“Marines then.”
“Screw the fucking Marines,” she snapped. “We’re the best Trackers in the compound. By the time they see the smoke, we’ll be gone and this poor man’s body will be burned to a crisp.” And hopefully useless to anyone wanting to experiment with it.
Sutter nodded.
They were quiet as they built a funeral pyre from the surrounding dry scrub and a small amount of precious alcohol from their packs. But as they watched the body burn Sutter finally spoke. “I don’t care if it’s just rumor. I don’t want to get turned into a fucking zombie. Promise me you’ll never let the Marines take my body either.”
“I promise.”
Rain hoped it was a promise she’d never have to keep.
***
“Gone? What do you mean gone? Dead bodies don’t get up and walk around in the general scheme of things.” Elan’s voice practically dripped with sarcasm. “Maybe the dragons ate him.”
“Don’t be an idiot, El,” Rain snapped back. “You know as well as I do dragons won’t go near their own dead, and that mother was sitting feet from where Caine died. Obviously somebody took his remains. It’s just a question of who and why. You’ve heard the rumors about the Marines taking dead bodies?”
They were sitting in one of the many tiny rooms which made up the warren that was the underground civilian compound of Sanctuary. This particular room was Elan’s own personal lair of sorts. He kept it Spartan, furnished with only a table and chairs, a cupboard where he kept his brew, and a single hurricane lantern. Rain had no idea how El saw anything with only the one candle for light. Frankly, it was sort of depressing.
El rolled his eyes. “That’s ridiculous. What would the Marines want with dead bodies? Somebody probably buried him.” He took a gulp from the cracked mug in his hand. Elan was fond of his home brew. He had his own still hidden deep within the compound. No one knew where and he wasn’t sharing.
“And left his dog tags behind? Don’t be ridiculous. Besides, why wouldn’t they bury the other bodies?”
El laughed at that. “Oh, well. We got what we wanted, right? Guns, ammunition. Something to really fight with.”
Rain felt like growling. She crossed her arms under her breasts and leaned back in her chair. She seriously needed a new bra, but those were hard to come by these days. “You know as well as I do that those guns are useless. Have you seen the armor plating on those damn drags? And the grenades? Maybe if we lob one down a dragon’s throat, but otherwise they’ll do us more damage than they will the drags.”
Her mind stopped there. A grenade down the throat? That would explain the damage to the dragon back at the bunker. But why hadn’t the humans survived? It wasn’t dragon fire that killed Audrey or Foster.
“It’s like you said before, Rain, hope. You and I know the weapons are hardly better than sticks and stones against those monsters, but for everyone else, this is hope.” El took another sip from his mug. “I know you think that finding the body of Micah Caine would accomplish that, and maybe you’re right. Weirder things have happened, but we ain’t got his body. We’ve got guns, and people like guns. Makes them feel safe, even if it’s false safety. And dammit, people need to feel safe.” His face wore a haunted look as he stared at the bottom of his mug.
Rain sighed. He had a point. Guns did make people feel safe, but that would only last until the first time they went up against a dragon and they realized the weapons wouldn’t save them. Then where would their hope be?
“How’s Sutter?” Elan’s voice was soft, his eyes avoiding her face.
“He’s good. Fearless out there. I couldn’t ask for a better partner.”
“Good. That’s good.” He continued to stare at the scarred wooden table that sat between them, fingers toying with the empty mug.
“Come on, El.” Her voice was soft. “You two have got to get over this feud, make things right between you. Life is way too short. You’re brothers, for god’s sake.”
Elan closed his eyes, eyes that were the exact same shade of black coffee as his brother’s, and shook his head slightly. “You know it’s not that easy. He still blames me.”
“It wasn’t your fault, El. Everyone knows that.”
“And yet, she’s still dead.” His voice was bleak.
“Lots of people are dead, El. Blaming each other is a waste of time.” She was tired of this argument. She was tired of stupid people and their stupid anger and hate. Didn’t they have enough going on? The world was overrun with fire-breathing dragons, for crying out loud. Family feuds they did not need.
