by Linda L Zern
The world of the Little-Big Econ State Forest went on unchanged in the green zones. Birds nested. Animals scurried. It was easy to imagine that the Strandline still stood: its barn and paddocks, the storage shed, the outhouse, the fishing shack, the trashcan shower platform Grandfather had built for his girls. But then the green gave way, and the ground smoked.
Parrish, Tess, and Samuel kept to the unburned sections like the animals.
The Doe Kids carried the Amazon’s confiscated weapons; one little girl, not big enough to keep the stock of the shotgun she carried from dragging in the dirt, giggled every time its owner cursed when the gun smacked a cypress knot or stump. The women had re-covered their faces.
Tess handed Parrish a red bandana to keep the smoke out of his lungs. “Here. It was nice of your sister not to steal everything in my vest.”
“You think El knew that they ransacked your gear?”
“No. But someone, who isn’t me, is enjoying my tomahawk.”
He smiled and said, “Someone who isn’t me is enjoying everything I carried a couple days ago.” He lifted the deer rifle he’d chosen out of the pile of guns. “The fortunes of war.”
At the river’s edge, Parrish stopped, addressed his sister’s squad. “I’ve left it up to Tess whether or not we invite you into what’s left of our lives.”
Tess kicked at a clump of crumbling fern. Even here, the heat had drifted and settled and left its mark.
“Yeah . . .” She pulled the bandana from her face. “So, about that. I think that anyone that could kill a child as coldly as that one did,” she said, pointing to Hilly, face hidden again behind her head scarf, “are the last people on earth we should trust.”
Among the Amazons there was the subtle shifting of weight, a slight rolling forward onto the balls of their feet—combat stances. These were not people who would ever be ready to let their guard down. Ever.
“But I also know that there’s something called mutual self-interest at work here.” Tess threw her hand wide, drew their attention to the countryside. “It’s together or not at all. You have to agree to be under Parrish’s command.”
A smaller woman tore her head covering free. She spit in the dirt at his feet. River stepped back, pulling at the arms of two more of the children, trying to drag them away. Tess saw Samuel’s hand tighten on his rifle. The children faded toward the trees and the protection of the woods.
“You don’t get it. They’ll never agree to that,” Britt said, talking to Tess, ignoring Parrish. “They’d rather let the gators take them.” She nodded at the thick, slow water in front of them. “It’s you or forget it.” She stared at Tess, eyebrows raised in expectation.
“I don’t have his training. I don’t.”
“Doesn’t matter. They can’t listen to him. They won’t.”
“Okay. What we have here is mutual self-interest, but it’s got to be rational. We won’t be shooting unarmed kids. We’re not—”
Samuel cut her off. There was dirt on his hands and face from grave digging. “I just buried the evidence of who and what these people are. I don’t know that I have a say, but I say maybe not.” Irony dripped from his statement.
Britt stepped between Tess and Sam.
“You’re right, you don’t have his expertise.” Britt showed her teeth. Ignoring Sam, she looked at Tess.
Sam didn’t count, Tess could tell; after all, just another man. Britt added, “But I get you. We’ll make a pledge. If you want we can make it a blood pledge.” Britt held the palm of her hand out to Tess; it was marked with old, healed slash marks.
Parrish shook his head and jerked a shoulder when Britt glanced at him.
“Cripes all mighty,” he said. “Blood pledges?”
“Enough. There’s been enough blood here. I’m your new squad leader.” Tess pulled herself to her full height, squaring her tired shoulders. “Britt will answer to me. Agreed?”
She waited for each woman’s silent, grim nod. Hilly took a long time before giving her okay.
“Good enough. But if you betray this effort, I’ll unleash Parrish on you with no rules. And I will do it.”
No one objected or pretended not to.
“Samuel? Take us home.”
At the bunker, Jess T lay in the dirt like a lump of crushed rags: shot, beaten, stabbed. The old man had gone down hard but not fast. Next to him, Blockhead the Dog lay like a deflated balloon.
