by Linda L Zern
“To some people I know. They’re people as interested in information as any I’ve ever known. Invaluable, precious information, right?”
“And I’m going with you because—”
“Because, little man, you are trade goods. And besides, I don’t want my family to have to bury you.”
CHAPTER 12
It was an hour of hard going and then quick enough once they hit the trail Tess remembered from her first trip to Oviedo.
At the edge of a twenty-foot-wide firebreak, the Marketplace seemed to be disappearing behind a growing wall of mounded dirt. The wall, at least eleven feet tall, marked the edge of the pockmarked parking lot, set in the shape of a triangle. Stone had described it to her—just because she didn’t want to sit down and have tea with those women running the old mall didn’t mean she hadn’t sent Stone to keep an eye on things. But seeing it now, for real, for herself . . .
It dominated the countryside. A gap in the wall opened on the long line of the triangle, facing east. A place for a gate? How had they done it? How many people were helping them? It was a wonder.
She dragged Roy Terry closer to the edge of the firebreak, keeping the pistol on him.
“What does that look like to you?”
He didn’t answer her right away. He was too busy staring.
Men scrambled over the wall like so many worker drones, hauling buckets of dirt out of a ditch that grew deeper as the wall grew higher. No, not dirt, mud. Children crawled after the men, rolling short chunks of log to tamp it all down. There were a lot more people than when Tess’d been there last, before the wall, before the arrival of the female death squad, or Amazons, as Jamie called them.
She didn’t think the drones were drawing regular paychecks. Deep in the ditch that was taller than a tall man, workers filled buckets of mud to send up to the workers on the top of the wall. High water table around here, it didn’t take much to hit water and muck when you started digging.
“Slave labor to build a fort,” he said, sounding grim about it. “Male slave labor, maybe? Who would do that voluntarily? That’s my first thought.”
She frowned at him. “Do they have to be slaves? I haven’t seen too many forts lately, but I think I know one when I see it. People banding together, preparing to protect themselves. Isn’t that a possibility, too?”
He looked at her then, searching her face. It made her uncomfortable, the way he studied her.
“Why did you bring me here again?” Mister Terry asked. “Why this place?”
“I told you. We’re missing people, and these folks are in the neighborhood.”
He snorted. “Neighbors? Can’t remember hearing that word lately.”
“A bunch of girls runs this place.” She laughed and tightened her grip on the pistol. “I’m surprised you aren’t more worried. They’ve got all those men slaving away. Aren’t you afraid they’ll put you to work? And don’t forget I’m ready to end you at any moment.”
He studied the frenzied activity. “And don’t you think I’d be long gone if I actually thought that you were capable of being a stone cold killer?”
She matched him snort for snort. “Don’t be so sure.” She gave him her best glare—not up to Parrish’s intimidation standards, but it felt intense nonetheless.
Parrish. His name chanted through her head, and if she wasn’t careful that chant was going to become an unending scream. Forcing the shakes down, she focused on the scene in front of her. He was inside that ugly mud wall, had to be. She closed her mind to the thought of his being taken by strangers, of disappearing from her life because of a stupid accident, to never knowing what had happened, like her mother.
She’d rather see him dead than not know. The thought was in her head before she could stop it. Sweat slicked her hand. She flexed her fingers on the pistol grip.
“Listen, I don’t know your Myra person, or if I even believe there is such a person—pirates? Really? But I do know these people, and I’m pretty sure they or one of them is a lot more likely to be the one who beat Kilmer and snatched up Parrish and Blane for this little Marketplace improvement project here. Voluntary or not.” She stared Mister Terry down. “And you’re the closest thing I’ve got to a bargaining chip. Information being as precious as it is these days. I believe you said you’re full of it?”
He scratched at a dirt streak on his bald head. His clothes hung in a patchwork of poorly stitched repairs. If he was an advanced scout of some kind from a bloodthirsty band of invaders, it didn’t look like things were going so great where he was from.
