Following the Strandline

by Linda L Zern

  “Help me. There’s still time. I’ll take her and leave her. With Goliath I can beat the fire.”

  He shook his head, refusing to look at Tess.

  Tess rolled Golda into her arms. She barely weighed enough to make Tess have to strain.

  “Help me! What do you care about what I’m going to do? You’re out of that place.” Tess stumbled when Golda’s head flopped. Tess paused, shifted the girl more firmly in her arms. “I can’t explain it. I don’t know why. I just need to take her back and not leave her here in the dirt. You don’t have to come. I don’t want you to come.”

  Sighing, he stepped close when Tess staggered again under the awkward, dead weight of the girl. He lifted the body from Tess and moved to put her on the mule.

  “Place her facedown on Goliath. I don’t want her to throw up and choke.” She knew she sounded bossy, but she needed to get it done.

  He draped Golda onto the mule’s back gently, her head facing the animal’s tailless rump.

  “She’ll ride better this way. He’s broader through his backside.”

  When the chore was done, she watched Sammy’s shoulders droop.

  “Is there somewhere for you to go, Sammy?”

  His eyes cleared. “Not anymore.” He gave her a broken smile and shook his head. “Don’t worry about me. I’m out of that place.”

  She reached for Goliath’s makeshift halter, pulled his nose around to head in the direction of the Marketplace. It was an empty gesture taking Golda back. She could hear her grandfather now, “Empty gestures waste precious calories.” Parrish wouldn’t be so polite. If only she understood it herself.

  Looking back at Sam, she decided on another empty gesture.

  “Sam, listen to me. I’m going to tell you how to get home, to my home, and you’re going to tell them I’m right behind you.”

  He looked down at the blood on his hands. “Okay. I’m not going to waste your time or mine, pretending that I don’t want this. Thank you.” His brown eyes held her as he searched for words. “Tess, I know how hard it is to trust.”

  Then Tessla Lane broke the second rule of the S-Line Ranch and told Samuel Holt how to find the longhouse and her home, in the clearing, deep in the heart of a Florida forest.

  CHAPTER 22

  Goliath marched back to the Marketplace like a champion. It was a relief not to have to wrestle with him when he had to cross a ditch near the big church on the hill in downtown Oviedo—the old First Baptist Church. It was a tumbled shell of a building, but as a landmark, it marked the heart of downtown with shabby dignity. The crucified bodies lashed to the church’s three crosses were gone, not even bones dissolving beneath a blanket of grass. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Goliath didn’t even snort when they passed the dead. Nothing left to smell.

  Golda’s breathing slipped away to a faint hiss. She wouldn’t last much longer. Maybe not even long enough to get her all the way back to El’s fortress.

  It was getting easier and easier to think of the old mall as a fort: those towering walls, that reinforced gateway, all those people working under the watchful eye of El’s army of women.

  At the edge of Oviedo, the asphalt took on a buckled, roller coaster shape. A rolled tanker truck, barely recognizable as a vehicle, lay on its side under a blanket of wild grapevines next to the melted road. Tess hadn’t noticed before. Some monster wreck and fire had been hot enough to warp the asphalt.

  The dips in the road shifted the unconscious body on the mule’s back. Tess wrapped her hand in what was left of the girl’s clothes, steadying Goliath’s load. If Golda slid off, she’d probably be able to get her back on, but it was a job Tess didn’t care to have to do by herself, and the fire wasn’t going to wait for delays.

  “Walk on.” It was hard to tell if Goliath was listening to her without the sweep of his massive ears. He kept up a steady pace over the uneven pavement, so he must have heard.

  At the edge of the trail flattened by the feet of the people coming and going to the fort, Tess stared at the workers on the wall—more than she remembered, and women now, too. Two enormous wooden posts were being hammered into place, while a group of men nailed random hunks of tin onto the frame of the wooden gate. The two panels of gate stood upright. Mud and tin and a moat; it was the Marketplace Fortress; run by women who might not be too happy with the gift she was about to bring them.

  Someone on the highest part of the wall pointed—for a trip hammer heartbeat, she thought they were pointing at her—but it wasn’t Tess the guard noticed.

