by Kathy Miner
When she was finished, she and Martin settled the animals for the night. Neither spoke more than was necessary, both lost in their own thoughts. Twilight shifted towards full dark, and Naomi unfurled her sleeping bag, spreading it out on one of the chaise lounges. She looked up to find Martin watching her.
“I figured you’d want to sleep inside, under your own roof.”
“No.” Naomi didn’t know how to explain. She didn’t fit under that roof, in that life, not anymore. So she defaulted to the practical. “I sleep better near the horses.”
“Okay.” Martin retrieved his sleeping bag and set it up on the other lounger. Unlike Naomi, though, he didn’t remove his boots and start to settle in. Instead, he prowled the perimeter of the yard, then stood staring at the moon, which was slowly rising in the east above the roof of the house.
Naomi crawled into her sleeping bag, and watched as he began to methodically prepare himself for his nighttime excursion. He removed the shirt he’d worn all day and replaced it with a long-sleeved black t-shirt. Then he un-self-consciously shucked off his jeans and slid into black, multi-pocketed cargo pants. He double-checked his pistol, clipped extra ammunition to his belt, and began smearing his face with a blacking agent he took from his backpack.
Long before he actually left, she felt his energy withdraw from her. He stood there on her deck, a lethal shadow, both familiar and strange to her. “I’ll be back by dawn, maybe sooner, depending on what I find.” His eyes met hers, cold, flat, focused. “If I’m not back by noon, I’m not coming back. Don’t load Shakti up with supplies if that happens. Just get out of here as fast as you can, by the route that feels safest.”
She could not speak. What could she possibly say? To speak so dispassionately of your own death and the practical matters in the aftermath was beyond her ability to understand. What had his wife said when he had deployed to active duty? Be careful? I love you? Watch your six?
So instead of speaking, she just nodded, and sent a pulse of all she had to give from her heart to his: warmth, protection, safety, luck, love. She closed her eyes and reinforced that last, let him feel what was in her heart for him, and heard him catch his breath. A moment later, she felt his fingers touch her cheekbone, but she didn’t open her eyes.
“Christ on a crutch, Naomi, you sure know how to distract a guy.”
Then he was gone, without even a whisper of sound. Hades whined low in his throat and crowded up on the chaise lounge with her, lying with his head at her feet, his rump pressed into her stomach. Naomi lay back and curled around him, staring up at the glittering stars. She let her mind drift and rest while her body relaxed completely, a trick she’d learned watching over sick babies. The moon slid through the night sky, so bright she could have read by its light. Sometime around midnight, she dropped into a light sleep, lulled by the total relaxation of the animals.
Hades woke her when Martin returned just before dawn. His big head was a darker shadow as he stared towards the house, and his senses told her that Martin was unharmed, as well as some of what he’d seen. The faintest miasma of smoke clung to him, and when Naomi reached out for his feelings, she touched despair and helplessness, and a storm of other emotions she couldn’t begin to sort out. She put Hades on a stay and went to find him.
Martin was in the living room, standing in front of the fireplace, staring up at the family portrait still hanging over it. Moonlight streamed in the windows, illuminating both the picture and the tension in his posture as he rested both hands on the mantle, looking up at her family as it had once been, her as she’d once been. He spoke then, but not of the depravity and death he’d surely seen.
“I’m not Scott. Best I can tell, I’m nothing like he was.” Martin’s still-blacked face was in shadow, but she could feel how his emotions rolled and boiled.
Naomi shook her head slowly, and moved to stand beside him. “No, you’re not. Did you think I expected you to be?”
He dropped his hands from the mantle and shrugged, but the nonchalant gesture did nothing to alleviate his tension. Her answer mattered to him, a great deal. She gazed at his profile for a moment, then returned her eyes to the portrait.
“I can see how you’d think that, that I’d want to just slide you into his place. You, and Grace, and little Lark – I could just plug you all into the empty places my family left. But I wouldn’t, even if I could. I wouldn’t diminish my memories of them that way, and you deserve your own place.”
