Campbell (13 page)

The element of surprise he’d created seemed to give what was left of Lucy Campbell a fighting chance with Ski-mask, and as Tal took a step back from his victim, he heard a blood curdling scream coming from the other side of the vehicle, which he could now see was a Lincoln Town Car in fair condition. A few strides put him in front of the most disturbing scene he’d ever encountered, and he dropped the tire iron and took a step back, as he tried to mentally process what he was seeing.
 

She’d taken his eye, as Tal suggested, hours earlier. It was in her hand. Her determination was kind of overwhelming, and left him unsure of what his role in her counterattack against her much larger, mostly naked assailant should be. Ski-mask was bleeding profusely from his eye, and as Tal scanned the scene, he realized that wasn’t the only place. Tal had imagined eye wounds being at the top of his list of disturbing injuries, but Ski-mask had changed his opinion of that.

“Make sure the other one’s dead,” she snapped, glancing at Tal, the look in her eye fairly far from human. “Go!”

“She’s dead,” he replied quietly, glancing down at what had to be grey matter on the front of his already bloodstained t-shirt. “Really dead.”

Tal found himself thrown to the ground by someone unexpected, smaller and more prepared.

“Oh,” he muttered, momentarily looking up at the small guy standing over him before the tire iron connected with his head and he dropped on top of Tal, Lucy replacing him in his line of vision. She looked terrible, Tal thought briefly, as she staggered back, and leaned against the car.
 

“We have to burn everything,” she hissed, moving back to the sobbing mess to Tal’s left. “Make sure that one’s really dead. Put the bodies in the hole.”

Tal scrambled to his feet. The day was becoming much lighter, illuminating the blood and gore around them, the streaks of various things brownish red on the ground. He’d lead a sheltered life growing up, and until that moment, had really and truly thought he’d seen the worst of what people were capable of.

That was before he’d beat a woman he hardly knew to death with a tire iron.
 

Now that he had a few minutes to think, he determined from the rapid changes in light that he hadn’t been gone for all that long, but in that time, Lucy Campbell had held her own in a way he wouldn’t have been able to. She’d been enough of a problem for them to forget all about his escape. She stood up and took in the scene as well, pausing for a long moment at her attacker, who was now entirely blind and sobbing like a baby.

“I don’t know if I want to kill you,” she said quietly, her tone ice cold as she sat just out of his reach. “I don’t know if that’s the worst thing that could happen to you, if it’s what you deserve. What do you think?”

“I think you’re a fucking psychopath,” he groaned, clutching at his face. “And you’re going to get yours.”

***

Lucy mulled things over, her ankles crossed in front of her. She’d won at no small cost to her dignity, but everything she’d done had been voluntary and premeditated. A few seconds of acting for the result she needed. It wasn’t her preferred way of doing things, not by a long shot, but she was alive. She scooped one of his eyes off the ground and looked at it, ignoring his statement, which she believed was factual in every way. “I made myself a promise when I was ten that I’d never, ever let myself be used again like you tried to use me tonight. That I’d die before I let that happen. You almost made me let myself down.”

“Just kill him, Lucy,” a firm voice from behind her said. “Kill him so we can get the fuck out of here.”

She looked up to see Tal standing there, arms crossed, looking exhausted. His expression wasn’t one she’d seen before and was almost as dark as she felt inside.
 

“I want to hurt him,” she said quietly, her words disconnected from all the parts of herself that she liked. “I think…I’ll feel better.”

“You already hurt him. He’s not worth any more effort. There’s food in the car. Water. Please,” he said, with a small grin. “It’s been a really long day, and there are better things to do with being alive than wasting more energy on him.”

The Vice President of West handed her the tire iron.

“He...” she glanced up at him, for the first time in many, many years broken enough to look to someone else for answers. “I don’t know what to do.”

Tal knelt down, careful not to touch her, obviously concerned about how she’d respond. She’d always been self-aware, and in that moment she knew she closely resembled a caged animal. “Let me?” he asked.

She paused, then nodded, handing him back the tire iron. He examined it for a moment, debating the fastest way to end the waste of life in front of him.

