One boot half off, Rae looked up at Kellen in dismay. “Everybody likes me!”
“That’s true.” Kellen took the first boot. “Everybody who knows you likes you. But maybe someone is on drugs and sees you as a threat. You know about people on drugs, right?”
“They taught us in school.” Rae got very solemn. “Drugs make people do bad things.”
“Right. Some people have problems in their minds, even without drugs, and they might be afraid of you and strike out.”
Rae frowned at Kellen. “Like in baseball?”
“No, I mean hit you.” Kellen accepted the second boot and used a nylon zip tie to fasten them to her backpack. “Grab you and try to take you somewhere you don’t want to go. What could you do to get away?”
“Run?” Rae jumped to her feet.
“That is a great answer!” Kellen took Rae’s athletic shoes out of the bag and knelt down beside her. She straightened Rae’s socks, made sure her athletic shoes were tied tight, and while she did, she listened to the sounds of the forest. Birds chirped. Small creatures scurried. An occasional breeze made the high branches creak. To her, it sounded normal, without threat or ambush.
She knew better now.
Again she thought, Oh, Max, I’m so sorry. Max took responsibility for the safety of everyone in his family. She remembered when she had saved his niece from kidnapping, everyone in the Di Luca family had toasted her, but it was Max who swore his allegiance to her. Even if they had never become lovers, she still had no doubt he would have protected and cared for her.
What would he do to keep his daughter safe?
“Come on,” she said to Rae. “Let’s keep walkin’ and talkin’.”
Rae put her hand in Kellen’s. “I like talking with you, Mommy.”
“I like talking with you, too, Rae.” Kellen looked at the little hand in hers. How did the child get so grubby so fast? “How about this? Let’s say someone knocked you down and sat on you and you couldn’t kick them. Do you see anything around here you could grab to poke in their eye?”
“A stick!” Rae yelled and broke away to grab a broken branch off the forest floor.
“Good girl.”
“I’m going to use this as a walking stick. It’s too long. I’m going to break it. Wait, Mommy.” Rae swung the branch as hard as she could against the trunk of a tree, missed and whacked Kellen across the thighs.
“Ouch!” Kellen said.
Rae’s eyes filled with mortified tears.
No. No crying. Kellen was proud of her calm when she said, “That didn’t work too well to break the stick, but it would hurt an attacker.” She rubbed her leg. She could feel the bruise rising. “Try again and hit the trunk this time.”
Rae did. The end broke off. She said, “Mommy, I’m sorry.”
“I know. You’ll be more careful in the future. Now you have a great walking stick and you can hike even faster!”
“Yeah!” Rae ran about twenty feet up the path, Kellen hot on her heels, before she slowed again.
Kellen figured, Keep up the conversation. “What if you want to whack a bad guy in the mouth and break his teeth? Could you find something to use?”
“A rock!” Rae looked hard for a rock and finally scuffed one out of the hard-packed dirt.
“You’re good at this! What if a man was running at you, going to hit you with his fist?”
With awesome calm and logic, Rae said, “If he was fat like Zio Placido, I’d climb a tree.”
“If you’re fast enough, that might work. If they manage to grab you, break off a branch and poke them in the eyes. Never stop fighting, Rae. Never give in to the bad guys.”
Rae stopped in the middle of the path, turned and faced Kellen. “Mommy, why?”
“Why are we talking about this?”
“Yes. Aren’t you going to take care of me?”
“For as long as I’m able, I promise.” Kellen urged her to turn and walk up the path again. “But I won’t always be where you are, so you need to learn to take care of yourself. Come on, let’s go.”
“And if you’re hurt, I need to take care of you.”
Uh-oh. That wasn’t at all the conclusion Kellen wanted her to draw. “You’re little, and what’s really important is knowing there’s no such thing as a fair fight.” Kellen got to the heart of the message she wanted to convey. “There are only fights you win and fights you lose. Once a fight is started, if you lose it, you’re going to get hurt.”
