“Not that I’m aware of, but now we can grill them like a couple of fish and see what they have to say for themselves. Will that make you happy? I mean, they’re not actual children anymore, so terrorizing them might not be as fun for you as, say, a four-year-old, but it should still give you a bit of a lift,” he said, patting her on the shoulder.
“You know me so well.”
10 ~ BLASTING THE PAST
“Mom, is that really you?” Cam knew it was a ridiculous question to be asking, but she’d been terrified over the last couple of days.
“Why is everyone asking me that? Yes, it’s really me. There are no pods in the bottom of the boat, and I haven’t suddenly developed a super-nice personality or anything. Sheesh!”
“Honey, two people have asked you that question. Two. That’s hardly ‘everyone,’” Cam heard Neil chastise. Her mother hadn’t released the button on the mic.
“Fine, yes, it’s me. I’m okay, alright? What all is going on there? And why are you forgetting how to use a damn radio? You’re supposed to say, ‘Over,’ when you’re finished talking, remember? Over.”
“I’d think there are more important issues to worry about right now,” Cam said with a giant eye-roll. When her mother refused to say anything in response, Cam swore and then sighed.
“Fine. Over,” she said, exasperated. She couldn’t resist asking, “Happy now? Over.”
“You’re still doing it wrong, and I’m still a cranky bitch, so no. Anyway, what’s going on at the farm? Over.”
“We’re fine here. We’re not the ones getting tossed around on a boat, cracking our heads open, are we? Over.” Cam figured her best defense at the moment was a good offense. She had no intention of telling her mother or Neil about the sensors going off every night. They had more than enough to worry about, and there wasn’t anything they could do from that distance anyway, other than rush back.
“How are Pickle and Squeaker? They getting lonely? I hope you’re spending some time with them. Over.”
“I think they miss you, but I’ve got them in my room with me now. The idea of sleeping in your bed kind of creeped me out. I didn’t want to have weird images of the freaky things you get up to with Neil bouncing around in my head while I was trying to sleep. They’ve been a little bit crazy in my room, though. Really excited with all the new stuff to explore and climb. Over.”
“No doubt. Hopefully they’re not getting stressed by that. Even happy things will stress them out, so be careful. Bring them back to our room when you’re not in your own, so they have some familiarity while we’re gone. There have been so many changes for them over the last seven or eight months. Over.”
Cam subjected her ocular muscles to another workout, as her eyes rolled around in their respective sockets, but she told her mother that she would do as she asked. It was just easier to agree, and in truth she was almost as protective of the boys as her mother was. In the meantime, she had another topic she wanted to cover with her mother.
“I thought you said you were going to be careful, mom. This whole head injury thing doesn’t qualify. Over.”
“I was tied to the boat and my hair might have saved my life, so I think I did okay under the circumstances. Besides, Neil’s the one who broke my nose. Over.” The grouchy note in her mother’s voice made her smile. It sounded like she was completely back to normal. But the information about her mother’s nose made her frown again.
“Wait a minute. What do mean he broke your nose? Do I have to shoot him or something? Because I will. Over.”
“He didn’t punch me, for fuck’s sake. He just forgot to secure the door at the top of the built-in ladder thingy, so when the boat lurched the door came back and hit me in the face. I still have all my teeth, but I don’t think they’re going to help much with my looks at this point. My face is a mess, and I’m not sure it’ll ever look normal again. Over.”
“Serves you right. Over.”
“Look, miss bossy-pants, I’ve had enough of being lectured for one day. I’m going back to bed once I browbeat Neil into getting this boat moving. We should have been in Cleveland by now. Unless there’s something specific at the farm you need to talk to me about, I need to get going. Over.”
“No, mom. We’re doing okay here. Go get some rest. Over.”
After they said their goodbyes, Cam released the button on the mic with a sigh of relief. She’d gotten away with it. At least for now. The hardest part had been not snapping at her mother too much. Bitching about her safety was one thing, but if she’d shown just how tired she was, her mother would have known something was going on.