Finally, he looked away from the portrait, touching his fingers to his chest. “Did you mean it?” he whispered. “What you made me feel before I left?”
She stepped in close to his strong body, and there, surrounded by the wreckage of her old life, she lifted her mouth and kissed him. So different from Scott, her mind whispered, then Scott was gone. She let her lips linger, then drew back. Martin hadn’t moved to touch her, but when he opened his eyes, what she saw there made heat lightning dance down her spine and left her breathless. She smiled, and gave him the words they both needed to hear.
“The woman who loved Scott doesn’t live here anymore. This woman, this one right here, loves you.”
TWELVE: Grace: Rock Ledge Ranch, Colorado Springs, CO
“…ninety-nine, one hundred.” Grace finished her count and rose from where she’d been crouched, in the back yard behind one of the houses that bordered Rock Ledge Ranch to the south. She slipped through a gap in the fence and moved to stand in the middle of the deserted street, scanning in a slow circle, letting her eyes float and probe, her ears tuned to every stray sound: the brush of the late afternoon breeze through the nearby cottonwoods, the rustle of overgrown bushes against empty houses, the occasional chirp of a nearby robin, warning of the coming rain.
By now, she’d learned to trust her senses; she’d know if something was off. When nothing triggered her inner alarms, she turned and ran swiftly down the path to the Chambers House, her footfalls only soft crunches on the gravel. She circled the house when she arrived, once again opening her senses to feel for danger, perceiving none. The house was safe. And deserted. She knew before she even opened the door and stepped into the kitchen that Verity was gone.
Again.
Grace opened the door to the modern bathroom off the back side of the kitchen, and Persephone greeted her with dancing feet, nails clicking a joyous rhythm on the floor. Verity had left the little dog with fresh water and a blanket for a bed, just as she’d done the previous five days. Grace sighed heavily and scooped Persephone up for a cuddle as she carried her outside. Nothing to do now but hang out on the front porch and wait for Verity to bring Death back to the ranch with her.
“Because that’s what she’s going to do, you mark my words.” She set Persephone down on the grass, watching for a moment as she sniffed around before taking care of business. When the dog was finished, she trotted off to sniff around the old animal barns which were empty now. Grace headed for the porch. She settled onto one of the benches and hunched forward, elbows resting on her knees, eyes alternating between Persephone and the trail on which Verity was likely to return. “She’s going to lead them right back here, like some kind of Pied Piper. Like Hansel and Gretel, dropping white pebbles.”
Grace had fallen back into the habit of talking to herself, in part because she was the only person she could rely on to make sense. Verity was prone to announcements such as, “Figs are quite nutritious when they’re not in Newton form,” or, “According to my sources, Channing Tatum didn’t cross over in the plague, but his wife did. I think my chances are good there, even if Raphael says it’s not meant to be...” Grace just nodded. A lot.
By now, she could see the writing on the wall: She was in a race against luck. While she scuttled around on the outskirts of the gang in her corpse-scented clothing, with her pepper-induced hives and streaming nose, Verity did God-knew-what, God-knew-where. Grace had begged her to go back home. Failing that, she’d begged her to just stay at the Chambers House and keep Persephone safe. But no. Oh, no
. Verity wouldn’t say where she’d been or what her objective in leaving was, and the more Grace pressed the issue, the more nonsensical Verity became.
When begging hadn’t worked, Grace had tried to talk herself into just leaving the eccentric woman behind, but she had Persephone to consider. She had never intended to bring the little dog, had planned to leave her with Anne, but nothing on this journey was going according to her carefully thought-out plan. For a few hours at a time, Persephone was fine when shut in the bathroom. But what if something happened to Grace? What if she was discovered and re-captured? She wouldn’t escape a second time, of that she was certain. The thought of dooming Persephone to a slow death by starvation and dehydration was not to be borne. Left free to roam, the little dog would follow her, endangering them both. Grace felt responsible for Persephone, of course, and inexplicably, for Verity as well. As badly as they were mucking up her plans, she couldn’t just abandon them.
