by Alex Howell
Afterward, when he came back to the States, he could do all of the reflection, therapy, and self-evaluation he needed to do.
“What’s the word?” he said to Luke as he exited. “Clara coming here?”
“The SWAT team has her en route.”
“Good,” Mason said.
“She’s a little bit frazzled and has some bruises and cuts, but no major injuries otherwise. No sign of anything traumatic, although you should probably take her to a therapist.”
“Her and I both,” Mason said. “And Tessa?”
“In the hospital for a broken leg,” Luke said. “Do you know what happened? Did she double-cross you?”
“How did you know?” Mason said.
“I have access to the same things General Jones did,” Luke said. “I have to request access, but it’s usually given to me. I saw what happened at that intersection, albeit only the video version, no audio.”
Mason bit his lip. What had happened to Tessa? That, like many other parts of this mission, seemed like a question not so easily answered. He’d have to ask her herself, and perhaps she wouldn’t even know the answer.
“My guess would be she got brainwashed somehow,” Mason said with a half-hearted shrug. “I’ve known that woman since our time overseas. I know how much she did for me to make this all happen. And I heard her when she got me. That wasn’t her.”
“Hopefully the folks at the hospital would figure it out,” Luke said. “In the meantime…”
Mason followed his line of sight.
And then he saw her.
Clara.
Alive.
Dirty and bruised.
But alive.
“Clara!” he shouted. “Clara, baby!”
His daughter looked up at him, burst into tears, and ran up to him. The two embraced tightly, Mason wanting to hold her as if he would never let her go. After everything that had transpired, he knew that he might never literally let her go.
The last of the Walkers was alive, perhaps changed in some way Mason could not predict, but alive all the same. Luke was right—years of therapy would be needed for this, and, in some ways, he feared that she would now forever be dragged into this life that he had tried so hard to keep her away from. There was so much in the road ahead he’d have to account for.
But, for now, he could give thanks that she was alive.
“Clara,” he said, tears streaming down his eyes. “I’m so sorry, I should never have let this happen to you.”
“Daddy, it’s ok,” she said, also crying. “I love you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for helping.”
“Love you too,” he said, kissing her on the forehead. “I will never let anything like this happen to you ever again.”
He held her close to his shoulder as she bawled her eyes out. Gently, he stroked her hair as tears of his own fell down. He let out an exhausted breath, kissed her on the forehead once more, and then motioned for her to follow him to a secure SWAT car. With his arm over her, he led her to safety.
No matter what it takes, I will take care of you. No matter what. Even if World War III breaks out. Even if the end of the world comes.
I will forever protect you, Clara.
I love you.
Epilogue
Mason stood in the center of the living room with the camera in his hands, fiddling with it gently, adjusting one dial and playing with another. He couldn’t believe that so much time had flown by so quickly; that his little girl had grown up so much that she was heading out to her senior prom.
There was a knock at the door, and Clara squealed upstairs and called down to her father. “Daddy! Will you get that please?”
Mason rolled his eyes with a sigh, but obliged. He went to the door and opened it to see Tom standing there in a tuxedo, looking better than he ever had, with a corsage in a pretty box held tightly in his hands. He swallowed when he looked up and saw Mason.
“Good evening, sir.” Tom gave Mason a nervous smile.
“Hello, Tom.” Mason replied, stepping back to invite the boy in. Mason flashed back to his own prom, and to his date that night. He’d been nervous and excited, and hoping for a lot of fun after the dance. Mason frowned and met Tom’s eyes with a serious look.
“I want you to show my daughter a good time tonight, and I want the two of you to have fun. There are a few rules, though.”
Tom swallowed hard again. “Okay...” Tom waited.
“No drinking.”
Tom shook his head adamantly. “She doesn’t drink anyway.” He said quietly.
“No drugs.”
“Oh, no sir.” Tom shook his head again.
“Don’t touch her anywhere that I wouldn’t touch her.” Mason’s eyes bored into Tom’s. Tom nearly choked.
“Oh no, sir. I mean yes, sir.” He nodded, and then shook his head, as if he wasn’t quite sure how best to respond. “I mean... I won’t sir.”
“Okay, I’m coming down!” Clara called out from the top of the stairs. Mason held Tom’s gaze a long moment and then they both looked up toward the staircase and waited. Clara came down carefully, a step at a time, with blushing cheeks and a big grin. Her dark hair was pulled up in soft curls, and her green eyes shone with excitement. Mason’s heart melted.
“You look beautiful.” Mason told her as he held the camera up and snapped a couple of photos. “I wish your mother was here to see this. She’d have loved it.” He said tenderly as he smiled wide.
Clara beamed and gave him a sympathetic look. “She’s here in our hearts.” She replied, and then she turned her attention to Tom, who was paler than he had been when he walked in the door.
Tom blushed pink and stared at her. Clara grew slightly coy and looked at the box in his hands. “Is that for me?” She asked lightly. Tom blinked a few times and then nodded and laughed nervously.
