“Oh, we were just talking about clothes. You know, girl stuff,” Maya said.
“No, we don’t know silly. We ain’t girls,” I replied.
“Ok. I offered Sarah Mae a change of clothes; because she outgrew everything she had this spring during the growth period, by a bunch. She said she doesn’t like wearing clothes at all, because of the boost the sunshine on her skin gives her. I told her that she is naughty for running around like that, and we had a good laugh over it,” Maya said.
“It’s true Maya,” I told her. “At home in Michigan, in the summer, us hybrid kids were always getting yelled at for running around in our bathing suits. We couldn’t go around naked, in front of our families and all, or we probably would have, but the sun does give you a boost. I know about that. You mean you’ve never figured that out?”
“No,” she said. “At the Island I had to cover up to keep the pervs eyes off of me. Just because I have titties at nine, they think I’m fair game. Did you do that too Donald?”
“No way,” Donald grinned. “I don’t have titties!”
“No, you dummy,” Maya laughed. “I meant run around in your bathing suit.”
“Well yeah, when it was hot. In Michigan remember, we get snow and ice and stuff as often as we have hot weather. It isn’t like here.”
“I’ve never seen snow,” Sarah Mae said. “Is it pretty?”
“For about three minutes it is,” I told her, “then it just sucks. Being cold and wearing winter clothes sucks.”
“Well it never snows here,” Maya said. “So I guess we can do the bathing suit thing here, or less. It’s not like anybody is gonna yell at us for it. C’mon Sarah Mae,” she said, grabbing her hand and running off to her bedroom to change, giggling.
“Girls,” Donald said, shaking his head.
“You know you like Maya,” I teased him.
“How’d you know that?” he asked, in a whisper.
“Because you’re my best friend, and I ain’t blind or stupid,” I told him, grinning.
“Well don’t go sayin’ anything and embarrassing me Adrian. You promise?”
“Yes,” I said, chuckling. “I promise. I’m pretty sure she already knows though.” We hybrids don’t blush, but if it had been my brother Adam having this moment, he’d have been beet red in the cheeks! “I’m gonna go put my suit on, are you?” I asked.
“I will if you will,” he said.
I just shook my head and chuckled again. What a dork Donald was back then… “I just said that I am. Jeesh!”
We went downstairs and moved the deck chairs around to the south side porch into the sun. “Watch, I’ll prove it to you,” I told Donald. The chairs were all in a row. I sat on the right end, and told him to sit on the left end. I picked up the old magazine I had found and pretended to be reading it. The girls came down whispering to themselves, and shut up once they came outside. Maya sat right down next to Donald, leaving the only other chair next to me for Sarah Mae, who plunked down smiling and continued talking a mile-a-minute. Donald didn’t say anything, but his grin was priceless.
“Now doesn’t that feel good?” Sarah Mae asked Maya, winking.
“Oh yeah,” she said, sneaking a peek at Donald, trying to read him.
“Nice suit,” he told her, and looked away quickly. I wanted to bust out laughing at the dork, but I bit my tongue. ‘I’m surrounded by children,’ I thought. Then I remembered; my birthday was in two weeks, and I’d be seven. Weird. I’m seven, Donald’s eight, Maya’s nine and I assume that Sarah Mae is ten, yet once again, I am the adult of the group.
“So, tell us about yourself Sarah Mae,” I said.
“Ok. I’ve lived here all of my life. I mean, not at that exact farm, but in the glades. That place belonged to Mamma’s folks, and had been empty for years. After Mamma had me, she got kind of sick Daddy said, and just never got better. So, he moved us up here where she came from, closer to civilization for her sake, to make it easier on her about 4 years ago. We were always going to go downriver and find her sister, but Mamma got sicker after we got here, and she died before we ever got the chance to. Daddy didn’t know where they live, so he said we’d wait around to see if they came around. He thought it might be better for me to go to town, than to live in the glades with his people. Daddy was a Seminole Indian. His people have lived here in the glades for generations. They originally came from Georgia. They had been part of the Creek tribe there, and were the only hold-outs that never signed a peace treaty with the Government and followed their rules, he told me. He wasn’t sure that their ways were right for me, being the way I am. Hybrid, as you say. Mamma’s people came here as run-away slaves back before the Civil War, Daddy said. I told him I didn’t want to go to no town. He said that living in the glades had made Mamma sick, and he didn’t want that to happen to me.”
