by Ric Beard
Ultrasound.
Lexi’s nose ticked up at some kind of flowery scent in the air. Her lot in life seemed to be killing things, and plants were no exception, so she had little basis with which identify the sweet odor.
“So what’s with the Black Ghosts? What’s this Children of the Widow shit?”
It was Ella who unexpectedly answered. “People and their god damn superstitions.” Her sudden change in tone caused Lexi to cock her head to one side. The blonde shook her head gently back and forth as she worked. “There’s a legend of a woman dressed in black who used to sneak around the MidEast, and on the East Coast, who cut people up. It’s all hocus.”
Lexi suppressed a knowing smile.
Little did the young woman in front of her know she was repairing the Black Widow’s arm.
Lexi tried to guess Ella’s age. She was a fully formed woman, replete with glorious hips, but there were no bags under her eyes, no discernible wrinkles around them when she squinted at the monitor, and her skin was smooth like it’d never seen the sun. At first glance, Lexi had placed her around seventeen, but now, she was thinking early twenties. The .45 automatic hanging on her hip contradicted her gentle touch.
Lexi shot an expectant gaze at Sasha. “Children of the Widow?”
“Do you know about Churchill?” Sasha asked.
“I was there,” Lexi said.
Ella’s head jerked up from Lexi’s arm, Sasha’s eyes looked like they might pop out of her head.
“What do you mean, you were there,” Ella asked with a suspicious glare.
“After Sampson’s men killed that family, the boy they either hadn’t known about or hadn’t thought about, ran into the road. Nina, Sean—that’s my brother—and I found him. We saw their bodies.”
“I didn’t know you were there,” Sasha said. “After we got wind of it, we pulled in more of my people to patrol the area. It was far enough from any towns that we could operate. Sampson would have a hard time reinforcing the trucks on that winding road. So when one showed up, we tracked it to see what we could learn about how these enforcers were operating, and why they’d escalated.
“Why suddenly get involved?”
“We’d stayed out of it until we heard about Churchill, but Moss doesn’t like it when people kill children. He gets real pissed off-like. Eventually the truck stopped at the Ellison Farm to collect what they call taxes—”
“Bastards!” Ella blurted. “Taking people’s food.” The words were trailed with the same shake of her head, slowly from side to side.
“Right. At this particular farm, they started throwing the husband around. When his wife came out of the house, they raised their weapons. Moss said we had to draw the line somewhere, so we did. Suffice it to say, we intervened.”
“Intervened?”
“We didn’t kill anyone, but we sent them on their way. Told them the farm was under our protection now, and they shouldn’t come back. Moss sent a message to Sampson.”
“Sounds like it,” Lexi said.
“No, I meant he literally gave them a message to take to Sampson.”
“What was the message?”
The bed atop which she sat was a single, made up tight enough to bounce a quarter, and raised high off the floor so Lexi’s boots didn’t touch. She swung her legs gently, side-to-side, and Ella didn’t seem to mind as long as she kept her arm still.
“That we don’t get into other people’s business until we have to, but if we have to, it won’t be so nice next time. He also said that any truck coming back to this farm would be destroyed.”
Lexi smiled. “Destroyed?”
“We left four men on that farm. Sampson sent a truck. It was destroyed, we dragged the men off the property, and left them there. They had to walk back. It was a long walk.”
“And the men you left?”
“They’re still there. If anyone goes back,” she shrugged, “they’ll walk home. Some people are thick. You gotta teach them over and over again.”
“Why do you think Sampson hasn’t returned with numbers?”
“If we could take them down without killing them and leave them on the side of the road, he probably figures they don’t have the training to deal with us. Moss thinks it’s because our presence on the farm better suits Sampson’s narrative.”
“What narrative is that?”
Sasha threw Lexi a sideways glance. “Um, that we stole a farm and killed a law keeper?”
Lexi glanced down at her arm as Ella continued to scan. “This is why you’re wanted in Blacksburg?”
“Sampson is such an asshole,” Ella said.
“Sounds like a methodical asshole, though.” Lexi shrugged her free shoulder and glanced around.