After some silent deliberation, he opted for the same method he’d used for Ski-mask’s female companion.
 

“How did you get the upper hand?” Tal pondered out loud, as Lucy stood on weak legs and moved to his side.

“I hurt him with the tire iron before, and then I think I broke his leg, and then I really hurt him,” she mumbled.
 

After the two of them dumped Ski-mask in the hole that had been dug for themselves much earlier that morning, and devoured all the food that was left in the cooler, they collapsed onto the ground, both of them a mess in their respective ways.
 

Panic set in for Lucy as soon as her mind switched from surviving to processing. She was flooded with images, a disgusting assortment from the last hour or so interspersed with her childhood. She felt like she was being assaulted all over again, like there were hands, rough hands, touching her everywhere.

“I need to have a shower,” she whispered, her tone pained. “I need to do that before anything else.”

“I don’t know where—”
 

“You need to drive,” she said, standing. “We need to find somewhere.”

He stood, brushing the dirt off his beyond-salvageable pants. “We don’t know where we are.”

Lucy shoved him roughly against the car. “I need to find a lake, or a river, or a goddamn mud puddle, okay? I need to clean up or I’m going to lose my mind.”

Tal looked down at her, frowning. “I just killed two people,” he snapped. “I’m not exactly the picture of sanity right now either, but let’s think about this here, before we drive off in a car belonging to people who were going to kill us. There’s some sort of water out in the woods. My feet are fucking soaked from walking through it.”

Lucy stared at him hard, her hands still tightly wrapped around the top of his disgusting t-shirt. “Okay,” she finally replied, dropping her hands and wrapping them around her waist. “Let’s go find your water.”

As the sun peeked over the horizon and the morning turned into midday, Lucy was grateful that Tal didn’t comment on the fact that she was
 
crying. It wasn’t the kind of crying that you commented on, she decided. It was the type that you did on your own, the kind that comforting did nothing to help. She wiped her cheeks a few times on their walk, and tried to think of happier things, but everything took her back to the fact that Cole was gone, and because of it, her life was in shambles. She didn’t care so much about what had occurred that morning. It was an accumulation of things. She’d done what she had to do, and felt nothing but pleased with herself over it, even if she was simultaneously disgusted.

“We’re going to need some new clothes,” she whispered, as they came to the tiny stream Tal had stumbled into earlier. “I don’t know where we’ll get them.”

“We can wash ours a bit, maybe?” He tugged his t-shirt off, feeling much more himself without it touching him. “But yeah, we need something new.”

“I need more water than this,” she muttered, looking in the other direction as Tal stripped down to his boxers. “Don’t take your clothes off.”

“Relax,” he mumbled, reveling in the freedom from his sticky clothing. “I think we’re a bit beyond modesty at this point. If you think I’d…” He cringed. “You’re one sick fuck.” He folded his stiff pants and t-shirt into a pile, which he tucked under his arm. “Let’s follow the stream and see if it gets wider.”

“Where are the shoes from?” Lucy asked, when they started walking.

“The third kid, who seemed to just appear.” He looked down at the pristine oversized white gym sneakers he’d taken off him. “I don’t think his clothes would have fit, but these aren’t too bad.”

“Why are men so fucking stupid?” she asked.
 

“I don’t think we’re all stupid, but proportionally, it’s not a good ratio sometimes,” he acknowledged.

“When you do…that, you leave yourself open for all sorts of attacks. It’s not an effective way of gaining power. What did he think? I was just going to lie there while his weak evolutionary characteristics dripped into me? Fuck that,” she spat, her voice wavering. “Fuck.”

“I’m sorry I left,” Tal replied under his breath. “I…It just seemed like the thing to do.”

“It was the thing to do.” She said with a shrug. “And you came back. Even if you hadn’t known you’d come back, you did, which balances out your earlier cowardice. For the record,” she stated, her eyes hard, “I would have killed you if you hadn’t.”

“Great,” he replied dryly, then nodded ahead. “The river seems to open up here, wherever here is.”

