Too late for that. She shut the door behind her and used the facilities; her aunt and uncle’s old camp trailer had a larger bathroom. She glanced in the mirror. She looked like hell.
Oh, well.
She came out and strolled over to the tiny old slump-shouldered white refrigerator. She looked inside. A slightly shriveled green apple sat on the top rack. She plucked it free, shut the door and bit into the apple.
Zone slammed his palms on the table. “Damn it! I figured that was disgusting enough I’d be the only one to eat it.”
“Ever been to Afghanistan?”
“Yes.”
“So have I.”
He stared at her through those thick black glasses.
She stared at him.
He said, “Okay, then.”
“Okay, then,” she agreed. She glanced at Max.
Interesting. When she sparred with Nils Brooks, Max hated it. He hated everything about her and Nils. But with Zone, he watched them both with an affectionate half smile. Probably he thought Zone wasn’t attractive?
ZONE (FIRST OR LAST NAME UNKNOWN):
MALE. ETHNICITY: BROWN (HISPANIC?) AND/OR CAUCASIAN/TANNED. 6'1", 160 LBS, SHAGGY BLACK HAIR HANGING BELOW THE BASEBALL HAT HE WORE EVEN INSIDE (BALDING?), LONG MASSIVE CURLY BLACK BEARD; RESEMBLES AN OLD TESTAMENT PROPHET. GREEN EYES, BLACK LASHES, DISTORTED BEHIND HEAVY-FRAMED BLACK GLASSES. FACIAL STRUCTURE UNKNOWN. DEDUCE SCARRING. HERMIT. AURA OF POWER, INTELLIGENCE, KNOWLEDGE. EASILY IRRITATED BY HUMAN CONTACT.
No, Zone was definitely attractive, if only for the mystery he exuded.
She asked, “What are you two looking at?”
“It’s the radar for all submarines in the western Pacific,” Zone said.
“No, it’s not. It picks up life forms around the lookout.” She met Zone’s gaze again. “I heard you.”
“It used to be a radar screen for... Oh, to hell with you.” He stomped away and started rummaging through the cupboard over the miniature stove top and incongruously large dishwasher. He saw her watching him and said, “What are you looking at? I’m not going to wash dishes by hand.”
“I didn’t say a thing,” Kellen pointed out.
Max chuckled, that nice low laughter that made her feel warm in all places south, then guilty for being so easily distracted from a very serious and deadly situation.
Zone got out three mugs. “Coffee?” He didn’t wait for an answer but poured the mugs full, rinsed out the coffeepot and set it up again. He muttered, “Only thing I miss about civilization is espresso.”
“Espresso machines aren’t expensive.” She finished the apple, tossed the core in the compost bin and accepted the coffee. She took a sip and amended that to, “Espresso machines aren’t terribly expensive.”
“Thanks for that!” Zone said.
She studied the screen. “When I look at this, I see a mile perimeter around the lookout, and I see life forms. Animals, right?”
Zone muttered something rude.
She figured she’d get used to that. She put the coffee cup down on the tiny countertop. “You must be Canadian,” she said to Zone.
He grinned evilly. “How did you guess?”
“Because you don’t look Turkish.” To Max she said, “Only the Turks and the Canadians make coffee that strong.”
“A few Venetians, too.” Max sipped. “I’ve got an aunt who makes coffee that will keep you awake for days.”
She pointed at the screen. “I can see creatures prowling around. Coyotes? Wildcats of some kind? Congregating around in the area where the battle took place.”
“No living humans are out there,” Max said.
She glanced at Rae, still sleeping hard. The child had been through enough hell. She didn’t need to hear them talking about danger and death. Rae shouldn’t know about death and pain at all.
But she did. She did.
“What happened to them? There were four shooters—three men and the man in charge. I shot two of them, wounded them badly and knocked one unconscious, but none of them were dead, and I left the goddess for them.”
“As a diversion,” Max said.
