“Thank you,” a soft female voice said from the other side of the couch.
“Can you stand a little light?” I asked.
“It is not a problem,” the voice said.
An instant later the table light beside the couch clicked on. A beautiful and mostly nude small woman sat on the couch under the light. Her skin was a light blue and she had two fragile-looking silver wings tucked behind her.
Her beautiful, long, silver hair cascaded around her and covered most of the important parts.
But there was no two ways about it, she was stunning.
I moved over to a large chair facing her across a frost-covered coffee table and sat down, my hands in my pockets of the heavy ski parka. Somewhere between the door and the chair I had lost touch with my feet, since they were only in thin slippers and I was sure they were already frozen.
“So I assume you were calling me for help?” I asked, doing my best to not push any power toward her for fear she might think I was trying to meddle.
“I was,” she said, nodding, moving her silver hair around in such a fashion that any good strip club would hire her in a moment.
“Not warning me like you normally do.”
“No, calling you for help,” she said.
Relief flooded through me but did nothing to warm me up. You would think it would have.
“I have been stuck in this frigid-state for almost five hundred years now,” she said, her voice taking on a little more power. “I have done my job as instructed for five hundred years.”
I nodded, a little worried about what was coming next.
“I would like you to help me become free of this punishment.”
Oh, great, she’s asking the newest member of all the superheroes in God’s world for help with something that happened five hundred years ago, as if I should know what that was.
“Why do you think I can help with this?” I asked.
“I have watched you and your team save many, many lives,” she said. “I hope you can now save mine.”
I nodded. “We can try. But can I bring a few members of my team in here to help me?”
“You can,” she said, nodding.
Being afraid to stand on my frozen feet, I shouted to the door. “Patty, Stan, Ben, could you join us?”
She nodded, making her hair dance around the important parts of her body. “I am honored you are willing to try to help me.”
Stan had bundled all three of them up in parkas and gloves and they came in slowly like an expedition to the South Pole lost in Patty’s apartment. No dog sleds, luckily.
Patty came over and sat on the arm of the chair beside me, calming me some with a touch. Stan and Ben both nodded to the banshee and remained standing.
She nodded back.
I turned back to the banshee and said, “We are ready. Could you tell us what caused this punishment five hundred years ago?”
“It is not punishment for a crime,” she said. “It is punishment for love. I loved the wrong woman.”
Well, I was as liberal as the next person, but honestly, that answer surprised me, right down to my frozen feet.
THREE
I NEEDED TO GET THIS GOING before I froze completely to the chair. “May I ask first who put this punishment on you?”
I glanced over at Ben who was shaking his head from side-to-side. “You don’t want to know,” he said softly.
“I did,” Lady Luck said, entering the room right after Ben said that.
She did not have a ski parka on and seemed oblivious to the intense cold.
If I got many more surprises like that, the blood actually might reach my feet again.
Patty squeezed my arm to keep me calm.
“How are you, Laverne?” the banshee asked, smiling.
“I am well,” Lady Luck said, moving to the end of the couch and sitting down and facing the banshee. “You are as beautiful as ever.”
The banshee nodded her head thank you, again doing wonderful and alluring things with her hair over her perfect blue body.
Who knew a blue body could be perfect?
Then the banshee said something that got me even more confused, which in this frozen state, was going some.
“Thank you for saving my life.”
Laverne smiled and nodded. “I am sorry that it had to be in this fashion. It was what your husband would accept as a punishment short of death.”
“I have survived,” the banshee said. “Loving you was worth it. Is my husband still angry at me?”
“He is not,” Lady Luck said. “He is retired, his daughter has taken over his month of duties as Death just last year, and he spends most of his time surfing in Hawaii with his new wife.”
I just about choked. This banshee had been married to Death himself. And she had been in love with Lady Luck. Wow, I really needed to spend time with Ben and learn about some of the history of the Gods.
“Then is it possible to return me to the normal world?” the banshee asked.
“I just spoke with your ex-husband,” Lady Luck said. “Poker Boy and his team helped his daughter make the transition last year, and I told him that Poker Boy was trying to help you now after five hundred years of punishment.”
“Thank you,” the banshee said. “He never knew you were the one?”
“He knew,” Laverne said. “Right from the start. And he knew it broke my heart, as wells as yours to do what I did. That’s why he allowed the punishment.”
“I have been wailing over death and broken hearts now for five hundred years,” the banshee said. “And with every one I mourned the loss of your love.”
“You never lost it,” Laverne said.
Once again my toes felt warmer from the shock of that statement.
“You are married, have four grown daughters?” the banshee asked, staring at Laverne in clear surprise.
“My husband and I have,” Laverne said, smiling, “shall we say, an open arrangement.”
I just about said, “More information than I needed.” But my teeth were chattering too much luckily to get that stupid joke out.
