Capture

by Melissa Darnell

  Pamela scowled. Leaning a hip against the island, she crossed her arms over her chest and turned toward the rest of the group. “We could learn to be self-sufficient, Steve. Use solar, water and wind power. Grow our own food. Use the river for water. Make what we need. We can do our own healing, home school our children the way we want to. We’d be our own little town. Our kids could grow up surrounded by magic and people just like them. We could finally be ourselves and be proud of it.”

  Steve looked around him, prompting me to do the same. What I found was amazing. People who had been afraid and angry, their faces dark with despair and resignation, were completely transformed, their shoulders back, standing straight, their faces alive with...hope.

  “You’re all crazy,” Steve said. “You’ll get yourselves killed. There’s no way to keep a group this size a secret for long, especially if they try to stay in one place together.”

  Pamela stared at him in silent argument until he stood up and stomped out of the kitchen.

  After his footsteps faded up the staircase, Pamela said, “We could do it. How many of you would go?”

  I swiveled my barstool’s seat so I could see the group behind me better. The adults had all trickled in from the living room at some point, crowding into the kitchen and dining room.

  Several people nodded or murmured their agreement. A few even raised their hands shoulder high to signal their vote.

  Everyone wanted in. Including Tarah, judging by the way her eyes were all lit up with excitement. When our eyes met, she bit her lower lip and looked away.

  I turned back to Grandma Letty. She gave me a challenging half smile, one eyebrow arched, and said, “Well, how about it? Are you in, or are you out?”

  Last night Tarah had told me to forget the Shepherd family legacy of leadership and go my own way, to do what I wanted from now on. I looked at her again, openly staring, but she still refused to meet my eyes. She was trying to keep her face blank, probably so she wouldn’t influence my decision.

  “You know the logistics of pulling this off is going to be a nightmare,” I muttered, looking around me at all the hopeful faces. “We’re going to need immediate temporary housing, at least till spring, before we can build more permanent shelters. We’ll also need water treatment systems, septic systems, green power of several kinds like Pamela said—”

  “So that’s a yes?” Grandma Letty prompted.

  I turned to her, Tarah’s words from last night running through my mind on a loop. What do you want?

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to make this my life calling. But at least for awhile, it seemed a good route to take. “Yeah, that’s a yes.”

  Excited conversation broke out all around us, allowing Tarah to edge closer to me without an audience and whisper, “Are you sure? You know you don’t have to do this.”

  “I know. And yeah, I’m sure. I want to do this.”

  Finally she met my eyes, searching them to make sure I wasn’t lying just to make everyone else here happy. After she found whatever reassurance she needed, she smiled and took my hand in hers. “Okay, then. If this is what you want to do, then we’ll do it.”

  It was what I wanted to do. I just hoped it wasn't a huge mistake. For all of us.

  The next few days flew by in a storm of activity as we tried to get it all pulled together. Bud was kept knocked out except for brief semi-conscious bathroom breaks or to eat groggily. Pamela and some of the guys shopped together online for solar, wind and water energy and treatment systems, while the other ladies kept the kids busy in the basement, which turned out to be a crafter’s mecca. There was a reason Grandma Letty hadn’t set up any sleeping pallets down there...you could hardly walk between the towering shelves and tables full of craft supplies. This at least gave the kids plenty to do as they made little gifts for everyone for Hanukkah and Christmas. Also sharing basement space was the laundry room, which was kept going full tilt twenty-four hours a day as my grandma nearly bought out the local Goodwill and consignment shops for clothing for everyone, and the ladies tried to keep us all in clean clothes.

  When we weren’t shopping at Wal-Mart, we were shopping online or with Grandma Letty at local mobile home centers. The shout of “mail!” became like a fire drill bell, signaling for everyone to either run upstairs or down to the basement to hide as Grandma Letty and I accepted countless deliveries of power systems, seeds, and books on everything from farming, weaving and soap making to raising sheep, cows, chickens and goats. We had so many books we could start our own library. It was probably the first town building we’d have to build in the spring, just to have somewhere to house them all.

