The Thrust (4 page)

Letliv, Connecticut

CLARISSA

THE FOLLOWING
morning, Clarissa woke with the first rays of sunlight streaming in through the window in Trent’s bedroom.

She finger-combed her hair and pulled on her pants. Trent’s bed had been comfy, and with the door locked, she’d slept well. Perhaps even knowing that Trent was right outside that door, ready to protect his house, also helped her sleep soundly.

“Morning,” he greeted her when she emerged. He was already dressed, freshly shaven, and drinking something out of a mug.

“Is that . . . coffee?” Clarissa asked. Coffee was hard to come by. Her own meager supply ran out a few weeks after the Pulse.

He laughed. “I wish. It’s peppermint tea, since my side yard is full of it. Stuff grows like weeds.” Trent passed her his mug. “If you like it I can show you how to brew some.”

“Thanks.” She took the mug from him and sipped. “It’s good! Refreshing. Do you mind if I pluck some peppermint leaves? I know how to make tea.”

“Of course. There’s a bucket of seawater to flush the toilet with, too, if you need it.”

Clarissa blushed and nodded, stepping outside in search of his peppermint plants.

When the tea was ready she sat with him silently, unsure what to say. He was, no doubt, dying to know everything about Annie, but there wasn’t much more she could say. Annie needed to be rescued, just like Evan and just like all of the other people in Grand Central.

She’d much rather focus on
how
to get them out, than on
why
.

“Apple?” he asked, offering her one from a bowl.

Clarissa took it gratefully. “We didn’t have much fresh fruit at the camp.”

“I’ve got a bunch of apple trees,” he said. “They grow well here.”

“I used to love going apple-picking in the fall when I was a kid, with my mom and Randy,” Clarissa said, smiling at the memory. “We’d always have so many extra afterward that we’d have to make pies and freeze them.”

“Randy? Is that what you called your father?”

“Stepdad. Yeah, just Randy. He married my mom when I was eleven, and calling him Dad felt weird for me.”

Trent nodded, but she could tell he was fighting the urge to ask what had happened to her real father.

“My father left when I was in kindergarten,” she offered. “My mom said he only paid child-support for a few years, and then he just . . .” She mimed walking her fingers across the table. “Dropped off the face of the earth.”

“What a douche bag,” Trent said. “Sorry.”

“No, that about sums it up.” Clarissa smirked. “But Randy’s a gem, so it’s all good. Even offered to pay for college so I wouldn’t have student loans.”

“Nice,” Trent said. “Student loans are killer. Or, were. Guess no one’s paying those back now.” He shrugged. “What’d you study?”

Clarissa waved her hand, as if it didn’t matter. “Never actually went. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, career-wise, so I figured I shouldn’t waste his hard-earned money.”

“Do you know now? What you want to do, I mean.”

What the hell kind of question was that? She frowned. “There’s nothing
to
do. Everything’s gone.”

“Well, we might not need paleontologists or some other random thing right now, but people are going to get back to normal and have jobs. Being a blacksmith, or a baker, or a builder, or teacher, or . . .” He paused. “Probably will need some computer tech guys too, to help rebuild the grid.”

“Darn,” she teased. “I had my heart set on paleontology.”

He laughed, and she bit her apple, pleased.

“My poor mother was convinced I’d be one of those seventy-year-old waitresses,” she smiled. “If the Pulse hadn’t happened, she might have been right.”

“Where are they now—your mom and Randy?”

She had no idea. No idea if they were even alive.

“Portland,” she said. “Last I heard from them, anyway.”

Clarissa had been finishing a shift at the diner and on her cell phone with her mom when the power went out. The call was dropped, of course—and she hadn’t been able to speak to her mother since.

She’d carried that useless phone around with her for almost a month before leaving it behind to go to Grand Central.

“Do you think they’re okay?” he asked, concern in his eyes.

She shrugged. “If you go by the statistics everyone’s spouting, probably not. But I’m still here, so maybe they are too.” She smiled, trying to keep herself optimistic. “I mean, you’re okay, and your sister’s okay, so . . . you know. Other people might be too.”

Trent was looking at her so intensely that she had to look away. There was a good-sized crumb on the stovetop behind him. “Hey,” Trent said, and she glanced up. “We’re meeting at the church in about an hour. To discuss the plan.”

