Graham's Resolution Trilogy Bundle: Books 1-3 (62 page)

“I don’t really know; it happened so fast. He was trying to hurt me, and I fought him and saw his gun on the nightstand. I grabbed it and took a chance. There were gunshots in the distance, like before, and singing. People chanting crazy things . . . my hands shook. I was so scared. I couldn’t stop. I thought I’d mess it up, but it went off. I killed him. I shot him in the chest and killed him. There was blood everywhere. He fell on me and I pulled myself out from under him. There was more gunfire outside. I threw the burka and hood back on, opened the door and . . . I don’t know. I was so scared. I ran. I barely remember what happened between the time I left and when I woke up the next morning at Dutch’s place.”

“Did you have shoes on?” Sam asked.

“I never took my tennis shoes off; they were still on.”

“What did you do with the gun, Lucy?” Dalton asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“You didn’t bring it with you?” Sam asked.

“No. I must have dropped it.”

“How’d you get past the others without them seeing you?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know. I opened the door, crouched down, and kept to the railing. There was a bonfire in the parking lot. With all the yelling and shouting, they weren’t watching. I got lucky, I guess. I don’t know.”

“So, that’s when you ran into Dutch?” Dalton asked.

“Yes, afterward, when I was running through the woods; I ran behind the hotel complex and just kept going. I barely remember—I kept seeing his bloody face in my mind—I ran into someone and I thought they’d caught me, and that was it. Except he pulled me farther away, and that was the direction I wanted to go, anyway, so I didn’t fight him.”

“Dutch, this sound about right?” Dalton asked.

“Yeah. I pulled the hood off her and saw she was a local in the wrong getup. She was covered in blood, man. I guessed what had taken place. She’s right. I heard them carrying on. Couldn’t believe this was on my own soil. Every now and then, you heard them scream,
‘Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim’
—in the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful
—
and shoot off like the demon misfits they are. Like I said before, this is a mop-up exercise. We are the last infidels. The last unbelievers.”

Dalton noticed how Clarisse visibly shook. He touched her back, trying to calm her. She let him. They were all afraid. Hell, he was scared shitless himself, but he’d kill every last one of them given the chance.

Lucy looked at Dutch and asked quietly, “You knew?”

He filled his lungs with air. “Yes. I’ve seen it before. I’m sure a few of us have. This is their M.O. They have no regard for women. They’re nothing more than animals. You passed out shortly after I got you. It wasn’t a stretch and I figured, if you needed to, you’d tell me in your own time when you were ready. It didn’t matter. I got you away from there the next day. If I’d babied you, you wouldn’t have been able to function, Lucy.”

“I understand. Thank you for taking care of me, Dutch.”

“No problem, kid.”

“Okay, anyone else have questions?” Clarisse asked, but no one volunteered another.

“Thank you, Lucy,” Dalton said. “You’ve helped us more than you know.”

McCann heard the engine before it even traversed their long driveway. They were all attuned to the minutest of sounds; even a deer entering the cabin’s clearing in moonlight, pulling at the dewy grass, registered in their subconscious, or the first busy bees of spring flying like overburdened dump trucks into the glass windowpanes. It was amazing to him, the sounds of nature that he’d never paid attention to before.

He’d thought about waking the others to say good-bye, but he didn’t want his departure to be a big deal. Not as he was going off into danger.

He padded into the living room with his gear held aloft. He stopped at the door and glanced at Macy’s bunk. He nodded his head at Sheriff as if telling the dog to be on watch over her now.

“Leaving without saying good-bye?” Graham said in the darkness of the living room, scaring the living daylights out of McCann. Graham had waited for him there, he realized.

“I don’t want a long, sappy farewell. I’ll be back in a few days,” McCann said.

Graham nodded hid understanding. While McCann put on his boots, Graham couldn’t help but give another warning. “You may see things, McCann, that will burn into your mind. Inhuman images you can’t rid yourself of. I want you to know life is worth living in any possible form. Don’t ever give it up.”

“I don’t plan on getting myself captured, Graham. I’ll be back in a few days.” The headlights of the Jeep flashed twice into the window, signaling McCann to hurry up.

“I’ve got to go,” he said.

“Take care, McCann.” Graham embraced the young man and slapped him on the back before opening the door for him to join the others.

As McCann walked toward the headlights, he had the bitter sense that guilt overtook Graham because he couldn’t make the trip himself. If something were to happen to him, Graham would be the man that needed to go on, not him. The fault would weigh on Graham’s soul, and for that reason alone McCann would make sure he came back in one piece.

He turned back after loading his pack into the back and waved. With the lights shining past his form and blotting out all of his features, Graham could only saw his shadow outlined, but he waved back.