  Unfortunately, not everything went so smoothly. The last day we went to look at mobile homes, Grandma Letty and I got into an argument.

  “Be reasonable, Hayden. You and Tarah need a place of your own so you can have your own bedrooms. Right now, we’ve only got enough bedrooms for the families, and even they are going to have to sleep in bunk beds in order to fit. We need at least one more small house.”

  “For just Tarah and me? No way. That’s a waste of money and land.”

  “Then exactly where do you think you two will sleep? In your truck?”

  “You’re getting huge sectional couches for each house, right? So Tarah and I can sleep on them instead.”

  “In one of the living rooms? Oh please. Be serious. You’ve never even had to share a bedroom with your brother. All your life you’ve lived in a huge house. And don’t forget, you’re not in East Texas anymore. Winters are long and miserable up here, and everyone’s going to be cooped up indoors for months. Just where do you think they’ll be spendng all their waking hours other than the living rooms? You’ll have zero space of your own to get away to, and neither will Tarah. At least let me get you a camper to tow behind that truck of yours for you and her.”

  “Thanks for the offer, but I can’t take it. Spring will come soon enough. When it does, everyone’s going to start building their own homes and free up the bedrooms in the starter houses. Until then, sleeping on a couch will be fine for us.”

  She spent another ten minutes trying to convince me, but there was no way she was going to change my mind on this. Tarah would never agree to having a whole room of her own. And if I took an entire room for myself while asking each family of three or four to share a bedroom and bunkbeds, that would only cement everyone’s idea of me as a spoiled rich kid. While I wasn’t sure how long I’d be staying in the village past spring, I definitely knew even a few months of winter would be far too long if everyone treated me like a spoiled brat.

  Finally Grandma Letty gave up. Or so I thought.

  She still got her way in the end. She just had to be a little devious about it. Just like a Shepherd.

  Saturday, December 19th

  On the day before the advance logging team was scheduled to leave, a honk outside had me yelling out, “FedEx.” While everyone scrambled to hide, I looked out the window. It was a delivery truck, all right. But it wasn’t FedEx, unless they’d switched to hauling strange, plastic-wrapped pallets on flatbed trailers behind big red trucks.

  Grandma Letty took off outside without a coat, a bad habit of hers when she got excited. I grabbed her coat from the entrance closet while pulling mine on, then followed her outside.

  She clapped her hands together like a little kid on Christmas morning, ignoring me as I draped her coat over her shoulders. “Oh, it’s here! I was so worried it wouldn’t get here in time. You have no idea how much extra I had to pay to bribe them to even get it here today. Normally they take weeks to put together, but we were in luck. They just happened to have this model in storage. Apparently somebody ordered it for Christmas then changed their minds.”

  I studied the giant plastic wrapped cube on a trailer. “What is it?”

  “Your future new home, of course!”

  I groaned. “Grandma, we talked about this.”

  “You said I couldn’t get you a trailer or an RV. This is neither. Technica
lly it’s a house kit. You did not say I couldn’t get a house kit for you.”

  “That pile of stuff is supposed to become a house?” Hands on my hips, I walked around the cube in disbelief. Not a window or door in sight. Maybe she was pulling a prank here. Shepherds could be weird like that. It was the reason my father had always claimed it was safer to avoid family reunions. Of course, now I knew he was mostly just ashamed of all the Clann descendants in his family tree.

  “It’s a prefabricated tiny home. It includes a RV septic system, a toilet and shower, a ten gallon water tank with a Y shaped feeder system, an on-demand water heater, and detailed instructions. It’s prebuilt then taken down again for shipping, so it’s supposed to take only a hammer, a drill and a few days to put together.”

  “What’s the point of prebuilding it then taking it down again for shipping?”

  “So you can have the fun of putting it back together again, of course.” She grinned at me.

  She had lost her mind.

