Chapter 38 - Reid
Gage takes the turn onto the Harlow mine road with both hands on the wheel, and the green sign comes up out of the grey on my side of the truck.
My mask is sitting on my knee where it has been since we cleared the last intersection.
There's no rule about it inside the cab and I would fight a man over that rule if there was one.
Hours of breathing through it leaves your whole face numb and itchy at the same time.
I scrub a hand over my hair and grit comes off of it onto my jeans.
That's the thing about this ash nobody understands until they've been out in it.
It falls softly and it settles on things in a way that almost looks pretty from a window.
But when it gets on your skin, it turns out to be tiny bits of ground glass with a sharp edge on every side.
By the end of a day out in it you're covered in scratches almost too small to see. The back of my neck feels like it’s raw from it.
All I want is a shower hot enough to hurt and a full hot meal and then Luna in my arms. We stopped at place after place today only to find a lot of them were already stripped to the walls.
Shelves down, doors hanging open, and everything of value already looted.
Other people got there first. Anything we need from here on is going to cost us more time and further driving to find.
We still came home with four cases of filters and a bunch of other things on the list, so the day counts as a win.
Mars has been fairly quiet on the ride back, but Jules has been narrating the ash cloud in a nature documentary voice for ten minutes and Torrin keeps encouraging him. This is how the five of us used to be before everything, and it took eleven days in a wrecked world to get it back.
The elephant in the room was brought up at lunch in an abandoned furniture store off the main drag with all of us sitting on display couches eating the lunch Gigi packed for us.
Mars was the one who said it, which surprised everybody.
"So, you're really doing this?" He looked around the circle with his sandwich halfway to his mouth. "All of you. On board with being with her together?"
Nobody jumped in, so I did.
"Yup. We're all going to be official boyfriend in laws."
Gage barked out a laugh. He smothered it a second later behind the blandest face he owns, but it got out first, and everyone heard it. First time I’ve heard him laugh in days.
"Cool. Um, Luna and I had a moment so I might be a part of all that…if that’s what she wants." Mars tells us and none of us are really surprised given their history.
I glance over my shoulder through the back window at the tarp bungeed down over the patio set we took out of that store.
It’s a long table with eight chairs. We're going back tomorrow with one of the covered trailers to get more so that everybody down our row has somewhere decent to sit in the evenings.
It's the first plan any of us has made that isn't about staying alive.
I start humming without deciding to. It's been circling my head all afternoon, four or five notes that keep turning over, and it takes me most of a minute to understand what's actually happening.
My music has come back. It hasn't been there since I woke up in that flooded hotel room.
My fingers start moving on my knee, and I want a pen and my journal to write lyrics to go with it so badly it's almost a physical thing.
Gage drives us in through the bay door and everybody piles out to unload.
That's when I first hear it. It's faint and it's somewhere underneath everything, a voice with no words I can pick out. Animals get through to me all day long now with them just outside the door in the pen, but I’m getting better at letting it flow past me instead of hearing each and every thing, so it doesn’t overload my brain. I take my end of the patio table and let the noise go. By the time the truck bed is empty, the voice has gotten higher and realize it’s not coming from outside.
I rub at my ear with my head turned, trying to shake it loose, like when you’re trying to get water out of your ear after a swim.
"Reid?" Torrin closes the tailgate. "You alright, mate?"
I don't answer him, because now I'm straining to listen. It's coming from the far end of the bay where everything we aren’t using now gets parked, and there’s something frantic about the sound.
I start walking, and the closer I get the more of it comes through.
About halfway down that row the sound stops being noise and turns into words.
"MY GIRL. My girl my girl MY GIRL, somebody, the curly one, the big one, ANYONE, my girl is GONE and I could not stop it, I BIT him, I bit at the sour man's hand and it did not work, LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME OUT."
I'm running before I tell my feet to.
Boots come after me, all of them as somebody shouts my name but I keep going. The Jeep is nose in against the wall with all four windows fogged from the inside. Penny is up against the driver's glass with her paws scrabbling and her whole body shaking.
"How the hell did she get in there?" Jules reaches for the handle a half step behind me. The door comes open and she launches out of it straight into my chest and knocks me back into Mars before she hits the floor and scrambles around us with bulging eyes filled with fear.
"The truck the TRUCK, the smoke man put his hand on my girl and she was AFRAID, I have never smelled her that afraid, and the sour man grabbed my neck and the ground went away and then the DOOR, and the sad boy just STOOD there, he smells like the shed and old sandwiches and he did NOTHING, why did he do NOTHING, and the ice girl and the little one went in the truck too and my girl put her hand on the window and then it went OUT THE DOOR. "
She's going too fast, tumbling over herself. It comes through in pieces and smells and terror. I get down on both knees on the concrete and take her face in my hands and hold her still.
"Slow down. Pen, slow down for me."
"The smoke man and the sour man and the sad boy took my girl in the truck out the big door and NOBODY CAME."
Cold quickly followed by fear goes straight through me. I'm on my feet and turning in a circle before I've worked out what I'm looking for, and there are four men standing around me with their faces filled with confusion.
"What?" Gage has hold of my arm. "Reid. What did she say?"
"Luna." I say in a strangled, choked voice.
