The Scarlet Empress (7 page)

Cam made the mistake of trying to shift positions in bed. Needles pricked her body through the mattress, joining forces with the demons that battered her day and night with their sharp, cloven little hooves. She forced her eyelids open with all the smoothness of prying a top off a rusted can. “Hay . . .” she croaked.

“Zhurihe,” the girl corrected patiently.

No. Hay,
Cam wanted to tell her.
Straw.
Where was she that there was so much hay? High over her head motes of hay dust floated in the sunshine pouring through cracks in the wooden tepee. A yurt, Zhurihe had called it. So many questions. How would she ask them all? “Tell me,” Cam croaked. “Tell me what happened.” She wanted to hear it again, to hear what had happened to her. Maybe this time it would make sense; maybe this time the tears would stay dammed up until Zhurihe finished with her explanation, telling of unspeakable horrors in that high, lilting, English-accented voice of hers. “It is 2176,” the woman began. “The world has changed. . . .”

Cam closed her eyes, trying to absorb it all.

“Nuclear war destroyed everything you knew. It’s been fifty years. There is no modern communication, no electronics. No motorized travel.”

“America, too?”

“Yes, everything is gone,” Zhurihe confirmed in a gentle voice. “There is no America, no Europe. No Asia. Only this place. Mongolia. You are here now. You live with us on a farm—a cooperative, a collective farm. These people, they’re my family, though not by blood. We grow many things here. Raise livestock. And we maintain a shrine, a religious shrine, where travelers come to pray and partake of the hot springs. You will share in the work when you are well. We are your family now. . . .”

We are your family now.

Zhurihe had told her that over and over. That they were family, that this was her home. That nothing else existed. If Cam could scream, she would. If she could make fists without convulsing in agony, she would. All she could do was close her eyes to slow the falling tears, to get a grip on the pain, the anguish inside and out that held her in a relentless grip. Mongolia . . . It was a long way from Korea. How did she get here? And why alone?
Bree, what ever happened to you?

The ball of sorrow in her chest expanded. The last she’d heard from Bree was on the radio after they’d been shot down. Then Cam had been captured. After that, her captor had done the answering for her, using Cam’s radio to answer Bree with clicks of the mike button, luring Bree closer, to Cam’s outraged, gagged-and-bound horror. They’d been brought to a cave, tied up, and drugged. The next thing Cam knew, she’d woken in this world of pain blunted by a haze of confusion.

She struggled to make her lips form words. “Must find other pilot,” she whispered. Bree would know what to do.

“No.” Zhurihe’s answer was sharp. “There are gangs, dangerous gangs. They roam the less civilized areas, which encompass most of the world. Yet here, on our little farm, we are safe, free of radiation.”

Safe . . .

Free . . .

This is your home now. . . .

A rooster squawked, warning the world of sunrise. Prying one eye open, and then the other, Cam blinked up at a dark, conical, smoke-filled ceiling above her bed. It always took a few minutes to distance herself from the dreams she had of the long, painful days of her recovery. Why did the dreams come every night? Maybe it was her mind’s way of analyzing everything Zhurihe told her. Yet if that was the case, then why hadn’t anything worthwhile come of that analysis?

Feeling like a ninety-year-old grandma, Cam rolled from her side to her back. Mercy, she hurt. All over. Her bones, her muscles . . . shoot, her damn eyelashes were killing her. She wished she could blame the hay-stuffed mattress, but she knew her daily morning pain was a consequence of more than that.

It was only bad like this the first few minutes after waking, when she was fixing to get out of bed, not all the time like it used to be. Over the course of the day exercise worked out most of the kinks, but at night the pain settled in again as she slept.

The bed made crunching noises and sent puffs of dust into the air that tickled her nose and made her sneeze.

Hay. It was everywhere in the yurt. Cam wrinkled her nose at the powdery sweet odor, the first scent she’d recognized after being revived, and the first thing she’d tasted, felt, and seen after becoming aware. Straw cushioned the dirt floor; it fed the horses and served as bedding. The cloyingly sweet smell filled her nostrils from dawn until dusk, making her nose itch. It found its way into her homespun wool undies, pricking and itching, and it tangled in her hair.
If I never see, feel, smell, or taste another piece of hay for the rest of my life, I’ll be the luckiest woman alive.

