I got up and she handed it to me. “Just watch where you point it. Double-action revolvers are pretty safe. You either have to pull the hammer back with your thumb, and pull the trigger lightly, or really squeeze the trigger a long ways before it shoots.”
“Does it shoot as far as a regular shotgun?” I asked.
“Well, yes, but the pellets will spread way out because the barrel is so short.”
“I see,” I said. I pointed it at the tree stump five feet away, thumbed the hammer back, and squeezed one off. The bark on the whole side of the stump erupted into a shower of dried dust. “Crap I’m glad we got the jump on that guard. I’d hate to be on the receiving end of this thing,” I said.
Maya took the pistol and put it back in its holster. She picked up the other one and said; “Take your belt off.” I did, and she showed me how the loop on top of each strap, which held six extra shells above each holster, fastened onto the belt that the guard had worn. She put it on me. One holster hung down either leg, between the front and the outside of my thigh. Then, she adjusted and fastened the leg strap on the bottom of each holster around the leg of my shorts.
I pulled the black metal rings attached to the Velcro hammer covers on both sides, and pulled them both out, pointing them at the stump again. They were a matching pair. Smith & Wesson Governor was etched on the short barrels. Each held six shells.
“Those would shoot .45 bullets too, if we had any,” Maya said.
“Very manly looking,” Sarah Mae said, putting her hand on the back of my shoulder. “Now, wear those all the time. We don’t know if The Island will send men back for revenge, or not.”
“That’s what my mind has been on since we left Sunny’s place,” I said, “but there’s something else we all need to talk about too.” Everyone listened. “Did you hear how that guard talked about Sofie? He called her a ‘cute little lizard’ and intended to use her in a way that no little girl should have to be used.”
“I’m so glad you guys killed that creep,” Donald spat.
“Well, that seems to be the way most heirlooms think,” I said. “They figure they can pretty much do anything they want with us, because they don’t think of us as human. As if the normal rules of decency don’t apply to us. We all have each other and Donald’s place here to depend on. It looks like there must be other hybrid kids around these parts that don’t have that. Had we not showed up at just the right time earlier, I’m pretty sure I know what would have happened.
“It’s up to Donald first off, then the rest of us to decide, but what do you guys think about creating kind of a refuge here for hybrid kids with nowhere else to go, and nobody else to turn to?”
“That’s fine with me,” Donald said, with no hesitation.
“Yeah,” both girls agreed.
“If we don’t do it, then I don’t know who else will,” I said. “We’ll have to figure it out, but we have a good start already.”
“I’m thinking of the Seminole village where Daddy’s people live,” Sarah Mae said. “There were probably more than fifty of us there, and we didn’t have anything as good as all of this. This place is wonderful compared to there. Everybody there had chores to do for the whole village, but nobody had too many. Actually, it was pretty fun living like that. I didn’t want to leave there, but now that I’ve seen how other people think about us, I wonder if maybe the others there were afraid we’d make them sick. None of them have children like us. They are all what you call heirlooms. Maybe we had to leave, but Daddy just didn’t want to tell me that and make me feel bad. He was a really kind person.”
“That might be it,” I agreed. “Judging by what we saw where we’re from, the drive down here, and the people we’ve met here so far, nobody seems to like us except the ones who have hybrid kids themselves. But maybe it’s not that they don’t like us. Maybe it’s that they’re all afraid of us. Maybe they think we’ll make it happen to them too.”
“And maybe we would,” Donald said. “We gave it to our mothers when they were pregnant with us.”
“Or, maybe they already had it, and that’s why we were born with it… Who knows?” Maya added.
“Well, there’re different ideas about how it happened, depending on who you talk to,” I said. “One of these days we’ll meet somebody who knows for sure that can explain it better to us, but for now, we have to work on keeping ourselves safe and fed.”
“Speaking of food, tomorrow morning we’d better figure out how to get some,” Maya said. “We’re just about out.”
12
In the morning when I awoke, Donald and Maya were already down at the dock fishing. I could hear them talking and laughing quietly from the porch. I stood there, just watching them for a few. Donald noticed me and waved for me to come on down there, so I did.
When I got there, I was surprised to see what they were catching. Bass and blue gill, just like at home in Michigan. “I thought you said there were different fish down here Donald?” I asked.
“Oh, there are, there are,” he answered. “Remember, right here the river is almost all fresh water, flowing towards the ocean. The closer it gets to the ocean, the more salt water gets mixed in it from the high tides, making brackish water. Different fish like different water. The bass and brim (that’s what they call blue gills down here) have to have fresh water. We can fish right here just like we did at home, but then we can save the fish heads and skeletons and bait crab traps with them.
“If we go downriver to the bridge at the Tamiami Trail, past Sunny’s place, we can start catching little tarpon and ladyfish. Tarpon have more little bones in their meat than the pike at home though. We usually just use them for cut bait.
“We can also set traps down there in the holes or the moats around oyster bars the same way and catch shrimp and blue crabs. You gotta have a fishing license though.”
