by A. R. Shaw
He couldn’t keep them here for the long term. The ice age would last for years, and the killers needed to be exterminated, or it was likely the whole town of Coeur d’Alene would succumb to the few who’d gained power in the crisis.
These things were easy to predict for a soldier of war, one who’d watched the worst of atrocities. Man’s true nature, once all the façade of the modern-day world was stripped away, was nothing more than beast. To survive, man would smile at a mother and butcher her child to eat if he were starving—and save her for later. There was nothing man wouldn’t do to ensure his own survival. “We’re fickle like that,” Jax once said to him. “We’ll praise humanity as the height of honor but murder the likes of humans in any shape they come, give all for a meal, an unremitting quench.”
The girl’s lips were no longer blue. Her thin face was still devoid of color though Jax last said she might have a chance. Her breathing was raspy, and Jax kept a steam going around her that smelled of pine forest. He continually crushed dried berries he had inside of dark hide pouches and mixed them with other equally mystifying herbs into a poultice that he smeared with honey on the girl’s chest. The stench was nearly unbearable. Then Jax made Bishop remove his shirt when the blood began seeping through.
Again Jax complained and moaned as he attacked several dried items in his mortar and pummeled them into a paste. This time, the stuff he applied looked like tar and smelled more like licorice than mint as he slathered a thick layer over both sides of Bishop’s shoulder wound. Then Jax wrapped a large leaf over both sides before rewrapping his shoulder.
“It’ll heal on its own. Leave that alone for a week. Drink this too.” He handed him a cup of something foul, and Bishop grimaced before downing the entire thing.
“You’re such a baby.”
Bishop didn’t bother with a comeback. “Thank—”
“Shut up.” Jax cursed him as Bishop found himself falling over and onto the seat where Maeve and her son were sleeping.
Bastard, Bishop thought before he fell unconscious.
Chapter 17
Shadows passed against a flame. Her eyes mere slits, Maeve couldn’t keep them open but for a brief moment, followed by another struggle to lift her eyelids.
Again she tried, and finally with all her strength they fluttered open but had all intentions of slamming shut again. Struggling with all her might and finally gaining the strength to keep them open, her eyes searched the room for Ben; a primal need to find him overtook her. She tried to move her arm, and again it was a monumental feat of effort just to raise one finger.
Whatever Bishop had given her to drink, the concoction had knocked her out, and now she was struggling to stay awake. The warmth from the fire was almost too much as she lay under a fur blanket, and the person next to her smelled awful. His skin sweated onto her shirt. She stirred and found that the hand she was trying to move was draped over his bare arm. The arm belonged to Bishop, and she recoiled away from him, realizing she was cuddled against his side in a way too intimate for a stranger.
Maeve pulled herself into a sitting position and out from the stifling heat of the blankets, finding Ben asleep on her other side.
She pushed on his shoulder. “Ben. Wake up.” His small body jerked with her efforts. It didn’t matter how much she jostled him, though; he didn’t move on his own. His little chest rose with each breath, and she was consoled by the fact that he was merely sleeping. Then it dawned on her. Where are the blindfolds? she wondered and then looked around the room she found herself in. This isn’t the same place we were in before. The room they were in before took stairs to climb. This place had a solid floor of stone and felt like a cellar or cave of some kind. In front of her, there was a fire pit made of stone. The flames blazed away at the logs inside, and beyond that, there was a locked wooden door with a cast-iron handle. They were lying on a pallet on top of a cold stone floor. “Where are we?”
Bishop’s arm was wrapped in the half T-shirt with some horrible-smelling medicine underneath. Beyond him lay the girl next to his side.
“Louna,” she called out and scrambled out from between the blankets. Maeve’s shoes were off, and her socks caught on the rough stone floor. When she rounded the other side of the girl, she found her asleep but breathing well next to Bishop.
“Bishop must have moved us here,” she reasoned, staring beyond the girl at the man sleeping. “How, I don’t know.”
She looked around the enclosed room and found the rest of their shoes and Bishop’s firearms piled nearby. Closer to the door there was a bucket full of what she hoped was water. She took a metal mug from nearby and dipped the cup in the water and smelled it first before she dared take a sip. The water was crisp and cold and tasted pure. She quickly brought the mug to her son and lifted his head with her arm while holding the cup to his lips. “Ben, can you hear me? Take a sip.”
He did and then no more. She laid him back down and checked him over. Satisfied that he was all right, she brought the cup to Louna, and though the girl did not respond she was able to get some of the liquid past her lips. Next, she went to Bishop and tried the same technique. “Bishop, wake up.”
His eyes bolted open, and his response scared her so much she spilled the water down his chest. “I’m sorry,” she said, and he looked at them in alarm.
“Where’s Jax?”
“I…I don’t know. I just woke up.”
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know. I thought you brought us here.”
He shook his head. “No, I didn’t.” He looked at the sleeping girl at his side and checked her pulse. And then he looked to Ben.
“He’s fine. He’s still asleep.”
“Where’s Jake?” he said after he had realized both children slept on either side of him.