Tess stood over the bodies—dry-eyed; she kept her eyes on Jess T. Parrish knew the look, the steel it took to see someone you loved after they’d been made to resemble so much trash in the dirt. He hated it—that look in her eyes. Later, later he’d help her cry before the tears turned to stones in her brain and then became nightmares that never left her.
“What’s happened here?” Britt barely glanced at the dead man. She turned on the children, slashing at them with her voice.
They stumbled back, huddling. Samuel searched the ground for hints, moving like a tracker, someone used to reading tracks and scuffs left by the animals they hunted. Good. They were going to need people like him. Parrish let him take the lead.
“Where’s the entrance to the bunker, Sam?” Tess continued to stare at her dead friend.
Parrish began to search Jess’s pockets. They were empty. The old man hadn’t been stripped; that was something at least. Whoever had done this was moving fast. A glint of metal winked from the ground next to Jess T’s hand. Brushing the bloody dirt back, Parrish found one of Jamie’s triangles, one of the warning bells. Jess T had been trying to warn the others.
“Tess, look at this.” He held the triangle high. “I think they had some warning. Some. And that means some of them may still be alive.”
Her brow lowered. Pain washed across her face.
“Think about it. If they’d had some warning they’d have hidden.”
Behind them the hollow boom of a boot on metal made them turn. Samuel stomped three times against the ground. Dust and ash puffed up. A grinding, rusty squeak answered his stomps. The bunker was tucked against the berm of a drainage ditch, one of the forgotten ditches that crisscrossed the area, some long abandoned government project to prevent flooding. The flames and heat had scoured the softly rolling hills of sand free of vegetation. The eroding edges of the ditch made a clever hideaway for the bunker.
Sam reached down and then barked at the Amazon closest to him. “Grab. Help me.” The woman hesitated and then shrugged, finally obeying him. Together they bent, grabbed a metal handle, and yanked. The hatch opened like the mouth of a big-boned fish. Two huge, round eyes blinked in the sudden light.
“We’re here,” the boy, Barker, offered helpfully. “We got pushed down here. Jess T pushed us into the hole and told us to lock the top.”
The group scooted close to stare down into the bunker. Tess waved them back. “Who else? Who told you to stay down there? Was it just Jess T?
Another head popped to the surface next to Baker’s from the dark, a gray-haired head wrapped in a bandage. “Mister Jon and Zeez and Jess T. And Stone too.” Kilmer held a hand over his eyes, blinded by the sun. “They said ‘take care of these kids,’ and then they shoved me in after them. We heard Jess T bang the warning out, three loud clanks, and then into the hole we went.”
Four more kids pushed by the boy and the old man and scrambled up and out of the opening.
The Barker boy smiled in apology and shrugged. “It’s dark down here. We don’t like it.”
“They pushed us in to save us,” Barker repeated. Kilmer started to ruffle the boy’s hair, then catching sight of his friend’s body, stopped. His hand froze midair. They were all silent as Kilmer climbed out of the darkness.
“We need a head count of the kids,” Tess said. It came out flat, dry—emotionless. The sound choked off something in Parrish’s heart.
Samuel shot Tess a look, before climbing down into the bunker.
“No one else in here.” Sam’s voice boomed and bounced from inside.
“Tess, look at me.” Parrish grabbed for her hand. She acted like he wasn’t there. “That’s still good news.”
Finally, she looked at him, really looked at him.
“Tess. There’s still a chance.”
“No chances for Jess T.” Pushing Kilmer and the children out of the way, Tess climbed down into the bunker.
Britt joined Parrish next to the open hatch. “She’s right. No more chances for him.” Britt focused on Tess’s descending figure. “She’s hard or getting there.” Britt rolled her shoulders, stretching. When she nodded her head at the squad, they dropped to one knee, without a word.
“Hard is good. Hard is best,” she said. “Parrish. Hmmm . . . I think I’ll keep calling you that. It works. You know?” She studied his face and then added, “Probably should get that body in the ground before the birds come and advertise. And then we should plan how we use the guns I’m betting are stored down there.”
