by Linda L Zern
Another knob of cypress humped up enough to let them see the ground was sloppy, but not underwater. Rain clouds started to gather.
Britt led the way to the small island of cypress and then turned to look back. The goats didn’t need to be told; they headed to the cypress island, leapfrogging through the black mud. Tess slopped behind her. The boys were slime to their waists, two swampy gnomes. Tess gave up trying to find somewhere dry to sit. The swamp closed in around them. She struggled through the mud until she was face to face with Britt.
“Who are we dealing with here? They could beat us to the Marketplace. I’m sick of hearing this woman’s name and watching people go stupid with fear.”
“Myra,” Britt said. “An English tourist trapped on a boat they were sailing around the world, a grand adventure, in the beginning. And then the solar flares killed the GPS, the radios, the lights. Just some woman who lost her husband, her children, and then became what she might have always been in her maggoty heart—a bloody, murdering witch. She dabbles in raiding, pillaging, and slavery. She runs a floating whorehouse.”
Britt started to clean filth from her rifle. The mark that covered Britt’s cheek stretched flat across the clenched muscles of her jaw.
“Myra was my owner. And she’s back to collect her property.”
A cloud of late season gnats floated into the center of the group. The Hawk Brothers waved them out of the animals’ eyes and noses. The bugs arrived with a dull hum, and Tess realized that when the sun set they were going to be eaten alive by mosquitoes. The swamp provided a refuge from the human swarm, but there were other kinds of invasions to deal with out here.
Air quivered with the haze of tiny wings as the sounds of Myra’s men faded. Big Hawk reached out, cut a stalk of saw grass and waved it in Ruben’s face. The buck goat accepted it as his due. Little Hawk slapped at his neck. Heat settled over them like a glove.
Britt crouched, her back stiff, ignoring the bugs and the boys’ efforts, ignoring Tess. She barely blinked as she stared out at the sea of grass. A gunshot boomed—just one, and then silence. Tess could see gnats thick around Britt’s face, but she never moved.
Suddenly, Britt jumped to her feet. “Get up. We’re going. He’s not coming back, and I won’t be caught out here at night.” She snatched the saw grass fan out of Big Hawk’s hand. A note of hysteria snapped through her statement. “I won’t be taken again. I can’t.”
“Britt. Keep your voice down.” Shocked, Tess jumped to her feet. “What are you talking about? He’ll be back.”
Britt reached down and dragged one of the does to her feet by an ear. The goat bawled in pain. “We have to go.”
Tess pushed between Britt and the goat. She knocked the woman’s hand free. The goat trotted off as far as the cypress mound would allow. Britt’s eyes were glassy, blank. “What’s wrong with you?” Tess demanded.
“Parrish’s gone. We can’t wait. He won’t be back.”
Her voice ping-ponged over the muddy water. Desperate, Tess reached out to cover Britt’s mouth with her hand. Britt jerked away, wildly pacing to the muddy edge.
“No. Parrish won’t. He’s gone. And Darby died, and we didn’t even get to bury her or, or the baby. A tiny baby. Myra came then. Myra. There were so many. And Parrish was nowhere. He left us. He was gone. He. Left. Us. All. To. The. Butcher.”
“Britt. Stop now. They’ll hear you. Shut up.” Tess reached out, wrapped her arms around Parrish’s sister. Britt’s body went tense; her head fell back. She opened her mouth to scream. Tess pushed her backward into the wet and slop. Water rushed into Britt’s still-gaping mouth. Somewhere near, someone splashed in their direction. Tess scooped Britt into her arms, pressed her finger to her lips. The boys and the goats were already gone. They’d vanished like fog or gnats before a breeze.
Tess whispered in Britt’s ear, “Parrish won’t leave us. He won’t. Now you have to shut up.” A chill shook Tess. Her pants were black to the knee, and she was wet to her shoulders. She strained to hear where the footsteps were headed in the sucking mud beyond their hiding place, trying to gauge when to break and run.
Somewhere in the swamp, a sambar buck barked out its strange throaty call, a warning. Maybe one of the original bucks her grandfather had imported, with the big S and L ranch brand on its hip. A survivor barking to stay alive. She wished him well, hoped he wasn’t alone.
