Bring On the Dusk

by M. L. Buchman

  Claudia’s head hurt less and she was hungry. A bowl of soup arrived along with an admonishment not to try standing up yet, but she was able to sit up as the others crowded around her, perching on her bed and the empty ones to either side.

  “So, you survived one,” Lola Maloney said once the doctor was gone.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But then she studied their faces and could see it. Lola, Connie, Kee—they’d all survived a black-in-black. Of course they had, they’d flown with Emily Beale, the master pilot of the 5D. These were the women who’d flown with her.

  Even… “You too?”

  Dilya grimaced. “Sort of by accident. I was just trying not to lose my new mom.”

  Kee wrapped her arm around Dilya’s shoulders and softened as she did every time they were together. They were of a similar height, but that was the only thing they had in common. Kee was a curvaceous Eurasian sharpshooter from the streets of LA with narrow dark eyes and severely black straight hair. Dilya was a dark-skinned Uzbekistani war orphan with round eyes of piercing green and had a slenderness that spoke of still having a ways to grow. Yet arm in arm as they presently sat, they were no less family.

  Trisha leaned in to whisper with one of her winks and saucy grins. Everyone else leaned in to listen.

  “She didn’t just survive it. She led it.”

  “Whoa!” was the universal reaction around the room.

  “Only Emily ever led any of ours,” Connie observed. The others all looked at Claudia in surprise but, she noted, none of them was asking how Connie knew that. Connie simply knew things and that was enough.

  “So, Captain Casperson…” Lola looked down at her as she finished her soup and set it aside. “You led one and brought your team out alive with no one knowing what you did.”

  Claudia nodded carefully.

  “You know how I hate it when Trisha is right, but I’m thinking that maybe you really are goddamn good enough to belong with the women of SOAR.”

  * * *

  Michael stood outside the door to the infirmary and listened.

  Captain Claudia Jean Casperson really was that good. Her laugh that spilled forth moments later pulled at him. It wasn’t the hysterical loss of composure at the base of Nell. Or sheer delight at something new. It was a sound of welcome.

  It was not a welcome he could accept, no matter how it drew him. He was Delta. He was “other.” He’d been too long in the field and now understood that. There was no path back from so far afield to what was happening in that room.

  They were bonding. Stories of Emily, of themselves, of their husbands. They were community.

  He was not. He had a team; he had missions. He couldn’t afford community. And he wouldn’t risk exposing Claudia to that. She deserved better.

  She deserved not to wake up at night and wonder if her lover, if her husband, if Colonel Michael Gibson lay dead, bleeding out in some godforsaken hellhole.

  Claudia Jean Casperson deserved better than him.

  Chapter 32

  Michael sat at the top of Nell. The warm summer breeze had been replaced by one of the chill fogs on which the redwoods thrived. Yet he stayed. When darkness fell he didn’t even bother rigging a Treeboat, merely zipped his jacket up tight to his chin, tucked it down into his safety harness, and dug his fists deep into the pockets.

  The storm that had been sweeping in from the Pacific as they left Nell aboard Emily’s helicopter had been short but brutally sharp. Several Titans had fallen. Two near Arcata, one up in Jedediah, and another here in Del Norte. It was a devastating loss, four of fewer than fifty.

  Nell had survived, but not unscathed. One of her major tops—though not the highest—had broken and crashed down, only to snag in the lower branches. Some of the wreckage had broken through to make a wide debris field around the base. Some of it still hung here, leaving the upper canopy clogged with hangers and widowmakers. He should never have climbed her.

  Years ago, a friend had closed the entire Atlas Grove to climbing—including a half-dozen Titans grouped together—because of this exact situation. His friend had waited for years before the branches had finally released their shattered pieces, many two feet across and dozens of yards long, to crash down into a debris ring around the tree’s base before he dared climb there again.

  Nell was unclimbable now. Michael had never once in his life pointlessly risked his life, not until he’d made this climb. He’d taken a thirty-foot whipper when a branch he’d been anchored on had let go. Only the fact that he’d crossed over to the other side of a main branch before he fell, and that he’d been fast enough with a knife to cut himself free before the broken limb had dragged him down, had saved his life.

  So, he sat for the last time atop this tree even though he knew he’d never again find peace here. It would never be the same.

  He didn’t begrudge Claudia Jean Casperson that loss. Every branch here was filled with the memory of her laughter, of the gifts she’d given him.

  His resolve had been softening throughout the mission; he’d been wondering if he was right in his plan to push her aside for her own good. But then he’d seen her fall from the sky. He’d cradled her lifeless form for hours and waited until he knew she’d be okay. He knew the pain of fearing connection to another human being and the loss that could cause.

  Michael would never do that to her.

  He’d left the infirmary doorway without entering. Packed his gear and arranged transport off the Peleliu. One the flight deck, he’d taken Bill aside and told him he was now the lead Delta liaison position with SOAR’s 5D.

  Bill hadn’t understood.

  Michael should have expected that. What he hadn’t expected was the massive fist that had crashed into his jaw moments later.

