Gone to Ground (11 page)

“Lindy?” he asked.

The child didn’t answer, but tucked her small head under his chin, keeping her arms tight around his neck. Looking back at the bed O’Reilly suddenly realized that the low raspy breathing had ceased sometime in the past few minutes. Rising carefully to his feet, he looked upon the still form under the blanket and realized that Lindy’s mother had finally lost the fight for life.

He shook his head,
How long had she hung on for her child? You hear about things like this, but you don’t usually believe them.

Turning, he headed for the door, closing it quietly behind him. Once in the living room he paused, head bowed, feeling the weight of the warm, smelly bundle in his arms, and thinking about the woman who gave it life, and possibly gave her life for it.

A soft squeak and a wriggle under his chin brought him back to the here and now, and he was again made aware of the various odors given off by the child, none of them good.

Craning his head back and looking at his new companion, he smiled down at her. “First things first, little one. You are going to have a bath, and the sooner the better.” Deciding not to remain in the house with the dead woman, O’Reilly headed back down to the barnyard where there was fresh water, stopping by the first house to pick up some of the soap and towels he had placed outside.

Thank God it’s summer, and warm enough to do this outside with well water,
he thought, carrying his burdens to the barnyard. Sticking his head into various stalls in the barn, he eventually came upon a black plastic feeder that would do nicely as a bathtub and carried it back out into the waning sunshine where he filled it with water from the hose that he’d used to fill the horses’ water trough.

The little girl,
I must start thinking of her as Lindy
, toddled around after him, silent as a real ghost. He remembered Kay-Tee at this age, always laughing, never quiet for a second, and wondered about Lindy’s lack of speech. Was it the result of what she’d been through, or had she been mute before her mother’s illness? He sighed. He might never know, he realized.

This was definitely not on Maggie’s
shopping list,
he thought ruefully as he plopped Lindy into the cool water and began to soap her down, pausing several times to pour water from a small bucket over her head. Even those actions elicited no verbal response from the girl. She merely kept her eyes glued on O’Reilly, as if afraid he would disappear if she turned her attention away from him.
Another slave to fortune,
he thought.
Heaven knows what Maggie’s going to make of this.

A pang of regret twanged though his guts.
How many more would he collect before everything fell down around his ears? How many would get hurt if he didn’t gage things right? He shook his head. Not that it mattered, he thought. There was nothing he could do about it, but damn, he didn’t know if he could handle any more deaths at his doorstep.

14

Christina lay in her bed, listening to Alysa’s soft breathin
g from across the room, the breeze flirting with the curtains at the window. Jumbled thoughts of the events of the past two weeks filled her mind.

She felt an increasing rush of frustration that was keeping her from falling into the sleep her body craved. It was as though her mind was on autopilot, spiraling around and around, rehashing the past two weeks since the Colorado River outing.

Christina had been overjoyed at seeing Nick and Ryan at the river, but it quickly became obvious that the caregivers were deliberately trying to keep the boys away from her. Whenever she began to move in that direction, they stepped in, either drawing her or them away to another activity. It wasn’t until the end of the day, during the chaos of the trip back to the Nursery, that Christina managed to speak with her brothers privately for a few minutes.

She was disappointed to find that both boys seemed to have accepted life in the Nursery as the way it was going to be, repeating rules they’d been taught, and some of the things they’d been learning in school. When Christina tried to remind them of their father, their eyes dropped and they started to turn away.

Then Nick, always the bolder of the two, turned back to Christina, looked her in the eyes and said, “Tommy says that Dad did some bad things,” referring to Nick and Ryan’s counselor. “He said that Dad made some mistakes, but that now things are all straightened out and we’re going to live here because that’s what’s right.” Then he turned and began to walk after Ryan.

“Wait, Nick,” Christina started after her brothers, arm outstretched. Nick and Ryan stopped and looked back at her. “You don’t believe that about Dad, do you? You know he didn’t make any mistakes. He was right about what was happening with the weather and the people and everything. You know that don’t you?”

Ryan walked back toward Christina, stopped in front of her and looked up into her face, his dark brown eyes bottomless. In a soft voice he said, “We don’t like it here, Christy, not at all.” Nick and Ryan had always tended to talk of themselves as a single unit. “We don’t like living in this place, but what are we going to do? They tell us this is the way it’s going to be, that everyone will be living in places like this, that Dad wasn’t right. We got to live somewhere, you know.” He started to turn away again but stopped when Christina put her hand on his shoulder and looked up to face her again.

