by Linda L Zern
El didn’t move.
Myra screamed again, closer, “What is this? Ella, what are you doing? What’s wrong with you?”
A gunshot, close enough to stun Tess’s ears, exploded. A bullet thumped into El’s still body as pain seared Tess’s arm, a quick stinging burn. She pushed upward against the dead weight of Parrish’s sister and shoved. El rolled out of the blanket.
Myra’s back was to Tess. The woman whirled and convulsed. She tore at her hair. Her body was covered by a mass of rags, one layered on top of another, her gray hair a nest of snarled knots. It was hard to tell where the rags and hair ended and the woman began. She howled and screamed and slapped at her own head. She spun back to the body on the ground.
“Say something, damn you! Talk to me. Say that you’re done collecting stray dogs and cats and girls. Say you’ll come back to me. Say it! I was going to make you a master over all of it,” the woman demanded. “What was wrong with you? Why did you leave me? CASSIE!”
The disciplined pop, pop, pop of a unit cutting its way through a poorly armed rabble moved steadily closer. Myra fixated on the dead woman at her feet.
CHAPTER 54
Something was wrong with Britt. From the ground, Jamie watched as she stood on the wall, her hands fisting against her head, the binoculars dangling from her neck—forgotten. She was frozen. Horror etched its way across every line and mark on her face. Something had gone very wrong with Britt’s part of the plan. The sniper rifle lay at her feet. He was blinded when the sun shifted higher. He put his hand up to block the blaze of light.
“Britt!” he screamed.
The gunfire and shouts fell silent in one of those odd breaths of time where everything stopped in the middle of hysteria. Britt was screaming her sister’s name.
Jamie had been waiting for his turn to scramble over the big gate, try for the Buffalo, lock it down. His bad feeling about it had become a sick feeling.
Britt looked down at him. “She’s dead. El’s dead. Myra shot her.”
The sounds of fighting erupted again.
Jamie darted to the ladder and was halfway up the rungs when Ally’s voice nailed him in place.
“Jamie, talk to us. Where’s Tess?” Ally yelled up to Jamie. “What’s happening? Can you see ZeeZee?”
He turned, saw Ally with Gwen’s arm around her. She looked like a guilty kid who’d broken curfew, barely standing, white and shaky, clutching at Gwen’s arms.
Jamie felt his fingers dig into the rope of the ladder. She shouldn’t be out here. What was Gwen thinking? Wasn’t there enough to worry about without having Ally watching him go up the wall in a panic?
“Go back in. Both of you.”
Gwen bristled. “She wouldn’t stay down. One of the girls said something, frightened her about what was happening out here. We could hear the noise inside. I couldn’t make her stop.”
Ally shook her head so hard her hair hit Gwen in the face.
Served Gwen right. Ally was looking at Jamie as if he’d be able to sprout wings and fly his way out to Tess and the others. His gut rolled. “Go back. You’re not helping.” He didn’t need hero worship laid on him right now. Couldn’t worry about Ally now.
“Jamie?”
“Go back!”
Dismissing them, he climbed up to Britt. Ripping the binoculars out of her hands. He watched as El’s body toppled out of the carpet. Tess pushed her way out from under the blankets on the stretcher—busting out of the quilt—a raging butterfly from a cocoon.
Myra’s back was to Tess as she kicked and beat at El’s still body.
Jamie saw Parrish scream at Tess from the cross. She looked unsteady as she stumbled toward him, blood sheeted down her arm. Jamie watched her shoot a man on the run, saw her trip over something and start to spin as she looked at something or someone on the ground. It was a body. She staggered away from whoever she’d been looking at, and fell. Turning, she crawled toward the cross.
“Shoot her, Tess.” It was a whisper.
Why didn’t Tess shoot Myra? What was she thinking?
She’s waiting for Britt, he realized. Or was too hurt or too wounded . . .
The crazy woman spun in the center of the mayhem, hysterical and shrieking. She lashed out at one of her men, slapping him. There was some sort of discussion, an order. He raced away. Myra, raising a machete over her head, finally spotted Tess. Jamie shoved Britt out of the way, grabbed the big sniper rifle, and prayed that his ammo would make the distance.
