“Oh, Mom…”
“Sweetheart, unless we can open up to our own kind we’ll never recover what we lost.”
“But, Mom, why can’t we just be like we are? I mean, how do we know this isn’t better?”
“Not this,” Maggie exclaimed with a self-deprecating gesture. “This isn’t better. We can be so much more. We used to be so much more… before they came.”
“But how can you be so sure? That was before you were born, and your mother, too, right?”
“Because your father believed it, and I saw the truth of it in his eyes, and every time I look at your little brother.”
“Yeah, right,” Maia snorted, “because he’s like so evolved. Besides, when have we ever met anyone like him?”
*
It was already two years since Nero died, and her mother’s words still rang in her ears. But without him, what was the point? She’d fought so many battles, against the stragglers from the ships that finally fell to Earth, against the wild animals that had grown accustomed to eating people, and especially against others of her own kind. They were the worst of all, the most vicious, the fiercest… but then, they’d have to be. How else could they have prevailed?
“Keep him safe,” her mother told her. “He’s the best hope for the future.” But she failed at that one task. A mere moment’s inattention in the heat of passion—she took her eyes off him just long enough to slash through those hunters and their beasts, and when she turned back, he was gone. She found his body a few hours later, saw the telltale signs, and hunted down his killers over the next few days, relentless, cruel… aggrieved… ashamed.
“Maia, come back,” he whispered in her ear. “We’re safe. It was just the wind.”
“That’s the problem, Noah. It’s like I hear him in the branches.”
“You’ve got to let him go.”
She pushed his arm away and stalked off into the jungle, then turned to glower through the undergrowth at him. “He can’t understand,” she muttered. “Stupid knuckle-walker.” Her eyes felt wet. “It’s time to move on, before he starts to think I belong to him.”
She turned and ran, not as fast as she could, just as fast as she could sustain for as long as it might take to get away from him. “Don’t look back. I don’t care if he’s following.” Her machete rattled inside the sheath slung across her back, the rifle on her shoulder bounced with each stride, only three bullets in the clip, one in the chamber. She always kept track.
The jungle refreshed her sense of the possibilities. Lush, vibrant, life everywhere, bursting at the seams… on a good day, the filtered light caressed her face; on a dim day the shadows beckoned, offering a safe harbor. The meadows her father used to speak of—she remembered that much about him—with the sun bright in her eyes, and smaller insects flitting about, they formed so small a part of her experience, as if they were merely some fading dream of a lost world. How could a world so alive be sick? If she wanted to see the big sky, all she had to do was climb up to the canopy and stick her head out.
“It’s not about breeding,” her mother used to say. “It’s about training. We have to learn new habits.” Maia had no idea what she meant.
“So we’re supposed to train the whole world, Mom?” she would say, as if her words would have the effect of a refutation if only she could get the tone of voice right.
“No, sweetheart, just the people we meet.”
These words echoed in her cavernous heart, making her chest throb until she couldn’t run any further. Maybe if she hadn’t reacted so quickly to that hunting party, slashing at them before they could raise their crossbows… maybe Nero would still be with her. But she couldn’t risk doing anything else.
Rainwater collected in a broken leaf rinsed the salt from her eyes. A sharp kick to the tree trunk brought a fine drizzle down. She shivered it off and followed a stream along the jungle floor until it broadened out before the falls she’d heard a few minutes earlier. With a vine wrapped around one arm to steady herself, she leaned out over the edge to gauge the height of the cataract. Mist obscured the pool at the bottom, but judging from the trees and the path of the water flowing away it couldn’t be more than sixty or seventy feet. Now to find a way down.
*
When she righted herself, having to tug harder on the vine than she expected, they came into view. The noise of their approach must have been obscured by the rushing water. Maia looked them up and down.
“How could I have been so stupid, gaping over the falls like an innocent,” she growled.
Two men and a mangy dog stared at her, armed with guns and bows, but perhaps they didn’t have any ammo. Lots of folks carried weapons for show. Bullets were a much scarcer commodity.
“Look what we got here, Jake,” the ugly one said. “A girl, all by herself in the woods.”
“Chui, you idiot,” the other one snarled, swinging the rifle off his shoulder. “There’s bound to be others. Keep ‘em behind those rocks while I suss it out. And do what you can to keep her quiet.”
Maia shrank down into her least threatening posture while she sized Chui up. “If I hand him my gun,” she thought, “it might distract him long enough to slide the machete out under my arm. After that, I’ll have to run for it. But run where?”
She glanced at the falls behind her and mulled the prospect of going over. “Would there be rocks at the bottom?” she asked herself. “And even if there weren’t, the pool at the bottom might not be deep enough to land in safely.”
A darker voice spoke inside her: “What does it matter whether you survive, now that Nero’s dead?” This question had presented itself to her before, and she’d had no answer to it, though its obdurate fatalism helped her find the ferocity to fight through more than one nasty encounter. But this time, for reasons she couldn’t bring into focus, the question felt not quite the same, as if the voice spoke in an ever so slightly different register. She shook her head and loosened the band holding the machete in the sheath.
