by Kyla Stone
For a while, it had worked.
The next day, he began lessons. He taught her to shoot with his Glock 19 and Remington shotgun, and even his M4 carbine. He showed her how to take down an assailant swiftly and efficiently with a quality tactical knife—taught her to keep it hidden until she was ready to attack, then to lunge in, swift, brutal, and deadly.
After a week, Eden’s fever receded. With the infection conquered, the wound slowly healed, leaving a ridged and ragged three-inch scab stretching from two inches below her left ear to the front of her neck.
Her ruined throat would only allow her to make a low rasping sound. Eden could no longer speak.
“Must be her vocal cords got cut,” Ezra said, frowning down at her. “A proper doctor—”
Fear slid between Dakota’s ribs like a blade. “No!”
It was a terrible choice—a decision between your sister’s voice and her soul, possibly her very life. The decision tore at Dakota, shredding her heart with grief, guilt, and regret.
She hated herself for it. But she did not waver.
“No doctors. No hospitals.”
Normally a bright, bubbly child, Eden became wan and withdrawn.
In those first weeks, she barely left the cabin. She only communicated through frustrated gestures Dakota couldn’t understand.
One day, Ezra left and returned with several notebooks—a couple lined for writing, another that was blank inside, with a cute unicorn leaping over a rainbow emblazoned on its front.
He handed Eden a box of artist-quality colored pencils. “For drawing,” he said gruffly. “Don’t leave these lying around. Clean up after yourself, or they’ll end up in the trash.”
He turned without another word and stomped out of the cabin, his Ruger American hunting rifle slung across his shoulder.
Eden waited until he was gone.
She bent her head and wrote quickly, fiercely. She held up the notepad and thrust it at Dakota. Why are we here? What happened?
Dakota went rigid. She had put off the question for as long as possible, dreading the answer.
She couldn’t bear the thought of the condemnation in Eden’s eyes once she knew the truth.
18
Dakota
“What do you remember about that night?” Dakota had asked anxiously.
They were in the bedroom Ezra had fashioned for them from his “Ham Shack,” the second room that housed all of his amateur radio equipment.
He’d set up two hand-made duck-feather mattresses on the wood plank floor. A scarred wooden dresser sidled against the desk where he kept a radio transceiver, rectangular tuner, old-fashioned headphones, a set of medium-sized speakers, and several other strange machines covered with dials and knobs.
Dakota repeated the question.
Eden only shook her head in confusion.
She didn’t remember. She didn’t know. She didn’t know that Jacob was dead or how Maddox had betrayed them.
She didn’t know what Dakota had done.
It was a blessing. Dakota alone would carry the poisonous truth deep inside her. It was Dakota who lived with the regret, the shame.
Only two people alive knew what really happened that night.
Dakota would never forget—her nightmares wouldn’t let her.
And neither would Maddox.
“We’re safe now,” she said. “You’re safe. Do you understand?”
Eden scribbled her response on her paper. I’m not going to the Prophet?
“You don’t belong to him. Not now, not ever.”
What about family?
“Something bad happened.”
What?
“I’ll tell you later, when you’re better.”
Tell me now.
Dakota shook her head, adamant.
Eden couldn’t handle it. She was too sweet, too trusting, too good. The truth would break her.
It was bad enough she knew about the Prophet. She couldn’t know how her own family had betrayed her.
“All you need to know is that it’s not safe for us there anymore.”
Eden thrust the notepad at Dakota. Why????
“It’s safer for everyone we care about if we don’t go back.”
Eden frowned and worked her jaw, trying to speak, but only that low, rasping moan escaped. She tore off the sheet of paper, crumpled it in frustration, and hurled it to the floor between their mattresses.
Dakota closed her hands over Eden’s. “Do you trust me?”
Eden nodded without hesitation.
“Do you know that I love you?”
She nodded again.
“You are my sister, and I am yours. Do you understand? We’re all we have now. We’re each other’s family.” Dakota smoothed out the wrinkled paper and handed it back to her sister. “I need you to be with me in this, okay?”
Eden’s eyes filled with tears. Will it ever be safe to go back?
“Of course,” Dakota lied. “Soon, I promise.”
Finally, Eden gave a sad little nod.
Dakota sucked in a steadying breath. “And we need to change our names.”
Eden blanched.
“Just the last name. So bad people can’t find us, okay? I was thinking Sloane. I knew a girl named Sloane, back before…it has a nice ring to it.”
Tears sparked in Eden’s blue eyes. I miss Maddox and Jacob and Father. I miss home.
Dakota bit back a sharp retort. Someday, she’d tell Eden the truth.
But she was too brainwashed with love and loyalty to see it now, to understand how they’d treated her like chattel, no better than a slave to be sold at auction.
These were the things Dakota never worked up the courage to tell Ezra.
And yet, the way he looked at them sometimes—not with pity but with an awareness, a dark understanding—though he kept them to himself, she knew he had his suspicions. Suspicions confirmed the day he saw her scars.