To compound her frustration, she hadn’t learned much so far. As she had expected, the gang had closed their perimeter, and rumors buzzed of plans to blitz outlying communities later in the summer, but she had yet to talk to someone who had hard facts. Grace had slipped back into her fringe position in the group by virtue of a full bottle of vodka she’d “borrowed” from Rowan’s supply months ago. Loudmouth himself had remembered and cleared her at the checkpoint with a bark of laughter and a sneer.
“Where ya been, Stinky?” he’d asked as he’d waved her through. Grace had been ready with a cover story, but he hadn’t asked. She had swiped a greasy hand under her nose to hide a smirk as she’d sauntered right past one of the men who had brutalized her. Right past one of the men who might be Lark’s father. Right past one of the men on her short list to see dead. She kept that irony in her mind like a pampered pet, stroking it whenever what she was seeing became too much.
As hard as it was to believe, conditions had deteriorated even further. The majority of people still living under the protection of the gang had become nothing more than slave labor. For the life of her, Grace couldn’t imagine why they stayed. Fear was one thing, but had all these people lost their memories? Did they really think their only option was to endure terror and abuse in exchange for getting their basic survival needs met? Sometimes, it was all Grace could do not to stop the next person scurrying by and whisper to them: Do you know how valuable you are? Do you understand how precious your life is? You’re a survivor! She refrained, of course, but the effort of doing so was starting to wear on her. They were like sleepwalkers, stumbling around in an endless nightmare, just waiting for someone to wake them up.
In the past few days, Grace hadn’t seen a single child and very few women. The “nightly show” was still going on and still involved rape as well as gladiator-style combat between unwilling participants. But from what Grace had gathered, they’d run out of women to keep as disposable victims. Instead, women were chosen from among the survivors to service the gang leaders and were allowed to return to the general populace, humiliated and bleeding, but alive. No less sickening or terrifying, just conservation of resources. Grace had forced herself to watch for three nights running, until she’d figured out the lay of the land. Now, she just kept her ear to the ground for whispers and rumors during the day and cleared out before they fired up the lights and the music each night.
As far as the helicopters were concerned, she’d learned almost nothing beyond what she’d already guessed – gang-affiliated group on Fort Carson was in possession of the aircraft, and in this populace, that was all anybody knew. Grace was frustrated by the all-around lack of information and knowledge. She needed to know numbers. How many helicopters did they have? Was aviation fuel more stable than regular gasoline? If so, how long was that fuel good for, and how much did they have? How many pilots had they managed to train? Answering those questions had become her top priority. She planned to skulk around this encampment for one more day. After that, she had to ditch Verity and Persephone – somehow – and find a way to infiltrate the Fort Carson group. She didn’t have the same “in” there as she had here, and given how tight security was likely to be, she had no idea how she was going to pull that off.
Just the thought made her stomach clench violently. Attuned as always to the needs of the people around her, Persephone chose that moment to abandon her sniffing. She trotted up to the porch, butterfly ears bouncing perkily, and leaped onto Grace’s lap, curling into a little, comforting ball. Grace leaned back, feeling her tight muscles and tense shoulders ease, pulling Persephone’s small, sturdy body onto her chest. She may not have intended to bring the little dog with her, but she was sure glad she was here, especially when the reality of what she planned to do loomed so dark and large.
Grace may not have learned much since she’d arrived back in the Springs, but she’d reached an important conclusion: It wouldn’t be possible to achieve both of her objectives. She could either focus on taking out the gang leadership, or she could focus on disabling the helicopters. Not both. The likelihood that she would survive the execution of either objective was too slim. Once she got a look at the situation on Fort Carson, she’d make her choice, but the question to be answered was simple: Which path would give Lark the greatest chance at a future? She couldn’t be a mother to her daughter, but she could stand between the baby girl and danger. Grace’s own survival was secondary. And unlikely. And that was okay.
