Sunshine and Blood #7
“Well, if I knew the bad guys served pizza with cookies for dessert, I might have quit sooner,” Brady retorted, and the last sound they heard until the SUV slowed down for the turn was Jai’s hearty laughter.
Ernie had sat still in the middle seat next to Cotton the entire time. He’d been so quiet, Eric had forgotten about him until the SUV was parked in Jai and George’s garage and they were unloading.
“Eric,” he said, almost as though awakening from a sleep.
“Yes?”
“Can your camper run without hookups for a while?”
Eric frowned. “It’s full up on water and power, and I cleared the sewage tanks yesterday.
” There was a hookup for the entire neighborhood—Burton had shown him how to use it so they didn’t contaminate their groundwater, and Eric didn’t have to take his giant flashy RV out on the highway. “It can go for several days.”
“Good. Maybe… maybe unhook it tonight?”
It was a sign of how much Eric had come to trust the goofy-looking kid with the wild black hair that he said, “Sure, Ernie. Anything you ask.”
Ernie didn’t glance at him so much then as peer through him. “Don’t be careless with your life,” he said. “It’s enough that you know what it’s worth.”
And with that, he almost fell, but Jai caught him up in his arms. “You will sleep in the guest room, little one,” he said kindly. “George—”
“I’ll go feed the cats,” Cotton said cheerfully. “George, you go set up the guest room—I’ll hang with you guys until Jason and Burton get home. Jason asked if I could.”
“Of course,” George said. “And thanks for doing the cats.”
Eric thought of all the cats in Burton and Ernie’s house, including his, and although he missed his little fuzzy guys, he realized that his team had their backs as well.
And for now Ernie curled up in Jai’s arms, like a kitten might curl up on a couch.
Eric thought again about how this odd group of people seemed to care for each other.
No questions, really. No being put upon.
Jai needed extra leg room. George needed to go home to go to sleep.
Ernie needed help when his gift got too heavy.
Sonny needed them not to pressure him to conform when he was upset.
And the others… did that. Like it was breathing.
God, he wished he’d known people could live like that earlier.
Still, when he took Brady’s elbow, an innate possessiveness fueled him, guided him across the street, and he wanted nothing more than for the two of them to be alone.
Brady glanced at him as they crossed the street. “Something on your mind, soldier?” he asked, and the tartness made Eric smile, some of his intensity lessening. He wanted to answer tartly back, but his mood, not just of the evening but all day, wouldn’t let him.
“I’m worried about tomorrow,” he said, the honesty raw and revealing. “These last two days have been important to me—I want you to be okay.”
“Oh,” Brady murmured, accepting Eric’s invitation to enter the RV as he followed close behind.
“Oh what?” Eric demanded. He wanted… not sex so much as contact. He took Ernie’s warning seriously—he was going to go out and unhook the RV, knowing he had enough water, sewage space, and power to last for a couple of days—but first this.
He gathered Brady into his arms, relieved when there were no questions, when he felt no resistance, just the soft pressure of a hard-muscled body setting down its burdens with Eric’s own, at their feet.
“Oh,” he said, feeling this moment deep in his bones.
“Yeah,” Brady answered. “Oh.”
They had to separate eventually, and he went outside to do the hookup thing.
He was fiddling with the pressure knob near the sewage hookup when he got a sudden twitching at his shoulders.
He couldn’t…. He would have glanced around, but he was sandwiched between the RV and the house.
He was, in effect, hidden from sight, but he felt naked. Exposed.
Somebody is watching us.
He thought of the roadblock between Ace’s house and this one and wondered… had somebody seen them? Had somebody gotten suspicious about this little hidden suburb?
He pulled out his phone and texted Jai first. Keep everybody away from the windows.
Then he texted Ace. I’m twitchy.
Then he texted Brady. Lie on the floor. Now.
He knew how to be calm. He knew how to not panic. But at the thought of Brady, lying on the floor of the camper, his palms grew clammy, and fear sweat trickled between his shoulder blades.
