Guns & Smoke

by Lauren Sevier

  “Don’t you ever put your fucking hands on her,” he said. Just as Mickey dropped my wrist, Jesse threw him bodily to the ground. His arm was around me from behind, shielding me from the man staring incredulously up at Jesse from the floor.

  “You’re a Kincaid, alright. Got the same right hook,” he said, pushing onto his elbows as he stared at me behind Jesse’s shoulder.

  “You kill him?” he asked, wiping the back of his hand across his bloody mouth. I stared at him in confusion.

  “What?” I asked, swallowing hard.

  “Phillip Jones. Did you kill him? You had to if you have that gun. I was there when he bought that for Emma; he wouldn’t let it go without a fight,” he said. The world spun, and the ground tilted beneath me. I hadn’t realized I’d gone weak in the knees until Jesse’s arm steadied me on my feet.

  Phillip Jones.

  I never even knew he had another name. Phillip. It sounded too normal for the monster who’d broken me for sport. My stomach thrashed inside of me. I was there when he bought that for Emma.

  “M-my mother’s name was Emma,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. I found it hard to focus on anything in the room. Mickey pushed to his feet. Jesse tensed, pulling me farther away from Mickey as he crossed into the living room. He grabbed a box from the top of a bookshelf leaning in the corner of the room. He opened it and rifled through what sounded like papers until he pulled out a photograph, one of the corners creased, faded at the edges. He handed it to me, and a strangled sound came from my throat.

  There in the middle were two young men. One was clearly Mickey, nearly identical to Jesse with his bright blue eyes and lopsided grin. His arm was slung over a tall, lanky boy with short, clean hair and dark eyes I knew well. He and Jones were friends, comrades.

  Worse still was the dark-haired girl tucked in tight next to Jones, her blue eyes wild with laughter. My mother. I couldn’t breathe. My chest was so tight it hurt. Jesse looked over my shoulder to the sandy-haired woman and curly-haired man next to Mickey in the picture. I trembled in his arms.

  “Why is my mother hugging Jones?” I asked. Jesse’s surprised eyes turned up to me. “Why do you have a picture of my mother?”

  “Kid,” Mickey said, his voice full of sorrow. “Emma is Phillip’s baby sister. Jones is your uncle.”

  I didn’t realize I’d moved. All I heard was buzzing in my ears. It wasn’t until I’d slammed the door shut to the room I’d shared with Jesse and the lock clicked behind me that I allowed myself to breathe properly. At some point I’d fallen to my knees but, through reckless tears, I studied her face in the picture still clutched in my hand.

  Wild. Vibrant. Alive.

  “Did you see the new True Grit movie? They remade it! As if anyone could be better than John Wayne,” Jones said. I stilled, afraid to say anything. But I didn’t know who John Wayne was, and I’d never heard of a movie before. He’d said so many strange things lately. I turned slowly, watching as realization crept into his dark eyes, edged with madness. He pulled a belt off the table, still laden with a holster and extra buckles, bringing it down across my shoulders. Again and again and again.

  He thought I was her, I realized. The thought sobered me enough that I curled into the messy bed sheets that smelled like Jesse and folded the picture until all I could see was my mom’s wild smile in the darkness beside me.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight - Jesse

  Mickey’s words hung heavy like smoke on the air. I watched as Bonnie left, the picture clutched between her fingers. The two seconds I hesitated to follow her proved to be my mistake. By the time I reached the door to our room, she’d already locked herself inside. I knocked quietly, my ear pressed against the wood.

  “Bon?” I called.

  Silence.

  I couldn’t imagine what she was going through. Finding out that she was related to a psychopath was probably the last thing she expected today. I knocked again, but still no answer. I pressed my hand to the rough wood.

  “I’m here. When you need me,” I said quietly.

  I waited another five minutes before leaving her alone. I promised her that we would be together through everything. Some things you have to go through alone before you can let other people in. The least I could do was give her that. If I learned that the sadistic bastard who raised me was an actual relative, I wouldn’t know how to handle it either.

