Apocalypsis: Book 4 (Haven) (26 page)

I pretended to look behind me and spoke out of the corner of my mouth at him.  “That girl in the rags came to Haven and refused to enter with some bullshit.  Watch out for her.”

I looked up as I turned back to face our welcoming party, and caught Trip nodding so slightly I questioned whether I’d even seen it.  He was ever so much cooler than me.

We both stepped forward to talk to the girl in red.

She stood there with her hands fisted at her sides.  She didn’t look like a trained fighter, but she sure looked determined to be tough.  She had dark skin and her hair looked like it had been hacked off with a dull knife.  Her big boobs were the only thing keeping her from looking very boyish.  She wore camouflage pants and had a canteen on a belt at her waist.  Her other hip had a knife in a holder on it.

“Hi,” I said, stopping about five feet in front of her.

“Hi,” she said.  Her eyes darted nervously from me to Trip and then over our shoulders to the group behind us.  They had stopped about fifty yards away.

“My name’s Bryn, and this is Trip.  We’re just trying to pass through.  We don’t mean you any harm, and we’re not here to take anything.”

“This is our land.  Our spot,” she said.  “Nobody passes for free.”

“What are you, a troll?” asked Trip in a snotty voice.  “We gotta pay your toll to get over your bridge?  Please.  This is Miccosukee land.  Always has been, always will be.”

She looked at him calmly, only her flexing fists belying her nervousness.  “Wrong on both counts.”  Then she looked at me.  “His history’s as flawed as his reasoning.  Either you pay, or you go away.  It’s simple.”

“We have stuff to trade,” I said.  “What do you need?”

“We aren’t giving her any of our stuff!”  Trip was indignant.

“Trip, can it, would ya?”  I tried to give him my stern look but his was much more effective than mine.  I just rolled my eyes and looked back at the girl.

“What’s your name?”

“Robson.”

I thought I’d heard wrong.  “Say that again?”

“You heard me.  Robson.”

“That’s a guy’s name,” said Trip.

“At least I’m not named after an accident someone has when they can’t walk right.”

I had to laugh at that.  A snort escaped before I could stop it.  I held out my arm to keep Trip back.  “Relax, Trip.  She’s right.  Let’s get down to business, okay?”  I pleaded with him using my eyes.  I was going for the sad puppydog look.

“Stop staring at me like that,” he said, backing down and not pushing against my arm anymore.  “You look like a canner lunatic.”

I wiped my expression clean, going back to the girl.  “Okay, Robson, what do you want to trade?”

She gestured over to Gail.  “We’ll trade that chick over there for a gun and safe passage.”

“Uhhh, we don’t trade people,” I said.  

“But we do, especially when they’re a pain in the ass like she is.”

“Hey!” Gail shouted.  “I’m not the pain in the ass,
you
are!”

The few kids standing around her laughed a little, none of them looking at her.  It was pretty clear they were behind Robson one hundred percent.

“How about we take her off your hands as a service and you just thank us for it?” asked Trip.

“You won’t have to feed her or put up with her anymore,” I added.  “That’s got to be worth something.  We can’t give you a gun.  We don’t have enough.”  That last part of my statement wasn’t even close to true with the armory we had at the prison, but the last thing I wanted to do was arm potential or future enemies.

“You’re in no position to bargain.  Take the PITA, give us the gun, and we’ll let you through.  Don’t and you turn around or suffer the consequences.”

“Troll,” said Trip in a soft voice.

“And one more word out of pretty boy there and the deal’s off too,” said Robson, not even looking at Trip.

“Fine,” I said.  “Deal.  But no bullets.”

“We have plenty,” she said.

I turned Trip around and pushed against his lower back.  “Be right back,” I said over my shoulder.

I could hear Gail ranting behind me the whole way back.  Apparently she didn’t want to go with us anymore than we wanted her to.  Robson seemed pretty tough.  Maybe Gail felt safe with her.  Gail’s attachment to the treehouse couldn’t be for Robson’s sparkling personality, that was for sure.

“Why’d you tell her we’d take that idiot with us?” he asked.  “And offer her one of our guns?  We don’t have enough.”

