by AJ Powers
Ruth’s older brother, Michael, and their cousin, Levi, urgently walked toward the gate, guns in hand, as they saw horses approaching the property. They expected a cow, not four colts and a cow. But it didn’t take long for them to recognize Dusty’s almost iconic hat and they waved and cheered on the returning party.
Levi turned and jogged back to the houses to alert everyone of the news, while Michael—who suffered a severe leg injury a few years back—kept walking toward the gate.
“Welcome home,” Michael said as he unlocked the gate and pulled it open. “Gotta admit, we were starting to get a tad worried about y’all.” He looked over at Geoff and saw the blood stains on his jacket. “Looks like you guys ran into a bit of trouble, huh?”
“Something like that,” Clay said absent-mindedly. His eyes glued to the front door of his house. He got down from the horse and handed the reins to Michael.
“If you want, I’ll take them over to the workshop. We can keep them there until we figure out a long-term solution,” Michael said.
“Yeah, that sounds fine,” Clay said, barely paying attention.
Geoff and Dusty dismounted, too, and led the horses over to Michael. Though they were excited to have a speedier means of transportation, both were eager to stretch their legs—something they hadn’t done much of since acquiring the steeds.
The door on Geoff’s house nearly flew off the hinges as Ruth stormed out and came running toward Geoff. Wyatt ran behind her, doing his best to keep up. They passed Clay, barely acknowledging him as they kept their focus on who was ahead—just as Clay’s did.
“Daddy!” Dakota shrieked as she leapt off the front porch and sprinted toward Clay.
She quickly closed the gap between them as she ran straight into Clay’s arms. He picked her up and spun her around, throwing her in the air before giving her a tight hug. “Koty-bear! I missed you so much!” He kissed her cheek and asked, “Were you good for Mama?”
“Of course,” she said with a smirk that told Clay she withheld a bit of information.
Clay put Dakota down when he saw Kelsey standing on the porch, leaning against one of the columns. She held Charles, who was doing his best to break free from his mother’s grip to go greet his father. Kelsey finally put him down and he clumsily ran across the field to Clay. Several stumbles and a full face-plant later, the toddler was comfortably in his father’s loving arms. Following closely behind her unsteady toddler, Kelsey grabbed Clay and kissed him passionately. Her touch on his lips was heavenly. Kelsey began to cry and wrenched him even closer. She didn’t want to let go. And for the first time in nearly a month and a half, Clay finally exhaled.
Before the moment with his wife had fully passed, Clay, Geoff and Dusty were surrounded by the rest of the kids on the farm. Excited to see their family return, the children chattered noisily, recounting their own tales of the past six weeks. The screams and laughter were deafening, and Clay was being pulled in a different direction by each one of the kids. It was frenzied. It was loud. It was…perfect. He was home.
Megan and Bethany came out from behind one of the houses. Megan hauled a sack of laundry over her shoulder, Bethany doing her part by carrying a basket of clothespins. When Bethany spotted Clay, she dropped the basket and ran to greet him. By that time he, Kelsey, and a few other kids approached the porch. Clay knelt down and absorbed Bethany’s affectionate impact as she squealed in delight. “Daddy! I love you so much!” she said as she squeezed her arms around his neck. Clay looked down and saw Julie, the stuffed giraffe Charlie had given to her for her second birthday, peeking over the top of her overalls. Bethany cherished that faded yellow animal. And even though she was so young when Charlie had died, Clay suspected some of her affection toward Julie was her way of embracing his memory.
When Clay stood back up, Bethany’s death grip around his neck did not loosen, so he transitioned to carrying his adopted daughter toward the porch.
“Hey!” Megan said as she caught up. “Don’t I get a hello?”
Clay turned and saw her overjoyed smile as she celebrated the return of her little brother with even more than he sought out to get. Clay felt viciously conflicted about how to respond. His anger toward Megan had dwindled during the long journey home, but seeing her stirred up an ire that still resided in him. “Hey,” he said coldly before walking up the porch steps and on into the house.
Megan stared blankly in disbelief, unsure of what she had done or said to merit such an icy response. Clay had never been so hurtful to her before. At first, she wanted to cry, but the hurt feelings quickly evolved into bitterness. “Be that way, jerk!” she said to the front of the house before storming off to finish her chores for the night.
After a bath and a shave with his straight edge, Clay started to feel human again. The effort that went into drawing a hot bath that always ended up being lukewarm—or colder—was something Clay dreaded. But after five weeks of mud, blood, and grit on the road, a good scrub was a requirement before Kelsey would grant him entry into their bed for the night.
Clay was in the middle of the bed with his arms and legs spread out; he could feel every muscle in his body start to relax. The bed was soft and fluffy, and compared to the makeshift beds he had slept in over the last month, it felt as if he was just floating on air.
Rain started to lightly pelt the window next to his bed and a soft clap of thunder rumbled in the distance. In a matter of minutes, Clay was on the verge of sleep until he heard the bedroom door latch shut. His eyes sprang open and he saw Kelsey walking toward him.