  He refused to rub it though it still ached. Michael had put in for some of the massive amounts of leave he’d only rarely taken and come back to the redwoods. To Nell. His parents’ kind questions about the woman he’d taken aloft just the week before stung. He’d been unable to answer. He’d simply taken the truck keys, turned around, and walked back out the door.

  They even still had her duffel. They’d been unable to reach him to ask where to send it because he’d been in communication lockdown for the mission. It rested on the passenger seat of the truck parked in the brush down by Highway 101.

  He sat through a second sunrise and sunset. He should eat. Drink water. Climb into a sleeping bag.

  Instead he watched the stars poking in and out of the fog.

  Half of what he did was practice for missions; the other half of the time was spent planning for success and analyzing failures. So, perhaps it was time to analyze why he and Claudia Jean Casperson had failed.

  * * *

  Michael climbed down from the tree, stripping the climbing gear behind him as he went and testing each branch thoroughly to make sure he’d reach the ground alive.

  He crawled out through the thick brush and dew-wet ferns to the truck. He backed it out of its hiding place and began driving. It wasn’t until past Arcata that he realized he was headed south rather than north toward his parents’ home.

  Somewhere past San Francisco he became aware of where he was going. He wouldn’t think about why or what to expect there. He simply drove and waited for enough of the road to pass beneath his wheels for him to arrive.

  * * *

  Bumble Bee was a small town in the desert, but not dusty like Somalia or Azerbaijan. The air had a crisp clarity, dry and clear. To Michael it felt as if he could see forever.

  The blue sky above the redwood trees was almost always soft with moisture, sometimes as clouds, sometimes simply as a softening of the blue. In the Arizona desert the blue was a slap in the face. It was as if you’d never seen the true color blue before and now you’d been given a new sense just for that sole purpose.

  A bright
yellow sign, almost the only color not found in nature here, informed him there were seventeen people, forty-five horses, and a hundred and sixty-one cattle in Bumble Bee. Also that the town had been here since the Civil War a century and a half earlier. Some of the buildings had fallen, some looked as if they would fall the next time an overly stout squirrel ran by. A few were solid though—some of stone, some adobe. Just a scattering of human signs amid the vastness of the arroyo-and-ridge chaparral.

  Michael found her home just before sunset. The old wooden house had a tar-shingle roof and “Casperson” carved into a wooden post by the road. It wasn’t her home, but it was her house. Like him, she didn’t live here; she only came to life out in the desert.

  No lights. No car, though the tire tracks in the short driveway were recent, not more than a few days old. It was a small one-story house that might have once been blue. He shaded the window against the bright sunlight and inspected the dim interior. While the outside of the glass was coated with a thin film of dust, the interior looked neat enough.

  His knock went unanswered. When he knelt to pick the lock, it looked frozen with age and disuse. He turned the knob and the door swung quietly inward. No need to lock your door in a town of nineteen people. No intruders would come calling.

  He looked down at the narrow threshold and hesitated. It should be sacrosanct. None would cross this strip of wood uninvited. No one except a colonel in the U.S. military hoping to find some answers.

  There were few answers in the small house.

  It was a two-up, two-back arrangement. Enter into the living room, kitchen left. Two bedrooms to the back down a narrow hallway of beige paint, rear exit straight ahead letting in a thin light through the dirty panes of the back door.

  The interior was clean, dusty but far from abandoned. A well-worn couch and two equally weary chairs. Claudia’s appeared to be the right-hand chair because it had a stack of books, a close reading light, and a small table that would hold a teacup and a small plate of food. The other chair and the sofa hadn’t been used in a long time.

  In the kitchen he found no food other than some canned goods. The floor creaked down the hallway. Even stepping only on the nailed rafter lines, it still squeaked at his every step. No silent entry here.

  The larger bedroom was stripped bare, while the smaller one had a single bed, chair, and dresser. Neat as a pin. No, neat as a soldier’s bedroom. There were no certificates, no knickknacks, yet the room was far from barren. The walls had been covered with photographs of the desert: unbelievable sunsets, a racing rabbit with hind legs blurred in movement, a towering saguaro cactus with bold, white blooms on the tip of each arm. An old horse looking at the photographer. Her desert brought to life inside.

  In the corner stood a beautiful wooden recurve bow and a worn leather quiver of arrows. The goddess hunter. He could feel her nearby, as if she was watching over him.

  Michael returned to the living room from studying the images as the last of the daylight failed. He lay down on the braided rag rug that covered the old wooden floor and settled in to wait for first light.

  * * *

  The heavy tread on the front stoop had Michael rolling to his feet. He had no sidearm, was even disoriented for a moment until he recalled where he was. Claudia’s living room.

  An old man, once a large one, stood at the front door blocking the late-morning light. Michael didn’t recall sleeping. Here in Claudia’s house, his sleep had been long and dreamless. Restful. So different from the tortured catnaps that had barely sustained him since leaving the Black Sea.

  “You can’t be squatting here, son. This house belongs to someone.” The big man’s voice rasped with age but you could still hear its firm core. A shotgun dangled in the crook of the man’s arm; no real threat, as Michael could disarm him long before he could get it raised and his finger to the trigger.

  “I’m looking for…a friend.”

