by Linda L Zern
But they were gone. Dozens of turkey vultures had managed to worry most of the body off of the fence to fight over it like squabbling children. A bald eagle and a vulture played tug of war with a little arm, a child’s arm. There was still enough of the boy’s shirt left that Tess dissolved into a mindless shock when she saw the birds arguing over it—horror and terror. She stripped a tree branch off a mulberry tree.
Beating at the flock of big, black birds, she tried to bring herself to reach down to gather up what was left. Blood pools mottled the sand. The vultures flopped in protest a safe distance from Tess as she cursed and cried. She could taste tears at the corners of her mouth, bile in her throat.
What was she going to tell Gwen? How could she bring this mess home and tell the woman she loved like a mother that her baby boy had been—
She slipped in a puddle of slick entrails, fell backward into the dirt onto her butt.
It was wrong. The bones were too small and the skin . . . then she realized what she was looking at. This was no one’s child. A pig, someone had dressed a pig to look like Blane. Relief replaced panic. Then dread followed.
If this wasn’t Blane, where was he? And Parrish? Where was Parrish? And who would pull such a horrible trick? Golda, that crazy girl from the Marketplace. It was the only answer she could cobble together over the panic of not finding them. Golda. It had to be.
Calming herself long enough to look, really look, she pushed to her feet and saw that someone had dragged the ground, literally covering tracks, covering what had happened there in the spot next to the Last Fence. A trap. The sky blazed bright orange as the sun dropped behind the trees and the light dimmed. Too late to search. It would be dark soon—too dark.
Parrish! Other than the bloody clothes, ripped to shreds, there was no sign Tess could see of him or the boy he’d come to find.
Tess pressed her face against the decaying, rusted links of the metal fence, her fingers curled through the wire. She pressed until the wire threatened to cut into her forehead. She used the pain to quell the free fall of misery that made her want to run through the woods screaming for them, screaming for Parrish, because not knowing was worse than madness.
CHAPTER 7
Blane tripped over the tail end of the huge shirt he wore. It had turned black from dragging in the dirt.
Mister Parrish had cut the sleeves off the shirt of the man he’d killed and made a belt out of them. He’d killed the fat man. He’d killed him and taken his shirt when he was dead. Blane was glad. Those other men had stolen Blane’s clothes and left him naked except for his socks. It was awful. And then they’d gone off. Blane didn’t know where, but they’d left Blane alone with the fat man and Mister Parrish, who’d been all tied up and hurt. That sure hadn’t mattered. Mister Parrish had killed the fat man anyway.
Wearing the shirt was kind of like wearing a dress. The big, dead man’s shirt wrapped around him almost twice, but it was better than being naked. Mister Parrish didn’t want him to try to get home without clothes.
Blane kicked a prickly pear with his toe. Running into the cactus made him cry.
No, that wasn’t true. He’d been crying since Mister Parrish had pushed him down into that rotten log and told him not to cry. The men had come back fast, too fast, for Mister Parrish to get away too, and they’d beaten Mister Parrish until everything had gotten real quiet; that’s when Blane had really started crying, with his fist in his mouth so he didn’t make any noise, down inside the log that smelled like dead mushrooms and frogs.
Not to cry, that was the last thing Mister Parrish had said. The last thing before the sounds of fists slamming into faces and bodies and bones and then nothing.
Had he really fallen asleep inside the log? But for how long? If only he’d been brave enough to help Mister Parrish.
He had no idea what time it was, only that it was too dark to be able to pull the thorns out of his big toe, so Blane Dunn cried, but he did it as quietly as he could as he stumbled toward the sound of slow-moving water.
The cages at the mercenaries’ camp smelled like moldy bananas. It was the stink of too many people crushed into too tight a space and left for too long. Richmond Parrish knew that smell down to his bones. He kept his head down, trying to keep the memories that beat around him like so many flies from landing. This was no time to slip into the trauma of the past. He ground his fists into his thighs.
The darkness brought the whine of mosquitoes and the threat of a black, moonless night.
