealt with someone who wouldn’t quit. Someone like her.
They’d rolled down the ramp, grappling. Now he was on top of her, knees digging into her armpits. His weight on her chest was pressing the breath from her. Her head was on fire. She thought he was going to tear her scalp right off her head.
With a shot more luck than skill, Kodak stopped trying to free her hair and clocked Tobin on the side of the neck with one hand. With a grunt, he let go of her hair. Gagging, he moved just enough to let her wriggle free.
Now they faced each other, smeared with dirt and sweat. She wasn’t grinning anymore. Kodak risked a glance over her shoulder to see how her soldiers were doing, but couldn’t do more than glimpse the fighting before turning back to face the most dogged enemy she’d ever faced.
“What are you waiting for?” Tobin turned his head to the side and spat blood.
Kodak didn’t throw herself at him this time. Something was happening to her, something bad. Her scalp and jaw ached fiercely, and so did the small of her back from their most recent fall to the ground. She couldn’t seem to make herself move. Something she’d never felt before paralyzed her limbs. With disgust, she realized it was fear.
Kodak spotted Dallas still standing on the ramp. Dallas had a gun, the third gun. Maybe the only one that still worked.
“Dallas!” She yelled. “Shoot the fucker!”
Dallas shook her head, refusing. Kodak was overjoyed to find that her anger came back in an instant, erasing the fear. Tobin stood between her and Dallas, but she’d take care of him and then teach the little bitch a lesson.
−
53-
Tobin saw Kodak’s attention shift from him to Dallas, so he wasn’t prepared for Kodak’s full-body attack. This time she hit him with the top of her head, connecting squarely under his chin. They both went down again, but instead of hanging onto him, Kodak scrambled to her feet and ran over him.
Her foot caught him in the throat, and suddenly he couldn’t breathe. Choking, Tobin swung out his hands, trying blindly to catch her. He missed. She was over him and onto Sophie.
Tobin rolled over and got to his knees, pushing himself up from the ground while fighting for breath. Kodak held Sophie up against the closed barn door by the throat, using her knee between the younger girls legs to prop her up.
“When I give an order, you will obey it!” Kodak screamed to Sophie. With each word she banged the girl’s head against the wood.
Sophie’s legs kicked futilely. Her face was slowly turning red as Kodak throttled her. Tobin put his foot on the ramp to get to her, and slipped.
“No,” Sophie managed to say. “Not this time, Mama.”
Kodak banged Sophie against the door again. “I told you not to call me that! Never call me that!”
“You’re…hurting me….” Sophie muttered. Her eyes began to roll back, showing the whites.
“You’re damn right I’m hurting you!” Kodak shrieked. She noticed Sophie fading and shook her until the girl opened her eyes again. “You’re nothing but a goddamn mistake, Dallas! Nothing but the worst fucking mistake I ever made in my life! I should have used a coat hanger to rip you out of me!”
Tobin had his hands on Kodak’s shoulders when the shot rang out from Sophie’s gun. The bullet tore through Kodak’s back and whizzed past his ear, close enough to burn. Kodak fell against him, but he managed to keep his feet. He let her drop to the ramp, where she fell on her back. Her eyes were wide and staring, and her hands clutched at the air.
Sophie slid to the ramp, too, leaving a thin trail of blood on the door behind her. Ignoring Kodak, Tobin stumbled to the girl and gathered her into his arms.
He cried her name, holding her against him. The trembling he thought was sobs was instead a series of small convulsions. He looked frantically for the source, and found it in the large nail sticking out from the door. Kodak had pounded Sophie’s head against it. The girl was dying.
“No, oh no,” Tobin whispered, rocking Sophie in his arms.
“She was…my mother….” Sophie spluttered in a moment of coherence. Her red-rimmed eyes blinked up at him. “And the General….”
“Shh,” Tobin said. “Just rest, Sophie. You don’t have to talk.”
“You were nice to me,” she said. “I….”
