Campbell (3 page)

She pushed Tal’s shorts down with her feet before wrapping one of her legs around his waist, pulling him on top of her as he fumbled with her shorts. She reluctantly released him when he motioned that he wanted to remove them, and reached for a condom from the bedside table.

Condoms were an early reinvention; one that made life far more bearable.
 

He regretted ever touching her, giving into something that should have stayed in the realm of perverse fantasy, but he did it anyway, giving in to her, and to himself.
 

“This is it,” he whispered, brushing her damp hair off her forehead and tracing the underside of her breast with his index finger before rolling the condom off. “I’m done. Leah, we can’t...what if—”

“Fuck you,” she muttered, pulling the top sheet around her, as she climbed out of bed, avoiding his eyes. “I’m making pasta for dinner. It’ll be ready in a half hour.”

Chapter 2

June 2001

Fort Macleod, Alberta

“Lucy, come here,” her grandfather slurred from the living room. She could tell exactly where he was sitting from where she stood in the kitchen, and she knew exactly what he wanted. Her face constricted into a tight grimace. She looked down at her hands, the dirt shoved under her nails; wished she could think about anything other than what she knew was going to happen.

“We could run away,” Cole whispered to his sister, his eyes wide and sad, his hand on her arm. “We don’t have to stay here.”

“If we run away, they’ll find us, and if they don’t send us back here, they’ll separate us.” She reached up and pulled his hand away, biting her lip, desperate not to cry. She never wanted anyone to see her cry. “I don’t want to be apart. We need to figure out another plan.”

“Maybe we can stay with Andrew.”

The colour drained from Lucy’s face at the thought. “He’s no better off where he is, Cole, believe me.”

“But he doesn’t have to—”
 

“Girl, where are you?” Isaiah Smith rasped, the ice from his fourth whisky of the night clinking in the glass. “Get in here.”

Lucy gave her brother a resigned frown and nodded towards the staircase. “Go on upstairs now.”

He took off up the stairs, skipping every other one in a desperate effort to escape what he knew was about to take place. For the first six months they’d lived with their grandfather, Lucy had done the same, but for her, hiding under the bed or in a closet wasn’t a solution. It just made Isaiah angrier when he’d pull her out from wherever she was. Then he’d yell at her and call her disrespectful, and it would be worse.

As Lucy slowly walked into the room, her eyes cast on the floor, her grandfather smiled. She’d enjoyed being his favourite when they’d first been sent here after her mother’s death, but that was short lived when she came to understand what being a favourite entailed.
 

He put on a good show, for Child Services, her grandfather did. So good, that when her older brother Andrew had broken the old man’s nose, it was the boy that was sent away, considered to be delinquent. Disturbed. A problem in the family unit. Hints had been made surrounding an inappropriate relationship between her and her older brother, the supposed cause of Lucy’s problems at school.

And now they weren’t allowed to talk to Andrew anymore, her and Cole.

“You do your homework?” Isaiah asked, setting his drink down and shuffling his newspaper onto the floor, clearing his lap.

Lucy nodded, still keeping her distance, hands clasped in front of her. “Yep. Cole too.”

“You look just like your momma when she was your age,” Isaiah noted, for what had to be the hundredth time. “A pretty girl too.”

The air felt like pea soup, thick in Lucy’s lungs as she tried to keep breathing. “I’ve…I’m going to go read. I’ve got a book report.”

Sometimes he let her go, after grumbling something about her ungrateful behavior, and they wouldn’t see him again until the next evening, when she’d be forced to try her luck once again.

That night was not one of those nights.
 

July 2012

Campbell

“So, just let me do the talking. She’ll listen to me,” Connor said, flipping through his ever-present notebook as their plane began its descent onto what looked like an abandoned road, yellow wheat fields stretching forever on either side of it enclosed by mountains to the west. The day was already in full swing, despite the ungodly early hour. “How do I look?”

Tal sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Do you think you’re going to seduce her? That she’ll see you in your fucking skin tight white t-shirt and decide to align with us, just like that? It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing, and it’s six in the morning.”

