by Linda L Zern
“How bad is it?”
Stone met Parrish’s eyes with a shake of his head and a weary shrug. “I don’t know.” Kilmer didn’t move or twitch.
The children, recognizing Parrish, gathered next to the stretcher. One boy reached out to pat the body in front of him.
Stone’s end of the stretcher dipped. Samuel’s knees buckled at the awkward angle.
Parrish stepped in to take over for Stone.
“Sorry Mister Parrish.” Stone rubbed his hands together. “But Mister Kilmer had finally talked the rest of the kids into coming inside the walls. Living in a hole in the ground got a lot less fun. Mister Kilmer was worried, with the cold coming.”
“Can these kids help you get him the rest of the way? I’m going after ZeeZee.”
“Parrish, I don’t think there’s a lot of time,” Samuel sighed.
The children resembled piles of dirty, wet laundry.
“Is he alive?” Parrish studied both young men as they shrugged, too tired to answer. “Let’s get them home then.”
Rain continued to beat down, dragging the temperature down with it. The children’s breath puffed out in tiny clouds that got easier and easier to see in the suddenly frigid air.
The outer courtyard of the Marketplace Fort dissolved into a muddy bog. Chunks of asphalt rose out of the slop like tiny islands. Children played leapfrog, hopping from one patch of pavement to the next as the cold sent the adults searching for heavier clothing. Most coats had been patched and re-patched to the point of making people look like walking quilts. Some wore blankets like brightly colored ponchos.
The cold started to settle into the area. There’d be frost tonight. Winter had arrived hard on the heels of a late summer and the blistering heat of fire.
And they were out there: ZeeZee, Parrish, Stone, Samuel, the Doe Kids, Kilmer, and those crazy Hawk boys, if they were even calling themselves that anymore.
Tess shivered inside El’s old army jacket that someone had handed to her. She waited for Jamie to fill her in on how best to move the Buffalo Bomb—his nickname—from their front gate. He seemed pretty confident it was a big dud, but when she’d pressed him, he’d squirmed and given her his “shucks ma’am” smile. In other words, he knew enough about demolition to know it was supposed to blow up but maybe not. If only it didn’t make her so nervous, having that thing sitting there, like a big, green tick. She snorted at the image.
A young woman with a shy manner and an easy smile brought a report from the kitchen that included a pressing need for firewood. A squad would have to go out with a wagon if possible, and they’d have to travel a fairly good distance to get enough for the stockpiles.
Tess reached into the pocket of the jacket and pulled out a hunk of shell, smooth under her fingers. El’s talisman? A good luck piece? It resembled a tiny skull, comical in its open-mouthed surprise. It reminded her of a famous painting her mom had shown her a picture of once: The Scream. Yeah. Funny how it made Tess feel close to El like nothing else had.
“I get it,” Tess said to no one as she dropped the shell back into her pocket. She burrowed deeper into the jacket and tried not to resent having to be here, locked away from the real work. She sighed when she saw one of the men from the wall construction teams coming toward her with his hat in his hand—literally.
Clang, clang, clang! The gong at the front gate rang out across the open courtyard. They’d found the big brass disc in the stacks after Tess had sent some of the younger women to inventory the storage room. “Catch rats and count cans.” It had been one her first official orders. Simple enough, and the gong went straight to the front gate.
It worked. Children scattered while Amazons went to their positions on the wall.
Britt ran to Tess’s side and then pointed to the front gate. The guard there waved to Tess, calling her out to the wall.
Britt led the way, reached behind her, and dragged on the sleeve of the army jacket. “Let’s go, General, the rain’s over, but winter’s here.” She handed Tess El’s binoculars, another symbol of command.
Tess ignored the sarcasm and beat Britt to the ladder by two steps. Tess pulled herself to the top of the berm.
The guards pointed, but it wasn’t necessary. It was ZeeZee. She stood in the open, ropes wrapped around her legs, her hands. Her clothes were still wet, and she visibly shook with cold.
