Death Thieves (7 page)

“Water.” I croaked, sounding strangely like the skinny guy crawling around the desert in cartoons. I heard noise and then felt the cool relief of water against my lips. I took in a mouthful and swished it around before spitting it out. I grabbed the bottle from his hand and dropped a little bit of water into each eye and then took several swallows clutching the bottle as though it was a lifeline.

Tag followed my ritual with a bottle of his own, and only then did I think about the fact that he’d taken care of me before caring for himself. I pushed that small act of kindness out of my mind so that it wouldn’t get in the way of me hating him.
I won’t go Stockholm on you, Wineve.

I took several deep breaths and looked around. We were still on the mountainside of Mount Rainier. The sun shone down on newly blossoming flowers as though there had never been a mud slide through this canyon—as though there never would be.

“When are we?” I asked after several moments of drinking in sweet oxygen. I wondered at the words falling so readily from my mouth.
When
are we? How quickly I had acclimated to the fact of time travel when only yesterday,
was it yesterday
, I’d never believed such a thing could be possible.

The grin still smeared across his ash-covered face, Tag glanced at his Orbital. “It’s 2097. We’ll have to stay here awhile though. We need food and some rest from that last little adventure.” He turned and gave me a long look as though to make certain I knew who was to blame for that “last little adventure.”

I had a hard time feeling even a little bad. “I thought you were in a hurry to get back and feed me to your queen.”

He shook his head and shrugged his pack off his shoulders. “I’m not feeding you to my queen; I’m making you a queen.”

“Whatever.”

He settled down on the ground, and used a big rock as a makeshift table. He pulled out his humidifier thing and a couple of packets. The thought of food made me lower to the ground beside him. My legs shook with exhaustion. No matter what Persephone might have thought of me, I needed to eat.

“It’ll be warmed this time since we have solar power.” He glanced at the sky and smiled at it with a nod to the sun as though it had done him a personal favor by being out.

Within only a few minutes of dropping the packets into the machine, he pulled them back out, each one filled with a steamy mixture of vegetables.

I snatched mine from his hands, cringing at my desperation for nourishment. He ate as greedily as I did, slurping down the broccoli and carrots that only tasted slightly off. We made short work of the vegetables, the small meal only adding to my hunger rather than diminishing it. Tag sifted through his bag and produced a few other packets.

Ultimately, he cooked up everything he had. And not a drop or crumb remained when we were through. My stomach still growled.

We drank through his scant supply of water as well. Too tired to care about still being thirsty, I fell back on the ground and closed my eyes. Tag’s voice came through the fog of sleep curling around my head. “Summer? Summer?”

I muttered something unintelligible to indicate he was bugging me, and I wanted him to go away.

“Summer, I need to find us water and food. I’ll try to be back before you wake up, but if you wake before I return, then stay! Wait. If you wander off, you could get hurt.”

I grunted and swatted my hand in front of me to shoo him off. He must’ve left, or at least stopped talking, because the fuzz of sleep came uninterrupted after that.

When my eyes fluttered open again, the sun balanced on the horizon’s edge. I reached up to rub my eyes, which felt extraordinarily dry and scratchy, and winced as I ground dirt and ash into them. My hands were nearly black, and my clothes hadn’t fared any better. Without a mirror to check out what the rest of me looked like, I could only guess that my tangled, matted mess of hair had an equal amount of filth.

I couldn’t see Tag anywhere, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t around. “Tag?”

No answer.

“Stupid, good-for-nothing kidnapper.” I staggered to my feet, feeling wobbly and unbalanced. My head pulsed as though a small tribe were beating drums and dancing around in my gray matter. I nearly sank back to the ground for more sleep but managed to keep my feet underneath me.

“Tag!” I yelled it this time, wincing with the headache.

Still no answer.

That decided it. I needed a bath, food, and water—though not necessarily in that order. If Tag had ditched me—oh, he better not have ditched me! What was I supposed to do with myself nearly a hundred years into the future with all my family and friends dead? The pain of that loss struck me like a slap to the face. “Winter, Winter, Winter . . .” her name crossed my lips again and again, like a prayer that would never be answered.