“Don’t give a bloody hell about my brother.” Britt pushed at Tess’s hands. “Can’t care. Caring kills.”
“Hold still. And I mean it.” Tess squeezed the woman tighter, shook her. The body in her arms was as stiff as one of the cypress knots that ringed the stand of trees. “He’ll be here. He’s going to . . .” Someone reached out and yanked Tess backward by the shirt-collar, dragging her to her feet. Blood. She could smell blood. There was blood on Parrish’s hands.
“Stop this. Mud wrestling? Really? Let’s go. Now!” Parrish shoved Tess in front of him. He reached down to pull Britt to her feet. His sister looked at his outstretched hand, his gesture, as if she couldn’t quite understand what she was supposed to do about it. “Come on, Brittany, let’s go. There’s a company of about sixty to seventy moving in on the Marketplace. I’ve dropped the number by two, but that’s not going—”
A childlike sob bubbled out of her.
“Brittany? It’s me. Ryan.”
Hearing him say their names like that seemed to help Britt focus —
“Ryan.”
The sound settled into Tess’s gut. Brittany sounded like a five-year-old. Tess realized he’d heard it too. The nonsense of it. The strange cadence of a child’s complaint from a grown woman.
Suddenly gentle, he leaned down to her. “I’m here. I’ve come back. I won’t leave you again. Let’s find Ella. Come on—”
“Ryan.” She reached up and took his hand. “Darby’s looking for you.”
He froze.
Tess caught Parrish’s eye. He shook his head when she started to speak. Another gunshot, farther away this time, as if to mark the coming twilight. Britt flinched.
“Come on then. We don’t want to keep her waiting.” Britt rolled to her knees, braced herself against a cypress knee, and stood up slowly. Britt took the hand he held out to her and followed him.
They moved into the deeper, thicker mud of the swamp, away from the advance of Myra’s invading army.
CHAPTER 38
The wetlands echoed with the sounds of animals hiding: displaced, frightened, cornered—and cornered animals were the worst. Everyone knew that. Parrish held Britt’s hand through the slog. Tess brought up the rear. They’d have to trust the Hawk Brothers to scurry off to somewhere safe. Late afternoon light, heavy with haze, gilded the surface of the dark water.
They moved as quickly as the sucking mud allowed. The air dripped. Frustrating to be surrounded by water and none of it helpful.
Covered in a film of slime, Tess kept up. Head down, hair matted against her scalp, she didn’t hesitate when the water lapped to their thighs, then their hips. It was easy to imagine what slithered and swam around them. Quiet and sure, she stayed close to Britt. Brave girl, his girl. The thought made Parrish smile.
Back at the cypress knoll when he’d pulled her to her feet, he’d seen the way Tess hesitated at the sheen of wet blood on his fingers. After that, he’d been careful to swish the blood off; better to be covered in mud than smelling of death.
With a quick nod of her head, she’d let him know that she understood what he’d done, what he might still have to do, and something tight loosened in his chest when he saw her help Brittany when she stumbled. Tess must be confused at his sister’s breakdown. Tough, broken Brittany, who’d loved to paint and sing, but that was before. All before.
Why would they want him back at the Marketplace? Why? If only there was time to sit down and hash through the thinking behind this madness, to let Britt have her say.
And Darby. Tess would have to hear about Darby. The thought sickened him—even no
w. He shut it off, focused on what he’d seen of the enemy.
Parrish hadn’t told Tess all of it. The first wave was armed with a motley assortment of handguns, long guns, machetes, and clubs; but behind the invaders, he’d heard something he hadn’t heard since the beginning, something that sounded like heavy artillery. A canon? A mortar dragged out of a museum? Or something else? How had they gotten something big across that breach in the Saint John’s Bridge? He shook his head. If he’d learned one thing, it was not to borrow trouble. Maybe what he’d heard had been nothing more than a hay wagon for the Pirate Queen. But he didn’t think so.
Either way, it was going to be a bloodbath, and he had no intention of marching Tess back into the middle of it, El or no El.
At the edge of the swamp, they looked out at a flat pasture of uneven grasses. A squad of El’s soldiers moved along the far side of the open field. He heard Britt gasp when she recognized them.
