by Rie Warren
Holy hell, my brain is a big ball of pain and he’s working the tongue twisters?
Such a small person, but his bearing was obviously the compass point of the commune. “Though you’ve earned some respect, should you stray, I will allow them all to go at you. And I won’t step in again.”
I struggled only a bit to raise my head. At least my voice was steady. “Affirmative, sir.”
“Hills, son. Never call a Freelander sir unless you’re part of that sort of scene.” His wink almost made me go at ease, until he raised a hand, calling my unwelcome committee forth. At least they looked as beat to shit as I felt.
“Shake hands,” Hills said.
Can I spit into my palm first? No?
Grudgingly, I clutched each hand in turn, holding extrahard to Village Idiot, hoping to dislocate his pinkie in the process. No such luck, this time.
Everyone moved off, fading into the background. Only Blondie remained. He grabbed my shirt off the ground, shook it out, and hung it over his arm. The way he handled it with such care let me know he’d been watching that article of clothing lie in the dirt, wishing he could save it since he couldn’t save me.
He handed over my knife, watching me strap it on. It took only three tries with my busted-up hands. Not bad, all told.
Sweaty and seeing even more swirlies than earlier, I said, “Thought you might try to stop me.”
He scarcely looked at me. “Know better than to get between you and a target.”
My grin wasn’t returned.
“Anyway, you’ve passed muster.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
“Initiation rites.”
“Everyone gotta go through this?”
“Just jerkoffs like you.”
Not exactly a gold star on my merit roll. “You got a new problem I need to sort out?”
“Nah. I really love standin’ back while a stampede of Nomads hand you your nuts in a bag, babe.”
I beat the flat of my hand to the board beside his head. “Worried?”
“Suck it.”
His reply, which wasn’t quite a denial, added to the warmth infusing my punching-bag face. “You oughtta have more faith in me than that.”
“Yeah, it’s all about faith, ain’t it?”
I dragged my forearm across my bloodied mouth. “So when’s your initiation? Because I want the same front-row seat.”
He didn’t answer, glaring beyond me instead.
“How come you know so much about this Wilderness stuff?”
Another nonanswer.
Our standoff ended when he exhaled and the tension drained from his features. “Let’s get you cleaned up, big man.”
Bolstered by his arm arranged around my midsection, I prodded my mouth and in the general area of my face. I was sausaged, my face the same consistency as the canned meat back in Alpha.
I made my feet count cadence until a stool was wheeled under my ass inside another kaleidoscope caravan. When a floor-to-ceiling curtain shuffled aside, Ma’am from the mess appeared, gathering vials and snippets of plants from the windowsills as she approached. The bead curtain clattered in her wake, and I scooted over for a closer look. They weren’t beads but finger-sized silver buckets strung one upon the other. Since it didn’t look like I’d be getting my ammo back anytime soon, I could melt this stuff down to make bullets, once I located their gunpowder cache.
Pushing a fingertip inside, I tinkled them, then yanked a little harder when my pinkie got stuck.
Amused by my predicament, Blondie watched me disentangle myself. “They’re thimbles, for sewing.”
Ma’am scowled. “No need to laugh at the man just ’cause he’s never seen the like.”
“Wasn’t laughin’ at him.” He got a sullen look on his face, complete with a pout. “Anyway, here he is. Thought you’d like to do the honors of cleanin’ up his mess since I already stitched him back together once.”
I don’t know what the hell he’s bellyaching about. Just another day in the life of the Great Commander Cannon.
The look she shot Blondie was so disapproving, he blushed. That was almost interesting enough to make me not want to pass out from the pain that increased instead of fading, adding some nausea to the mix.
“My apologies for bein’ abrupt, ma’am.” He even shuffled those big feet.
“Hmmph.” Setting her bandages and bottles on the table beside me, she dismissed him. “Since you don’t seem to be in a helpin’ mood, boy, I believe you’d be better put workin’ in the fields than staying here.”
