Ground Zero
Authors: Rain Stickland
Ground
Zero
Rain Stickland
Copyright © 2016 Rain Stickland
Cover design copyright © 2016 Amanda K. Woods
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to persons living or dead are either strictly coincidental, or have been fictionalized to a very great extent, such as in the case of known political leaders. Cities and towns named are real, as are many roads and highways, though the makeup of both may be altered.
ISBN-13:
978-0-9949500-4-8
Dedication
To all those who have dedicated their lives to rescuing animals. Luckily I count some of you among my friends. There is no finer human being than one who protects a creature more vulnerable than him or herself.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Thank you once again to Amanda K. Woods for putting up with my irritating nitpicking with respect to my cover. Graphic design falls well outside my milieu, and in fact gives me a splitting headache from which none of us will recover should I ever stop whining.
And thanks go again to Steve Kovacs, who was nagged into giving me information regarding personal security, martial art instruction, and insight into the vagaries of the world of criminal justice. I’m pretty sure I owe him my soul at this point.
My friends deserve a round of applause for putting up with my disappearing acts, as well. Particularly Sarah Lyons Fleming, who guided me through life as a new author, and Typhanei Celeste, who treats me like I always know what I’m doing. Much love to Marlin Woosley, as always (I
really
hope you attain the dream you’ve been working toward so hard). I’m a terrible human being, I realize, so thank you for not telling me to take repeated long walks off of very short piers. They all know I’m crazy, and appear to like me anyway.
Last, but definitely not least, to my readers, who have now made it possible for me to do what I love as obsessively as I want to, I give my deepest thanks and appreciation! Your kind e-mails mean more to me than you’ll ever know.
“I killed your father,” Mackenzie blurted at her daughter. Cameron’s mouth dropped open in shock, but then another expression crossed her face. Betrayal.
“You
lied
to me?
You
?”
“No, I didn’t. I told you he was killed trying to rob some people. I just didn’t tell you that we were the people he was stealing from. Or that it was me holding the knife.”
“But
why
? Why wouldn’t you tell me that? And why are you suddenly telling me this now, after hiding it for over twenty years? For that matter, what else have you been keeping from me?”
“First of all, not everything about me is any of your business, though in this case it actually is. There may be a lot of things I haven’t told you, but other than this there isn’t anything else I feel has anything to do with you. Granted, I can’t think of much I haven’t told you anyway.
“As for why I haven’t told you, mostly it has to do with time passing and me no longer thinking about it. You were a baby at the time, so I couldn’t tell you then. I wasn’t about to tell you while you were still in school and might feel like you had to keep secrets from your friends. It wasn’t technically a secret, since the cops were called and the whole thing was written off as self-defense. Small children wouldn’t understand that, though, and if the other kids had known about it, you would probably have been tormented by them for it.
“As you got older it became one of those memories that lose their importance and potency as time passes. I’ve had a lot of things happen to me throughout the years, and that was just one of them. Granted, it sort of stood out for me since I’ve never killed anyone else, but I dealt with the guilt as best I could. There were quite literally more important things to be getting on with, however,” Mac finished.
“More important than killing my father?” Cam’s tone was incredulous.
“Well, I figured our survival was the biggest priority, so … yeah. That about sums it up. I’m guessing you want an explanation,” Mackenzie said.
“What do you think?”
“Ah, sarcasm. Guess I deserve that. I haven’t exactly explained this very well. It just wasn’t very easy to start the conversation, so I figured being blunt and getting the words out would jump-start things. Well, here goes nothing.
“I was working on the budget when he broke in. I had just over a thousand bucks sitting on the kitchen table, and I was trying to figure out how we were going to pay six hundred in rent, another two hundred in hydro, a hundred for the gas bill, and still be able to afford diapers, baby food, and groceries.
“Your father looked at the money like it was some sort of windfall, and grabbed it off the table. My brain was going a hundred miles an hour, trying to figure out what I would do without that money, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to fight him for it. He turned to me with a knife in his hand. One of those folding ones, but the blade was about five inches long. He was telling me he was going to kill me for being such a whore, because he apparently thought I was turning tricks to get that kind of money. He accused me of screwing all his friends, too, which was laughable since he didn’t actually have any.