“Well, we know now what happened that made our folks have us the way we are, had to do with certain foods,” I told her.
“I know that now,” Sarah Mae said. “Sunny told me all about it, but Daddy never believed it. Then he got sick and couldn’t do much of anything at all. He couldn’t even get out of bed. Sunny said he had the flu. He died about a year ago from it.”
“That stinks,” Maya said. “Why didn’t you go back to where you lived before?”
“Well, I thought about it, but I wasn’t sure that I could find the way. It’s far away up the river and across different waterways. Daddy knew them all, but I don’t for sure. Then, some men came and stole the canoes and most of our stuff. I just hid until they left. There was nothing that I could do.”
I felt the rage a little, just from hearing her story. “Why is it so lawless down here,” I asked the girls in general.
“Because with all of the heirloom people inland getting sick and dying, the law has their hands full keeping order in the cities Daddy told me,” Maya said. “They’ve been saying on the TV for everyone south of Highway 93 between Marco Island and Miami to move north to a town, or deal with the consequences. They don’t have enough men to enforce the law down here in this two million acre swamp anymore, they say. They claim the Sheriff’s Department is on call down here, but Daddy says he’s never seen any.”
“Wait, you had TV here?” Donald asked.
“At The Island, yeah. TV and Internet from a satellite,” she said.
“Who is Sunny, Sarah Mae?” I asked.
“She’s my neighbor on the other side. They are further away than y’all are.”
“They?” I asked.
“She has a little girl named Sofie. It’s just the two of them. Sunny used to work at The Island. She was a dancer, then her skin started getting bad and she looked better with her clothes on, she said, so she started waitressing. Eventually her skin got terrible, and they let her go. She said all the dancers used to tan in ‘tanning beds’ to look pretty, but the GG-Factor, as she calls it, made them ugly. Now she’s a gardener for The Island. She grows marijuana for them to sell to their customers. They pick it up once a week from her. She doesn’t have a boat either.”
“Are there any more neighbors past them?” I asked.
“Not for a long ways. A really long ways. The next place is beyond the bridge south of the Tamiami Trail. It’s too wet to get there by land. It’d be better by boat or the road,” she explained.
“Just trying to figure out how many people there are around here,” I said.
“Not too many that live here, but there are more and more boats from The Island running up and down the river lately. I always hide from them. I don’t want them to know where I live, plus, I usually don’t wear any clothes. No laundry that way.”
“What are they after up the river?” Donald asked.
“Booze, drugs and workers for The Island mostly. They shuttle people in and out every few days, and pick up. No boats except theirs can go to The Island. Sunny says that’s how they defend it.”
That caught my attention. That must be how the men that had been here were planning
to sell the snake skins then. That meant that a boat from The Island would likely be coming here too then. I needed to know what to be ready for. “Do they always come on the same day?” I asked her.
“No. It’s always different days.”
“How many people in the boats?”
“Always two,” Maya said. “A guard and a runner. The guard stays in the boat and sends the runner in to pick up or deliver stuff. Sometimes the runner is a kid, but usually it’s a woman from the kitchen or the bar. They always wanted me to be a runner, but I wasn’t going anywhere alone with those pervs. They couldn’t keep their eyes off me. No tellin’ what they’d have tried to pull once I was out of Daddy’s sight.”
“It’s not right that heirlooms treat us like we’re not human,” I said. “It makes me so mad, I feel like I could kill them all, except they’re not all like that. Dave wasn’t like that. This Sunny sounds like she’s not like that. So how are we supposed to know the good ones from the bad ones?”