Sniffing and wiping tears from my face, which only smudged the dirt around worse, I started off down the mountainside alone. Tag had likely been eaten by bears or kicked in the head by a moose. He got me into this mess and sitting around waiting for him to help was like asking the devil to give me a ride to the Pearly Gates.

The setting sun determined which direction to go. With luck, I’d find one of the tributaries that emptied into the Puget Sound.

Or not.

After what felt like an hour, my wobbly legs gave out on me. My tongue felt fat in my cottony mouth. Every so often, a cough exploded from my chest, likely a result of breathing in all that ash and whatever noxious gases the earth belched out in the volcanic eruption. I sat on the ground and tried not to cry, knowing how desperate my situation had become and how crying would only dehydrate me further.

I fell asleep again, drifting in and out as the discomfort of my body tried to pull me to action—to feed it and water it—but sleep won over those other needs. I dreamed of Winter. We held hands and walked on the beach. My hand slipped out of hers. She cried out my name over and over as something unseen yanked me away from her. “Summer!” she screamed.

“Summer, you have to wake up. Summer!” He jostled my shoulder. My eyes popped open. Tag’s light shone on the ground next to us. He slid something cold and wet into my hand—my water bottle. He’d found water and refilled it.

“I told you to wait.” He sounded tired. I didn’t care. I popped the lid open on the bottle and drank in gulps.

“Slow down!” He pulled the bottle from my hand, or tried to. I had no intention of giving it back. “You’ll make yourself sick again.”

He was right. I tried to slow down.

He looked off toward the darkened trees. “Orting City isn’t too far. We should be able to walk there and get some food. We need rest. The next jump window from this area isn’t for another four days. It’s better to wait it out than keep jumping ourselves into trouble.”

“Orting is not walking distance. I live there, remember? I drove up here all the time. It’ll take us four days to walk.”

His eyes reflected the light from his flashlight still on the ground near us. His face looked cleaner; so did his hair. He must’ve found a stream or a river. “Things have changed in the last eighty years. Orting’s a big city. But even if they hadn’t changed, it would
not
take four days to walk. When you feel up to it, we’ll go.”

It crossed my mind to be stubborn and never be ready to go, but the need for food overwhelmed my desire to irritate my kidnapper. I tried hard not to think about the fact that I’d only had food and water because he’d given it to me. I was only still alive because he got us out of the mud slide before it swallowed us whole. And though I hated to consider it, I was still alive because he pulled me out of a fatal car accident.

I got up and let him lead. He didn’t bother to try to hold me captive; he must’ve sensed my waning ability to run away. Honestly, where would I go? Who would I run to for help in the year 2097? Winter would be dead by now, my whole world was lost to me, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

“The next jump window isn’t for several days,” he repeated. “The Orbital looks like it might be working right now, but I can’t tell. I think it needs a break, or who knows when we’ll end up? The last thing either of us wants is to be dinner to a T. rex in the Cretaceous period. When we’re settled, I’ll see what can be done for it.” He took my hand when I stumbled over a dried-up tree branch sticking out of the ground.

“How are you going to fix it? Didn’t you say you were a soldier? What would a soldier know about a computer watch time-travel thing?”

“I helped invent it.”

“Oh.” Smart soldier kidnappers. Just my luck. “I thought you said you couldn’t fix it earlier.”

“I’ll need to makeshift some tools.”

“Wineve is dead now.” I spoke my thoughts aloud, as I tromped along behind him, yanking my hand out of his.

He didn’t respond.

“She’s dead, and I don’t even know where she’s buried to put flowers on her grave. Do you have any idea how much that hurts me?”

He whirled around. “Yes.” The one word uttered through gritted teeth stopped me in my tracks. “I do know exactly how that feels. I’ve lost people I’ve loved, too. People I can’t mourn. So yes, I understand. But you remember that, even without me, she would have lost you. You died in that car wreck. Don’t forget that.”

