Eden's Promise, page 4
So she slammed her head back as hard as she could.
***
“I am really sorry about this,” Eden apologized for the hundredth time, pacing the clinic where she’d taken him to get stitched up after she’d split his lip and broke his nose...again.
He tried to laugh as Vicky, the nurse, stitched the gash in his upper lip, but damn, it stung. Not as bad as his pride, though. He hadn’t seen the head-butt coming, hadn’t expected to be bleeding so soon after coming home. Only a couple stitches, and only because it was in a spot that could be easily infected.
“You did what I told you to do, and you didn’t hesitate. That’s good.” He stroked Huck’s head to soothe him, because the dog was pissed that Eden had made Aaron bleed.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“So you said.” About fifty times from the park to here.
He had to admit to being sad she’d changed out of her bloody tank top and into a spare scrub top Vicky kept in the back. That tank top had been a major part of his motivation in volunteering to help her learn hand-to-hand combat in the first place. And feeling her breasts against his arm when he held her, well, he could see why Damien was so diligent in his training.
“Why do you want to train so bad, anyway?” he asked around Vicky.
“Because I want to go on the next supply run.”
A chill skittered down his spine. “Why? It’s hell over there.”
“I hear that, and I understand that it would be, but I need to—a part of me needs to know that way of life is done.”
“It’s done. Trust me.” As much as he tried to push what he’d seen out of his mind, he couldn’t. He didn’t see any way the country could come back from this.
“I need to see it for myself. Does that make sense?”
“No,” Aaron and Vicky said together.
“Your daddy did everything he could to keep you safe here, and you want to throw it away because you want to see for yourself,” Vicky chided. “And you go and break this poor boy’s nose in the process.” She turned back to Aaron. “You’ll have some bruising around your eyes.”
“Not my first time,” he assured her. “Or even my second.”
She looked over her shoulder at Eden. “I’ll let Eden explain to your mama how it happened.”
Eden turned a lovely shade of pink. “Oh, sure. ‘Hey, Mrs. Jenkins, I was wrestling with your son in the park and I broke his nose.’ Sounds so mature.”
“That is just what I mean,” Vicky said, gathering her supplies to put them away. “You keep that clean, now, Aaron. If you need anything, you can come back and see me any time.”
He tried to smile but the stitches pulled. “You bet, Vicky.”
“I can’t believe she was flirting with you,” Eden said as they walked out of the clinic. “She’s old enough to be—”
“The lady who held me when I broke my arm when I was four. She can flirt all she wants.”
She looked over at him and winced.
“That bad?”
“I’m—”
“Sorry. I get it. Enough.” He backed away from her when they reached the corner near his house. “Tomorrow. Same place?”
“I, ah, yeah. Okay.”
“I’m not going to go easy on you.”
She laughed. And laughed. The sound shouldn’t turn him on, but damn, it did.
***
Eden winced when Aaron approached the park the next day with Huck. He looked worse than yesterday, though he’d removed the bandage from his nose. Both eyes were black, and the stitches on his lip stood out on his skin.
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” she asked.
He twitched the knees of his cargo pants and squared his shoulders, crouching. “You aren’t getting that close again.”
A twinge of disappointment went through her. She’d spent most of last night remembering how it had felt to be held against him. But right, that wasn’t why they were here.
“Today, you’re going to do what I tell you to do, got it?”
“You don’t think I was teaching her the right way?” demanded Damien, walking up behind them.
“I think you were doing fine. But if she wants to go to the mainland, she’s going to have to have more skills.”
Damien bristled. “We’ve been working our way up to that.”
“I think it’s time to start. I have skills that would come in handy for you, too. We could have training sessions—your men, too.”
Eden struggled against the disappointment. Any training was good, for all of them. That she wanted Aaron to herself was selfish, not when he could be helpful for the good of the town.
“I think it’s a good plan. For all of us,” she forced herself to say. “We can all learn a lot,” she said to Damien. “He was there longer than anyone else. Even if we never need it, if no one ever comes to the island, it will be good to know.”
“That won’t happen,” Damien said tightly. “We manage the shore.”
“When it’s a boat or two,” Aaron pointed out. “What if it ever comes to more? If people ever get into their minds they want to be here, they could come in force.”
“Which is why we have weapons and rules.”
“What if we have to leave the island?” Eden asked. That had long been a fear, and not just her own. Right now they were doing all right with what they could grow and fish, but she didn’t know how long that could last.
“We won’t,” Damien said through his teeth. “Look, we’re doing just fine. We don’t need his help.”
“He’s a Navy SEAL, for God’s sake, Damien. My father would have been over the moon if he could have been trained by a SEAL. Even if we never need it, it will be good to know.”
Damien stared at her a long minute, betrayal clear in his eyes, but then he nodded.
***
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing with those boys down there,” Sarah McKay said over a quiet dinner that night. “It looks ridiculous.”
Eden set down her soup spoon and stared at her mother. “It looks ridiculous to know how to defend myself?”