"She's telling me about Luna. Men took her and Kara and Briar were with her.
They put them in a truck and drove out the bay door.
" I'm already moving. "Penny tried to stop them and bit one of them, but they locked her in the jeep, and she's been stuck in there since. "
Nobody asks a single question. We scatter across the bay.
Gage goes up the motorhome steps and comes straight back down out of them shaking his head.
Mars cuts toward the garden racks while Torrin and I take the fifth wheel.
Jules comes back from Kara and Briar’s camper shaking his head with his face gone white.
I stop a woman carrying a laundry basket and ask her. Two men walking to the visitor stairs get the same question. Milton takes his hat off when I ask him and his face fills with concern, but nobody has seen them.
We meet in the middle of the floor with nothing, and then all five of us go for the visitor centre stairs at once.
The cafeteria is full and loud with the smell of something delicious.
Somebody strung lights along the window wall and there are pizzas coming out on trays with people around the tables with paper plates, kids running between chairs and two of Clayton's men pushing tables together.
I scan every face in that room, looking for her. Anders is at a table near the back with his neighbors and when he sees the five of us come through that door in a rush, he's up out of his chair before anyone says anything. He gets to us fast for a man his age.
"Luna. Have you seen Luna and the girls?
His eyebrows come down in a furrow as he starts shaking his head. The kitchen door swings open, and Elenor comes out backward through it with a tray of pizza balanced on one arm, already talking before she's all the way turned around.
"Oh good, you made it back in time." She slides the tray onto the end of the nearest table.
"Go get showers, all of you, and be back up here before it starts properly.
Grab the girls while you're down there, would you?
They made half of this before they went down to get dressed up and I want them getting their fair share of it. "
"They're not down there." Gage's voice cuts across the room. "Something's wrong."
Elenor face shuts down as I tell her what we know. "Somebody shut Penny in the Jeep. She's been screaming in my head about men who put Luna, Kara and Briar in a truck and drove them out the bay door. She said Luna was scared."
The nearest tables have gone quiet as people overhear and it spreads out from us in a ring.
Mars turns a slow circle with his eyes going over the room, and then he stops.
Clayton is at the long table under the window with his sister beside him.
Neither one of them is eating. Both of them are watching us with guarded expressions, and now that Mars is looking at them, Clayton's hand moves under the table.
Mars walks toward him and calls out, "Where are your men? Tanner and his sidekick. Where are they?"
"I'm sure I couldn't say. They come and go, they don't check in with me, I'm not their keeper." His eyes give him away when they go to the window and come back with a calculated glance.
Mars's shadows come up off the floor, running up his legs and his back in a fast, dark rush.
Then they leave him, cross the table, and get Clayton under both arms. They haul him up out of his chair with his knees knocking the underside of the table.
Plates and glasses rattle and somebody gasps in another part of the room, but the rest is filled with a tense silence.
"What did you do?" Mars shakes him hard enough to snap his head back. "What did you do?"
Marlene brings her hand up from under the table and I see there's a walkie in it. She holds it up beside her face where all of us can see it, and she doesn't look scared at all. There's something close to smug satisfaction sitting on her face.
"Put him down this instant." Her thumb rests on the button. "Remove your foul evil darkness from our presence, or your whore will pay the price."
Her threat ripples through the room to more gasps and murmuring starts up around us. Mars drops him and the shadows come off Clayton all at once and race back up Mars's arms to wrap around him there. He stands with his hands open at his sides waiting to see what to do next.
Elenor shoves past me. She gets to the table in three steps and swings across it with everything she has. Her fist catches Marlene on the side of the head and puts her on the floor, with her chair going over on top of her. Gage grabs her and pulls her back and me…
My skin starts to buzz.
It comes through me like it never has before. Goosebumps sweep down both of my arms and every hair on the back of my neck stands up at once. All I can think about is Luna and my sister out there in the ash in that man's truck scared.
Marlene gets her hands under herself fast for a woman her age. She shoves up off the floor with her hair half down out of its pins and blood at the corner of her mouth, and she's already yelling.
"How dare you." She points across the off centered table. "God will see you burn in hell alongside the rest of these evil abominations. If you touch me or threaten us again I will personally see to it that your whore witch gets exactly what's coming to her."
Rage that she would call the sweetest girl in the world that, threaten her, takes over and the thing that happens next is not in my control at all.
This magic I was given that I thought was a dumb, useless thing turns into something else entirely.
The magic comes up out of my skin all at once in a flood.
My mouth pulls back off teeth that are not my teeth anymore, they’re sharp and crowding and too many to fit in my mouth.
Both my arms get longer and heavy and thick, causing my jacket to split down the seams while my shirt tears open across my chest. Every one of my fingers stretches out into a black talon that catches the strung lights along the window.
I bring both hands down onto the table in front of her and it comes apart under me, splintering and buckling and folding in half.
The sound of it is nothing next to what comes up out of my chest. That roar goes through the room, through the glass wall, and down the stairs into the mine.
No human throat has ever made that sound on this earth.
People go over backward out of their chairs as screams ring out.
The words come out of whatever my mouth has turned into, mangled and growled and barely words at all, breaking apart into another roar before they're even finished.
"WHERE IS SHE?"
To be Continued…