He performed another foot shuffle, gaze wavering from her to land on me. “Rather stay here, if that’s okay.”
I was enjoying the awkward show. Damn. He’s acting like a schoolboy caught cheating on a Company test, the kind that could get him neutered.
Her voice stern, she replied, “And I said scat.”
Letting this hard-nosed little woman get the best of him, Blondie backed out the door, ducking his head. His look remained on me until, with a final nod, he pivoted and stalked away.
Ma’am was laying out her supplies, muttering, “Durn fool boy. Got the sense of a goose.”
“Excuse me?”
Her wide-set blue eyes slanted up. “I didn’t mean you, son, though by the looks of it, same could apply.”
I shifted in my seat, getting the uncomfortable feeling I was being scolded in a roundabout way. While she swabbed the congealed blood from my latest acquisition of cuts and scrapes, I got a load of what was going on around me. The collections of hundreds of tiny plant pots fighting for space inside her home, the radiant colors and sheer gauzy fabrics tenting the place, her demeanor, all of it reminded me of Mrs. Cheramie back in Sector Five.
That led to thinking about Erica, which directed me to Liz, because why not just flay myself open with razor-sharp thoughts about all the women who’d been in my life. The ones I’d lost. Like my mom, for instance.
They weren’t the only ghosts chasing me out here in the Wilderness.
The caustic squeeze in my chest had nothing to do with the short gash bisecting my pectoral muscle. Another screw in the works came from all the built-in bullshit I’d been sold about the Nomads. They’d cheered me on, against one of their own. They had schools, healers, their own culture. I couldn’t just label them as rabid animals anymore.
Just Kale.
As Ma’am cleaned me up, moving with compassion and precision, the hard knot descended from my chest, zeroing in on the pit of my belly, growing bigger. Liz always tended my battle wounds, and I hers, unless I did it alone.
Unless Blondie did it.
So that was enough thinking for one day.
“You’ve got a lot of scars.”
Or maybe not.
“Hard life, tough knocks.” I pushed out a breath.
“Scars on the inside.”
Direct hit.
I had a wound that could never be mended, one that might’ve been avoided had I thought for one second places like this really existed. I stiffened, and her soothing hands slid away from me. “Sorry. I don’t like being touched.”
I couldn’t escape the beam of her eyes when she narrowed them at me. “You don’t like being read.”
“True.”
“Want me to continue?”
A short huff of laughter made my ribs ache. “With the healing or the head tripping?”
“Whichever you prefer.”
“Proceed, please…”
“You can call me Miss Eden if you like.”
Eden. The Garden of Eden was in the Bible. I remembered that much of religion. It looked like the garden had deployed all over Miss Eden’s caravan. Maybe her soul was as fertile as her soil, because she was lit up from the inside. Her feminine features were neither young nor old, and freckles dusted her slim nose and high cheekbones. Her light brown hair was a wavy mass swaying with her movements. Only when she saw me watching her, when her lips cast a pretty smile, did I see the faint wrinkles forming starbursts
around her eyes.
“All right, Miss Eden.”
“Or ma’am.” She winked.
She’d taken care of my shoulder—again, Blondie would say—rubbed me with salves and sweet-smelling leaves, and was preparing to add more bandages.
“Don’t need any more of those.” What I needed was ease of movement. Clean up and clear out, that was my style. Besides, it was just surface damage.
“You might, Cannon, someday.”
My clear out went south as I dropped back onto the stool. She wasn’t talking about the wounds to my body, again. “Ma’am.” I cleared my throat. “Miss Eden, I’m a homosexual.” I didn’t know where that confession came from. Maybe I’d been punched in the head one too many times today.
“Reckon there’re worse things to be.”
“Like a Corps commander,” I said with a self-disgusted grunt, suddenly seeing myself as the Nomads did. Probably with the same prejudiced blinders I’d had about them.
