Lady Grace & the War for a New World (Earth's End Book 2) (30 page)

Part Three

50

Jeremy stood, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, then looked around the burnt-out campfire. His muscles hurt more than he thought possible. Every step reminded him of the battle the day before. He moved stiffly, but as quietly as he could. The sack Ellie had made—whatever it was—hung from the oak a hundred yards behind the camp.

It was larger than when he’d seen it last. Its gray, papery exterior looked like the wasps’ nests he’d seen in the olden times, but this one was four feet across. It almost looked like a cabbage, attached to the oak’s limb by a heavy stalk. Broad, flat leaves were wrapped around a mass inside. Eggs? How could that be? Ellie carried her babies internally.

He wanted to find Ellie and thank her for everything that she’d done. But she wasn’t perched on the limb above her sack as she had been before the battle.

Jeremy poked around, circling farther from their camp. He walked past a massive oak and stopped.

Ellie lay on the ground, fallen on her side. It looked like a chunk of her abdomen had broken in; a piece maybe eight inches square was gone from one of the plates of her belly. He could see inside her. She was hollow. Nothing inside. No bug guck. No white stuff. She was empty.

“Ellie,” he said. She didn’t answer. She would never answer, not even with an angry buzz. She was hollow because the white stuff she’d spread over everyone’s injuries was her. She’d killed herself saving the others.

Jeremy’s eyes stung. His chest froze. He felt saliva at the edges of his mouth. He couldn’t move. This couldn’t happen. Nothing like this could happen.

“Ellie?” he bent forward and touched her. Her bulging belly disintegrated, shattering into hundreds of pieces. He bent and picked up a hunk, wanting to stop the terrible falling apart. The little chunk became dust in his hand.

The wind came, just a gust. Ellie’s wings caught it. They detached from her body soundlessly, not even making a pop. They tumbled along the ground. He ran after them.

Jeremy caught one wing, stuffed it under his arm, and chased the other one. He caught it and held them both to his chest. The wings’ front edge, a sturdy spine, was still intact, but some of the lovely iridescent material that held her aloft had shattered. No matter. He’d keep them. He put the wings under his arm and went back to where her body had been.

“Ellie!” he called, looking round. “Where are you?” He spun. “Where are you? You can’t
die
, Ellie. You’re not allowed to die.”

Nothing comforted him. Nothing spoke to him. No Commands or God or Great One. No Native American shaman or Buddhist monk appeared. Nothing came to him to wipe away his tears. That’s what he always got: nothing.

Ellie, you can’t leave me! What am I supposed to
do
? His soul screamed. He looked down and saw the most enduring part of her. Those little hooves. He had thought they were adorable when he first saw them. They made her seem like a little pony and let her dance en pointe without distorting her feet. They let her dance the way she had through the days and nights of their life together. Through love, and storms.

His mouth opened and he almost screamed. He stopped himself and picked up her hooves. The stingers were retracted. He put them in his pocket and ran.

He would never come back. He would never love anyone again. He never wanted to see anyone in this shitty world.

51

“I’ll keep an eye on him. You go back and get the others ready to break camp,” Bud said, sitting easily astride his horse. Wes and his mount were next to him, watching Jeremy run across the plain. He was heading toward the river. At least he’d get home going that way.

They stood on the rise where Lena had done her shooting.

Bud and Wes had done an early morning patrol, looking for dead bodies they’d missed the day before and any new spiders and Bigs. It looked like Lena had picked off everything that ran out the back way, but they wanted to make sure that nothing needing killing reared up anywhere. They got up at the break of dawn before anyone and saw Ellie’s body before Jeremy did. They debated telling him, but decided he’d find out soon enough. They had to reconnoiter.

The group had agreed that going back to the cliff by the river was the best bet. Too many bad things had happened where they were. Not to mention the view being ruined by the smoking pit of the underground.

“You watch Jeremy and I’ll try to get the camp going,” Wes said, wheeled his mount, and headed back to the impromptu encampment. “May take a couple days though. Those horses have never pulled a travois.”

Bud rode down the hill in the direction Jeremy had gone. He wanted to give him privacy to grieve, but make sure he didn’t do anything stupid. Once he got on the flat, he followed the tips of Ellie’s wings. He’d let Jeremy run until he slowed down by himself.

“I’m not going back, so don’t try to make me,” Jeremy shouted over his shoulder. “I knew you were following me.” They’d gone a fair stretch when Bud closed the distance between them.

“I’m not trying to take you back. I’m going to get poles for the travois,” Bud replied. “We got the little kids and the new people and Sam to get back to the cliff. They can’t walk.”

“Oh.” Jeremy slowed down.

“You can go your own way. The rattlesnakes are done hunting for the morning. You’ll be pretty safe.”

Jeremy slowed further.

“I did see some bear scat back there. Grizzlies were a real problem in California in the old days. They’d rear up twelve feet out of the grass. Real bad dispositions, too.”

“This isn’t California; it’s Connecticut.”

“Bullshit, Jeremy. You know as well as I do that this place is no place. This here grassland with the big oaks is
California
. I’ll tell you exactly where it is in California, too. It’s the Santa Ynez Valley, down by Santa Barbara before any humans got there.”

“I know. My mom had a ranch near there. It looked just like this.”

“So what do you think?”

“What do you mean?” Jeremy was walking very slowly, but still didn’t turn around.

“This place is bogus, Jeremy. It’s made up. Somebody made it up, and they’re keeping it going.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, what if Ellie’s people—and I want to tell you I’m sorry about her, Jeremy. She was a really good …
person
. And son, you’re losing a lot of her wings holding them like that. Why don’t you let me see if I can make them stronger?”

Jeremy stopped and turned toward Bud, holding the wings to his chest. He looked at them. They were eight feet long and did look ragged after his treatment of them. “What can you do to them?”

