Anna lightly touched down on the ground and Rodney thumped down after her, his feet not nearly as comfortable on the gravel as hers seemed to be. He winced at pain in both feet, but Anna smiled, still apparently determined to slip away, as if taking great care that he not cling to her now, or in the days and years ahead. She did stop for a slim moment, looking hard at him for just a half second, as if to seal what had passed between them and to make a clean break. Then she did something surprising; she reached her right hand toward Rodney’s sore feet and hesitated another second, as the pain disappeared entirely from where gravel had dug into his soles. While Rodney was distracted by this amazing trick, Anna vanished into the darkness.
Rodney stood staring into the night, his linear, rational mind convinced that he just needed to focus, to squint harder, to tip his head at just the right angle to see her, even if to see her in the distance, walking away. She was wearing white, surely he could see her no matter how dark the night. But no, she was gone, having disappeared with astounding speed.
The relief in his feet attracted his attention again. How did she do that? Was it real? Did she do, or say, any of those things? There he stood in his boxers and t-shirt, starting to feel the cold night air penetrate his skin, knowing that he had not been dreaming. Then he heard a woman’s voice again.
“Are you alright? I thought I heard voices. Were you talking to someone?” Emma asked. She approached the side of the van, a quilt from Rodney’s lean-to wrapped around her. Rodney noted that she wasn’t carrying her gun, an unusual choice, given the dangers they had all survived in recent years, and given the understandable vigilance she had displayed when she first approached him early in the evening.
Rodney took two quick steps toward the van and grabbed a blanket from the foot of his sleeping bag, shaking it out to full length and then throwing it around his shoulders, both out of modesty and in defense against the penetrating chill. He looked at Emma and tried to decide what to say.
Emma seemed to sense Rodney’s dilemma. She looked into the darkness, as if hoping to find confirmation there for something she guessed.
Emma broke the hesitant silence. “A couple of weeks ago,” she said, “Daniel and I were riding in the back of a truck, driven by these two men that had agreed to give us a ride. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but I was exhausted from walking and we hadn’t found a working vehicle yet.”
Still cold, Rodney flipped the latch on the second van door and swung it open, he climbed into the opening, getting his feet off of the cool gravel and into his blanket. He patted the spot next to him and Emma obliged, taking the same squatting posture, kicking off her untied boots and pulling her feet inside the quilt.
Emma continued. “Daniel didn’t trust them from the start, but he didn’t have enough energy to convince me to refuse their offer. So we both just kept alert, expecting the worst.” She paused here and looked at Rodney, as if to assess her listener all over again. Then she forged ahead. “I know what I saw next, and Daniel saw it too, but I can’t, for the life of me, explain it. This woman just suddenly landed in the back of that pickup truck next to us. She looked me square in the eyes and said ‘You are in danger here; you must get out as soon as I stop this truck. You just run, both of you. I will keep these men here, while you get away.’”
Again, Emma assessed her audience. “I don’t know where she came from, how she got into that truck, or how she knew we were in danger. And I really don’t know how she made that truck stop, or what she did to keep those men from coming after us, but Daniel and I bailed out the back, as soon as the truck skidded to a stop. I looked back and could see those two guys going crazy at that woman in the back of their truck, so worried about her that they never once looked at me and Daniel running into the trees beside the road.”
Emma checked for a look of acceptance in his face and, again, saw Rodney trying to decide how much to say. She tried to help him decide, “You did see someone, didn’t you?”
Rodney nodded and turned to take his own assessment of Emma. His attitude toward her now also carried the impact of what Anna had said about him being free, and her implied approval of Emma. Anna seemed to know what Rodney had already intuited about Emma. All this flashed through his processor as he decided to tell Emma everything.
For over an hour, approaching the coldest part of the morning, Emma listened as Rodney filled her in on what had transpired that night, complete with the back story of his life with Anna and his kids. Around the campfire, after supper, he had only spoken vaguely about these things, but now he dug deep, in order to process his feelings, as much as to bring Emma into his experience.
By the time he was done, Emma sat wrapped in his sleeping bag, as well as the quilt, and Rodney had pulled on pants and a sweater. As he finished, they both sat silently, cross-legged and huddled close against the damp morning air, listening to the faint nighttime noises giving way to the first bursts of morning bird songs.
Rodney had, of course, omitted what Anna had said about Emma, but not the part about him being free to move on. Emma, on the other hand, was in step with Rodney’s desire to try to make sense of this appearance. She needed to fit Anna’s visit into her own set of strange experiences, including the woman who rescued her and Daniel from the men in the pickup.
Emma leaned her head against the side of the van and turned to look at Rodney, who raised his eyebrows, anxious for her response.
Finally, she said, “I don’t understand how she could be alive and not a ghost. But, with the strange things we’ve been seeing, I can’t say that the appearance of your deceased wife is impossible.”
Rodney appreciated her faith in him, given how little they knew of each other, but he still wasn’t entirely convinced himself that he hadn’t imagined it all, somehow. His best confirmation of the experience came from Emma’s report of hearing voices and not just Rodney talking to himself.
Emma continued. “Do you think we’ve crossed over into some new kind of time in history or something? So many things seem out of place.”