  “It’s going to be perfect for you and Tarah. It’s got loft beds at either end, one over the kitchen and one over the porch area, so you can both have your own little spaces to get away from everyone else as well as each other. And it’s got beautiful arched windows to let in lots of sunlight and a little wood burning stove for plenty of heat. The stove works for cooking too, though I also bought you an energy efficient griddle to run off the solar power system.”

  I could tell she might go on for hours. Taking her short pause for an opening, I jumped in with, “Thanks, Grandma. I appreciate this. I mean, I’ve got no idea how I’ll put the da—I mean, darn thing together. But it was very...creative of you to think of this.”

  Actually, the longer I thought about it, the more creative a solution it seemed. It wasn’t even a fourth of the size of the mobile homes we’d bought for everyone else. And unlike an RV, it was going to take a heck of a lot of work on my part to get it put back together somehow, which should make everyone else feel a little better about Tarah and me having our own house. I could also imagine Tarah loving having her own tiny house to fix up. She’d always whined as a kid about not having her own playhouse in her backyard. Now she’d have one that went anywhere we did.

  The delivery guy hopped out of his truck and held a clipboard for my grandmother to sign. While she did, I studied the trailer and frowned.

  Then again, would Tarah even want to share a house with me? Grandma Letty was assuming a lot there. Whatever this thing was between Tarah and me was still new. We hadn’t even had a real date yet, and here my grandmother was trying to get us to shack up together. Tarah might freak out about that.

  Well, maybe we could include a third bed in the living room area and Mike could live with us too. That might make it more a group thing with less relationship pressure on Tarah. And she could always get a place of her own built in the spring if she wanted.

  A loud clanging rang out as the delivery guy unhitched the trailer from his truck then left.

  And then I saw the full ingenuity of my grandmother's plan. She was giving me my freedom, ensuring I’d always be able to move on if I wanted and still have a home I could take with me anywhere I wanted to go. But the complication of having to build it would force me to stay put at least long enough to give the village time to get off the ground.

  Strategic planning for the long term, with plenty of manipulative incentives thrown in for good measure. Yep, Grandma Letty was definitely a Shepherd at heart.

  CHAPTER 16

  Sunday, December 20th

  And then it was time for the logging party to leave. I was going to take three men with logging experience to make a clearing for the houses that were due to be delivered to the village’s site in three days. Three days wasn’t a heck of a lot of time for us to make the size of clearing we’d need for four mobile homes. But we needed to get our group out of Grandma Letty’s house as quickly as we could before her neighbors started to ask questions about all her visitors. We couldn’t go on hiding the bus and keeping Bud drugged and away from his family forever.

  Tarah looked worried as we said goodbye early that morning.

  “Hey, it'll only be for a few days,” I said, rubbing a thumb across her lips, which were currently set in a dark scowl the likes of which I hadn’t seen since we were kids and she had to get that tetanus shot after getting hurt on a rusty nail.

  “Yeah, I know.” She sighed.

  Smiling, I pulled her in for a hug and a kiss on her forehead. It was nice to know she’d miss me while I was gone. “We’ll be fine. Just make sure this group doesn’t get too rowdy while I’m gone.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, right. Like your grandma would let us get away with much anyways.”

  We kissed goodbye, then the guys and I left.

  It was an eight hour drive to Spearfish, South Dakota, made even longer when we had to drive slower due to icy roads. Just to be on the safe side, I'd gotten rid of the GPS unit, so we followed a paper map instead.

  But when we got there and then found our way onto the Scenic Byway in the Black Hills National Forest, oh man, was it amazing, with steep, snowy limestone mountains towering at least a couple thousand feet above us on either side and the narrow Little Spearfish Creek winding alongside the road. Cabins dotted the mountains’ charcoal gray and tan sides here and there, easier to see now that all the icy hardwood trees were stripped of their leaves. In the spring and summer, those houses were probably hidden fairly well. But in the winter...

  We’d have to be careful and try to leave as many evergreens around our village as we could for more year round coverage.