She playfully smacked his leg. “Scootch,” she said before hopping into bed next to him. She gave him a kiss that ejected him out of his drowsy state. She pulled away and smiled brightly. Clay still found himself captivated by her eyes after nearly four years. “I missed you so much, Clay.”
“I missed you too, Kels…” Clay’s sigh satisfied his exhaustion and joy. “You have no idea.”
It was the longest Clay and Kelsey had been apart since the winter after they met, when they were forced to spend nearly six months apart, separated by a little less than fifteen miles. This trip, however, felt much longer than that first winter.
Clay moved in to kiss Kelsey again, but her touch was not quite as inviting as previous contacts. She eased back and gave him a look that said “I need to get things off my mind before that train leaves the station.”
Clay groaned with acceptance.
“You’ve been gone for weeks; is it asking too much to just talk to my husband for a few minutes?” she asked playfully, but not without a dash of sarcasm.
Clay gestured for her to speak her mind.
She buried her face into his chest and held him tight. “I always get so scared when you head out on any trip, but this one was even harder than the others,” she said. She rolled over and looked at him. “And it seemed like so much happened while you were gone.”
“Like what?” Clay asked.
“I’m not even sure I can remember it all,” she paused. “Well, for one, Charles almost drowned in one of the wash tubs that had filled up with rain.”
Clay felt sick to his stomach with the thought. “How’d that happen? Where were you?” he asked, sounding more accusatory than he had intended.
“What you went through earlier—being pulled fifty different directions at once—is my life on a daily basis, Clay,” she said while giving him a glare.
“I’m sorry, Kels, I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I had to run over to get something from Megan’s and asked Dakota to keep an eye on him, but she got distracted herself.”
“With what?”
“A butterfly.”
Clay tried not to smirk, as the lapse in judgment could have been devastating to the family, but she was six going on seven, and was enthralled with the flying insects that had only just made an appearance again this past Summer. Her passion for the pretty winged creatures was adorable, poor babysitting skills notwithstanding.
“I kno
w you have been home a lot more than you used to, but…” she trailed off, trying to push the stressful previous month out of her mind, and focus on the future. “Just try not to leave us for such a long time again, okay?” she said with tears in her eyes.
As the storm rolled in, Clay and Kelsey continued talking, catching each other up on the events of the past five weeks. Clay reluctantly told Kelsey what happened with the trade—the setup— as well as the voyage back. Kelsey’s expression was wrought with fear as Clay told her the details, as if she was reading a fiction and didn’t know whether or not the three of them were going to make it home. Even though he still wrestled with his frustration with Megan—a detail he neglected to share with Kelsey—he found that recounting the trip to Kelsey had been cathartic. He hadn’t realized just how much he needed to vent.
“Did you see the sky tonight?” Kelsey asked, redirecting the conversation in a more positive direction. “Wasn’t it just beautiful?” Clay just stared at her in the dim, flickering candlelight barely illuminating the room. She became bashful. “What?” she asked as she pulled the blanket up to her eyes, all the while giggling.
“Yeah, I saw it,” Clay said, “but once I saw you, I was distracted by an even more breathtaking sight.”
Clay meant what he said in a most sincere way, but he figured the almost cliché line would also have a positive impact on her romantic mood—a theory that was confirmed when Kelsey grabbed his face and kissed him intensely. “You think that’s gonna work on me?” she asked with a wide grin.
Clay emphatically nodded.
“Well, you’re right,” she said followed with laughter. She leaned in and kissed him again.
As quickly as the moment heated up, the flame was extinguished with a frantic knock on the door.
“Mommy!” Dakota cried from the other side.
Kelsey whispered an apology to Clay and got out of bed to let Dakota inside. With another clap of thunder, Dakota promptly dove into the bed and hid under the blankets.
Clay was reminded that Dakota’s fear was deeper than the thunder itself. Over time, her nightmares had become less frequent, but sudden, sharp cracks of thunder in the middle of the night still pulled her out of Northfield and dropped her back inside Silas’s cabin to a night filled with lightning and thunder, gunshots and death.
Dakota’s trembling shook the entire bed. Clay reached down to scratch her head, but she pulled away. The poor girl. Clay pushed his own frustrations out of his mind and tried to comfort the frightened child. He couldn’t imagine the terror she was experiencing. Even though Clay was right there in the cabin with her, even though it was he who killed Silas on that stormy night three years ago, to witness the horrific events from the eyes of a toddler had to be far more traumatic than anything Clay experienced.
“It’s okay, Koty-bear,” Kelsey said as she climbed back into bed. Dakota scrambled to Kelsey’s leg and latched on. Her shuddering weakened as she clutched to her mother.
Kelsey looked up at Clay, giving him a sympathetic look. It was a tough spot to be in as a wife…as a mother. But Clay made no attempt to guilt her; sometimes things just happened and there was nothing he could do about it, so why stress over it? It was one of those moments. “It’s fine,” he said quietly. Then spoke a little louder, “I love you, Koty. Mommy and Daddy won’t let anything bad happen, okay?”
“I love you,” a muffled, sniffling voice said from beneath the blanket.
