“See!” Dustin said happily. “I told you dad’s worried about us! He figures we died and he wants us back!”
Tanya smiled, but the expression never reached her eyes. She massaged her temples in fact, the sign of a pending headache.
“So what happened to them?” Jessie asked. Suddenly the self-discovery and the newness of the situation was not so important to her. She realized she might be losing out on the reward money.
“They won’t be bothering us again,” Carl said.
Stunned expressions on the teenagers’ faces told a story all their own. Carl slipped his rifle back together and worked the action, insuring it was smooth. Finished, he picked up the guns and walked them back over to the cabinet. Everyone else remained silent, questions raging through their minds while they digested what he had told them.
“Why send them away?” Dustin asked. He was happy, he was having a great time in spite of the rib problem. He had kissed his first girl yesterday and it was no simple girl! But still, if he could get back, well, roughing it was neat and all but he’d kill to be in his bed again. Not to mention having the constant ache in his side gone.
“He didn’t send them away,” Jessica said in an overly sympathetic tone. She walked over to him, ready to try and diffuse the situation. She understood what had happened. She knew the kind of guys that would have come looking for them. She did not know why he stopped them, but she was thankful.
“What do you mean?” Dustin asked, looking at her, then Carl, and finally his big sister.
“You wouldn’t have liked these guys, kid,” Carl said. “Ain’t nobody that makes it through a plane crash. And it’s a lot easier carrying back a body than it is dealing with a walking and talking person. Fewer questions that way.”
Dustin’s eyes widened. He trembled a little at the realization of just what that meant. He looked to Tanya and saw that she was a little thunderstruck as well.
“Couldn’t you tell them there’d be a reward if we were brought back safe?” she asked timidly.
“Finder’s fee didn’t specify alive or dead,” Carl said. “Easier dead – and they get to keep whatever might have burned up in the crash.”
“If it burned up in the crash…” Tanya started to ask.
“He means they’d say whatever they found must have burned up, then they’d keep it or sell it,” Dustin interpreted correctly.
“Oh….,” she said, her voice trailing off in depressed thoughtfulness.
“Hey,” Jessie said, standing over her and making her look up. Jessie knelt down in front of the gymnast and gave her a smile. “Let’s take a walk.”
“She ain’t going anywhere,” Carl said, scowling.
“Fine!” Jessie snapped back at him. “How about you take Dusty for a walk? Show him how to be a man or something. Maybe go piss on some rocks to mark your territory?”
Dusty stood up, not knowing what to do but clearly interested in the idea. Carl scowled. “What are you gonna do?”
“I figure she’s already injured, maybe I can beat her around some and then tie her up and have my way with her,” Jessie said.
Dusty laughed nervously, but his laughter faded quickly. It reminded him of a scene from one of Jessie’s movies, I-666: Expressway to Hell. He saw no one else laughing so he stopped and looked nervously at Tanya. “She’s kidding,” he said, as much for her benefit as his own.
“Ya think?” Jessie said, then gave him a wink. “Look, I want to talk without the extra testosterone around here, okay? Then maybe we’ll go powder our noses together or something.”
Carl grunted, clearly annoyed, and then turned to walk to the door. “Come on kid,” he said, grabbing his M4 and then a simple hunting rifle. Dusty’s eyes widened and he hurried to follow, suddenly excited.
When the door shut behind them Jessie turned back to Tanya and sat down next to her on the mattress. “Ever think your life could get this fucked up?” she asked her.
Tanya stared at her, then finally shook her head. “We’re never getting back, are we?”
“Look, we didn’t hit it off right,” Jessie said. “That’s my fault, I get it. I fucked up and tried to pull one over on you guys. I treated you like stupid kids.”
Tanya was nodding her head throughout Jessie’s admissions, and finally Jessie reached up and put her hand on Tanya’s shoulder, making her stiffen at the familiarity. “I just wanted you to stop agreeing with me so much,” the former actress said with a smile. “You know, maybe offer me a little something too?”