The stream fed into a rocky lake with a few shrub covered islands dotting it. Sitting at the edge of it would have been nice, if not for the circumstances. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the water was clear and relatively clean. Tal set his clothes on a rock and started in until he was submerged to the waist.
 

“We didn’t die,” Lucy murmured, when she stood beside him also naked a few minutes later. “Don’t look at me.”

“If you want to talk about what happened...” Tal swallowed, as he turned away. “I mean, I don’t know what happened really. But if you want—”
 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she mumbled, crossing her arms over her chest, as she did her best to wash every bit of emotional grime off her skin. She scrubbed roughly, and wondered why she wasn’t repulsed by being near Tal naked. She hadn’t given it a second thought, stripping down and getting in. He seemed to be in the same place mentally as her, which probably had a lot to do with why she was feeling relatively safe around him. “I’m…I’ll be okay. I hurt him a lot more than he hurt me.”

“I don’t know how he would have possibly hurt you worse than you hurt him.” Tal said, washing the brain matter from his arms. “If they’re any indication of what East is, I have no idea why we’re intimidated by them. Those kids were weak. Stupid.”

“No,” Lucy said, looking at Tal’s back. He was lean, she noticed. And freckly, the kind that almost demanded connecting the dots with a finger. She looked away when he caught her looking. “They were pretty strong. Just stupid. If I hadn’t…I’m not sure anyone could have operated with what I did to that guy, and the other two went off looking for you.”

“They didn’t find me.”

“Idiots,” she said dryly. “I could hear you running. I would have found you.”

Tal found a rock that left him submerged to his shoulders and sat down, briefly submerging himself in the water entirely. It was cold, but it felt good. Better than anything he could remember.

“Where are we?” Lucy asked, when he brought his head out of the water. “I don’t know how long we drove for, and this doesn’t look like it does around home. Is this what West looks like?”

He turned to look at her and she ducked under the water to her chin and squinted in the sunlight and did her best to untangle her hair. “It’s not LA,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve never been to most of the
 
mid-central states. Maybe we’re there.”

“That would make sense if they were from East.” She put her hand over her face to shade herself from the sun. “We’ve got to get back to Campbell.”

“We’ve got to get out of here, that’s for sure,” Tal replied, for the first time questioning what water he was bathing in. “I hope there aren’t gators here.”

Lucy’s eyes went wide. “Fuck.”

Tal’s hands immediately went to his parts, and he started back to shore. Since everything else was still covered in guts and brains, he pulled his boxers on and crawled up on a rock to dry. Lucy watched him cautiously from her position in the water.

“Turn around,” she ordered, doing her best to maintain some air of authority, even though she knew she might crumble at any minute.
 

“You’ve still got blood on your shoulders,” Tal said quietly, as he shuffled around on the rock, seemingly indifferent to her modesty . She knew that if she needed him to turn around, he’d turn around. Killing three people with a tire iron gave him a machismo pass for a while.
 

“I think we’re pretty far south,” Lucy said quietly, swatting a mosquito off her arm once she’d redressed. “Regardless, we head north.”

“Agreed,” he said quietly, sneaking a glance at her battered and bruised form as she did her best to dress quickly.

There were certainly worse people to be stranded with in the middle of the unknown with than Tal Bauman, she decided.
 

Maybe.
 

Chapter 9

November 2001

Fort Macleod, Alberta

A loud rap on the door caused Lucy to jump to her feet, with Andrew hot on her heels. They’d been half asleep on the couch, watching
Beverly Hills 90210
late into the night.

“Who’s here so late?” she wondered out loud, glancing at her brother, who had his newly acquired semi-automatic rifle at the ready. “Fuck’s sake. Put that away.”

Andrew shrugged and shook his head. “No.”

“Put the damn safety on.”

“Fuck no,” he muttered, his voice cracking as he peered through the peephole. “It’s a bunch of guys.”

“What do you want?” Lucy called through the door.

“We’re here for some cows,” the biggest boy called back, peering through the side window. “We heard you got some.”

You paying?” Andrew called back.

“Good money,” was the reply from another boy.

“I’ll blow your brains out if you’re fucking with us,” Andrew replied gruffly, upon opening the door.