by K. M. Fawkes
“No,” he said. “You don’t know. You don’t have a clue, because it’s never you out there, Anna. It’s me. It’s always fucking me that has to make these decisions.”
Anna sank down onto the couch and put her face in her hands. After a few moments, her shoulders began to shake. As much as he wanted to, Brad didn’t sit down next to her. He simply stood where he was and waited.
He knew that he’d been harsh. It was the first time he’d ever been so blunt with her when their lives weren’t in immediate danger. But for several weeks now, Anna had been driving him to do more and more, to prepare and stock up and hunt, and fish and dry and smoke. He’d done every damn thing she’d wanted. And now she was yelling at him, and he hadn’t done anything to deserve it.
“I could have worded that better,” Brad said when she finally looked up at him again. “I’m sorry about the way I said it.”
She shook her head. “It’s fine,” she said, her voice slightly stiff. “I’m just…this is a huge difference. Having another person here. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“I know,” he said. “I never expected this to happen. I had never even thought about it. But I didn’t know what else to do.” Brad shrugged helplessly. “I couldn’t just leave her there like that. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I would have been signing her death warrant.”
The wind howled outside, rattling the windowpane and underscoring Brad’s point. Snow swirled against the glass. The temperature had dropped at least five more degrees since he’d come in. This might be the night they were actually snowed in.
He thought back to the windowless cabin, and imagined Martha trying desperately to get warm as the snow blew in around her. No. He didn’t care if it made his own meals a little skimpy. There was just no way that he would have left her to fate.
“I know,” Anna replied, looking at her hands. “I’m just overwhelmed, I guess.”
He nodded. “Me too. We’ll figure it out, though.”
She made a scoffing sound and Brad sighed. “Anna, do you want to talk to me?”
“About what?” she asked, her voice going tight.
“About what happened last week,” he said. “When I kissed you.”
“No,” she said, standing up. “I told you that I didn’t want to talk about that.”
“Fair enough,” he replied. “But you haven’t talked to me at all since then.”
“Of course I have,” she said, stepping around him and heading for the door. “We talked about Sammy’s schoolwork today.”
“That wasn’t a real conversation,” Brad countered.
Anna rolled her eyes. “What does that even mean? Real?”
“It was completely different than the way we used to talk and you know it,” he said. “Look, Anna, if I could take back what happened, I would—”
“But you can’t,” she said flatly.
“No,” Brad agreed. “So why can’t we just move past it?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” she said tensely. “You’re the one bringing it up all over again.”
He supposed that she had him there, but what was he supposed to do? Letting a situation fester was never the answer.
“Anna, I just want to go back to the way things were,” he said, finally catching up to her on the stairs and catching her arm. She shrugged away as though he’d burned her and he looked down at her. “Is it really that bad?” he asked. “Having me touch you?”
“You don’t understand,” she said.
“No,” he agreed. “I really don’t. Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking? Tell me why you hate something that you seemed so…” He trailed off. He wasn’t the type to pat himself on the back, but he didn’t think he was wrong about how much she’d enjoyed their kiss. She’d been the one who had asked not to stop. She’d been the one who’d pulled his shirt off.
“If I’ve done something since that night that hurt you,” he said, “will you please just tell me? I miss you, Anna.”
She shook her head. “Don’t be stupid. I’m right here, every single day. And clearly, I’m not going anywhere.”
With that, she walked up the stairs. She didn’t look back.
With a sigh, Brad went back to the couch. He pulled the afghan off of the back of the couch and wrapped it around his shoulders. He’d forgotten to get an extra blanket from his room and he didn’t want to go upstairs again now.
He built the fire up and grabbed his book before he took his place on the couch. After staring at the page for five minutes without reading a single word, he gave up and rested the book on his chest.
Nothing about what had happened with Anna today made sense. Her reaction to Martha had been ice-cold. He could have understood being a bit standoffish. Frankly, Anna didn’t strike him as the nurturing type, but to treat the girl like a criminal right off the bat was a little much, no matter how surprised she’d been to have another person turn up.
And why wouldn’t she talk to him about their kiss? He’d never—in the entire time she’d been with him—given her reason to not trust him. She, on the other hand, had knocked him out and left him to the elements for an entire night while she took what she wanted from him and left. He had tried his hardest not to think about that night. For the most part, it had been easy. Resentment welled up now, though.
He’d shared with her from the beginning. He’d trusted her from the beginning. He had never pushed her for anything. And now, she was treating him like garbage and there was no reason for it.
Brad took a deep breath, willing himself to stop thinking about it. This kind of thing—tallying up another person’s sins when they weren’t around to defend themselves—didn’t work. Whether she liked it or not, they did have a relationship. It wasn’t sexual. Hell, right now it wasn’t even friendly. But it was there. They shared a house and supplies, and more than that, he was the one who kept her and her son safe. So why would she make it harder than it needed to be by refusing to talk to him?
No answers came to him and eventually, lulled by the hypnotic dancing of the fire, Brad managed to drift off.
