Capture

by Melissa Darnell

  We worked past dark, using the truck’s headlights to light our path. I think we all would have stopped by about one or two in the morning for sleep if we’d been working as individuals. But something about working as a team helped us push on past the exhaustion. Or maybe it was the thought of all those people counting on us that kept us going. We’d brought bottles of soda, six five-gallon gas cans, oil and sharpening tools for the saws, which also helped.

  Around sunrise, we got our second or third wind, the growing daylight shining through the forest spurring us on. It was a beautiful area, and exciting to think that soon it would be our new home.

  But by nine a.m., we were running out of gas and energy, even as determined as we were.

  “Hey, guys,” I yelled over the whining of the saws.

  One by one, they shut off the machines.

  “How about we stop for awhile, grab a meal and some more gas and oil?”

  Wearily, they brought the chainsaws back to the truck and I unhooked the chain from the back hitch. I tried not to cringe as we piled into the cab, our heavy boots knocking off clumps of muddy snow into the floorboards. Mentally I promised my truck a full bath inside and out someday soon as I drove us back into Spearfish.

  We opted to eat at the local Perkins restaurant, where we plowed through what my mother would have called an unholy amount of cholesterol and pork fat with good sized dollops of ketchup and Tabasco sauce on the side. Then we had to chug more than a few pots of coffee to counter the food as all the blood rushed to our guts and turned our visions blurry.

  To say we were pretty dang tired was an understatement.

  The guys were all for taking a few packs of beer back with us to ease the pain of our overworked muscles. But I’d met some loggers with missing toes and fingers as a result of combining high speed cutting tools and alcohol. Not a good combination. Besides, buying alcohol might require one of us to show an ID. Also not a good idea for people on the run from the law. So we settled for ibuprofen, packs of cola and bags of gas station sandwiches for later. Then we headed back to the woods.

  Our woods.

  By that night, I was referring to them as “that God-awful group of trees,” with more than a few curse words thrown in there. My arms ached from lugging around a sixty-pound chainsaw and fighting tree after tree. My back ached like an old man’s, popping and creaking every time I moved, especially when I had to bend over to deal with the chains to drag the felled trees out of the way.

  Finally, I’d had enough, and a glance around told me the others had too. I let out a loud whistle and made a slashing motion at my neck to signal it was break time. Then we all trudged back to the truck.

  We sat on the tailgate, cooling off while we ate in silence and chugged down the caffeine as quickly as we could. But my body didn’t care how much caffeine I drank. I’d hit the point where it had no effect on me whatsoever.

  I swore, scrubbing at my eyes. “All right. I know we all want to get this done. And I know a whole lot of people are counting on us. But if we don’t snag a few Z’s, somebody’s gonna end up cutting off something vital. And that ain’t gonna help anybody.” Geez, I was so tired I sounded drunk. I was actually slurring my words.

  “I can keep—” One of the men began.

  “Shut up, Harvey,” someone else said. “The kid’s right. Let’s rest a few hours.”

  Harvey grumbled but climbed into the truck with the rest of us. I cranked the engine, set the timer on my watch for four hours from now, and we all promptly commenced to sawing a different kind of log.

  Beeping, high pitched, quick, and extremely annoying, dragged me out of a deep and dreamless sleep. I reached out for my bedside alarm but found nothing but air. Somebody must have moved my clock. Probably Mom in an attempt to help me be on time for school for a change.

  “Aw, come on, Ma. Ten more minutes,” I begged, reaching for my pillow so I could use it to drown out the noise.

  No pillow, no Mom arguing back. Only male laughter. What the...?

  I cracked one eye open then sat bolt upright as I realized I was in my truck a few thousand miles away from my old bedroom. With a bunch of older men who were snickering at me.

  Scowling, I shut off the alarm on my watch, opened the driver side door and had to roll out of the cab. Holy crap, my whole dang body hurt!

  Apparently I wasn’t the only one in pain as the other three doors opened and more groans and cussing filled the air.

  “Aw, just ten more minutes, Mom,” Harvey whined then snickered again.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said with a grin then called him a name my mother would have smacked me on the back of my head for saying. My hands hurt too much to flip him off instead.

  Laughing, Harvey and the others walked around to the front end of the truck to survey the woods ahead.

  “How much further, Dad?” one of the others joked in a whiny, little kid voice.

  Smiling, the oldest of our group scanned the area then said, “Probably another six or eight hours. If we work fast. And we’ll still have to squeeze the houses in pretty tight.”

  “That could be a good thing,” I said, trying to picture four mobile homes packed into this area. “We can face their entrances in towards each other. It’ll add more shelter from the wind if we keep the outer perimeter of trees fairly close to the houses. And it’ll mean less area to have to hide with a cloaking effect, too.”

  Grunts, either of agreement or disagreement, I couldn’t tell which and was frankly too tired to care either way.

  “All right, let’s get her done,” I sighed, reaching for the chainsaw I’d recently come to view more as a torture device.