Laverne stood and with a “thank you” into the air, more than likely to the banshee’s former husband, she waved her hand.
Intense heat filled the room and the banshee sat there, smiling, soaking it all in.
And then finally, after a few seconds, it was over.
I did feel warmer, but not much.
Water was dripping all around Patty’s apartment from the melting frost and I could feel the temperature on my face returning to normal, although it would not surprise me to have frostbite on my nose.
The banshee now was no longer blue, but a tanned golden brown all over. And I do mean all over. And her hair was now just as long but a rich brown. And her wings shimmered in a rainbow of colors.
Laverne reached out her hand to the banshee and then said, “Jayne, welcome back.”
Jayne took her hand and stood, smiling, her long hair doing little to cover some pretty amazing assets.
“It’s a pleasure to be back.”
Then Jayne turned to me and said, “Thank you, Poker Boy, and your entire team, for being willing to take a chance on talking to me.”
I just nodded, not trusting myself to say anything sane.
“We have some catching up to do,” Laverne said, smiling.
“Now that’s something I’ve been looking forward to for five hundred years.”
Then, like two teenage girls, they both giggled, and vanished.
Lady Luck giggling was unsettling, to say the least.
Stan shook his head and said, “See you tomorrow.”
Then he and Ben vanished.
Patty stood and shivered, water dripping off her coat from the melting frost.
“Would you do me a favor,” I asked as she offered to help me out of my chair.
“Anything, my frozen love.”
“Would you start a warm shower running. I’m just going to teleport out of these clothes and into
the shower from here. I don’t think my feet will carry me.”
She laughed. “I’ll be there, naked, standing under the hot water, ready to catch you.”
And she did.
And I got real warm, real quick. I’ll leave it at that.
USA Today bestselling writer returns to the world of his latest novel, Dust and Kisses, the first of many books that span time and space in his Seeders’ Universe.
In this heartfelt story, Tammy works with her best friend and love, Hal, to help in the formal discovery and burial of the dead lost in the Big Death. The survivors call the task The Respect Project.
On a Portland, Oregon, suburban street, Tammy discovers from the tragedy of a family that the future can be a hopeful place.
REMEMBER ME TO YOUR CHILDREN
“TAMMY, CAN’T YOU JUST RELAX A LITTLE?”
Tammy glanced around at her best friend and lover, Hal Lemmon, as he tried to follow her up the center of the suburban street. The day was hot and Hal was sweating, staining his white tee shirt around the brown straps of the backpack he carried. His longish brown hair was damp where it stuck out from under his Yankee’s baseball cap.
His handsome face was flushed and he looked tired, even though they had only gone four blocks in distance.
She was hot as well, which was why she had been walking fast, trying to get them to their starting target before they stopped or the heat got them. It normally wasn’t this hot in Portland, Oregon, or at least that’s what some long-time residents of the area had told her earlier.
She was wearing jeans with tennis shoes, a sleeveless tank-top with a sports bra under it, and she had her short blonde hair under a Dodgers baseball cap. Sweat was running off her neck and down her chest and she desperately needed a drink of water.
She had her Smith and Wesson pistol in a holster on her hip and Hall had a small twenty-two saddle rifle tied to the side of his backpack. It had been years since they had gone anywhere without those guns, winter or summer. They both had admitted they would feel naked without them.
On both sides of the suburban street around them, the houses were like tombstones for the people who had been killed inside of them when the Big Death happened five years before. The once green grass lawns where children had played were brown and had long turned to tall, dry weeds. The house windows were dirty and almost every house had drapes pulled, at least on the lower floors.
Weeds and grass had started growing in patches of dirt along the street and up through cracks in the concrete. What had been perfect lines of lawns, driveways, sidewalks, and street were now blurred as Mother Nature slowly took back the neighborhood. Tammy had seen a projection on how in fifty years a neighborhood like this would be completely overgrown, in one hundred years it would be all plants and piles of rubble, and in five hundred years it would be almost impossible to tell what had been here.
Just as Mother Nature had killed most everyone on the planet one day with a burst of electromagnetic waves from space, she now was slowly reclaiming the planet.
The Big Death had hit at a little after eight in the morning here in Portland, so most people in this neighborhood were either at work or taking kids to school or some such thing. Tammy and Hal had been two of the million-plus lucky ones who had been either underground in subways, in vaults, or deep inside ships. She had been down in the vaults of her Boise newspaper, doing research through old papers not yet scanned, on a story that no longer mattered, other than being down there had saved her life.
Hal had been in a bank vault in downtown Boise getting something from his safe deposit box. She and Hal had stumbled upon each other on the second day of wandering around in the dead bodies. They hadn’t known each before, but they stayed together and helped each other survive those first few years until they joined up with other survivors working to rebuild a civilization.
Over that first really hard year, they had fallen in love.