Chapter 9
Things didn’t improve between Brad and Anna over the next few days, but Martha slowly and surely opened up more. Though nothing else had come of their conversation, Anna had started treating Martha better. Brad still wouldn’t call them close, but there was less tension there now. He’d take what he could get.
Martha seemed to enjoy following Brad around from time to time, though she was still largely silent as she did so. He didn’t mind. In fact, he had easily gotten used to her. He could tell that she was beginning to trust him and he was glad for the elasticity of a child’s endurance.
It was Sammy, however, who had won Martha over completely. When she wasn’t shadowing Brad, the two of them were inseparable. They ate every meal together and Sammy had insisted that Martha join him for his lessons. She was a natural at math and her skill and quiet demeanor really helped Sammy focus on his work. They had started reading to each other at night, taking turns with the same book, so Sammy’s reading skills were improving by leaps and bounds as well.
Right now, Brad was sitting on the porch, mending one of the traps that the bear had damaged and keeping an eye on the two of them as they rolled a giant snowball. They had decided over breakfast to make a snow family, since another inch or two of fresh powder had fallen in the night. He assumed that the one they were working on now was meant to be him because he’d heard Sammy say, “Okay, so this one has to be huge.”
Martha laughed, the sweet sound clear in the cold, still air. “No, Sammy!” she said between giggles. “That’s way too big! He’s tall, not fat!”
Brad managed to hold back a laugh because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Martha might like to shadow him, but she rarely laughed in the presence of either adult. He couldn’t keep from grinning, however. Sammy laughed as well.
“I don’t know how to make tall snowballs,” the boy protested.
&
nbsp; He and Martha put their heads together over the issue and Brad watched with interest, curious to see if they would come up with anything.
“Brad,” Anna said softly from the doorway and he turned in surprise. This was the first time she’d said his name without anger in her voice since that night on the couch. “Can you come inside with me for a minute?”
She’d slowly grown more comfortable with leaving Sammy and Martha alone together as the days went by—it was pretty clear at this point that the girl wasn’t a homicidal maniac. Brad stepped inside with Anna and looked down at her, pale and nervous, and wondered if they were finally going to talk things out.
“What’s up?” he asked, making sure to keep his tone neutral.
“I noticed something last night when Martha was leaving the bathroom wrapped in a towel,” Anna said in a low voice, even though there was no chance that either of the kids would hear them in here.
Brad raised an eyebrow. That wasn’t where he’d expected this conversation to go. “Okay,” he prompted. “What kind of something?”
“I thought it was just a scar,” Anna said. “But it’s not. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s not. Brad, I think that there’s a brand on her shoulder.”
Brad blinked. “What?” he asked. There was no way that he could have heard her correctly. “A brand?” he repeated.
Anna nodded. “I was pretty shocked, too, but yeah. A brand. It’s not even all the way healed up yet.”
“What does it look like?” Brad asked.
“I don’t know,” Anna said, shaking her head. “I didn’t get a chance to get a really close look, and I didn’t want her to know that I’d seen it. But it’s about the size of my palm.” She held her hand up, open. Brad winced at the idea of that much hot metal coming into contact with skin.
“The design looked elaborate,” Anna went on. “But I was just so shocked, I couldn’t really focus on what I was seeing. I…” She trailed off, wrapping her arms around her midsection. Her face had gone pale and she looked nauseous. “I hate to say this, because she’s been opening up a lot and I really don’t want to set that back, but I think that we need to ask her about it.”
“Yeah, definitely,” Brad agreed. “If there’s someone out there branding people, I want to know about it.”
It was a whole new level of insane, and he simply couldn’t seem to process it. Why the hell would someone brand a kid? Or anyone for that matter? He knew that ranchers branded their cattle so that they could claim and identify their own animals. Did the person who had branded Martha think of her as their property?
The idea was terrifying, on multiple levels, but especially considering the fact that he’d brought her home with him. She’d said that she’d been waiting for her parents. Had they been the ones to put the hot iron against her flesh? Somehow he didn’t think so. Martha hadn’t shown any fear when she’d mentioned her parents. Surely being branded by them would make a person just a little skittish.
“I’d rather Sammy didn’t hear it,” Anna went on, shaking Brad out of his reverie. “If they branded a kid, who knows what else they did to her.”
Brad stared at her for a long moment. “Okay,” he said finally. “We’ll wait until tonight.”
“Bedtime, Sammy,” Anna said several hours later.
The day had passed almost torturously slowly for Brad and he could tell from Anna’s face that she had been just as tense. Neither of them knew quite how to broach the subject of Martha’s brand with her. There hadn’t been an opportunity to discuss strategy because it had begun snowing again and the kids had had to come in. They’d never managed to make a tall snowball, but Brad thought that the snow family had ended up being fairly accurate, anyway.
“Okay,” Sammy said, looking up from the puzzle he and Martha had been working on for the past hour after dinner. “Want to walk up with me?” he asked her. “Maybe we could take one of the lamps and finish that book?” he asked Brad.
Martha nodded eagerly, but Brad shook his head. “Sorry, kiddo. Not tonight. Martha, I need you to hang out here with me for a little while.”
The girl’s face went instantly pale.