You’re dead, Summer Dawn Rae.
Those had been his first words to me. I felt dead and yet kept up with him in some self-serving need not to be dead. In spite of everything, I wanted to survive this situation. I didn’t want to be dead.

Tag turned out to be right about how far we had to go. Not long into our trek down the mountain, lights from houses appeared through the trees. “This was national forestland,” I said, marveling at the fact that houses existed in the middle of the woods, where they couldn’t possibly be.

“It still is. These are renters. The government needed money to subsidize several social programs that were failing. They improved much of their more desirable properties and rented them out to people who had the means to pay the overpriced rent. The rental bailout saved a lot of people from losing medical care.”

“Says who?” The need to argue blanket statements of government loyalty came from years of living under the government’s foster program.

“Says the history plugs.”

I didn’t ask what a history plug might be. “Yeah, well, fat lot of good it’ll do them. When Mount Rainier blows, all of this will be mowed over by lava and mud slides.”

Tag didn’t argue, which validated my point. We skirted around the first several houses until we came to the main road.

Instead of taking the road, which would have been easier to walk on given my tired, weakened state, Tag insisted on weaving in and out through the trees while keeping the road within our sight.

“Why are we acting like spies?” I asked after several minutes of tripping over rocks and getting dried leaves in my tennis shoes.

“Curfew. I can’t remember the year they implemented curfew, but we don’t want to get caught out if it happened to be in force this year.”

“Aren’t we old enough to be out after dark?”

He held a tree branch for me so it didn’t swat me in the face. “Age isn’t a factor. Curfew is for everyone. They thought it would keep the crazies in line.”

“That’s not exactly nice to call people crazies, is it?”

He turned to give me a quizzical look, shrugged, and picked his way through an overgrowth of scrub oak. He seemed intent on not talking, which added to my own personal paranoia. “So what happens if we get caught out after curfew?” I whispered, since we’d edged closer to several more large houses in the middle of the forest. Tag kept waving his hand in front of the windows as we passed them. Then he’d frown and we’d move on.

He didn’t bother to turn around when he uttered the two words I was getting tired of hearing him say. “Bad things.”

We kept on in silence for a long time until Tag found whatever it was he’d been looking for. He led me to a house just off the road. He checked a window, shining his own light in through the darkened pane to make sure it was empty and started jimmying the window open with a wicked-looking knife he’d pulled from his backpack.

“Are you breaking in? We can’t break in!” I darted furtive glances to the road, certain the police would be showing up any minute. The foster care system might have improved over the decades, but I wasn’t in the mood to try it out. Trying out the local prison seemed an even worse idea.

“No one’s here. And this house isn’t equipped with entry sensors.”

“How would you know that? You can’t know that!”
Entry sensors?
I tugged at his jacket, but he ignored me.

“This is a bad idea. I don’t want to go to jail.” I may as well have been talking to a rock for all the good it did me to reason with him. “You’re doing that wrong.” I yanked the knife out of his hand. “Haven’t you ever broken into anything before?” I slid the knife so the tip of the blade pressed against the latch and twisted. The window opened with a pop. I handed it back to him before it occurred to me that I’d had a weapon and then given it back. I was such an amateur. His legs were already dangling out the window as he scrambled to climb inside.

Against all my better judgment, I followed his really bad example and entered the house.

It’s dark.” I stated the obvious as my hand went to the wall to feel for a light.

“It’s better that way.” He took my hand. “Leave the light off. No one’s here right now, but there are still neighbors, and we aren’t that far off the road. If anyone’s watching, they’ll notice the light.”

“What are entry sensors? How do you know we didn’t trip an alarm and that cops aren’t on their way here right now?” He didn’t answer but led me farther into the dark. I didn’t pull away, needing the security of another human being. The house furnishings weren’t weird like I expected them to be. I’d expected chairs made of bubbles and steel cabinets—something futuristic looking, but I ran my hand over the couch and felt the plush fibers of the cushions. I could make out the faint outline of real books on the bookshelves. I didn’t think books would have a place in the future. I thought everyone would read books on their cell phones.