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“HOLD STILL, YOU TWO.” Beau and Kayli had been falling asleep and jerking awake every other minute for the past mile or so. Brenda only had so much strength to hold everything together. They were taxing her beyond her limit.
The sun had set long before she was ready. Moonlight that did make its way between the cloud cover was paltry at best. But the air was changing, getting thicker the closer they got to Fernan Lake. And people built houses around lakes.
Dark trees bordered them into the road, shaded in black and lighter shades of black. Smooth riding indicated Brenda hadn’t left the road, but that could change with any sudden turn or sharp drop off.
A break in the black wall to her left made her heart skip. Either they’d reached another road, found a lake entry point, or a house. The first two she could do without. But a house? Hell yeah.
And a large house it was. Brenda stopped the dirt bike and slid off to steady the kids and the machine from toppling. She turned off the motor. Sudden silence pressed against their ears. Cricket chirps echoed over the water just past the sprawling, dark two-story cabin.
Relief filled Brenda. If only for a moment, they had a destination, somewhere they could hold up. She had enough food in the pack, if the house was empty of supplies, they’d still be fine. She just needed to get the kids out of the open.
Beau and Kayli staggered to the side of the driveway, stopping next to a hedge acting as a partial-privacy fence. Keeping an eye on their silhouettes, Brenda yanked the pack from its straps and balanced the bike. She looked around for a place to hide it. They’d need it again in the morning and someone would take it if it was left out in the open. Not that the traffic out that way was noteworthy. Brenda snorted, the sound loud in the quiet night.
The privacy hedge might work, if she rolled the bike behind the bush and leaned the body against the infrastructure inside the leaves. Pushing it around the kids, who pivoted like slow-moving tops, she hoped her arms didn’t fall off. The ride was catching up to her and sitting down with her arms hanging by her sides had never sounded so good. Even more so than a hot cup of tea or a steak dinner.
A fountain-shaped blur loomed before her around the end of the bush. Screw leaning it against the bushes. The dirt bike rested nice against its base.
Releasing the weight of the bike freed Brenda to breathe fully. She found a seat around the rim of the fountain base and pressed her hands on her knees.
Kayli’s small hand found Brenda’s shoulder. “Are you okay, Aunt Brenda?” She pushed close to Brenda, the warmth pleasant in the rapidly cooling night air.
Beau’s fingers traced Brenda’s arm to her hand and grasped it. “You’re shaking.” His voice so young but he’d caught what she’d hoped the dark would hide.
She was freaking the hell out.
Wrapping an arm around their shoulders, Brenda pulled them close. “You two are awesome. Nothing’s wrong. I’m just glad to be off that noisy bike. Aren’t you?” Kayli nodded. And Brenda looked at Beau. “And I’m shaking ‘cause I’m so cold. Let’s see if we can get in this house. I’d like to get warm. How about it?” Beau nodded and they stood, Brenda a bit slower than the kids.
She hadn’t noticed the breeze until the warmth of their small bodies had moved from her sides. With a bit of a bite, the moving air spurred her to move the kids to the side of the house, out of the wind.
No lights or visible smoke. Hopefully the people were gone. If not, they could be dead or hiding in wait, ready to kill anyone they came across.
Brenda hitched the pack off her shoulders. She pulled the gun from the small of her back where she’d tucked it into the waistband of the tight jeans she’d borrowed from Rachel’s cache of clothes.
Pushing Kayli to Brenda’s left, up against the side of the house and under a window, Brenda knelt and kept her face as close as possible to her niece and nephew. In a low voice, she spoke slow but with urgency. “I’m going to search around the house, see if I can find a way in or find out if anyone is inside.” She ruffled Beau’s hair and brushed Kayli’s cheek. “Listen to me very carefully. If you hear me yell or you hear a gunshot, I want you to run back to the road and across it to the woods and hide. I’ll come get you, as soon as I can.”
“But what if you die?”Kayli’s voice trembled. “Who will take care of us?”
Beau gasped and whimpered.
Brenda shook her head. “I won’t die. I promise. And if something happens, you’re big kids. You can make it.” But make it where? Who the hell did she think she was, making promises she couldn’t guarantee.
She leaned in and hugged them tight to her chest and sniffed their little kid scents. How could Rachel have left them? And with Brenda? If Brenda had kids, she wouldn’t leave them for anything. And yet there she was, leaving her niece and nephew.
Some things were unavoidable.
Standing, she palmed the gun and looked over her shoulder into the darkness. Nothing moved. She hoped.
With the gun in her right hand and her left guiding her along the log siding of the house, Brenda walked the perimeter to the front porch and the steps leading up to the front door. She stopped and looked back. The kids were invisible beside the house.