“I should have kept my mouth shut, but I was starting to panic, thinking that if I died you would end up starving to death.
He
sure as hell wasn’t going to remember that he had a kid in the bedroom down the hall. Never mind caring enough to take you to someone who would care
for
you. I begged him not to leave you without a mother. I regretted saying it as soon as the words left my mouth, because he got this horrible look on his face.
“By this point he was being pretty casual about the whole thing, and the knife was just sort of dangling from his fingertips. I didn’t even think about what I was doing. I snatched it away from him and was holding it with the point toward him. He sort of lost his mind and ran at me, and to this day I couldn’t tell you if I purposely allowed him to impale himself, or if I just didn’t have time to react.” Mackenzie fell silent and waited for Cameron to speak.
“Holy fucking shit!”
Mackenzie waited again, but nothing else seemed to be forthcoming.
“Would you say something else please! The suspense is killing me,” Mac said, her tone anxious. She couldn’t help thinking she had waited too long to tell Cam about this, but there hadn’t been a pressing need until now. Cameron was showing every sign of suffering from PTSD and guilt over killing Gerry in August, though, and Mac could no longer stand idly by. Cam needed to know someone close to her truly understood what it felt like to kill someone.
“I don’t know what to say, Mom. Give me thirty seconds to absorb, would ya?”
Mackenzie couldn’t sit still. She had cornered her daughter in the kitchen as soon as Cam had come back from the ferret building, because she wanted to get the confrontation over with, so she took advantage of their location and got up to root around in the fridge for something to snack on. She grabbed some of the cookies she’d made the day before, and pulled out the jug of goat’s milk to go with them.
“Here. Have some cookies. Maybe that’ll help you absorb better,” she told her daughter, and slid the container toward her. Cameron automatically grabbed one of the cheesecake cookies Mac had figured out how to make from the goat cheese that was so plentiful on their farm now. She’d taken a lot more satisfaction from homesteading-type activities than she had expected, and busied herself coming up with new things, but she knew she’d go back to take-out in a heartbeat if it were at all possible.
“So I take it all this happened before you started working as an accountant for that big garage then,” Cam finally said.
“A few months before, yeah. We were dead broke back then. You wouldn’t remember it, but it was not a happy time for me. I had just turned eighteen, and summer was starting to kick in something fierce. Air conditioning was a luxury we couldn’t afford in my wildest dreams in those days, and I remember sitting at that table, wanting to cry because there was no way I could even afford to buy some cheap ice cream at the grocery store.
“Thankfully the guy at the garage took a chance on me,
and
on my two years of high school accounting, and gave me a job. From there things got a whole lot better for us. It meant putting you in daycare, but at least my boss was understanding the few times I got called out of work for emergency situations with you. My work could be done on a fairly flexible schedule, since I didn’t need to be there answering phones or anything, but a lot of employers aren’t that nice.
“I really learned that lesson later, working for that corporation in Toronto. I wasn’t very good at taking orders from people anyway, and I decided that was enough for me. I was sick of working for idiots who knew less than I did about their own jobs, and then having to take crap from them. It was a really good thing I left, though. The money was a hell of a lot better for consulting work. I only did that part-time, of course, but even that was more than enough to live on. I just needed variety,” Mac said. Cameron nodded her head in response.
“No kidding. How long did it take you to get bored with accounting? And then later on it was investment stuff. Of course, most people would have been bored with those types of jobs right from the start, but you were really into them at first.”
“I’m so bad for that. That’s why I’ve always got my head stuck in a book, learning something new. Between my curiosity and my need to keep my brain engaged, there aren’t a lot of subjects I haven’t learned at least something about. And I took classes, too. A lot.”
“Well, I’m glad you knew how to raise chickens and grow vegetables, because otherwise we’d have been screwed. I certainly wouldn’t have survived when the shit hit the fan.”
“That wasn’t any of my doing. I was raised on a farm, and, believe me, I hated it. I despised having to weed the garden, especially, and we had a big one. Then there were the animals. I’d no sooner make friends with one of them than we were eating them for dinner.”
“Seriously? Ugh. That’s just mean. I’m so glad I never met your parents,” Cam stated emphatically.