Parrish pushed Britt onto dry ground and then reached for Tess’s hand, hoping they’d have enough cover to melt back into the saw grass and cattails. Even if they had to spend the night in the bog, they needed to make their move soon and get away from Britt. Let her go back to El’s folly.
“Here. I’m here.” Britt’s voice carried on the breeze. The women froze hearing her.
Parrish pulled Tess back away from the field. She staggered back, then yanked her hand out of his and started to run.
“Tess, stop! Tess.” Then he saw them. A handful of stair step kids, some of the Doe Kids, wandering the field. They looked lost. Alive, but wandering. Tess screamed for ZeeZee, but got no answer. One of the children waved a stick over his head at the sound of her voice.
Tess shouted something, kept running. Parrish raced to catch up.
It was too late. The rifles were raised and shots rang across the field over the heads of the S-Line survivors. Intimidation. Tess threw herself around a little girl wearing a banana leaf for a hat. The five straggling children froze, looking stunned at the sound of gunfire.
Parrish shouted out an order, “Hold still! Don’t move. They won’t shoot you, hurt you, if you don’t run.”
One of the girls, he thought she’d been calling herself Fern-Curl last week, grabbed the arm of another kid, a bigger kid, a boy, who shook her off. He broke and ran for a line of trees spared by the fire, which edged the field. The kid wanted the safety of trees and forest and cover—like the animals.
Calmly, one of the Amazons raised her rifle and shot him. He tripped and went down.
Children began screaming. Parrish reached them in time to wade into their hysteria: yanking at their clothes, he pushed them down to the ground. Tess and the girl went down to their knees, holding each other.
“Shut up. Shut up. I told you not to run.” He shoved the four remaining children facedown into the wispy patch of grass, kicked them over when he saw them tense up, readying to bolt. They were like rabbits, frozen in terror one moment, ready to jump and run the next. It was a strategy that had kept them alive a long time—until now.
Britt, surrounded by the armed squad, stared across the field at the body of the murdered child. She slid back into her role as their leader without a blink. He saw it now. The way she used the weapons, the discipline, the violence to hold herself together.
She snapped. “Well, if you were wondering or not if we were serious, now you know.” The cold was back in her eyes, the sneer back on her face as if the breakdown in the swamp had not happened. She jerked her shoulder. “It ran.”
Tess exploded to her feet, rounded on her. “It! When did you become the thing you hated?” Her voice cracked with intensity. “When did you become a butcher of children? My God. How do you sleep at night?”
“Sometimes we don’t, and don’t even pretend to understand us, you pampered pissant of a princess!” Britt spit the words out like pieces of slime she’d found in the mud. “I can’t understand why El wanted me to find you two.” She waved a hand over the group. “Why she wants you. There’s always dying out here. Always.”
“Who are they? Tess?” The girl whimpered.
Parrish could smell the faint copper taint of blood coming from the children. “Tess, check the kids. I’ll check the boy.”
“Sorrel, his name is Sorrel.” The banana leaf bobbed with the girl’s trembling. Is not was, not yet.
Parrish knelt in front of the girl. “Okay. Okay. How about you? What should we call you?”
“Christmas.”
He looked into the girl’s soft green eyes and saw the tears caught in her lashes. “Good name. I hope you keep it for longer than a week.” There was a blood smear on her neck. He stood and turned to check on a boy with the funny name of Sorrel.
With a head jerk, Britt assigned one of the women to walk with Parrish. It had been a good shot—no fuss, no muss—a kill shot. The child hadn’t known what hit him, a small blessing. He bent down to scoop the boy into his arms.
“Stop. What are you doing? Leave him. We don’t have time for this. Britt won’t like it.” The woman’s voice came out muffled from behind the grimy folds of a once-red kaffiyeh, a man’s head covering. Probably someone’s souvenir from serving in the Middle East, back when America fought other people’s wars.
Parrish held the dead boy against his chest.
“Do you even know where that thing on your head came from?”
The woman took half a step back, one hand coming up to touch her head wrap, acting as if she’d just heard a bear talk.
Her voice sharpened. “I know who I killed to get it. Drop the kid. Leave him.”