“To be throwing yourself around with them. You don’t see any other young ladies doing it.”
“Because everyone else wants to pretend nothing is wrong, that everything is just the same as it ever was. And while Aaron won’t exactly tell us what he’s seen, he says it can never go back to the way it was.”
“He can’t know that.”
“Neither can we. He’s seen what life is like on the mainland.”
“But it’s not like that here. Your father made it as safe as possible for us here.” Still a touch of bitterness tinged her voice. “As long as we stay here....”
“But we can’t always stay here. You said yourself the chickens aren’t laying like they used to, that we need a rooster so we can breed more. And you know the medicine situation.”
“None of that is worth risking your life to go over there.”
“The more I know about protecting myself, the less of a risk it will be.”
“And if we send Damien and Josh and Joey and Ben, then it’s no risk to you.”
“But how can we ask them to take that risk for all of us? They have families, too, people who worry about them. Dad wanted me to take care of the people here.”
“Yes, here. He would never want you to go over there. He didn’t even want you to go look for Kelly. He wouldn’t even go.”
Bitterness tinged her mother’s voice, and guilt tugged at Eden’s gut. She should have gone for Kelly after her father’s death, but she’d been afraid. Afraid of what she’d find and afraid of what she wouldn’t. Part of the reason she trained so hard was so she could go see if she could find Kelly. She knew the chances were slim, that supply runs were performed with guerrilla-like precision, but if she went along, just maybe...
But she couldn’t tell her mother that, couldn’t get her hopes up. Finding Kelly this long after everything happened would be like finding a needle in a haystack.
***
Eden was wrapped in Aaron’s arms, her hands clamped around his wrists, her arms crossed in front of her, her bottom against the cradle of his thighs. She felt warm all over, and wished they weren’t standing in the middle of the park with people walking by.
Instead, she shifted her hip, her weight, brought her right elbow down to break his hold. She flipped him over her shoulder so he landed on his back. He grimaced for a minute, then grinned. She squared her shoulders, and he grabbed her ankles, snatching her feet from beneath her and knocking her on her ass so hard the vibrations traveled up her spine to rattle her teeth, jar the breath out of her.
She was still wheezing when he leaned over her, his brow furrowed in concern. He pushed her hair back from her face, and she might have appreciated his touch if everything in her body didn’t hurt.
“Eden! Eden, come quick!” a voice called from the direction of the road. “Your mom collapsed!”
Eden’s skin iced and she sat up so quickly she almost smacked her head into Aaron’s chin. She stared at Jennifer, whose hair tumbled wildly around her red face. She must have run all the way down the hill.
“Where is she?”
“Home. Vicky’s on the way, but she told me to grab you.”
“Vicky told you? Or my mother?” If her mother was conscious, maybe it was nothing to be worried about.
“Vicky did.” Jennifer grabbed Eden’s arm as if that would hurry her along. She broke free of Jennifer and ran toward the house.
Only when she reached the front door did she realize Aaron was on her heels. She acknowledged him, then raced up the stairs to her mother’s room, two steps at a time. She burst in to see her mother so still on the bed and Vicky moving briskly around her. Eden’s knees buckled. Aaron grabbed her elbow to steady her.
She didn’t look behind her, but moved forward to see Vicky had opened her mother’s blouse to listen to her heartbeat. Her mother would hate for Aaron to see her like this, so Eden turned and pressed her hand to his chest and backed him out of the room.
“Thank you for your concern, but I’ll take care of her.”
His brow furrowed, and he opened his mouth as if to protest, but closed it again, nodded, and let her close the door in his face.
***
Aaron rose when he heard footsteps on the stairs. Eden stopped short when she caught sight of him in her living room.
“I didn’t know you’d stayed,” she murmured.
“I didn’t want to leave in case you needed me.” He glanced up. “How is she doing?” Vicky hadn’t come down, but he wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or not.
“Vicky thinks it might be a stroke.”
“Jesus.” They had no resources on the island to deal with something like that. On the mainland, either, come to that.
“She wants my sister. She wants Kelly here.”
Defeat dragged through him. He’d known Kelly, and there was no way she’d managed to survive in this new world. She may have been raised by Ed, but he hadn’t managed to instill any fear in her. She’d been all about fun, which had drawn him when he was a teenager, but it couldn’t be helping her now.
“Eden, you know that’s impossible. Would you even know where to look?”
She dropped to the couch and lowered her head to her hands. “No. I haven’t heard from her in years. I don’t even know if she was still in Tacoma when everything happened. But it’s the only thing my mother has asked of me. I have to go find her.”
He sat on the edge of the cushion beside her and took her hand. “She doesn’t know what she’s asking. Sending you there is a—” He stopped himself from saying “death sentence,” though that was what he believed. “A mistake. And do you really want to leave her side when she’s so sick?”
“No, of course I don’t, but she asked me, Aaron. You have to understand that.”
He understood, all right. He understood that Eden wouldn’t be able to do it on her own, either, and he dreaded what was coming next, when she lifted tear-filled eyes and looked at him.
