by Alan Tucker
Neri continued to hug the girl while trying to collect her own thoughts on this new development. Clearly, she would have to stop being so trusting of people coming to her for help. She waited for Ellie to quiet again and asked, “If that’s the real reason, why lie about it?”
Ellie looked up, her eyes red and puffy. “I didn’t think you’d let me stay, since I have family, unless I said those things. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“It’s true, you’ve put me in a tough spot with the sheriff,” Neri admitted with a sigh. “I don’t like the idea of arranged marriages, but I don’t know if that’s grounds enough to keep you here.”
“So, I was right then. I’ll have to go back.”
“Maybe. I’d like you to come with me tomorrow morning and talk to the sheriff. Tell him your story— no lies— and see what he says. I believe he’s a good man. He might know of a way the law can help you.”
Ellie sighed and cast her gaze downward again. “He’s just one man. There’s no law anymore.”
Neri squeezed Ellie’s shoulders. “True law isn’t law because it’s enforceable. It’s law because it’s right. When push comes to shove, good people will do the right thing.”
“You really believe that?”
“I do.” She gave Ellie a pat. “Now go on and dry your eyes. Them eggs won’t collect themselves.”
Ellie nodded and gave Neri a half smile before leaving the room. Neri tilted her head back and studied the ceiling. She did believe what she’d said to Ellie. She also knew reality would make doing the right thing very difficult for the sheriff. Somehow, Neri had to tip the scales in their favor.
Another soft knock at her door caused Neri to turn. Maureen poked her head in and smiled. Neri gestured her inside.
Maureen closed the door and took Ellie’s spot on the bed. “How did it go?”
“She lied about her father,” Neri said. “He didn’t abuse her, but is forcing her into a marriage she doesn’t want.”
Maureen nodded thoughtfully. “I talked with Kenzie a bit.”
“And?”
“I think she’s quite smitten with Ellie. They’ve shared a room the past two nights.”
All of the women shared rooms, except for Neri at the women’s insistence. Neri sometimes wondered if it was out of respect or fear. “By room, I assume you mean bed. I don’t need things sugar coated. You know I don’t have a problem with that sort of thing. It happens all the time.”
Maureen chuckled. “I know. It’s really my old bones that need the sugar coating. What I mean is Kenzie’s only a couple of years older than Ellie. They’re both young. And probably prone to foolishness.”
“I see your point. Sarah’s in that room too, right? Ask if she wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on them today. I told Ellie I’d take her with me to see the sheriff first thing tomorrow.” Maureen gave a nod in response and the two stood up.
Neri said, “Where do y’all need help outside? I’m itching to get my hands dirty.”
———
That evening, after a satisfying day of hoeing weeds in one of their garden plots, Neri sat in a comfortable chair by an open window in her room, reading a worn book in the dimming light of sunset. Her familiarity with A Lesson Before Dying meant she could relive the story in any light, even no light at all. Neri’s mother had read it to her as a young girl— not a typical bedtime story, to be sure, but the ideas within were hugely important to her.
“Prejudice isn’t just about the color of a body’s skin,” Mama would say. “It’s about believing there’s only one way to do things. One way to live. Never discount someone else’s viewpoint, Neri. That’s like telling them they don’t exist.”
Neri shed a tear as she recalled her mother’s words, wishing she could have taken them to heart sooner in life. Along with reading A Lesson Before Dying, Neri’s mother had also once told a frightening story about how she and her sister— Neri’s Aunt Tish— had been stolen away one night when they were children by little bald men who poked and prodded at them for hours before depositing them back in the woods behind their house as if nothing had happened. As a child, Neri had accepted the story at face value until she told some of her friends at school about it one day. They had laughed and called her and her mother “crazy” for saying such a thing. Neri went home crying after being made fun of and asked Mama if the story was true.
“Of course it’s true,” she said.
“How come Aunt Tish never said anything about it?” Neri asked.
Mama frowned. “She’s afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“People calling her crazy.”
The next day, Neri’s friends had asked if her mama had told her any more crazy stories. “Nah,” Neri had answered. “That was just a spooky story for around a campfire, you know?” Her friends had laughed and everything had soon been forgotten. Neri even found herself believing the lie she’d told as time went on. Mama never mentioned the incident again and Neri gave it little thought as she’d grown older. It wasn’t until she and Aunt Tish had been sitting in the living room downstairs, watching the Amalgamation Day festivities on television, that Neri was reminded of the story. The Grays had just marched onto the stage to greet the President and Neri turned to Aunt Tish to say something when she witnessed a look of pure terror on her face. Aunt Tish mumbled an apology and ran from the room.
In that moment, Neri had understood the insidious nature of prejudice. She had been willing to manufacture and believe a lie about her beloved mama because the truth had made her uncomfortable.
Aunt Tish had refused to talk about it afterward. The Blight took her less than a year later, leaving all of Neri’s questions unanswered.
Darkness fully encompassed Neri’s room. Beyond her window, frogs, lining a stream called Bull Creek, which ran to the east of the farm, sang a monotonous tune. The book lay open in her lap.