“What got you here?” The man next to Parrish asked, immediately curling tighter into himself after he asked the question; apparently he’d figured out that curiosity was as likely to earn a slap as an answer.
So the man had been here a while. They sat hip to hip in an enclosure made of hog wire and rough-cut posts, not enough room for two grown hogs. The wire ran the length of the pen, top, bottom, and sides: no digging out, no climbing over. It was a holding pen with a bucket at their feet and barbed wire twisted through the field fence. Try to shove out and get cut to ribbons. One of their captors had been in the militia or had been taught by a member and knew their way around a detention center.
The children in the Junior Militias called the cages pigpens—for prisoners, reluctant recruits, deserters. It varied. Wasn’t hard to figure out which category of trouble they were in now.
The raiders had walked Parrish most of the afternoon toward the east. He’d tracked the direction from the heat as it crawled up and over the blindfold he wore, straight east, away from the setting sun, all afternoon.
They’d walked in rigid, strict silence, carrying the man Parrish had killed, a tight enough group. No one mentioned the dead man until they’d stopped to make camp, and then they’d taken turns trying to kick in Parrish’s guts with boots they’d probably stolen from militia troops, who’d stolen them from civilians, who’d been all kinds of dead.
Parrish bided his time. Let them think the beating they’d given him had worked. If they only knew how far they’d have to go to break him. He made sure to stumble just enough to keep them thinking he’d given up, but not enough to piss them off. He knew how to play it. He played the game all the way into the pigpen. And now he was sharing a cage with a man that looked about as fit as an eel left up on the riverbank. There was a sheen on his skin, part humidity, part fever.
The man tried again. “Was it a raid?”
“Stupid. That’s what got me here. How about you?” Parrish slapped at a mosquito on his neck.
“I’m a fisherman. That’s all I was before, and it’s all I tried to be afterward. There’s some that don’t care about fishing I guess.”
The darkness closed in around them as tight as a belt. Parrish thought he’d counted a row of pigpens six in a row by two deep, twelve total, mostly empty. The cages were new. The posts still smelled of fresh cut pine; a new group of scavengers settling in, threatening the S-Line and its people.
“Where did you fish, mostly?” Parrish said. He pressed back into the wire, felt the prick of the barbs.
“Around.” He shifted next to Parrish, grunting, paused for a moment. “Up and down the Saint John’s River. Grew up there. Lived there all my life. Decided I wasn’t leaving unless dragged out of my boat.” He snorted. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” The man started to whisper. “I know better. But I saw that they hadn’t scared you, even though you wanted them to think they had. When they brought you in.”
Pretty perceptive for a fisherman. Parrish knew better than to let himself be convinced by the seduction of a sympathetic voice in a damp, black hole.
“You walk like them. You know?” the fisherman said. He sounded curious.
“It’s just walking.”
“No. It’s the way some of those others do it. Standing at attention, marching to a cadence, it changes how a man walks. I know what you are. What you were.” His voice became tense. “When you get free of this, I’m out too. I can do it. I’m coming with you.”
&nbs
p; “How long have you been in this camp?”
There was silence and the dark and the sound of two men breathing.
“Lost track.”
Long enough then. Time had a funny way of becoming elastic in captivity, stretching and contracting—sometimes it felt like forever or hours; sometimes it was forever.
The stink of moldy bananas and the loose, relaxed chatter coming from the storage shed where the mercs sat at the edge of the camp settled over Parrish, into him. The man next to him was a voice in the dark, a worried noise in the mud. Parrish reached down and tore the seam of his pant leg up to his thigh.
“Okay. Here’s how it’s going to go. There’s always a place where they have to start wrapping the wire on these cages—the weak point. Cover your hands as best you can. Feel along the bottom. The wires are going to be twisted and looped.”
The man grunted when Parrish shifted and elbowed him in the gut.
“Now! Move. Hands and knees. If we aren’t out of here by sun up this isn’t going to be the worst place we’ll have to pry out of. Scoot over. Find the beginning.”
