by Tracey Ward
Three hours later I’m dressed and sitting in the living room when I feel Alex and Nick arrive on the front porch. The Slip vibrates in my blood where my body remembers it. I haven’t done it since the last time Alex Slipped me here to the house from the Sahara. I haven’t wanted to. Where would I go that could be better than here?
We had the house demolished. It wasn’t worth saving. We had it taken down to the foundation and built up again into four smaller homes spaced out around the property. We’re the only ones who live here permanently, but the place is kind of a sanctuary for supers. Everyone who survived that night has an open invitation to come stay with us if things get rough. Britta and Beck stayed here last month. Justin came out and lived with us during the rebuild, helping out around the ranch. After he recovered from a broken neck, he got his GED and just started college in Texas last month. But during breaks, he’ll come here. He’ll come home.
Stewart is in an assisted living home in London, and he loves it. We agreed that he was better off there than in the middle of nowhere out here with nothing to do or see. In his home, he has peers to talk to. To relate to. They take day trips constantly. They’re teaching him how to live on his own with the hope that he’ll be able to hold down a job and keep his own apartment someday. He sends us postcards once a week. Sometimes the same one, but Jonnie keeps every one of them. Alex and Nick Slip out to check on him every couple of weeks to make sure he has what he needs. To make sure he’s happy.
Brody found a job with a survival skills school in Oregon. He’s one of their top instructors. Hands down their best hunter. I can’t imagine why…
Trina’s body is buried on the hill behind the house. Beck dug the grave himself before he and Britta left to find their bliss in Australia breeding koalas or something. Seriously, they’re working with Greenpeace I think. Or Amnesty International. I can’t keep up. Some hippy crap where they’re saving the world, making it a better place through protests and glitter signs and granola. Good on ‘em, but it’s not for me.
Nick and Alex Slipped back to the base a couple of days after Naomi tried to swallow us whole. It was nothing but rubble. Not a soul left alive, definitely not Naidu. I guess Naomi did what we set out to do there. Destroying it was always the plan, but the fact that she refused to turn it off afterward was what made me do what I did. What makes me lose sleep at night wondering if it could have been avoided.
Nick knocks on the door; quick and clipped. Military efficient to the bone.
“We don’t want any!” I shout from the couch.
Jonnie shakes her head, a smile on her lips as she goes to answer the door. “Every time, Max. Does it never get old to you?”
“When you stop smiling at it, I’ll stop doing it.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
She opens the door, letting in the later afternoon light and the only friends we have in the world. They look tan and happy. Relaxed. Life in Aruba must be good.
They went there for their honeymoon five months ago and never left. For the last few months, they’ve been managing a kayak and zip-line tour in the jungle, living in a hut over the water, and bumping uglies every night. The first two things are fact, the last part I’m just assuming based on the smile on Alex’s face and the easy slope of Carver’s shoulders. He has the stature of a man who’s getting it on the regular.
“Oh my God,” Jonnie gasps when she sees them. Her hand goes to her mouth, her smile peeking out from around her fingers.
Alex’s smile slips, her eyes widening with amazement. “Holy crap, you can see it, can’t you?”
Jonnie drops her hand, shaking her head in denial. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. It’s just so… bam! Right there, you know?”
Alex grins meekly. “Yeah. I definitely know.”
“Know what?” I ask, coming to stand behind Jonnie at the door. “What are we talking about?”
Alex lifts her eyebrow at Nick. “Do you want to tell him?”
“Alex is pregnant,” Carver tells me plainly, his arm slung over her shoulders protectively. Proudly. “She’s about a month and a half in.”
“Ha,” I laugh, not really sure why. “You’re not kidding, are you?”
“Nope.”
“They’re not,” Jonnie confirms. “I can see the baby.”
I think about being flippant. Making some snide comment about how fat Alex is going to get or how big her boobs will be, but something stops me. Maybe it’s maturity, I don’t know, but I don’t feel like being a dick about it. I feel happy for them because they’re obviously excited. Carver’s face is filled with hope, something I’ve rarely seen on him. PJs don’t do hope. We do determination. Sacrifice. Focus. But the look I see on his face today, I feel in my gut whenever I look at Jonnie. Whenever I think about a future without fighting. Without wars, super or other. I think there’s a life here, one worth living. One worth protecting. And when I look at Alex, I see another life. A new one. The start of a different kind of adventure, for all of us.
“I call godfather,” I tell them seriously.
Alex laughs. “Of course you do.”
“I want his middle name to be Maxwell. No arguments.”
“Some arguments. What if it’s a girl?”
I look at Jonnie questioningly.
She shakes her head with a sly smile. “I’m not telling.”
“You know, though?” Nick asks curiously.
“Maybe.”
“She knows,” I confirm, eyeing her suspiciously. “You can see its penis, can’t you?”
“No,” she laughs.
“Quit looking at it. It’s weird.”
“You’re weird but I look at you all day.”