This room was too nice for the MidEast. For one thing, it was sterile. Dust was the way of the world out this far from Triangle City. The pubs she’d trolled to gather intel and listen in prior to leading The Foundation here were covered in the shit, like their floors had never seen a broom, and Lexi often found herself clapping her hands against her clothes upon leaving.
“I get it,” Lexi said. “They think you killed the lawkeeper.”
“Well, we might have killed one.”
Lexi nodded. “The one guarding Sean and I? Yeah, that’s bad luck.”
“Moss thinks the guy who was guarding you was one.”
“Well, shit, that’s bad luck.”
Sasha leaned against the bed next to Lexi. “Why do you say?”
She talks funny.
“Killing one naturally ties you to the other.”
“Shit. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll bet Moss has though. All the more reason to change out of our uniforms when entering town.”
“Why did you ever wear them in the open? Maybe it was our introduction to you, but I always imagine you running around in the dark, causing havoc.”
“You mean like you used to? We wore our gear in the open because we wanted the people to know Lucinda is under our protection.”
“So you’re using the same legends to control people? Make them scared of you?”
Sasha gave the lazy shrug that was becoming all too familiar. “Yup. Fuck ‘em.”
Lexi did a double take, opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again.
“We think Lucinda Proctor could lead the MidEast to greater things.”
“Oh, goddammit!” Lexi barked. Ella stepped back, her shining eyes throwing a wary stare at Lexi. “Sorry. My bad.” She waved the hand on her healthy wrist. “I hate politics. I’ve had my fill for one lifetime. We should just cut his throat and have done with it.”
Ella stepped forward and continued her work.
“People in this town can’t be so stupid as to be fooled by a change of clothes, Sasha. Can they?”
“Let’s just say Jacob keeps a low profile, and Cage stays close to his mother. If they do know, they certainly haven’t reported us.”
Ella chuckled. “Who would they report you to?” She changed the subject. “You say you set this arm, Sasha?”
Sasha took a step forward and glared at the monitor. “What? Did I mess it up? Tell me I—”
“Calm down, woman!” Ella said as she hooked the wand onto its stand next to the monitor. “I was just going to say you did an excellent job. I don’t need to do anything but rewrap it.” She crossed the tile floor and opened a cabinet. “I wish you’d get me a pair of those crazy glasses of yours.”
The door at the other end of the room opened and Cage appeared, holding the knob and comically trying to make himself thin so a woman of average height with sunshine-yellow hair flowing past her shoulders could pass through. Any question of Ella’s maternity was erased by the woman’s features. According to Sasha, Lucinda Proctor was a very special woman, worthy of respect. To Lexi, she didn’t look much older than thirty-five.
Good genes.
Cage’s wide arms pulled the door closed, and he resumed his watch outside. Right before the door sealed, Lexi saw
the dog sitting out there in the hallway at Cage’s feet, looking up at him expectantly, tongue hanging out one side of her mouth. The giant dwarfed her.
Lexi’s eyes fell on the rummaging Ella over her shoulder, then back on Lucinda.
I wonder what their dad looks like.
“Hi!” Lucinda said. “Hello!”
Sasha’s face grimaced for an instant when Lucinda leaned in and kissed her on the cheek.
“Hello, Lucinda,” Sasha groaned.
Lucinda seemed unfazed. “You look lovely today, Sasha. So much better than all that black.” She faced Lexi, slapped her hands on her hips, and cocked her head slightly to one side. “My! Aren’t you just the pretty one.” She surveyed Lexi’s arms, found the uninjured one, and grasped the attached hand. “I’m Lucinda Proctor, and I have heard so many delightful things about you!” She shook the hand as if she was trying to crank start a tractor while the interest in her eyes transitioned to her daughter, fumbling around in the cabinet.
“How’s our patient, dear?”
“Oh, dammit!” Ella grunted, dismayed at her arms banged and bumped around the storage cabinet. “I guess you could ask her, since she’s standing right in front of you!” As she rifled further, there was pattering, clattering, thumping, and banging. “Dammit! Where are…oh…here they are.” Lexi heard the unmistakable sounds of a pill bottle rattling, and Ella stepped back into view. “Excuse me, mama.”