El’s eyes were open but empty, her body like driftwood. Dead. Rage seethed under Myra’s skin, rolled through her brain. Dead. Defeated. Whipped. El had won by what? By dying?
But . . .
Weren’t they a fearful force for revenge and retribution? Hadn’t these men said they would fight for her a hundred times? They did. They had. And now this, a dead woman and a wall shutting her out and here they were, and it had gone wrong so quickly. Rabble—brain dead rabble. Myra watched three more men slink back and away.
“Boy-O. Boy-O! They brought me a dead woman.” But he was nowhere. No bloody where.
She wailed and cried and tried to remember what she’d been about, asking them to come this far in the first place, even after the fire had leveled all the hidey-holes. She had been a prophet bringing the purifying fire. She kicked at El’s worthless body.
Another girl crawled toward the cross, marking the ground with a steady drip of blood. It was confusing. Where had she come from?
Boy-O cried out, “It’s over. They’re coming at us from outside of the wall. They’ve been coming out through the wall, over the wall. They have big guns, better guns. Let’s live to fight another day.”
Boy-O! Calling for a retreat? Ready to run? Another betrayal. Roy Terry and El and now him. She threw her arms around his neck, clung and cried, then reared back and slapped his face. He grinned at her.
“Dead. They brought me a dead woman.”
A boy yelled, his voice high and cracking, “Run. Run. They shoot you twice. They kill you twice.” He raced by, his only weapon a rusty hunk of chain nailed to a club.
Boy-O Terry reached out with one hand and grabbed at the kid’s arm. Not quick enough, the frightened boy struggled then slipped free.
“Stop him. Get him back. We need him.”
Boy-O shook himself like the good, faithful dog he was and darted after Freckles.
It was Freckles. Was that right? A boy when they’d found him, they’d chained him to the deck until his skin had blistered and he’d been ready to swear allegiance. Sure. There’d been a brother too? No.
Freckle’s voice exploded over the sound of gunfire, “They’ve got big guns. This isn’t a bunch of unarmed babies. She lied. She—” The sound gurgled away under Boy-O’s capable hands. He sent Myra a cheerful wave as he looted a dying man.
Myra spun in a circle, searched the camp.
The big Water Buffalo sat abandoned near the crosses. The wormy horses were long gone. Why had they brought it? What had Boy-O thought he would do with it?
She couldn’t remember. She bent down and picked up a machete.
The machete in her hand felt familiar, felt honest. She looked down at the blade, raised the machete with two hands over her head and focused on the girl crawling toward the cross.
Parrish watched Tess go down next to her father in the dirt, blood dripping from the sleeve of her shirt—her face fading to gray. Amazons swept around the corners of the front wall. Myra’s men had given up even the pretense of fighting. They ran and they died, and before the women walked past the fallen, they were quick to finish the job—a double tap to be sure.
Myra raised the machete behind Tess as the last of her men scuttled away. Amazon warriors fanned out and then pressed forward into the main camp.
“Tess!” Her name ripped his throat.
But then Myra’s chest bloomed blood and bone before she could hurt Tess, or had he imagined that?
He blinked sweat out of his open eye and arched against
the lashings. He had to get down—to her. Had they tied him here, above the world, so that he could watch El die and Tessla too? His sister was gone before they could hurt her at all. No one could hurt El ever again.
Tess couldn’t be dead too. Please, God. Her father twitched and groaned.
He struggled harder against the belt leather tying him to the cross, felt skin rip. When he pushed up, hoping to feel some weakness, some give in the leather, agony jetted into the cramped muscles of his leg. The sun blared down.
Myra’s men hardly bothered glancing up as they retreated. The Amazons had broken them in short order, more likely the rifles they carried and the sniper on the wall. Myra’s death cemented it; they limped back the way they had come. Most looked relieved as they ran. They hadn’t planned on Strandline guns and Amazon skill.
The scum had been brave enough last night, beating Samuel, kicking people unconscious. Tough enough. Precious little fight in them today. Like most bullies, they couldn’t take a punch. Good enough. Parrish would take it.
He thrashed against the bar at his back.