“Who’s Jake?”
He looked at her with frustration. “The horse!”
“I don’t know,” she said, still holding the empty mug.
This was like some kind of bizarre dream that she was still trying to figure out.
When Bishop stood, he swayed a little and caught himself on the stone wall.
“Where are we?” she asked him.
“I…I think we’re in one of Jax’s hideouts. He must have brought us here.”
“How did he do that? I thought you brought us here.”
“He really doesn’t like to be around people.”
“Well, it’s not OK for him to put us all to sleep and move us around like that,” she yelled.
“Yeah, but we’re alive, and the girl sounds good, too.”
He pushed a few fingers to his wound. “I wonder how long we’ve been here,” he said as he walked toward the wooden door.
“I have no idea,” she said and realized she was still holding on to the metal mug. She set it down.
“Had to only be a day. He must keep coming to reload the fire pit.”
Bishop slipped his feet into his boots and picked up his Beretta and pulled the iron lever on the door. Cold air and flurries blew inside. The fire protested and roared while Maeve pulled the fur blanket up over the children to shield them from the sudden cold.
His face reflected the whiteness outside until he shut the door again.
He confirmed her suspicion when he said, “Blizzard.”
“Great. Now, what do we do?”
“Well, Jax will be back—I’d say in about two hours according to the fire. Unless he knew exactly what time we’d wake, which he probably did. And, in that case, he won’t be back.”
“We need to get into town. This girl needs real medical attention, and we need to let the authorities know what happened.”
He shook his head. “She’s going to be fine, and there’s no town to go to. Those guys who robbed your neighbor and killed her parents…It’s more than likely that same scenario is going on all around Coeur d’Alene as well as everywhere else. This is what happens to society when everything goes to hell. The evil prey on the clueless.”
“What do you mean? This is just a national disaster. It’ll blow over in a few days. The police will arrest the looters and then we can go home.”
“Your home was burned to the ground, Maeve. Don’t you remember that?”
She remembered then…the girl’s home was smoldering, and her own house was ablaze with fire. “We can’t just stay here.”
He didn’t say anything else for a while. The wood continued to snap and crack in the fireplace. “We’ll need water, food, and…facilities,” she said, trying to hint that she had to go.
“We’ll go back to my place when the snow dies down.”
“Where’s your horse?”
“He’s out there under an overhang. Jax wouldn’t harm Jake or us. He just doesn’t like to interact with people.”
She nodded but still didn’t think it was an excuse for him to put everyone to sleep for his own comfort level.
Ben began to stir then. He rubbed his eyes and sat up. “Where are we?”
She shook her head. “I have no idea, but we’re safe.”
“Is Louna OK?” Ben asked.
“We think so. Her breathing sounds better.”
An hour later, when the fire died down, they gathered their belongings and Bishop wrapped the girl in the fur hide. Again, Bishop helped Maeve up onto Jake, and he handed the unconscious child to her. She smelled like winter berries, and Maeve wished Jax was a little friendlier so that he’d share some of his secrets with her because she had no idea how he’d made the child’s near-death condition improve to merely resting. As peaceful as she was in sleep with her long, dark lashes against her alabaster skin, her world would shatter when she woke. So as long as she could sleep, Maeve wanted her to, just to keep her life peaceful for a little while longer.
The sun, dim as it was through the pouring snow, seemed to be behind the gray sky to the west. She figured it must be about two in the afternoon as they slogged through the cold. She worried about Bishop. He was frozen through, and snow clung to his hat and coat so thickly that he looked miserable. Bishop led them through the forest and finally stopped near a stack of boulders that she would have never noticed were a home unless Bishop had pointed it out. He opened a gate after swiping his thumb on a black pad and then took the bundle from her lap after helping Ben down from the horse. Snow that had accumulated on them dropped to the ground or froze in place on her hat and in her hair.
They went inside the cave past a kitchen and then deeper into a large stone room filled with bunks and a lot of boxes. It reminded her of a hobbit hole, but she’d never say that out loud in his presence.
Everything was perfectly laid out in straight lines. She could recognize an engineering man anywhere. Her father was one and wouldn’t condone curves or angles in home décor. The beds were in even rows. The utensils were laid out in lines and perfectly straight on his table. There were no extras or flourishes.
“You live here?” Ben asked Bishop.
“Yes,” Bishop said and handed the girl back to Maeve and averted his eyes while he cleared his throat.
“I’ll put Jake away and be back in a minute.” His eyes looked at her warily. She wasn’t certain he trusted her in his home. After all, he was only a few hundred steps away from Jax. They were both hermits in their own pain living out in the woods. The comparisons were likely drawn.
She laid Louna out on one of the cots and checked her breathing again. It was as normal as Ben’s was when sleeping. She removed the snow-covered blanket and covered her with another blanket that was lying on the end of one of the cots. Then Bishop returned and stared at her like she’d been up to something.
“I swear I haven’t touched anything,” she said to him.
“It’s OK. There’s nothing you can harm here.”
“Look, I have a bookstore downtown. Ben and I can stay there. You don’t have to keep us here.”