“Oh, certainly,” Lucinda said, finally relinquishing her grip on Lexi’s hand, raising jazz hands, and shuffling to the side. Her salt-water blue eyes bounced from Ella to Lexi and back again as Ella shook the bottle for effect.
“These will help the bone heal up faster. Take two a day.”
“And call you in the morning?”
“You can call my handheld if you like, but I’m not sure why you’d need to. They’re just supplements.” She slapped Lexi’s knee and leveled a finger on her. “Just don’t forget.”
“I’ll remember.”
“So the bone is good?” Lucinda asked her daughter.
“Right as rain. Should heal up, good as new, fit as a fiddle.” She beamed. “Seems Sasha’s been taking to my teaching!” She slapped the shoulder of the sleeved, purple dress. Did a bang-up job.” Again, the converted woman in black grimaced for just a moment at the physical display.
Lexi made a mental note.
“Um, thanks,” Sasha muttered, one side of her mouth pursed.
Ah, a master at the social skills, this one.
“Good!” Lucinda said. “Well, I’m having food prepared and we’ll all talk in just a little bit. Sound good?”
Without waiting for so much as a nod from anyone in the room, Lucinda Proctor patted Lexi’s knee, threw a quick hand on her daughter’s shoulder, threw Sasha a warm smile, and pranced to the door with her golden hair bobbing loosely behind her. She knocked twice and threw another smile over her shoulder as a click led to the door being opened. Cage stepped aside, Lucinda passed through, and Cage pulled it closed.
Lexi locked eyes with Sasha. Sasha rolled hers.
“That’s mama!” Ella flipped her hands in the air as if there wasn’t much to be done about it.
“I gathered.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
STEAK
35
Steak.
By-god-straight-from-the-plains, grass-fed, glorious red meat. Lexi wasn’t about to rush through it. Each bite was like a bloody party for her taste buds. The sensation was to her mouth what the colors of Mardi Gras had once been to her eyes. It wasn’t beyond the scope of reality that, upon request, she would lick Lucinda Proctor’s boots to a resilient sheen after this meal.
Like the medical facilities in the small building a block away, Lucinda Proctor’s home was well-kept, if not flashy. There were some decent paintings and sparse plant life to be seen inside; the floors were polished wood. Lexi had smelled lemon in the entryway as Cage led them in, harkening back to memories of her own home, when her parents’ part-time housekeeper had been polishing wood at their ranch in Raleigh. A wood stove in the living room up the hall kept the place toasty.
Dinner conversation wasn’t as pleasant as the lemon scent or the joyous explosion of taste in her mouth. Sasha explained that bringing any kind of violence in a troop carrier currently sitting outside Blacksburg was going to play poorly, especially with Lucinda Proctor as their host. Taking out Sampson’s men in the one town that had refused the lawkeeper he’d offered to leave behind might force his hand.
Apparently, Proctor had politely sent Sampson packing when he brought his dog-and-pony show to the self-sufficient trading town, and there was to be an expected level of animosity between the two. From Sasha’s telling, as they’d changed clothes before riding into the queue to enter town at the main gate, it’d been quite the sight: the demure, blonde woman with the tiny voice and a southern appeal standing with an entire town of armed citizens hanging on every word, as Sampson scowled and was shown the door.
Beneath the table, Dummy whined at Lexi’s feet. Lexi chewed and poked the dog with her foot.
“Shut it!” she whispered.
Though Lexi itched to give back some of what the men on these trucks dished out to the uncooperative people in the boonies of the MidEast, it’d be poor form to repay her hostess’s hospitality with an army of trucks pounding at the town’s wall. So when Jacob had shown up devoid of appetite and willing to slap a tracker on the truck, Lexi had given him directions to her bike’s hiding spot. She was promised a longer conversation on the state of things when they were in transit to the truck’s location later, wherever it ended up.
She was getting tired of being promised conversations at a later time, but again decided not to force the issue.