Rodney nodded slightly, furrowing his brow in thought. Then he voiced a new observation. “Strange things are happening, but they pretty much all seem to be good things. Have you noticed?”
Emma considered this. Rodney pressed his point. “I mean you being picked up by two guys with ill intent is not strange, that’s the same stuff we would expect, but the stunning thing is this woman coming to your rescue. I was pretty torn up about the loss of my wife and kids, but Anna’s visit was really reassuring, when it all comes down to it. I’m just realizing that I feel a lot better about things with her now. And then, think about the odd animal stories, those too are good things, a sort of new peace that affects even the animals.” He was gaining momentum with this line of thought. “And the Dictator’s troops and bureaucrats all disappearing is a great thing, even if it seems a bit bizarre.”
The clarity of Rodney’s observations started to add up for Emma. She shivered a bit, more from the profundity of this new thought, than the autumnal morning air. Then she voiced the same thought that Rodney was just starting to formulate. “I do hope this is for real,” she said, “’cause I don’t think I can take another crash landing, if things start to go to hell all over again.”
Rodney laughed at the way Emma expressed it, as well as at the way she moderated a sunny prospect with well-earned skepticism. As they laughed together, Rodney was thinking that meeting Emma was one more thing to add to his list of positive new turns. Then they heard the door to the lean-to close and both looked through the front windshield of the van to see Daniel staggering out in search of a place to pee. They were both relieved to see that he wasn’t panicked about his mom being gone.
“He’s getting too big for me to share a bed with any more,” Emma said, upon seeing Daniel from a distance in the dim predawn light. Then she relinquished Rodney’s sleeping bag and stepped down into her cold boots on the driveway. “I should try to get some more sleep,” she said, smiling shyly
at Rodney.
He nodded and said another goodnight, crawling back into bed still half-dressed. As he began to fall asleep, he thought he could smell a faint hint of Emma still in his sleeping bag. He dropped off to sleep with a small smile on his face.
CHAPTER FOUR
The sun had been up for well over an hour when Rodney awoke that November morning. Calculating the date as accurately as he could, he realized that it must be very close to Thanksgiving Day. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell whether this morning was a Tuesday or a Wednesday, so he couldn’t really tell just how close. When every thought begins and ends with calculating the best way to survive the next minute, details such as days and dates tend to slip away. That Rodney now felt even a bit curious regarding such luxuries, testified to the state of peace he had entered during that warm autumn.
Emma had restarted the fire and had found sufficient supplies around the nascent house to scramble a half a dozen eggs. She refrained from making coffee, not knowing how much Rodney cherished the little store of grounds he had in the lean-to. Rodney smiled like a man on vacation, as he approached the fire where someone else was cooking, for a change.
“I hope it was okay to cook the eggs,” Emma said apologetically. Rodney had foraged those eggs from the woods behind the house, where some free-range chickens had left them unguarded. Finding six eggs that foxes or raccoons had not found already was reason for celebration. Eating them with Emma and Daniel seemed fitting.
“Perfect, that’s the perfect breakfast,” he said. “What do you think about some coffee?”
“I saw it, but didn’t want to presume on such a rare treasure.”
“Actually, by an odd chance, we had quite a bit of coffee around here, even during the worst of it. A train carrying several tons of ground coffee in cans, derailed just outside of town a couple of years ago.” He smiled at the memory of Pete’s alarm on the day that it happened. The intensity with which his old friend sped around with word of the caffeine windfall, testified that Pete had already had a taste of the goods. That the coffee lasted this long was, however, evidence of how thinly populated the town had become.
Rodney broke out his last pound of the train crash coffee and wiped an old, aluminum coffeepot clean. Within fifteen minutes, the smell of fresh coffee collaborated with wood smoke and the bright outdoors, to complete their breakfast. Rodney even had the leisure to wish there was a bit of cream or milk around, wondering if he could get a milk cow any time soon.
Daniel tried the coffee with the adults, mostly because they were so enthusiastic about it and, of course, the only alternative was water. He made the best of it until Rodney dumped a spoonful of sugar into his cup, which made all the difference. Thoughts of Thanksgiving, the warm company of Emma and Daniel, and his freeing—if confusing—encounter with Anna, lifted a holiday spirit in Rodney. In such a state, he could treat coffee and sugar as if all was well in the world, just like his childhood.
“When I was a girl,” Emma said, “fourteen-year-old boys didn’t drink coffee.”
Rodney laughed, then he said, “That’s right, except when I went to visit my grandparents’ ranch in Nebraska. They always let me drink coffee at their house. I suppose it was one of those grandparent things, you know, spoil the kid to get back at his parents.”
Emma laughed, recognizing a phenomenon she had experienced in her own family. This led to an exchange of stories about childhood visits to grandparents’ houses and holiday memories, good and bad. Then Rodney asked Emma the question he had considered earlier that morning.
“Do you know how close it is to Thanksgiving?” he asked.
Emma took a deep breath, twisted her mouth and looked into the corner of her eyes, trying to remember the last time she knew the date. Then she shook her head. “I don’t know the date or the day of the week.” She looked a bit forlorn at that admission.
