The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy (38 page)

“The people who live on the estate. The village, we call ourselves.”

“You’re a caretaker?”

“In a way.”

“Have you seen any treasonous activity here?”

“I don’t know what that means, lass.”

“Plotting to take over the United States?”

“No. We had a party last night.”

The wind off the sea picked up. It blew over them, rattling the house. Sam stood strong, but the woman looked like she wanted to fall to the ground. She dropped to a squatting position and cowered, momentarily taking the gun off him. He stood still. She had the pistol back on him as fast as that. She could plug him in an instant.

Relax, Sam, and you’ll live, he thought. He took a deep, slow breath and willed himself to relax. Everyone was already in the shelter. No one knew what was happening. No one would help him. The wind shook the trees out by the road, making the tall grasses whip and sway.

When the grass hit her legs, she jumped toward him, raising the gun. Her eyes darted to her right, toward the road behind her. Her mouth was slightly open. He could see her panting. She was terrified.

She turned to him, wild-eyed as the wind continued to beat against them. “There’s a hant.”

“Aye. There’s a hant. Guards the village.”

Her eyes widened. “It ate Josh.” Her eyes flitted to the road like she expected it to attack. She was so panic-stricken that Sam feared she might nail him by accident.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “It’s a dog. He loved the little girl who was here. Killed himself to help her. He come here with ‘em, to guard her. Now he guards the village.”

“He was guarding you?”

“Yeah. They were people from Jamayuh, coming here to break into our shelter. I’m sorry that they died, but they would have made us die, too. The shelter couldn’t hold us all.”

“You have a shelter?”

“Yes, lass. Jeremy made us a shelter for the atomics.”

“He made you a fallout shelter?”

“Yes.”

“That’s all? That’s what he was doing? I thought he was trying to overthrow the government.”

“No. He wanted us to live. He made the shelter so we could live in it for two thousand years. It’s big.”

She started to laugh. “That is so funny. That is just so funny.” Her eyes were gushing, but they weren’t tears of joy. She was cracking. He had the first inkling that he might get out of the situation alive. The gun wavered and its barrel dropped toward the ground. She acted like she might fall down.

But she pulled herself together and leveled the gun again. “Do you know why my office was empty when I went back yesterday?” He shook his head. “They’d evacuated it. They took everyone to shelters somewhere and left me to rot. I talked to the president of the United States yesterday. He said I’d be the bureau chief if I completed this mission. He knew what was coming. He sent me out here to die. When I drove here, past all the big installations that looked like missiles—they are missiles. And they’re going to go off, aren’t they?”

“Yes, lass. Very soon—”

“Shut up! You’ll talk when I say you can. I’m not finished.” She kept blinking. “Maybe we’ll both stand here and die.” The wind shook the trees and mansion again. She cowered, terror swamping her bravado.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t talk to you like that. They were right to leave me behind. I’m a bad person.” She was within arm’s reach of him now. He wanted to grab her, but, close to breaking or not, she still held the gun like a pro.

“They lied to me. There’s a war going on, did you know that?”

“Yeah. I thought so. Lot’s of burnin’. Smoke in the air. Looked like a war.”

“I could see it all over when I was driving. Bombed out shopping centers, houses burned. They were trying to cover it up, but they didn’t. And no one travels anymore, do you know that? They say in the city that everything’s fine, but it’s not. There’s nothing outside New York. Oh, God. I’m so stupid.” The pistol’s barrel dropped toward the ground.

“Lass, I’ll talk to you as long as ye want inside the shelter. But we need to get inside now.” His voice was calm and confident and soothing.

She looked exhausted. The gun was pointed down. “I’m a bad person. I’ve done terrible things. I thought it was for my country and that made it right, but it doesn’t. You should never do things like that. Everything they said was a lie. I’ve killed people for them! I tortured and killed people for them!”

He grabbed the gun as it fell and swept her to him with one arm. With the other hand, he put the safety on the pistol and stuck it in his belt. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight.

She lay against him stiffly. He murmured words from the village in her ear and petted her back. She was a nice little thing, barely reaching his chest. Too thin. He petted her and she reacted the way women did with him, relaxing against him and holding on tight. Most of them didn’t cry like her when they were in his arms, though.

“I’m a bitch and a murderer and a torturer. I fuck around. I’m nasty. They were right to leave me behind.”

Sam stroked her hair and whispered, “Lass, the world you knew is comin’ to an end. You can go with it.”

She pulled back, alarmed.

“You got a badge or anything that says who you are?”

“Just this.” She held out her shield, attached to her holster.

“Come with me.” He held her hand and led her to the cliff. “Whoever you were just died.” He threw the holster and shield into the surf. He thought twice about her gun. That was a nice weapon. But he threw it after the holster. “Now skin off yer clothes.”

“What?”