Connor was not dissuaded. “This is when she said to come. We’ve got to give her the illusion of some control over the situation.” He shut his notebook. “Make her think that we’re caving. And hey, maybe I will seduce her. Maybe I’ll talk her into marrying me. I hear she’s hot, and that would lock things down. I’m good with women. It’s one of my strengths.”

“You’re delusional,” Tal said bluntly, thinking back on many times Connor’s bold statement had been proven wrong. “She knows she has us by the balls. That’s why we’re arriving at six in the morning, like she asked.”

A dismissive hand was waved. “She’s not as tough as people think. What people say about her? There’s no way she did those things.” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t do that. Who would do that? That’s the kind of thing you tell people to scare them. It’s not the kind of thing you actually do.”

Tal wasn’t so sure the rumors about the Campbell’s brutality and disrespect for vital body parts were true either, but they were unsettling nonetheless.
 

The Vancouver trip the month before had been a complete and utter bust. They’d negotiated for ten hours over what amounted to buttons and string in Tal’s opinion, and in the end, they’d more or less been laughed out of the city. It was humiliating, the way they’d been treated, especially since the leader of the city—a cocky eighteen year-old named Dev—had told them that they’d had no intentions of aligning themselves with West again, despite their reassurances that they’d speak with Connor. Not long ago, representatives from West had been welcomed anywhere they went.
 

After that unfortunate discussion, it took three weeks for the Campbells to respond to Connor’s request for a meeting.
 

“Let me do the talking,” Connor reiterated, as they stepped off the plane and onto a dusty cornfield thick with cobwebs in the early morning light.
 

Tal sighed. “I think we lay it all out and see what we can work out with her. She’s not an idiot, obviously. Kids want change and she’s the change. Who the fuck knows what kind of change, but change nonetheless.”

“We don’t even know what she’s offering everyone else, because they won’t tell us. I’m sure it’s the same old shit, packaged differently.” The president of West took his suitcase from the pilot, Juan, a stocky Mexican kid who he’d known almost his whole life and who doubled as his bodyguard. “I probably should have brough some girls,” he said under his breath, as they looked out onto the vast prairie plain spread out in front of them. “The brothers probably would have liked that.”

“I don’t know what you’re hoping to accomplish by being here,” Tal muttered, thinking back on how early he’d had to get up to be here now, alone, waiting in the middle of nowhere for someone he wasn’t sure was going to show. No matter how many times he told Connor he wanted out, he was ignored. He knew he needed to play the part for the time being, but he wasn’t sure what decisions he would make afterward.

Connor raised his eyebrows, obviously irritated with Tal’s statement. “I’m hoping to accomplish something useful, instead of watching our country get picked apart by vultures. I’m hoping to be able to continue to eke out a place for us in the world that doesn’t leave us fucking destitute. Do you think Leah would survive five minutes as a seamstress or a farmer?”

“I think you’re exaggerating.”

Connor leaned in. “If this goes wrong, we’re likely to end up dead, and whatever vultures are circling in West waiting for us to fail, would love to swoop in and drag your smoking hot cousin off to some Chino brothel and whore her out to whoever’s got something mediocre to trade, that is if East doesn’t get there first.”

Tal resisted an overwhelming urge to punch Connor in the face, but clenched his teeth instead. “Fine. We’ll see what we can do, but don’t get your hopes up.”

The morning crawled by and anticipation of the meeting they’d planned began to develop in Tal’s gut. He watched Connor for a while, amazed by how calm he was about the fact that they were sitting ducks a million miles from home, and so far, nothing had gone according to plan.
 

Connor’s cell phone, not surprisingly, didn’t work in Campbell. They waited with the plane until nearly noon and had begun to discuss walking in the direction that an old Chevette that flew by twenty minutes earlier had gone, when a beat-up Ford pickup truck with more rust than green paint approached them from the east. As the truck came closer, it slowed down and eventually stopped inches from the plane. Two men, one obese and one bone thin, almost bowling ball and pin-like in their appearance, got out dressed in their finest farm attire, reeking like pot. The skinny driver had a joint tucked behind his ear, and the larger passenger had his in his mouth half smoked, but not lit.
 