I stopped pushing on him and walked at his side, keeping my voice as low as possible.  “We have a ton of guns at Haven.  Hundreds.  And enough bullets to kill every canner a hundred times over.  And that Gail girl hates me, so she isn’t going to agree to walk into Haven. We’ll get her out of the Glades and send her on her way if that’s what she wants.  No harm, no foul.”

Trip stopped and faced me for a second.  “Most of the time I look at you and I see a complete goofball.  But then you go and do something like that and I see something else.”

I put my hand on my hip.  “Oh yeah, like what?  A brilliant mastermind?”

He smiled.  “No.  Someone not as goofy, but still a little goofy.”  He walked over to the buggy, leaving me standing there.

I couldn’t think of a sharp retort, so I just shut up, waiting for Trip to find the crappiest gun in his cache of weapons.

Bodo came over as I waited.

“What happened over dare?  Are we going to cross?”

“Yes.  We had to do a trade, though.  We take that Gail girl off their hands and give them a gun and we can go.”

“Dat sounds like dey get all da good stuff.”

I shrugged.  “At least we get to go through.  And like I told Trip, Gail won’t want to stay with us.  She rejected us once already.”

“Yes, but now she iss getting rejected again.  Maybe she hass no place to go now.”

“Maybe.  But unless she wants to cooperate, that’s not my problem.”

“Maybe she can grow tomatoes,” said Bodo, getting a far off look.  “Maybe she will be especially smart with eggplants.”

I couldn’t help but laugh.  “Eggplants?  Can’t we just outlaw those from Haven altogether?”

He smiled back at me, the first time in what felt like a long time.  “I make a fairy, fairy goodt ratatouille.  You will like it.”

“You keep your rat soup away from me, boy,” I said, walking away to join Winky at her horse.

“It’s not of rats.  It’s of vegetables.”

I waved him away over my head.  Things felt more normal now, or a least a tiny bit more normal.  We were going to get through this grove and then we’d be almost home.  Things were looking up, and for the first time in days, I felt my heart lighten just a little.

***

“I don’t know why you traded for me.  She would have kept me there.  I was helping them.”  Gail was still yammering on and on, two hours after we’d taken her through the grove.  She’d decided to walk next to Winky’s and Bodo’s horse, so even though Paci held back on the reins a little, we still had to listen to her.

“If you were such a big help, why’d they want to trade you?” asked Winky.

“Great question.  It’s that idiot Robson.  All she does all day long is bark orders like a freakin’ drill sergeant.”

“What are you goingk to do now?” Bodo asked her, finally getting to the part I was wondering about.  I hadn’t pressed the issue because I didn’t want her to think she wasn’t welcome.  She actually wasn’t welcome as far as I was concerned, but I knew it wouldn’t be fair to exclude kids who rubbed me the wrong way.  Haven was not a dictatorship.  It had to be a kind of democracy with more than one person making decisions.  And even if everyone disliked her, it still wasn’t a reason to exclude her and send her out to starve, as long as she was willing to be loyal to all of us.

“I guess I’m going with you guys.  It’s not like I have a choice.”  She obviously wasn’t happy about being trapped, and I could hardly blame her.

“You have to swear an oath and mean it,” said Winky, “or you aren’t coming in.  I don’t care how hungry you are.”

“You’re a serious bitch, you know that?”  Gail had stopped walking and was staring at Winky with her hands fisted at her sides.

I stopped myself from mentioning out loud how much she looked like Robson when she did that.

“No, I’m not.  I just tell it like it is.  And you rejected Haven once, so there’s no reason for us to think you won’t try to do it again.  But we have rules and you should know that before you walk all that way.”

“You mean
she
has rules.”  Gail was glaring at me now.

“Hey, don’t put me in the middle of this,” I said.  “You know the deal, Gail.  Winky was just reminding you how we operate.  You left threatening us just the other day.  Now you want to come in again, so you’re going to have to fix that.  That’s all on you, not her and not me.”

I squeezed Paci a little around the middle and he got my signal exactly, spinning the horse around and walking the opposite direction.  Now was a perfect time to check on the other riders and kids walking at the back while enjoying the side benefit of avoiding Gail.

“Wow,” said Paci.

“Yeah.  Wow.”

“Think she’ll stay?”

“I’m not even sure if she’ll enter,” I said.  “Winky’s right.  She has to agree to our oath or we can’t let her in.”

