Reborn (20 page)

Chapter Ten

Me and Leo take the first watch in the barn.

I have the rifle and my bow from the bunker, and the handguns from the gun storage at Bernie's.

In one of the windows of the farmhouse, I see Anna walk across the kitchen. It's dark inside and out; nothing moves except her and the wheat blowing in the field. She slips across the gravel driveway, almost completely silent. I hear the familiar creak of the boards on the stairs.

She creeps across the hay and sits next to me. I don’t look at her. I keep my eye on the fields.

"Is it possible Bernie made it too?"

I close my eyes and recall the way he slumped over the keyboard as he gave out his last breath. I had to expect she would ask it though. I would have asked it. I would have gone back. I never would have taken her word that he was dead.

She must hate me for lying about Will and doubt me about Bernie.

I shake my head, "Anna, if he's alive then my father performed a miracle, because minutes after he was shot twice at point blank, the power went out. About an hour later, a lady lit the building he was in on fire."

She starts to cry quietly, "I can't do it without him."

My lip creeps out as tears slip down my cheeks. I have nothing to offer her. I ran up the stairs and turned my back on him after he saved us all. My cowardice is shameful.

I speak softly, "I would do it all differently now. I would have let Marshall take me in, so he could have set the missiles and destroyed everything. You, Bernie, Meg, Jake, Sarah, Will, Star, and Sully would be safe."

She sighs and lays back in the hay, "Em, you laid with the dead to help me escape. You saved Meg, Me, Sarah, and Jake. You helped Bernie stop the bad people having power over us all. You are the fiery crow, even when you don’t try to be."

I scoff, "Some fiery crow I turned out to be." I glance back at her, "I think Bernie was the crow. He let the man he used to be die, so he could be a new man for you. A man you could be proud of and tell your baby about."

She smiles and wipes her eyes, "Thanks, Em."

I shake my head, "Don’t thank me. I never brought him home."

Leo moves to lay with her. She runs her fingers through his downy fur. "Why do you think they were rounding up the infected?"

I watch the field and listen to the rest of the world, "I don’t know."

"I think it's your dad, I think he's got an evil plan."

I nod, watching the darkness, "He always seems to have one."

"Why didn’t you kill him?"

I shake my head, "I wanted him to see how it really was here. He's been living in that city with all those Gen babies of his scaring everyone into being under his thumb. He never had an army or anything, beyond the guards. He had all those Gen kids. Everyone was so scared and timid there, they just let him do everything the way he wanted. No one challenged him I bet." I look back at her, "Bernie stopped that and made it so he has to see how we have lived. Think of how last winter was for you. Alone with Jake in the woods, freezing and starving. My dad was in the city, nice and warm and torturing people."

She presses her lips together, "We hid out in a house and burned the furniture to stay warm. Then the snow was melting and we saw you and this guy here. He came up, growling and acting all mean, but I gave him a piece of rabbit. He ate it and then we became friends."

I nod, "Little traitor. I figured there was something. There was no way he was just so easy around you from the start." I smirk back, "I'm gad though. For everything that’s gone wrong, the things that went right have changed my life."

She kicks me, "Gimme my rifle and go see my brother. I think he's sort of bummed out that you're hiding up here, instead of with him." She rolls her eyes, "Lord knows he's gonna come up here if you don’t, and then we'll all get murdered while you two mess up the watch."

I think for a second and then pass her the rifle. It's hers anyway.

She gets into position with Leo, shoving me out of the way.

"You should be sleeping, you're pregnant."

She shrugs, "I can sleep tomorrow." She looks up at the stars and smiles, "I miss him tonight and I can't sleep, so I'd rather sit here under the stars and see if I can guess which one is him."

She is killing me.

I get up and walk down to the house. I creep inside to the room in the back where I know he's sleeping. I open the door softly and step inside. My stomach is in knots, but I want to touch him.

I pull off my pants, shirt, and boots, crawling into the bed in my underwear and tank top. He pulls back the covers, "I was getting hurt feelings."

I laugh as quietly as I can, "I just don’t think it's hit me that you're here. I don’t trust it. Everything else is wrecked—why do I get to be the one who gets lucky and finds the man she loves?"

He leans on his arm in the moonlight and grins a shitty smile at me, "I knew you loved me." He reaches out, taking my hand in his. I close my eyes and remember how it felt in the lab room. In the dark I would swear it was him, but now in the dark of this room, I can feel the calluses from picking at a guitar. The hand in the room never had that. He pulls me into his arms, whispering into my cheek, "Emma, you and me deserve all the luck we can get. If it's one day’s worth, or it's two years’ worth, or it's a whole lifetime, we deserve it. After everything we've been through, we deserve every second." He kisses against the edge of my lips, "I love you with my whole heart and I'll never lie to you again."

I nod into his face, pushing into the kiss and let him pull me under his body.

When I wake up in the morning, he's gone but Leo is crashed on the bed with me. He lifts his face, making his wolf smile and yawns.

I rub his fur and decide we need to stay in this room a little longer. Bad things rarely happen when I'm in bed; it's mostly when I get up and start the day.

I give Leo a deep rub down. He rolls onto his back so I get the parts he loves the most. His belly and armpits are his favorite. I scratch and he starts to make his wolf purring noise. Sarah comes in with a plate of food and crawls into the bed with us. I steal some of the pancake on her plate. It's slathered in apple butter. She gives Leo a piece and smiles, "Can we just stay in one place, all of us?"

I nod, "I think so. Unless you have somewhere you need to be?" My Granny used to say that to my dad all the time. He always had somewhere else to be. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be with me; it was that he wanted to be ready.