  We had to stop again a few hours later for more gas and oil and to resharpen the saws. None of us was very hungry; all we really wanted was sleep. So we settled for more gas station sandwiches with a healthy side of ibuprofen and sodas. Then we were back at it. I had a feeling if the group had arrived right then, we might have all looked crazy to them, covered in sweat, sawdust, oil and gas fumes, our hair standing on end, noses steadily dripping from the cold, our eyes gritty and too round as we pushed ourselves way past our bodies’ natural limits.

  We were on a mission. And that was all that kept us going.

  The sound of big engines drawing closer pulled me from the circling fog of my thoughts sometime later. I turned off my chainsaw, nearly cutting off my own leg when I set it down before the chain had fully stopped cycling.

  Ready or not, the houses were here.

  I looked around me and sighed with relief. Yeah, we should have enough room to position the houses. But it would be tight, and the drivers would have to be careful not to puncture their tires driving over the stumps we’d left everywhere.

  We had to help the drivers position rubber mats along the makeshift road into the clearing to give their tires enough traction. Then we had to prune back a lot of branches along the perimeter to keep them from busting out the windows of the houses as they were arranged.

  While the drivers finished arranging and leveling the houses with cement blocks, the logging team and I leaned against the hood of my truck, half asleep on our feet.

  And then everything became a series of minute long moments separated by long, slow blinks.

  Long blink.

  “Sign here, and here, and here, and here,” someone said, thrusting clipboards in front of me that I clumsily forced my gloved fingers to scrawl some attempt at a signature on.

  Long blink.

  The tail lights of the last delivery truck turned at the end of our newly created road and faded. I hoped Grandma Letty remembered to do something about the paperwork trail for the houses. She probably would. She was one smart old lady.

  Long blink.

  My chin bounced off my chest and I stumbled sideways. “I’ve got an idea,” I muttered, scrubbing my face. “Let’s cut up one of these trees, stick the logs in one of those houses’ fireplaces, and see how soft the living room carpeting is.”

  Somebody la
ughed, which was kind of annoying because I was totally serious.

  “Yeah, sure. You volunteering to chop the firewood?” Harvey said.

  I scowled. “On second thought, my truck sounds better.”

  Grunts of agreement were all the votes I needed. We pulled ourselves into the truck, and this time I didn’t care at all about the snow we tracked in on the floorboards. I had just enough energy to crank the engine, turn on the heat, and call my grandma. No one answered, so I left a message to confirm the houses were in place. Then I conked out.

  Wednesday, December 23rd

  Tapping sounded against something hard near my left ear. I jerked awake to find the sweetest smile on earth on the other side of the glass.

  “Hey, guys, they’re here!” I cut off the truck’s engine and tried to casually unfold my stiff body out of the truck. A series of pops from my joints gave me away.

  “Oh my lord, Hayden, are you okay?” Tarah gasped as I hugged her with one aching arm I nearly couldn’t move.

  “Nothing a bottle of aspirin won’t fix,” I joked, drawing in a deep breath of shampoo from her hair.

  She shook her head and looked up at me with a smile. “Did you have much time to miss me?”

  I knew she was teasing me. So I didn’t tell her the truth, that thoughts of her were just about all that had kept me going the last few hours. She probably wouldn’t have believed me anyways.

  So all I ended up saying was, “Yeah.”

  “Everyone’s checking out the houses and putting together the bunk beds. Should we help assign families to each room, or...?”

  “Nah, let them sort it out.” Slinging an arm around her shoulders, I grandly swung an arm out towards the grouping of houses, intending to say, “So what do you think?” But before I could speak, I got a good look at the place in the daylight, and my free arm dropped to my side, screaming muscles already forgotten.

  Cut trees formed haphazard piles all around the perimeter like forgotten Jenga pieces some giant had thrown down and forgotten to put away. Despite the use of the rubber mats, the delivery trucks had still managed to plow deep ruts into the snow in places. And though we’d tried to cut the trees as close to the ground as we could, there were still stumps left visible everywhere.

  And then there were the mobile homes themselves. Grandma Letty and I had picked out a design that had a short, narrow porch on the front and a peaked roof with green shingles. So they didn’t exactly look like metal cans on wheels. But...

  I walked over to the nearest cement steps leading up to one of the house’s porch. I must have dozed off when the delivery drivers had set up the steps for each house.

  “What’s wrong?” Tarah asked.

  I didn’t know how to answer her. I looked around us, at the four matching white houses resting several feet above the ground, their wheels exposed below. Then I flopped down onto the nearby steps.

  Tarah sat beside me with a frown, waiting.

  “Well, this sucks.” I was too tired to be mad. All I felt was beat up and defeated.

  CHAPTER 17

  “What sucks?” Tarah looked around us, clearly lost.

  “This!” I threw my hands out at all the houses, the clearing, the stumps like huge zits making the whole area ugly. “This is supposed to be a village for people with powers so dangerous the government’s afraid of us?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  I growled in frustration, trying to sort out my groggy thoughts enough to put them into words. “It’s...not right. It’s just a bunch of ordinary houses in the middle of nowhere. Where’s the fantasy that says ‘secret Clann village?’”

  She burst into laughter. “Hayden, what exactly did you expect, Disneyworld?”