A bubble of quiet formed around Tess. All the blood lust was somewhere else when a man, one of the few who’d kept his distance when the beatings had started the night before, stopped at the sight of Myra’s body—disgusted. He was a compact, muscled man with a quick, efficient way of moving, radiating experience. Reaching down, he pulled the machete out of Myra’s hand and then hunted through the dead woman’s clothes. He walked over to the foot of the cross, the machete dangling.
“Help us,” Parrish croaked.
Looking up at Parrish, he said, “Can’t stay. But I see help coming. Women to the rescue.” He shook his head.
Parrish could hear the shouts and sounds of battle coming back, but slower now: gunshots more random, the screams of the wounded silenced quickly, efficiently, the women calling to each other now, exultant.
The man reached behind the cross, dragged someone forward. Parrish struggled to focus.
ZeeZee? He had ZeeZee.
A man cursed and then a pistol shot and then silence. Parrish shook the fog out of his head.
But wasn’t ZeeZee next to him? Crucified like him? The straining muscles in his neck screamed when he turned his head to study the body on the other cross. ZeeZee’s clothes. ZeeZee’s size. But not ZeeZee . . . Couldn’t be, but it was a kid or a small boy, another trick to manipulate and terrorize. Someone who was supposed to make them think they were willing to sacrifice a girl. But girls were too valuable, even in the middle of a siege.
“Help us.”
The man with ZeeZee ignored him and dragged her around by the arm, yanking her back to his side when she rushed to go to Tess and her father. Her hair streamed with sweat and filth. She was dressed in an oversized plaid shirt, the pocket torn off, the arms rolled up to her elbows, and grimy sweatpants that had belonged to someone much larger. She’d tied them up with a hunk of twine. The tails of the rope dangled to her bare feet. They’d taken her shoes and given them to a corpse.
A flurry of shots popped and zinged, following the man Myra had hugged and slapped and sent off on some insane mission as he returned to the fight. Boy-O. Myra had called him Boy-O last night when he’d overseen the beatings. His face had a vague blandness that was somehow familiar. He stood and stared at the Water Buffalo, then the bodies on the ground. El and Myra dead; Tess and Jon, bleeding. He looked at the carnage and then up to Parrish, ignoring ZeeZee and her captor.
The man tried dragging ZeeZee away, lost his grip, and had to lunge after her. He grabbed her around the waist. She thrashed in his arms. Off balance they tumbled to the ground.
Boy-O’s face changed from a straining tension to an easy, cheerful smile. He aimed the pistol at Tess’s head, still grinning.
“Tessla!” ZeeZee choked out.
Parrish howled. With a laugh and a shrug, Boy-O took three steps toward Jon, swung the gun to the fallen man and pumped two rounds into his back. Jon’s moaning stopped. Tess crawled back to her father’s body.
“No, Daddy, No!” ZeeZee called out. “Tess!” Her screams drew the murderer’s attention. He pointed the pistol at ZeeZee. Her captor threw himself on top of her, shielding ZeeZee with his body. Boy-O fired. The shot went wide. He pulled the trigger again. Click, click, click—the magazine was empty.
Parrish pleaded, “Cut me down. Don’t leave us. Cut me down.”
The sniper rifle boomed again. Boy-O flinched, stumbled, and staggered out of Parrish’s sight. Not hit, but not hanging around to give the sniper a second chance. Boy-O’s insane laughter trailed after him.
ZeeZee’s captor yelled out. “Not today. Sorry.” Jumping to his feet he pulled ZeeZee off the ground. “No time. But good luck to you.”
ZeeZee tried to say something to Parrish, but the man cut her off. A stray bullet hit the body on the cross next to Parrish. No reaction, nothing, another dead body. Already dead. Been dead. Another shot kicked dirt up next to the cross.
“Help me. I’ll get you into the Marketplace—the fort. I’ll . . . Don’t take the girl.”
“Sorry, but it’s about insurance.” He jerked ZeeZee’s arm.
Amazons poured toward them, organized, efficient, clinical, mopping up. They asked no questions.
“Time for us to go, Barabus,” the man shouted. Grabbing ZeeZee around the waist he half dragged, half lifted her off the ground and out of view, and they were gone.
Parrish squinted at the wall of the fort. Someone had made that shot and killed Myra, but missed the second shot. More of Myra’s crew ran by. A sniper on the wall changed their attitude pretty quick. They were getting out of range—and fast. El had known how to beat the bullies at this game.
