by Kathy Miner
Naomi dismounted as well, and both horses shifted and sidled, tossing their heads fractiously. A few feet behind Shakti, Pasha got in on the action as well, tugging on the lead rope that connected her to Shakti’s saddle. Naomi grimly hung on to Ben’s reins and felt her lower lip begin to quiver. Even the horses were against her.
Martin led Shakti and Pasha off the road and into the shade of a huge, shaggy Juniper. He ground-tethered them both, then moved out of range of their ever-swishing tails and sat down on the sandy ground. Removing his hat, he ran his maddeningly clean handkerchief over his face, watching her all the while. Not knowing what else to do, she joined him in the shade, tethering Ben next to the other horses. She, too, moved out of tail range but didn’t sit. Instead, she folded her arms across her chest.
“What, exactly, are we ‘getting over?’”
Martin leaned back on his hands, stretching his legs out and crossing them at the ankles. “You tell me.”
Hades, who had been ranging ahead, picked that moment to trot into the shade. He sat down beside Naomi, pressing close in spite of the warmth of the day, and lifted his head to gaze at her with sad, confused eyes. She felt his soft whine, and caught a glimpse of herself through his perception: Sad, angry, sad, scared, sad sad sad. Naomi’s lip quiver turned into a full blown chin wobble.
Martin’s voice was soft but insistent. “I will be the first person to admit I don’t have a great track record with women. I may not have made the smartest choices, but I sure as hell learned a few things. I know when a woman needs to cry, and you need to cry. So let ‘er rip, and let’s have done with it.”
Well. Well, then.
Stooping, Naomi scooped up a clod of dirt and threw it at him. Then another. And another. Martin fended off all three, his eyebrows climbing steadily higher with each pitch. And once again, she found herself snarling.
“You think you know what I need? You think you can tell me what to do?” A fourth clod of dirt exploded in the center of his chest, and it was all she could do not to throw her fists in the air and scream her victory. “I’ve got two words for you, Martin. ‘Fuck,’ and ‘you!’”
His jaw dropped open, and he goggled. Naomi had never actually seen someone goggle before. The next thing she knew, she had both hands clamped over her mouth, making sounds that fell halfway between sobs and whoops. Martin dusted his chest clean with great deliberation, his expression now wary, worried and pissed.
“Are you laughing? Or crying?”
Naomi took her hands away long enough to half-shriek, “I’m not really sure!” Then she was back at it again, tears streaming, nose running, an enormous sense of release blowing her chest wide open. She plopped down on the ground beside Martin and rocked with her arms clamped around her middle. When the sounds she was making diminished to occasional hiccups, she spoke.
“I heard Piper say that to one of her boyfriends once, and God help me, I was so proud of her! He was such an arrogant prick.” She accepted the handkerchief he handed her and swiped it over her face, taking one deep, shuddering breath after another.
“So…you’re calling me an arrogant prick?”
Naomi snorted. “Maybe.” She put her head to the side and considered him. “Yes. I am.” His eyes went storm-dark at that, but she didn’t backpedal. “I appreciate your concern, Martin, and I do owe you an apology. I’ve been a foul-tempered traveling companion, but I’m not ready to talk about it yet. I just need to deal with…what’s eating at me in my own time, in my own way.”
“Okay.” His voice was gruff, but the storm had blown over. “Will you at least tell me what the dreams are about?”
Naomi wrapped her arms around her bent knees. “I think it’s Piper,” she said. “I’ve been getting these flashes of her in unfamiliar places since a few days after they left. Really vivid, really weird flashes. The colors are almost fake, they’re so bright. They’re not like any dreams I’ve ever had before. A few days ago, they changed.” She started rocking again, just a little, soothing herself with the gentle motion. “I’m still getting flashes, but Piper isn’t in them. I see a town and a boy I don’t know, other strangers. And Piper hasn’t checked in since this started.” She pressed a hand over her heart. “I’ve sent her so many messages. She’s not responding.”