“Daddy says instead of fighting, to use my words.”
“Good advice, and I agree.” Sometimes it even worked, and those were the times when the fight didn’t start. “I don’t think we can talk to these guys who are chasing us. There are more of them, they’re men and so they’re bigger and stronger than we are, and they have a lot of guns and mean fists.”
“I want to take karate!”
Kellen imagined solemn children in white gis and white belts, lined up and listening to their master. “That’s a good idea.”
“Grandma says little girls don’t take karate, and she says anyway I don’t listen.”
Kellen made a note to herself to have a talk about karate classes for Rae. “How will you learn to listen if you don’t try?”
“Yeah!”
Kellen managed to carry the discussion for another half hour and an arduous uphill trek. Then the path straightened and conversation moved on to:
What are we having for lunch?
I’m tired of peanut butter.
Are we there yet?
I’m not tired.
What’s for lunch?
I’m bored.
Why did we eat all the huckleberries?
What’s for dinner?
Are we there yet?
By late afternoon, Kellen knew she needed to find someplace for them to stop, to rest, to be safe, because apparently the headhunters had decided to let Rae drive her crazy to make their jobs easier.
Things were working out for the Mercenaries.
18
Kellen found her a place to rest and be safe in a small flat spot cradled at the top of a cluster of boulders ten feet above the surrounding forest floor. Up here, the rainwater had drained away from the sandy soil, leaving it damp but not unpleasant. Up here, Rae couldn’t ask if they were there yet, because obviously they weren’t, and even if hoards of mercenaries attacked, Kellen could hold them off for quite a while before she ran out of ammunition.
But mostly, in an hour it would be dark and she could roll out the tarp and her one-person sleeping bag, hide with her kid for the night, eat and sleep and refresh. If they put in some hard hiking the next day, even with constant questions and conversation, they could reach the Restorer and...
She looked at her daughter, drooping against the trunk of a tree. “Come on. It’s like we’re birds, and I’ll help you get up there to our own private nest.”
“I don’t need help. I’m not tired.” Rae sounded cranky.
“I know. Let’s get up there and eat and sleep.”
“I’m not tired!”
“But Mommy is.” Kellen pushed Rae up the steep, narrow, slick path to the top. Then dragged herself and her bag and the head up after her. That head was really starting to creep her out. No matter which way she stashed it, eyes stared at her, either the maiden, the mother, or if she caught an unlucky glimpse, the goddess. She was going to be so glad to deliver that thing to the Restorer...
“Mommy?”
Kellen realized she had locked eyes with the goddess, and was hypnotized by that wild angry stare. Not good. Not now. She pulled the jar of peanut butter out of the duffel bag, opened it and stuck her finger in. She took a scoop, put it in her mouth, and passed the jar to Rae.
Rae giggled. “Mommy! We’re not supposed to use our fingers!”
“In a m
inute, I’ll cut up an apple and find the protein bars.” Which were crumbs by now, but why worry about that technicality? “Right now, let’s get some good stuff into us.”
Rae giggled again and dipped into the peanut butter.
That giggle. Maybe the forest muffled the sound. Probably it carried for miles. “You know what would be a good idea? If we had some kind of alarm that would warn us if the bad guys were coming.”
“I like sirens! Can we have a siren?”
“Did you bring one?”
“No, but I’m not the mommy!”
The kid had a point. The mommy should have come better prepared, and when the mommy got back to civilization, the mommy was going to personally undertake a trip to Washington, DC, to place her boot up Nils Brooks’s uncaring ass. “Since we don’t have a siren, I can only think of one thing that would surprise these guys and make them yell. What if we built a giant spider web and strung it on the bushes around our nest?”
Rae licked her fingers one by one, thoroughly removing the peanut butter. “How?” She looked around. “Are there giant spiders?”
“Better than that.” Kellen slowly drew Rae’s blankie out of the bag. “We have lots of yarn here. If we take this apart—”
Rae lunged and grabbed. “No!”