“You want to be all new, don’t you? Get rid of everything that shows you were with them. I won’t let you freeze on the way to the shelter. Leave on the boots. They make good boots at Jamayuh.”

She did what he wanted, hesitantly. Once she saw him looking at her, she stripped fast, bending over and trying to cover herself up. Her ring flashed, a blue strobe.

“Do I have to give it up?” she whispered.

“Where’d ye get it?”

“I bought it for myself.” She looked so sad saying that.

“It’s yours, then,” he said. “Come to me lass.” She did. “Good, lassie.” He stroked her hair. She shivered and leaned into him. He smiled at her. She was going to be fine. Sam swung her into his arms and ran for the house.

They pulled the round door behind him and screwed it tight and kept going until they were at the deepest level. The people of the village stared when he walked in with a naked stranger in his arms.

“This here’s Em’ly. Em’ly Baahuhd. Ma wife.” He said it in the thickest village tongue. He didn’t want Emily to catch the change in her marital status until he’d wooed her properly.

They felt the explosions in the shelter. Most were just thuds that made the lights waver. Some rocked the shelter like the concrete might shatter. Their force made the villagers cling to each other, screaming. Made them give thanks that they were so far below the surface.

“It weren’t a foot too deep, thankee kindly, Jeremy.”

“We’ll stay as long as ye want, O Great Tek.”

AND

T
ALES FROM
E
ARTH’S
E
ND
...

A
uthors are often asked where they find inspiration for their stories. For Sandy Nathan,
The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy
was born out of tragedy and a beauty that was otherworldly:

I had a dream a year or so ago. I dreamed of a beneficent being, a golden creature of love and life. As the dream progressed, that angelic creature was superimposed upon me. And then she became me. The physical pleasure I felt was astonishing. Joy coursed through me. I was totally good, totally alive. Golden light poured from me. I was the Angel.

The experience carried forward into my day, slowly dissipating until I was my ordinary self. I realized I’d been given a gift. I’d experienced a vision of another world, another way of being. I’d been granted a glimpse of the Angel’s reality.

In the days that followed, the rest of
The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy
flowed out, as the characters revealed themselves to me: Jeremy Edgarton, son of a great musician and an infamous beauty, heir to one of the great fortunes of his world. A genius? An outcast? A revolutionary? Then came Jeremy’s friends and the dangerous milieu in which they lived, and the idea of a tortured United States on the verge of disaster.

What was that world? I asked myself. Not the world we know. Or was it? Was it our world pushed forward in time?

Was that dream all that prompted the book series, Tales from Earth’s End? No. When I write, I experience a repeated and sometimes violent cracking of everyday reality. The mundane world shatters so that a truer, larger voice can speak. What causes this rupture? Pain, mostly.

A few months before I had the dream, my brother died unexpectedly and tragically. My grief wrote
The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy.
As I remembered our life together, I wanted to give my brother a tribute that captured his essence. My unconscious did the rest. Many of the themes of
The Angel
have particular meaning to my brother and me.

That was how Tales from Earth’s End was born. The tales are stories of human beings pushed to their extremity, literally to the end of the earth. They come from my depths being jostled and torn, wounded. Writing was the cure.

I wrote the first draft of
The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy
in five weeks. When I finished, the sequel was burning inside me. I wrote that. And then the sequel to the sequel. This was somewhat inconvenient, as I was working on the sequel to my novel,
Numenon
, and people were writing to me, asking when it would be out. Creative process waits for no one; I knew I’d better take the material that was being given to me before it fled. Readers can be assured that Books Two and Three of Tales from Earth’s End are well along. They’ll be in print shortly. And so will
Numenon’s
sequel.

But now I invite you to join me and meet
The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy.

“Creativity is the thread that binds the various parts of my life and gives me meaning. I’m happiest when some inspiration has me by the teeth and I’m producing flat out.” For the past fifteen years, Sandy Nathan has been passionate about writing, and praise has come to her in the form of multiple national writing awards. Over the years, whether working as an economic analyst, negotiation coach, or designer, Sandy Nathan has always been involved in the arts. “I work best when I’m using both halves of my brain, the artistic and the logical. When I was a graduate student in economics, for instance, I spent almost equal time producing and showing sculpture.” Sandy lives with her husband on their California ranch and is the mother of three grown children. She has two grandchildren.

www.sandynathan.com

www.talesfromearthsend.com

Coming soon from author Sandy Nathan—

T
ALES FROM
E
ARTH’S
E
ND
, B
OOK
T
WO

F
irst there was
Numenon
of the Bloodsong Series, a 20th century tale of spirituality and mysticism. Then came
The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy,
which took readers to the edge of a planet’s extinction. Now Jeremy, Eliana, and their friends are joined by Bud Creeman and Wesley Silverhorse in exploits that bridge times and realities.

In this world of the future much time has passed—but has it been enough to create a better world?

www.talesfromearthsend.com

www.bloodsongseries.com