“I guess we’ll just have to sort ‘em out one at a time,” Donald said. “It seems like the parents of a hybrid kid are the only ones who are good to us, but they’re all sick from having us. Single adults who haven’t had any kids aren’t usually nearly as sick, but they’re the ones who think we’re less than human.”
“I say when we sort out a bad one, we do away with them right then,” I said. Both girls looked surprised.
“Let’s eat some alligator soup, before it cooks away to nothing,” Maya suggested, changing the subject.
We all got a big bowl of soup and sat around on the porch talking and getting to know each other better. Donald invited Sarah Mae to spend the night with us, and suggested that she think about the idea of moving her things over to our homestead. She seemed pretty receptive to that, right from the first. I think she had been lonely. I would have been.
We decided that in the morning, before it got too hot, that we’d all walk over to Sarah Mae’s place and look around. If she decided that she wanted to, we could carry some of her things back with us. We decided that since we knew The Island had men out here often, that nobody would ever go anywhere alone anymore, and that we’d always be armed. It seemed that I was the only one that didn’t have experience with a gun. My dad had never let me near one. He was probably afraid of what I’d do with it. He was probably right to be worried, too…
We learned that Sarah Mae loved coffee in the morning and tea in the afternoon, but she’d been out for a long time. Maya was pretty excited about that.
10
Sarah Mae showed us how to walk spread out through the woods on the way to her place, so we didn’t leave a beaten trail by following single file. She said we didn’t need to make it any easier for anyone to follow us back. She hardly made a sound moving through the thickest places, unlike the rest of us. She said that she’d practice with us, and have us as good as her in no time. I remember doubting that. I also remember noticing how gracefully she moved, and how much confidence she had in herself out there. I liked that.
When we got close to her place, we could hear the squealing and grunting of the pigs in the mud hole. She told us that as long as we didn’t scare them, they’d stay right there and come back every day during the hot hours. She said they went to the field across from us at night.
Her place was much smaller, and was pretty much falling down. The kudzu grew all over it, and the wood was all soft, and getting moldy. I felt bad that she had been living here all this time. She would be much better off with us.
Sarah Mae showed us around the little house. She didn’t have much left after those men had stolen her stuff a while back. Mostly her few clothes, that she kept in a pack, some kitchen knives that she wanted, some blankets and most importantly, her Mamma’s knit sweater. She gathered these things up and stacked them on the bench by the door.
“I think we should go tell Sunny that I’m moving over to your place, so she doesn’t worry,” Sarah Mae said.
“Sure, we can do that,” I agreed. “Let’s go.”
We followed Sarah Mae single file this time on a trail that had been traveled quite often, it looked. We made much better time, moving like this through the woods. Just as she said that we were most of the way there, we heard a power boat coming up the river. It sounded like it was moving fast. Sarah Mae crouched down, and we all followed suit. “Island boat for a pick up,” she said quietly. “We’d better stay here. Have a seat, we’ll wait until they’ve gone.”
We all sat down, right on the trail. The boat kept getting closer and closer. Finally the engine slowed, then idled as it docked. We heard voices. Two women were exchanging greetings over the sound of the idling engine. We couldn’t see them, but they weren’t very far away. The voices trailed off, and I figured that the women had gone inside. After a few minutes, a man’s voice yelled; “Hey, hurry it up!” impatiently.
After a couple of more minutes, the engine shut off, and we heard boots clomping on wood. Then we heard a girl’s voice squeal and running feet, then running boots.
“That’s Sofie!” Sarah Mae said, tensing up to move.
“Easy,” I warned her. She began sneaking closer to the sounds. I motioned for Donald and Maya to stay put, and followed her.
“I’m coming,” hollered the runner woman. “Stay out!”
“Shit, you didn’t tell me she had a cute little gray lizard here!” the man’s voice said. “Come here, little lizard!”
Sounds of the door opening and closing caused Sarah Mae to move forward quickly and silently, me right behind her. There was screaming inside the little house we came upon quickly, and sounds of a struggle within. Sarah Mae shot past the door with her knife in her hand and motioned for me to pull up just short of the door, on the side that opened, which I did.