“Is she in trouble?” Sammy asked.
“Is there a reason that she should be in trouble?” Brad asked.
“No,” Sammy said, drawing the word out long. “I…we went down to the lake earlier and her jacket kind of got torn, but it was my fault, not hers.”
“I can fix that tonight,” Brad said.
“It’s…kind of under my bed,” Sammy said. “I was going to show you tomorrow!” he protested when Anna gave him a quick look.
Brad smiled at him. “No one is in trouble.” He looked at Martha. She had begun trembling, so he repeated himself. “No one is in trouble, Martha. I promise.” He held her gaze until she nodded. “Go up with Sammy and bring that jacket back down,” he said. “I’ll make some hot chocolate.”
“Aw, that’s not fair,” Sammy said. “Why can’t I have some?”
“Because you’re not answering any questions,” Anna said. “Come on, both of you.”
Once a protesting Sammy had been tucked into bed and told very firmly to stay there, Anna steered Martha to the living room. She handed Brad Sammy’s jacket and Brad handed Martha a cup of hot chocolate. The girl’s blue eyes lit up for a moment when she saw that there was a large marshmallow bobbing in the center. Then, she looked up at the two adults, her face growing serious again.
“What’s going on?” she asked, her voice trembling slightly.
“Nothing bad,” Brad said. “I promised, remember?”
With a nod, she took her place on the bricks in front of the fireplace. “Okay.”
“It’s just…we need to know some things about you.”
“And we need you to tell us the truth,” Anna added. “That’s the best way for us to be able to help you.”
“What do you mean? Brad said that I could stay here until my parents come back for me.” Her voice had risen slightly and she swallowed hard, seeming to force herself to stop speaking.
“And I meant that,” Brad said, crouching in front of her. “We’re not asking you to leave, and I would never let anything happen to you. I’m only asking you these questions so that I can do a better job of keeping you safe. Will you tell me the truth, Martha?”
She looked at him for a long moment. It was almost uncomfortable to be gauged so thoroughly and obviously, but he didn’t look away. She must have seen what she needed to see, because she nodded.
“Yes, I will. Sammy likes you. He says I can trust you.”
Brad smiled, glad that Sammy had vouched for him. “Okay, let’s start with something simple. Where are you and your family from?”
“We lived in Portland,” Martha said, taking a cautious sip of her hot chocolate.
“Portland, Maine?” Brad asked.
“Portland, Oregon,” the girl corrected.
Anna’s mouth dropped open in surprise.
Brad understood her shock. How in the hell had her family managed all of those miles? He was so flabbergasted that he wasn’t even sure what his next question should be.
Martha nodded, thinking back. “Daddy said that Maine was really far away from home and that it would take a long time to get here. But he said we had to go when the soldiers came.”
“When did they come?” Brad asked. “Do you remember?”
“June sixteenth,” Martha said promptly, taking Brad by surprise again. She read it on his face this time and said, “It was Mom’s birthday. That’s why I remember.” She took another drink, her eyes growing darker as she continued. “The soldiers came when it was almost dark. They wanted to take Daddy away. They wanted all of the men in our neighborhood. They said there weren’t enough people left to be soldiers.”
“That happened in my neighborhood, too,” Anna said, and Martha glanced at her. “They said all the men between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five.”
Martha nodded. “Yeah, that’s what they said to
us, too. They told all of the men to be ready in the morning. Some people wouldn’t promise.” She gave a small shrug, looking down at her hands. Her grip on the mug was so tight that her knuckles were white, but her voice was steady. “They said everyone had to be useful or they were just an extra mouth to feed. The soldiers lined them up and shot them if they wouldn’t promise. So Daddy said he would, but we didn’t stay. We ran in the night.”
“How come you ended up in Maine?” Anna asked.
“My mom’s sister lives here,” Martha said. “It took us a long time to get there. People along the way were sick and we kept having to hide from the soldiers. Some people weren’t as good at it as Daddy. They always got shot when they got found. Sometimes, people got shot by other people, too. It wasn’t always the soldiers.”
Her blank expression when she said those words sent a shiver down Brad’s spine. He’d been out on some of the major roads. He knew a little of what the girl had seen, but he’d traveled a few days. Martha had traveled across all of America when it was falling apart at the seams. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like at the height of the panic. Anna raised her hand, pressing her fingers to her lips as the girl went on.
“We finally got to Aunt Sarah’s house in Presque Isle, but the soldiers were there too.” Martha put her cup down carefully. “There were more of them than there had been back home. They were making everyone leave. They said they had houses that were safe and everyone should go there so they could make sure that none of us were sick.”
Brad’s eyebrows went up. Presque Isle could have been one of the towns that was supposed to move into Sunrise Towers, then. It wasn’t too far away from Bangor. But if they were, what had happened to them after that?
“Did they say people had to be scanned?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yeah, but I didn’t know what that meant. And I didn’t want to go. So, I hid like Daddy taught me. I thought he’d hide too, but he didn’t have time. The soldiers took them all. I thought Daddy would come back for me. But he didn’t.” Tears clouded her vision as she remembered. “I thought he’d be back,” she said again.