Parrish saw Tess jerk and then curl into herself. No No. Stop moving. Don’t draw attention to yourself. He wanted to yell at her. He didn’t. Didn’t dare. She needed to be still.
A few men, bloodied and wounded, were still falling back through the main camp. Parrish had seen more than one friend who’d survived the worst of some viscous fight killed in the winding down moments, the time when people were starting to breathe their sighs of relief, congratulate themselves on surviving the worst of it. It was the darkest part of the fight to Parrish’s mind.
As her troops retreated and saw Myra’s corpse, there was shock and curses, sometimes a sly relief. No one stopped to try and help. They were rats leaving a sinking ship. The camp emptied, leaving the faint smell of copper on the breeze, a slick metallic taste in the back of their throats. Death and burning mixed in a sickening musk over the battlefield.
“Tess, don’t move,” he said, but it was only a whisper.
The frustration of being trapped this way—bound, helpless, vulnerable—
made him want to throw his head back and hurl curses at the sky. The sun blistered its way across the day, burning through his eyelids. It was too much. The world went black.
Suddenly he was falling, backward, into more nothing, with nothing to stop him. Hitting the ground knocked the wind out of him. He lay in the dirt waiting for that first sickening gasp of air to sear its way back into his lungs.
“Sorry. I couldn’t find anything to stand on except dead men.” Samuel tried to smile through broken lips, but his pained grimace fit the occasion better. He sawed at Parrish’s ropes.
“Tess. Help her, help Tess. She’s there. She’s . . . been shot.”
“I’ll get to her.” Samuel shook his head and crawled to cut Parrish’s hands and feet free. He headed to the next cross.
Parrish growled, “Don’t bother. It’s not her. It’s not ZeeZee. Help Tess.” Samuel hesitated but went to Tess’s side.
The sun faded behind a cloud, no, not a cloud, a woman’s face and then a familiar red head popped into view. Jamie squatted next to his friend.
Hilly waved an old Saturday night special over Parrish’s face and sighed, “Everywhere you are.” She tut-tutted while unwrapping her headscarf. “Everywhere you are the bodies sure do pile up
.”
“Please don’t,” he coughed. “Over there—my sister, she’s dead. Jon, too. El. She’s gone.”
Hilly shook her head at him, her face a study in confusion; she turned a slow, careful circle, searching. A group of Amazon fighters started to gather.
Parrish rolled onto his side and tried to rub at the grooves left in his skin from the restraints. His hands felt like clubs. Parrish elbow-dragged toward Tess, who lay too still in the black ash.
Hilly shoved her gun into her pants, not bothering to worry over the death around her or count the stray bullets. She walked straight to El’s body, bowed her head, and wept.
CHAPTER 55
The Hawk Brothers waited at the edge of the fighting, tucked under a blackened stack of half-burned stumps. Their eyes blinked white in their blackened faces. They had crawled pretty close to the action, but not close enough. Big Hawk had spit and cried and muttered bad words when they couldn’t get near enough to save the day.
“This is stupid!” Big Hawk cried. “We’re stupid.”
Little Hawk crawled his way up to his brother when the gunfire died down, trying to shut him up. There were too many running men, too many bad guys who might hear them.
“Shut up, you dummy. They’ll find us and take us, and that will be the end for us. Be quiet!” Little Hawk ended his command with a fist in Big Hawk’s gut. He coughed and spat. They started wrestling under the clump of trees.
“You shut up.”
“I mean it. The bad guys are running away, and they’re real mad. Shut. Up.”
“You shut up.”
“No. You!”
Through the overhang of their hiding place, a man’s hand reached down to grab Little Hawk by his ragged shirtfront.
The boy blinked up at the man with shoulders broader than most of the sky. His skin was a beautiful light brown, his eyes like glowing coals—like the devil if the devil had eyes. Little Hawk tried his kicking trick on the golden-eyed man, aiming for his stomach first; the man gave the boy one hard shake. Big Hawk jumped up and got pushed onto his butt with one hard shove.
“Stop and listen,” the man said. “I’m thinking you’re not with this bunch of filth, and that you might know someone on the other side of that big mud wall.”