“He loved her.” Elan got up to pour himself another drink from his stash in the cupboard. “He loved her and I couldn’t save her.”
“You loved her, too,” Rain pointed out. She didn’t mention the fact that the woman in question had played both the brothers. He didn’t need the reminder.
El’s grin was anything but happy. “Yeah, and there lies the problem. She was his wife.” He finished pouring his drink and ambled back to the table. He looked so much like his brother that if it weren’t for the full head of dreadlocks and the ever present mug in his hand, Rain doubted even she’d be able to tell the difference.
They were handsome devils, she’d give them that. They’d made the hearts of more than one woman flutter. They were also the most miserable bastards on the planet. El with his functional alcoholism, that’s what they’d called it back in the old days, and Sutter with his burning rage hidden under a layer of humor.
Where was Dr. Phil when you needed him?
She shook her head at her own whimsical thought. Dr. Phil and his ilk had more than likely been dragon food a long time ago. All that remained were a few tattered paperbacks by the self-help guru which Padre Pedro horded like gold and quoted more often than he quoted the Bible.
“You think it’s important? That his body is missing?” Elan changed back to their original topic.
“I think it’s suspicious. Like I said, his is the only one missing.” Rain leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table. She noticed a jagged tear in her sleeve. She wondered if the Padre could repair it. He was good with leather and it was her favorite jacket.
“Scavengers could have dragged the bones off somewhere. Scattered them,” El suggested.
Rain shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I doubt they’d have messed with one body and left the others.”
Elan frowned. “But why would anyone want a bunch of bones?”
She shrugged. “Don’t know. Might not have been bones. Depends when he was taken.”
“Why would anyone want a dead body, then?” Elan got up to fill his mug again. Rain decided that was her cue to get out before he passed out.
“No idea,” she told him as she rose to leave. “But I’m going to find out.”
“Yeah,” he saluted her, “you do that.”
She strode to the door, then turned and gave him a look. “I will.” She closed the door firmly behind her.
***
Rain shrugged out of her jacket and flung it across the bed before sinking down onto the old club chair. On reflection, her own room was nearly as Spartan as El’s.
Oh, she’d tried to make the place comfortable, warm it up a bit, but it still had the hallmarks of a typical room in the compound: Cement walls, steel door, no windows, zero natural light. Even covering one wall with scenic pictures from an old calendar and hiding the ugly gray floor with what Padre Pedro called a “Persian rug” still couldn’t hide the reality that Sanctuary wasn’t really a home, but a fortress.
Rain liked to pick up things on her missions to decorate her quarters, things that spoke of a world she couldn’t remember. She’d only been three years old when the dragons came.
She’d found the calendar still hanging on the wall of an abandoned office building, flipped to the final page: December 2012. The picture had been a gorgeous scene of a giant tree decorated in colored lights surrounded by a sheet of ice where people dressed in bright clothes and ha
ppy smiles skated back and forth. Rain envied the simple joy of that picture.
She’d never been happy like that. Never skated before. Hell, she’d never even seen ice before.
Her pride and joy was a small bookshelf leaning haphazardly against the wall next to her chair. The bookshelf was crammed with every book and magazine she’d been able to salvage during her missions. Few had survived the fires that had raged across the world, so those she’d found were more precious than gold. At least to her. And Padre Pedro.
Rain smiled to herself a little as she pulled a small hardback off the shelves. There was a little black scorching along the spine, but the dark green cover was otherwise in pristine condition. She could still read the gold letters spelling out the title Complete Works of John Greenleaf Whittier. The most amazing thing of all was the date listed on the inside page: 1884. Imagine that. A book published over one hundred and fifty years ago.
It wasn’t the book she wanted, it was what lay hidden between its brittle pages. She carefully leafed through until she came to a page marked with a photograph. She tilted the photo to the light, a wistful smile hovering at the corners of her mouth.