Martin’s gaze didn’t waiver. “Is she alive?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
Naomi shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Absolutely. I know what it felt like when Scott and Macy died. I wasn’t that close to Layla, but I felt that change, too. Piper’s alive.” She clenched the hand that had been pressed to her chest into a fist. “Either that, or she’s taken a part of me to wherever it is they go, because she’s right here.”
“Okay.” Martin nodded. “I was picking a fight, and I’m not sorry. You’ve been shut up tight as a tick. I had to get in your head somehow. Unless we run into the mother of all mudslides or some other catastrophe, we should be in the Springs by this afternoon. We need to be on the same page.”
Naomi made a face at him. “You mean I need to stop acting like a tired toddler.”
Anger flared in his eyes. “No,” he said, and she could feel how much effort he put into the level tone. “What I said was, we need to be on the same page. Communicating. You’ve been distracted and oblivious to what’s going on around you. You’ve alienated not just me but the horses, and you need to reconnect with them, too. The only one who’s not pissed is Hades, and you’ve got him so worried about you, he’s tied in knots. We’re riding into a dangerous, unknown situation. Connect the dots.” He stood. “Now, if you’re done putting words into my mouth and twisting them into some kind of criticism I didn’t intend, I’m going to get something to eat.”
It was Naomi’s turn to goggle. Martin stood up and moved to Shakti’s side, rummaging in the saddle bags. They’d packed plenty of food for the two or three day journey they’d expected, and the delays meant they’d been on light rations for days. It was tempting, to attribute Martin’s sharp words to hunger, but she knew better.
She stood, and moved to Ben’s side. From the depths of the saddlebag, she unearthed the very last crumbly ginger snap cookies. She handed them to Martin without a word, then returned to Ben. He shifted uneasily at her approach and she paused, feeling sorrow, along with an echo of the fear she’d felt the day she’d first met him. She went back to that day in her mind, and heard Ignacio’s patient voice in her head. Ben can handle all the grief you or I have to dish out. It’s the conflict that confuses him.
And that, as Ignacio had said, was the crux of it. It wasn’t the depth of what she was feeling. It was that she was feeling everything at once, too much to sort out, every feeling a paradox or contradiction for another. Naomi closed her eyes and Ben’s familiar energy was there, a little ticked, like Martin had said, but still her gentle, giant-hearted boy. She leaned into his side and felt his head curve around her. His forgiveness was instant and generous, releasing a burden on her heart she’d been unaware of carrying. Without opening her eyes, Naomi started talking, trying to unravel the knots around her.
“I’m angry, Martin. So god-damned angry. You talk about ‘deciding’ whether to stay in Woodland Park or to leave. You talk about that as if it’s a choice.” She opened her eyes and felt her face fall into the bitter lines it had been wearing since they’d ridden away from her cabin. She hated the way the expression felt. She was becoming a stranger to herself. “It doesn’t matter what I want. I can’t even remember the last time I had a choice about something. I just keep doing what I have to do, whether I like it or not. So don’t talk to me about ‘choosing’ like that’s something I can do. Frankly, it pisses me off.”
Martin listened, and after a moment, nodded. He dusted cookie dust from his fingers, then moved to stand on the other side of Ben. He crossed his arms on Ben’s saddle and leaned his chin on his forearms. “The people who killed themselves after the plague,” he said. “Was that a choice?”
Naomi’s frown deepened. “Of course it was.”
“Try to imagine what they were thinking. What was in their minds?”
“Pain. Loss and grief and loneliness. Some of them felt like they didn’t have anything left to live for.” She remembered the couple they’d found, corpses holding hands. “Some of them didn’t want to live in a world that had changed so much. They were too scared to try. What are you getting at?”
Martin shook his head, his expression gentle. “It’s so easy for you to understand and forgive the feelings of others, and so hard for you to show yourself that same compassion. Naomi, people will choose to stay in Woodland Park to defend their homes. You can choose to do that, too. No one is forcing you to do anything. Stay or leave. It’s your decision.”
