Wymie nodded.
Blinda darted away, ducking under a clumsy swipe of Mord’s pallid paws. She ran to the open window and leaned on the sill, sticking her face out to breathe in the cool spring-night breeze and watch the early fireflies dance. Her grimy toy bear dangled over the cracked wooden sill.
Mord made to follow, but Wymie put herself between them, her bare, reddened forearms, still steaming from the dishwater, crossed beneath her breasts. She knew that emphasized their heft, but the gesture also helped get her message across. She didn’t want to raise a hand against the man unless she had to.
As he said, she couldn’t be there to watch over her ma all the time.
But she was here now.
“Not another step,” she declared.
“I’m a man,” he repeated. It was one of his favorite things to say. It was almost like he thought someone might disagree, or forget it if he didn’t repeat it often enough. “I’m stronger’n you, little slut. I could knock you out of the way.”
“You could try.”
He tried an engaging grin on her. It seemed to work on her ma, but it turned Wymie’s stomach. In her eyes it was nothing but a snaggletoothed leer.
“You could take her place,” he said. “Help take the edge off for your poor daddy, the way a dutiful daughter should.”
“It’s not gonna happen.”
His eyes flashed and his heavy black brows jutted low and outward above them.
“Why do you act so high and mighty?” he bellowed. The stink of his breath rocked her back on her heels and made her eyes water, but she stood her ground. “I know what a slut you are. Givin’ that sweet thang up for every boy in the county, from Maccum Corners clear to the holler!”
“That’s a lie and you know it,” she said. “No boy would dare touch me with anything they wanted to keep.” Again she looked meaningfully at the ax.
Wish I’d gone ahead and struck his filthy hand off when he grabbed me through my skirt that time, she thought. But she had mashed his ugly tuber of a nose for him, as she’d reminded him before.
In return he’d knocked her sprawling with a backhand and blackened her eye. But that victory was short-lived. She bounced back up right away, and that time she held her ax in both hands. Ready to cut.
“C’mon,” he pleaded. “Let me get a little sugar, can’t you?”
“Wymie,” her mother called from behind him. “You don’t be sassing your pa, now. He’s right. You got to do what he says. We all do.”
“Oh, Ma,” Wymie cried, shaking her head and squinting her eyes to try to hold in the hot tears that filled them. “Can’t you show some spine sometime?”
But she knew the answer. She doesn’t dare, she thought. Because I can’t protect her. I’m not good enough. Not strong enough. It’s all my fault…
She shook her head again, once, fiercely. She wouldn’t walk down that trail again. Not where it led her.
It had only been the once. But no amount of washing, mebbe not even a dose of straight-up lye, would ever cleanse her of the foul feeling that he had left her with.
“Blinda,” she called, “come with me. Let’s go for a nice walk in the woods, honey. Get some clean air in our noses for a change.”
She turned away from her stepfather. She was afraid he’d rabbit-punch her, but she had to take that risk. She doubted he had the sack to try, anyway. He knew what she’d do to him if he tried a trick like that and failed.
Blinda was slumped over the sill. The dirty soles of her bare feet showed, the toes bowed together against the floor.
“Blinda? Wake up, honey. I know you ain’t been sleeping good, but we got to go.”
She reached out to take her sister’s thin shoulder. She shook the girl gently.
The ragged bear slid from her fingers to the floor. Blinda slid back to follow it.
Horror struck through Wymie like lightning.
Her beloved baby sister no longer had a face. There was only a bloody red gap where her face should have been.
“Wait,” Ricky Morales said. “What was that?”
“Probably your imagination,” Mildred Wyeth responded. She had stripped off her shirt to work in the humid heat of the hollow in her scavvied sports bra and khaki cargo pants. She straightened from sorting a pile of mostly unidentifiable scavvied tech, mostly metal parts and components J. B. Dix identified as electronics, and drew the back of her hand across her high, dark-skinned forehead. “Heat’s making you see things.”
But Ryan Cawdor was standing and staring intently at the spot in the brush above the excavation the kid had snapped his head around to look at.
“No,” he said. “I think I saw something, too.”
He had his palm resting on the grip of the SIG Sauer P226 blaster in its holster. He’d left his longblaster, a Steyr Scout Tactical, in the shade of a rickety lean-to.
He glanced at Jak Lauren, who stood on top of a heap of dirt, rocks, chunks of concrete, and bits and pieces of cloth, plastic and other debris that somehow hadn’t degraded into the dense clay soil in the hundred or so years since skydark. The slender, slight young man shrugged. Despite the sticky mugginess he insisted on wearing his camouflage jacket, to which he’d sewn jagged shards of glass and metal fragments to discourage an in-fighting opponent from grabbing him. His adversary would get a further surprise if he grabbed the young man by the collar. Hidden razor blades would cause severe injury. Jak was swiveling his head, long white hair swinging above his shoulders, white-skinned brow furrowed over ruby eyes.
He sensed Ryan’s attention and looked toward him. “Check out?” he asked.
“No,” Ryan said. “If there’s something out there, it knows the area better than we do.”
Jak let his thin lips quirk contemptuously. “Could beat.”
“Mebbe,” Ryan said. “Mebbe not.”
The white-haired youth frowned. Though a product of the Gulf Coast bayou country—even hotter and double-steamier than this—he was proud of his wilderness skills. Indeed, his skills at stealth and tracking in any environment—even urban ones, as alien to his upbringing as the dimpled face of the moon. And for a fact, he was good. Those skills had kept Ryan and the rest of his companions alive on many occasions.
“The pallid shadows again?” Doc asked. Doc was a tall, gaunt man with haunted blue eyes and rich silvery hair. Though he appeared to be in his late sixties, he was, in fact, in terms of years lived, in his thirties. Looked at in a different way, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was almost two and a half centuries old. The whitecoats of Operation Chronos
