Bebe (22 page)

“Think you can manage?” Ben asked. “It’s at least four miles between here and the southern ridge.”

Though weary and growing more so by the minute, Bebe nodded. She had no idea how far a mile was, but four didn’t sound like so very many.

“I can carry her,” Will offered helpfully. He came to stand with them at the mouth of the cave, and Bebe turned a dubious eye from all that snow, crusted across the top with a thin layer of sun-sparkling ice. In particular, she stared at his narrow shoulders and somewhat still boyishly immature frame.

Will flexed one arm, a gesture difficult to see considering the thickness of his fur coat. “I’m stronger than I look. Feel. Come on,” he cajoled when she hesitated. “Put your hand on my arm and feel.”

Hot, hurt and tired, Bebe reluctantly placed her hand upon his forearm.

“No, up here,” he said, gesturing above his elbow.

She moved her hand to where he indicated, feeling the slight pulsing bulge of muscle as he flexed again.

“See that?” he asked her, and grinned. “That’s solid rock, baby. Know what else is solid rock?” He waggled his eyebrows at her and then did a funny rapid-flicking thing with the tip of his tongue, startling Bebe so much that she not only released him, but stumbled back a step and almost fell into Ben.

Ben quickly caught her, his large hand planting itself on the small of her back to arrest her fall. “Start walking,” he told Will, not in the slightest bit impressed.

The younger man obediently headed outside, grinning back at her over one furry shoulder.

“Stay close to me or Matt,” Ben told her. “We’ll help you as much as we can.”

Wilting just a bit, Bebe stared out across that impossible sea of white, wondering if Tral had worked his way free of the ropes yet. Was he looking for her? More importantly, was he still angry? Probably. She’d still be angry, if she was him. She’d probably be so mad that she’d not want anything more to do with a troublemaker like herself.

The whiteness began to blur as her eyes filled up with tears. She swiped at them with the back of one hand, wishing she knew the way back to the station. For that matter, she wished she had the strength to get there on her own. And she really wished that she’d never opened the door for Ben in the first place.

But she had opened it, and these were the consequences.

Bowing her head, she took that first painful step and slipped in the snow, very nearly falling flat on her butt. Both Ben and Matt caught opposite arms, heaving her promptly upright again. She hadn’t even realized the old man was behind her. She hadn’t realized she was crying now, either.

Matt snorted, shaking his head as he looked at her. She knew that look, that tightening around his mouth and grim staring eyes. She was being a burden again. Bowing her head, Bebe swallowed her misery and pain and made herself start walking.

But it never got any easier. There were things in the snow, buried sticks and vines that tried to trip her, jagged rocks that jabbed through her boots and bandages and into the bottoms of her aching feet. She quickly came to hate the snow. It was wet, it was cold, and it was evil. And they had to walk in it for what felt like forever. Just trudging up that first hill to get out of the valley was both morally and physically exhausting. Before Bebe reached the top, her sweat soaked the interior of Tral’s coat and she was breathing heavily. The cold of every gasp hurt her throat and lungs. They hadn’t even put the old cave completely behind them before she collapsed to kneel in the snow and rest.

“Come on,” Ben encouraged her. “We’ve got a ways to go yet before we can do that.”

“Hell, we only just got started,” Will scoffed from a little ahead of them, but she noticed he was breathing heavily too. Of course, he was lugging two fur rolls of supplies, several spears and a bulky hide satchel that looked to be quite heavy.

This time when Ben offered her a hand, she took it and he pulled her back onto her feet. She didn’t want to cause them any more trouble than she already had. She’d caused too much for Ma’am and Sir, and then again for Tral, and look what happened. Although Ben was walking slower than the others in an effort to keep pace with her limping steps, already she was falling behind him. It hurt so much, but she tried to hurry and catch up. If she was too much trouble for the humans, they might leave her behind, and although she never wanted to be with them in the first place, she was frightened of being left alone. Where would she go then? She couldn’t start a fire or kill her own strange-tasting meat. She was utterly useless.

Walking through a blinding veil of tears, she tripped over a snow-hidden length of stick. This time she went down face-first, landing in a big, soft, wet splat on her belly and sinking in up to her waist. She got snow in the sleeves of Tral’s coat, in the tops of her boots and in the waist of her trousers before she finally managed to struggle back onto her throbbing feet. Within steps, however, she fell again, and Ben ended up dropping that carcass of meat into the snow to come back and get her.