A man with a knife blade resting below ZeeZee’s right ear held her in front of him. He walked her closer and closer to the front gate. Next to the Water Buffalo he paused, whispered something in her ear. When she reached into his pants pocket, he grinned up at those standing above him and waited. She pulled something out of his pocket.
Dynamite. It looked like dynamite. The man said something to ZeeZee, who tried to relay the message, but her voice cracked, and the wind dragged the sound away. He said something else. She shook her head, and he pushed her forward another step.
Without looking at Britt, Tess pointed in the direction of the ladder. “Get Jamie. It’s the man who killed my father.”
“I’m not your—”
Tess rounded on Britt, grabbed the front of her shirt. “Get down that ladder now. Unless you know anything about explosives, do what I tell you.”
Britt registered what was in ZeeZee’s hand, paled, and jumped to the ladder.
ZeeZee couldn’t stop the way her hands shook, and it made her angry. Gritting her teeth, she focused on holding still, holding the dynamite in front of her like a wedding bouquet.
“Mister, I don’t think this stick is going to be enough to get my sister to open that gate. You’d better have something else in your sack of crap.”
Instead of answering, he grinned wider and waved at the figures looking down at them. The knife blade pricked her skin. She could feel blood trickle down her neck.
He’d started off giving ZeeZee orders as if they were at lunch and trying to decide on dessert, and then he was shrieking. It was as if some kind of switch had been flipped.
He roared out, “Roy Terry. Bring me Roy, or I’ll show you the color of disaster.” The man’s eyes wheeled in his head like a spooked horse. “I have so much more than that boomer in her hand. See that tank? Full. Full. Full. Made Myra drag it all the way from Titusville. What a pisser that was, but she did it the way I wanted and hardly even cared. Poor Myra Cryra. Came so far to sputter out so fast. But not me. I don’t sputter. Hold it up higher.” He jostled ZeeZee’s elbow.
He bumped her arm up with his left hand. She saw the lighter out of the corner of her eye.
“Sure it’s old, but I’m betting it works just fine,” he assured her.
Roy Terry, his arm still in a sling, needed help to creep his way up the ladder to the top of the wall. Jamie led the way. Britt followed him up.
“Why you?” Jamie demanded. “What’s he about?”
They handed El’s binoculars to Terry. He waved them away. “I know who it is. Don’t we, Britt?”
Britt looked sick.
Tess pushed into the man’s face. “Who is he, and what’s he think he’s doing? Dynamite and that tank and my sister?”
Jamie half nodded, took the binoculars back, and studied ZeeZee’s hands.
“Who?” Tess insisted.
“Colon,” Britt said, her voice filled with ice. “It’s his cousin. Isn’t it? Myra called him Boy-O. She liked to hand out nicknames. He thinks he’s going to settle up something—”
“Roy!” It was a shriek.
“I’m here,” Terry said, his voice rusty. He cleared his throat. “Colon. I’m here. Come in and get something to eat. Get warm. Let the girl go.”
Colon’s laughter bubbled up to them. “Afternoon tea sounds lovely. Your words say welcome, but your great big gate says, ‘Go away.’ I think it’s time to Open Sesame.” He pushed ZeeZee another step closer to the Water Buffalo.
“Colon, I’m coming down. There’s no point to prove here. Please, don’t hurt these people. They’ve got nothing for you.”
&nbs
p; “Well, and isn’t that the truth. We were supposed to come here and win a big prize. Get you back into the fold.” He bent his head close to ZeeZee’s neck. He screamed, “Don’t think you’re going to make some fabulous shot without killing the pretty princess here.” He angled ZeeZee in front of him. “You left me. You. Left. Me. After you’d promised to take me with you.” His voice turned to tears. “Roy. Brother. Cousin. Father!” Tears turned to screams. “Father, forgive me for I have sinned. And I intend to keep right on sinning.”
“Stop him. We take the shot. Get the big gun, Jamie.”
“He’s too close. He’d see us. He’s got a knife on ZeeZee, and if she’s holding dynamite, I know that the older that stuff gets, the more unstable it can be.
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure. I think. At least that’s what this kid told me once, and I was pretty sure he knew his stuff. He was missing three fingers—”
“Jamie! Shut up,” Tess said.