  Turning, Tess watched a boiling black cloud of smoke begin to stain the eastern sky like spilled ink. It grew like a poisonous blot and covered all the blue. When had it gotten big enough to fill the sky?

  At the entrance of the Marketplace, hands reached out, grabbed Goliath, led him away, and pulled Tess toward the towering front gate. Someone screamed Golda’s name and shouted for a medic. Halfway through the gate, Tess started to struggle against their insistent grasping hands.

  “Stop. I’ve brought back your girl, but I have to go.” She lost her footing. They dragged her in anyway. The doors groaned closed. “Stop! I’m not staying! I have to help my family.” She jerked one hand free, swung wildly, felt her punch glance off someone’s chin. A grunt greeted her effort. She thrashed.

  “Shut her up. Now.”

  “Britt, don’t do this. Don’t. I have to get out of here. I only brought back Golda. Britt, please. I wanted to do the right thing!”

  The world went black to the sound of the harsh laughter of Parrish’s sister.

  CHAPTER 23

  Jon Lane focused on the two white horses across the river, standing in water up to their hocks, drinking. What luck, he’d found them. Now he’d have good news to tell them after he told them to run for their lives. Dusk fell. The light ticked away. The beautiful animals pawed at the edge of a curl of sandy beach in the Little-Big Econ River. The young stallion, what did Ally call him? He couldn’t remember.

  The stallion stomped deeper into the coffee-brown water. The mare, Curie, hung back. Her belly had started to swell with the unborn foal she carried. It was the beginning of a herd, a tiny shred of hope for the future. That’s what the girls liked to say. His girls. They were worried now for the boy and for Parrish and the horses too, probably. Soon they’d be worried about more than that.

  No Goliath that he could see. He whistled for the horses.

  He watched them sniff at the water then go back to drinking. Hadn’t the boys claimed they’d hobbled the horses properly? Jon couldn’t see any evidence that they’d been hobbled at all—someone had cut the ropes through and through. A mystery for another day, that’s what that was.

  For now, he needed to get them back to the S-Line, make Tess proud; make Ally and ZeeZee, his girls, happy. He could do it, wanted to do it.

  The horses had wandered pretty far off the boundary of the ranch, following the river east, crossing from the ranch side of the river to the heavier wooded part of the national forest at some point. The Spanish bayonet hedge would have discouraged them going toward the road into Oviedo. Too bad they hadn’t headed that way. Colonel Kennedy had been a nut about some stuff when it came to prepping for disasters. But that spiked wall of thorns had been a nice touch.

  Probably should have planted more spiked Spanish Bayonets. The thought shot through Jon’s head like a falling star. He stared off into a dreamscape, imagining a tower surrounded by thorns. Keep his girls locked up in the tallest tower, in the highest room, he thought. Safe. But for now, get the horses. Get home. Get the horses for his beautiful girls. Hey! They could ride the horses out of the fire!

  The horses spooked away from the river, snorting and blowing. A gator, resembling a chunk of slow moving driftwood, coasted through the brown water, the reptile’s eyes and nose an ugly hint of its true identity, its hidden size. The stallion took a half step forward, placing himself between the mare and the water, protective and belligerent.

  There was no swimmi
ng back across now.

  Jon watched the horses decide whether to bolt or not and then their heads came up as they sniffed the evening breezes. They began to dance across the sand, spooked. Something worse than a six-foot gator on the hunt. Smart horses.

  The horses bolted. Jon watched them go, looked up at the sky, and tried not to cry.

  The Hawk Brothers watched the horses’ tails swish as they drank from the river. They stayed hidden as they also watched the man across the river as he talked to himself.

  “Why he do that all the time? That Jon man. Jibber-jabber, jibber-jabber like that? When no one is there?” Little Hawk asked. It was a good question that didn’t have an answer, but that didn’t keep the Doe Kids from making up answers that suited them about the father of Miss Tess and Ally and ZeeZee.

  Big Hawk propped himself up on his elbows behind the worn bump of a cypress stump. “Well, sometimes people feel better talking out loud to the dead and gone ones. Makes them feel not so by themselves. You know? The way you talk to your Mommy at night. ‘Dear Mom, Please make Big Hawk not grow so fast, so I can catch up.’”

  “I’m calling Slap-Down,” Little Hawk said, slugging his big brother and then slapping at the ground.