“Is that what you think you are, Britt? Hard and tough? Tough enough to be okay with shooting a little boy in the back?” Parrish looked into her eyes.
She tipped her head back to the shrinking light, closed her eyes, and ignored him.
“Britt?”
She didn’t answer.
“Fine. You just stand there. But you should know that Tess taught me there’s a difference between tough and hard. They aren’t the same thing at all. You’re right about tough being good, but Britt, hard can be a lot like being dead. Believe me, I know.”
He left her to go and bury an old friend and a silly dog.
CHAPTER 41
They weren’t brothers, not really, not the way boys used to be when they shared a mom, a dad, and a last name, but that didn’t bother Little Hawk or Big Hawk. They were brothers now. After that long ago day when Big Hawk had chucked a can at the wild dogs that had treed the kid on the roof of the broken down pickup truck, they’d become family. Forever.
The bigger boy still couldn’t say why he’d bothered to help the kid cornered by the dogs. Maybe he’d been tired of being alone after his family died. He vaguely remembered his name from back then: Danny. Just as vague was the vision of a baby sister who cried all the time, a mother who’d stopped eating even though he’d found them more food—cans with dogs’ pictures on them—but Mommy had hurt herself days and days before. She’d been opening some other cans with a screwdriver when it slipped and stuck her in the leg. And then she couldn’t walk. And then she couldn’t speak. And then the baby sister had quit crying. And then Mommy didn’t open her eyes anymore. And then Danny had been alone until he had found the boy on the truck.
The dogs in the pack had looked like the pictures on those cans of food. They looked like pets. They acted like wolves. Danny was pretty impressed to see that the boy with dark skin and big, shiny, black eyes wasn’t crying or frantic. He sat cross-legged, head in his hands, waiting. He was so little that Danny couldn’t imagine how he’d managed to scramble all the way up there. Could be someone had put him up there and then left him?
One of the biggest dogs, the kind his mom had called a Great Dane, led the pack. Its nails had scratched long, jagged grooves in the truck’s paint as high up as the windows. The other dirty mix of dogs howled and barked and circled. Intent, they hadn’t registered Danny’s presence.
He took one of the cans with dog pictures on it out of his mom’s backpack and threw it as hard as he could at the big dog. It was a good shot, smashed the dog on the side of the head. It had yipped and gotten frightened, and then it had run away. Hungry but not stupid, the pack followed. A skinny wiener dog thought it would make a stand and fight until Danny gave it a hefty kick.
Danny crawled into the bed of the truck, surprised to find a bonanza of grocery store food: noodles, crackers, cereal, water in bottles, but mostly boxes. Sure they were soggy from dew and wet, but his mouth watered at the sight of the pile. It was more food than he’d seen since before his mom had hurt herself to death.
Looking up, he caught the boy’s steady stare. There was a rope tied around his waist, threaded through the frame of the truck bed. Someone had left him there on purpose, but the filth on the kid’s legs and the stink coming from his clothes said that maybe they weren’t coming back anytime soon, or ever.
When the little kid held his arms out to Danny it was done, and they were brothers.
And then, after running away from the man-catchers on the coast, they’d stumbled into Stone’s camp at the crossroads of Van Arsdale and the road they called Hog Highway because of all the wild pigs that wallowed in the muddy potholes there. Stone’s pack of kids was another kind of family, so Danny and his brother had stayed and started picking new names for themselves when the mood struck or for no reason at all.
Big Hawk and Little Hawk crawled through the maze of flood ditches tracking Miss Tess and Mister Parrish. It was easy. No one thought to look for two boys slithering their way through the chalky dust and all the burned down trees. They’d left the goats near the river in a secret place they knew, a shallow between two Indian mounds.
They watched the other Doe Kids and Miss Tess and Mister Parrish, trying to decide if they needed to be rescued.
“Why are they still with those girl soldiers?”
Big Hawk harrumphed from the sloping edge of the ditch. They could hear the metallic banging noise of people moving inside the big hole in the ground.