“Me neither,” Rodney said. “But I know it’s somewhere past the middle of November.
“Really?”
Daniel interjected, “November didn’t used to be so warm.”
Rodney nodded, “Yeah, that’s true. This is surely one of the warmest ones I remember.”
“I don’t suppose there are any coastal cities left in the world,” Emma said, “with everything warming up so much.”
“Yeah, I met a guy from California a few months ago, and he told about having to abandon his parents’ place in Oceanside, south of L. A., a couple years before.”
“They said the Western Ice Shelf in Antarctica slid off into the ocean,” Daniel said, proud to know something so significant.
Rodney hadn’t heard that; all such information was fragmented and uncertain, having been overshadowed by more immediate concerns.
Daniel took a very serious tone and asked, “Do you think my Mom’s right, that we’re in some new kind of time in history, like everything is different?”
Rodney remembered Emma testing the idea early that morning. He wondered whether she had told Daniel anything about his visit from Anna the night before.
Emma made the same association and stepped in to assure Rodney. “Daniel and I’ve been talking about this idea the last few days, after the odd things we’ve been seeing.”
“Did she tell you about the lady that fell out of the sky and rescued us from some bad men?” Daniel asked excitedly.
Rodney smiled and said she had.
“Your Mom was asking me that same question about a new time or new era,” Rodney said. “It does seem as if there’s a change in the atmosphere or something.” A carpenter and soldier, and a thoughtful one by the standards of both occupations, Rodney, nevertheless, didn’t venture much into abstract thinking about historical epics and cosmological meaning. He actually regretted that now, feeling inadequate to interpret what was happening around him.
Rodney said, “I know my wife would have said something about God moving history toward the end of the world, and Jesus taking us up to Heaven, or something. But I skipped a lot of church and didn’t pay much attention when I did go as a kid.”
“Church people were the ones that chased us out of town when we refused to take the chips,” Emma said. “I never had much use for folks like them.”
Rodney nodded. Though he had known plenty of Anna’s church friends who weren’t like that, he had seen numerous people turn to the Dictator in the name of God and morality. Anna had mourned this trend, perhaps especially for the way it justified staying away from church, in Rodney’s mind.
Emma pulled him back from this stroll over that old territory. “Have you seen the graves?” she asked, reminded of that phenomenon by the mention of church.
Nodding silently for a moment, Rodney looked blankly at her, distracted by thoughts about his children and then by the sight of a small beetle flying past.
Daniel filled in the silence. “What do you think happened to the bodies?”
Rodney refocused on Daniel and then Emma. “What do you mean?”
Daniel restated his question. “Do you think someone took all those bodies, or did those people just get out of their graves?”
As far as Rodney knew, the bodies were still in those graves, though he had considered the possibility that the graves were empty. He suddenly realized that, if his enemies had planted bombs in the cemetery, those explosions would have produced some gruesome evidence around them, if the bodies had still been there.
Emma sensed the disconnect between Rodney and Daniel and stepped in. “We talked to a man near the last town, who said he checked several of the disturbed graves and found no bodies, just empty clothes.”
Without thinking about it first, Rodney said, “Those were my children’s graves.”
The non sequitur confused Emma only momentarily. Daniel instantly felt ashamed that he had spoken so childishly about something that clearly had personal significance to Rodney. Rodney saw the looks on their faces and tried to apologize.
“I didn’t mean that you were talking about my kids when you said that. It�
�s just...I mean, I hadn’t really figured out what happened. I didn’t even check that closely when I saw that their graves were torn up.” Still he knew he wasn’t speaking rationally.
Emma responded in the best possible way, she got up and squatted next to Rodney, placing her arm around his shoulder, her face sympathetically close to his. For a man who endured countless losses with very little display of emotion, the events of the last few days had shaken loose a whole avalanche of cascading feelings. He barely resisted breaking down and crying.
“I think I’ve been in shock about the graves,” Rodney said quietly. Then he returned to something Daniel had said. “You said he found clothes but no bodies?”
Daniel looked at his mom to see if it was alright to keep talking about this. Emma nodded for him to go ahead, though she could have told the story as well as her son.
Daniel looked at Rodney now, still hesitant. “Well, he seemed to be a real nice man and he seemed honest. I couldn’t think why he would’ve lied to us, and my mom agreed.” He paused and checked Rodney. “He said, it looked almost like the people had just evaporated out of their clothes, leaving them exactly in the order they would’ve been in when the people were buried.”
By this time, Rodney was becoming weary of so many unexplainable phenomena. To grind that feeling in, the coyote walked into view behind Daniel, sniffing around the fire and the cooking utensils. He looked at Rodney for an answer to his mute question, instead of snatching at any scraps he found. For Rodney, the best refuge from the teaming crowd of mysteries around him was just to live in the moment. He got up from his seat, helped Emma back to her feet and then slowly walked toward the coyote.
The coyote tensed slightly, but seemed determined not to run, almost as if he had been trained. When Rodney saw that, he wondered for the first time whether someone had kept this animal as a pet. He had never heard of a domesticated coyote before, but entertained the possibility now.
The REIGN: Out of Tribulation Page 6