“Girl,” he said. “You might be reading the situation in front of you all wrong. You think of that? I might have read it right. Slaves. You might want to be careful.” His voice softened, gentled. “Who are you searching for? Someone special? I can see it in your face.”
His tone caught her off guard. Her heart stuttered. Quick tears threatened.
“Yeah, special. There’s a little boy and another guy. His sisters run this place. He has to be here, or they have to know where he is.” There was a catch in her voice even she could hear. If only it didn’t make her sound so weak. Was he making fun of her? It suddenly felt like a challenge. “So you know what that mud pie wall is all about, do you? You’re the big man with all the knowing. I doubt it. All I see is a man made of rags.”
He didn’t seem insulted.
“Sure. Okay. I hope the people who live here have what they’re going to need inside, Tess. But maybe you should be asking yourself why a bunch of women warriors need to organize a crowd of worker serfs, maybe slaves, maybe not, to build themselves what looks to be a moat, a wall, and a castle keep. Look harder, Girl.”
She did. No one working on the barrier slinging mud around seemed skinny or beat down or unwilling. Like insects, they moved and worked and hauled dirt. The whole deal reminded her of fire ants determined to build a wall to keep out attackers.
“They’re preparing. They’re getting ready,” she said.
CHAPTER 13
At the temporary front gate on the east entrance of the Marketplace, they stripped Tess and Mister Terry down to their undershirts and pants. No weapons. No vests. No guns. No way to defend themselves. Tess got it. The past few months had certainly changed the way she worried about strangers.
She would have laughed if she wasn’t surrounded by women with hard eyes and vicious scars on their faces, scars left from having their slave brands removed by unskilled hands.
What had El said? “The brands made us victims. The scars make us survivors.” Yeah. Tess got it when she thought of the nasty F for Fortix burned into her sister’s face.
After they’d gotten their clothes back, she didn’t have to ask, they took her straight to the boss. It was protocol. The women moved and reacted to the arrival of strangers with a natural kind of discipline that spoke volumes. Nobody getting lax at the Marketplace.
Mister Terry had the good sense to keep his silly mouth shut. Smarter than he looked.
Most of the women had finally abandoned their headscarves; that was a change. Feeling pretty secure behind their barrier of heaped mud and sweating workers, it seemed. Tess studied the parking lot as they marched her into the hollowed-out mall. The pits and holes in the asphalt had been filled and leveled. They’d hauled the derelict cars, trucks, and hay wagons to the wall, shoved them end-to-end to form a framework of sorts. Twisted chunks of metal stuck out in spots like artificial bones. Tess could see the curve of a truck fender in the layers of compressed dirt. The image of an old woman with a black diamond burned into her face flashed through her mind. She’d given the woman a scrap of muslin to keep the sun off her head, and that hag had thanked her by trying to turn her over to the thugs that worked for the family who’d run the place before the Amazons. F for Fortix. F for Finished. F for Ally’s scar.
El looked thinner than when Tess had last seen her, right after the Amazon’s Marketplace victory. Was that the right word? Victory, takeover, invasion, conquest—massacre.
Best not to forget what these women were capable of doing. Still, it was hard to find words to describe what Tess had witnessed and discovered outside the boundary line of the ranch, her home, out here in the real world.
El had changed. There were big changes in the Marketplace, too. It looked a lot more like a tidy army barracks than a flea market. Armed women moved in teams of two through the crowded interior of the building. They wore their signature scarves around their necks, or occasionally to hide their faces. A few women herded small children in front of them down the broken steps of the escalator to the central atrium. Blankets and sheets and quilts still covered the openings to the old shops and stores, but now they were clean, mostly repaired, hung straight.
Tess didn’t recognize the Amazon escorting them, a sturdy dark woman, wearing a police issue belt stocked with hammers and a cop baton.
When she saw Tess watching the children, she muttered, “School’s over.”
At the top of the escalator, El peered down, waiting.