  “I call seconds.” Big Hawk punched back.

  “Ooof!” Little Hawk frowned, but it was worth it. “Hush or Miss Tess’s daddy is going to want us to stop running around the woods and go home and put on our underwear or something. Stone too. He’s become one of them.”

  Little Hawk pushed back to sit with his legs crisscrossed. He dropped his chin into his hands. “Well, I’m getting pretty hungry and Miss Gwen cooks good breakfast, and we should tell them about Mister Parrish and that other skinny man and that we found the wild horses and that stupid, farty mule. And that big fire that’s coming—”

  Tess’s daddy whistled to the white horses. They ignored him.

  A bit later a big, floaty gator swished by so that the horses stomped backward from the water. The boy horse snorted and pawed. He nickered to the girl horse to follow, and together, they raced up the riverbank and then they disappeared into the overhang of jungle.

  “Should we follow?” Little Hawk scratched at a mosquito bite on his cheek.

  “Nope. Those are smart horses. But that daddy is kind of jibber-jabber lost. If we bring him back to Miss Gwen, she’ll feed us pancakes with syrup. Sure.”

  Little Hawk pouted. “But she’ll make us take a bath.”

  “With syrup.”

  His little brother smiled, and when he smiled his face made Big Hawk think of stars.

  “Come on. A bath isn’t so bad when there’s syrup on pancakes.” They stood up and saw the man across the river have to shield his eyes when he looked up at the sky. He looked lost. He looked sad. He looked like a good way to get breakfast.

  Finding the water and hearing the sound of it lap against sand and bark made Blane feel better in the dark. The Little-Big Econ River had been a part of his life since they’d come to live with Mom’s friend, the Colonel. It felt like finding a treasure, seeing the water, hearing it. And there were only two choices now, upriver or down. He headed upriver, letting the slow, steady drift of dark water lead him back home to Mom and Blake and fresh bread. His stomach cramped.

  The sky behind him glowed with color and light. He bent down to pull another inch-long cactus thorn out of his big toe. A big gush of blood came out with the thorn this time. He knew that was good. Mom had told him. He reached down and squished out more blood, proud of himself when he didn’t tear up. It hurt bad, but there were worse things than cactus. The sudden sound of voices startled Blane.

  He threw himself under a heavy fall of grapevines that covered a shrubby scrub oak. Panic made him sick to his stomach. The voices got louder. Not grownups. A boy’s voice and a girl’s coming from the direction of home, upriver, too far away to know who they were. Still too spooked to think straight, Blane waited. He was afraid he’d be in trouble. He’d lost Mister Parrish. It was his fault.

  “I’m telling you, it’s on the air.” It was the girl.

  The sound of Blane’s heart beating made it hard for him to understand her, comprehend the words, recognize if it were his friends’ voices.

  “A big fire, maybe.”

  “Maybe,” the boy said; he didn’t seem as worried as the girl.

  “Look at the sky. Why is the sky glowing, Stone?”

  Stone. A name Blane knew. Maybe it was trick. The crazy part of Blane’s brain tried to talk him out of making a move. What if the bad guys knew Stone’s name? What if they’d captured Stone and ZeeZee and were just trying to fool him?

  Stop this. Stop.

  Blane stretched his hand out toward the couple chatting next to his hiding place. He tried to make it stop shaking.

  “Stone,” the girl repeated. Her voice was low and serious—steady. “Look.”

  Blane closed his eyes when one of them grabbed him by the hand, pulling him from under the lump of vine.

  “Boy,” Stone said.

  It’s what Stone always called Blane. Never his name, just Boy.

  They stared down at Blane, ZeeZee’s eyes growing huge when she saw what he was wearing.

  Stone frowned. “Boy,” he began again. “Where’s Parrish? We’ve been looking and looking.”

  If only he knew what to tell them.

  Blane Dunn, toes throbbing and dressed in rags, shrugged his shoulders and started to cry.

  CHAPTER 24

  Myra Blackwelder braced her legs against the roll of her schooner, the Black Watch.

  Funny how the tip and sway of a ship’s deck eventually became more familiar than the feel of dry, stable land under your feet. Funny, how a boat could become more solid than earth. Funny. Funnier. Funniest.