“I don’t want to know yet,” Alex tells her, running her hand over her still flat stomach. “It’s still really early and if anything happens…”
Jonnie crosses her heart. “I won’t tell. But the baby is strong. Glowing like a little purple sun. Same color as you, Alex.”
Alex beams up at Nick. He smiles down at her, pulling her in close to kiss her on the forehead.
“Alright, that’s enough,” I warn them. “If you’re going to make out, I’m going to go watch Sports Center until it’s over. You have to at least wait until this baby is born before you go trying to make another one on my porch, you know.”
Jonnie laughs, pushing me out of the way. “Come on in, you guys. Sit down. Get comfortable.”
They come into the house, giving us a view of the outside where they have bags waiting behind them. A lot of bags.
Carver notices me noticing. “When we told you the news, we were going to ask a favor.”
“The jungle isn’t the best place to be pregnant,” Alex continues. “It’s uncomfortable and I can’t keep doing a lot of the tour activities we run out there.”
“We were hoping we could come stay here with you for the duration.”
“And probably a little while after the baby is born. We want to take some time to get settled into a routine.”
“Of course you can,” Jonnie agrees immediately. “We’d love to have you. You’re always welcome here, for as long as you need.”
Alex smiles, clearly relieved. She’s not used to being welcome places, not after her parents kicked her out years ago. The idea that she has a steady home is a new one to her. “Thank you so much. We’ll help out around the ranch, I promise.”
“Whatever you feel like doing so you don’t go stir crazy, but take it easy. We’re here for you.” She smiles at Alex’s stomach. “All of you.”
They hug because they’re girls and they love that crap. I look at Carver expectantly, but he shakes his head at me.
“No. I’m not touching you.”
“Good,” I reply. “I didn’t want to touch you either.”
“Good.”
“Great.”
“Yep.”
“Congrats, though,
man. For real. Good job knocking her up.”
Carver smiles, shaking his head. “Thanks, dude.”
“It’ll be nice to have people on the property again,” Jonnie tells them, disengaging from Alex. “With Justin at college and Britta and Beck out doing their thing, we haven’t had anyone here in a while.”
“No word from Liam?” Alex asks gingerly.
Jonnie frowns. “None. I’m guessing none for you either?”
“Nothing. Not since he took Naomi’s body to bury in England.”
“I’ve reached out to him a few times. He’s alive, out there somewhere in the ether, but he doesn’t answer me.”
“I wonder if he’s still in England. Maybe in one of the family homes?”
“How many did they have?” Nick asks.
Jonnie shrugs. “I don’t know for sure, but at least three. Both his parents were rich.”
“Dr. Evans less so after you cleaned him out,” I remind her.
She glares up at me, thin lipped and annoyed. “I didn’t clean him out.”
“I’m not judging. I’m glad you did it. He owed you.”
“He owed all of us. That’s why I gave a lot of it to everybody else.”
“And we’re very grateful for it,” Alex reminds her. “It made it so much easier to get a life started again.”
“I’m glad. And Liam will be fine, wherever he is. He has his mom’s fortune to live off of. He’ll never have to work again.”
“I wonder if he will anyway,” Nick muses grimly, his eyes hooded with doubt.
I feel that. I think about Liam and what he’s doing a lot. I wonder if he blames me for what happened. He has to on some level and I get it because I blame me too. It’s why I have trouble sleeping sometimes. It’s why I feel sick for no reason.
Jonnie frowns, picking up on Nick’s meaning. On his worry. “I’ll keep reaching out to him,” she promises, but what she’s really saying is she’ll keep tabs on him.
Eventually she’ll start zeroing in on where he is. Then on what he’s doing. If he doesn’t respond, she’ll go full Spy Master again, something she definitely doesn’t want to do. But we have to know. If he starts to work again, we need to see it coming. We need to know what we’re up against.
We need to be ready, for anything. Especially now, with a new super on the way, because what scientist, mad or sane, wouldn’t want to get a look at that little dude’s DNA?
I know Nick’s thinking it when his eyes go to Alex and his hand dives into his pocket. He’s got the stones there. More than before. He rolls them in his hands, calling to them quietly, waking his army. He’ll use them if he has to. With a vengeance unheard of, if they come for his kid. He’ll unleash a flock of stone birds. A navy of sharks. He’ll bring unholy hell from the land, sea, and air to protect the people he loves.
And I’ll be right there with him. Always. Until the end.
These things we do, that others may live.
THE END.
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Keep reading for an excerpt from my YA Apocalypse Thriller,
THE SEVENTH HOUR.
Prologue
Change doesn’t happen overnight.
That’s what they used to say. I bet it used to be true.
Now it’s an idiom, a phrase we use out of six hundred year old habit that has no literal meaning anymore. Not since the world changed and everything was forced to change with it. The people, the animals. The weather and the landscape. The very nature of the Earth shifted, taking all of us with it.