“Ryan, it doesn’t have to be this way,” she pleaded. She glanced back over her shoulder, spotting some caregivers heading their way. Voice dropping low, she continued hurriedly, “I know about a place out in the country. In the empty lands in Arizona.” Her voice dropped even lower. “Just have patience. Tell Nick. This place I’ve heard about is so isolated that no one can find it. We can make it, I know it.”

The caregivers were almost upon them and Christina’s voice dropped to just above a whisper, while her hand tightened on Ryan’s shoulder. “Give me a chance, guys. Don’t give up. I’ll get us out of here. Just give me a chance. Promise?”

Ryan and Nick fixed her with identical deep brown stares and identical serious faces. They looked quickly at each other and a wordless communication passed between them. They nodded then turned to face Christina again. Ryan uttered one word. “Promise!”

Then he and Nick turned away and walked toward another group of boys, while Christina turned to face the caregivers, Andrea and Robert. Plastering a smile on her face she greeted them and went willing when she was asked to join the other girls on the way back to the Nursery. 

Since that day she’d only seen her brothers at a distance, walking with other young boys to their classes, and playing out in the Nursery’s play area. She wasn’t given the chance to talk with them, but when she was able to catch their attention, she would give them the interlinked pinky sign that had always indicated a promise kept in their family, and they would give her the sign back, lightening the load on her heart a little.

Finally, a week ago she’d achieved  her goal of working closer to the kitchens. She was rotated to the dining room, bussing the tables, wiping them down once everyone had finished eating. In this new position, not only did she have a greater chance to interact with her brothers while they were eating, but she also found opportunities to hide small amounts of food in her pockets, taking it back to her room where she hid it in a backpack under her bed.

The opportunities were plentiful enough that she began wearing oversized shirts, and a large smock type apron so that she could hide more food, always choosing those things that would stay relatively fresh for a long period of time; boxes of raisins, granola bars, small bags of cereal. Her stash grew slowly, but it was growing, and Christina was becoming more and more confident that she would be able to gather enough to last her and her brothers several days until they were able to reach the canyon O’Reilly spoke about.

Then today he came. That Enforcer... Captain Richards or Rickards or something like that. He tried to be nice at first, acting sugary sweet like some adults, not accustomed to kids, will when faced with one of the beasts. Generally treating her as though she had nothing between her ears but feathers. Humph!

What surprised her the most, though, was not the visit by the Enforcer captain, but what he wanted.

When she saw the big, broad uniformed man walk into the dining room she felt a rush of adrenaline and a flood of panic as though he could see through her smock to the six granola bars hidden under her shirt.

He came while she was busy with her chores, cleaning tables and disposing of the post meal debris, either into the compost bins, or into her pockets if no one was looking. When she saw the tall, dark-haired man approaching, she ducked her head, trying to avoid notice although his direct stare made it obvious that it was she for whom he was heading.

“Hello, Miss Craigson,” the man began with an ingratiating smile. “My name is Captain Seth Rickards of the Laughlin Enforcer Division. May I take some of your time?”

Christina raised her head to look at the captain, unsure as to how to answer his question.
Hell no, get away from me you murdering son of a bitch
seemed a little extreme, though she desperately wanted to use that phrase. After a hesitation that seemed to last forever, she settled on “Uh... yeah, I guess. But I’ve got a lot of work to do here,” stammering embarrassingly in confusion and kicking herself mentally for not having a quick comeback that would cause the captain to leave with a bee in his bonnet, whatever that old saying meant. She bent her head back to her work.

“I understand,” he smiled that greasy smile again. “I checked with your supervisor,” nodding toward the woman standing in the kitchen doorway, watching them, “and she assured me that it would be fine if I spoke briefly with you about a friend we have in common.” Again, Rickards attempted a smile which made Christina think of a shark watching a school of tuna.

“Here, have a seat.” He pulled out one of the table’s chairs for her, then one for himself, taking a seat and looking up expectantly at her.

Hesitating for a moment, then moving slowly, she sat in the offered chair and faced him, a look of puzzlement on her face. What “friend” could he be talking about?

After what seemed like an interminable silence, Rickards finally spoke, keeping his voice soft and nonthreatening.
Or at least as nonthreatening as a shark’s voice could get. If, of course, sharks could talk. And, if you could get past the sight of all those teeth and actually listen to him
, she thought.

“Several weeks ago one of my officers, James O’Reilly, started visiting you while you were in isolation.”

Christina felt a jolt pass through her at this opening. She didn’t really know what she expected, but it wasn’t this. Surprised as she was, though, she kept quiet, waiting for Rickards to get to the point.