“There’s nobody checking for fishing licenses here anymore,” Maya said. “Not even out in the 10,000 Islands. The closer you get to the mouth of the river from here, these cypress trees turn into mangroves that actually make like tunnels over the river. Where that starts, there are tons of snakes that you need to watch out for overhead. They’re there after the birds and small animals on the mangrove roots everywhere.
“Right where the river meets the ocean, there are huge grass and mud flats. You have to watch out there because there are literally hundreds of alligators lying around on the mud banks. There are thousands of wading birds, looking for something to eat. Even eagles and osprey hang out there. We hunted from the boat there for deer and pigs. Sometimes we would see panthers and bear along the edge of the water too, but we didn’t bother them. A couple of times we saw families of manatee, and we always saw dolphins playing around.
“Once you get past the mouth of the river, there are literally thousands of mangrove islands in water that’s like five feet deep. The tides coming in and going out make the water between the little islands go faster, and that washes out holes that they call ‘passes’ that can be twenty feet deep. That’s where you find the big fish.”
Right then, Donald hooked a really big bass. It was jumping and splashing and dancing across the surface of the water. We all quit talking and watched him fight it. The fish took out so much line that he had to tighten up the drag on his reel. Finally, he started winning the battle. As the bass tired, Donald was able to get it near the dock. “Adrian, get the net!” he said. We’d done this a million times at home on the Shiawassee River, so we both knew the drill. The fish tired more, and Donald got it to the surface, working it towards the dock. I put the tip of the net into the water and moved it towards the fish’s head. One fast swoop, and up came the bass in the net, followed closely by a mouth full of snapping teeth belonging to a small bull shark that tried to take the bass, net and all. Maya screamed, I yelled, and Donald cussed the shark.
“Don’t ever fall off that dock, any of you,” Sarah Mae said, behind us. Her bright green eyes were as big as saucers. She backed right off t
he dock onto dry land.
“That’s enough fish for today anyhow,” Maya said, in a quiet voice with a flat tone, joining Sarah Mae. That shark scared the crap out of everyone but Donald. I guess he was used to them. I wasn’t sure I ever would be. The girls ran up to the house. Donald and I cleaned the fish on the second table. He saved all the scraps for crab traps in a bucket. He said they could get a little stinky in the bucket before we went to the barn to get a couple of traps.
“You know that really thick fishing pole up on the porch Adrian?” Donald asked.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“I’m gonna use it to catch that damned shark some day!” he told me.
“Then do what with it?”
“Then we eat shark steak,” he said.
“You can eat shark?” I asked.
“Of course, you dork! What’d I just say?”
I punched him in the shoulder playfully, and we carried the fish fillets up to the house in the pan that Maya had brought down for that with a little water in it. We heard the girls giggling and talking about the shark long before we walked inside. They were getting along really well. It was a beautiful morning, all of us were happy, for the moment, and it seemed as though maybe, just maybe, everything was gonna be alright!
Maya took the fish from us and headed to the sink to fine clean them. She sent us outside to find something else to go with it to make soup. A walk around the outside of the kudzu covered fence surrounding the barnyard provided Donald and I with a large basket of small volunteer cherry tomatoes. The walking onions and hard-neck garlic had gone wild and spread like crazy since the days when his grandparents had lived here. A couple of good handfuls of those, along with some rice from the big bag of it we had bought at that Walsanto stop and the fish made a huge pot of really tasty soup. Sarah Mae told us that in her father’s village, the two main meals were morning and early afternoon. There was pretty much always a soup pot going in the community eating area. That kept anything from spoiling. Keeping it heated was just as good as keeping it refrigerated.
As we ate our soup, we talked about what we would need, to always have a soup pot going. Sarah Mae said there was a much larger cast iron pot with a hanging handle and a heavy lid over at her place. She had used it with a metal fire pit stand and grate sometimes, but said it was plain too big for cooking for just herself. She said that if our tribe grew much, it’d be a good idea to go get that, but for now, what we had was good.
We decided that we would need to build up and maintain a larger supply of firewood for our grill if it was to be used constantly. For now, there was a good supply of fallen twigs and branches, but that wouldn’t last forever, nearby. We at least knew that we’d need a plan for that.
Donald said that he remembered that his grandpa had always had a field of sweet potatoes across the road. We decided that a trip over there to walk the field and see what was there was in order after eating. I knew from experience that sweet potato plants, from root to vine to leaves are edible. I also knew how to grow slips from cut up pieces of one potato that would yield many more plants. It had been one of our staples at home. I also remember mom saying that there was all of the fiber that a body could need in the sweet potato plant, so using them in the soup pot seemed like a good idea. It was late in the season, at least at home, to be planting that kind of thing, so we figured that we had better get by with something already growing that first year.
Sarah Mae said that the kudzu all around us was edible. That it has really large, starchy, edible tubers in its roots. In the Seminole village, they chopped and dried those tubers, then ground that into flour for thickening soups, or as a coating for things to be fried. She said that the young new growth shoots chopped up about as small as rice is long, cooked in soup, makes just about the same consistency as rice. She said that they always used them, as they had no rice in the village. The leaves could be washed, trimmed, and used raw in salads. They could be used in any meal that you’d normally use spinach in, and that they could be cooked like collard greens. She said her mamma could make some good collard greens, and these were almost exactly the same. The purple blooms could be used for making jelly, candy, syrup or wine. The main vines were useless for eating, but they burned decently after drying.