And no, it didn’t happen overnight.
It was painfully slow. The rotation of the Earth took its time grinding to a halt. It spent over a hundred years losing momentum until finally it leveled off, but the damage was done. We revolved around the sun the same way we always had, but the Earth’s spin had all but stopped, and humanity’s concept of time stopped right along with it.
What used to take twenty-four hours now took a year to complete, the Earth’s revolution around the sun our only true movement. Dawn to dusk lasted six of those months. Over one hundred and eighty days of burning, unrelenting sunlight that scorched the earth and killed every living thing in its path. Rivers and lakes dried up, plants and crops burned alive, temperatures soared to sweltering heights.
Then the night would come. Dusk to dawn lasting another six months. The baked landscape cooled and froze over. What the sun didn’t kill the cold would finish off, and it did it in the dark. Thousands of hours of living nightmare, one you couldn’t wake up from.
It was even worse when the storms rolled in. When the animals woke up.
We adapted or we died, and if there was one good thing about the slowing of the Earth it was that it gave us time. Time to learn, time to prep, time to adjust. Time to save what technology we needed to survive and cast the rest aside. To build cities to withstand the bitter cold and the blistering heat.
Some people burrowed into the mountains, building their homes and cities under the ground. They hid from the elements and they waited out the summers. The winters. The hours.
Others refused to hide. As the oceans pooled to the north and south, burying the old world and raising a new supercontinent that circled the Earth like a ring, they took to the sea. They built boats, set sail, and left the frigid night and burning day behind. They stay in the hours in between, in the half-light. That perfect hour. The golden hour.
The Seventh hour.
Chapter One
Liv
I imagine swimming is a lot like flying. You’re weightless and diving, soaring. It’s exhilarating. Quiet. Just you and the elements, the water and the air, speaking to you in a language you can’t understand, urging you to fly higher, to dive deeper, and maybe they’re going to get you killed but for just a moment you’re more alive than you’ve ever been before. You’ve broken free of man’s middle plain, the space between, and you’ll never be the same again.
Yes, I imagine flying is a lot like swimming.
And I can do neither.
I look down to the frothing water below me, my bare feet dangling on either side of the thick bowsprit jutting out from the front of our ship. The skirts of my dress billow in the wind like thin red sails that have lost their lines. Like wings beating, trying desperately to fly, but they can’t. They never learned how. They buffet against my legs that are growing cold, and I wonder if it isn’t time to come in. It’s probably too late. I’m sure I’ve already been spotted and once word gets back to him, I’m sunk. As surely as if I slid off this mast and into the sea right now.
“Do I even want to know the logic behind this?”
I don’t turn. I’m not surprised to hear Gav’s voice behind me. I’m actually surprised it’s taken this long for him to show up.
“Behind what?” I call over my shoulder.
“Behind you hanging out on the front of the boat like a figurehead.”
“Do you know what the figurehead on this ship is?”
“An angst-ridden seventeen year old girl?”
I grin faintly. “Close. A blond mermaid with boobs bigger than my head.”
“Lucky girl.”
“On the other ships are a lion, an angel, and a unicorn.”
“That’s only four.”
“The fifth Dasher doesn’t have one.”
“Why do you know this? Have you sat on the front of all of the ships like this?”
“No. This is a first.”
“Do you want to tell me why you’re out there?” Metal jingles together lightly behind me, like discordant, dented bells. “Or why your shoes and necklace are in a pile on the ground?”
I shake my head without a word. My eyes brim with cold tears, the sting of the wind flooding them, sending salt down my cheeks in rolling tracks of ice. I don’t know where the emotion is coming from. It hits me hard out of nowhere the way the claustrophobic feeling hit me on the
deck twenty minutes ago when I tore the heavy jeweled necklace from my throat and freed my feet from the painful confines of my shoes. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see. Like I’d be sick there on the deck, and before I knew it I was climbing. I was on the bowsprit in the wind with the waves splashing underneath me. It felt a little bit like flying, or as close as I’ll ever come to it. I pushed farther and farther out on the beam until the ship was behind me. Forgotten. It felt like the entire ocean, the entire sky, was all that surrounded me. It was an incredible feeling.
And now it’s over.
“They’re too tight,” I tell Gav, carefully keeping my voice steady.
“Your shoes are too tight?”
“Yes.”
“So you kicked them off and climbed out onto the front of the ship?”
“Yes.”
“In your dinner dress?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” he agrees quietly. “Alright.”
“Don’t talk to me like that,” I scold sharply.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m crazy.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy, Liv.”
I laugh incredulously, the sound shaky even to my own ears. I quickly wipe away a tear trailing down my cheek.
“I don’t,” he insists. “But I am worried about you. You haven’t been yourself lately.”
“I don’t even know who ‘myself’ is.”
“I do. I know you, and this isn’t you. You’re stronger than this.”
“Stronger than what?”
“Than whatever it is that’s crushing you.”