  Next to her, Colon “Boy-O” Terry stood watch over their latest human cargo. He was the man she called first mate now—after his cousin, that traitor, Roy, had failed to find his way back to them. Scout and report, it was hardly rocket science. The boat’s one hundred and twenty-one feet of deck crawled with her patched and flamboyant crew. Less than there had been, sure, after the Jetty Park disaster, but the ones who were left would still drink blood for her. Sure. It was a brutal world, and wasn’t Boy-O Terry up to the challenge of it? He hadn’t let the weeping and the wailing and the teeth gnashing keep him up at night. Not the way that idiot Roy had started to do; that man had probably gone and gotten himself eaten by pigs or dogs or those Indian River cannibals, but what did it matter? His job was to follow the rumors, find the runaways, scout out El Summerlin’s girl murder brigade. He’d failed Myra, and that was betrayal, and betrayal meant death.

  People didn’t leave Myra. Traitors left Myra—except for Caleb and Cassie—not them, not her children. They’d never left, not really, not on purpose.

  Caleb had been murdered by those Coast Guard bastards. It wasn’t his fault that the sailboat, flying that Guard flag and piloted by a crew of mutineers, had bashed his brains in. Not the United States Navy at all, because the government hadn’t ruled the seven seas or even the Intracoastal Waterway for long, not after the sun flares had come down on top of everything. It might have started out as a Coast Guard ship, still flying the colors of civilization, but it was a full on death ship flying a Coast Guard flag when they’d butchered Caleb, taken Cassie. It was sloppiness on the part of those murderers that the Black Watch hadn’t been burned over Myra’s head.

  Flag. Flagging. Flaggity. Flag. Flag. Through the starboard porthole, that flag had been the last thing she’d seen of the ship carrying away Cassie and her heart and soul, the tattered strip of cloth declaring Semper Paratus: Always Ready. Yes. Exactly. It was important to be ready, always, and they hadn’t been ready—and whose fault was that? Not hers. Not Caleb’s. Certainly not her sweet girl’s.

  The flags, they meant nothing. They were so many fluttery lies, but Drew, her husband, he’d wanted to believe in the flags.

  It seemed a long time ago when she and Dr
ew and the twins had sailed up and down the Atlantic coast, trying to make sense of the dark marinas and deserted coastal towns, trying to make sense of so much empty blackness. What had happened to Drew? It made her head hurt when she tried to pin down the memory.

  “Myra, we’re loaded.”

  She didn’t bother to look down at their latest cargo. She never looked anymore. They all had started to look like Cassie, even the babies. Instead, she used her thumbnail to pick at the bloody cuticles of her left hand.

  “Tell them to shut up that crying, or we’ll just eat them quicker.” The immediate silence almost made her laugh.

  It didn’t have to be true to be effective; it just needed to sound true.

  Boy-O smirked, relayed the message, and kicked at the metal shackles chaining the three boys to the girl and the girl’s grandmother. Heads down, they stuffed fists in their mouths, chewed their lips, and obeyed.

  “They’re not much to look at, but the Merritt Islanders were still getting themselves back to themselves after Summerlin’s group went through. Boy-O, do me something later and offload that Army Water Buffalo we found up in Saint Augustine. You know the one, that big tank that holds all that water. Maybe I’ll fill it up with beer for the boys.” She laughed when his face fell. “Or not. But we need to find some way to drag that big tank cross-country: horses, cows, sled dogs, slaves, something. If those combat freaks are holed up in Marco’s old place, we should plan for that, right? I like the way you think, Boy-O.”

  She didn’t wait to see if he agreed. Hadn’t it been his idea in the first place to use the Army’s Water Buffalo after they’d discovered that warehouse in Mims and realized what was in it—all that lovely fertilizer—and a water tank to haul it in.

  Sure, Colon Terry thought. Absolutely he’d go to work on the Water Buffalo project. He’d show Myra what destruction was supposed to look like. There was an art to terror or should be; he’d seen that before the lights went out. Terror made the world stand still—round and round the Mulberry Bush—pop goes the weasel—and Roy was the weasel. Myra would eat bats if she thought it would lead them to El and Roy, make them all crawl across glass if Colon suggested that it might work.