by Martha Woods
“Is that how it was for you? Homeschooling?”
“Not exactly, but I don’t want to talk about that just yet, it’s not exactly first drink talk.” She polished off her drink, sighing as she placed the glass down.
“I get that, I had a talk like that just today actually.” Finishing off his own drink, he set it down on the counter and turned to her. “You think it might be third drink talk?”
“That depends, do you think talking is all that’s going to happen?”
“Just talking,” He said, raising his hands up, “I promise. If not you can let Paul shoot me.”
She threw her head back and laughed, echoing off the old wooden walls of the bar and making Paul smile a hidden smile from his seat by the door, before she wiped at her eye and stood up from the stool. “Fine, let’s get going.”
“Get going?” Shane asked, “Wait, get going to where?”
“Your place, I’m dying to know where someone all mysterious calls home for the time being, call it professional curiosity.” Reaching behind the counter and pulling up a coat and a six pack, Holly started walking towards the door before she stopped and looked over her shoulder. “Come on, are we going or not?”
He nodded, perhaps too quickly, nearly stumbling and slipping on a wet patch on the floor before he righted himself. Grabbing his keys out of his pocket, he unlocked his car and let them both in, waving goodbye to a clearly amused Paul before he pulled out of the parking space, turning them in the direction of the outskirts of town and pressing his foot down. “Just so you know I live a ways out, I’m not taking you out to murder you or anything.”
“Ah, but that’s what you’d say to someone that you were going to take out to murder.”
He huffed a laugh, shrugging and thumping his hand against the wheel. “I guess you got me there.”
Chapter 3
“Wow, you really weren’t joking about it being all the way out here, were you?” Holly said, slamming the car door behind her and wrapping her coat tighter around herself, “There is like, no one around for miles.”
“That’s the best part of it,” He said, “Had my fill of people for a long time after all.”
They both stepped inside the cabin, the warmth of the fire draping over them like an old friend and welcoming them deeper inside, both of them slumping into the sofa against the wall. Popping open two bottles, they clinked the glass against the other and took a swig each, letting the moment of silence just stretch for a while in comfort, more comfortable than they had been in a long time. Holly looked around the walls of the cabin, very minimal with what had been hung up, but what little there was was very interesting. A deer hide jacket, clearly hand stitched, a few pictures of a small group of four, all looking various degrees of excited and miserable, and a few more pictures of a different group, much larger than the other and all dressed in green.
“Do you mind if I look at this?” She asked, pointing at the picture of the large group. Shane hesitated, before he nodded and grabbed the photo down for her, brushing his thumb ever so slightly over the frame. “This is… where did you take this?”
“Out at home,” He said, voice sounding more distant than it should have, “Me and a bunch of friends, before we went out again.”
“Went out?” She asked, looking along each of their faces and memorizing all the details. They looked young, every single one of them, especially the one who she recognized as Shane, standing in the middle looking like he barely even needed to shave. “Where did you all go?”
“Out to fight,” He said, taking another swig of his beer and letting it rest next to his knee, “I came back, the others didn’t. That’s the last photo of most of them if I’m remembering right.”
She snapped her eyes up to him, darting quickly between the man that she was sitting next to and the… boy who was smiling in the photograph. “But you’re all so young! You were really sent out when you were all that small?”
“Not much choice sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do. That’s war though I guess, no sense in dwelling on it.”
“I suppose…” She shook her head, handing him back the photograph and leaning closer. “You all can’t be more than seventeen, eighteen, you were really going out to war like that?”
He realized distantly that they weren’t talking about the same kind of war, but it was a chance to talk about it at least, if there were some misunderstandings that went unnoticed then that was no big deal, they could just push past that. “Everyone else had already gone, so it was expected that we would too, follow in their footsteps and all that. It wasn’t our war, we didn’t want it, didn’t cause it, but we were still fighting in it, and now look at where it got us. I haven’t even been home in… damn near five years I guess.”
“Why not?” She asked, “After everything you went through, wouldn’t you want to just go back there and… relax?”
She had no way of knowing that home had been where the war was, where his friends had died and where he had done unspeakable things, all in the name of protecting the land that they were slowly destroying. So he settled for a half truth, one that felt like it had much more to do with how he felt than he wanted to admit. “I can’t… really look at anyone there again, not after I turned my back on them, you know? Sure they knew me growing up, but the person I was then isn’t the person I am now. You saw me in that photo, did I really look the same?”
Six foot, a dusting of stubble, with an air of something dark around the eyes, he very much didn’t look like the bright eyed, smooth faced youth of the photograph so many years old. She thought for a minute about what she could say, something that she could do to make him feel better, and she came up dry. She’d never really met anyone who had gone to war, of any kind, she had no idea how to comfort someone who knew exactly how meaningless it had been, who couldn’t even fall back on a lie. So instead she settled for handing him another beer and shifting closer, the space between them narrowing little by little, as the walls between them broke down too.