More roosters crowed. Dawn meant it was time to accomplish her first chore of the day: milking the goats.

And she used to complain about early flight briefings? At least no one required her to be mentally alert while tugging on goat nipples. It had gotten to the point where she could milk the herd in her sleep—which was likely to be the case this morning. Her body was not happy after the physical exertion she’d put it through yesterday. Not happy at all. She’d be lucky if she could walk. The people who sheltered her understood little about physical therapy. Yet Cam knew that if she wanted to heal, if she wanted to get strong again, she’d have to force herself through the daily torture disguised as training. She looked at her hands: scratched, chapped, swollen in spots from frequent falls. Those hands had once held the throttle of an F-16. Those hands now milked goats. What would her hands be doing in five years? Ten? Fifty? Did people live that long anymore? Did they want to?

Once, her hopes and dreams for her life had stretched out like a wide-open country road in front of her. She’d known exactly where she was going, and how she was going to get there; all she had to do was follow the path.
Now she couldn’t see much past the tip of her nose. She hated driving blind.

“Well,” she whispered to herself, emphasizing her Southern accent, which in truth she’d been losing slowly over time, “it sure don’t matter now, Miss Scarlet, does it?” Scarlet was spelled with a single T because the guys in her fighter squadron who’d given her the call sign and written the name on her helmet hadn’t known
Gone with the Wind
from the Weather Channel. “Now you milk goats.”

A one-way ticket to hell—that was what she’d surely bought that day the missile slammed into her F-16. One minute she was running for her life through thick North Korean forests; the next she was here, in a cold, remote, postapocalyptic no-man’s-land. Everything else was one big, fat, useless chunk missing from her memory.

“I can always tell when you’re thinking about the past.”

Cam rolled over. A pretty seventeen-year-old girl smiled at her from the adjacent bed. “Zhurihe! When did you get home?”

“A few hours ago.” Zhurihe gave a distinctive tiny sneeze that ended in a squeak.

Cam smiled. “Allergies again.”

Eyes watering, Zhurihe smiled. “They stay with me after I visit certain places.”

Cam knew better than to ask just where those
certain places
were, or what she’d done while there. The girl disappeared with no warning for days, and once for weeks at a time. “Mushroom picking again?”

“Uh-huh,” Zhurihe replied.

Yeah, right.
The girl’s response brought back Cam’s
childhood memories of sneaking off to find her brothers behind the old tumbledown tobacco barn. They’d bribed her with Krispy Kremes so she wouldn’t make a peep about catching them chewing and smoking when they were supposed to be off picking blackberries. Cam had a strong feeling that Zhurihe hadn’t been picking mushrooms, that she never was. The girl was a pretty teenager with a baby face and braids that made her look even younger, but something about that face looked mischievous. Cam had no proof, only a nagging feeling that there was a missing piece in the puzzle. Yet it was on one of her supposed mushroom-picking missions that Zhurihe claimed she’d discovered Cam buried under the permafrost, snug in her high-tech casket.

At the same time, despite her sporadic tenancy here and Cam’s moments of doubt, Zhurihe remained an emotional anchor, and had been ever since Cam had been set adrift in this world she no longer recognized. Zhurihe was a Mongol name that translated to
heart
in English, a fitting label for this teenager who was, bless her heart, equal parts instructor, guide, cheerleader, and a shoulder to cry on. That Zhurihe—and everyone else in Mongolia—spoke perfect English was a mystery in itself, something about a long-dead king who’d unified all of Asia under one flag and one language before the war. But English? In Asia? It was hard to believe that any one person could have had that much power, charisma—and trust. Cam had thought the modern world incapable of producing leaders like that anymore. A tragedy that that the extraordinary man was now dead. His successors, too.

Cam reached across the space dividing their two small beds and gave the girl’s hand a welcome-home squeeze.
“It’s good to see you back. I missed your company. And you’re right—I was thinking about the past. Bree, specifically.”

“Surely she wasn’t as good a friend as me!”

Cam smirked at the ceiling. Zhurihe seemed at times to have the simple mind of a child. And yet Cam had witnessed too many examples of her feisty cleverness to believe it to be true. She was an enigma. “We couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds. It didn’t matter. Bree was the sister I always wished I had.”