We had lots of kudzu, free for the taking, so that was a good thing. That bit of information reminded me that Mom used to chop, dry and grind sweet potatoes into flour, which she used 50/50 with all purpose wheat flour to make it go further and reduce the gluten for flat breads. Sweet potato flour pizza crusts were one of my favorites, I told them.
We all agreed that wheat and corn were probably not going to be on our ‘to grow’ list, just because they had been to blame for making us different. The idea of using kudzu tuber flour and sweet potato flour mixed, if it worked, for making flat breads sounded pretty cool though!
~
Over the next couple of weeks, we did indeed keep the soup pot going, over low coals in the fire-box of the grill. Donald caught some blue crabs with dip nets in shallow water, and lots of fish off the dock. Maya used Donald’s pellet gun that he had several boxes of pellets for to bag a variety of birds. Sarah Mae and I walked the property extensively, her teaching me which plants were edible and easily foraged here; me identifying a variety of garden vegetables that had been self seeding for years, out in the fields.
I sharpened a small scythe-like tool that I found in one of the shops in the barn and began cleaning up the barnyard and a large garden spot down by the river, just like we had had at home. The idea was that it was close to the cooking area, and easy to water from the river.
We had plenty of shovels and rakes, so everyone got involved in turning the soil and raking it into raised rows. Every time we came across wild patches of Everglades cherry tomatoes, or some other variety unknown to us while exploring the fields across the road, we would pick what was ripe into our baskets, and bring a couple of the plants back to transplant into our kitchen garden.
We discovered that the harder we worked out in the sun, while drinking lots of plain water and eating this way, the stronger we felt. I was actually conscious of having much more energy than I had ever had at home. We all were. We talked about it often. I noticed that I was laughing more, and never had angry thoughts. I was happier than I had been in a long time.
The girls, Maya especially, couldn’t get enough sun. We spent a lot of our resting time lying about in the sun together, talking. We talked about everything. All of us liked hearing about the others’ lives prior to now. We identified the strengths we each had. Donald majored in fishing and minored in hunting. Maya sounded like she’d major in technology, if we had any. She was always missing the Internet, this gadget, or that gadget. Here, she majored in hunting and minored in running the house. Sarah Mae majored in foraging and minored in teaching us the native ways of doing most things. She appeared to me to be a natural teacher. I was the thinker, the planner, the muscle and the leader of the group I guess, and minored as the gardener, according to the others anyhow. Maybe it was the other way around, I don’t know.
13
Sarah Mae wanted to go check in with Sunny and Sofie, and I had been wanting to try out the kayaks here, so one morning we decided to do both. I wore my pistols, as always, and Donald insisted that we both also carry a long gun. Sarah Mae carried the assault rifle we had captured and I the shotgun. She insisted that she was a good shot with a rifle. I knew I wasn’t.
After stowing Donald’s canteen, full of water, and looking around for alligators we pushed off quietly, waving goodbye to Donald and Maya. Sarah Mae led and I followed close behind her. It felt great to be back in my own kayak on the water. I had always loved the river at home. The sun was hotter here, the birds larger and louder. There were things here that would eat you, but it all felt right. The river smelled like a river should, and that was a good thing!
“Look,” she said, pointing. “You would never see it if you didn’t know it was there.”
&nb
sp; “What?” I asked.
“My house, silly.”
She was right. With the dock rotted down and fallen in, with weeds growing right through it, it wasn’t noticeable. The little shack of a house was all but covered by the kudzu now. Beyond it, I heard some faint pig noises and smelled some faint pig smells, but only because I knew they were there. Like the river at home did, the river here would reclaim this piece of itself sooner, rather than later.
Several short minutes later, she held a finger to her lips signaling silence. We coasted, not paddling, listening ahead. Finally, we heard Sofie laughing and saying something to her mamma. Sarah Mae made some kind of a bird call, and then listened. “Sarah Mae! Sarah Mae’s here Mamma!” Sofie squealed.
We surprised her as we glided up to the dock. She had run over to the trail that came through the woods looking for her Sarah Mae. “Here we are beautiful,” she called to Sofie. She came bounding out the walk to the dock. Sunny came out of the door smiling, drying her hands on a towel. Boy she had some bad skin!
We carried our kayaks and gear up the walk and put them beside the house, out of sight from the river, and went inside to talk.
“Look at you! You look happier than I’ve ever seen you,” Sunny told Sarah Mae.
“And you smell better too,” Sofie said, matter of factly.
Her mamma looked like she’d die of embarrassment, but Sara Mae just laughed, and said; “I’ve been keeping better company you little squirrel! And… they have a bathtub too.”
I chuckled. I couldn’t help it.
Adrian (Genetic Apocalypse Book 2) Page 6