“I didn’t have parents,” She said, after a moment to consider if it was the right time to say it, “They died when I was a kid, and no one really wanted to take care of me so I just… wandered around for a few years, spending a few nights with friends here and there but for the most part just squatting in the empty buildings. I couldn’t drive, and we’re a long way away from anything else, so I was just… stuck here.”
“That sounds very hard,” He said, leaning forward and placing his hand on hers, patting it twice before he pulled back, determined to keep his word. Shane held his beer up with a smile, laughing slightly as he said, “I guess it really was third beer talk huh?”
“I guess it was,” She giggled, opening her own beer and leaning back, “Things got pretty heavy all of a sudden didn’t they? I wasn’t meaning for that to happen.”
“How could you possibly expect all of my friends to have died?”
“Not that!” She laughed, “I meant just… I thought we were going to share some funny stories, maybe learn a little about what we’ve been up to the last few years, I didn’t think that I’d make you dredge up something that’s… clearly not easy for you to talk about.”
“If I didn’t really want to talk about it I wouldn’t, you can rest easy about that,” Shane groaned, stretching his legs out onto the coffee table and letting his back slide further down the couch, “Still sure that you wanted to come out here? I can drive you back now if you’re having second thoughts.”
“Nah, I think that I’m comfortable enough here,” She said, mimicking his pose, “It’s been a long time since I talked about myself like that, it’s… it feels kind of nice to get all of that off my chest.”
“Well you can be sure that I’m not going to judge anything that you’ve had to do, I’ve had to do some things to get myself through the days since I left, it’s just one of those things.” Placing his beer down next to him, he reached up and plucked down one of the photographs above his head, rubbing his thumb
along the aged frame and smiling at the wrinkled photograph within. “These three… they’re my family, we haven’t talked in a long time but… I think about them sometimes, you know?”
Holly took the photo, looking down at a Shane who was clearly older than he had been in the previous, a few new scars and a bit more stubble, not quite as… worn as he was now, even at the age of twenty two. “They definitely look like you, but… different at the same time.”
He pointed at each of the figures in turn, starting on the far left at a young woman with mousy dark hair and a small scowl on her face, hands clamped around her biceps as she was clearly voicing her displeasure at having her photo taken. “That’s Megan, she fought too but she was always that sour anyway, probably to do with our father if I had to voice a guess. They… never really got along, and when he died I think she was the one that was happiest about it.”
“She definitely looks the most like you, if only because she actually looks like she’s ready for a fight half the time.” She grinned. “Not saying that you’re looking for a fight, but I think you’d be ready if one came for you.”
“Well, call it a force of habit,” He laughed, pointing at the nervous young man standing next to Megan, “That’s Jamie, he was… always more of a reader than a fighter, but he still put himself into it with all he had. It affected him the most, it got to all of us in our own ways but he always had the hardest time with it, I just think he’s too good to be able to do it. Of everyone I think I was saddest to leave him behind.”
“I knew a few boys like him when I was growing up, always too soft and giving for their own good, they always deserve so much more don’t they?” Noticing that the silence was stretching on, she looked up at him and saw that he was staring down at the last figure with an indiscernible expression, brows knitted together and his mouth in a flat line. “Shane? Who is that?”
“That’s… Orson,” He said, tone matter of fact, “He’s the oldest of all of us, always the ‘responsible’ one, we… didn’t usually see eye to eye on a lot of things as we got older.”
“Brothers usually don’t but… you sound… angry at him?”
A little more complicated than just ‘Angry’. “Before I left, all of us were together in the house and we were talking about who was going to take over properly for dad. Most of us hated the old bastard, but he was in charge of a lot of things and suddenly we’re the ones who have to take over where he left off. Because he was the oldest it fell down to him, and I guess… it got to his head a little bit.”
“How so?” Holly asked, “Whatever happened, I’m not going to judge.”
“Well… he started bossing everyone around, listening to us less and less, everything had to be done his way, not anyone else’s. After a while it started to really grate on us, especially since it looked like he was just fucking things up even more than they already were.” Shane frowned, tapping the frame against his knee as he thought about his next words. “The way I remember it, we were all standing around and arguing, at some point Megan throws a glass through the window, I punch a hole in the wall, and Jamie just grabs his bag and walked right out the front door. Me and Megan went to get him but then we just figured… why not, you know? So we grabbed our own stuff as well and marched out right next to him, didn’t look back until we split off in our own directions and went our own ways. That’s… the last time that I saw or heard from any of them, that was about five years ago now I think.”
“That must have been hard,” She said, sliding closer until her head was resting on his shoulder, “I lost my parents before I could really remember properly, but you… you had these people with you for most of your life, I can’t imagine what it was like having to turn your back on them.”