“Who’s meeting?”

“Well, everyone. Anyone who wants to. But I want to go over some things with Jenna and Barker before we present them to people.”

Clarissa nodded. “I’m ready when you are.”

Trent gathered a covered bowl from the counter and rose. “I’m going to put some bread in the sun oven before we go, so it has time to bake. It’s not particularly good, since it’s just ground wheat and water with a little salt, but it’s better than nothing.”

She looked at him with interest and followed him into his yard, where he had an old car sunshade, the silver-looking kind, rolled up and weighed down with a rock. He unfurled it and spread it like a cone around a simple charcoal grill that hadn’t seen charcoal in a long time, from the looks of it.

“Pretty simple,” he said, placing the dough flat on the bottom of the grill. He put what looked like an old car window over the grill, and positioned the whole thing so the silver carshade lit up from the sunlight. “The sun is reflected through the glass and it gets really hot in the grill. The bread won’t rise without yeast, but it’ll do.”

“That’s amazing. How did you figure that out?” she asked. “You’re saving so much time and firewood this way.”

“Necessity is the mother of invention. But I didn’t invent this—one of the women in town figured it out and shared. We all use solar ovens for at least some of the cooking, when we can.”

They headed out to the field where Jenna and Barker were camping in Trent’s tent.

The tent was zipped, with no sign of a morning fire. “How are they still sleeping?” Clarissa asked. “Jenna, wake up!”

Trent laughed when Barker emerged from the tent half-naked, zipping his pants.

“Just a minute,” Jenna called. She came out a moment later, looking flushed.

“Enjoying your privacy, I see,” Clarissa teased.

“Fuck yeah,” Jenna laughed. “Wouldn’t you?”

Clarissa felt her face grow warm. “No. I mean . . . no. He slept on the couch.”

Trent raised his hands and stepped away from the women, quickly extricating himself from the conversation. He went over to Barker and the two men stood together, talking.

“Seriously, Clarissa?” Jenna asked, looking at Trent. “He’s really hot. And he’s letting you stay at his house. You kicked him to the couch?”

“I wouldn’t stay at his house if I had to pay my way,” Clarissa pointed out. “Besides, he’s not like that.”

“All men are like that,” Jenna said, shrugging. “Trust me, he would have been happier if you’d let him share the bed. You would have too. Think about it.”

“It’s too soon,” she said, shaking her head. “I think being with Roy proved to me that I’m not ready to have sex again, not yet, anyway.”

“We had a pretty good time, if I remember correctly,” Jenna whispered, smiling secretively.

Clarissa was surprised that Jenna could talk about that night so nonchalantly. It had been such a defining moment in Jenna’s relationship with Barker. After Jenna and Clarissa took comfort in each other’s arms—something Clarissa had never done before, and wasn’t planning on doing again, even if it had been what she needed at the time—Barker had asked Jenna to make a choice.

Him, or everyone else. Jenna chose him. Based on her satisfied look, she’d chosen well.

“That was different,” Clarissa said. “Trent’s a man. I think being under a man again would freak me out.”

“Eh,” Jenna said, waving her hand. “So push him down on the bed and jump on top. Take control of the situation so you can remember how fun fucking is.”

Clarissa glanced over at Trent, hoping he couldn’t hear Jenna’s blunt words. “Or,” she said quietly, “I could just be his housemate.”

“God, you are not this naïve.” Jenna put her arm around Clarissa’s shoulders, her blonde hair falling into her face. She smiled to soften her words. “Trent didn’t invite you to stay at his house because he suddenly decided he needed a housemate. Think about it.”

Fuck. Jenna was right.

Trent wanted to sleep with her. Yes, he was a gentleman, and wasn’t being pushy, but how long would that last?

And Clarissa knew, deep down, that she wouldn’t have accepted his invitation to bunk with him if she wasn’t attracted to him. She could have camped, or made friends with a family or a woman and shared their house in exchange for housework or gardening or something.

Instead, she accepted Trent’s offer to stay with him.

Why?

Because there’s something about him.
Something . . . good.

“What do I do?” she asked.