CHAPTER 8
“I can hear that old, farty mule.” The boy’s voice sounded smug in the gloomy dark. He flashed his bright smile. Cicada song had given way to the cheerful chirp of legions of tree frogs. Black stick figures shaped like men, armed and lean, shuffled near a fire built low, down deep in a hole—a campfire designed to be hidden, two holes, one for smoke, one for fire—hard to see, but this close it was easy to smell.
“Hear him?” The boy elbowed his companion in the side. “Do you?”
“Hush up, or the Raggedy Men are going to hear you. That’s Goliath and those girls’ horses, too. They haven’t eaten them. That’s good. I’m glad.” The second boy was a head taller than the first one, his face covered in mud to mask his white skin and freckles. Miss Gwen had given up trying to make them cut their hair or stuff their feet in shoes. She’d yelled at them yesterday for fist fighting over the new name they’d both wanted to use for the week: Hawk Man. She’d settled it with a look; pointing, she’d called them Big Hawk and Little Hawk. Brothers. Or as good as.
“We found them, Big Hawk. We did it. I hope we get a prize for it.”
“Shut up,” the bigger boy muttered. “Not just mules and horses tied up here. These are man-catchers too. See the cages. It’s a catch-up spot. Don’t you remember?”
If only Big Hawk could forget. All the men and boys—without women, without children—who roamed together, moved fast, lived rough, who acted like the wild dogs that had ganged up to form packs after their owners abandoned them. These were men who acted like dogs.
“Don’t you ‘member?”
But the younger boy hadn’t heard. He’d already wriggled his way through a clump of Brazilian pepper trees to get closer to the picket line where Goliath and the white horses pawed in frustration.
Big Hawk belly crawled after him. The scraggly branches of the pepper trees dragged the ground. It was easy to stay low to the ground, burrowing through the snarl, hidden as any raccoon bent on thieving.
The camp edged an open patch of prairie, and the perfume of the big river that wound and curled through the grassland filled the air. In the wet season, all of the open space would disappear under the overflow from the river, but now it made for quick traveling along the Saint John’s: wide, open, flat, and lined with trails.
Little Hawk disappeared into a mound of tall grass close to Goliath’s nose. Big Hawk came close to spitting in anger. If only his brother would wait up and do something right for a change, but he was always trying to win every race, every game. And everything was a game to him. Big Hawk used his elbows to wedge himself closer to his brother’s hiding spot.
Two things happened at once, a big man’s hand snagged the collar of his shirt, and another covered his mouth.
Big Hawk bit down hard on the flesh of the man’s palm and got a head-snapping shake for his effort.
A voice next to his ear hissed, “Stop.”
Big Hawk knew that voice: Mister Parrish. Here. He was here, too. He’d found the horses, too.
“Stay.”
Big Hawk nodded against the hand over his mouth.
Mister Parrish dumped him into a void in the branches and then was gone, after his stupid brother, probably. Big Hawk curled down into the leaf mold to wait.
The thieves muttered just beyond his hiding place. It was a comfortable sort of talk; these were men settling down to sleep. In the half-light of their fire, he saw that their clothes were faded and colorless, their hair stuck out from their heads in brittle, bleached tufts, and their skin was leathery and dark from the sun. They were men who did not live under roofs, who spent their days on boat decks; men from where the big water slapped at the sand—man-catchers—slave makers—water pirates. That’s what Stone called people like these when he told stories of the bad men who lived on the Atlantic water. A sick worry ate at Big Hawk’s brain. Big Hawk couldn’t remember a time when the water pirates had left the water and come this close to the big ranch—ever—not even when the children all lived with Stone next to the two roads.
Someone in the group barked a quick laugh. Someone else told him to shut up.
Other than that there was nothing to listen to, no sound of Mister Parrish moving through the underbrush, no noise of a small boy trying to be a hero. Big Hawk was impressed. It was hard to stay quiet in the woods even if you were just a kid, and Mister Parrish was no kid.