Chapter 3
Clay stepped onto the porch and looked out into the large field. He loved his home. Being there gave him a sense of peace that he hadn’t experienced anywhere else and any time he had to sleep in another bed other than his own, he was reminded of just how much the place meant to him.
Northfield used to be one of the most successful farms in the county, but the heavy commercialization of agriculture eventually took a toll on small, local farmers. Facing stacks of past-due bills and an unstoppable competition, Ruth’s grandfather started a welding company to offset the losses. Over time, he planted fewer and fewer crops and took on more and more welding jobs. By the time the property was passed down to Cliff—Ruth’s father—most of the land was leased out to the big companies. He kept farming a couple of acres next to the house, growing various plants for his own family and his booth at a local farmer’s market. However, for all intents and purposes, the long line of family farmers had ended with Cliff.
Stepping off the porch, Clay headed over to the large workshop just a couple hundred yards away. The decent sized aluminum building—once the very lifeline for the family business—was now where all repairs for the homestead occurred. It also housed the community’s armory.
The oversized bay door had allowed Cliff to work on anything from a small green tractor to a 500-horsepower semi. That same mechanic’s bay now acted as temporary housing for the animals until a proper stable could be built. The smell was nauseating—so much so that Clay planned on making it well known to the others that the livestock’s permanent home needed to be at the very top of the priority list.
He unlocked the door and walked inside, the stench assaulting his senses. The translucent, plastic ceiling provided a reasonable amount of light, even when the sun was hidden—which was still most days—and the solar panels on the roof provided enough juice for a few fluorescents at night. The nicest feature about the workshop, Clay thought, was the wood burning stove that provided heat once the freezing temps rolled in; which occurred in the middle of October last year. He contemplated throwing a couple of logs into the stove to fight off the crisp morning air, but decided it wouldn’t be worth the effort. It wasn’t even cold enough to see his breath, and by the time he got a hot enough fire going, the outside temperature would be on the rise. Plus, he knew it only felt cold compared to the toasty-warm bed he had climbed out of just minutes before; his body would adjust after a few more minutes.
The supply closet had already been converted into something of an armory before Clay and his family arrived. Like the server room he had transformed back at the tower, the long closet was set up with shelves, multiple rifle safes, and a workbench. Buckets of brass and a few other reloading components were strewn about, but they still lacked a reloading press and dies—something Clay was forced to leave behind when they abruptly abandoned the tower a little over three years ago. By the time he and Geoff were able to return to retrieve the crucial survival gear, the place had been thoroughly scavenged, presumably by Watson’s men.
Clay placed his rifle on the bench and quickly disassembled it. After his initial exam of his weapon, he was not optimistic about his ability to fix it, but he was unwilling to retire the firearm until he had the opportunity to investigate the problem in a safe and well-lit environment. With a wealth of gunsmith tools and books nearby, Clay held onto a sliver of hope that he may be able to do the repairs himself, but it didn’t take long for him to realize the tip of his firing pin had broken. It was easy to spot after he disassembled the bolt carrier group—something he decided not to do when he first examined the rifle back at the factory. However, he should have noticed it then, even without breaking it down. The stress and anxiety from the shootout in the parking lot that morning must have impaired his observation skills.
The sight of the broken pin deflated him. He glared at the tiny piece of metal that literally made the difference between having a highly tuned precision rifle and an unsophisticated club. Without it, the rifle was useless. There was no repairing the pin, and making a new one was far outside Clay’s abilities—due to his lack of expertise and necessary tools.
Clay was startled by the sound of the door opening behind him.
“Hey, jerk,” Megan said, unsure whether she was joking or being honest with the salutation. Likely a bit of both.
He looked at her over his shoulder and said, “Hey,” before turning back to the bench.
“Why are you mad at me?” Megan snapped, getting straight to the point.
Clay sighed, his shoulders slumping. He
placed his palms on the bench and leaned forward. “Megan…I’m not mad at you,” he said as he shook his head.
“So, last night was what, some new type of greeting you were trying out?” Megan twirled her hair with her fingers—something she was finally able to do again after years of keeping her hair cut short.
“Okay, so I was mad at you…”
“Why?” she asked as she shifted her stance and crossed her arms tightly across her body. She pursed her lips and tapped her toe as she waited to hear his response—like an angry mother waiting for an explanation of how her favorite vase had become dozens of shards on the floor.
“I was mad at you for pushing us to go on that trip. I was mad that you convinced Geoff, and that he convinced me. It was a stupid idea, regardless of the outcome.”
Megan was surprised by his response—she hadn’t expected that reasoning—her frustration morphed into guilt. She had been the biggest advocate for the idea while everyone else was, at best, feeling tepid. But once she got Ruth on board, Geoff quickly caved, and he was the final domino in convincing Clay.
She walked up to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “I honestly don’t know why I got so amped up about that stupid cow. Normally, I would be the first one to veto such a risky decision, but sometimes...” she trailed off, trying to think of a good response. “I guess the hope for a better life gets the best of me sometimes, and I am sorry for that. I should have never talked—”