She nodded. “They were after us, Rae and me. I was carrying her. We got into the canyon, into the fog. I heard a rifle shot. I sent her away and passed out. Easy pickings for them.” She dug her hands into the robe’s wide pockets. “Where did they go? How did they not kill me? Why didn’t they take the head?”
“Good questions,” Zone said. “Nils called, wanted me to search for you. I said no.”
“Who says gallantry is dead?” Kellen asked.
Obviously, Zone didn’t give a crap about his lack of gallantry. “I heard a rifle shot, too, then a bunch of pistol shots, then more rifle shots. I was headed to the lookout to get in out of the firefight before I was a casualty.” He made no apology for running away.
Kellen didn’t blame him. “Not your battle,” she said.
“No shit.” Zone sighed mightily, and in a flat tone of resignation, he said, “Then I ran into the kid, and she dragged me to get you. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“She never does.” Kellen cleared her suddenly clogged throat.
Zone continued, “On the way, we met Di Luca and he had grabbed you.”
“I sprinted up that mountain.” Max leaned forward, gaze fixed on her, intense and grim. “I got into that place where the trees thinned and the path narrowed. Fog drifted like terrorized ghosts. I could see trees looming up, rocks. But I couldn’t hear anything, anyone. Then someone shouted. And that rifle shot. Then no more shouting. I thought... I thought Rae was dead. You were dead. I ran toward the shot.”
“Hero,” Zone said.
Fiercely angry, Max jerked around. “If they’re dead, I have no reason to be alive.”
“Wasn’t being sarcastic,” Zone said.
Max closed his eyes, opened them and nodded.
“What happened, Max?” Kellen whispered.
“I saw a body. Then another. I found a trail of blood and another body, still warm, shot twice, once at close range.”
Kellen broke a sweat. She wasn’t out there anymore, in that wilderness of trees and stones looming out of the fog, but Max’s words brought the anxiety, the fear, the desperation back to her. People had died for that head. Rae had almost died for that head.
She got up, went to the sink, poured herself a glass of water and sipped it. “Four shooters,” she repeated. “None of them dead. Don’t get me wrong, I would have killed them, but with a pistol I couldn’t aim well enough, not at that distance. I killed no one.”
“Then shooter number four offed them all.” Zone was matter-of-fact.
She chewed her lip. “So one of the remaining mercenaries—the boss, I bet—must have killed the rest to keep the payment for himself.”
“But he didn’t take the head.” Zone indicated his workshop; he’d covered the Triple Goddess with a cloth.
Kellen was glad. She got tired of locking eyes with that statue, and every way you turned there were eyes, if not the goddess’s, then that relentless mercenary. “He was ruthless,” she said. “He must be the one who slit Horst’s throat. And killed his other men.”
“Why isn’t he out there?” Max tapped the radar screen. “We should have at least one human life showing on this screen. He should be watching for his chance to grab the head. When is he coming back for it?”
Kellen looked again at the Triple Goddess, and even though she was hidden beneath that cloth, Kellen could feel her gaze, critical, demanding that Kellen be all the things a woman must be—mother, warrior, protector. She looked toward Rae, toward that small face so sweet in repose and so vibrantly, irritatingly alive when awake. She whispered, “He wanted to eliminate the witnesses.”
The events of the past few days rose in a tide of memory and overwhelmed her. She pulle
d the chair toward her, tried to sit, missed.
“Kellen!” Max lunged for her.
She thumped on the floor and burst into tears.
29
Max sat beside her, hovered as if he didn’t know what he should do. “Kellen, what’s wrong?”
“Rae... She used the last little square of her blankie to bandage my arm.” Why that came out first, Kellen couldn’t say. Why did that make her feel more guilty than all the other horrible things that had occurred on their journey?
Zone didn’t care what her reasoning was. He said, “Fuck me a-runnin’,” went into his workshop and shut the door. Hard.
Max gathered Kellen in his arms. “Shhh! Don’t cry so loud. She’ll hear you!”