  “What makes you think your friend is here?”

  Michael liked that the man was careful enough not to reveal the resident was female.

  “I served”—he winced at the past tense, but pushed through—“with Captain Casperson.”

  The man didn’t ease his stance and neither did Michael.

  “And would she be pleased to see you asleep on her floor like you owned it?”

  Michael had to consider that for a moment. Then he knew the answer to the first of the many questions he had. “I have to say, sir, I rather expect she would not.”

  The old man harrumphed but still made no move to raise the weapon. “When was the last time you ate, son?”

  “Been a while, sir.”

  “It’s coming up lunchtime. You come on over, and we’ll see about fixing at least that part of it. Be sure to close the door behind you.”

  Michael made a guess about who this might be. “Would that be to keep your wandering cows out of her kitchen, sir?”

  Mr. Johns nodded as he moved off the stoop and waited for Michael with only the slightest hint of a smile. “That. And she has a habit of shooting vermin with that bow and arrow of hers.”

  Michael closed the door softly and followed the old man down the road.

  * * *

  They sat out on his back porch talking well into the afternoon. The dry hills rolled out into the distance, with scrub tree, reddish sand, and jutting bare rock defining the steep hills above dry arroyos. The stark, dark green and long stretches of exposed earth were such a sharp contrast to the thickness of a redwood forest that Michael felt as if he were floating just a little above the world and looking down on it.

  Long after the tuna fish sandwiches were gone, Mr. Johns admitted that he “might have seen Claudia pass through a few days ago.”

  “You were the one who taught her to fly?”

  “She tell you that?” The man nursed a smoking pipe, Michael a lemonade.

  “I can see the old Bell 47 up behind your barn there. She flies like she had an exceptional teacher early on.” The front bubble of the helicopter was barely visible from where they sat, but it was enough. It was also enough to see that no rotor blades were still attached to the old craft.

  “I taught her how to fly, but the way that girl flies, she found all of that herself.”

  “Best I’ve ever seen.”

  Michael liked the old man. His silences were a comfortable pace for him, no matter how badly he wanted to find Claudia. He was enjoying this time, but he was starting to feel itchy.

  “You’ve seen a lot fly?”

  “Yes, sir. The very best. I’ve seen them not come home too.”

  Again the heavy nod. Clearly the man had served, but if he didn’t want to talk about it, Michael wasn’t going to ask.

  “She’s never had a man come after her before.”

  Michael pondered that a bit. “Still not sure how she’ll take it that I have.”

  “There’s the rub, Colonel.” For he’d insisted on calling Michael by his rank once he’d revealed it. “I’m not a big fan of sending extra burdens her way.”

  “Neither am I. But I have…things I’ve done that don’t feel right. I’m not used to that. Claudia, she has such clear vision. I’m hoping she can see the sense of it.”

  “And I’m betting that she’s at the center of the sense of it.”

  “She is, sir.”

  Mr. Johns inspected him a while longer. Then, with his pipe stem, Mr. Johns pointed up into the hills.

  “She left two days before you came in. Might be at the Castle Creek Wilderness up that way. I can lend you a horse just as I lent her one. Only seems fair.”

  “Never learned to ride, sir. Don’t really have time now.” He rose to his feet.

  “You’re just going to walk into the desert, young man?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That isn’t some playground out there.”

&
nbsp; “I’ve walked through much worse.”

  He returned to his truck and assembled a small pack with water, food, and a few other supplies. As he crossed by the back porch on his way toward the hills, the old man stopped him and inspected him closely.

  “Are you the one that did it to her?”

  There was no need to ask what had been done to her. He still had the lingering ache of Bill’s powerful blow if he needed a reminder. He let his silence be his answer.

  “Expect you don’t want my opinion much, but it looks like you done the same to yourself, young man. Walk soft. She’s the best woman I ever met besides my wife.”

  Michael nodded and turned for the hills.

  Claudia was the best woman he’d ever met too. That was the problem.

  * * *

  Michael started in the general direction that the old cattleman had indicated. Over the rise, he found a worn trail. The thorny brush was dense, unbroken along the sides of the trail, no hoof marks in the dirt. No one had passed this way in a long time.

  He backtracked and found two other likely trails. Pulling a shirt out of his pack, he tied it around his head and let it fall over his shoulders to keep the sun off. He ranged a hundred yards up each trail. On the northern track he found a single preserved hoofprint in the soft sand. It had a horseshoe.

  Even at a trot it took him until sunset until he knew she must be close. Less erosion of the prints. False leads along a streambed had cost him more than an hour. Guessing that the stream was the last water he was likely to see for a while, he drank his bottles dry, refilled them, and dropped in a couple of purification tablets.

  She’d crossed over two ridgelines on her way and skirted the edge of a steep canyon. If the Sonoran Desert was this hot in May, it must be brutal in summer. The shirt he’d been using as a headband was white with salt that he’d sweated out during the long afternoon and evening of tracking. He popped a couple of salt pills.

  Michael scanned the three possible trails and two ridgelines that lay ahead of him in the last of the light but could discern no clues. If she had a fire, she knew how to control the smoke.