“Yes! Yes... this is for you.” He said, handing the box to her. “I hope it’s the right color green. Your dress is so beautiful. It really brings out your eyes.”
She took the corsage out and gave it to Tom, and with trembling fingers he closed it around her wrist. “It’s perfect!” She sighed blissfully. Clara hadn’t looked so happy in longer than Mason could remember.
He took a few photos of the couple and then kissed Clara on the cheek. “You two have fun tonight, be careful, and enjoy yourselves.” He gave Tom one last look of warning, and then watched them as Clara took Tom’s arm and the two of them headed out to the limousine that was waiting on the street.
Mason smiled wistfully as he stood in the doorway. “Ah Bree. We made an amazing girl. I wish you could be here to see her. Maybe you are, somehow, someway, watching over her and me, but I wish you were standing here by my side tonight.” He spoke quietly to himself, missing his wife terribly. “Clara’s right, though. At least you’re here in our hearts. We’ll always keep you there.”
Tom helped Clara into the car and the chauffeur closed the door and drove them away. When the taillights disappeared around the corner at the end of the street, Mason’s heart went them. He took a deep breath and walked back inside, closing the door behind him.
Book 2: The Warrior
Prologue
August 11th, 2028
5:52 a.m.
Baltimore, Maryland
It was a new day, and, for that, Mason Walker was grateful.
From his vantage point, in his small, well-kept room in his small house in Baltimore, he could see the sun just starting to peek over the horizon, waking itself up. The birds outside had slowly begun to chirp, their voices picking up to match the increasing luminosity of the outside world. Their voices sounded like nature’s alarm clock—the kind of noise that could alert you it was time to rise, but not in the obnoxious, grating way that many alarms now had.
And, best of all—and the most important sign that, like every other day for the past few months, all was once again normal—he heard Clara walking in the hallway.
Well, better get yourself up before she gets yo
u up, Mason thought to himself with the equivalent of a normal person’s smile—a simple grunt.
He opened his door, his way of telling his daughter he was up, and then sat back at the edge of the bed, reaching for his shoes, stuffing them on. He tied the laces twice, checked his phone to make sure he had no new messages—things had gotten a bit busy in the couple of months or so since everything had happened in D.C.—and, satisfied upon seeing that only a half-dozen messages had come through the darkness of the night, descended his recently vacuumed stairs to find Clara waiting for him.
For someone who had gotten kidnapped and nearly killed by her captors, if she was suffering from any sort of trauma, she sure was not showing it.
“Jeez, I didn’t realize that the summer meant you got up slower!” she said, sticking her tongue out.
“It’s the old man pace,” he grumbled. “How long today?”
“Five?”
Mason grunted as he activated his watch to running mode.
“On your cue.”
Clara nodded, flexed her biceps in demonstration, and Mason grunted as he struggled to match his daughter’s energy.
He admired how much spirit his daughter had seemed to find since the incident just mere months ago with his former boss and the near war with Saudi Arabia. If it had scarred Clara in any way, which was almost a certainty, she had chosen to repress it in favor of a much more upbeat and positive attitude. Mason knew there would be consequences of what had happened that he could not yet predict, perhaps trouble forming healthy relationships, perhaps difficulty going anywhere with anyone else alone, perhaps some screaming in random nights, but, for right now, he’d made a deal with her to only offer help if she asked for it.
And, so far, Clara had not only not taken up Mason on his offer, she had seemed intent on proving that such an offer was never needed. At first, Mason had worried that the lack of taking the deal was going to make things worse, but he eventually gave up the energy needed to question it and just assumed that Clara had made a different kind of deal with herself.
A deal I think every soldier makes to their own detriment.
Clara giggled at Mason’s grunt, the young teenager about to depart for the West Coast for her new life and the old, grizzled veteran who still couldn’t believe that his old life had caught up to him once already—to say nothing of what the future might hold. He definitely did not see it holding that terrible insurance job for much longer.
He now saw running almost as his sacred duty, just in case his old life called back for him once more. A man like Mason could never truly give up that life, mostly because that life would never really give him up.
At least this time, if it involved his daughter, it wouldn’t come from someone he considered an old ally.
He thought. He never really could say for sure after what had happened just months before.
The two of them headed through the door into the musky morning, the heat not quite yet to uncomfortable levels, drawing a shiver from Mason. Clara rubbed her arms, made an exaggerated chattering motion, and pointed to the woods past the dead-end side of the neighborhood. Mason gave a nod, Clara set her watch, and, seconds later, the two of them were off on their morning jog.
As usual, Clara took the lead for both of them, setting a pace that challenged Mason and went beyond even that he had to experience in BUDS or any other type of Navy SEAL training. It was never anything he couldn’t do, but he looked forward to more casual paces once Clara departed for the west. I guess I’m just getting to be an old man who can’t keep up with his kid anymore. I suppose this day would always have to come.
It was about the only aspect of her leaving that he looked forward to.