Apparently surprised by Christina’s silence, Rickards paused, then resumed speaking, trying to make his voice even friendlier than before.

“I understand you and he spent quite a bit of time talking with each other.” Again he paused, waiting for her to volunteer information about their conversations. Again he was disappointed as Christina merely watched him, not uttering a sound.

Finally he began again. “We’d like to speak to Officer O’Reilly, but he seems to be missing.”

Christina knew this time the shock was visible on her face. She’d thought O’Reilly had stopped coming because he’d been reassigned. She never dreamed that he’d disappeared.

Rickards was watching her and she knew he could see her surprise. A look of mingled satisfaction at shaking her, and disappointment that she couldn’t place, crossed his face and Christina wondered at it.

After another brief pause, Rickards continued once again. “We were thinking that since you and he spent so much time together that he might have said where he would go, or told you a little about his past that might help us find him.”

This time remaining mute wasn’t really an option. Rickards was obviously looking for a response and Christina was at a loss as to what to say to him that wouldn’t endanger her future plans for escape. Stalling for time, Christina posed her own question, curious to see how Rickards would answer.

“What do you want to talk to him about?”

“While Officer O’Reilly was stationed here in Laughlin, he was involved in bringing in a number of people from outside the APZ; people who were trapped in the small communities, without resources. The last group that he escorted here contained several young children, and we’ve been having trouble determining if they have any relatives still alive.” Rickards tried his smarmy smile again, apparently counting on his story of orphaned children to strike a resonant chord in Christina. “We need to talk to Officer O’Reilly to determine exactly where he rescued the children so that we can run a search now that the Internet is functioning reliably again. These poor children are so young that they can’t tell us their addresses. But if there’s anyway to reunite them with loved ones, we’d like to accomplish that.”

As Rickards had been spinning his tale of orphaned children, Christina’s mind was racing, trying to decide on a plausible story that Rickards would believe. Christina was sure that the captain’s story was bogus, since O’Reilly himself had told her that he’d been assigned to bring in what he called “ghosts” before being assigned to security on the Nursery, and he’d told her that he’d been assigned there because he’d gotten in a little bit of trouble for not following orders. O’Reilly’s story didn’t sound much like Rickards version of altruism, and she was sure who she believed, even though she knew O’Reilly had probably left a great deal out.

Thinking fast, Christina came up with a tale of her own. One that would pull the Enforcer’s attention away from northern Arizona if she had any luck whatsoever.

“Officer O’Reilly talked about spending time in the mountains, up around Wyoming and Montana, maybe as far as Canada. He said he liked going fishing and hunting there because it was so lonely.” Christina tried a smile of her own, and hoped it didn’t come off as fake as Rickards’. “He said that when all this was over, and we were allowed to go home, he was going to buy a place up there and move to the mountains permanently.”

When she began her story, Rickards had a satisfied look, as though what she said confirmed something he already suspected. However, at her mention of buying a home following things returning to normal, a look of doubt flickered across the captain’s face, telling Christina that she needed to do a better job of selling her narrative. Then another thought crossed her mind. Rickards would have maps. All kinds of maps, and she needed a map to get herself and her brothers to Hideaway. Maybe, just maybe...

“He told me once where he’d like to go, but I can’t remember the name exactly. I think maybe it started with an ‘s’ or ‘c’ or something like that. Maybe if I could see a map, I’d remember where it is and you could find him there.” Christina peeked up at the captain, trying to make her face look as innocent as possible and hoping that Rickards would run true to form and underestimate her simply because she was a young girl. Besides, there surely had to be someplace in one of those states that began with that sound.

Just as she hoped he would, he rose to the bait. “I don’t have any maps available here, but in the office I have many. I’ll arrange for you to come down to my office tomorrow and we’ll see what we can find.”

Christina nodded, eager to appear helpful, and once again a brief look of doubt crossed Rickards’ face, quickly brought under control. Christina realized she had to tone it down a bit, since her rapid shift from silent and distrustful, to eagerly helpful had apparently set off warning bells in Rickards’ mind. She didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize her chances of gaining access to the maps she desperately needed.

Hesitating for another minute, studying her intently, Rickards finally rose to his feet, and held out his hand to Christina as she stood. She took it quickly, disliking the dry rough texture.

“Very well, Miss Craigson,” Rickards nodded, smiling a more natural smile this time. “I will speak with the caregivers here and arrange for someone to bring you down to the central office tomorrow sometime. We certainly appreciate any assistance you are willing to give us.”