  By the time I returned to the kitchen, Mickey sat at the table, his coffee long forgotten. He drank directly from the bottle, pictures and other items from the box strewn across the table.

  I had a lot of questions, but I didn’t know where to start. I sat across from him, then grabbed the bottle and took a deep pull from it. The liquor burned.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Only the best tequila from the Borderlands,” Mickey remarked with a grin, yanking the bottle back. He lit a cigarette before grabbing one of the photos and passing it to me. It was another picture of my mother and the woman Bonnie said was her own. My mom had an arm around Bonnie’s mom’s shoulders. They were young, carefree. As though they had no idea that the world was going to end.

  Bonnie had told me about what happened to her mother, what she’d witnessed. It was hard to imagine the beautiful woman in the picture next to my mom had met such a terrible end.

  “How did you know them?” I asked.

  “Phillip and I were in the same unit. These are from Thanksgiving a couple of years before the Culling,” Mickey said, sliding more photographs across the table. One of Mickey and Pop arm wrestling, while Mom cut a piece of pie in the background. They seemed so happy.

  “I knew Emma had a kid. I never knew what became of her.”

  I watched Mickey’s eyes flash to the hallway. There was something more in that gaze than curiosity. It was almost guilt and sadness. I frowned, wondering what life was like for the people in the pictures and how things would be now had the Culling never happened. Would I have met Jones in that life?

  “Do we need to be worried about Jones coming here?” I finally asked, looking back at my uncle.

  “No,” he said, lifting the bottle to his mouth.

  “Are you sure?” The words came from between my clenched teeth. If I ever had the chance to meet Phillip Jones, it wouldn’t end well for him. Not after what he’d done to Bonnie.

  “I told him I’d kill him if he ever came back here,” Mickey said. “That piece of shit does nothing but destroy the people around him.”

  From the things I knew about Jones, I would say Mickey’s assessment was correct. My uncle gathered the pictures and papers, placing them back in the box. He passed one of them to me before closing the box and returning it. Mom and Pop were embracing, staring at one another. She was in a white dress, and he wore a fancy suit. I recognized the picture. Pop had a smaller one of it in his wallet, which probably burned down with the rest of the house.

  “It still doesn’t make sense to me,” I said, flattening the photograph on the table. “You say people were after them, but who? And what was she hiding?”

  “Jesse, I don’t know,” Mickey said, taking a long drag of his cigarette. He exhaled the smoke on a long, suffering sigh. “She only told me what I needed to know.”

  My mother had worked in the government. It was a challenge to reconcile the idea that she may have been in a position of power with the woman I knew. She’d always been soft-spoken, firm when she had to be, but kind. What could she have been hiding?

  I thought back to the day we picked up Will, when I’d learned that his dad was responsible for the fires. I grabbed an old piece of newspaper from the stack of them on the counter and a pen. I sat back down at the table and began to draw the pointed flower I remembered from Sixgun’s neck.

  “What do you know about this symbol?” I asked, sliding the paper across the table.

  Mickey regarded it for a while, silent. Then he passed it across the table toward me.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  He was lying.
I knew how to be a good liar, and Mickey wasn’t one. I could tell by the way his eyes shifted to the right as he spoke. I grabbed the paper and smacked it down on the table in front of him.

  “The men who came that night had this symbol branded into their necks,” I said, my finger coming down on the drawing with a loud thunk. “One of Jones’s men has it, too. They weren’t there on Jones’s orders, though. Whoever it was, they were after Mom and Pop.”

  “This is a fleur-de-lis. Way back in the day, it symbolized French royalty,” Mickey said, shoving the paper back across the table. “The people with these markings are a ruthless gang. That’s it. They’ve never come here, and that’s all I care about.”

  I let out a low breath. My head ached from the tequila. My parents were heroes. According to Mickey, they’d saved people during the Culling, and Pop had tried to save people long before that. I knew my dad was smart, given the way he could take a car apart and put it back together. How he always knew the right time to plant and harvest, even when others told him he was doing it too soon.