Only slightly less difficult had been convincing Gilles not to say anything, though in some ways she knew he agreed with what she was trying to do. If Neil and her mother came back to the farm to deal with the current situation, assuming it wasn’t already dealt with by the time they got there, it would mean them turning around and attempting another trip to Cleveland. It would involve more risk, and it wasn’t necessary. There wasn’t a damn thing they could do that Cam, Billy, and everyone else on the farm weren’t already doing, other than provide two more bodies for security detail.
She hadn’t slept much, and Cam knew it showed in her temper, but at least no one was questioning her on the farm. She was careful to discuss things with Billy, because they needed to present a united front if they wanted to keep things under control, but for the most part she was the one looking after everything and making all the plans. Billy seemed content to let her run the show, and Cameron had a feeling Lisa had a lot to do with that.
Cam closed her eyes and took what her mother called cleansing breaths. In through the nose, and out through the mouth. After five of those, she felt more settled, and the possibility of getting some sleep didn’t seem like such an unattainable dream now. Her mother appeared to have most of her brain back in gear, so that was one less thing to worry about. Billy was fully capable of keeping an eye on things if she crashed for a while.
Thankfully Billy was carrying a two-way, because she was too exhausted to hunt him down physically. It was bad enough the upper floor on this side of the house didn’t connect to her bedroom on the other side. There was a sort of catwalk, but in her present state there was no way she was up to doing any sort of balancing act.
No. Two sets of stairs were in her immediate future. The circular ones that would take her down to the bedroom her mother shared with Neil, and the wide, straight set that led to her own room. She could sleep in the bedroom below, but Pickle and Squeaker were in her room, and she felt guilty about them being left alone so much lately.
Billy readily agreed to take over at the radio, and his relief at her mother’s recovery made her smile. He was really a decent guy, she knew, and if he was content to be her friend or something like a little brother, they’d get along fine.
The fact that it was full daylight made it easier for her to relax anyway. The sensors only went off at night, so she didn’t really think anything would happen while she was asleep. Eventually she managed both sets of stairs, and after snuggling both ferrets, she crawled into the cool softness of her sheets. Her last thought before dropping off had to do with how glad she was her mother had insisted on buying really good sheets. Definitely worth it, she agreed in her head.
“Cam, are you there? Come in Cam!” The crackled, staticky sound jolted her from her sleep. She pushed up on an elbow, and peered blearily around the room. The sound had grown fainter while she’d been struggling to pull herself from her dreams. Suddenly she understood why. Squeaker had grabbed the two-way’s antenna in his teeth, and was making off with the radio to hide it in his newly created stash behind her dresser.
She wanted to smack her own forehead for not keeping it out of his reach. The rubber coating on the device had undoubtedly been a siren’s song of temptation for the little guy. He was the reason every one of the drain plugs in the house were the mechanical kind that operated with a little plunger-type va
lve. He’d declared war on all things rubber at the moment of his birth, as far as Cam could tell.
“Squeaker! Now I have to move the damn dresser you little bugger. You can’t have the radio.” So saying, she angled the dresser away from the wall, and then had to engage in a brief tug-o’-war with the ferret.
“Mine, Squeaker. Not yours. Mine,” she stated, and then shook her head at herself. She was trying to bargain with an animal that could not be bargained with, though she was pretty damn sure he understood everything she was saying. Ferrets were far from stupid, and her mother had always told her they were supposed to be smarter than cats or dogs. Considering their behaviour, that wouldn’t surprise her in the least.
Finally she managed to extricate the radio from the firm grip of Squeaker’s teeth, and pressed the button to radio back to Gilles.
“I’m here. Sorry. Squeaker stole the radio so I had to get it back from him.” Silence greeted her response, but then she heard a squelch and a bunch of laughter.
“Is that anything like, “The dog ate my homework,’ Cam?”