She’d found the photo in another bunker hidden in a box under another pile of rubble. This one had held files. Files of long-dead heroes who’d fought in countless other wars. Wars that seemed so trivial and useless, such a waste of human life now that the dragons had come.
Stumbling across his file had been a minor miracle. A sign, Padre Pedro would say, though a sign of what exactly, she had no idea. All she really cared about was the photograph.
It was an official one, with him in his dress uniform against the background of the flag of the old United States of America. His eyes stared straight at the camera, not even a trace of a smile. Still, lack of smile couldn’t hide the delicious fullness of his mouth, the almost too-sharp cheekbones, the blue eyes rimmed in ink-black lashes, or the strong jaw line that barely saved him from being too pretty. Micah Caine had been one hell of a stunning man. Breathtaking, actually.
Rain heaved a sigh. She knew it was incredibly stupid mooning over a dead man. Heck, even if he would have survived the Wars, he’d have been over sixty years old. An old man. These days you were lucky if you made it to forty without turning into drag food.
She tucked the photo carefully between the pages of the book and slid it back on the shelf. Stupid. Stupid. She had wasted so many years of her life mooning over a man who’d been dead nearly as long as she’d been alive, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.
She pulled the dog tags out of her jeans pocket and laid them gently on top the bookshelf. They glinted in the soft light from the lantern. Sutter would tease her mercilessly if he ever found out she was being such a sentimental idiot.
She kicked off her boots and propped her feet up on the well worn footrest. She’d found it in a huge building belonging to someone called Ethan All. She didn’t know who Ethan All was, but she figured he wouldn’t mind since the building had obviously been abandoned for years. Not to mention, the man had owned an awful lot of furniture.
Her head told her to forget Micah Caine. The man had been dead over two and a half decades, after all. Her heart was another matter. Or maybe it was the thing Padre Pedro called intuition. Whatever it was called, it was screaming at her that something wasn’t right about the death of Micah Caine. There was more to be discovered.
But how? She couldn’t very well go bang on the door of the local Marine base and demand to know the truth of what happened all those years ago. They probably wouldn’t know anyway. Most of them were younger than she was, and if Rain couldn’t remember anything about Before, how were they supposed to remember? They’d probably lock her up for crazy. Or worse.
Rain frowned. There had to be a way. She’d found his files. By accident, but still. Of course, there was nothing in those files dated after 2012, but the files had survived the War, so why couldn’t there be someone left who remembered Caine?
She sighed and tilted her head back against the chair. Why did she care anyway? Surely there were more important things to worry about than a dead man. Or rather, the missing bones of a dead man.
She almost jumped out of her skin as the shriek of the alarm shattered the quiet of the compound. “Oh, no,” she whispered to herself as she yanked on her boots. “Please, no.”
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Heather Marie Adkins
Latchkey Kid
It isn’t easy being the daughter of a police officer, but it’s even more difficult to be the daughter of a female police officer. I would come to understand this early, and often, in my life.
My mom’s career has always been the whirling force of my existence.
She was sworn into the Louisville Police Department on September 10, 1990. I was five years old. For the majority of my developmental years, I bounced through a succession of caretakers—my grandmother, my father and stepmother, and a kind woman I called ‘Mama Lo’—while my mom was forging her way through her early years as a rookie officer.
I remember late nights—my mom in her uniform, her gun belt digging into my side as she bundled me into a blanket to carry me to the car. I remember mornings getting on the school bus, knowing Mom would be coming home from work just in time for me to leave. But when I remember these things, they are snippets: Only bits and pieces of the woman who is my mother. Her job was demanding and sometimes, you just have to sacrifice to make your dreams come true.
When I was ten, Mom aced the Detective test and was granted her first promotion. Suddenly, we were buying a new house in a nice neighborhood. I was in middle school, which was awkward enough, and Mom began working 4 pm to midnight.