“I doubt your bookstore is still standing, Maeve, and if it is, it’s not safe.” He began removing his gear and then gathered a few utensils and a few bottles of water. She sat next to her son on a cot that leaned against a boulder as he started a fire in the woodstove. “I don’t mean to discourage you, Maeve. In a day or two, I’ll scout down there and see what’s going on. For now, we stay here,” he said.
“I’m starving,” Ben said, and so was she.
Bishop took three caramel-brown pouches out of a nearby box and tore the tops off of each one. After reshaping them, each pouch stood on its own while he poured boiling water into each one.
“Something smells good,” Ben said as they watched steam rise from the bags.
Bishop handed them each a packet.
“What is it?” Ben asked.
“Chicken a la King, according to the package label, but it could be anything.”
Ben was right. She was starving too, and when she took a bite of the brown bag’s contents, it tasted like mushy chicken bouillon, and it was wonderful. She began to look at the contents and poked around with her fork. There were green peas in there, but the rest looked like reconstituted rice and chicken pieces.
“I wouldn’t dissect it if I were you. Less appetizing that way,” Bishop said, and she smiled.
He was probably right. So Maeve blindly scooped up spoonfuls into her mouth and swallowed.
After she was through, she handed him the empty packet, and then he tossed them into the fire. She watched while the package shrank and sizzled. What am I going to do now? My home and all I’ve worked for is gone.
Chapter 18
Later that night, Maeve tucked Ben into a nearby cot next to Louna. The girl still slept. She checked over her many cuts and abrasions for any sign of infection but found nothing alarming. Whatever Jax had put on them was healing them well.
“Bishop, do you have a spare T-shirt or something we can put on Louna? When she wakes, she might be startled to find she’s undressed.”
He’d been staring at the fire too, lost in his own world, when she began to talk to him. He rose from his seat on a spare log. “Sure,” he said and rummaged around in the boxes. He handed her a grayish-white T-shirt that once was bright white but was now at least clean.
She slipped the crewneck over the girl’s head and pulled each arm through the too-large shirt and then slipped it down past her torso, the hem nearly reaching her knees. She covered the child again and wiped Louna’s hair out of her eyes after slipping a little more water between her lips. The only thing to do now was wait for her to wake up. There was nothing else she could think to do.
Perhaps she had relatives nearby who would take her. Maeve had only met the family down the road a few times. Anyone that lived out in the woods did so for a reason. Her reason was Roger and his need for peace. They weren’t hermits, not like Bishop and Jax, but they hadn’t wanted and didn’t need a lot of excitement in their lives while raising their son.
“Mom, when are we going home?” Ben asked sleepily.
“Well, I’m not sure. The snow is piling high out there. It might be a few days, but this is like camping out, don’t you think?” She didn’t want to tell him the truth. She wasn’t sure of the truth herself.
“Did those bad guys burn down our house too?”
She had no idea what was left of their house or how much Ben saw from the ridge that night Bishop led them to safety. She’d thought her son was asleep on the back of the horse with her.
Smiling, she pulled the blanket higher under his chin. “I don’t know, Ben, but if they did, we'll find something else. Don’t worry.”
Her attention turned to the door as Bishop stepped outside. She wondered where he was going. She tucked her son in and made sure he and Louna were warm enough. The cave was an ingenious shelter, but it was drafty and cold, so a fire was always needed to keep them from freezing.
“Maeve,” Bishop called suddenly when he opened the door a crack.
“What?”
“Put your coat on and come out here for a minute. I need to show you something.”
She looked over the children again, making doubly sure they were both warm enough, and went back from the cave entrance to the cabin addition and put on her coat and boots and gloves again. They were still damp from the day before, but there was no other option. She stepped out into the night quickly and shut the door behind her. He stood nearby. The moon glowed eerily through the clouds.
“Come here,” he whispered. “You have to see this.”
She stepped toward him, and he took her by the arm and led her into the woods.
“I don’t want to leave the children.”
“We’re not going far.”
He led her up to a rocky ledge where they could see the valley below. What she expected were a few home fires like before if the looters were still out. What she saw was devastating. Down below, the town of Coeur d’Alene looked as if it had been bombed by warplanes. Even from that far away there were shouts she could hear and sirens or alarms that wouldn’t soon fade. The whole town looked like it was on fire, and even the lake had burning boats lingering listlessly, smoke mixing with the night. Gunshots rang out in the distance as if war had been declared.
“This is what I meant,” he said. “Strip away humanity in its modern form and only savagery remains.”
She looked at his profile. The glow from the fires below reflected in his eyes. This man had seen war alongside her dead husband.
“We have to do something!” she said.
He shook his head. “No. I’m not doing anything to endanger you and the children in there.”
She pointed toward the blaze. “There are more people down there who need your help, Bishop.”
“I swore to protect you and Ben. That’s all. If I go down there right now, there’s a good chance you and Ben will die. After three days, I’ll go down. I’ll go down there and see what remains and what I can do, but for now, we wait and watch.”