Just as she slid her rifle down to hand to Chui, a snap in the underbrush caught her attention. There were more of them! Her eyes scanned the foliage behind a nearby log. Chui turned to look, giving her an even better opening, until she saw a little head peek out.
“Uncle Chui, we’re hungry,” the boy muled. “And Zane’s tired.”
“Stay down,” Chui growled, and then turned back to Maia, who breathed a sigh of relief and slipped the band back over the machete handle.
From the other side, loud noises and a simulated birdcall turned both their heads toward Jake, who had raised his rifle and trained it on whatever might emerge from behind the foliage.
“It’s not about breeding,” Maia muttered, and then cried out “Don’t hurt him! He’s with me.”
“Maia,” Noah called out. “Is that you?”
“Please don’t hurt him,” she implored Jake, though she had no notion that he would care what she said. Why should he? Two strangers in the woods—the law of the jungle was clear: kill them or make whatever use of them you can. But don’t burden yourself with their baggage.
If she followed this line of thought any further, it led back to her original plan, gutting Chui like a fish in front of the children, and she no longer had the stomach for it. But could she really risk trusting these people?
“Noah,” she cried. “I’m over here, with some… new friends.” As she said these words, still uncertain how they’d be received by Jake and Chui, an unexpected sensation washed over her, dissolving her bitterness and carrying all her recriminations over Nero out with the undertow.
*
Later, sitting around the fire with Jake and Chui, and the boys, Zeke and Zane, she leaned on Noah’s shoulder. And when he reached his arm around her neck and began to pick some nits from her head, she didn’t push him away. Maybe her mother had been right all along. It is about training, even if the only person she could really train was herself.
“What happened to their mamma?” Noah asked.
&n
bsp; “Dunno,” Jake replied. “We lost track of her in the last battle on the big island. Lost our sisters, too.”
“You mean they’re…,” Maia caught herself before she finished that thought in front of the little ones.
“Dunno,” Chui said. “We’ve been afraid to go back there with the kids, you know, in case there’s any ETs left over there.”
Jake glowered at him, as if saying too much might bring their worst fears to pass. Maia picked her head up and looked at Noah. He nodded.
“We’re on our way down to Port Lucie to see if we can find a raft to take over to the big island. Or maybe build one out of whatever scrap we find down there.”
“You wanna come along?” Noah offered. “It just means building a bigger raft.”
“We only got a dozen bullets between us,” Jake moaned. “If we come across any ETs that won’t be hardly enough.”
“We got nine between us,” Noah said. “But most of ‘em are incendiary rounds. I think that’ll be enough for any ETs we run across. But, to tell the truth, I doubt there’s any left over there.”
“What makes you say that?” Chui asked.
“Because we haven’t heard anything in months. If they’d survived, we would’ve heard. Once the ships crashed, they were out of time.”
Chui glanced nervously at Jake, seemingly as frightened of the prospect of taking them up on their offer as of not doing it. When Jake finally nodded, Maia realized how young they were, hardly adults at all—little more than callow adolescents. “It’s so easy to misread people,” she thought.
“C’mon, guys,” she said, with a merry note in her voice. “Let’s go find your mom.”
The journey down the river felt like going home, even if she had no idea where, or even what, home was. But she had a large party to take care of—no longer just herself—and there were kids, too. All her ferocity, her ingenuity, and her alertness could be deployed once again, to protect her new “family” without any of the bedeviling reservations and paradoxes that had beset her since Nero.
And Noah didn’t fail to notice. One moonless night, under a rock ledge curtained with vines, while the others slept under a blanket of fronds around the embers of a dying fire, Maia kept watch. He crept over to her.
“You seem content,” he whispered.
“I feel better. The world doesn’t seem so empty.”
“What’s different? Is it finding the boys?”
“I dunno. Maybe. It’s just that I feel like I have a purpose again, something to live for.”
“What’s our purpose now,” he asked, genuinely curious.
“I haven’t a clue,” she laughed. “Whatever it is, at least it feels like it’s leading me somewhere.”
“To the big island, you mean?”
“Nah, bigger than that… way bigger.”
“Am I part of this bigger purpose?”
“Of course you are, dummy,” she said, and grabbed his head to push her face into his. With eyes wide, she nuzzled a nostril against his cheek, and then her lips brushed his hairy mouth and her eyes drifted shut as she dreamt of eternity, if only for an instant. When she let go of his face to look at him, he seemed all out of focus, like he’d forgotten everything except the sensation of her mouth touching his.
She patted his cheek and said “Your watch,” then darted for the nearest tree, which she scampered up almost as fast as her little brother. Other concerns would have to wait. At the top of the canopy, she poked her head through the last layer of foliage, gazed at the vastness of the starry heavens and said “Thanks, Mom.”
* * *
By day, Jacques Antoine is a professor at a small college in the southwest, by night he writes thrillers. At first, he wrote "kung fu" tales just for his daughter, when she was a little ninja studying karate. As she grew up, the tales evolved into full-length novels focusing on the dilemmas of young adults in extreme circumstances. His latest series, Taking Back Earth, follows Maia, a young woman burdened with the task of protecting humanity's last hope in the aftermath of an alien invasion.