“I wasn’t going to let them within a mile of you, and it had nothing to do with the chickens and rabbits. Flopsy and Mopsy aside, there was a lot of other cruelty and sickness in that house. I might have gotten pregnant young, and with the naïve hope that my even-less-mature husband would rescue me from that life, but I wasn’t completely without a sense of self-preservation,” Mac explained.
“While I don’t blame you, considering what you’ve told me about other things your family has done, it was still hard to explain to people why I never saw my grandparents when they weren’t actually dead. People just don’t get it when you say you don’t speak to your family. It’s like they think all families have to love each other.”
“Believe me, I know. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had people say, ‘How can you
not
talk to your own mother? She’s your
mother
!’ Like that’s some sort of guarantee she’s good, kind, and loving, and there’s no chance at all she could be anything else. Actually, my mother wasn’t all that bad, but my father was a nightmare. But so long as my mother stuck with him, and willingly sacrificed her kids’ welfare just to stay with him, there was no way I could have a relationship with her. She obviously didn’t care that much about her children.”
“What happened with your brother, then?”
“Don’t know, really. None of the people I was friends with around here would have told me anything that was going on with him, because they knew I wanted nothing to do with him. He was even worse than my father in some ways. I’ll put it this way. He used to get really excited when our father would let him slaughter the animals. That should tell you something of his personality. Most farmers look at it as a necessary chore. He thought it was fun, and couldn’t wait to get at them. Our father encouraged him.”
“Nice,” Cameron said with a sneer.
“The whole bunch are like that on my father’s side. They beat their dogs and leave them outside in the middle of winter – and that was before winters started getting so mild up here. Forty below wasn’t uncommon back then. I couldn’t wait to get away from this area when I was in high school. Every girl I knew wanted to get knocked up just to go on welfare or get married. Maybe my situation didn’t seem all that different, but I actually wanted you. Not as a means to an end, but because I wanted to have a kid. I was really young, but I really wanted to have a baby. I really wanted to have a husband, too.
“I had this fantasy where I would finally matter to someone, and because of that fantasy I made some big mistakes with men. Brad was one of them. So was Allan, though we never got married. At the same time I can’t really consider him a mistake, because he was good with you. He loved you like you were his own, and not many men can do that. You were three when we started up, and you should have seen how happy he was the first time you called him ‘Dad.’ He was so thrilled.”
“I know, mom. You’ve told me that story a zillion times. Always nice to hear, though. I sometimes forget how lucky I was to have someone like him. Or you for that matter. I mean, you went through your childhood with parents that not only didn’t give a shit about you, but treated you like shit, too. I had two parents who really loved me. I can’t imagine having a kid at seventeen, and being able to care for him or her. I can’t even imagine being a parent now!”
“Good. Hold that thought, because this really isn’t the time for you to be making me a grandmother. I can only be grateful you’re not at all like me in that respect. Hell, I don’t even want anyone else getting knocked up. Chuck and Kayla are content with the kids they have, and Gilles and Felicia both feel they’re too old for that now, though her daughter, Melanie, might want kids with John one day soon. Whatever they decide, I’m still glad they’re here on the farm with us. And it’s not like we have to worry about Kelly and Annette having kids,” Mac concluded with a smile.
“Or Carol and Samantha,” Cam added.
“Not together at least. Anyway, you’ve had time to ponder the situation. Are you okay with it all?”
“Well, gee. Do I really have a choice? It’s not like you can go back and change things, any more than I can. We both killed someone, and that isn’t exactly a temporary thing,” Cam said with more of her own brand of sarcasm.
“No, it’s really not. It’s the one thing that’s hard to explain to someone who’s never killed anything before, or who has no respect for life. Even hunters. It’s why I can’t kill the animals we have, and why I chose animals that would give us eggs and milk. I can’t consciously choose to kill something. It’s not in me. Not if it isn’t directly related to defending myself or someone else.
“I can tell you I’d much rather have been the one to kill Gerry, than have that load on your shoulders. I’ve borne it once before, and I’d have done it again, but that’s not something I can do for you. I’d have protected Neil in a heartbeat, and probably wouldn’t feel anywhere near the guilt you’re feeling now, though it’s hard to think of ending the life of someone who was as young as my daughter. It’s just that you had never even spoken to him, so you have no idea how bad he really was, other than what I told you. He really was a waste of life.