Tess climbed the steps, concentrating on El’s face. Terry trailed behind them. El’s hair looked lighter now that it wasn’t soaked in sweat, her blue eyes brighter in her sunken face. There was a funny color to her skin that Tess had never seen before. Maybe she wasn’t getting as much sun as she had been, back when her warriors were marching through the countryside cutting their enemies to pieces.
El had been pretty once, before someone had tried to remove the brand on her face. Now the scar dominated, a puckered badge of rejected slavery. She wore a sleeveless tank top that showed off thin arms—muscle, bone, and sinew—and a pair of cargo pants that had seen better days. The pants were patched but serviceable.
El sighed out loud when she saw Tess.
“You. I had a feeling you weren’t going to stay away. Call it a sixth sense.” El smiled her broken smile, the scar dragging at one corner of her mouth. It was hard to tell if there was any real warmth in her face.
“I wouldn’t have come if I thought there was another option. I’ve got some trouble—people missing—and you’re the only game in town,” Tess said, hesitating, “that I know of.” Her throat went dry so fast it shocked her. People missing . . . That was one way of putting it. Better that than saying something hokey like, “My heart, I’ve lost my heart. Please help me find him.” The hard-eyed leader in front of her would not thank her for being silly or soft.
El crossed her arms over her chest, arching one eyebrow at Tess. “Losing people. I can sympathize. Never easy.”
Parrish’s sister might as well have been talking about a missing barn cat.
“Easy? Not easy? I know you send patrols out. I know they come onto Strandline land, and I was hoping that your scouts had heard or seen something. The trail . . . I lost the trail at the highway. They could have been taken east or west. I just don’t know.”
El’s face was unreadable—a broken, blank mask.
A growing desperation thumped in Tess’s chest. “I’m no tracker. That’s a skill that your brother excels at, but he’s the one missing. He went after a boy, and they didn’t come back. There was a trap.”
Dropping her hands to her sides, El shoved them into her pockets.
“Tell me something, Tess: This brother of mine, that kid, what happens if they’re gone for good, and you never figure it out? Happens every single day.”
Tess marched up to the top step, shaking her head. “No. That’s not an option here. I can’t. I won’t stop looking. He’s here. I know it. He was hurt, and your scouts brought him in, or he needed help and headed this way, or he’s pinned down or . . . I don’t know.”
El’s crooked smile was back. “Him who? Who do you mean? My brother? Or the kid?”
Tess stepped off the top step of the escalator, heading toward El. She had to make her understand. She had to. “What difference does it make? One. Both. They’re my family. We’re family. I don’t know how you measure things around here, but where I’m from no one is expendable. No one.”
When the guard reached out to grab Tess’s elbow, she jerked away. Roy Terry slipped behind the two women like a beaten dog avoiding attention. “Did that Golda girl have something to do with it? Or don’t you care when your people go rogue, or turn up missing?”
The older woman stiffened at the accusation. “Golda? What do you know about her? We haven’t seen Golda in months,” El said. She ran one hand through her short-cropped hair. “It’s like that sometimes with the ones that are too far broken. They break all the way. And then they go away into their own world to live.”
“Well, your Golda came into my world and shot one of my family, one of my men. And now Parrish is missing, and I can only think that she has something to do with it. It’s a starting point. We know that girl is running wild.” Tess shifted away from the woman who’d escorted her up the steps. She stopped when she saw Roy Terry frozen against the railing of the balcony—an odd mix of relief and worry shining on his round face.
He’d become the soul of modest invisibility, shrinking away from the argument. The Christmas lights were still twining around the raw wood of the rail where he stood, but the generator Jerome Fortix had been so proud of, was still broken. The lights stayed dark. Must not have ever found the man who knew how to fix the generator; he was long gone.
El had barely glanced in Terry’s direction.
“Did I hear you say, ‘my men’? My. My. A promotion? Does that make you a leader of men now? I don’t remember you having a command last time we talked,” El said, finally looking Mister Terry’s way. He dropped his eyes. El continued, “I remember when you were just a girl looking for handouts in very trying times.” She stared at Mister Terry’s bowed head while she talked to Tess.