Tanya smiled back, breaking through her defenses for a moment. “Well, you’ve made it hard to like you…”
“Your brother likes me,” Jessie said.
“My brother likes your boobs,” Tanya snorted. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. He’s a smart kid, but he’s been sheltered and pampered by my mom all his life. Especially after my accident. He hasn’t had a chance to experience anything without me or her around.”
Jessie nodded. “Yeah, I can tell he doesn’t get out much.”
“Try at all!” Tanya reinforced. “I mean, you’ve got nice boobs and all, so don’t get me wrong. If he had to lust after a pair at least he found a real set instead of one from his collection of porn.”
“Yeah, lucky me,” Jessie said, smiling in a way that hid the hollow feeling Tanya’s words caused in the pit of her stomach. She glanced away to re-center herself, wondering again why she was trying to help.
“Anyhow, I’m sorry I lied to you, okay?” Jessie said, looking back at her. “I am a bitch, and I’m not always nice. You’re helping me see I don’t have a monopoly on those traits.”
Tanya blushed a little at Jessie’s accusation. She knew better than to deny it, even though she thought she could put up a good fight doing so. She was just defending herself and her brother, after all, and Jessie’s actions seemed to justify her behavior.
“You helped me out last night,” Jessie said, staring across the room again. “And it’s been eating at me, trying to figure out why.”
“Why?” Tanya interrupted, surprised. “You were messed up, you needed help. I don’t know what you were doing on the floor, but somebody had to do something and I was the only one able to.”
Now it was Jessie’s turn to nod. “I know. I figured it out a little bit ago. You’re not like me. Maybe you could be, someday, but I hope you never are, for your sake. What you did was something I wouldn’t have been able to understand a week ago. I’m not saying I get it now, but I think I can in time.”
She shook her head and smiled, then lightly clapped her hand on Tanya’s shoulder again. “Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is that I am a tough bitch, and I made you a promise for the wrong reasons. I plan on keeping that promise.”
“And the reasons?”
“Yeah, well, give me some time, I’m still working on those,” Jessie said.
“When I fell, I saw my life flash before my eyes,” Tanya told her after they lapsed in a long moment of silence. They shared it without awkwardness, each feeling like they had more to offer but neither quite sure how to go about it. “I passed out, everything shutting down. It takes about twenty or thirty seconds without a heartbeat for your brain to stop working. You stop forming memories, so anything after that is anybody’s guess. You don’t know what it’s like, those twenty or thirty seconds. The longest and the shortest ones in your life.”
Jessie nodded. “I believe you.”
“I don’t know what happened to you,” Tanya said. “Maybe it was worse. Maybe there’s more than what you’ve told us. Maybe… nah, I don’t know anything about you really. All I can tell you is that I figured out I had to fight, and I’ve been fighting every day ever since then.”
“Come off it,” Jessie said lightly. “You must have busted your ass being able to compete at that level. To try out for the Olympics? That’s something 1 in 10,000 people can do?”
Tanya nodded, but shrugged lightly, the movement reminding her of her stiff back. “Maybe, I don’t know,
it always came so easy to me. I went through the motions but never really had to work that hard at it. After my accident it all changed. I knew what could happen. I knew how lucky I was. So that’s when I got serious about fighting.”
“Must have been one hell of a scare,” Jessie offered.
Tanya nodded. “I still get headaches all the time from the chips. I’ve learned to deal with them, but it’s always there, waiting for me.”
They lapsed into silence again, both having shared a little more than they felt comfortable with. It was a test on both their parts, but neither one knew what it meant to pass or fail or even how the other could pass or fail. Finally Jessie rocked forward and rested on her knees in front of Tanya. She stuck out her hand and smiled.
“We good?” She asked, smiling slightly.
Tanya smiled back, “We’d better be. I’d hate to think the first girl I slept with didn’t respect me the next day.”