Kellen totally agreed, but she couldn’t stop. “It’s all bloody and crusty and the rest of her blankie is nothing but a ball of yarn and I promised to crochet it again and I don’t know how!” Kellen was wailing now, feeling absurd and trying to muffle her sobs in her robe.
Max pulled her toward the corner, behind the easy chair. “Rae is fine.”
“Rae almost died!” Kellen turned on him, shouted in a whisper. “She almost died. She almost froze to death. She... They shot at her. She knows that the sound of a man screaming can muffle a retreat.” She inhaled deeply and stared up at Max.
“It’s unfortunate that all happened. I wish she could be the same child she was before she joined you in the hopes of bonding.”
“I wish that, too.” With all her heart.
He picked his words carefully, as if he desperately wanted to say the right thing. “She shouldn’t have stowed away, but in all fairness to her, even if she had understood what true danger was, and she didn’t, this trip shouldn’t have been quite as harrowing as it turned out.”
“No.” Kellen sniveled, dug around in the pockets of the robe and finally dabbed her nose on a sleeve.
He didn’t seem to be judging her, but then, it didn’t matter.
She was judging herself.
He stood up and left her.
She didn’t blame him.
But he came back with a roll of toilet paper, sat beside her again and handed it over. “How long’s it been since you cried?”
She didn’t want to tell him. He would despise her. He would see her as the irresponsible know-it-all that she was. He would realize she shouldn’t be trusted with their daughter. Yet she couldn’t stop the words, and they spilled out. “It was another life. In Afghanistan. When I killed a woman and her two daughters.”
“Not on purpose.” But he frowned, as if he couldn’t imagine she might have made a mistake as a warrior.
“I didn’t shoot them. It was worse than that. I was responsible.” She unrolled a wad of toilet paper and blew her nose. Thankfully, there was a wastebasket beside the chair, and she tossed the wad into it and unrolled some more. And shredded it between her fingers, because she had to have something to do. Anything to take her attention off these horrible memories.
“In Afghanistan, in some of the rural areas, in the mountains, it’s difficult to live. War. Constant war. Famine, all the time. For a woman, a widow with no relatives, it’s not...good. Men control that world. More than this one. They’re not always kind, and Ghazal had two children, two girl children.”
“Ghazal was a friend?”
“Not a friend, no. She and the children lived on the edge of the poor village. A village filled with thin, pitiful people who paid both the government and the insurgents. In a hard, cold land, only the strong survive. Maybe. When our convoy went by, the eight-year-old stood out there and begged. Those big brown eyes, so sad and...old.”
That face. Kellen needed to remember that face. She was the only person alive who did.
“Madeena said she had a mother and a little sister. I followed her home. That mother and her kids lived in a hovel. I’ve seen shacks in Wyoming that had been abandoned for a hundred years in better shape. It was freezing. The children were emaciated. The mother was skeletal.” Kellen’s heart still hurt as she remembered, and she shredded more toilet paper. “I gave them everything I had. Food. Blankets. I was cold and hungry that night, but—poor me.” She had mocked her own hunger then. She mocked it now.
“Still you did help them.” Max sounded strong, encouraging. “Did no one else take pity on them? Their own people?”
“Winter lasts for months. Crops fail. Food is scarce for everyone. No one could explain all the ins and outs to my satisfaction, but because men make the deals, and because Ghazal had no relatives, she couldn’t remarry. Or wouldn’t because of what would happen to her daughters in a family where they were not blood kin. She didn’t conform, and in her part of the world, she and her girls were easy to forget.”
He sighed. “I’m so sorry. But you helped.”
“Stop using that word. It only makes it worse.” She put down the toilet paper, straightened away from him, leaned against the wall, crossed her legs. She needed to be apart from him to tell this story. “I got them stuff online, went back a couple of times. Gave them picture books. A couple of toys. A Slinky, one of the good metal ones.” She half laughed. “I’ve never seen children so fascinated and enthralled by one cheap little...” She caught her breath on a sob. “I did wrong.”