“Will you help me find my sister?”
Chapter Four
Eden’s heart thudded as the sailboat slid silently through the water toward the shore of the mainland. At Aaron’s signal, she took the sail down so no one would hear the canvas flapping and give them away.
Eden shivered in the boat as they looked for a place to pull in along the shore, someplace where they could hide the boat but could get to the city. They weren’t arriving at a dock, and were south of the city, so had to be careful of rocks as they neared the shore. Running aground could be deadly. They’d left home before dusk and now it was full-dark, but they couldn’t risk flashlights being seen from the shore. They’d even painted the boat and sail black so the reflections would be minimal.
Reflections of what, Eden wondered. Everything was so dark, even the stars were shrouded by clouds. Aaron had declared this a perfect night to go as he’d streaked his face, then hers, with grease paint.
Five days, he’d said. He’d give her five days to look for her sister in this giant haystack, and then they were heading back. They were armed to the teeth and supplied so that they wouldn’t have to waste time foraging. They’d start at Kelly’s last known address and move from there.
Eden knew Aaron thought her sister was dead. She knew he thought this was a foolish quest. But he had come with her anyway, dismissing all other offers of help from Damien, Ben and Angel. It was enough the two of them risked their lives.
She knew, too, that his mother was angry with her for asking this of him. But she also knew he was her best shot at finding Kelly, and fast.
Suddenly, Aaron was out of the boat, barely making a splash in the waves, guiding the boat onto the sand. Eden hopped out, barely getting her feet wet. She opened her mouth to say something but Aaron’s warnings came back to her. Voices carried in the open. Instead she helped him drag the boat across the sand to hide it near a group of rocks. Aaron tossed a gillie blanket over it and declared it hidden. The small boat had been hell on the ocean, and though she’d sailed all her life, she’d come damned close to getting seasick. But with the weather and the swells, two people could barely handle it. Still, it was their only means home, and she hoped no one discovered it and took it.
He barely allowed her to catch her breath before motioning her across the beach to the cliff.
He would go first, in the event of a patrol. As they hiked up the path, her anxiety grew. He crouched as he neared the top of the rise, scanned the area, then gave her the all-clear. They scrambled onto the flat of the cliff and looked around. Eden knew the city was nearby, but without lights, it could be anywhere.
They would be moving at night, as Aaron had done on his way to the island, but without flashlights. And with no moon, Eden struggled to see. Aaron wrapped his fingers around her elbow and guided her onto the asphalt of the road. They wouldn’t stay there long, either, since the roads were probably patrolled, either by military or gangs. He’d impressed upon her the need to avoid both. The fewer people who knew they were here, the better.
Her vision adjusted to the dark as they headed north into the city. She was astounded at the amount of decay in such a short time. The road buckled and broke, signs were twisted and bent, sitting at crazy angles, the green highway signs cracked, showing coma 6.
Six miles to Tacoma, the last address she had for her sister. And finding her house in the city would be tough with no lights, especially if the street signs were the same shape as the highway signs. She hoisted her pack higher on her back and followed Aaron along the road.
The clouds parted and she glimpsed the skyline, eerily dark. Below were some spots of light within the city.
“Fires,” Aaron said, low. “We want to avoid those.”
He’d warned her repeatedly in the time it took to gather their supplies, to prepare the boat, about the kind of people they could encounter here. Her knees were weak with terror as she stepped on the boat after hearing what people did to survive on the mainland, but she’d done it anyway. Now, seeing the lights in the distance, knowing the people around it would be desperate, willing to do unspeakable things, a shudder went through her.
The sound of gunfire popped in the distance, echoing off the concrete buildings, and she ducked even though she knew it was far away.
“Time to move off the road,” he said, and headed down the embankment into the shadows.
She stumbled after him, barely able to see where she was going, wondering how he could.
They moved into the town, past a corner store with the windows smashed, glass still littering the sidewalk and parking lot, hoses torn from gas pumps. If she’d thought they’d be able to find anything of use here, she was mistaken. She’d keep her focus on finding her sister.
Other than those random gunshots—had it been rival gangs fighting? People shooting wild animals for food?—the city was so quiet, only the occasional breeze whispering through the trees, the skittering of a rock on the pavement when she misstepped. No people, none of the sounds of the island, none of the sounds of a city.
And destruction everywhere, signs of desperation in some cases, with the shattered storefronts, scattered cartons, ruined now after being out in the weather for months. Some of the damage, however, was vandalism, boards torn from houses and tossed into the streets, signs shattered and torn down. She could almost feel the panic the residents must have felt. But did they stay, did they hunker down? Or did they leave? What did Kelly do?
All around them, creatures scurried—she could hear their claws on the broken pavement, the occasional hiss and bark. Pets left behind? She missed having a pet. Since her father had been the vet, they’d always had various animals in the house. She’d gotten her own dog when she was eight years old, and it had died when she’d been away at college. When she returned home, she’d thought about getting another pet, but her father had been against it, so worried about what would happen to the animals if the world came to an end.