“It’s okay,” he said, pausing to wipe the stinging tears from her cold face before offering her his broad back. “Come on. Alley-oop.”

This time, Bebe didn’t bother refusing. Grateful for the chance to rest, she wrapped her arms around his neck and let him hoist her up piggyback-style. Strong as he was, by the time they reached the low ground opening that was to be their new winter home, Ben was puffing and panting every bit as hard as she had been.

It wasn’t even a real cave, just an opening in the rock not much larger than Tral’s station house. She had to get down on her knees in the snow and crawl through the small opening. Roots poked through cracks in the rock and dangled like hair from a ceiling that was only mere feet above her head. At least it was dry, although it was still every bit as cold as it had been outside. Bebe hugged herself, shivering as she looked around. It was breezy, too. Or maybe that was just her imagination, tricking her into thinking she could still feel the gentle brush of the outside wind. She was so tired now, and she hurt so much. She found an out of the way corner and collapsed into it, wet inside her clothes and shaking.

Ben scouted back into the meager depths of the smaller cave. Using his spear, he jabbed twice at the ceiling and was rewarded by a slight shower of snow and a thin beam of daylight. Brushing snow from his face, he peered up at it a moment. “Perfect,” he said, and came back to the front. “Let’s get a fire started.”

Greg remained with her long after the others dropped their burdens against one wall and then began the long, laborious trek back through the icy snow to fetch the remainder of their supplies. Even Ben abandoned her, returning to the meat he’d left behind.

“I’m trusting you,” he told Greg before he left. “Don’t make me regret it.”

“I won’t,” Greg promised, and he took that promise seriously. He barely looked at her and yet at the same time seemed so intensely aware of her presence as he moved through the new cave, picking up stray rocks and hacking at any roots long enough to be a nuisance. Huddled in a corner, Bebe did her best to stay out of his way while he worked around her. Wet inside her clothes and miserable, she watched him build a ring of stones and then use sparks from their previous fire, carried here in a careful wrap of coals and hollow bone, to build a new one.

“You’ll warm up in a minute,” he promised, sneaking quick glances at her from out beneath the shaggy brown shield of his bangs. He didn’t say anything more, he simply busied himself rummaging from bundle to sack, pulling out weapons and stacking them near the entryway, tacking the old hide up across the new entryway to help keep out the wind, and unrolling beds anywhere the ground was flat enough to hazard sleeping upon.

Eventually, Ben returned with the half-gnawed meat carcass. “We need to get this stored or the wolves are going to get what’s left. Find a good place and start digging.”

“The ground’s hard as stone!” Greg protested.

“Needs to be done or we could all go hungry,” Ben said unsympathetically. “Get digging.”

Swearing first, Greg then sighed. Running a hand through his hair, he looked at her first and then dutifully headed outside, leaving Bebe and Ben alone.

“How’s the feet?” Ben came towards her slowly. He stretched his back, trying to rub a kink from his shoulders before lowering himself to one knee in front of her.

Bound within her boots, she could barely wiggle her toes, they hurt so much and burned like fire. “Fine,” she lied.

“Sure they are.” He motioned her to extend her legs. “You’re wet. You must have got half the snow in the valley trapped in your leggings with you. You should have said something.”

Concern about wet clothes, however, took an instant back seat to the bloody condition of the bandages as he untied and removed each boot in turn. A foul smell permeated the air. Without a word, he unwrapped her wounds, and the look on his face turned grim as the blood and pus-encrusted layer of hide finally came away and he saw the full extent of the damage.

It all felt so much better now that nothing touched her feet. The pressure eased, and so did the throbbing. The cooler air caressed her hot skin, diminishing the pain until it was hardly more than a faint ache. “Fine,” Bebe said, closing her eyes in relief.

That relief did not last long.

Ben set a bowl of snow into the fire to melt and then washed her feet as best he could, but everywhere he touched hurt first in searing white-hot flashes, and then burned molten and unrelentingly deep inside her flesh. The ache consumed her, pulsing up through her legs and hips until she could feel it throbbing all the way into her guts. In every part of her. In the backs of her teeth. Even in the roots of her hair.