  I lunged off the steps, giving in to the urge to pace though my sore leg muscles protested loudly. “Not a trailer park in the woods, that’s for sure. Look around you. Does this look like Hogsmeade or Lothlorien to you?”

  She snickered. “Okay, first off, you’re talking about made up places. And secondly, this is just temporary until spring. The fantasy village will come. We just got here.” She stood up, walked over to me, and wrapped her arms around my waist. “Give it time while everyone settles in and gets used to their new home. Come summer time, I bet you’ll get your Lothlorien.” She rose up on tiptoe and nuzzled her nose against mine. “And your elven ears, too, if you want them.”

  I tried not to smile, but it was a useless fight. “And one of those clingy elven dresses for you?”

  Laughing, she kissed me, and I let it ease away the frustration of the moment a little.

  But the disappointment wasn’t completely gone, because I wasn’t sure I would still be here by summer time.

  Still, I tried to forget about it. Why should I care what this place looked like? These people didn’t care, that was for sure. All they wanted was some place safe where they could be themselves. My ideas for a cool looking village for magic users had no meaning or purpose to people who were more concerned with just surviving right now.

  So I focused on what was important instead, helping set up the solar panels and wind power systems so we could start generating electricity. The water proved to be tougher. The ground was hard and cold, requiring the use of spell fire to first melt the snow and then warm the earth enough so we could dig trench lines from the houses to the water system, and from the water system to the creek. Even with the help of magic, it would still probably take the digging team a week to get it all completed. Until then, people from each house would have to haul water from the creek.

  And then there was the bus driver, Bud Preston, to deal with. Grandma Letty had woken him up enough to safely drive the group here. But she’d also sent her homemade sleepy time potion with Pamela so we could knock him out again and keep him that way overnight. Tomorrow, however, we’d need to wake him up and send him on his way back home.

  As I took a turn fetching water from the creek, I worried about what using sedatives for so long on a man Bud’s age might do to his health. Grandma Letty claimed the homemade herbal mix was harmless, but had she ever used so much of it for so long on someone Bud’s age before? I doubted it. And it wasn’t like the FDA had done tests on the stuff either.

  While returning to my assigned house after fifteen long minutes spent breaking up ice at the edge of the creek, two loud voices behind one of the houses brought me up short. Water from the plastic bucket sloshed out onto my jeans, forcing me to bite back a curse.

  I recognized those voices. Steve and Pamela. What the heck had they felt the need to discuss out in fifteen degree Fahrenheit weather in the woods at night?

  I edged closer until I could make out their individual words.

  “What is your problem?” Pamela said.

  “Seriously? You have to ask? We can’t stay here!” Steve all but shouted.

  “Why not?” she said.

  “Four people packed into every room? No running water, and twelve people sharing just two bathrooms in every house and I have to pour my own toilet water every time I flush? That idiot kid and his grandma have got us packed in like frigging sardines here! Is this what you really want for our family, for Cassie?”

  “It’s just for a few months, Steve. Then spring will come, we’ll build our own house exactly the way we want it, and everything will be fine. And besides, you should be grateful. These four houses alone probably cost Grandma Letty a quarter of a million dollars.”

  Actually, it had been closer to half a million once you threw in the furniture and dishes and stuff. I’d seen the paperwork when Grandma Letty had bought them.

  “Besides,” Pamela continued. “We have a shot at a real life here. No more hiding—”

  “But we are hiding! We’re in the freaking woods—”

  “But we don’t have to hide our abilities within these woods,” Pamela said. “Cassie won’t have to feel like a freak anymore.”

  “No, just grow up in some backwoods hillbilly commune with second rate education and
no health care.”

  “Which is a lot better than no education at all and drugged out of her mind in an internment camp! Or have you already forgotten that place? And while you’re struggling with that memory of yours, why don’t you also try remembering that you’re talking to one of the resident health care providers around here, you insensitive jackass! Second rate health care? I can heal us just fine!”

  Pamela was nearly shrieking at this point. I was surprised the rest of the group hadn’t come outside to see what was going on. She took in a long, noisy breath, then let it out slowly. “Look, I’m not discussing this with you any more. Cassie and I are staying here where we’re safe and accepted. If you want to go brave that crazy world out there on the run, you do what you have to.”

  I took that as my cue to leave in the other direction. I wasn’t sure why I’d even listened in as long as I had. All I’d really wanted to know was if Steve’s pissy mood was based on something I did, or if the whole situation ticked him off in general. Obviously it was the latter. And definitely none of my business.

  Though I sure wouldn’t have been sad to see Steve go, if that was his decision. The guy was an idiot to think he could possibly keep his family safe somewhere else. With the way the international politics were shaping up, there weren’t too many safer places on the planet right now.

  But Steve struck me as the hardheaded loner type. Maybe he figured he could put a disguise spell on his family’s faces for the rest of their lives and keep them safe that way. Whatever he was thinking, I doubted it included giving up on his family this easily. I’d have to keep an eye on Pamela and Cassie for the next few days just in case Steve tried to force them to leave with him against their will, or something crazy like that.

  After seeing him kill that cop back at the gas station with zero hesitation, I had no doubt Steve was fully capable of anything in the name of protecting his family.