Mister Terry raised an open hand and said, “Let me outside the wall. I’ll talk him down. I used to be able to talk him down.”
Britt called out, “You harm a single one of our people, and I will personally see that you will not walk from this land, you piece of moldy sh—”
“Roy Terry.” Colon said, his voice rising. “Cousin. It’s time!” He stopped, threw back his head, and bellowed at the sky. “I thought your promises were good!”
The man next to Tess gasped, took a half step closer to the edge of the wall. She grabbed his arm.
Jamie said, “I don’t think he wants anything we’ve got. Not really. Tess, he’s going to try and light that big barrel of fertilizer up.”
Someone hollered, “But what does he want?”
“Misery. Company for his misery, that’s what he wants,” Roy Terry said.
Parrish had taken Stone’s end of the stretcher. The body lay like so much deadweight between him and Samuel. Stone fell back and walked with the Doe Kids, helping the stragglers. They shuffled, huddled in their creative assortment of layered clothing. When the rain stopped and the cold settled they walked faster, looking ahead to warm fires. Stone had promised.
They could see the top of the fortress’s wall when Samuel froze at the crest of an incline.
“Parrish, drop him!” They lowered Kilmer to the ground. Samuel went to his belly. He waved Parrish forward. The Doe Kids settled in the curve of the on-ramp as still as birds in a nest.
Samuel pointed to the green water tank and the two people standing next to it.
“Are those people you know?”
Parrish didn’t have to see her face: ZeeZee. He could see the dull, dirty gleam of her blond hair from where he studied the scene.
“What’s that guy’s game?”
Parrish rolled back from the peak of the incline. “Doesn’t matter. He’s got a knife against her neck. Keep the kids out of my way. I’ve got to get closer.”
“Will do. Parrish, look to the wall, if you’re not careful, they’re going to give you away.”
Parrish dumped his backpack, picked up his rifle and moved low, following a zigzag path toward the Marketplace Fort’s big, front gate.
ZeeZee’s hands cramped around the dynamite in her fist. Too late. It was too late. No one was going to be able to stop this madman. He babbled and muttered and worried over the big green tank, and then grinned in the direction of the people on the wall. He wasn’t going to listen to reason. He wasn’t going to let her go.
From the top of the wall, she thought she heard her name. She tried to convince herself it was Tess calling down to her, that she was up there, seeing her, seeing them. At least Tess would know what had happened to her. The cold turned her bones to fire. Her hands were frozen.
“I can’t hold this a-a-an-an-anymore. The ropes are cutting off my circulation.”
“You won’t have to hold it much longer, Girl.” He cut her ropes and lit the end of the fuse.
On the wall, Tess lunged for the ladder, but instead of climbing down she started dragging it to the top. She ordered the guards to wave people back from the gate. “Get these people back out of harm’s way. Do it.”
Jamie and Tess started to haul the rope ladder up, bending low.
“I’m going out there. I have to get to her.” Tess turned to look again and saw the bright flare of a flame. She dropped her end of the ladder, and teetered forward, almost falling. Roy Terry grabbed her, pulling her back from the edge.
“You can’t.” Mister Terry was shaking his head at her. “Then he’ll have two hostages.”
“I’ll go,” Jamie said.
“Aren’t you hostage material?” Tess dismissed his offer.
The crack of a rifle shot cut through the freezing air. The man next to ZeeZee went down in a heap, dragging her down with him.
ZeeZee dropped to her knees, the stick of dynamite clutched tightly in her aching fingers. She caught sight of someone racing up behind her. Someone worse? Following them?
“No . . . yyyou . . . ssstay back. Go. Go. I don’t know how to make this stop. I can’t.” She was talking to no one, to herself, to ghosts, now that the crazy man lay dead at her feet. She jumped up. In a panic, she threw the stick as hard as she could. It bounced and then rolled and then came to rest at Stone’s feet.
ZeeZee screamed at Stone. “It’s bad. It’s a bomb. It will hurt you. You have to run!” He looked up at her confused.