Nine days into their stay, with Dakota still sleeping with one wary eye open and Eden barely coherent, Dakota helped mend the electrified, barbed wire fencing damaged in the storm.
As she struggled to pull up a strand of damaged wire caught on a tree branch, she accidentally stepped into a gopher tortoise burrow. Her ankle twisted painfully, and she fell against the barbed wire.
She jerked away but not quickly enough, tearing a large, jagged rip in the back of her shirt. The hot breeze brushed against her exposed skin.
Her breath snagged in her throat. She went completely still.
The torn fabric revealed the neat rows of circular scars spanning her back. She didn’t have to see them herself to know what they looked like.
From the wings of her shoulder blades down to her lower spine, she’d been branded dozens of times. Some were years old, now a puckered, shiny pink; others were fresh, savage red welts.
Shame spread fire-hot beneath her skin. “Please, I can explain. I’m clumsy and—”
Ezra had been looking at her, but at her words, he turned sharply away. She stared at his broad shoulders, too stunned to finish her sentence.
“Expect you’ll be needing another shirt,” he said. “Back at the house, you’ll find one of mine on the line.”
He never asked where they came from or who’d done it. That night, she found a jar of burn ointment on her nightstand.
The next morning, Ezra left early in his F-250 pickup and returned before breakfast with two five-packs of boys’ T-shirts, a few pairs of boys’ cargo pants a size too large, and two belts. The belt held the pants up just fine.
“I expect you should be in school,” he said when she came out in the new clothes, still pulling at the tags. “There’s somewhere better for two girls to be than here.”
He reminded her of a bald cypress tree, tall and ancient and strong. He was brusque, but not cruel. Instinctively, she knew he was different from the other men she knew.
He didn’t want anything of them, only expected Dakota to help around the property, which she was happ
y to do. She’d always liked working with her hands, building and feeding and fixing things.
Eden was still sick, but she was getting better under his care.
Dakota liked this place, liked him.
She could breathe here.
“No,” she said. “There isn’t.”
He just looked at her.
“We were homeschooled at the compound.”
He raised his gnarled gray eyebrows.
“You can order textbooks online, and Amazon will deliver them straight to your door. Or a post office box,” she said quickly at the look of alarm on his face.
“Is that so.”
“And tampons.”
It was the only time she ever saw him blush.
And that was how they had spent the next eight months: tending the property, harvesting, hunting, cooking, and practicing preps, interspersed with shooting and self-defense lessons. Eden learned how to express herself through her notebook, hand gestures, clicks of her tongue and whistles.
Evenings had been spent around a campfire or the plank table in the kitchen, Eden drawing and Ezra cleaning his guns, Dakota listening raptly as Ezra jawed about his favorite topic—preparing for the impending end of civilization as everyone knew it.
For the first time since her parents had died, Dakota was truly happy.
19
Dakota
Dakota blinked and pulled herself out of her reverie. Logan was looking at her sideways. He’d asked her a question she hadn’t heard.
“What?”
Logan took another swig of beer and tossed the empty bottle to the street in front of a pale yellow stucco house. As they traveled farther northwest, laundromats, hair salons, and convenience stores slowly gave way to residential areas.
He raked his left hand through his scruffy black hair, several heat-damp strands sticking to his forehead. “I asked what your prepper friend is like.”
“Quiet. Scrupulously clean. Good with his hands. And grumpy,” she said fondly. “Ezra isn’t much for talking unless it’s about preparing for the end of the world. He’s the one who taught me about EMPs and radiation, how to use a gun, how to survive.”
“How’d he learn all that stuff?”
She remembered the dusty medals she’d found in a drawer one day, along with a framed photo of a much younger Ezra Burrows in a sharp, pressed military uniform adorned with ribbons, pins, and medals. He’d been standing next to some sort of major or general. They were both smiling in the photo, but when she’d asked him about it, he’d said, “The past is the past for a reason, girl.”
“He was in the Marine Corp, I think. Served in Vietnam. I don’t know much more than that. He would never tell me.”
“Maybe his PTSD turned into paranoia,” Logan said as they sidestepped a mangled SUV that had plowed onto the sidewalk and buried its nose into the front of an apartment complex. “You really never thought he was crazy? Not even a little?”
“Never.”
She hadn’t thought Ezra was crazy for even a second. She’d admired him. She wanted to be him.
He’d turned his back on the life he didn’t want and forged one he did. He was ready for anything.
Except that the one thing he couldn’t plan and prepare for was the thing that took what mattered most…his wife.
That same fear dogged her every waking moment and haunted her dreams.
No matter how strong she was, no matter how tough and skilled with a blade and a gun, no matter how many bug out bags she prepped or how often she practiced at the range, no matter how many escape routes and contingency plans she mapped out and memorized—no one could control chaos.
“It’s not crazy to think about what bad things might happen.” She hesitated. “The world ends for individuals all the time, in a hundred different ways.”
Her world had ended the first time when her parents died.