  “You knew about me,” I said. “Gabriela said you mentioned me.” I’d always known I was born shortly after the Culling.

  “That’s right. Jeff used to make jokes all the time. That his parents missed a prime opportunity to name him Jesse James, after the most famous outlaw in the west. He and Anna made a bet that if you were a boy, that’s what they’d name you,” Mickey said. “She lost.”

  “Why didn’t they stay and help more people, though? It doesn’t seem like them to give up,” I said. My parents were devoted people. From what I’d seen, and what Mickey had told me so far, it didn’t make sense that they’d abandon their cause. Mickey’s red-rimmed eyes looked heavily into my own.

  “Anna almost lost you,” he said. “They came to me, thinking it would be safe in Roswell until they got more people out, but they were attacked on the way. Jeff didn’t want her to take any more risks. They left in the dead of night in his shitty old car.”

  “You said she hid something. What is it? Where is it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mickey said, running a hand over his face wearily. “You should go check on your girl. I’m sure she’s much better entertainment than I am.” He let out a choked laugh before taking another pull from the bottle.

  He wasn’t wrong. I stood, tucking the photo of my parents into my back pocket. I needed a break. Talking about them was hard for me. I couldn’t imagine what Bonnie was going through. The door was still locked when I reached the room. I grabbed my knife and wiggled it between the door and the frame. Eventually, it popped and I pushed it open.

  Bonnie curled up on the bed, fingers clutching the folded photograph. I kicked off my boots and climbed in behind her. I slid one arm around her waist, tucking her against my chest. I smoothed her hair down and pressed a gentle kiss beneath her ear. Some of the tension went out of her body at my touch. I smiled against her hair. Knowing that my presence could help her through something difficult meant almost more than moments like last night, when we were entwined together. She shifted, rolling to her other side and burying her face in my chest.

  I enjoyed it, having her there against me. I’d never felt so comfortable with a woman before. Maybe it was because, like her, all of my secrets were stripped bare, and she didn’t judge me for them. I inhaled her scent deeply, my eyes closing as the word home echoed through my mind.

  After a while, she let out a breathy laugh, then tipped her head to look at me.

  “If the Culling had never happened, we would have still met,” she said. A lazy smile crept across my face. She was right. An image of our two families, sitting together around a gigantic table with a bird as the centerpiece passed through my mind. It was a beautiful idea, this world without the Culling. Where we could have grown up like our parents, lived in relative peace, and maybe had the chance at finding one another under happier circumstances.

  None of it changed that, against all odds, we had met in this life. I was grateful for it.

  I slipped the photo of my parents from my back pocket, smoothing it down before holding it out for Bonnie to see.

  “They’d have loved you. Mom, especially. She tried to be friendly with Clara, but I could always tell she wanted something more for me, even if she never said it.” I tightened my arm around her, letting silence engulf us for another long beat. “I’m sorry about Jones,” I said into her hair. “But blood doesn’t mean family.”

  If there was anything I had learned on this journey, it was that people you never could have imagined could become even more important than the people you were related to. I thought about our ragtag band of people. We were an interesting group for sure, but they were mine to protect. In some way, the things we’d gone through brought us together.

  I thought back to last night, when Bonnie had claimed The Kid as ours to Gabriela. I hadn’t been able to express how much it meant to me to know that she loved my brother. Just like she loved me, though neither of us said it.

  A loud crash sounded from down the hall. Moments later, The Kid came banging into the room.

  “They’re sleepin’!” he called out behind him.

  “We’re not,” Bonnie said, lifting her head to look at him.

  “Never mind!” The Kid said. I rolled onto my back to look at him, standing in the doorway.

  “Did you need something?” I asked.

  “Will said he was tired of walking around,” he said.

  Well, I guess it was time to get back to some semblance of normalcy. I still had questions for Mickey, but I had a feeling they were things he couldn’t answer. We shuffled out of the room. I tucked the photo of my parents into my pack before following Bonnie. Mickey still sat at the table, staring between Clara, Will, and The Kid.