Naomi’s eyes filled with tears again. “You and I both know Grace is right. They’ll come. I felt it, the moment she said the words. Staying is suicide.”
“I think so, yes.” He reached to gather one of her hands in both of his and brought her fingers to his lips. “But it is still a choice. You don’t have to like it, you can be pissed as all hell about it, but don’t give away your own power like that.” His warm breath feathered across her knuckles, and the nape of her neck tingled. “You’re not just a helpless victim of circumstances, even when you hate those circumstances. If you need to stay, I’ll help you prepare, help you supply a bolt hole.”
“But you won’t stay with me.”
“No. My choice is Grace and Lark, and I intend to get them as far away as possible.” He pressed her fingers against his mouth again, hard this time. “But I won’t promise not to try to change your mind.”
“You make it seem so simple.” She narrowed her eyes. “That kind of pisses me off, too.”
“It is simple. That doesn’t mean it’s easy.” A teasing smile touched his mouth. “You know, it would help a lot if you didn’t bottle this shit up and force me to pry it out of you. Are we good now? Did you get it all out?”
Something huge shifted inside her chest, something that wouldn’t wait much longer to be dealt with. She leaned her cheek against his hands where they still cradled her fingers. “No. But the rest of it has to wait. I don’t have words for it yet.”
“Fair enough.” He freed one of his hands, and smoothed his palm over the strands of hair that had come free of her braid. The gesture was unpracticed and a little rough and swamped Naomi with tenderness. “You just let me know if I need to start singing again. Let’s get going.”
They rode into the Garden of the Gods in the high heat of the afternoon, then slid south out of the park into quiet, disintegrating neighborhoods. Here and there, groups of homes were burned to blackened husks, and evidence of looting was everywhere. When they reached Highway 24, the changes were even more ominous. Vehicles had been removed from the road, rolled into adjacent parking lots or ditches, both to the east and west of where they sat. Naomi reached out with both hers and Hades’ senses, and the danger she sensed on this stretch of road smoldered along her nerve endings like an electrical fire. She wondered how to ask Hades if there was anyone nearby, but even as the thought formed, he was scanning with eyes, ears and nose. She met Martin’s questioning gaze.
“There’s no one in the immediate vicinity, but this doesn’t look good.” She inclined her head at the highway. “Plenty wide enough for vehicles to pass through.”
“Or tanks.” At her look, he nodded grimly. “Yeah, they’ve got those on Fort Carson, too.”
They rode east until they hit 31st Street, then headed south and climbed the steep switchbacks, finally arriving at the intersection that looked down on the old Bear Creek Nature Center. The sentry flags which had been prominently displayed on nearby buildings and rock formations were gone. Again, Naomi reached out through Hades, feeling for what was going on. This time, she picked up a buzz of activity driven by unsettled emotions: Anxiety, worry, dread and loss, all united by a steady beat of hurry, hurry, hurry.
“There are still people here, but something has them rushing around,” she said. “They’re almost frantic, and they’re scared.”
Martin’s eyes swept ceaselessly around them as he answered. “Should we ride on or get out of here? Is there danger?”
“I don’t think so - not immediate danger, anyway. I think we should find out what’s happening.”
Martin nodded, and they continued on, groping forward cautiously, guided by Naomi’s Hades-enhanced instincts. When they turned into the parking lot by the old nature center, the cry went up from sentries at last. One of the men standing watch had met them on their previous visit, and he hurried forward to greet them, armed with a rifle tucked in the crook of his arm. He shook hands with Martin and nodded at Naomi.
“You’ve caught us at a bad time,” he said, his words as hurried as his movements. “We’re getting out of Dodge. I’ll take you to Isaiah.”
They secured the horses and left Hades on watch beside them, then followed the sentry into the cool, dark interior of the nature center. Isaiah was in one of the rooms behind the long counter, packing books into boxes. He looked up when they entered, and as before, the power this mild-looking man radiated was palpable. He nodded at them both, but kept right on packing.