The day that he had feared most was now just a couple of weeks away. Though Clara had not said anything about it, not made any emotional mention of it, Mason knew this just meant that when he actually did say goodbye to her, all of the emotion the two of them had suppressed would come roaring out, making them look like bubbling fools at Stanford’s campus. At least Mason could leave knowing she had the best education possible, a gift of sorts after the national news, and that she would take full advantage of it. He just wished he could pace out the emotional release some… although, truthfully, the idea of that much emotion was never comfortable to him, even if he had revealed as much following his wife’s death and everything with Clara.
Sending her to the best school in the country helped. She was smart enough for Stanford, to be sure—although Mason knew almost not a parent alive would say their child wasn’t smart enough—but the incident that still felt like it had happened yesterday had matured her. She had become much more engrossed in the world around her, noticing everything from the way specific bird breeds chirped to making sure to volunteer in the community every Saturday and Sunday. Though it was too late to change her high school grades, Mason had little doubt that, upon enrollment at Stanford, she would do no worse than As and Bs.
I just wish Bree was here to see it.
Few thoughts made Mason start to well up, most especially on morning runs that strained his lungs and heart and made him seek a deep well of energy by mile four, but thinking about Bree tugged at his heart harder than the force of a sub-seven minute mile pace. Heck, thinking about his wife was harder than a full-on sprint for as long as he could go.
He especially felt it when he remembered the speech that Clara had given at her graduation, another sort of honor that Mason had tried to deflect, but Clara had insisted on taking.
“Everyone knows what happened to me a month ago,” Clara had said at her speech. “But what many don’t realize is how I was able to have the strength to remain strong and not quit. It was because of the lessons giving to me by my late mother, Bree Walker. Bree suffered through cancer for many, many years of my life, but, through it all, she handled it with dignity, grace, and honor. There was never a part of me that wondered why mom wasn’t trying so hard, because everything she did was meant to try hard and to take everything in.”
Mason, standing near the back of the audience at this time, had to put on sunglasses so people couldn’t see his eyes welling up. The memory of Bree was a particularly tough one, so much so that nothing had changed since three months before. He still wore their wedding ring, he never had any intentions of taking it away, and, for as long as he lived, he could never see even trying to date again, let alone marry or, God forbid, have more kids.
The numerous photos in his room of her, both of her by herself, with Mason, and with Mason and Clara, made it all but an impossibility that he would ever allow himself to be free of thinking of her. She was the reason he had quit the teams in the first place; her final words were the reason he cared about and protected Clara as much as he did; and she continued to inspire him and guide his path well beyond the grave.
And what would that mean for him when Clara finally did leave? What would it mean when he got on that return flight from San Francisco, went to his house by himself, and discovered that he truly was a man alone in his castle?
We deal with that when it comes. In the meantime…
Try and keep up with her. Don’t you dare fall behind—last thing you need is an 18-year-old talking trash to you.
Christ, this is a damn hard run.
It was near the end of the trail, though, and Mason knew he only needed to muster the energy for about another half a mile. The good news, too, was that because of this spot, he no longer had to summon an enormous amount of energy to get over the hump. It wasn’t the end that sucked, because at that point, the reserves kicked in and helped finish the job. It was about from mile three to mile four and a half that were the true test of Mason’s fitness, the point where the warm-up had ended, but the finishing kick had not yet arrived.
It was just like his time in the SEALs—the beginning felt like a rush of adrenaline; the end provided that light that kept Mason going; but the middling years, when Bree was pregnant and Mason still had a contractual obligation to finish his duty,
were just awful.
Clara jumped to the finish, a wooden railing that signaled two different directions to go even further in—runs which she’d done before, thankfully not at a sub-seven minute pace, that had left Mason with his feet up on the couch, a cold one in his hand, and sports on his television. They’d only done such runs a few times over the past few months, but, at Mason’s age, he intended to keep it at just that.
“Tired?” she teased when he slowed down.
“Tired?” he shot back. “Do I look tired? ”
“You sound it, old man,” she said as she started to stretch, again guiding Mason along with what to do. “You sound like you need to walk the entire way back.”
I mean… I’m not in the teams anymore, so what’s the rush, right?
“That was the plan,” Mason said, hoping that this wasn’t the prelude to more running.
“It still is, don’t worry,” Clara said. “Although…”
Aw, come on.
Her voice trailed off, but not because of anything that Mason had to fear—instead, her smile grew big as she pocketed her wireless ear buds, listening to the bird songs of the early morning. Mason, who never had ear buds, but nevertheless had not noticed them until now, took particular attention now to the songs—or tried to, at least. Clara had the ears of an expert birdwatcher; to Mason, it was like trying to understand the different types of classical music. To an untrained ear, it just all sounded the same.
“What are they?” he asked.
“That one… it’s an Eastern Bluebird,” she said, turning her head like a satellite, trying to take it all in. “I think I hear an American Goldfinch and a Baltimore Oriole as well.”
“Huh,” Mason said as he sat on the ground to do more stretches. He couldn’t even pretend to understand half of what Clara was referencing. “Like the baseball team?”