“I am still just a girl trying to help her family. That’s it.” Tess clenched her fists. “El, tell me that he’s here, that they are both here. Please. I don’t care if one of your squads scooped them up. We’ll exchange. This guy stumbled onto the S-Line,” Tess said, jerking a thumb over her shoulder at Terry. “He has information, and it looks like you’re gathering up a lot of stray men for your earthwork’s project out there.”
El suddenly looked exhausted. She walked to a rocking chair that sat in the corner of the balcony, a homey throne in an audience room. She sat, not leaning back, prim, upright, careful. She tipped her head to the side, eyebrows raised over fever-bright eyes.
The gesture startled Tess. Parrish did it, moved his head like that and then raised his eyebrows when he wanted to show someone he was truly listening. It was so achingly familiar she wanted to reach out.
“Just a girl with a family that she loves,” El said, sighing. “Such a serious girl, and look, you’ve brought me a present.”
Seeing Parrish in this women’s face, his moods and habits, was hard to take calmly. She kept her voice firm. “Serious? Sure. I know I promised to stay away, and I would have, but you can’t control your people.”
The pleasant disdain disappeared from El’s face. Steel sparked in her eyes. She stood up and stared at Terry.
“Parrish isn’t here, and Golda’s gone, for more than a month. We’ve got nothing to trade. If that one wants to stay,” she said, pointing to Terry, “he’ll have to sign the Contract of Service. Do you hear me, old man? Other than that, I don’t know what else you think you can expect from us.”
A fist tightened in Tess’s gut and punched. “What is the matter with you, with this place? I know you and your sister were given the poison of cruelty and worse, but why would you want to turn around and give poison to everyone else? You know what I expected? I expected you to care about something, about your brother. Help us.”
The steel in El’s eyes turned to knives. “You mean my little brother? The boy I knew died—the one I remember—the one who liked brownies, who played ping-pong in the garage. He died in a camp of the Junior Militias. I watched the soul go out of him. That guy, the one you call Parrish, I don’t know who that is.” She threw her head back and dragged air into
her lungs, then exhaled. “Tell me something.” Her eyes looked black in the gloom and shadows. “If you were me, would you risk your family to help mine?”
“Of course . . . And so should you. When he was sick, you sent the sulfa drugs. Britt, she brought them to me, your sister, his sister—family—and you knew that he was allergic to penicillin and she warned me.”
El stopped her with an uplifted hand and a deep sigh. “Let me think.”
It was hard not to let the fear show on her face, in her clenched shoulders. Tess stood up straighter.
Dismissing Tess, El turned again to look at the still silent Mister Terry. “What’s brought you to my door, Little Man?”
He stepped out of the shadow cast by the crumbling edge of a cement column.
“She’s coming. You should know that she’s coming. And not just her—”
His declaration galvanized El. She leaped up, hands outstretched as she slung Roy Terry into the wall. He didn’t fight back.
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“How long before Myra’s here?”
That name again. Who was this woman? Why did her name suck all the oxygen out of the room? How did El know her?
“Maybe before that big mud pit you’ve got out there is finished,” he said, his voice cracking when she pressed an elbow against his throat. “Soon,” he coughed. “Too soon, and I want sanctuary because I’m not going back to her.”
She frowned as she searched his face. “Sanctuary?” She pushed away from him, dropped back into her rocker. “Yeah. Okay. But you’re going to tell me what she’s planning. How many she has with her. You’re going to tell me everything that’s happened since—” El snapped. Her voice faded as the man rubbed at his throat. She started again. “Is he with her? Is Colon still alive?”
Confused by their almost private conversation, Tess asked, “Wait a minute; you know each other? Half the world is dead, and you know each other?”
El turned to Tess. “When half the world is dead, it’s easy to know the putrid half that’s left.”