  “Who’s the kid?” he asked. I crossed to the cabinet to see if he had any food.

  “That’s Harry, my younger brother,” I said, turning to glance at Mickey. “But don’t call him that. He goes by The Kid. He’s an outlaw, and he’ll set you straight if you call him anything else.” My brother gave a curt nod, sitting at the table beside Mickey.

  “You don’t look like my mom,” The Kid said, wrinkling his nose, probably at the smell emanating from Mickey.

  “Well, your mom got all the looks in the family,” Mickey said. I gave brief introductions of Will and Clara before abandoning my hunt for food. With the meager rations we’d been living on, I was ready for a good meal. The Kid mentioned a place they’d seen up the road, so we set off.

  For the first time, the urgency faded. We had no plan. I’d expected that when we found my uncle, he would know what to do with us, but I could see how hopeless he was. He didn’t have a plan for his own life. How could he have one for ours?

  I glanced over at Bonnie as we ate hot bacon sandwiches, wondering where her head was at.

  “How’s your bacon?” I asked, flashing a grin at her. Bonnie narrowed her eyes playfully and took another large bite of the sandwich instead of responding.

  Here we were, on the verge of the unknown, and yet neither of us broached the subject of the end. She tangled her fingers with mine beneath the table, and I smiled at her. The Kid chattered on about all of the stuff they’d seen while exploring the base.

  “I watched this guy clean his rifle. Will says he was really slow,” The Kid said, looking at Will with admiration in his eyes. He turned to Bonnie then. “Will you show me how to clean a gun?”

  “Sure, Kid,” she said, her eyes shimmering in his direction as she took a sip of her drink.

  The interactions between them had initially scared me. Back in Vegas, when The Kid looked up to her, I was wary of her motivations. But now, sitting at Fort Hood, in some semblance of safety, my heart beat a little more quickly in my chest at the care she showed him.

  I couldn’t let her go. I hoped she couldn’t let us go, either.

  After we finished lunch, we headed back to Mickey’s house. Gabriela was there, trying to get him to sober up
. She showed us to the backyard, where a small range was set up for target practice and a table for playing cards.

  “Wanna see how a real outlaw does it?” Will asked my brother.

  Bonnie sat at the table, the M9 disassembled in front of her. I stood back, happy to watch for a while.

  “Rule number eight, Kid: know your weapons. If it’s supposed to keep you alive, you should know it inside and out,” she said, folding a bandana. Then she tied it around her head. Once it was secure, Will waved a hand in front of Bonnie’s face. Her hands fell to her sides.

  “How long do you think it’ll take her, Montana? A minute? Two? I’ll bet you a pack of fresh rolled cigarettes she can do it in less than a minute,” Will said, smirking in my direction.

  “You shouldn’t be allowed to bet,” I said to him. “You have an unfair advantage.” I lifted my eyebrows in challenge at him.

  “I’ll take that bet, then,” Clara said, moving to stand next to me. “I say it takes her a minute and a half.”

  “What’re the stakes?” Will asked, lifting his eyebrows suggestively at her.

  “Whatever you want,” Clara said with a wink. I ran a hand over my face.

  “You might regret that,” Bonnie said.

  “God. Stop flirting. Let’s start!” The Kid said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Will handed him his watch.

  “Ready? Three, two, one—” Will let out a loud whistle.

  Bonnie began assembling the M9, her fingers moving faster than I could keep up. The pieces slid into place expertly, one after another, until she slammed the clip in.

  “Thirty seconds!” my brother said, letting out a loud whoop.

  The display set the mood for a happy afternoon. I watched as Bonnie showed her skill with knives. With each flick of her wrist, a knife slammed into the bull’s-eye of her intended target. Mostly, I watched her with The Kid. How she was always patient with him, making sure that he understood not only how to do it, but why it was important to do it safely.

  Will and Clara were off to one side. He was teaching her to shoot. At least, I thought that was what he was doing with his hands all over her hips.