And then she was done. Her body shook a few more times. Her eyes didn’t close, but the life went out of them. Uncaring of the battle still going on behind them, Tobin pressed his face against the young girl’
s cheek, and he wept.
-54-
Rain might come and wash the fields clean of blood, but the memory would never go away. The Plain People had done what was against their nature to do: they’d fought. But had they really won? Elanna closed her eyes against the sight of the Gapper bodies strewn like broken dolls across the grass. There could be no winners in a war like this.
“Shhh, hush now,” she soothed the children who clutched at her. Some cried while others bore the shock with stony faces and dry eyes. They were the ones who would dream of this and remember it, Elanna thought, and her heart broke for the innocence lost today.
None of the people had escaped injury. Many had died. Most still wandered among the bodies, searching for their loved ones. Husbands knelt beside their wives, weeping, and mothers called frantically for their children.
“Come along, sweethearts.” Elanna stood. She could never take away the tragedy that she and Tobin had brought these people, but she could give them back something they’d thought they’d lost: their children.
She helped the smallest children link hands and the older children to lift up the ones who couldn’t walk. The two infants she carried tucked against her chest. She’d managed to shield twelve in all, plucking them from the places in which they’d sought shelter. She could only pray that the others were safe.
They left through the house’s front door, stepping onto the wooden front porch in almost total silence. Elanna found she couldn’t speak even to cry out to the women and men walking in the battlefield. So she walked with the children, one small step at a time, toward them.
“Sarah!” Cried the first young mother as she caught sight of them. She picked up her skirts and ran
, stumbling on the uneven ground.
Elanna couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe at the sight of the young mother sweeping her daughter into her arms. The woman wept and laughed, rocking the little girl back and forth. She pulled away to look at her face, stroking the girl’s hair and then clutching her close again.
“Thank God, thank God,” the woman whispered over and over.
One by one, the mothers and the fathers saw that Elanna had brought the children. A man she recognized as Rachel’s brother Levi rose from where he’d been kneeling by the body of his wife, and stepped forward hesitantly to meet her. Beneath his beard Levi’s face was gray with weariness and shock, and his hands trembled as he reached out for one of the infants Elanna held. She surrendered the baby to him gratefully.
Levi Lapp held the child in his arms and sank to his knees as though his legs were unable to hold him up. The baby, a tiny girl only a few months old, began to wail. He held the child as though he’d never seen her before, his face blank with grief. His hands began to tremble so badly Elanna thought he might drop his daughter to the ground, but instead he brought the baby to his chest and mingled his tears with hers.
One by one Elanna relinquished the children, weeping with the parents as they were reunited with what they’d been certain they’d lost. Only when she’d handed over the last child did she turn toward the barn. She couldn’t move forward. She couldn’t move her legs.
All around her the sounds of grief and joy became nothing but background noise. Her heart thudded in her ears and still she could not move. She had saved the babies. All but one.
She couldn’t, wouldn’t think about Tobin. She couldn’t think of him dead. He had to be alive. He had to be alive. He had to be alive…
In a daze she at last forced her legs to move, step by solid step toward the barn. The doors hung open. She went up the short ramp, stepping over Kodak’s body with nothing more than a glance. Then she was inside, blinking against the dimness.
When her vision cleared, she saw him. He wasn’t moving. Tobin sat slumped along the back wall, hunched over next to the straw where she’d hid the baby boy.
The light went out of her life. In that instant Elanna didn’t know if she were alive or dead, only that she ceased to feel. Her limbs were stone, the only thing that kept her pinned to the earth so that she didn’t fly away, hurtling into the sky and the stars and the great abyss of night.
She managed a step forward, and then another, but the wooden floor came up to meet her and she found herself on her hands and knees. Splinters gouged her hands and brought thin streamers of blood to her flesh, but she didn’t feel them. Her hair hung in her face, and she pushed it away. Crawling. And then not even crawling anymore, unable to move, unable to do anything but lay on the floor and wait to die.
“Elanna?”
“Tobin?”