“That’s not what I was implyin’ at all.” She stood up, hands at her hips, gaining my attention with her crisp voice. “Some here are gay. Others are straight.” She ticked off on her fingers. “Then we have the bisexuals, the undecided folk, the subs and Doms, and a few who enjoy both sexes at the same time. We’ve got families in all varieties, and we don’t question anyone’s preferences so long as they’re consensual.” Her hips gave an emphatic thrust. “You are not that original in your wants and needs, Commander Cannon.”
The way she said my rank without malice or accusation was a new one coming from a Nomad.
“And you do like to be touched. Only by that boy I sent outta here.”
It was my turn to blush.
She ignored my blazing face. “But you don’t like to talk. So let’s get.”
Over the next couple of hours, she led me all around the compound. She showed me the giant open-sided kitchen and the meeting hall, where commune business was dealt with. The livestock barns, granary, and silo were pointed out. Electricity was used sparingly, powered by makeshift sol panels as well as a formation of effective, if clapped together, windmills. Unfortunately, I was not given the guided tour of the munitions unit.
Moving away from the center of the village, I watched the receding buildings. Silvery gray, their wood gave off a shine in the sunlight similar to the alloy sheen of Territory cityscapes, except the commune was enclosed by forests, not trenches and four-meter tall fortifications topped by wire, the coloring organic, not manufactured.
A learned guide, Eden put paid to my preprogrammed misconceptions about Nomads. What they missed in technological devices, they made up for in ingenuity, common purpose, loyalty, and acceptance.
They weren’t an untamed people either. But then there was Liz’s father, and even though I didn’t want to revisit the subject of her dropped coms, I needed to know what she’d intended to tell me about him and the Nomads. Considering what I’d just been through at their hands, anything was possible—and highly probable.
Well, isn’t this a circle jerk of gigantic proportions?
The name Nomads was considered a misnomer and a slur, Miss Eden informed me as she walked me across the meadow to three squat brick domes. These buildings I was allowed into, even permitted to touch and inspect the contents of the Seed Domes.
“These here seeds are the distant relatives of the ones collected from all over the world by the first settlers decades before the Purge.” Her fingers drifted through a tub of rattling white button-sized seeds. “Yessir, those naturalists and back-to-earthers began a communal way of life long before that catastrophe did its cruel work on the rest of us.”
She took my hand and trailed my fingers through the cool contents of another bin. “Imagine you’ve heard all sorts about us, son. I know what it’s like out there, the falsehoods bred. I lived in the Territories, too, for a time.”
“Where? When?”
“That’s neither here nor there, no more. What’s important is this. We are Freelanders, tied to this earth. This here is our land. Those who come to us are refugees, fleeing, displaced exiles. Those who stay with us become one with us, as we are one with the land. The land is a miraculous thing, Cannon, when it’s treated with respect, just as love is.”
I withdrew my hands and brushed them off. “Cultivating the land is one thing. Cultivating love is another, especially where I come from.”
“Never said it was easy, did I?” The corners of her mouth slid up as she made a slight tsking noise. “Takes patience. Sure does. But look at what we got here. And we’re not alone, no, sir. All over the Wilderness, heck, all over the world, we share our teachings, trade and take up arms for one another. Help in times of poor harvests and disease. The wealth of the land is freely distributed. Just like love.”
Just like love.
And all without the fear of being hounded, hated, hanged because of who you were. Shit, these people had created a stable society with a viable way of life. This wasn’t legend or make-believe. It wasn’t the stuff my nightmares were made of. They were that something more my sister had always thought.
By the time Eden escorted me to the fields, my think tank was redlining, giving me a headache, which compounded my chest ache. I was happy when she assigned me a work shift. I decided to put my back into it, never mind it was still spasming from the beat down.
“If you wanna eat, you gotta do your share.” She gestured over the sea of fields, thigh-high waves of wheat so gold, its color put me in mind of Blondie’s hair. People were spaced at wide intervals, and I got my own giant square of work-it-out the old-fashioned way. I studied her wielding the lethal tool to take down the ripe wheat, grasping its feathery plumes and shearing close to the roots for a couple minutes before I relieved her of the weapon.