  We followed the directions Grandma Letty had written out for us, passing a turnout area for tourists to view the Bridal Veil Falls and later a red brick building on the left side of the road with a large sign labeling it as the Homestead Mining Company’s Hydro Electric Plant built in 1917. Along the peaks’ ridgeline at our left, a row of electric lines on wooden poles indicated a public source of electricity to homeowners even here in the mountains, though I had a hunch maintaining those lines was probably a big enough pain to drive electricity prices sky high for anyone requiring the service. Thankfully we would be completely off the grid and able to avoid that ongoing cost for our village.

  About thirteen miles along the bypass, we reached the Roughlock Falls Road, a lightly graveled and recently plowed sandy road that Grandma Letty’s map said we needed to take. The road went on forever and at first seemed way too public and popular, with the large Spearfish Canyon Lodge at the road’s beginning complete with a big, well maintained parking lot and another parking area for tourists to view the Roughlock Falls and the long metal bridge spanning it. But the farther we went along the winding single lane road, the more civilization seemed to fall away.

  Even with the map, we still had a rough time finding the property. The clue to its location was the wide stone and cement bridge spanning the creek, which at this point was only five or six feet wide and looked to be about two or three feet deep at most. Then the logging started. When Grandma Letty said the area was untouched beyond the bridge, she’d meant it. So we had to start by cutting a road wide enough to let houses through. I really wasn’t happy about this part; the stone bridge plus a road would invite curious drivers down it, even with a No Trespassing sign posted. We’d have to think up a solution for it later, maybe replant some trees and teach several people how to do Mike’s cloaking spell so they could work as a group to hide both the entrance and the houses. Thankfully the snow was hard and crunchy, compacting down under my truck’s tires like a dirt road as we worked, so we didn’t have to fight getting stuck as much as I’d expected.

  For all Dad’s faults, at least I could thank him for dragging Damon and me out to join loggers in the woods a couple of times a few years back. He’d intended the logging lessons to serve as nothing more than a photo op and a commercial shoot to prove he and his boys were real East Texas men in order to gain votes from the local logging industry. But the b
rief experience had also taught me enough to know how to handle a gas powered chainsaw safely.

  And the work felt pretty good after doing nothing but riding around in a truck and planning for days. The job itself seemed pretty simple...cut a tree, then use chains and the truck to haul the tree off to the side out of the way, and repeat. The cold was crazy, though, burning my nose and throat and every inch of exposed skin until I worked hard enough to get warm. Then I started sweating inside my coat and snow pants and gloves. Still, the frigid air helped me stay sharp and alert. And it was great to be actively doing something useful for a change instead of sitting around talking. I wished we could have used some spells to get it done a lot faster. But all we could think of to use was fire, and the resulting smoke volume would have been way too much for even Mike to hide.

  As I worked, I tried to imagine what the village would eventually look like. Of course, eventually spells of all kinds would probably end up getting used to design the village in the spring, either in the architectural designs of the eventual permanent buildings or in the landscaping or something. Did we have any outcasts who specialized in guiding the growth of plants? Maybe they could get creative, really help make this village look like a proper town for magic users. And did outcasts have to follow regular growing seasons like everyone else, or could we get started right away?

  Revved up by the possibilities, I made a mental note to ask our group all these questions and more. The sooner we could work as a team to design our village, the better. It would give us all something to do while we waited out the long winter.

  As my arms fell into a rhythm of planned destruction, I kept my mind busy by imagining ways we could use spells to grow it all back even better. My favorite movies, which I’d never told anyone about except Damon because he was a LOTR nut too, was the Lord of the Rings trilogy and its prequel The Hobbit trilogy. In my opinion, the best parts were where they showed Lothlorien, the elven village that was magically erected along the steep sides of mountains. All the buildings in the movie featured these crazy, highly detailed, symmetrical Celtic-style weavings of tree branches that looked as if they’d been grown that way. Maybe something like that would look good here too.