The Doe Kids had only heard of things like dynamite and explosions, the way they’d heard of Pop Tarts. Neither one was any more real to Stone, than an alarm clock getting him up for school. Stone stopped in his tracks, looked at her—puzzled. The fuse burned down.
CHAPTER 61
Parrish lowered the rifle. It hadn’t been his shot that killed ZeeZee’s tormentor. Someone from the Marketplace, his money was on Jamie; it had to be. Jamie’d taken a big chance with the man’s eyes on the Marketplace like that, but it had worked; it was one shot in a million.
Unconsciously, he started running toward ZeeZee, but Stone was way ahead of him racing up on her left. Shocked and disoriented, she turned in a circle, fumbling with what looked like a stick of dynamite. Blindly, she heaved it away from her in Stone’s direction; Stone, who’d disobeyed like always, who hadn’t stayed put, hadn’t done what he was told, who was going to die right in front of them all, blown into bloody rain. ZeeZee fell to the ground, hands over her head.
And then . . . nothing.
No explosion, no bomb, nothing . . . the fuse fizzled down.
A cheer went up along the wall of onlookers while ZeeZee crawled toward Stone. They hugged each other. The Doe Kids streamed out from under the crumbled overpass.
Parrish backtracked to help Samuel with Kilmer. When the stretcher came into view, the cheering fell away, replaced by the whisper-quiet of a winter day.
ZeeZee and Stone stood up to meet them in the open field over Kilmer’s body.
“Who?” she said, not looking at the figure on the stretcher.
“Let’s move. You need to get dry and warm,” Samuel offered. “Being out in the open like this is stupid.”
“Who?” she repeated. Her hand hovered over the tarp.
There was a patience in Samuel’s voice Parrish wasn’t sure he could have managed. “Zeta, it’s Mister Kilmer. It was an accident, just one of those things that happen. He collapsed, bringing the children to the Marketplace—”
“He wasn’t out looking for me? Please tell me that he wasn’t.”
“No,” Parrish said. “He was helping the little ones get here, but even if he was looking for you, don’t go there, ZeeZee.” He shook his head. “If you start down that road then sooner or later it’s because you were born in the first place. And it’s not. People die. Come on. Let’s go deal with this. He was helping the kids, that’s all.”
She turned back to the dead man on the ground.
“Forget him.” Stone kicked mud on what was left of the man’s face.
She’d gone t
wo feet when she turned back and said, “Thank you. For taking the shot.”
Parrish paused, tipping his head sideways. “I didn’t. It had to have come from the wall. Thank one of them.”
“Come on, everybody,” Samuel said. “It’s time to go in and get out of this cold.”
Elder Jason Maxwell, the man with the lion’s eyes, eased back behind a pile of charred corpses. The rain had stopped the burning. Deserters had left a grim heap of bodies stacked like firewood outside of the perimeter of the fortress. He’d marched with most of those men. They’d accepted him without question because he’d been big and strong and seemed willing to listen to the madwoman and her crazy second in command. It hadn’t taken him long to win their confidence as they lay at anchor off the coast of Titusville. A single guy of fighting age wanting to take up piracy, it was a familiar back-story. He’d helped them rampage across the countryside—just enough.
Putting a sniper’s bullet into Myra’s lieutenant had been satisfying, and would keep his people safe from this particular threat. That’s why he’d done it, the only reason he’d done it. That’s what he told himself. He’d come back to check and see if the real threats were well and truly dead: Myra, Boy-O, and most of their rotten-toothed followers.
He had not backtracked for miles and miles to check on the girl with ice in her blue eyes and a way of setting her jaw when she was threatened that had made him want to shake her or kiss her. No way he’d come back to check on that girl.
Max snorted at the thought. He’d been undercover too long, that’s all it was, away from his people on the river.
He needed the long tranquil eddies of the big river and the fishing village tucked into the scrub palmettos of the Saint John’s.
Max had faded back and away watching the bizarre juggling act with Boy-O’s dud dynamite and the girl, and then the body arriving on the field. The drama had come in handy. Let the killers who lived at the Marketplace have their big victory. The less they knew about a fishing village on the river, the better.