“Lucy said to come get you,” the driver, the skinny one with a nest of dirty blond hair said, lighting up his joint. “You’ll have to sit in the back if there’s more than two of you.”

Connor and Tal exchanged a look. “In the back of the truck?” Tal said, more curious than anything. “Is there even a back of the truck?”

“Truck’s fine,” the larger one with the ruddy complexion said, running his fingers through his dark, greasy hair. “Rust is mostly on the surface. We aren’t going far.”

Tal, Connor, and Juan locked up the plane, after reassurances that it would be fine where it was, and climbed into the back of the truck with their bags. They’d brought gifts for the Campbells, mostly luxury items that they didn’t imagine anyone would be able to get there, but, as they drove through miles and miles of fields, Tal realized that these gifts were probably the last things anyone living here would have an interest in.
 

They would have been better bringing denim, or baseball hats.

Or rust paint.
 

“This town smells like shit!” Tal shouted, wrinkling up his nose as the agricultural smells consumed his nostrils.

“These guys drive like shit!” Connor replied, rolling his eyes, his voice faint over the rattling truck and wind whistling around them. “And they were hours late.”

“She’s fucking with us,” Tal shouted back. “That’s exactly what this is about.”

“Maybe so,” he replied tersely. “But we’re here now.”

The drive took about half an hour, eventually turning from fields to sporadically-placed farm houses, and then to a small town, made up of some older, original houses, and some haphazardly slapped together shacks. If this was Campbell’s base, Tal decided maybe this wasn’t as much of a problem as he’d originally anticipated. He felt encouraged by this.

That was until he started seeing the vast numbers of people that lived in the town they were driving through. They seemed to crawl out of every possible hole in the wall. They looked happy. Well fed, with rosy cheeks. Just like he’d heard.

The truck slowed at the far end of the town and drove up a long driveway to a large blue farmhouse covered in weathered cedar shingles. There were a few cars out front; a much nicer truck, an SUV, and a blue hatchback. The fact that they’d arrived in a rusty pickup was not lost on Tal.

“Nothing to write home about,” Connor said, rolling his eyes at the scene. “We’ve got this.”

A petite blonde girl approached the truck first, and peered up at the visitors, her hand shadowing her eyes from the sun.
 

“You boys missed breakfast,” she said, shaking her head, a slight grin twitching across her mouth. “Too bad. We made something special.”

She was pretty, the girl, in a long black dress that showed off her shapely figure and a pair of cowboy boots, her face dashed with a healthy dose of freckles from the sun. Connor and Tal looked at her appreciatively, before shooting each other a glare.
 

“Are you Lucy?” Connor asked graciously, extending a hand once they’d climbed off the truck. “It’s great to be here—”

The girl chuckled and shook her head, refusing the hand. “No. I’m Zoey. I’m Lucy’s girlfriend. Lucy’s out, taking care of some things.”

The three of them exchanged another look. Tal chuckled to himself as he watched Connor’s seduction fantasy evaporate into thin air as his face dropped at the realization that he was really and truly not Lucy Campbell’s type.

Not that Tal imagined Connor would have been even if the queen of wheat fields liked men.

They followed the girl inside, flanked by their drivers from the truck, who made themselves at home in a large, modern kitchen, rummaging through the cupboards and the fridge until they found some bread and what looked to be peanut butter. Nothing was offered to the West envoy.
 

A long silence followed, with Zoey watching them all, arms crossed from a seat at the head of the table. Finally, she spoke.

“I hope you boys have some sort of plan. Lucy doesn’t think you do and she doesn’t like having her time wasted.”

“We’re just here to figure out what’s best for everyone,” Connor said, doing his best to keep a smile on his face. “That’s all.”

“So you’re signing everything over?” Zoey looked up at him, batting her eyelashes. “See, that’s what I thought might happen, but I’m not much of a strategist. Good for you guys,” she said, beaming. “Better to just work something out now.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s why we’re here,” Connor muttered, leaning against the stove. “We’re here to talk though. I hope she’ll take that seriously.”