Goliath’s ugly bray erupted in the dark. An angry command from one of the men at the fire answered the mule. Big Hawk heard a quick, short yip. He knew that sound. That was his dumb brother. Then came the thunder of stampeding horses through the camp. He could feel the vibration of their hooves through the ground. Before the sound of running animals had faded, Mister Parrish dragged Big Hawk out of his hidey-hole and deeper into the underbrush. The boy tumbled onto the ground next to Little Hawk. The men at the fire screamed and cursed.
“They’re coming.” In the dark, Mister Parrish’s voice seemed to come from nowhere. “Don’t follow the old highway. Go. I’m behind you. Go. Now.”
Another body rolled to the ground next to his brother. Someone else with Mister Parrish. Little Hawk started to kick at the man. There was a wrestling scuffle.
“Knock it off. Go!”
Big Hawk scrambled to his brother’s side, dragging him to his feet. Only stars lit the sky, but it would be enough. They left Mister Parrish, who whispered to someone else in the night, the man Little Hawk had kicked.
“Georgie, can you get me through the saw grass to the big bridge?”
A soft voice answered him, but they couldn’t hear what was said. Goliath’s hee-hawing trumpet was already far enough away to be fading. Good for that old fart and those horses. Ha. Stupid man-catchers. The animals were free. They knew how to get home. Big Hawk grabbed his brother’s hand and headed toward the river.
CHAPTER 9
Having Georgie the Fisherman’s help to navigate this section of jungle was a stroke of luck. The man knew this land, even in the dark, even sick and weak and close to collapse. The slight man headed north before darting into the heaviest of the swamp.
“Stay low through here. The game trails are tight.” The man was hardly more than a disembodied voice and a mad rustle as he moved through the palmetto brush.
Parrish followed the sound of the man’s gasping breath.
The land dipped into slick patches of wet and muck the closer they got to the big, slow Saint John’s River.
Georgie avoided the ruin of Highway 46, once the main road from Seminole County to the coast—the only path. Now, it was a trap of space and ambush terrain.
Thorns hooked and ripped Parrish’s feet. Barefoot. They’d taken his boots. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to move fast through the miserable mush of a Florida swamp without his shoes. He appreciated that Georgie didn’t hesitate. It was better not to give the snakes and gators too much of a target. Than
k God the rain held off this year and they didn’t have to wade through chest high water across a mile of flooded wetlands.
Light glinted on the smooth, dark surface of the river, bright teardrops of starlight. Still north of the bridge, Georgie kept to the largest clumps of saw grass, winding through the head-high grass. At the riverbank, the fisherman dropped to his knees and splashed water on his face.
“From here, the Riverman’s Camp isn’t far.”
Parrish squatted, concentrated on slowing his heartbeat. “You give up too much information. You should watch how you do that. Bad habit. It’ll get your people in trouble. Nobody needs to know nothing.”
“I didn’t tell you anything.” He sounded puzzled.
“Sure you did. There’s a camp. Close. A camp indicates people, not just you, and it’s not far. I doubt it’s on the bridge side, so I’m guessing downriver. That’s where I’d head if I was looking for a camp with resources and food, and I’m guessing women and children.”
The slap, slap, slap of water teasing at the hyacinths along the edge of the river measured the moment.
“You could come with me. We could use you—”
“Georgie,” Parrish said. “Listen to me. They’ll guess at your camp—the raiders moving through this part of the county. Warn your people. Move them.”
The edge of the sky above the tree line glowed orange. With dawn it would be easier to get home to the Strandline, warn his own people. Orange snapped into a glowing yellow. Too bright. Too fast. That glow wasn’t the sun coming up. The smell hit Parrish like a fist in the mouth—wildfire.
If only there’d been more rain. Hadn’t he just been glad for the lack of rain? Pretty ironic. Funny if he weren’t so worried.
He thought about the woods full of tinder, and nothing and no one to stop a wildfire. A steady sea breeze from the east dried the sweat on his face.
He stood, felt Georgie the Fisherman push to his feet next to him.
“Move them, Georgie. Now.”