Jessie stared at the gymnast, eyes wide and mouth open in surprise. She started to laugh and was quickly joined by Tanya. Finally, she shook her head and wiped the tears out of her eyes. “You be careful, you might not know what you’re getting yourself into.”
Tanya just smiled and shook her head, then positioned herself on the bed to try and get comfortable with the hard piece of metal helping to support her spine. She watched Jessie as the mercurial woman made her way around the strange house, taking care of things and cleaning up for lack of anything better to do. Soon she found herself drifting off again, but for once she felt okay about it, instead of feeling as though her feet were hanging over the edge of a bottomless pit.
Chapter 8
“Khaled, careful with those wires,” Jessie told the Iraqi boy that had been tagging along with her. She smiled at him, thinking that the kid had a chance, now that Iraq was a democracy. Once Iran was dealt with, the region might even know peace. Then Khaled and other children could live without fear.
Jessie cringed. Well, without fear of war, at least. There were some things no kid should ever have to fear, things that she hoped would never happen again.
Lieutenant Thelen approached, smiling. This interview would finish up another series of assignments for another video, then she had been promised a ride in an armored convoy overlooking the Iraq / Iran border, where the US was getting ready to push in. Or at least that was the rumor. It was pretty tense, including a few incidents of twitchy fingers on both sides. She was kind of anxious to get the story on that and see if she could shift from recruiting fluff to doing something interesting.
She saw the man emerge from the building and suddenly everything seemed wrong. She knew what was going to happen, but she could not stop him. She couldn’t yell out a warning. She knew she was powerless to stop it. Screaming inside, she watched him explode again, a flash of white and yellow and red. A hand flew past her, spraying her with blood. The lieutenant slammed into her, bearing her to the ground. Was it his hand she had seen?
She turned, stunned in her dream but able to think clearly at the same time. She tried to stop herself from looking. She didn’t want to see it, she wanted to wake up. “Please,” she begged, “please let me wake up!”
But she didn’t. She saw the boy. He was lying there with his eyes glazing over, half his face torn to the bone and his ear missing. His image, frozen forever in her mind, was not what it should have been. Jessie found herself staring not at Khaled, but at Dustin.
Unable to control herself, she cried in her sleep while her gaze shifted. She looked down, and instead of the final bloody breaths of Lieutenant Thelen, she saw Tanya, her head twisted at an unnatural angle. She was dead, no one could have their neck broken like that and live. Behind Tanya she saw the flaming wreckage of the airplane instead of the ruined debris from shops and vehicles.
Refocusing on Tanya, she saw that her eyes were flat, but still her mouth opened and she spoke, “I’m dead Jessie, why didn’t you save me?”
* * * *
Tanya woke up, feeling something had changed. Something was wrong. She looked around in the dark room, trying to figure it out. Was it her nerves? Was she finally going crazy trapped in this wreck of a shack? Sure, she appreciated Carl and how he was helping them out. She even appreciated Jessie’s frenzied cleaning effort yesterday as she tried to keep herself busy. She had really appreciated the look and pain on Carl’s face when he and Dustin had returned and he saw how neat and organized everything was. Or at least it was neat and organized compared to the ultimate bachelor pad it had been.
Now she heard her brother breathing as he slept, occasionally moaning or groaning a little. She hoped it was from the pain of his ribs. She didn’t want him to be in pain, she just was more afraid to think of what else might cause him to moan in his sleep. She kept looking and listening and saw Carl sitting in his chair. He sat so still it was almost unnatural.
He moved finally when she scooted over and stood up. She knew he’d tell her to lay down, but she was tired of it. Sure, she had a major injury, one most people had no chance of surviving. She was special though, thanks to modern science and an ultra-wealthy father with contacts in the right places. She felt the stiffness in her back. It was always worse when she got up. Her back would swell, making it painful to twist her neck too far or even move her shoulders if it involved her shoulder blades.