“Yeah, well… it had to happen sooner or later, you know? I love my family, even Orson even though I’m still angry at him, we were just… too different.” He blew a breath through his lips, a bitter impersonation of a laugh, “It’s kind of screwed up to think about, but the time that we were all happiest together was when we were fighting in a war together, what does that say about how stable our relationship was? Soon as we stopped fighting and killing we fell apart, if that was the sort of thing keeping us together then I don’t know if we were really meant to last.”
“Family is a very strange thing,” Holly said, patting his knee, “Maybe all you need is time apart from each other, time to grow into your own people and come to terms with the things that you’ve had to do through your lives. You could wake up tomorrow and discover that you want to go home, just like that.”
“Hmm… maybe.” He didn’t want to say no, because truth be told he had no idea if that was actually what he thought. But he knew the answer wasn’t exactly yes, there were still so many feelings and resentments mixed in that had lain dormant for years at this point, opening the box on them could very well lead into something even more messy than he’d walked out on. “It’s good advice at the very least, you really are a bartender aren’t you?”
“Hey, it’s my job,” She laughed, shrugging and taking a swig of her beer, “What kind of bartender would I be if I couldn’t help some people through their long lasting issues right?”
“Well, you could be like any of the other bartenders that I’ve come across in my time. One of them pulled a gun on me for no reason, I left that town pretty quickly.” Draping his arm over her shoulders, he looked down and asked, “Is this ok?”
“Mm-hmm,” She hummed, nodding along and squeezing in closer, “It’s… actually really nice, I’m kind of surprised by that.”
“That it feels nice? Or that I’m actually asking?”
“Both,” She said, “For all their talk, most everyone else just wants to bend me over the bar for five minutes until they get their jollies. It’s… really nice, just sitting here and relaxing, I haven’t really had something like this in a long time.”
“Neither, if I’m being honest. I’ve been moving for so long, haven’t really had time for anything that didn’t last a night or two before I had to get going again, to find a new job or… just because people decided they didn’t really want me around anymore.” He let his head fall back against the couch, staring up at the ceiling and muttering, “Probably been just as long that I’ve been running if I really think about it.”
“Well, keep doing what you’re doing and I think we’ll be alright,” She said, voice getting softer and her head drifting slowly down against his side. When he looked down he heard the soft sighs of her breath, the gentle rise and fall of her chest, and he knew that she’d just fallen asleep completely. She must have been working harder than he thought, though working a bar in a town like this seemed like you’d definitely have your hands full one way or another.
“Probably been a while since you had a break,” He said, standing slowly to not wake her up with his movements. Placing one arm underneath her legs and the other under her shoulders, he lifted her and carried her over to the bed, placing her down softly and lifting the covers over her, standing back and watching to make sure he hadn’t woken her before he retired to the couch.
Picking up his laptop and opening it up, he scrolled through the usual sites that he frequented and read what little updates there had been in the time since he’d stopped researching. The large scale migrations had been taking place over the last few months at least, the animals doing what they normally did when the temperature got too low to be livable, but something had been… different lately, not least because it was happening far sooner than it should have been.
“What is going on down there?” He asked himself, tapping through to recent satellite photos of the area that had been taken within the last few days, and when he saw the most recent set and connected them to an attached report, his eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. “Fires? Those aren’t just fires, that looks like a blaze big enough to take down the entire camp…”
He knew the woods like the back of his hand, even after so long away from them, and the coordin
ates that he was staring at would be pointing him directly down at what had been his home so many years ago, though when he pulled out further he had to admit some level of confusion. His first instinct was that the wolves had broken the treaty that had been formed between their two clans, but when he looked out he could see that there was another fire miles away from the first site, in the rough area where he could distantly remember the wolf clan being, on the rare occasions that he’d walked there to discuss the peace terms. But if it wasn’t the wolves that had done this, then who could it possibly be? If it indeed was anyone at all, for all he knew it could just be a random tragedy that suddenly befell their forest, it wasn’t out of the question with the amount of fires there had been lately, but the season didn’t seem right for it.
“What the hell…” The news stories didn’t seem to be indicating any deaths, or even any signs of a camp that had been found, all they noted was some damage done to what seemed to be camping sites that had been short lived before the fires died out. They were noting that it seemed to be a miracle that the fires hadn’t spread to the rest of the forest, but he knew the truth that the clans must have spent all day and night making sure the fires were contained and then extinguished, before they made their disappearance before anyone could discover them.
They’d practiced escaping many times over the years, aware that it was always a possibility that they would have to do so with how tentative the peace seemed to be, but the thought that it had actually happened… he didn’t know how exactly to feel about it, but it was impossible not to feel sorrow for the damage that had been done to his home. He’d grown there, shed blood to defend it, and now the fruits of their labor, though previously wilting, were now gone up in flames.
He just had to hope that Orson was alright, wherever he’d ended up. He was likely leading them right at that moment, pushing them through the hard moments, being the leader that he’d always wanted to be.