He hadn’t been this scared with his gun aimed at the rapist in broad daylight.
In a lightning-strike moment of clarity, he knew, without a doubt, that he’d never had so much to lose in his life, not even when his life was at risk.
He sidled back around the camper the long way, staying beside the house, and when he came out by the rear, he was facing the garage.
The back half of the camper was hidden behind the house, but the front part, the part with the door and the driver’s seat, was open to the street, and because the neighborhood was half finished, the street was open to a lot of desert behind the cul-de-sac, including the slight rise that hid the turnoff from the east.
Someone up on that rise could pick the people on the street off like tin cans.
Eric crouched down as soon as he hit the open side of the RV, staying low when he opened the door.
“Stay down,” he ordered, watching as Brady started to scramble to his feet. Brady dropped immediately, but something of his body must have shown, even for an instant.
And the shooter on the slight rise had nerves like moldy cheese.
They heard glass tinkling as the window over the couch shattered, and then the report of the rifle cracked loud over the neighborhood.
“Fuck,” Brady muttered. “Where are they?”
Eric scrambled inside, pulling the door shut after him. “The ridge to the east,” he said. “Pull out your phone and tell Jai to keep everybody in the house and the lights off. They’re obviously after you, and you’re leaving.”
“How do you know it’s me?” Brady asked, but he was staying in the walkway in front of the couch, cramming his back up against the bottom, which was good.
There was a lead-lined container full of guns under the couch/convert-a-bed cushions, so even if whoever it was opened up with a full clip, Brady would be safe right where he was.
Eric combat-crawled alongside him, listening for another shot, grateful when one didn’t happen.
The lights are on, he thought.
Of course. Brady had turned the lights on when he entered, like the camper was a home or something.
“I’m going to pull away,” he muttered. “As we peel out of here, when you can stand up, turn off the lights, then crouch by the stairwell.” The light switch was on the panel next to the door.
“As soon as you can, get back to this spot,” he urged and kept up the combat crawl, disregarding the shattered glass from the first shot even as a pebble bit into his arm.
“What’s so special about this spot?” Brady asked, frowning at his phone.
“There’s a bulletproof container full of weaponry at your back,” Eric told him, pausing to brush Brady’s cheek with his fingertip. He left a bloody trace that he had no time to regret. Fucking glass. “What’s wrong?”
“Jai gave me a thumbs-up and then disappeared,” Brady said. “George texted and told me to wait for it. What does that mean?”
Oh shit.
Eric went from combat crawl to all fours, because that could mean anything, and as he crouched next to the driver’s seat and flipped the switch warming the diesel engine up, he wished they’d worked up a signal or something.
God, how long did this take? Five to fifteen seconds, the brochure said. He knew how an internal combustion engine worked, with modifications for diesel fuel. Warm the cylinders, prepare the chamber, wait for the light to go—off!
He cranked on the key, and as the engine turned over, he threw himself into the driver’s seat, killed the parking brakes, and hit the gas.
He liked to think he did a good job as he peeled out, half in the seat and half still crouched next to the wheel.
He pulled himself up enough to correct his trajectory, because he did not want to end up in the nice military officer’s pool via his garage, and then kept going.
The houses at this end of the block were not only not finished, they were not started, only the briefest of outline flags there to show where the foundation would have been poured now that the hookups had been established.
He thought briefly about turning left and then hitting the highway, but where would he go? They had roadblocks everywhere, except the vasty bastion of nothingness that was the desert.
With a thump, the front tires bumped over the sidewalk and he blew through the plans for what would have been a lovely house at one time.
And once he’d cleared the rotted wood-flag outline, he just kept going.
There was sand out here, he knew, and hardpan, and cactuses and desert palms and Joshua trees and yucca plants and great big rocks.
But there were also big stretches where all he had to do was weave the RV delicately in and out and in and out of all of the above.
He had to keep his headlights on, which was a problem, but he also had a good idea where the road lay.
Parallel to the road, he thought, glancing at the stars.