“That would probably be easier to believe. You’d have to know ferrets to understand why this is true. Anyway, what’s the problem?”
“We found someone near the driveway. He showed up on the cameras while Billy was keeping watch on the monitors, though he didn’t set off any of the sensors. He says he knows you,” Gilles finished.
“You’re kidding me. What’s his name?”
“He says his name is Mitch, and that he was married to your mom. I never met her second husband, and can’t remember what his name was supposed to be, so you’ll have to come out here to verify.”
“Holy shit! Let me get dressed. I’ll be down in a minute. If it’s him, my mother is going to be so relieved. Be right down.”
If she hadn’t been forewarned that it was Mitch, she never would have recognized him. He had wasted away to almost nothing, and he’d been a pretty big guy. Muscular, with a bit of heft, too. Now his clothes were hanging off of him, and he looked near death.
“It’s him,” she said to Gilles. “It’s okay.” Then she turned to Mitch.
“First, food and something to drink. Then we can send you off for a shower and fresh clothes,” she said to him. The relief on his face was immense.
“Thanks, Cam. I didn’t think I was gonna make it here.”
She led the way into the kitchen through the greenhouse at the back, and had him sit down at the counter’s serving area that separated the kitchen from the area with the partially-assembled pool table.
“From things mom has said, if you’ve been starving I should probably give you something light to eat at first. Otherwise you might just throw it up. We’ve got some veggie soup that will do for now. It’s got vegetables that are high in protein, so even though there’s no meat in it, it should help.”
She ladled out a small bowl and heated it up in the microwave. Serving him made her feel a bit funny, since Cam would normally have told him to get it himself, but even she wasn’t that heartless. She didn’t like him, and he’d been a dick to her mother as far as she was concerned, but now he needed help. Of course, it pissed her off that he was in this state in the first place, because her mother had made a couple of attempts to get him to the farm when things started to hit the fan. It was his own damn fault he’d ended up in this condition.
“How come that guy called you instead of your mom? Isn’t she around?” Mitch’s question raised her hackles, and she was leery of answering it, but there was no point in not doing so. He would hear the details later anyway.
“Mom will be back soon. They went to get Ian in Cleveland,” she said shortly. The microwave beeped, so she pulled out his soup and put it on the counter in front of him.
“Oh, thank God,” he said, and started spooning it up. He finally resorted to drinking it directly from the bowl, apparently unable to get it in his mouth fast enough. Not that she blamed him, but she was still a little disgusted. She knew it was because they didn’t get along, though, rather than a disgust with his actual manners. Generally Cam just wasn’t that picky.
“Too bad I couldn’t get in touch with her. I could have used the lift. I didn’t think anyone would still have a working vehicle,” he finally said, once the bowl was empty.
“They didn’t go that way. They took a boat. If they’d gone by truck, they could have been there and back in a day, but it was too risky to go through so many cities, not knowing what was happening in them,” she said, and went back to the fridge for a loaf of bread and some butter.
“I can’t give you a lot of bread, because grain is something we’ll be short on for a while. We just brought in the winter wheat, but we need to make sure the chickens and all that are fed from it first. We’ve got other stuff we can eat, but you’re still hungry and you need something a little bland right now. The butter is from goat’s milk, but I don’t think you’ll taste much of a difference.” She pushed the plate with the four slices of homemade bread toward him, along with the container of butter.
“You mean all this stuff is homemade?” His surprise made her laugh.
“Yeah, I know. Mom was never Suzy Homemaker, but if we weren’t making the stuff ourselves, we’d have starved to death. We’ve got chickens for eggs, goats for milk and cheese, and then vegetables, mushrooms, that kind of thing. Our first garden wasn’t that big. Just enough for a few of us, but we’ve got more than twenty people on the farm now, so we’re stretched until we start harvesting from the bigger garden.