Sarah takes another bite of pancake. It was the one thing she had to take from Bernie's, the pancake mix. I'm glad now she did.

"Will made them."

I smile, "You glad he's back?"

She nods, "Yeah. I just hope Bernie can find his way too."

I frown, "Honey, Bernie is gone. I watched him die."

She shakes her little head, "Emma, you were wrong about Will; you're probably wrong about Bernie too."

The pancake tastes funny to me and hard to swallow. I get it down and nod, "Yeah, I hope so."

Jake comes in and flops onto the bed too. He smirks, "How ya doing?"

I give Sarah a smile, "Can you get me some water?"

She jumps up, taking Leo with her. I give Jake a look, "I'm waiting for something terrible to happen. It feels like we should be on the move and killing or fighting. I just don’t trust any of this."

He gives me a grim look, "I feel the same, like something bad is coming."

I shrug and lay back down, letting him lie across my legs, "Guess we wait and see, huh?"

He slaps my leg, "Actually, something maybe not awesome has come."

I give him a look, "Huh?"

His grin splits into the goofy one I love, "The cooking circle ladies are here. They just arrived from Marshall's camp. They brought food and seeds, and hands to help us get this place functional for winter."

I smile back, "Really?" Something about the numbers increasing is making me happier. Older ladies who might be able to deliver a baby also make me happy.

He nods, "Yup. Will's out there chatting with them now. They brought all the seeds they’ve harvested, and because this place is between the retreat and the trade towns, they're going to use it as their winter base and summer farming area."

I sigh a type of relief, I swear, I have never felt before.

"I know, I almost sounded exactly the same when I saw them coming."

I point at him from my back, "You need to get the firewood piles going."

He laughs, "You and Will are soul mates, I swear it. I came in here to avoid the firewood."

I smack whatever is closest to me, "No, go slacker."

He grabs my hand and lifts me off the bed, dragging me down the hallway. Anna walks past me, looking green again. She points at the bed, "Sleepy."

Jake and I nod. She has been like that for a month.

I see Will in the yard from the kitchen window. He smiles at me but keeps talking to the ladies, "If we have that many more people, we need to start getting ready. This house only holds so many. We need guards in the trees and to start getting the field ready to prepare for a spring plant. It's gonna need to be tilled so we can use it in the spring. I think we can get a lot accomplished in the two months before the snow hits."

The circle ladies smile at me, waving, "Emma!"

I wave back, "Hi!"

"So this is your place?" The lady with the red tongue on her tee shirt asks. I shake my head, "It's everyone's."

She smirks, "Same old Emma. How's Marshall?" Her eyes gleam.

I cock an eyebrow, "Dead."

She slaps me on the back when I get closer, "That’s my girl. I always knew you had it in you. That man was a bastard." I look past them to see the Jake dog running for me. I drop to my knees and he jumps me, slathering me in wet dog kisses.

"Jake dog!"

Jake shoves me, "Shut up."

I rub his face and kiss the top of his shiny head, "Look how chunky you are getting."

The ladies chuckle, "Oh, he never strays too far from the cook pot."

I snort and rub his furry, fat tummy, "I can see that." I glance at Will, "What do you need me to do?"

He doesn’t skip a beat, like he's been planning it, "Make arrows and teach a few guys how to make bows and arrows. We'll need them. The ammo is running low. They need to know how to make them and shoot them."

I nod, "Okay." When I stand up, he passes me a hatchet and brushes his lips against mine. It's like we steal a second and the world stops for us. I blush, thinking about the night before, when we break our kiss. I look down and head across the field to the group of men. The snickers of the ladies and Jake make the blush worse, but the fearful look in the eyes of the group of men makes me feel better.

"Who wants to learn how to use a bow and arrow?" I almost dare them with my tone.

They look scared for a second but then nods start coming my way.

I point at the willow tree next to the river on the far side of the field, "We go this way then."

Chapter Eleven

It's my turn in the north tree. Leo is camped at the base of the tree, sleeping. My butt is asleep from sitting for hours, but it makes me feel like, in my small way, it's not easy.

I don’t want us to ever take anything for granted again. We need things to not be easy. It made us lazy targets once; we can't ever let that go.

Leo stretches and rolls on his other side. I notice now that the weather is getting colder, he can't lay for very long on the side where the bullet went in.

The crisp of the air is refreshing after the long and smothering heat of the summer. The smell of the fire from the barn where they're fitting shoes on the horses, makes me anxious for winter. Winter in this world is peace. The calm of the snow is the only time I ever really relax. No one can travel in the cold anymore, not that they ever really did. Winter has always been quiet. We work like the ants to make the winter relaxing. Then we hibernate. Me and Leo have never shared a winter with anyone, but somehow I don’t think I can remember how it feels to not have them all there. To not belong. I see myself as part of them, no longer on the outside looking in. Maybe it's because they're in my territory now. This was my house and I invited them in.

The log houses are built, to get us by for the winter. They'll be improved upon in the spring, but seeing the little village we have built makes me happy. A crunch in the dry leaves below breaks my daydream. My tree moves as Jake climbs up into it with me. He sits on the branch next to me, giving me a funny look.

"What?"

He shakes his head, "Nan asked me to come and tell you it's time to get ready to go to Bern… Star's."

We try not to say his name too much. It makes Anna crabby, even when she's busy pretending she wants to talk about him. I nod, "Okay. So it’s me and you then, huh?"

He sighs, "I guess so. Will is staying, his cough is worse, I swear."

I look out at the woods and the sleeping wolf, "At night when he's sleeping, I swear I can hear something in there. Like he's not fixed. He's struggling for air and his chest sounds like it's crushing him. He can't do much, physically."