Her door rattled and a frantic woman’s voice called out, “Neri?”
She set the book aside and hurried to the door. “What is it?” Neri opened it to see Sarah’s worried face lit by a lantern in the hallway.
“Kenzie and Ellie. They’re gone. I’m so sorry!”
Neri pulled the woman into a hug. “Hush now, it’s all right. When did you see them last?”
Sarah trembled in Neri’s arms. “Maybe an hour ago? They were in our room when I went downstairs to play cards with Melody and Tawny. When I came back up just now, they weren’t there and their things are gone.”
Neri took the taller woman by the shoulders and looked her in the eye. Sarah was two years older than Neri, but authority in the house had never been about age or size. “Find Maureen and let her know. I’ll check the room and see what I can figure. They can’t have gone far. We’ll find them.”
Sarah nodded and ran down the stairs. Neri passed by the staircase to the other end of the hall. The door to the room Sarah shared with the two younger girls stood open and a cool breeze brushed Neri’s cheek. She took a breath and collected her power until it built into a comfortable knot inside her chest, just below her sternum. Her senses sprang to life, as if waking from a long sleep. Neri heard the other women conversing downstairs, Maureen’s voice firm and decisive. Neri allowed herself a moment of pride and affection for her little tribe of survivors, then focused her attention on the bedroom.
Her eyes absorbed the dim light, giving Neri a clear view of the furnishings and the single open window. She even picked out two warm spots on one of the beds where Kenzie and Ellie must have huddled together, planning their getaway. Sadness and disappointment crept into Neri’s thoughts, causing her concentration to waver.
She frowned at her lack of control and set the feelings aside to resume her inspection of the cramped room. The drawers of an upright dresser contained a jumbled mess of clothing and one side of the single narrow closet stood mostly empty. The girls hadn’t taken everything. Though Ellie had arrived with nothing but the clothes she wore, Kenzie had been in the house since m
id winter. Enough time for her to accumulate a small wardrobe through hand-me-downs from the other women and occasional trips to town. Neri moved back to the bed and pulled away the covers. Mingled scents from both young women reached her enhanced nose. She drew her knife from its sheath clipped to her belt and used the tip to prick the end of her thumb. A bead of blood formed and Neri used it to draw the curved shape of an infinity sign in the middle of the bed sheet.
“Seek,” she whispered.
The pattern she’d made glowed red and lifted from the bed into the air, swirling with increasing speed to form two sparks of crimson light. They hovered above the bed for the span of a heartbeat, then darted out the open window. Neri danced around the bed to follow their progress outside. She watched the lights wind their way down an elm, which grew next to the house, then run along the gravel moving east toward a grove of trees and Bull Creek.
It didn’t require magic, or genius, to determine how the girls had escaped the house, but Neri wanted to confirm the direction of their flight before deciding on her next move. She relaxed and turned to Maureen and Sarah, who stood in the bedroom doorway, as she allowed her heightened senses to fade. Sarah’s mouth hung open while Maureen waited patiently, her features stern.
“They’re headed east,” Neri said. She walked back to the bed and used her four-inch blade to slice away a circle from the center of the sheet. After sheathing the knife, she folded the scrap of cloth and put it in her pocket. “Sarah, you’ll come with me. Put on some warmer clothes and boots if you have them.” To Maureen, she said, “The rest of y’all should stay, in case the girls double back. Oh, but check the barn and the tool shed, just to be safe, and lock everything up until Sarah and I get back.”
“Are you sure?” Maureen asked. “Tawny knows that area well. Her family lived over that way.”
Neri nodded. “We’ll be fine. Just keep an eye on things here.” She slipped between the women, giving Maureen’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze on the way by and hustled back to her own room. Neri put on a pair of thick socks and her hiking boots, then donned a black, wool sweater.
She paused by her mirror. Neri wanted to get moving, but if she could glean some more information about the missing girls, it would be worth the time spent. She sat down and quickly traced a spiral on the glass with the leftover blood on her thumb. The same horrifying images she’d seen that morning of a city under attack from the Bug aliens filled her mind. Neri banished the scenes and gritted her teeth in disappointment. The power of the devastating event she witnessed earlier had evidently overwhelmed her forecasting abilities.
Neri left her room and found Sarah waiting for her at the top of the stairs. The woman had added a blue windbreaker jacket and a pair of hightop sneakers to her outfit and shifted her weight anxiously from foot to foot. Neri patted her arm and the two headed down the stairs and into the living room where warm light glowed from two oil lanterns. Maureen finished lining out instructions for the other four residents as Neri entered with Sarah fidgeting at her side.
The conversation paused and Neri spoke. “Y’all are here because you needed help when you were in a bad way. Kenzie and Ellie are no different, but sometimes folks don’t know they need help or who to trust. We all make mistakes. Best we can do is correct them if we can and try not to make the same ones again. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but we’ll find Kenzie and Ellie and be back. Then we can all sit down and sort everything out.” The women nodded and Neri caught Maureen’s gaze before giving the older woman a smile of thanks. Then she turned and made her way through the front door. Sarah hurried to follow.