McCann slid into his seat next to Sam. Dalton, in the driver’s seat, said, “Ready?” McCann nodded, and they backed out of the driveway and down the long, cold road. No one said a thing for miles. He stared out the window at a dark landscape of hope.

I will come back to them. I will return
,
he kept telling himself.
I have to. They can’t do it without me.
He continued to tell himself this as they rumbled on for miles over the gravelly, unkempt roads.

“You know, we ought to use some of this debris to make several blockades over roadways where they can’t easily get around,” Sam said.

“I have some experience in doing just that, in a faraway desert land,” Dalton said.

“Hell, I’m sure you do,” Dutch said, then added, “but we didn’t have much in the way of trees and foliage to work with then; it was mostly rocks and sand . . . endless sand.”

“That’s an advantage we have here. They get cold there in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan—hell, wherever they crawled out from under—but they don’t have trees and coverage the way we do. That’s probably why they waited for spring. They couldn’t handle the temps up here over the winter,” Dalton speculated.

“Damn, it gets cold at night. I remember that,” Steven said and then paused. “They’ve probably been here for a lot longer than we thought. Florida, Texas, I bet they’re just getting to us now.”

They were all quiet after that statement—too quiet. McCann wasn’t sure what was worse, having them talk doom and gloom or this silence. They didn’t really know what they’d find, but they all suspected it would be a nightmare. They kept going, speeding down the debris-strewn roads, heading south. Occasionally they avoided some obstacle in the street, passing through ghost towns. McCann remembered how eerie it had been when he’d seen these ghost towns last winter on horseback; now it was even worse. Since then the snowpack had collapsed several roofs. Fires had broken out and burned part of one town to the ground, with only black sticks marking the graves of the buildings.

“McCann, when you came to town last winter, did you travel as the crow flies, or did you follow the roadway?” Sam asked him.

McCann thought Sam already knew the answer to the question before he asked it, but he was trying to make conversation. “It would be too hard on the horses’ hooves to make a road trip that long, and it took longer than I thought it would with all the snow. I rode the crow line south. I cut several days off that way, but it was still a foolhardy trip. I should have waited, but I had to get out of Carnation. It was too quiet.” A chill ran up his spine, remembering how he’d come halfway before realizing that leaving in winter was a mistake. He’d almost frozen to death as the winds whipped at him, stealing his breath, freezing his eyelids shut, and making him so sleepy he didn’t care when the reaper came. It was hard now to imagine how he’d survived it. He didn’t remember parts of the trip at all.

“A trip like that’ll make a man out of you,” Sam said.

“Yeah, I think it did,” McCann agreed.

Tala sat on a soft blanket spread over the damp ground, resting in the shade of a generous pine tree. The cold damp had finally given way to warmth enough for bare arms and short sleeves to work at weeding the spring garden. They weeded daily now, but even that didn’t seem often enough; spring weed sprouts threatened to strangle the life out of their precious new vegetable starts.

“Well, if you’re going to sit there, you have to at least tell us stories while we work,” Mark said.

Knowing he was only kidding with her, Tala said, “You got it. If that’s the price to pay for a break, I’m all for it.” She was full of tales told by her American Indian grandparents; she retold them because they reminded her of the old ways—the way things used to be and seemed now to be again.

Sometimes she’d recall them when she needed to remind them of a life lesson. Sometimes, they just came to her for no particular reason she could think of, stories just begging to be retold.

Tala watched as Mark, Marcy, and Bang bent and pulled at the stubborn weeds. It was a necessity that they work each day like this; it was time again for children to labor as workers, and she felt that chores really were the best way to bring children up in the world. Idleness never benefitted anyone. In the past kids had always needed and wanted to work, to help their elders, but for some reason those lessons had been lost in the now-departed modern world. She hoped they would remember this lore, these stories—now and in the future.

As she tried to think of a story, something nagged at Tala’s subconscious and she took stock of her new family. Graham was safe at the prepper camp helping Rick, and she expected Clarisse to show up soon with Addy and the new one, Lucy. She wasn’t sure what bothered her, and she rubbed her backside knowing she’d pushed herself too much lately with work.