Lexi took her final bite, forked a piece of fat, and held it under the table. Dummy sucked the fat off the fork, and her tongue smacked.
“Well, Lexi, if asked, I’d guess you enjoyed that meal.”
Lexi raised her eyes from the empty, bloody plate as she chewed the last of her steak. Her own napkin sat half folded next to her plate. She let her enthusiasm power the nod she gave in return.
“Good!” Lucinda looked around the long table at her children and Sasha. “Who wants to walk it off our thighs, over to the gun shop, and talk a little business?”
Lexi’s eyes shot to Sasha, and she mouthed the last word Lucinda had spoken. Sasha gave her patented half-shrug and nodded at Lucinda. Lexi took a last look at the empty plate, wondering if she should sop up the blood with some bread, but that would be uncouth. Bad enough to have fed the damn dog.
Gun shop didn’t quite prove an adept description of the wide building off the main drag in Blacksburg. Whereas Lucinda’s small house and the medical building a block away were well-maintained, the scent of gun oil throughout what had to have once been a gymnasium gave off a more mechanical vibe. On the walls that would’ve once contained bleachers hung racks of restored weapons, the like Lexi hadn’t seen in ages. Though she knew a carbine when she saw one and had wielded her share of automatic pistols in her lifetime, the designations of some of the weapons hanging on the wall escaped her—or she’d never known them to begin with.
She figured she was a swords-and-daggers kind of gal.
“Who restored all these?” Lexi ran her fingers down the long barrel of a sniper rifle with a scope wider than its stock.
Jenna would get the biggest brain boner over this thing.
“Cage restored every single one, I’m proud to say,” Lucinda replied. “My boy has quite the functional hands, wouldn’t you say?”
Lexi glanced over her shoulder at the lumbering man behind the counter set near the double metal doors in one corner of the sprawling, wooden floor. He had to lean down so far to rest his elbows on its glass top that his body was bent at ninety degrees. He eyed Lexi with a stony expression, but there was an unmistakable pink hue coloring his cheeks, surrounded by otherwise tan skin.
Wonder if that’s a blus
h at the adoration of his mother or blood rushing from the effort to hold all that mass up on that counter.
“I would say exactly that,” Lexi said. She ran her fingers back down the barrel and let them drift off the edge before turning to face Lucinda, who stood in the center of the massive floor. “Forgive my ignorance, but how do you trade in this town?”
“Ah, I see Sasha hasn’t filled you in.”
Sasha’s attention was exclusively drawn to the guns, lending the mention of her name no weight. She paced near Lexi along the wall of potential destruction, her slow strides as natural as a cougar’s on a mountainside, albeit in a dress.
“The vendors in town use marks. They’re paper chits. When farmers, hunters, tradesmen, and the like come to town with something to sell, the vendors pay them in chits or trade. Those who take chits can buy from any vendor in town.”
“What if the tradesmen don’t have goods equal to the value of what they’re trying to trade for?” Lexi asked.
Lucinda placed her hands on her hips in the same way she had when she’d first set eyes on Lexi in the medical room, giving the taller woman an appraising gander.
“I don’t know if anyone has ever told you, young lady…”
Lexi laughed on the inside.
“…But intelligence beams from your eyes. It’s a rare quality. I can tell I’m going to like working with you.”
Working with me. I still don’t know what that means. Have Sasha and Moss signed me up for something, or is she part of a package if I plan on working with the mysterious figures in black?
“Thank you,” Lexi said.
A finger danced as Lucinda pointed at Lexi from the distance. “You-are-welcome.” She paced slowly across the floor, her forest green dress starched so it only moved when her legs brushed the skirt. “If a trader doesn’t have enough, we make deals. Sometimes, two or three vendors will come together to mutually satisfy everyone.” She came to a halt a couple feet from Lexi; her eyes never faltered as she spoke. “Those kinds of arrangements were more common in the early days, but you can find chits throughout the MidEast now. As a matter of fact, I’ve heard Sampson has taken quite the negative stance against the currency out in the townships, but he’s been bargaining with me on the flip side of his two faces to accept it as a currency throughout what he claims is his territory.”