Kellen released the blankie. “Your grandma can put it back together for you afterward.”
Rae hugged it to her chest. “No!”
“Your blankie wants to keep us safe. It has magic love woven into it to keep us safe.”
“That is bullshit!” The kid was too smart.
“Rae. You don’t say that.” My God. Kellen sounded like...like a parent. Like her aunt. Like my own mother.
Rae stuck out her jaw and looked like that photo of sulky little Cecilia that always made her mother laugh. The memory caused such an uprush of emotion that, before she realized it, Kellen had tears on her cheeks.
“Mommy?” Rae sounded truly horrified. “I’m sorry. I won’t say it again.”
“It’s okay, sweetie. I’m just tired.” And scared to death. Not for herself, but for Rae. Kellen had never had a mission like this. Not in the stony depths of Afghanistan, not in the sandy deserts of Kuwait, not in the terrorist attack in Germany. She was home, in the US. Everything was supposed to be safe and easy. She wasn’t supposed to be staring at a seven-year-old and feeling...feeling...things.
She didn’t want to feel things. She didn’t want to remember... Afghanistan, a twist of metal, the smell of burned flesh. She didn’t want to know that if she failed, death would follow. Death...
“Mommy?”
“It’s okay.” Kellen wiped at her eyes. “Let’s call it bull pucky from now on. About your blankie. Honey, we have to use it for protection. If I could figure out anything else to do, I swear I would. Your grandma can put your blankie back together. Please? Let’s do this.”
In slow motion, Rae offered the blanket to Kellen. “You.”
“What?” Kellen was so confused.
“When we get home, you make it again.”
And now horrified. “You want me to take the yarn and knit you a blanket?”
“Crochet.”
“What? Crochet? I don’t know how to crochet. Your grandma—”
Rae crossed her arms over her chest. “Grandma says any idiot can learn to crochet.”
Remembering the events of the day, Kellen muttered, “I have the qualifications then.” Louder, she said, “If I promise to crochet the yarn into a blankie again, you’ll let me use it as a trap?”
“A cobweb! Promise!”
“Oh, pucky. I promise.” Kellen began to unravel the stained yellow blankie. What had she got herself into now?
Rae doubled over with belated laughter. “Mommy, you said pucky!”
Kellen looked at her daughter sideways. “If you don’t tell Grandma I said that, I won’t tell Grandma you said bullshit.”
“Deal.”
Kellen wound the yarn around branches that hung over their rocky refuge and down around the perimeter, sure that if someone stumbled on their hiding place, the yarn would indeed act as a spider web and trap them long enough to give Kellen time to wake and defend them. When she got down to the last six-inch square of crocheted yarn, she tied off the thread, clipped it and handed the square to Rae. “Here. This is the heart of your blankie. It will keep you safe.”
Rae snatched it and cuddled it to her cheek. “Oh, blankie, I love you,” she whispered.
Kellen felt like a scumbag. When she was a soldier, she thought she was doing the hard job. No one ever told her being a mother was a wiggling wormy bag of guilt, worry and difficult decisions.
Well, except Max. He’d made it clear enough, and now Kellen knew—he hadn’t exaggerated. If anything, he had toned it down. “Do you remember all the stuff we talked about today? About defending yourself with sticks and rocks?”
“Sure!”
“There’s one more thing. If I tell you to drop or hide or be small, do you know what to do?”
“Hide?”
“Drop means get flat on the ground, right away. Hide means look for someplace like our huckleberry bushes. Be small means get low and wrap yourself into the smallest ball you can be.”
Rae clutched her tiny square of blanket tighter. “Because those bad guys are all around?”
Okay, maybe Kellen shouldn’t have mentioned this now, when dusk slipped through the trees and the forest rustled with the movement of owls and bats and... “Right! Let’s take off your shoes and socks and put them way down at the bottom of the bag.”
“I thought we hung them on the branch of a tree.” Rae sounded suspicious, as if Kellen was arbitrarily changing the rules.