Parrish ignored her and walked back to the huddle of frightened children and Tess.
“Are you hurt? What is this blood? Where is everyone else?” Tess shoved and pushed and yanked at the children’s arms, looking for wounds.
“Stop,” Christmas said, shoving back. “It’s not from us.”
Someone whimpered when Parrish reached them, carrying the limp body in his arms.
“It’s not from us,” the girl repeated, not looking up.
Tess glanced at the hard glint in Parrish’s eyes.
The Amazons backed away from the miserable knot of children in front of them.
“Not from us. Tess, they took her—Ally. We helped carry her. It’s was on her, the blood.” The children looked down their shirtfronts as if seeing them for the first time.
“What? Ally? Ally’s blood?”
Pointing to the twin drag marks in the ground that led across the pasture, Christmas explained, “Something’s wrong with Ally. Something Miss Gwen couldn’t fix. They took her. Jamie, Gwen, and the big boys, Miss Gwen’s big boys. We helped them until they said, ‘Go back.’ Stone and ZeeZee wanted to go, but they made them bring us back. Mister Jon stayed with us too.”
Parrish carried the dead boy close to a thicket of palmettos. Rejoining the group of children, he knelt down to be eye to eye with them.
Tess followed the children’s pointing fingers, understanding the ruts in the dirt—a travois. They’d put Ally on a drag. There were hoof prints between the marks. They’d found at least one of the missing horses, though, maybe one of Jamie’s small herd. Not Goliath. He was back at the Marketplace, maybe in some stewpot by now.
“Ally was bloody. They said ‘baby’ a lot. Gwen wanted her to go to the big place for a doctor. We helped carry her blanket.”
Tess watched Parrish grip the girl’s shoulder, trying to be comforting maybe. She wondered if he realized that the kid flinched under his hand, and that he was hurting her.
The Doe Kids snuck looks at the body of their friend.
Parrish was trying to keep them focused on him. “Hey, guys, look here. When, Christmas? When? How long ago?”
Another girl, wearing a cape cut from a tarp, answered, glaring at the Amazons. “The sun was half way to the top.”
“But which day?” Parrish asked, trying to be patient. “Today? This day?”
Christmas frowned, shrugged. “Not today.”
Britt kicked at the drag marks of the travois, erasing them.
“What difference does it make? Does any of this make? We’re going back to El. She’ll need us. Your people are already there,” Britt said. She avoided looking at the body on the ground.
Tess studied the Amazons’ eyes: cold, indifferent, blank. She was beginning to recognize their coping mechanisms. Pretending nothing had happened, getting on to the next assignment. The next conquest?
Christmas faltered in front of Britt’s impatience. She fell against Tess’s neck. The tears were real enough, but the child’s whisper against her ear had nothing to do with the wasted life of the child on the ground. Christmas made a show of being overcome with sorrow. The other girl joined her. It was a pretty decent performance. They needed to talk to Tess away from the Amazons.
Tess patted Christmas, nodded to the girl in the tarp, and then waved the others to their feet. She called out, “The children can’t stay here, and they can’t go with us. We’re marching into a war.” Tess grabbed Christmas’s hand, dragged the girl toward the tree line. “And you’ve terrorized them.”
The collective pressure of rifle barrels followed Tess as she stepped away from the group. Holding each other’s hands, the children followed her.
“Britt! Call off the guns,” Parrish spoke low and intense. “You need to figure out what you’re going to be able to do behind enemy lines to help El. You’ll never beat them to the fort. You’ll never get inside. Not now. They’ll have welded that gate shut somehow if they’re smart. You’re on your own. And we’re not going with you.”
Tess could hear the argument between Parrish and his sister. The broken child that had whimpered in the swamp was gone. The battlefield commander was back. Neither Britt nor Parrish sounded interested in backing down.
Tess dared to drag Christmas farther out of the Amazons’ hearing range. She glanced back when Parrish slid between Britt’s squad and the surviving children.
Britt called off her Amazons with a single, clipped order. “Stand down. Hilly.”
“Miss Tess, they didn’t have to shoot Sorrel,” the girl in the tarp complained. A name popped into Tess’s head. She used to call herself River.