She pushed away the annoyance of the unnamed thing and reached into her mind to select a story from the bevy in her memory bank. Having McCann away on the scouting trip weighed on them all, but he was a grown man and Tala knew he could look out for himself. She sensed no tragedy there to befall him, but she could be mistaken. She hoped not, for all their sakes—especially Macy’s. She sighed, leaning against the tree trunk with her belly resting on her lap, looking at the others working, bent over or squatted down. Bees buzzed by them without malice on their mission. She watched as Mark’s rifle slung over his back had slid down to his side and dangled from the strap, getting into his way. It was cumbersome work, weeding with a rifle, but it was a necessary precaution. Marcy passed him and silently nudged his rifle over to his backside again. Tala knew they carried a love for one another. It was something she and Graham also shared.
Those two are meant for one another
, she thought. Mark’s presence in Marcy’s life calmed her flighty spirit somehow.

“Did I ever tell you guys about how Bear got his claws?”

“No. I don’t remember that one,” Bang said, squatting down to plunge his little fingers into the earth in earnest on either side of a determined dandelion root. He used a screwdriver after he made some headway to work farther down the root, creating a free channel to help extract the thing in its entirety.

“Good. Okay, so, there once was a time when Bear lived side by side with Man, much like a tame dog does today. Only Bear also advised man and sat with him on wise councils and hunted, played music, and walked beside Man in life every day. Then one day a young warrior claimed that Bear had killed another man on a hunting trip. What had really happened was that the warrior had killed the other man so that he could claim his wife, but he blamed the murder on Bear.

“The father of the young man was the chief of the tribe, and he believed his son. The great council came together and Bear defended his kind, but it was no use. Man stood against Bear and ordered the death of the accused.

“When Man came to carry out the sentence, Bear resisted and bared his fangs at Man. Man tried to speak with reason that justice must be carried out, but Bear said, ‘Your justice is of your own making. If you carry out your justice, Bear will forever hunt the evil of your kind and shall never shake Man’s hand again, and instead rip you limb from limb.’ Man ignored Bear’s warning and carried out the wrongful death sentence. Bear then left Man’s side, and from that day forward Bear grew claws and never did shake Man’s hand again. Instead, Man now fears bear— especially if he’s an evil Man.”

Tala looked up and saw that they had all stopped what they were doing and stared at her, mouths agape. A moment passed in silence.

“You’re supposed to tell
nice
stories,” Bang said.

Mark and Marcy laughed.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Bang. It’s just an Indian legend,” Tala said, then saw movement beyond them through the wire gating surrounding the garden. Clarisse and two others walked their way.

“They’re here,” Tala said, bracing herself against the tree to stand up. She waved at them and, as they approached, Tala noticed how Bang moved behind Mark when he saw Addy. Tala knew this was going to be a challenge, but thought the best thing to do was let the transition happen naturally.

“Hi, you’re not working too hard, are you?” Clarisse asked her.

“No, I was just taking a break and telling stories. I guess the last one was a little scary.”

“I’ll say,” Mark said. “I’m going to have nightmares now. Man betrays Bear. Bear grows claws and kills evil men from then into eternity. Nice one!”

Marcy shoved him and giggled.

Tala huffed. “I don’t know why that one came to me. It is pretty scary.”

“Well, let’s get to work. You guys stopped about there?” Clarisse said, pointing to the area still embedded with weeds.

Tala caught Clarisse’s eye, knowing she had picked up on Bang’s tension as well. They’d both agreed earlier to expose the two to one another often enough to help Bang get over his guilt and his fear of Addy.

Tala handed the newcomers their own buckets, and they all began again while Tala stood watch and offered the others water that they’d brought with them that morning.

“Are you getting along okay, Lucy?” Tala asked her to make her feel a part of the group.

“Oh, yes,” Lucy smiled. “Everyone has been very nice. I’m going to be working in the kitchen now with Rick’s wife Olivia and helping Clarisse out in the infirmary. I’ll get to see everyone a few times a day, and I’m so thankful to be around people again. And Olivia doesn’t seem to be upset with me for hurting her husband.”

“We all understand, Lucy,” Tala said with compassion. That comment seemed to ease Lucy’s fears, and she went back to work among the others.

After another hour of occasional conversation, Tala watched as the sun rose to midday, and she called it quits. The crew packed up their buckets and tossed the weeds into the forest to rot on the pine floor. They stood back and surveyed the garden with hope. The tender young greens were thriving now; everything they’d worked for over the winter was now coming to fruition. Before they headed in, they picked enough early salad leaves and radishes for the evening meal.

“I can’t wait for carrots,” Marcy said in longing.

“Green beans,” Mark nodded.

“No, it’s the tomatoes I’m waiting for. I can smell them from here,” Clarisse said.

Tala noticed Bang pull away, and she realized Addy wasn’t privy to the conversation around her. She watched as Bang stopped in front of Addy and awkwardly signed the question as to which crop she most looked forward to.

She signed
strawberries
with a shy smile.

Bang agreed. Red, juicy strawberries would be the best of all.