“Martin and Naomi. Welcome. One of our women said we’d have friendly visitors today. I’m glad it’s you.” He stared at a book spine in an agony of indecision Naomi remembered all too well, then set the book aside with obvious regret and reached for another. “You’ll have to forgive our lack of hospitality. We’re preparing to leave.”
“So we were told.” Martin took off his hat and wiped sweat off his forehead. “Can we ask where you’re going, and why you’re leaving now?”
Isaiah paused to scrutinize them both, his eyes traveling between Martin and Naomi several times before he reached for another book. “I don’t know if you’re aware, but the gang has managed to get some helicopters in the air.”
Naomi spoke. “That’s why we’re here. We saw one in Woodland Park over a week ago. Just the one, and just that one time. We were hoping you’d have some information about what’s going on.”
“Precious little, I’m afraid, and what we have came at great cost. We’ve seen one every day for the past ten days – usually a Blackhawk, but once we saw a Chinook, and yesterday, my people tell me it was a pair of Apaches. Short training flights, it appears, and we’re guessing they’re learning via written instruction manuals. If they had an experienced pilot, we think they’d have been in the air long before now, and in greater numbers. Other than one fly-over, they haven’t approached our settlement, so we were planning to just watch and see what happened.”
He paused in his packing, straightening to gaze at them. “I need to back up a bit to tell this properly. About six weeks ago, we lost four of our outlying sentries – two men and two women. They just disappeared. At the same time, we heard the gang had closed its borders down tight. They were no longer letting people come and go, as they had been before. We didn’t know exactly what was happening until a couple of days ago. One of the sentries we’d lost literally crawled back to us.”
Isaiah paused, drawing a deep breath in through his nose and holding it. A muscle flexed in his jaw. He closed his eyes and slowly released his breath, and Naomi felt him force himself back to calmness. His self-control was formidable. “Jana had been raped, beaten, and left for dead,” he said flatly. “She overheard bits and pieces of information during her captivity, and she used the last of her strength to bring us a warning. We had noticed that the raids on some of the smaller groups in the area had stopped, and we weren’t sure why. The more optimistic among us hoped it meant those criminals were finally developing their own food sources. Now, thanks to Jana, we know what’s really going on.”
“They’re letting you grow and harvest,” Martin said. “They’re letting you do the work and lulling you into a false sense of security at the same time. When your crops are harvested and preserved, they’ll come with
overwhelming numbers, take everything they want, and kill everyone they don’t take captive.”
Isaiah nodded slowly, his eyes locked on Martin’s. “Jana gave her life to bring us that information. How did you get it?”
Martin looked down at his feet. “My daughter escaped the gang, too. She paid our price,” he said quietly. He looked back up at Isaiah, his expression one of mingled pride and agony. “She’s brilliant. She predicted this would be their plan.”
Isaiah went back to packing his books, and only the most careful listener would hear the thread of grief in his otherwise controlled voice. “Jana shouldn’t have lived long enough to get to us, but she did. She said angels carried her the last few miles, and I do not doubt her. God brought her home to us, so she could die among the friends she came to warn. Because of her, we know what we need to do, and I will not allow her sacrifice to be in vain. We’re leaving tomorrow at first light, before they can get wind of our plans.”
“Where are you going?”
“South, near Monte Vista, on the Rio Grande River. It’s not as far away as I would like, but one of our people has family there. She knows the area and the people. It would be best, obviously, if we could send scouts ahead, but we won’t risk the delay.”
“We’re considering the same course of action.” Martin’s eyes touched Naomi, then returned to Isaiah. “The San Luis Valley is a good spot for agriculture, even though it’s dry. We’re looking at Pagosa Springs. If we decide to leave, that’s probably where we’ll head.”
Isaiah nodded again. “If we didn’t have the connection in Monte Vista, Pagosa Springs was an option I liked. Protected by the mountains, surrounded by all that undeveloped land. A good choice. If Monte Vista doesn’t work out for us, maybe we’ll join you there.” He straightened from the box he had just finished filling. “But what do you mean ‘If you decide to leave?’ What’s stopping you?”