Her Aunt Ada had reluctantly taken her in, forcing her into the strange, awful world of the River Grass Compound—where religion was the new law and the outside ceased to exist, where they smiled bright perfect smiles and quoted Bible verses while they beat you senseless.
Her world ended the second time in the mercy room, standing bloodied and stunned over the body, Eden a collapsed heap beside her.
She’d known the only way forward was to run—to run and run and never look back.
And then a third time when social services forcibly ripped Eden from her arms and sent her to one horrible group home after another, where she fought with fists and teeth and nails to establish a place for herself, sleeping with a shiv beneath her pillow to ensure no asshole ever touched her again.
Her hand strayed to the comfort of the knife at her side. “It’s those people who trust a corrupted, broken system that they know is broken to take care of them that are the real crazy.”
Logan drained his beer and tossed the bottle aside. It landed without breaking and rolled into a gutter. “You might have a point there.”
“Everything is more fragile than we want to believe it is. Those people who are prepared? They’re the smart ones.”
If she’d been prepared, she could have saved Eden sooner. If she’d been prepared, Eden wouldn’t have lost her voice and nearly her life.
Dakota wouldn’t have the scars disfiguring her back.
And if she’d been prepared, Dakota and Eden wouldn’t be separated right now. That failure, at least, she was about to rectify.
She pointed to a dented street sign fifty feet ahead of them. “Bay Point Drive. We’re only a bit more than a half a mile away now.”
Her heartbeat quickened. She walked faster. Anticipation thrummed through her veins. Almost there. After everything, she was finally just minutes away from rescuing her sister.
Logan nodded. “Let’s pick up the pace—”
A scream shattered the humid air. Dakota and Logan both tensed, already reaching for their weapons.
This scream wasn’t like the others.
It wasn’t low and rasping or full of suffering.
It was loud, piercing, terrified—and close.
20
Eden
Eden’s throat burned with thirst. Her mouth felt stuffed with cotton, her tongue thick and swollen.
When nightmares weren’t stalking her, she dreamed of waterfalls, sprinklers, and streams bubbling with clear, cold water.
She lay on her back in the tub on top of the cushions, her knees drawn up. Sometimes she curled onto her side or flopped onto her stomach, searching for a more comfortable position.
But comfort eluded her.
Her lips were dry and cracked. Sour sweat beaded her forehead and dripped down her neck. Her empty stomach gnawed at her insides.
She’d had to use the bathroom a few times that first day, and now the stink hung heavily in the hot and stifling air.
For a long time, Eden stared up toward the ceiling, breathing shallowly, her pulse thumping in time with the fear throbbing through her. The hours passed in a slow daze.
She blinked her gritty eyes and forced them to remain open, even though she couldn’t see anything. She didn’t want to sleep; the nightmares always found her.
She desperately needed a distraction to keep the terror at bay.
She fumbled around, feeling the side of the tub beneath the cushion until she found her pencil, and opened her notepad to the next page, which she knew was blank. The previous page contained her ASL alphabet drawings.
She began to sketch without really thinking. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see. She just needed to do something.
After a few strokes, she felt the cypress trees coming to life beneath her fingers, and she knew what she was creating.
The long, rectangular concrete buildings, the clearing with the chickens and the raised gardens, the greenhouses and hydroponic farm, the large kitchen and cafeteria where she’d spent so much of her time learning to cook.
The compound slowly took shape on the page. She couldn’t see the
pencil or the paper, but she imagined the sun overhead, a great blue heron swooping low over the fishing and airboat docks on the western end of the property.
She drew the classroom with old-fashioned wooden desks and attached metal chairs, colorful science posters on the walls, spelling words of the week laminated and tacked to a spring green bulletin board.
And then the big grassy open area in the compound’s center rimmed by picnic tables painted bright pink and blue and yellow. She had loved to sit by the giant fire pit surrounded by Adirondack chairs.
There were the clotheslines strung between the stubby pines, the women hand-washing and hanging the linens; sheets, towels, and long skirts fluttering in the breeze like kites.
To the east, on a raised bump of land, loomed the church—with its hard wooden pews, cement block walls, and the plain but heavy cross hanging behind the imposing pulpit.
She’d spent much of her time there, too. Listening to three-hour sermons four times a week. Preparing herself in purity and obedience to the Prophet. Praying for blessings, for mercy and forgiveness.
Guilt pricked her. She hadn’t prayed enough. Not then, and not now.
She didn’t draw the collection of off-limits buildings hidden behind a cluster of cypress trees located far back from the rest of the compound. She had never been allowed anywhere near them. None of the women were.
Only the chosen Shepherds of Mercy went back there, men with uniforms and guns and other things she didn’t know the names of.
Her father had told her the most holy work of the Prophet took place within those buildings, just like the holy places of the sanctuary in the Old Testament.
She had never understood it, but it wasn’t her place to understand such things.
Eden also left out a drawing of the mercy room.
Her heartbeat quickened simply thinking about it. She’d never been allowed inside—but she’d seen Dakota’s burns afterward. And what they did to the others, the guilty ones.