She rubbed her hand over and over the small, soft curve of Persephone’s back as she thought about this. She didn’t consider herself suicidal. She wasn’t feeling despair or suffering from depression. She didn’t want to die. She had a job to do, and logic and analysis told her she probably wouldn’t be able to do that job from a safe distance. Whichever course she chose, she was going to have to walk into the very heart of danger. Walking out unharmed was improbable. She knew cognitively that the prospect of her own death should frighten her, or at the very least make her sad, but all she felt was a curious, calm determination.
This was all Verity’s fault.
It was the strangest thing, but it was nearly impossible to feel fear when Verity was around. It had nothing to do with physical prowess of any kind. Grace had never seen Verity so much as swat a fly. Nor did it have anything to do with trust. As nearly as Grace could figure, Verity served a Divine agenda that had little to do with human hopes, fears or goals. Grace didn’t trust her, not even a little bit. Rather, it was what happened when you looked into her laughing, innocent, all-knowing eyes. Grace considered herself a practical and down-to-earth person, but she would swear you could glimpse the Cosmos in that pure blue. Fear just dissolved, sorrow softened, horror was filtered through an infinite perspective and given context.
The first few days back, when she’d been struggling to acclimate once again to the dark violence around the gang, the phenomenon had terrified her. Fear kept her alive, kept her instincts functioning at maximum sensitivity, kept her from getting careless and making a mistake. Fear helped her feel the gaze of eyes that were too interested, helped her know when to change course and take a different path. Without fear, she was as good as dead. Now, the best she could work up to was a healthy agitation.
It had nothing to do with complacency, and everything to do with the strange conviction that settled in her heart whenever she looked into Verity’s eyes: Things were unfolding as they should, and no matter what happened, Grace would be okay.
At that thought, Grace snorted. When Verity wasn’t around, it was much easier to apply logic to the paradox. Grade had been lucky. And she had to complete her tasks before the odds shifted.
“Hello!”
Grace looked up and had time for exactly one thought before her survival mechanism kicked in: “Too late.”
She was off the porch of the Chambers House and running before she took her next breath. Persephone raced at her heels, easily keeping pace as they pounded down the gravel path towards the barn. As Grace ran, her brain registered what she’d seen: Verity, waving cheer
fully, followed by two hulks carrying rifles at the ready across their chests. Her mind replayed the men’s movements, the rolling prowl of their gaits, the way their heads swiveled in synchronized vigilance, the aura of menace that preceded them. Military. And in Colorado Springs, post-plague, that meant the gang.
Grace slid to a stop in front of the barn door and slapped the latch, reaching inside the cool dark to grab the go-bag she’d positioned right beside the door. She slung one strap over her shoulder and pivoted, her whole body coiling for a fresh sprint, when a sudden jerk made the world cartwheel. Her feet flew out from under her, and she landed on her back so hard the air was driven from her lungs. For precious seconds, she could neither move nor breathe.
A huge man stepped out of the barn, still hanging on to the other strap of her go-bag. Like the men behind Verity, he carried a rifle – an AR-15 like the one Piper used. Grace’s brain was on overdrive, cataloguing and analyzing tiny details. His finger rested near the trigger of the rifle, but he didn’t point it at her. His eyes were the coldest blue she’d ever seen, his face a blank, unreadable mask.
A scatter of gravel hit Grace in the face, making her flinch. Persephone had raced ahead, then doubled back. She slid to a stop between Grace and the man, barking wildly. She backed her little rump against Grace and shoved, trying with all her small might to urge Grace to safety while she snarled and snapped. The man stared down at the little dog, then met Grace’s gaze.
“Call it off or I’ll shoot it.”
Grace struggled to sit up and scoot back in the same motion, mind racing, as the first puzzle piece dislodged from the picture she’d formed. That didn’t make any sense. A member of the gang would have already shot Persephone with immediate plans to gut, skin and spit her over a fire for dinner. She hauled the little dog into her lap, scooting back again, then burst into action once more.