“Just get back in the boat you nasty bastard, and leave the little girl alone,” the runner’s voice said.
SLAP!
“You watch your mouth, bitch!” the guard’s voice yelled.
The door flew open, and out ran a little hybrid girl, as fast as she could go. Boots followed close behind. I tensed, and timed it; the man slung the door open moving through after her, and I caught him by the throat with my left hand. I lifted him, and his hands instinctively reached for my hand, which was crushing his wind pipe. With my right hand, I punched his face as hard as I could. I was seeing red I was in such a rage, and I heard his face break with my punch. I narrowly missed getting stabbed in the chest, as the tip of Sarah Mae’s Bowie knife stuck out of his chest. His eyes widened, his body stiffened immediately. He looked down at the knife point, made one gurgling noise, and went limp.
Sarah Mae pulled her knife out, and I threw his body off the walk. She was on him immediately and made him a smile from ear to ear. “Just making sure,” she said. “Bastard!”
Two women came running out calling Sofie, who came back. I figured out who her mom was easily, as she scooped up the little girl and hugged her tight, moving her view away from the dead man. She did have some awful skin. The runner looked at the dead man and said; “Shit! You killed him! Good riddance. He was a nasty man, that one. Now what am I gonna tell the boss? That some gray kids killed him?”
“Tell him, next time; send out a guard with better manners. Tell him The Tribe is watching.”
“The Tribe?” she asked.
“Your boss doesn’t have to know we’re kids. Tell him the story just as it happened, except that it was some Indian looking men that caught him trying to rape the little girl and killed him. Tell him that they took all of his gear, dumped his body in the river, but left you alone.” I looked at Sunny. “Give her what she came here for. That way they won’t think that you ambushed him.”
The women took care of that and talked while I drug him towards the river. He had two pistols holsters on his legs. I took them off. I took off his boots, his pants, his bloody shirt and his watch. Then I threw him into the current. He headed back the way that he had originally came. I heard a few splashes
across the river from the other bank. The gators would help do away with the evidence, I thought.
I looked in the boat. There was a black pump shotgun standing in a carrier, and beside it was a fancy looking assault rifle, neither of which I knew anything about. I took them anyhow, along with the boat hook, a flare gun, a fire extinguisher and his beer cooler. His sunglasses were on the console, so I put those on Donald, who had come onto the dock to see what I was doing. “Help me carry this stuff,” I said, without thinking. He did. No questions asked.
“There’s more shells in the glove box in the console,” the runner woman hollered. I went back and got two more boxes of shot shells and three clips of bullets.
“Are you going back?” I asked the runner.
“Of course, where the hell else would I go out here?” she replied.
“Can you drive the boat?”
“Yes.”
“Get going then. We left the radio for you. If you want to help your friend here, don’t tell your boss any more than I told you to. Tell him we said that we want no war with anyone, but we will not tolerate this kind of treatment of women and children.”
“You got it chief,” she said, hugging Sunny, then driving away slowly.
“She called you ‘chief’,” Donald grinned.
“Don’t. Just don’t, you dork,” I told him, shaking my head. “Meet us back at your place,” I told Sarah Mae. “Be quick.”
The three of us carried all of the loot back to her place, where we waited for Sarah Mae to say what she had come to say to Sunny. Very soon she joined us. We divided up the weight of her things and the captured loot between us, and headed home quietly. My mind was racing, all the way back.
11
Back at the Peterson homestead, we all moved our chairs into the sunshine and drank some water and talked while we rested. The tired feeling went away quickly, I discovered. Sarah Mae was right. Maya picked up one of the pistols in its army green holster and looked it over. She took it out, opened the cylinder of the revolver, and took out a shell. “Wow! .410 shot shells in a pistol, really cool. This is what you need Adrian, not being used to shooting. It’d be hard to miss at close range with these. C’mere…”
Adrian (Genetic Apocalypse Book 2) Page 5