“I don’t know. I been doin’ so much magic lately, I thought something might come to me.” Bud swung off his horse, which didn’t take too kindly to the wings being waved around. The mare snorted loudly and pulled away. Bud handed Jeremy the reins. “Here, you hold her. I’ll see what I can do.”

When he put his hands on the wings, that Power that had been with him so much came over him. It came over the wings, too. For a moment, they were enveloped in blue light. Bud stood with his eyes closed. He opened them, and touched the wings.

“That’s better. They’re just as light and pretty, but I don’t think they’ll break.”

Jeremy took them back, squeezing his lips tight and holding Ellie’s remains hard against his chest.

“We might as well just walk along together. Boy, I sure am worried,” Bud said congenially. “I’ll be damned if I know how to get forty tree trunks back to the camp by myself with just this one horse. We need those for the travois poles. If I do get them back, I don’t know how we’re going to get all those kids and people back to the cliff through the woods. We could barely ride through on horses. The travois will be too wide. And if we walk along this oak savannah, what about the bears and wolves?

“If we make it through that, I don’t know how we’ll get them up the cliff to where we live. How will we lift
Sam
, for instance?”

“We have a big pulley,” Jeremy said. “It’s in the equipment container with the weapons.”

“OK. We just have to set a pulley in the rock and drag ‘em up. I don’t know how to do that. What’s going to happen when those kids start walking? They will, you know. Some good food and room to move, they’ll be walking. They’ll fall off the cliff. And how is that guy with no legs going to get around? I don’t know how to make a rig for him. You’d need wheels and who knows what.”

Jeremy stopped. “Did you really see bearshit?”

“Swear to God. A big mound.”

“Why are we walking around with bears here? We need to get out of here.”

“Well, it wasn’t that fresh. About thirteen hours, I’d say. I got a gun. One thing this useless saddle has is a scabbard for a rifle. I could also blue-beam ‘em. I’m getting really good at that.”

“What are you talking about? There are bears here!” Jeremy stood with his eyes bulging and feet spread.

“Yeah. And rattlesnakes. But when it gets hot, they get out of the sun. And the mountain lions are probably closer to the cliff area, though they live in California, too. Around Lake Cachuma, lots of cats. Illegal to hunt them in my time. Probably OK now.”

“What are you doing? Trying to scare me?”

“Yeah. You shouldn’t be walking around unarmed here, Jeremy. And we need you. There’s lots needs doing and you’re the best one to do it.”

He stopped and glared at Bud, “Well what am
I
supposed to do? My wife turned into an
insect
, saved all sorts of people, and then
died
. What am I supposed to do?”

Jeremy turned his back to Bud again and clutched the wings. He stood there and Bud wondered if he’d explode or implode. He could see Jeremy’s body shaking from his feet to the stubs of his dreads. He was holding the wings so tightly, they must be strong as steel, because they would have broken in his grasp.

“Just leave me alone. OK. Leave me alone for a while.”

Bud rode on ahead. He turned back and Jeremy had slumped to the ground. He was holding the wings like you would a baby. And then his head fell forward. Bud rode on and kept watch. If he heard Jeremy crying, or if he heard anything at all, he’d never tell.

“It’s not an egg sack,” Jeremy said when they took up walking again. “The goldie doctor told Ellie she couldn’t have kids any more. And we haven’t done anything to make a baby, anyway. ”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. Some wasp thing. I don’t know what it is.” Jeremy sent a pointed look to Bud. “I do know that it stays here. When we leave, it stays where Ellie left it. She made it, and it stays where she put it.”

“That’s fine, son,” Bud said. He sent a thought message to Wes that no one should disturb the thing in the tree, period.

They hit the forest. Finding the tall, skinny trees wasn’t hard. Bud blue-beamed more than forty of them down and then stripped the branches off. All they had to do was get them back to the base camp.

“I wish we both had horses,” Jeremy said. “We could each pull twenty back. I could use the top half of my commando suit and put it around the horse’s chest, wrapping the arms like a girth.” In seconds, Jeremy outlined how to make a travois and haul the trunks back.

“We can do it with this one horse and walk next to her,” Bud said.

“You can’t just whistle and call another one?”

“Sorry. I do blue beams and healing. And don’t tell anyone about the blue beams. Many traditional people wouldn’t like that.”

“Talking about them, or having them?”

“Both. Most folks, even my People, can’t imagine stuff like what happens around Grandfather. They think it’s sci-fi. But it’s not. Holy men and women like him are rare, but they exist. I can’t do anything like what he could do. And usually, stuff like you’ve seen happens in the Mogollon Bowl with Grandfather present only. Must be a really big reason for us to succeed here, or we’d be dead.”

Jeremy looked at him. “I’m glad I know you, Bud.”

“Put those wings down, son. I need a hug more than you do.” He put his arms around Jeremy without waiting for his answer. They both needed a hug.

“What about this being a bogus world, Bud?” Jeremy asked after they’d continued a while.

“Wait a second. We’re being tailed.” He pulled the rifle out of the scabbard and handed it to Jeremy. “Don’t miss.”

The bear stood there, roaring, five-inch long claws pawing the air. Jeremy sensed he had one second to shoot it before it charged.

He used two shots. Its heart was where he thought it was.

The animal dropped with a thud that caused dust and bits of grass to fly.

The mare, heavily tranquilized by Bud’s touch, and way stronger than Jeremy thought she was, pulled the travois, the poles, the hide, head, paws, and the choicer bear cuts into the camp way after dark.

“Come on, folks, we got bear steak tonight. We got bear liver, and we got a new warrior here. Jeremy, the bear killer!” Bud called out as they entered the site.

Everyone rose and cheered.