Throwing out the first bowl of foul wash water, Ben melted more snow and washed her feet again.

Groaning and hissing in pain, she grabbed at her own legs just to keep from slapping his hands. It was a relief when the torment finally ended and at last he re-wrapped her feet in clean hide strips. He removed her wet clothes, all except for Tral’s coat which she refused to let him take, and hung them on spears near the fire to dry.

“Try and rest.” Ben said as he wrapped her in a warm blanket. He gave her leg a gentle pat, but there was a worried look on his face when he turned to throw the bloody bandages on the fire.

Small as the new cave was, that one small fire was more than sufficient to heat even the far back corners. Before Matt and Will had returned from their second trip, Bebe had warmed to the point of discomfort. Shoving the blanket aside, she unfastened Tral’s coat to peel the damp halves apart in an effort to cool herself. And when still she continued to sweat, eventually she took it off completely, leaving it as a shield between her bare back and the rough earthen cave wall.

Busy unpacking, Ben didn’t notice, but Will did. A short few minutes later, he crawled through the entry flap, pushing two sacks ahead of him and pulling in another from behind. He froze when he saw her.

“Holy shit,” he said, low and marveling as he stared at her breasts.

“Move your ass,” Matt grumbled from behind him.

“She’s naked,” Will said, and then when Matt nudged none-too-gently at his back with the toe of one boot, twisted around to call back, “I said, she’s naked!”

“And I’m fucking cold, so move your ass!” The older man nudged him hard enough that Will, cursing, finally got out of the way, then he crawled inside too. When he also paused to stare at her, Bebe looked wearily down at herself. She needed a bath; she was starting to smell and that made her self-conscious enough to pull her legs back up to her chest. She hugged them with both arms, resting her cheek upon her knees until Matt finally looked away.

“You’re beautiful,” Will blurted from the other side of the small earthen cavern. “I’ve never seen tits like that before.”

“You’ve never seen tits before, period,” Matt corrected. A ruddy stain flushed his cheeks above the salt-and-pepper expanse of his beard, and he averted his eyes.

“I have too,” Will protested, then looked at her again. “Just not ones that fine, is all.”

“Go help Greg with the digging,” Ben told him. “We’ve got to get the meat buried before there’s nothing left for us to eat.”

“Yeah, okay.” But Will didn’t move, not right away. He rubbed a hand hard across his mouth, drinking in an eyeful before turning and crawling back outside.

“We ain’t monks here, Ben,” Matt remarked as he started carrying the freshly-fetched bags into the back of the cave.

“I know it.” Finding the same shirt he’d tried to get her to wear the night before, Ben brought it to her. “Here, Bay-bay. You need to cover up.”

“Hot,” she moaned, shoving the shirt away.

“You can’t go running around like that.” Ben squatted next to her. Wrapping the blanket back around her waist, he tried to force the shirt over her head, tugging it down over her breasts.

She hated the touch of it. The crudely stitched skins were coarse against her own and as Ben tried to get her arms into the sleeves, in a rare fit of temper, she ripped it off and threw it as far as she could. It nearly landed in the fire, and Ben quickly rescued it before the shirt could smolder and then ignite into flames. Shaking, she pulled Tral’s coat closer but didn’t put it on, either. It was just too hot. She glared at him, flushed and shivering.

Stalking back to her, Ben grabbed Tral’s coat and yanked it up over her shoulders, wrapping it around to cover her with a good deal more force than was required. “We don’t have a whole lot of stuff for you to go throwing anything we give you!”

“I go home!” she snapped, her voice cracking and useless tears flooding her eyes.

“Get in line,” he snapped back. Leaning back on his heels, he made a visible effort to regain his temper. “We all want to go home. But as my mother used to say, we don’t always get what we want. So deal with it.”

Bebe watched him walk away, the set of his shoulders stiff and angry. Try though she did, she could only truly remember her mother ever saying one thing: “Don’t fight the monsters, baby. When they come for you, just don’t fight.”

For the first time in her life, Bebe knew what monsters her mother had meant. Glaring into Ben’s retreating back, she shrugged back out of Tral’s coat and shoved the blanket away. She wasn’t brave enough to throw it, but she did kick it as far from herself as the rock wall behind her would allow.