She turned back to the steps. A cloud moved and moonlight streamed down unencumbered to the yard and house. A sinking feeling filled Brenda. Glass littered the porch and the steps down to the cement pathway leading away from the road and around the side like little diamonds in the night.
Nights in white satin... I can’t remember the rest. Odd that she’d think of that particular song. The glass crunched beneath her boots. If someone was in there, they might be lurkers like her or a very protective home owner. Either way, Brenda had to be ready to shoot on sight.
Damn it. She didn’t want to shoot anyone. When she had commandeered the dirt bike, she’d shot more than she ever wanted to in her life. She stopped walking to look back at the kids. Moonlight spotlighted them, their pale faces lit up in the silvery light. An inhale, long and slow, steadied her nerves. She could do it. She had to.
Climbing the stairs one by one passed in a blur. Standing at the doorway, peeking through the hole where the glass had been, felt more like a damn movie. For the briefest moment, she wanted to trade spots with Rachel, seeking out a pharmacy and getting meds. How hard could that be?
No sound reached her. She stretched out her fingers for the handle, turning it soundlessly while her heart climbed into her throat. Oh hell, what was she doing? They could move on. Go to another house. Maybe get to town and find one untouched.
Her breathing quickened, heart rate racing. Sweat trickled between her shoulder blades. She closed her eyes and swung the door open, ducking behind the wall beside the frame in case someone shot at her. Opening her eyes, she waited. Nothing, no sounds of pursuit or defenses. She poked her head around the wood and waited. Still nothing.
Sometimes nothing was awesome and sometimes it jacked with you. This was a time when she couldn’t decide which it was.
Creeping around the side, gun at the ready, Brenda entered the house with deliberate steps. No way was she going to get shot. Or beat to hell.
Inside, the house was darker than outside and the moonlight faded, another crappy cloud had to move again, and Brenda took shorter steps, sweeping her free hand before her. Her eyes strained against the lack of light and her ears sought out every sound that made it past the loud call of her breathing and heart beat pounding in her ears.
The soft sigh of her feet on the flooring made it past the sound of blood rushing in her head. Nobody had accosted her yet. Maybe the coast was clear.
She moved into a large room filled with furniture, most likely the living room and into the kitchen. Nothing moved or hinted at residence. Brenda lowered her gun. No lights blinked on the appliances. The electricity was out. And why shouldn’t it be? Everyone else’s was. At least they had been.
But when Brenda turned to the stairs, a whisper of a scrape called her attention to what looked like pantry doors. Detail was difficult to make out in the darkened kitchen, but the doors looked to be ceiling high and slated like a closet’s.
If someone hid in there, what were the odds they were armed and about to attack? Or maybe they didn’t want to shoot either. Maybe...
Brenda brought her gun up and reached for the door to the pantry with her other hand. She could shoot. She could shoot. She could shoot.
With a yank, she pulled the door open and her jaw dropped.
“Please don’t shoot.” A girl’s voice pleaded from a group of six or more kids. Even fewer details could be seen in the dark pantry.
Brenda tucked the gun in her waistband and motioned the kids out of the pantry. “I won’t shoot. Come out.” They filed out against the wall of the kitchen. Brenda bent over. “Is it just you? Are you okay?”
The oldest girl, judging by her height, coughed. “It’s just us. Our parents are supposed to meet us here. This is our grandparents’ place.” She rubbed something on her face. “Who are you?”
Brenda held up her hand and ran to the front door. In a loud whisper, she called in the direction of her niece and nephew, “Kayli, Beau, come on in. Hurry.”
Feet scuffled on the cement path and then their shadows scampered up the steps into the house. Brenda closed the ineffectual door and ushered them into the kitchen with the other children. The presence of the additional two seemed to calm the larger group.
Eight kids total. Brenda couldn’t abandon the kids she’d found. And she and the two she’d arrived with needed a place to stay for the night. “Let’s go sit down.” To the oldest girl, she asked, “Is there a living room or somewhere we all can fit?”
The child nodded and led the way into yet another room, different from the one Brenda had seen by the front door. Three walls free of windows or doors and the fourth with just the entryway into the kitchen made a cave-like atmosphere. Someone closed the door behind Brenda and pure darkness covered the group. Brenda drew in a sharp breath. Kayli and Beau clung to her hands with vise-grips.
Before Brenda could worry she’d been dropped into some kind of juvenile cannibal shelter, a light filled the room from a small lantern tucked into the far corner. A small amount, it lit the room enough Brenda could make out details she’d missed in the night of the house.
The oldest girl was more like a teenager, about fifteen or sixteen, followed by the remaining five down to the youngest who couldn’t be older than Kayli. Smudged faces on three boys’ and tangled hair on the girls attested to more than just a day without their parents. A stomach growled and a smaller girl pressed her hand to her tummy and looked down.