“Those mean ones shot . . .” Little Hawk didn’t finish the statement. What more was there to say?
Big Hawk gave him a warning look. Little Hawk pouted, but he shut up. There was a reason they were still around to be spying their way through the Little-Big Econ Forest.
Big Hawk slid down the side of the ditch.
He shook his head at Little Hawk. “Don’t fuss. They’ll hear.”
“But, bu, bu—” Little Hawk stammered. He balled up one fist, smacked it against the ground. “Mister Parrish, he’s talking with those mean girls. And that ugly one killed Sorrel.”
“Stop. He must be just tricking them, and then he’ll beat them down. That’s all. And shut up. We can’t help him if they find us.”
Big Hawk pulled a hunk of burnt possum out of his pack, smelled it, judged it still okay to eat, and then handed a fistful to his angry younger brother.
Tess’s voice inside the metal bunker echoed.
She’d ordered everyone to stay outside: all the Doe Kids, Kilmer. Sammy stepped up to do guard duty with Parrish—establish a perimeter, keep the calm, help dig graves.
Inside it smelled of mold and gun oil and urine. She struggled to figure out what had happened; tried to see ZeeZee and Stone shoving the children into the hidden hole of the bunker. Out of time, panicked, determined to lead the killers away from the children, leaving Jess T to cover the hatch, her father in the mix somehow.
It had gone wrong; it had to have all gone so wrong, and the frightened Doe Kids and Kilmer had huddled in the dark of the underground metal tube for a long time—long enough to need to pee.
Parrish had had to help Kilmer up the ladder. It was so hard to see how old he’d become since the day of the missing horses. If only she knew what to say to him, to any of them. She let her eyes adjust to the darkness.
Whatever was supposed to be lighting the interior of the twenty-seven-foot-long space had failed. The only light came in through the open door of the bunker. Dust motes spun away in the razor-edged square of sunshine, glinting off of the slick barrels of a rack of AR-15s and pump action shotguns. There were other weapons, but they were hidden in darkness and stale air.
Sealed garbage cans, barrels, and rows of number ten cans waited, needing to be inventoried—a chore for another day. She reached for the closest rifle.
“How many?” Britt asked, joining her at the bottom of the ladder, looking past Tess to the weapons lined against the wall.
“Enough and then some. Tell Samuel to come down and help take up rifles to your squad.”
“Hilly and Ray want their old guns back. They
won’t be comfortable with anything unfamiliar, and we should grab something out of here that’s edible.”
“Barker,” Tess yelled up, “help us down here.”
The boy’s head popped over the edge of the opening.
“Come down. Get us something to eat, and don’t tell me you didn’t ransack the rations while you were down here. Water too. We’re going after ZeeZee, my dad, and Stone. Jamie and Gwen and Ally will have to wait.” A sudden surge of terror made it hard for her to swallow.
Tess could feel Britt’s glance; she imagined it was full of contempt. Behind them, Barker rattled through rows of cans. It was usually ZeeZee’s job—inventory and supply clerking with Ally helping her.
Tess leaned forward, pressed her forehead against the cool metal of the gun rack. There was a fist squeezing her heart.
“Breathe deep and slow and then shut it off,” Britt snapped. “Don’t let your brain fill in the blanks. You’ll know soon enough what’s happened.” Britt pulled a hunter’s vest from a hook next to the guns, methodically filled the pockets with extra magazines. “The end writes itself. Trust me. They’ve got at least a couple of hours head start, and whatever nightmare is going to happen to your sister, well, it’s probably over.”
Tess spun and shoved Britt into the far side of the bunker. The metal wall boomed. “You’re going to shut up about my sister and anything else that’s mine, and that includes your brother because he’s mine too.”
Britt hung slack under Tess’s hands, her smile quirked up in the gloom of the bunker. Her cheek scar puckered. “Do you really have time for this, Tess?” She sounded reasonable and calm and insulting.
Tess thumped her against the wall, but more gently now. “Shut up. I don’t need you to push me into a fight. I don’t. I’ll do what I need to do to keep us safe, to find them.”