A light, but chill, breeze blew from the west. Stars shone in the spaces between scattered, high clouds. Neri walked over the gravel drive surrounding the house and stopped before the first of their garden plots between the barn and tool shed. Kenzie and Ellie had a head start, but that didn’t concern Neri.
Turning to Sarah, she said, “We have a lot of catch up to do, so I’m going to have to give us a boost.” Neri rolled up her sweater sleeve and, with the confidence of practice, drew her knife across her forearm, making a shallow, inch-long cut. Blood welled up while Neri wiped the blade clean on her pants and slipped it back in its sheath in one smooth motion. She took her thumb and coated it from the cut. Drawing in her power again, she told Sarah, “Close your eyes.”
Sarah hesitated, her face portraying a mixture of anxiety and desire to trust. Trust soon won and she complied.
Neri reached up and drew her thumb across each of Sarah’s eyelids. The blood sparkled, first from starlight, then from its own magic and disappeared. “You can open them now.”
Sarah did and gasped. “It’s like the sun’s about to come up. And everything’s so clear!”
“Lift your chin, please,” Neri instructed and dabbed more blood from her arm before drawing a V shape at the base of Sarah’s throat. The symbol glowed and vanished. “Now, pull up your shirt a little. This might tickle just a bit.” Neri made two more lines of blood, each about three inches long, right above Sarah’s legs at her waistline. Those too, flared scarlet and faded away.
Sarah grinned. “I feel like jumping and dancing.”
“You can run like a deer and have the lung power to keep it up for the next hour or so, though it shouldn’t take us that long to catch up to them.” Neri collected more blood from her wound and repeated the process on herself. While she could manipulate her senses without it, she needed the blood as a focus to enhance other parts of her body. “Don’t get ahead of me and stay as quiet as you can. We don’t want to scare the girls if we can help it.”
After a confirming nod from Sarah, Neri cast her eyes east to the tree grove just beyond the farm and bolted forward. Two bounding strides took her past the garden and she picked up speed, gliding with ease and grace over fences and other obstacles in her path. The vociferous frogs paused their songs for a handful of beats as the two women dodged trees and leapt over Bull Creek, then continued their chorus of warbles and croaks. Air pumped through Neri’s lungs like the bellows of a forge and the strength of fire coursed through her legs. She and Sarah bolted across an open field, arrowing forward through the chill dark.
Kenzie and Ellie’s trail wasn’t hard to follow through the wild grasses. Neri and Sarah’s enhanced legs chewed up the distance between them and the runaways. Just a few minutes later, Neri spotted the girls up ahead, resting near the base of one of the bigger trees at the edge of another grove. Coming to a stop and crouching down in some knee-high grass, she took the patch of bed sheet from her pocket and poked at the cut on her arm with a finger, coaxing out a bit more blood. Neri drew the shape of a knot on the cloth and said, “Bind.”
Her drawing blazed with power and transformed into a pair of red strands of light, which snaked off the fabric and shot toward the unsuspecting girls. Kenzie and Ellie shrieked in surprise and began to struggle. Neri loped ahead and stopped in front of them.
“Please relax,” she said as she heard Sarah come up behind her. “The bindings won’t hurt, but I didn’t want y’all running any more.”
Thin bands of ruby-colored light wrapped around the girls’ wrists and ankles. Ellie looked up with wide, frightened eyes. Kenzie’s, however, radiated anger. “Why can’t you just leave us alone?”
“I want to help y’all.”
“Then let us go!” Kenzie screamed. Her face flushed to match the auburn stubble covering her scalp. “You can’t make Ellie go back to her dad. It’s not right!”
“Running away from your problems won’t make them go away.” Neri knelt down in the grass close to them. “Where did y’all think to go?”
Kenzie glanced away. “Rapid City. They got power there.”
Neri nodded. They had started picking up Rapid City stations on cloudy nights with their battery powered radio since a few weeks after the first of the year. “And how did y’all figure on getting there? It’s gotta be two hundred miles or more.”
Neither girl met her gaze. K
enzie shrugged, but stayed quiet.
“I’d bet there are way worse things for two girls to run into between here and there than me or an overprotective father,” Neri said.
Ellie shook her head. “I can’t go back there.”
“I don’t plan on…” Neri trailed off as a strange buzzing reached her ears over the sounds of distant frogs and crickets. She looked around, searching for the source of the noise, which grew louder. Sarah also scanned the area in confusion and backed away a few steps.
A shadow slid over them, blocking the starlight. Neri froze as a jumbled mass of legs, wings, and other body parts hovered a few feet over their heads. Reality joined with the terror of her earlier visions. Sarah looked up and screamed.
Her scream abruptly morphed to a liquid gurgle as an ebon blade surged through her chest. Her body convulsed and lifted off the ground for an instant before the weapon retreated and she fell to the earth, wide-eyed and silent.
In Sarah’s place stood the nightmarish object of Neri’s predictive magic. The Bug hissed and took a step toward her, brandishing its lethal appendage, dripping with Sarah’s blood.
Afterword & Other Works
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Other Works by Alan Tucker