“And we’re breeding chickens like crazy so we have eggs for the ferrets. Mom ended up rescuing fifty of them from three different shelters. You know what she’s like with ferrets. Anyway, we’ve been weaning them from kibble onto the eggs, so we don’t run out of food for them.
“I’ll show you where the shower is, and find you some clean clothes. Did you bring anything with you? Spare clothes or anything?”
“Yeah, but that guy took my pack and said he had to go through it first,” he complained.
“We’re pretty strict about security right now. We’ll get your clothes back and I’ll show you where you can wash them. Chuck or Gilles will probably have something that you can wear in the meantime. If you’re short on clothes we’ll have to figure something out, because mom and Neil only got kids’ stuff when they raided stores in Huntsville. We weren’t expecting anyone else.” Cam fell silent, part of her wishing she could tell him that her mother had written him off for dead, but she knew it was a shitty thing to say.
“Neil the new guy she hooked up with?”
“You mean married? Yes,” she said, her tone turning snotty. She wanted him to be very aware that her mother was no longer available to be used by him.
“That was fast,” he said with a derisive snort.
“Yes, it was. They got married five days after they met. And I’ve never seen her so happy,” she gritted out between her teeth. When he was finished his food she led him out back.
“Here’s the washer and dryer. We keep it here for a few reasons, but mostly so that everyone has access to it, and so we can wash clothing from the non-tested area of the ferret building. Anyone who comes in contact with those ferrets has to go through something similar to decontamination procedures, just in case one of them has ADV. It was a group that came from a shelter where we didn’t get their vet records. We have to protect the other ferrets, including Pickle and Squeaker, so they’re basically quarantined.”
“I can’t believe your mother did all this. Stupid,” he jeered. Cam’s temper hit the boiling point.
“And yet we’re not the ones who were starving to death, and begging for a fucking meal. You’re here only if Billy and I allow you to be, so you might want to be a little less cocky and judgmental about something you know nothing about.”
“Oh, please,” he said, and his condescending laugh was so infuriating Cam wanted to slap him. “So, what? I just bow and call you, ‘Your Highness,’ or something? Give me a fucking brea
k.” He laughed again, and now the urge to sink her fist in his face was almost irresistible.
“You’re standing on land I own, with your gut full of food the people on this farm have all helped to grow, myself included. I have no idea what my mother ever saw in you, and I don’t think she’s going to be anything but disgusted when she gets back. You will be very lucky to still be here at that time. You’ve got one chance. If you stay here you work, just like everyone else. You show me and Billy respect, and you treat everyone with dignity. If I hear that even one bigoted or racist remark has come from your fat mouth, you’re gone, too. And believe me, I’m perfectly capable of personally making sure you leave. The last person I forced to leave had to be taken away in a body bag, so don’t test me.
“I’ve hated your ever-fucking guts for as long as I’ve known you, and even now, when it’s up to me whether or not you even get another meal here, you talk down to me and laugh at everything we’ve accomplished. I won’t be bullied by an asshole like you. You’ll do what you’re told, or you’re gone. For tonight you can sleep outside where everyone can keep an eye on you, and bathe in the river instead of getting a hot shower and another meal or two. Maybe you’ll be a little nicer after that. I haven’t forgotten the time you stole fifty bucks from me for a fix, when my mother and I were just scraping by. I’m not willing to turn you out to die just yet, but watch your step. We’ve got a couple dozen people here who would be just as happy to not have to share their food with you.
“And just so you don’t get any stupid ideas, we’re all armed. Believe me, my mother made damn good and sure I knew how to use my gun. Consider yourself lucky she’s not here. If she had been, she might have shot you herself by now. She’d already gotten used to the notion that you were dead, after all, when you were too stupid to come here before.” Cam took a few steps away, and spoke into her radio.
“Gilles, we need to talk about our new guest. Meet me at the house as soon as you can. It’s important. And ask Chuck to keep an eye on him in the meantime.”
Tipping Point (Book 2): Ground Zero Page 14