Brenda glanced at the door. It’d keep the majority of the light in the room, but for the bottom. She kicked a rug up to the base of the door and sealed off the crack. She turned back and motioned to the couches. “Sit down, guys. I want to hear what’s happened.”
A few moments of shuffling around and soon everyone sat in a couch or loveseat. Brenda motioned to the oldest girl. “How did you get here?”
“We walked.” Her large eyes grew round with pent up fear. Of course she was afraid. She was the adult for other children in a terrifying circumstance.
“Okay, good job. Is there any food here? When did you guys eat last?” Brenda had found them in the pantry, there had to be food in there, right?
“No. My grandparents didn’t believe in hoarding. There was some cereal and flour, but we ate that a couple of days ago.” The girl sniffed and crossed her arms across her stomach.
Brenda closed her eyes and contained her groan. Provisions had to be kept on hand. So many reasons, but the most obvious was an attack on the area. A person couldn’t run to the grocery store with bombs falling from the sky just because they hadn’t prepared. She opened her eyes and watched the group as they shifted, swaying on their feet. The poor things were starving and she had some food, but not enough to last for very long.
The biggest difference between them and her was she could break into any number of homes and find food. Those kids most likely weren’t going anywhere. She reached into her pack and pulled out some water and granola she’d packed for the kids to eat. Homemade jerky and dried fruit joined the pile on her lap and when she glanced up she found every eye in the room trained on her moving hands. Oh, boy. Poor things.
She motioned the boy closest to her. “Hold out your hands.” He opened them without further prompting and Brenda filled them with the mixture of nuts, chocolate chips, raisins, and honey-covered oats that made up the granola. She plopped three dried apples slices onto the pile and a jerky strip. “Okay, next.” While she went through the same motions with each of the kids, she asked, “Who broke the windows?”
The oldest girl, last to come forward after all the younger ones had been fed, answered as Brenda filled her hands. “They were broken when we got here. I haven’t seen anyone else.”
Brenda didn’t respond. What would she say? Oh, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but more than likely someone stole the food that your grandparents did have and if your grandparents were here, they’re most likely dead now. You’ll likely never see your parents again and at this rate, with how your luck is playing out, you won’t live more than a few more days. Yeah, Brenda’s bedside manner wasn’t that terrible she’d say anything along those lines.
Kayli brushed her hand on Brenda’s arm. “You can give them ours, Aunt Brenda. They look really hungry and we’re still full from dinner.” Beau nodded next to her and turned his attention back to the kids. He’d stuck himself to his aunt’s side like she might disappear and watched the group with a nervousness Brenda had never seen in him before.
Brenda nodded and patted Beau’s back. She never should have left the cabin. At least with the kids. She could have waited for someone to return, done something different. And why had she left? Because she wanted to do something, had to work towards a goal, towards accomplishing something.
She reached into the pack for another water bottle to sip from and grabbed the radio instead. Maybe, she should call Dilbeck, tell him she’d be late, or better yet, cancel and take the kids back to Rachel’s... all of them.
The radio seemed so insignificant, so tame. She turned the knob and pressed the talk button. Too late to change her mind. “Major Dilbeck. Are you out there?”
A moment passed and then another. She tried again with the same phrase. Nothing but dead air responded. The kids in the room watched her as they filled their mouths and chewed. Nobody asked what she was doing. She’d given them food, they trusted her.
Brenda dropped the radio to her lap. Now what? Kayli’s eyelids drooped and Beau was suddenly heavy against her side. With full bellies, the rest of the kids would probably sleep and the shut-off room was as close to a safe-house as they were going to get.
She offered a small smile. “It’s okay for you guys to go to sleep. I won’t let anything happen, okay?”
They nodded, as if they were made of one mind and leaned on each other, some licking their fingers and others still chewing on the hard jerky.
The one nice thing about the gym? There hadn’t been any small children like this in there. Wounded children fell outside her expertise. Watching them die was outside her realm of coping capabilities.
Brenda called with the radio again, the same plea for Dilbeck to answer.
One by one, the kids drifted off. Two slumped to the floor with pillows from the couch and the rest spread out on the furniture. The chilly night air hadn’t reached them and most likely wouldn’t. It was relatively comfortable and Brenda’s eyelids grew heavy.
A moment passed. Or was it fifty? Brenda sat up, blinking. Something had startled her. A thump? A thud? Fast asleep, the kids couldn’t have made the noise. Nobody stirred. She blinked some more and tried to wake up. Her lack of sleep and the residual after-effects of her flight from Spokane had caught up to her.
She reached up and scratched her neck, wincing when she dislodged a piece of her scabbed burn with a fingernail.
Another thud. From inside the house.
Shit.