Turning to leave, she reminded me, “’Sides, you already owe us for breakfast.”
I joked, “Thought I’d already paid for that with a pound of flesh.”
It was a good thing these people didn’t like me, because if they showed one ounce of niceness, I was ready to move in. It was like Corps fellowship, without the lies.
Left with my own plot to mow down, with that sweet handheld scythe I could easily put to more violent uses, I stripped off my shirt, bent over, and went at it with gusto. Dirt embedded under my fingernails, the fresh smell of the wheat lifting to my nose, and the scratchy little fronds sticking to my skin, I razored off stalks and moved at a steady pace. It was a game of my scythe versus the faded green farm machinery threshing wide lanes of wheat on the edge of the field. I really wanted to take that beast for a spin.
These Freelanders had some merits—I’d give ’em that—but I wasn’t hanging around. Hope had no place within me, and Blondie wasn’t getting a deeper toehold inside my heart either.
For the bulk of the day, I didn’t lay eyes on the man. The twinge at that thought was solely caused by my knee-cracking posture, nothing else. The Freelanders didn’t go easy on me, and there was more than enough work to keep my mind emptied of most everything but occupation.
Then two things happened. The I’m-being-watched feelers crept up my back and made me look about six meters over to find Blondie fence side as a pair of female water bearers proffered a pail and ladle of the cool stuff to me, as well as a whole lot of eyelash batting punctuated by hip juts and tit jiggles.
The hell? Do I have fresh meat stamped across my chest?
I was trying to do the eye-to-eye thing with Blondie—there was the arched brow, the quirked mouth, and he was accompanied by a threesome of males all motioning with their hands to recapture his attention—but the twin spinsters redoubled their efforts with kissy lips and obvious invitations.
Whoa.
I supposed they were attractive, but all I saw was breasts and full hips, and that totally turned me off. I was an ass man, Blondie’s to be specific. By the time I’d shaken them off, he was ambling away, a last look and nod our only goodbyes.
The remainder of the afternoon was productive. A f
ourth of the field had been cleared, there were no more Blondie sightings, and thankfully, no more women coming onto me.
* * *
The work did its thing. I was unwound and loose by the time I returned to what I’d started calling the Love Hovel, Blondie’s and my junkyard caravan. I’d rinsed off at the lake and hung my shirt from the waistband of my camos on the way, hurrying to get back. Just outside, I slowed my steps, calming whatever the hell was making my heart clamor. For sure it wasn’t a feeling of coming home.
Nope, not that at all.
Performing a peripheral sweep inside, I saw Blondie had beaten me…home. Already stripped to the waist and barefoot, he lounged on that behemoth bed with a spread of food.
I joined him, making the bed bounce him closer to me, and leaned back on my elbows, feeling lazy as hell. “So, you still pissed at me about my fight?”
He popped a chunk of cheese into his mouth and lifted one to mine, making sure to rim my lips with his knuckle. His eyes were deep pools and his voice even deeper as it curled out from his chest. “Think you did the honorable thing.”
I laughed. “By honorable, you mean taking and giving a beating?”
“I ain’t finished yet. You had to earn your place. That was honorable. And, Caspar”—he shook his head in disbelief—“you are so fuckin’ beautiful like that. Powerful and so in control.”
His hand moved up my thigh to my stomach. He watched the ripples his touch caused, then splayed his hand flat to still me when he sensed my upward shift for a kiss. “You were beautiful, honey, when I detached myself, but I don’t want to see you gettin’ hit ever again, knowin’ I have to stand by while you suck it up and spit it back out.” His hoarse words hit me harder than any uppercut could. “Not bein’ allowed to strike alongside you, not havin’ your back, yeah, I’m not doing that again.”
What was that about toehold and heart earlier? Hell, he might as well have moved in. Covering up the warmth his words caused, I shoveled food into my mouth to keep from blurting ridiculous, flowery, and possibly even romantic crap about the way he made me feel.