He could spot the North Star easy this far out from Victoriana, and he resolved to keep it forever on his right, to the front of him.
Sailors have been doing it for years.
Eric kept his eyes on the desert and drove as fast as he could without wiping out on the rocks or the yucca plants and said tightly. “Anything on the phone?”
Brady grunted, and Eric could see him scrambling to his feet in the rearview.
“Fucking glass,” he muttered, shuffling through the shards on his way to the passenger seat. “Yeah,” he said. “Jai told me that—and this is a quote—‘That nice man won’t bother us ever again,’ and I don’t want to know what that means.”
Eric grunted. “I’m pretty sure it means there’s a new corpse in the desert—I hope that isn’t a problem for you.”
“Well, since I’m not the corpse, I’m going to say no,” Brady said grouchily, which meant that yes, it did bother him, but he was willing to admit it was better the gunman than him. “How do you know that’s what it means?”
“Because I get the feeling it’s not Jai’s first corpse in the desert,” Eric said. “And I hope this doesn’t freak you out, but it might not even be his tenth or twentieth.”
Brady snorted. “Yeah, nope. Still glad not to be the corpse. Do you think they’ll be okay back there?”
“The people in the houses, or Jai?” Eric asked, partially in irony.
“The people in the houses,” Brady said, and he didn’t sound like he was listening for snark of any kind. “Watch it—whew!”
Eric had swerved to avoid a small granite plateau and ended up going over a low patch of cactuses. With a sigh, he consigned this RV to the trash heap, which was too bad. She’d been a good home for a while.
They both caught their breath for a moment, and Brady asked, “How far? How far and how long are we going to drive out here?”
Eric let out a breath. “Ace’s front porch light should be visible to our left in a few.
When it gets visible, we’re going to go north for a little and then turn west again.
We’re going to circle around the garage and then keep going until we’re halfway to the sheriff’s office in Baker, probably still surrounded by nothing much and nowhen.
And then we’re going to turn out all the lights, sweep up some glass, and wipe the goddamned blood off my arm because it’s driving me batshit. How’s that for a plan?”
“Good stuff,” Brady said soberly. “I like that.” He checked his phone and blew out a breath. “George says, ‘Don’t go east into the desert. There will be ugly flowers.’”
Eric snorted, and then Brady read from his phone again.
“Ernie says, ‘Changes in the plan incoming, but it’s all still a go.’” He paused. “Oh. Okay—I guess that makes sense. Business as usual, only we’ll….” He sighed. “I’m sorry, Eric. We’ll be leaving your home out in the desert.”
“No worries,” Eric said. “I was planning to move into the house anyway.”
“Yeah,” Brady sighed, glancing up toward what looked like a wide ribbon in the dark. “Wait—do you see that?”
Eric risked some bumps and some cactuses, and they found themselves in one of those hardpan riverbeds, with all the cracks from parched earth.
“I wonder if this was formed during that weird hurricane in the desert,” he murmured.
The camper leveled out, their progress smoother.
The riverbed took them a little to the north as it headed west, and Eric breathed a small sigh of relief.
“We can’t be seen from Ace and Sonny’s,” Brady said, correctly interpreting his relief. Or maybe it was just Brady’s own. “Do you think anybody will follow us out here?”
Eric snorted. “Nope,” he said. “All the ugly flowers are to the east, remember?”
Brady shuddered. “Do you want me to go start to clean up the glass?”
“Sure,” Eric said. “There’s a high-powered vacuum in the little coat closet on the bedroom side of the bathroom.”
Brady laughed a little. “For broken glass?”
Eric shot him a look, and he knew his expression clearly said he was out of patience. “Brady, if you don’t know what I am by now—”
Brady stood and squeezed his shoulder. “Hush, Charlie. You’re right. I guess I’m just constantly surprised by how good you are at what you do.”
Eric’s entire body warmed from that touch on the shoulder, and he found he had to really concentrate to keep their progress within that impromptu hardpan riverbed because he kept wanting to glance behind him.