When he's not writing or teaching, he enjoys walking his dogs in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside Santa Fe.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6433641.Jacques_Antoine
*
More Than a Couple of Camels
Suzy Stewart Dubot
Chapter 1
London, 1818
Bathsheba Baxter pushed her eyeglasses higher on her nose as she prepared to peer at the painting. Usually, she did not appear in public wearing the glasses as she felt that they were a sign of weakness and were certainly not flattering. Their use was normally reserved for reading in the privacy of her home, but today the picture had caught her attention the moment she had entered the room. Being in the museum's art gallery, she felt that if anyone were to see her, she with her glasses might be mistaken for the intelligentsia.
When she had reached that nearness which allowed her to bring the figure on the canvas into focus, she jumped back.
“Oh!” She said rather more loudly than she would have liked. She looked around to see if anyone had heard her exclamation due to the startling image of a naked woman. That in itself might have passed without too much ado if there hadn't been a satyr standing next to the woman with a hand on her bared buttock.
Bathsheba quickly removed the glasses, folded them and placed them in a case taken from her reticule, all as she eased away from the shocking painting.
“It is always a good idea to take a programme,” a man's voice spoke to her, “which should give you fair warning as to the picture's content.
“According to this,” he waved the programme for her benefit, “this one's entitled 'The Satyr's Seduction'.”
The man was standing with his back to the bright light of the windows and Bathsheba couldn't at first see him clearly. She had to look up, so knew he was fairly tall.
“Are you speaking to me, sir? Do I know you?”
He chuckled.
“Miss Bathsheba Baxter, if I'm not mistaken? Alistair Hutton, your new neighbour. We were presented by your cousin, James. Admittedly, it was in the street, but as James is also a long-time friend, I felt that I might approach you.”
Bathsheba glanced around a little nervously and located her maid, Peggy, standing near to the archway leading into the next room. She was in discussion with the curator. Sometimes Peggy was very brazen, but then, maids were known for being bold. She wished that she, herself, were a little braver.
She returned her attention to Alistair. There was no point in hiding the fact that she was still recovering from her close examination of the suggestive painting and that he had witnessed her embarrassment.
“I can't imagine why they would exhibit such a picture among all these other delightful paintings,” she sounded indignant as she gestured around her with a limp hand.
“You are in the 'Exotic Room',” Alistair explained.
“What! How did that happen?” Bathsheba looked suitably aghast so that Alistair had no trouble believing that she had accidently gone astray in the museum's labyrinth of rooms.
“Allow me to lead you to the tearoom. It will give you time to recover your emotions before facing the world.”
He is very presumptuous, Bathsheba thought. She wasn't sure she liked the way he, he... presumed.
“Thank you Mr. Hutton, but I really should be returning home now. Papa will be expecting me.”
It was only a little white lie as her father would be expecting her, only not until seven this evening. It was also a polite way of telling him to go hang himself. She needed more than an introduction in the street before considering being seen with him in a teashop. Her cheeks flushed at the thought.
“In that case, let me escort you home. We do live next door to one another.”
Now she'd done it. She'd backed herself into a corner. Think. What would Peggy do in such circumstances?
She'd probably jump at the chance to be escorted by a gentleman, Bathsheba thoug
ht. Well, she did have Peggy with her, which would give a stamp of acceptability to being accompanied by Mr. Hutton.
Suddenly, she felt quite audacious.
“I do think a cup of tea might put me into a different mood before returning home. Most kind of you to offer,” she said in a tone as pleasant as she could muster.
Peggy jumped to attention as she saw her mistress coming her way. She spoke a few last words to the curator before joining her and a rather well-dressed man. The man was familiar to her and she suddenly realised that he was their newly arrived neighbour.
“Mr. Hutton has invited me to take tea with him, Peggy, so we are going to the tearoom. I'm sure you are ready for a cup by now, with all the chatting you've been doing,” Bathsheba reprimanded in a mild way. She was a wee bit irked about the way she alone was to blame for her present situation. If only she had paid more attention to the museum's rooms and programmes.
“Yes, Miss. I could fair do with a cuppa,” Peggy agreed good-naturedly.
She was fond of her timid, twenty-six-year old employer and the idea of her having a cup of tea with a gentleman was a step in the right direction, in a humble maid's opinion.
Peggy understood that her mistress's usual reluctance to engage in most social encounters made her seem staid and unapproachable to the outside world. Twenty-six was already considered to be spinsterhood. She had been her maid for eight years and had experienced Bathsheba's various enthusiasms and disappointments, all of which had contributed to her unwillingness to currently engage, in any way, with men.
Now she was curious as to what had happened for Bathsheba to have agreed to take tea with a relatively unknown man. Hopefully, she might find out later.
Bathsheba made a point of heading towards a table that would seat at least three. Now if it had been left up to Peggy, she would have sat at the adjacent table and left the two of them a little privacy. Mr. Hutton seemed content enough.
The Kiss: An Anthology About Love and Other Close Encounters Page 10