“You know, whatever you want,” Jenna laughed. “Don’t overthink it. You like him, he likes you, you’re both young and healthy and single . . . no reason to deny yourselves. I mean, really. Why deny yourself pleasure, after all the shit you’ve lived through? You could be happy with him.”

It was something to think about.

“Do you really think he’d let me take control in bed?” Clarissa whispered, glancing again at Trent’s back, his muscular shoulders straining the seams of his threadbare shirt.

“At first, hell yeah,” Jenna said. “He’ll just be so happy to be getting laid. But something tells me Trent’s more of your traditional, ‘me Tarzan, you Jane,’ type. You’ll have to give it a go and feel him out.” Jenna grinned. “And then, you know . . . let me know how it goes.”

Clarissa laughed. God, it felt good to laugh again. The world was too serious, too scary. But everything about Letliv made her feel free again.

“You girls done talking about us?” Barker called, and Jenna gave him a teasing middle finger.

“I love that man,” she sighed, and they walked over to where the guys stood.

“Barker was saying that we need to figure out a way to get the citizens at Grand Central on our side before we get there,” Trent said, filling them in.

“But we also need to train everyone to fight,” Clarissa said. “Because Colonel Lanche isn’t going to just let us waltz in and take everyone with us. His men will shoot us.”

“I agree,” Barker said. “We’ll need to set up a way for the people of Letliv who are joining us to work together, to communicate in the field, and to know how to cover each other’s back when the shooting starts.”

“Fuck,” Jenna whispered. “I don’t want to lead people into a battle. I don’t want any more blood on our hands.”

Trent looked at her. “No one will go unless they choose to. They’ll know the risks going in. And we won’t make our move until we’re all working like a . . . like a machine. Like a real militia.”

“We need to save all our ammo for the actual . . . event,” Clarissa mused out loud. “How will people train? We can’t waste bullets on target practice.”

“We can do dry runs,” Jenna suggested. “Shoot empty guns, just to practice moving with them, aiming, that sort of thing. I’ve done it before, and it’s surprisingly effective if you really visualize what’s going to happen.”

“When did you practice shooting without bullets?” Barker asked, looking surprised.

“The first time I stole your rifle,” Jenna said. “When I thought I was going to have to shoot you. I didn’t want to mess it up, so I practiced.”

“Jesus Christ,” Barker said, paling.

“Well, good thing you grew on her,” Clarissa joked, hoping to lighten the suddenly somber mood.

“We’ll need to practice taking cover, and maybe even draw out some maps of the main terminal and the Tracks,” Trent said. “I want to know exactly where Annie is the moment we get in the building.”

“That’s assuming we even get in the building.” Barker frowned. “Grand Central is locked up tighter than a prison. The best way in will be with inside help.”

“We’ve got Annie and Evan on the inside,” Clarissa reminded him.

Barker shook his head. She knew what he was thinking. A girl with a broken leg, and a boy.

“It’s better than nothing,” Trent said grimly.

“We need to recruit more people on the inside,” Jenna said. “But how?”

The four of them stood there silently.

This was going to be even harder than they’d thought.

At the church,
Clarissa watched as Trent stood to address the people who’d joined them to discuss freeing the camp at Grand Central.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I’m going to say, right off the bat, that you don’t have to be here. If you change your mind, you can leave, and there won’t be any hard feelings. Because I can’t ask you to risk your life unless you’re doing it for yourself, for liberty, and not just a misguided sense of pride or peer pressure.”

There were about two dozen men and some women, too. They nodded in agreement.

One woman pushed her curly, black hair off her forehead in frustration and raised her hand. “My husband is here because I couldn’t stop him. But we have two kids, and I don’t want him to go into a battle.”

Her husband glared at her and shook his head. “I need to. What if it were you and the kids living there? Wouldn’t you want someone to care enough to help?”

“Let someone else help,” the woman cried. “I need you alive.”

“We’ll need help on the home front, too,” Trent said quickly. “If you want to stick around, I’m sure we could find a position that won’t involve being on the front line.”

The wife looked relieved. “Okay. Thank you.”

But the man didn’t. “So you want me to stay here while I let one of these women go and fight in my place?” He crossed his arms, his chocolate-toned skin contrasting brilliantly against his white T-shirt. “That’s not right.”