Now they lived together in the new city of Portland, Oregon, worked together both on the local newspaper, and searching for the dead, and she couldn’t imagine being without Hal through any of it.
She looked around at all the empty houses. This neighborhood hadn’t been cleared yet, which was the process they were sent to start.
They were to inventory the bodies in every home along the street and mark from the outside which homes had bodies so the removal crews could come and take them to the new cemeteries.
And in each home they were to look for information as to who lived there and double-check it with their database, even those without bodies in them.
The ultimate goal of the Respect Project was to give everyone who died in the Big Death a proper resting place and a record of their existence for the future, including where they had lived and what they had done for work.
It was almost an impossible task, but everyone in the five now-growing new cities around the country, which included Portland, and the new national government, were committed to the task.
“We can start anywhere, you know?” Hal said. “How about we start here, work back to the truck along both sides, then cool down and bring the truck to here and go the other direction?”
Tammy stopped and glanced at an address still visible on the side of one of the homes. From what she could tell, they were about halfway along the long subdivision street. Hal’s idea was a good one. They had to get out of the sun. It was only ten in the morning and this day promised to be far too hot to stay out in the sun for very long.
She nodded. “Good plan.”
“Thank you,” Hal said, stopping and taking off his pack, letting it drop to the concert in the middle of the street.
They had been going out four mornings a week to catalog houses and bodies in the vast subdivisions that surrounded Portland. It had bothered her some at first, nosing into people’s personal homes, but then she had grown numb to it. After all, the people they were investigating were all dead.
The thing she could never look at were the children’s bodies, often in cribs. Every time they found a home with a child, Hal took that house on his own, even though they had clear orders to always stay together. Not that there was anything dangerous in these old subdivisions besides slowly rotting wood.
This subdivision had lots of signs that children lived in these homes, from swing sets visible in the back years, to small bikes and other toys left near the front doors.
She wanted a child someday, with Hal, but she felt the new world wasn’t stable enough yet to commit to that, even though hundreds of healthy children were being born every month in the new Portland. Hal wanted children, he was clear on that, but he was willing to wait until she was ready as well.
At the moment, she just wasn’t ready and when searching homes, she just couldn’t make herself deal with the dead children.
She took a long drink of semi-cold water that tasted wonderful and then handed the bottle to Hal, who took a drink and sighed. Around them a slight breeze kicked up filling the air with faint noises of houses creaking and dry brush rustling. The sounds did nothing to break the death silence of the subdivision.
“Let’s go get snoopy into people’s lives,” he said, handing her back the bottle of water.
“That one first,” she said, pointing to a light blue house on her right. “Let’s do two on that side, then two on the other side, as we work back to the truck.”
“Sounds perfect,” he said, smiling at her and picking up his pack.
She loved everything about him, his dark eyes, his solid build, and his strong arms. But mostly she just loved that smile.
Somehow, over all the years of living in the middle of death, that smile of his had kept her sane.
They headed up the front sidewalk of the two-story home that must have been very nice in its day. The drapes were pulled and more than likely the front door was locked. Both of them had been trained before they started this job to pick a lock. Hal was slightly faster at it than she was, but only by a second or so. They hadn’t found a lo
ck so far that had stopped them.
The people in charge of the Respect Project wanted all the homes to be respected as well, if possible, even though eventually they would all just rot away. Tammy was fine with that as well.
Hal left his pack on the front step and took out his rifle, slinging it over his shoulder before bending down and picking the front door locks. Thirty seconds later he stood and pushed the door open.
The smell of mold and dust and something with a slight tang greeted them and they both stepped back out of the smell and pulled out their cloth masks and tied them over their mouths and noses. That smell with a bite meant there was a body in the building.
They always wore masks when a body was in the building.
The masks also helped them with the dust and they went through about a dozen of the masks a day, maybe more on a hot day like today.
Even though there was some light filtering through the drapes and from a back window in the kitchen beyond the living room, they both clicked on flashlights. When they first started out doing this job, they had both tripped over various things in homes that they just hadn’t seen in dim light. So they took no chances now.
Tammy panned her flashlight around the living room. More of a formal room that didn’t look much used. A layer of gray dust dulled down all colors in the room.
Moving slowly to not kick up too much dust from five years of no one moving around in here, they headed for the kitchen and the family room beyond.
Tammy was relieved to see no sign of children’s toys around the family room.
Hal slowly opened some drawers near the family dining area. Often families left personal information in drawers near a kitchen table.
While he was doing that, she turned and opened the back door leading into a two-car garage. There was one car there. And a spot for a second one. Tools were in their places on the walls.
Nothing else of interest.
“One car left,” she said as she went past Hal and toward the rooms to the right of the big living room. One looked like a guest bedroom and was as sterile as the living room. Whoever lived in this house believed in keeping everything in its place. Even after sitting abandoned for five years and layers of gray dust making everything pale, that feeling of “in its place” was clear in this home.
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