“No, because today you didn’t get them wet.”
“Why do we put them at the bottom of the bag?”
So snakes don’t climb in them. “To keep them warm for in the morning.” She helped Rae out of her clothes and into the sleeping bag. As they got ready to sleep at last, the sun disappeared behind the mountain. The cold descended to nip at their noses, and Kellen listened too hard for movements below.
Even Rae seemed to hear the quiet, for she whispered, “Mommy, it’s dark out here.” Rae shivered, pulled herself into a little ball and cuddled her tiny scrap of blankie.
“No, it’s not. Look up. Have you ever seen so many stars? The sky is nothing but light from all over the universe, coming directly to us.” There! That was comforting and mother-like. Wasn’t it?
Rae didn’t sound impressed. “Tell me a story.”
Right off the top of her head, the stories Kellen remembered involved wolves, lost children and wicked stepmothers. Out here in the wilderness, those seemed wrong. So she said, “My cousin was the bravest, strongest person I ever met.”
“What was her name?”
Kellen hesitated. “Kellen.”
“The same as you?”
“Exactly the same as me. Only I wasn’t like her. Not then. I was a big scaredy-cat. I married a mean man—”
“Like Bluebeard?”
“Yes. Like Bluebeard.” Who had told her the old scary fairy tale about the serial wife-killer Bluebeard? “My husband wanted to hurt me, but Kellen stood up to him and I escaped.”
“What happened to Kellen?”
“She died.” Such a horrible memory, not one to recount to a child. “But in her dying, she taught me to be strong and brave, too.”
“That’s why you’re ThunderFlash. I’m LightningBug, and I learned to be strong and brave from you.” Rae snuggled closer.
“I...I guess you’re right. Kellen lives on in both of us, and what goes around comes around, even in a good way.”
19
The next morning, Kellen gathered the yarn that had made up Rae’s blanket, rolled it into a ball and packed it at the bottom
of her backpack. “The safest place,” she told Rae. She packed their jar of peanut butter and their apple core, and was folding their tarp when she heard a great rustling down the path, a rumbling of something large rolling up the slope. She heard grunts. She heard a rattle and a spontaneous curse. She looked at Rae and put her finger to her lips.
Rae mimicked her.
Keeping her head low, Kellen peeked over the edge of the stones and saw the first of a group of mountain bikers laboring up the slope and into the flat at the base of their hideout.
One of the women called, “I’ve got to stop here. That last ledge punctured my tire.”
The leader held up her hand. “Roberts needs a break. Looks like a good spot for a rest.”
Everyone nodded, gasping deep breaths.
The bikes ground to a halt.
MOUNTAIN BIKING GROUP:
FOUR MALES, SIX FEMALES, IN GOOD SHAPE. HELMETS, GOOD EQUIPMENT. LEADER IS SOFT-SPOKEN, EMPHATIC, COMMANDS WITHOUT BEING BOSSY.
They leaned their bikes against trees, pulled out bags of granola, rolls of dried fruit and energy bars, complained about their knees, the upkeep of the trail and swore they would never take this route again. They were grinning and obviously enjoying themselves.
Kellen slid down to sit on her rear and look at Rae. In a soft voice, she said, “Kid, we’ve got it made.” Standing, she called down to the bikers, “Hi. My daughter and I have been hiking this fabulous wilderness, and it’s great to see other people enjoying it, too!”
Startled, the bikers looked up as one entity. Two of the men and two of the women reached for tools and held them like weapons. Everyone studied her, wary and hostile.
Then Rae bobbed up and smiled. “Hi. My mommy and I are bonding!”
The tension oozed out of the group, but not all at once and not completely. Not from everyone. Uh-oh. “Is something wrong?” Kellen asked.
One of the guys, the one who still held a tool in his hand, said, “Come down and we’ll talk.”
Kellen studied them again. She didn’t think they were violent, but something was definitely going on. Yet she had committed when she spoke to them, so she said, “Let me finish packing and we’ll be down in a sec.”
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