“You’re much easier on people than Trip or even Kowi was.”  Paci’s voice hitched a little at the mention of his brother’s name.

“How are you doing?” I asked softly, knowing the loss of his chief was bad enough, but the fact that Kowi was much more than that to Paci had to be tearing him up.

“As good as I can be.  I haven’t had time to process it, I think.  We have too many emergencies going on for me to focus on it.”

“When we get to Haven, we’ll have a ceremony.”

Paci nodded but said nothing.  He probably didn’t want to cry in front of all these people, so I didn’t press the issue anymore.

We rode near the kids who were walking and eventually I got down to join them.  I limped along for a mile or so before my sore butt allowed for a normal gait.  Paci kept pace beside me.

I found myself looking up at him a lot, studying his profile.  He was so strong.  I never thought about it much before, but there were a lot of similarities between him and Kowi.  Besides both being handsome and very muscular, they were both patient and wise beyond their years.  And intense.  Something about Paci was just so magnetic to me.  I wasn’t sure everyone felt that way about him, but it was stupid for me to deny it wasn’t the case for me.

I was ashamed to think that it was these feelings I had about Paci that made me less tolerant of Bodo’s recent behavior.  Would I be more forgiving if Paci weren’t in the picture?  Would I be less sensitive to the things Bodo was saying and doing if Paci wasn’t so damn cute?  I didn’t have any answers, but I did know one thing:  I loved Bodo, and while it might not mean anything to him, it meant something to me.  I had to figure out what was going on with him and do what I could to repair the relationship.  If he didn’t want it anymore, then that was a different story, but I wasn’t ready for it to be over.  I didn’t give my heart to someone and then just yank it back at the first sign of trouble.  Love is supposed to be forever.

Someone shouting up ahead dragged me out of my emotional wallowing.

“Look!  It’s Haven!”

I walked out to the side a little so I could see around the group in front of me.  The first thing I saw was the fence that surrounded the property.  The prison was far from the edge.  This would be the area where the animals would graze, at least until we had something else figured out.  As my eyes scanned the building, I noticed something else.

“Holy crap,” I said as I tried to decide whether my eyes were playing tricks on me.

“Is that smoke?” asked Paci.

“It looks like it,” I said, my heart leaping into my throat.  “Help me up, Paci.”  I reached my good arm towards him and gripped his elbow when it came down.

He took off at a gallop as soon as I was on and my arms were wrapped around him in a death grip.  I ignored the painful stretching of my wound and my sore butt. I was more worried about falling from this running mountain than popping a few stitches, knowing the stitches would be a lot less painful.  And my bruised private parts would heal eventually.  I couldn’t bear the thought of arriving too late to help again. 
Please not Peter!  Please let Peter and everyone else be okay!

The closer we got to the prison building, the more freaked out I became.  There was one hell of a fire going on somewhere, and we couldn’t enter the property from where we were.  We had to run around the perimeter to get to the front gate.  I prayed we hadn’t arrived too late.

Paci urged the horse on stronger, yelling, “Get up!” as he kicked his heels into its flanks.  The beast surged forward, and I had to hold onto Paci with all my strength.  I kept my face plastered against his back and lost sight of what was going on ahead of us.

I felt us turning the corner and the horse slowing a bit, so I took a chance and leaned my head away from Paci’s back to see what I could.  When I was finally able to focus on the source of the smoke, I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or more worried than I already was.  It made no sense.

“What’s going on over there?” asked Paci as we pulled up to the gate.

“I have no idea, but I’m going to find out.” I slid to the ground as soon as we stopped.  I fell on my butt but jumped up in a hurry, ignoring the bruises I’d just added to my collection.

Several people came from inside to greet me at the gate, one of them Peter with the keys.  He was smiling.

“Oh my god, Bryn, you have no idea how happy I am to see you,” said Peter, a little out of breath and searching for the right key to unlock the gate.

“What the hell happened here?”  I waved over at the huge bonfire that was sitting on top of the mass grave we’d just filled in before I left.

“Lots of news, lots of news.”  Peter stuck the key into the lock and turned the tumblers.  “Where’s everyone else?  Are they okay?” He searched my face as two kids pushed the gate open for me.  Before I had a chance to answer, he looked up at Paci.  “Hi, Paci.  Welcome back.”

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