“You shouldn’t have...helped them?”
“The guys at the base, the ones who’d been there awhile, said, Don’t do this. Don’t interfere. Never never. It won’t turn out well.” She saw her hands; she was wringing them, and it took an effort to stop. “I didn’t listen. I told them I was sneaking in. I said no one would see me.”
“You were risking your life.”
“What would you have done?” She was fierce. “They were going to starve to death. I was afraid no matter what I did, that would be their fate.” Don’t tell the story. It hurts too much. “But they didn’t starve.”
“What happened?” Max put his hands over hers.
She had been wringing them again. Now she bunched them into fists. “I went to visit. Like I said, sneaking in. As soon as I got close I could smell that stench.” She could smell it now, curling like bitter smoke through her memories. “I knew what it was. I recognized it from other missions. Char, desperation, death. The house was rubble and still smoldering.”
“Did a mortar hit the house?” he asked calmly, as if by being composed he could make things better.
Never never. “That would have been too easy. No. They killed them.” Looking back, Kellen didn’t remember falling to her knees. She only remembered being on the cold barren ground, staring at the pyre where three innocent lives had ended.
A burned-out house. A melted coil of metal. The stench of desperation and death. Why was it always the innocents who paid?
Max slid his fingers between hers, loosened her fists. “Who’s they?”
“I don’t know.” She looked up, racked by guilt. “Maybe the insurgents. But probably their neighbors.”
“Why would they do that?” He didn’t sound as calm now.
“They had reason. The insurgents would burn down a whole village if one person was believed to be an American informant. So when the villagers killed a widow, an eight-year-old girl and a three-year-old girl for consorting with an American, they were protecting themselves and their families.” Sometime in the telling of the story, she had stopped crying. Now the tears came again, fewer, hotter, more painful. She pulled her hands away from his and used toilet paper to keep the tears under control. “Ghazal and her children died because they were desperate enough to consort with...me.”
Max watched her... Oh, he watched her kindly. But he knew now what she was. A fool and a butcher. “You didn’t kill them.”
“No. They would have probably died anyway or been forced into...” She shook her head. “There are so many sides there. There’s no way to tell an enemy from a friend. I don’t know who s
aw me, who told on me and Ghazal and her children. But when I saw Rae, and she said she was mine—” her own child, and she never knew “—all I could think of was that Slinky, stretched, melted, blackened, and the girls who, for one moment, had played with it and been happy.” She looked Max right in the eye. “No matter where I went, no matter what I did, I never helped anyone again. I never looked at another child. I kept to my own kind, to my comrades who would fight and maybe die but not helplessly. Not hopelessly.”
“That’s why you were always running away from Rae.” Max nodded. He got it now. “You were afraid you were going to love her, and disaster would follow.”
“Disaster arrived. I came on this mission. She came along.” Kellen leaned forward and in a voice that shook with intensity, she said, “I swear to you I didn’t know she was there until it was too late.”
“I know.”
“Earlier you said that I—”
“I know she sneaked away to be with you. I know you would never have deliberately brought her along.” He sounded disgusted—with himself. “I yelled because I wanted to blame someone besides myself.”
“Why would you be to blame?”
“Because I’m her father and I know how that devious little brain works. I should have seen this coming. As soon as I read her note...” His voice rose again. “Do you know how scared I’ve been?”
She just didn’t care. “Do you know how scared I’ve been? Those men murdered a helpless man for that head. They tried to kill us. What they would have done to a child—” Kellen’s throat closed. Pure panic pumped through her veins. Everything she hadn’t allowed herself to feel during the trek up the mountain, she felt now.
Max pulled her into himself as if he wanted to be part of her skin, her muscle, her bone. He hugged her, and he held her, and he must have done something special because slowly, ever so slowly, the terrible sense of being broken began to heal. After a long time, he whispered, “You brought her back to me. That’s all that matters. You had a second chance to save a child, your child, and you did it.”
“I never want to do anything like that again.”
What Doesn't Kill Her Page 17