“You had five brothers.”

“Five older, overprotective brothers.” Zhurihe never seemed to tire of Cam’s descriptions of her family. “I miss them.” A persistent ache, much faded now, clutched at her chest. She let her hand drop. “They’re dead now, all of them, and no matter how much I think of them, they’re not coming back. I know that. I’ve accepted that. But not when it comes to Bree.” Cam searched Zhurihe’s shadowed, earnest face. “She could be alive, you know. She’s the one person who could have followed me into the future. I’m going to find out what happened to her, Zhurihe.” It was why she battled her clumsy, aching body every day, desperate to be strong again, so she could take charge of her fate—and Bree’s.

Zhurihe pursed her lips and shook her head. “It’s too dangerous outside of the valley.”

“All my life people have been telling me to give up. I’m used to it.”

“Listen to me, Cam. Do
not
try. You won’t get far. Maybe not even past these mountains.”

It was always the same story. Zhurihe underestimated her. Everyone did. Even when dressed in a flight suit and
combat boots, a .45 strapped to her thigh and an againstthe-regulations switchblade wedged in her pocket, Cam knew her blond rich-girl looks and bred-in grace screamed that she was something else, that she was a woman like her mother, a Southern belle from a wealthy Georgia family, raised in a world of old money, cotillions, and rigid expectations. No one could believe it when she pursued an appointment to the Air Force Academy, and that she actually graduated. No one had thought she could do it. They never said it aloud, though, they were too well mannered for that, but she’d seen it in their faces. It made her victories all the sweeter. Defying expectations every step of the way, she was one of the few females accepted into Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas, finishing as a distinguished graduate, and at F-16 training, too. One by one by one she’d shut the cynics up. But there were always more of them, fixing to doubt her wherever she went, even after she’d received the coveted Gabreski Award for being the top air-to-air student in the USAF. It seemed if you were shapely, blond, and soft-spoken, no one figured you could kick ass. But not Bree Maguire. Never Bree. When Cam had gotten to her assignment in Korea, the infamous Banzai had, after flying a single mission with her, told the squadron at the bar that night that “If Chuck Yeager had made a kid with Scarlett O’Hara, it would have been Cam.”

It was the finest compliment anyone had ever given her.

The roosters crowed some more. Outside, the tinkling of cowbells rang in the morning calm. Cam pushed to a sitting position. “Enough lolling around in bed. I can
hear the goats calling my name.” She grabbed for one of the two crutches leaning against the wall by the bed and used it to push off the mattress. The floor was icy cold under her bare feet. “Want me to fix you breakfast?”

Zhurihe shook her head. She was never very hungry after coming home from her absences.

“How about I take the goats up to the pasture this morning? Then you can stay in bed.”

“Oh, would you, Cam? How can I make it up to you?”

“Tell me you’re staying around for a while this time.”

Zhurihe looked coy. “I would like that.”

A typically vague answer. It saddened Cam more than angered her. She enjoyed Zhurihe’s company, and missed her when she was gone. She had so little else to cling to in this world.

Zhurihe threw a blanket over her head and disappeared from sight, only a muffled squeak of a sneeze giving away who lay under the lump of brown wool. Cam wished she could stay in bed, too, but the ladies awaited her, udders filled to bursting.

The first challenge of the day was not stumbling and falling into the hole outside in the dirt that served as a toilet. If that meant sacrificing her pride and completing the task with the help of a crutch, that was fine with her.

Cam rinsed her face and brushed her teeth using a bowl of cold water. Then she fixed her wheat-colored hair in the same style as Zhurihe’s, but her braids were mere stubs no longer than the back of her neck. Cam studied herself critically in the small mirror. Somehow the style didn’t have the hoped-for youthful effect it did on Zhurihe. She was only twenty-five, but her eyes were prematurely old. Hollow, they reflected her devastating
loss. While she no longer wept big buckets of tears when she pondered what she’d lost, grief had left a permanent stain.

Cam turned away from the sad face in the mirror. After stripping and changing into soft layers of brightly colored wool and a pair of cowhide boots lined with the wooly undercoat of a yak, she fixed herself a plate of bread and goat cheese and ate standing up in the kitchen. Her leg muscles were so stiff and painful today that she feared not being able to leave a chair once she sat in it.