Thus began my time as a Latchkey Kid.
I rode the bus home from school and let myself into the house around 4:30 every afternoon. Under Mom’s strict instructions, I would check to make sure all three doors of the house were locked and then I would set the alarm.
Until bedtime, I was on lockdown. No going outside—not even to the backyard. No answering the door, no looking out the windows. Just me and the dog: A tiny Shih-Tzu named Cinnamon.
I was kind of an odd child. I didn’t care much for television, though I did love to play Nintendo. I could rock on some Mario Bros. I also absolutely loved to read, particularly R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps and Ann M. Martin’s The Babysitter’s Club.
There is really only so much video gaming and reading a girl can do before she wishes she had another hobby. At least, that’s how it was for me. I was lonely. Monday through Friday, every evening alone…it sucked.
It was around this time that my daddy shared with me a novel he was writing. Daddy is a computer guru who does freelance work, but he writes for fun on the side. “Demigod” was one of the most amazing things I had ever read. Not only was I astounded that my dad had such talent, but for the first time I realized there were people behind the books I liked to read.
Armed with nothing more than spiral-bound notebooks and pencils, I began writing.
Between 10 and 16, I wrote seven full-length novels. Today, I suppose they would be considered Young Adult. Some of them were murder mysteries with strong heroines. Many of them had elements of what today is considered Paranormal Romance. Most of my early influences were from authors I enjoyed: Stine, as well as Richie Tankersley Cusick and Christopher Pike. Somewhere in the midst of all this, my mom bought me a laptop and I transferred everything to digital.
I continued to write during high school, though significantly less once I got my driver’s license. I focused mainly on short stories and built up a vast collection that I ended up losing to the nightmare of an erased floppy disk. I majored in English in high school. Earned a couple college credits. And was told multiple times by various English teachers that I had talent.
After graduation, I went away to college at Western Kentucky University. My mother had married a great man who
was also a police officer. Between the two of them, I was able to go away to school and thus started several years of BAD DECISIONS. I kicked it off right, as most first-time college teens do. I drank too much and partied too hard, not making it to class, much less spending my time writing. Two years later, I came home to Louisville with my tail between my legs, no smarter than I was before.
Back at my mother and stepfather’s home, I found the situation to be stifling for the girl who had done what she wanted, when she wanted for so long. I was already rebelling—not phoning, disappearing all night—when a chance encounter on the banks of the Ohio River brought a man into my life who was not right for me in more ways than one.
Jason was an ex-con and felon. I was the daughter of two police officers. Cue ominous music.
Let’s skip the dirty parts and go to the section where I pack my things and flee into the night like a bat out of Hades. My parents change the locks, I cut off all contact, and hole up in a hovel on 3rd Street with my friend, Brent. Oh, and in the meantime, my convict boyfriend ends up back in the Slammer.
I bounced around for some time. To an apartment with my cousin, Ryan. Then to a big, fancy house outside of Nashville, Tennessee with Jason’s family. After severing ties with them, I rented a tiny studio apartment downtown. I moved a couple more times, losing money (and myself) in the process.
Not once in the years I spent chasing something, anything in Tennessee did I sit down to write.
In January 2008, I was in debt and barely hanging on to the apartment I was renting. My good-for-nothing, pot-smoking boyfriend-of-the-moment wasn’t helping with the bills because he couldn’t hold a job. My car was on the verge of repossession. I was going nowhere; the only positive thing I did have was that I was talking with my parents again.
Then the life-shattering, earth-moving event. In North Carolina, January 31st, my cousin Cory—a Marine, a firefighter, one of my best friends—was killed in a car accident. He was 25 years old.
My mom drove from Louisville to Nashville the minute she heard. She told me it was because she didn’t want me to be alone, nor did she want to tell me something so sensitive over the phone. That’s just how she is; no matter how terrible a daughter I could be, she always put me first.
Indie Chicks: 25 Women 25 Personal Stories Page 3