She didn’t know how they reached each other but within moments she was in his arms. Was she crying? Was he? She didn’t know, couldn’t tell, didn’t care. He was alive. He was here. He hadn’t left her.
“Baruch Ha-Shem,” she whispered, echoing the young mother’s prayer. “Thank God, thank God.”
A thin wail rose from the hay. The infant. Alive. Weakness assailed her and she had to sit. Tobin held her as she sank down next to the backpack, where the squirming child still lay. She lifted the baby from the pack, smelling its sweet baby smell, and held it close against her.
“I thought for sure….” She trailed off, not wanting to even put words to the thoughts that had been so awful.
“I know,” Tobin said. He held her shoulders, looking down with her at the baby in her arms. “But Elanna, there is something I have to tell you.”
He told her about Sophie Dallas, and how she’d died. They held each other as they cried, rocking the infant between them. And eventually, they got up from the barn and went out to face what had happened.
−55-
“Just go,” Samuel told them later, his face aged by dozens of years instead of hours.
So they went. They couldn’t stay. They weren’t welcome, and Tobin didn’t blame the Plain People for wanting them gone. Though they hadn’t intended it, he and Elanna had brought violence and change. Worse, they’d brought death.
With nothing more than some food and clothes, Tobin, Elanna and the baby left the small town that would reek of bloodshed and hatred for a long time. They put their feet to the road and walked, without speaking. There didn’t seem much to say.
The town fell away behind them as they walked, disappearing into the past like the memories never would. The road was firm and without rocks that might make them stumble. And for that, at least, Tobin was grateful.
“I’m going to call him Eitan,” Elanna said at last. She nursed the baby as she walked, and Tobin still marveled at how easy she was with the child. “It means strong. He’ll have to be strong.”
He heard the catch in her voice and knew she was crying. Tobin stopped to take her by the shoulders pull her close. Eitan whimpered once and then was silent.
“I love you,” Tobin said.
“I know you do,” Elanna said. “And I love you, Tobin.”
They stood together for a long time, saying nothing. There weren’t words to help what they’d gone through go away. More than that, they didn’t have to speak. It was enough just to feel her next to him, to hear her breathe. Some time they might talk about what had happened with the Gappers and the Plain people, but for now their silence was enough.
They started walking again, not fast and not slow, not even sure where they were going. They had no map. And for now, it was enough just to move.
“There is a story,” Elanna said after some time, “in the Torah. Our holy book. It’s one of the first stories, actually, and it tells about the beginning of the world.”
She told him the tale quickly, of how Adonai had created the beasts and the plants, and how at last he had created man and woman. About the place they’d lived, called Eden. Tobin had read the story in a book, too, though in her telling it gained more clarity to him than it ever had before.
“It was a perfect place,” Elanna said. “A place to start fresh.”
She stopped again, to look at him. “Do you think California’s the place to start again?”
“An Eden, you mean?”
She nodded. Eitan cooed against her and she brought the baby up to nuzzle its soft head. Tobin reached out to touch the fuzzy hair, still in awe that the child had survived.
He thought about her story, and her question. “I don’t know. Do you?”
Elanna bit her lip. “I think so. I hope so.”
“I hope so too,” Tobin told her, and they started walking again.
He’d left home with little more than what he carried now. Somehow, this felt right. When he’d left Eastport he’d had only the vaguest dream of what he wanted to find. A woman to love. Children. Other people. A place where he could be happy.
He'd found them all but the last one. California, if it still existed, beckoned. He strode through the night, Elanna at his side, thinking of the ocean. Would it look different in California? Tobin thought it must. Brighter, somehow, or more alive. A place to start fresh and new. And so they walked, content in their silence, toward the dream.
Seeking Eden.
-End-
About the Author
I was born and then I lived awhile and I did some stuff. Then I did some things and whatnot. Now, I mostly write books.
Connect with Me Online:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/Megan_Hart
website: http://www.meganhart.com
blog: http://www.readinbed.net
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