“Gotta take a leak?” Carl asked her, his voice gravelly but low, somehow blending in with Dusty’s soft snores and the ambient noise of their shelter.
“No… something woke me up,” she said, hugging her arms over herself. Carl’s idea of heating and cooling was pretty much non-existent. Blankets or clothes for warmth at night, darkness and keeping the hot winds out during the day. She’d been wearing nothing but a borrowed pair of his pants and the gauze wrapped tightly around her upper body and the piece of steel for days now, it made it cold at night when she tossed her blankets aside.
He nodded toward Jessie’s room. “She’s been making noises. Sometimes words, but I can’t make ‘em out.”
“You check on her?” she asked in a concerned voice. She stared at Jessie’s door, wondering what was going on.
He shook his head. Tanya frowned, then turned and started towards it. “Be careful,” he warned her.
Tanya nodded stiffly, then stopped. She turned back to him. “Careful? Of what? She’s a wreck.”
“Yeah, be careful of that.”
“What do you mean?”
He stayed silent for a long moment, long enough that Tanya began to think she’d never get an answer out of him. A few seconds before she would have either asked again or turned away he spoke. “She’s fucked up in ways none of us know about, not even her. Might be better to send her out into the desert and let her find her own place.”
“I thought you were the hero? You can take out four armed men without breaking a sweat, what’s a screwed up woman like her going to do to you?” Tanya challenged.
“I ain’t no hero,” he growled at her.
Tanya withered a little under his glare, but it only took her a moment to find her steel and blow it off. “Where I come from, if something needs to be done it gets done,” she said. “That means if someone needs help, I guess she’d best be helped.”
He grunted - it was either a chuckle, an acknowledgement, or a scowl, Tanya could not tell. “What she needs I ain’t got enough left to spare. Them that’s got it, you and your brother maybe, she’ll suck it out of you and then maybe that ain’t enough for her,” he told her.
Tanya frowned. She could not imagine running out of compassion. Oh sure, she hadn’t liked Jessie from the start, but the woman had a way of getting under her skin and growing on her. Especially now that she was showing signs of regretting some of the things she’d done.
“Maybe I’m still a stupid kid,” Tanya said, “but if it’s as bad out here as you guys keeping telling me, shouldn’t we do whatever we can to help her? How do expect people to change if you don’t help them?”
He snorted this time, a
nd she was sure it was a derisive laugh. “Change? If you ain’t holding a gun, then you ain’t changing nothing.”
“You been out here a long time, Carl,” Tanya said after a long silent moment. “Maybe too long. I appreciate you taking us in, you probably saved us as much or more than Jessie did.”
Carl grunted again. She was becoming a master of his monosyllabic language. “I know, she was helping herself first, not us, but it all worked out. My point is… well…”
Tanya trailed off thoughtfully. What was her point? Her mom always knew what to do. She wished she were there to offer some advice. Her eyes burned at the thought of it. She turned away, sniffing at the tears that came out of nowhere and threatened to overwhelm her.
Carl stayed silent behind her, not understanding and not wanting to be drawn into whatever it was that was bothering her.
Tanya closed her eyes and focused her breathing. Just like before she performed she figured. She centered herself. “My mom would know what to do,” she said, turning back to face him. “She’s gone though, and since she’s gone I had to take care of things. I guess that’s true now.”
Again Carl said nothing. If she was expecting a challenge from him, she was disappointed. He shrugged, at least, and for her that was good enough.
She turned her back on him and went to Jessie’s door. She almost knocked, then heard her whimpering on the other side. She turned the knob and went in quietly, shutting the door behind her. Tanya had to wait a few moments for her eyes to adjust in the even darker closet. She moved forward and stood over Jessie as she watched her head roll back and forth on the pillow. Her lips moved, whispering silent words.
Tanya leaned down next to her cot, dropping to her knees to listen. She heard Jessie then, feeling the breath of her words even as she managed to make them out. Jessie kept saying over and over a single word, “Please!”
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