Child, p.4
Child, page 4
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
“Here,” Jason called. Kara grinned, racing across the floor. She hit her knees ten feet away from the strawbales, skidding across the floor like a rock star, and hit the bales palm first, vaulting over them. The dog followed, barking like a shovel hitting an oil drum. It hurdled the bales, eyes locked on Jason. The black beast twisted in the air, mouth open. Anadidd’na made a clean path through the animal, bisecting him from shoulder to hip, and he dissolved into black-gray vapors.
They sat for a moment, quiet.
“You think that did it?” Kara asked. Jason shrugged.
“Guess we just have to wait and see.”
She nodded, moving on hands and knees to sit next to him against the bales.
“You killed a black dog,” she said. He shrugged.
“What can I say?”
She grinned.
“That it took you thirty minutes to figure out how to stab a mutt with a sword.”
He inwardly groaned, then picked his arm up. Kara moved under it, grinning.
“You were hoping I wouldn’t pick up on that,” she said.
“I was.”
“Not a chance.”
“I figured.”
<><><>
They stayed until dawn. By the end, they were pretty sure that the black dog wasn’t going to come back, and they may have let themselves get distracted.
Somehow, Jason was the only one with mud smears on his face when they got back into the Cruiser.
“Good work,” Kara said, pulling on her seatbelt and retrieving her cellphone.
“Which part?” Jason asked.
“Do you need that much affirmation, Elliott?” she asked without looking up. He grunted and she laughed.
“Fine. Yes.”
They drove for a few minutes in silence, and then she frowned.
“You know that was your turn, right?”
“If I don’t get to let the mutt kill him, I at least get to knock on his door and break his nose.”
Kara sighed.
“Really, Elliott? Do you really underestimate me that much?”
“What?”
She twisted in her seat and pulled her bag up into her lap, pulling out something that he couldn’t make out in the weak light. It clicked.
“Yeah, he beats the tar out of those two little girls. They’ve only been here three days, and everyone on the street knows it.”
“Why doesn’t anyone do anything?” Kara’s voice inquired.
“What’re you gonna do? They aren’t our girls.”
There was a space of silence, and then another voice.
“…just feel so bad. Do you call the police? Is that even what’s best for them? Beth told me they lost their mother a few years ago. Who else do they have?”
“Have you seen it?” Kara’s voice asked.
“My son told me they were out playing down shore from us while he was hunting minnows, and he saw John hit the older one. Can’t remember her name. He had nightmares, that night.”
There was another gap, and then a third voice.
“Hell, I don’t care what he does, s’long as he doesn’t get the police out here.”
“He do any of your stuff with you?” Kara asked.
“Nah, he just drinks himself stupid. The little one crying is a buzzkill, though.”
The recorder clicked again. Jason was quiet.
“They have an aunt in Kansas City. Their mom’s sister. She’s tried to get custody twice, Merlin says, but she never had any proof. Merlin already sent the video I took to her lawyer. I’ll put the tape in the mail when we get to Doris’.”
“Damn.”
She laughed.
“You thought I was having sex.”
“Stoner does sound like your type.”
“I could break him one-handed,” she said witheringly.
“Thanks,” Jason finally said. She nodded.
“You’re not the only one.”
He glanced at her, but she was buried in her phone. He put it away and started looking for a good place to get breakfast.
<><><>
It was time.
It was long past, time, actually, but they finally agreed it was time.
They’d taken four months off of everything related to demons and angels and being psychic, but they were ready. If either of them had been willing to admit it, they might have gone so far as to say they were bored.
“You’re sure?” Samantha asked. Sam nodded. Then grinned. She pressed her lips, acknowledging exactly what he wasn’t saying, then pulled her hair down. She pressed the hair pin into his hand and took a step back. As always, it was like a rubber band snapping loose. She was there, there, where his mind could find her, the same complex swirl of emotions as always, insecurity at what he would think and the rush of familiar comfort to be in each other’s heads again.
He hugged her, the warmth of body against body now two-sided. This was the danger of the bond that they shared. Intensity could grow unchecked as he felt what she did, and echoed it back.
“I missed you,” he murmured.
“I know,” she answered. It was the truth. More than that, she could tell that it was true, because she could also tell when he lied. It was completely unprotected, and had taken a lot of getting used to, but it was something that left him feeling a bit empty, now, when it went away. He wasn’t supposed to be only one person. He was supposed to be one half of one, or two. Whichever was more true. He had never really tried to sort it out. She had warned him, sitting cross-legged on the bed the night before the wedding, that this was a crucial difference about them. Something that no one else was ever going to understand.
“I’m old-fashioned,” she had started. He’d laughed at that. No kidding.
“I take vows very seriously, and when I say as long as we both live, I mean it.”
He nodded.
“So do I.”
She wasn’t intending to be insulting. This was groundwork, and he let her build to her point.
“The bond, Sam. If I understand the magic of it right, the vows we take tomorrow are going to make it permanent.”
He’d waited, trying to figure out why this was something she had been apprehensive about. The silenced stretched as she waited, urged for him to understand.
“So?” he finally asked.
“You can’t take it back.”
He shook his head.
“So?”
“The escape clause from the bond. I don’t think it will work, after tomorrow. I didn’t realize it until this morning as I was thinking about the vows, but… I think that you won’t really have an option any more. You’ll be stuck with me, no matter what.”
He waited, this time for dramatic effect.
“So?”
She’d wanted him to take it seriously. She was trying to offer him an opportunity to bail. He got that. She wouldn’t have felt good about it, if she hadn’t. He wouldn’t have felt good about it if he’d even pretended to consider it. Sure, yes, he had needed it once, not that long ago, but he was in it, with her, until one of them died. No question, no hesitation, no doubt.
Once the hair pin had turned up, they’d had their exit path. She could cut the bond, temporarily, any time she liked. It was great, because it meant that he got to hold her. That they weren’t torturing themselves perpetually with that I-want-you-but-I-can’t-have-you thing that had been going on almost since day one, that all of it was possible at all. But he missed her like he missed his own identity, she was so much a part of him, at this point, that it was like drinking water to feel her on the other end of the bond again. Nothing about it was simple, but there wasn’t any of it he’d have given up.
None.
“You’re really ready?” she asked now. He shrugged exaggeratedly. Sure, this was another of those no-going-back moments, but what else were they going to do? Continue to take this lovely extended vacation? Tempting as that was, he wanted to get back to work. Samantha watched him for another minute, and he poked her mentally, teasing her.
“I’m not that frail, Sam. Just do it.”
She licked her thumbs and put them over his eyes.
“Find Ashley.”
He was away.
<><><>
As a rule, his visions were in color. They ran at normal speed, and they came with natural sound. This one was odd. Different in a lot of ways so dramatic that he almost missed the subtle ones.
He was looking over a town. From way above it. In sepia and white. To sad orchestral music and in slow motion. Vast fields of some kind of grain were undulating in a steady breeze all around the little settlement, interrupted only by car-wide dirt roads that were visible miles into the distance. It was idyllic, if you were into that kind of thing.
Sam tried to push his awareness down onto the ground, closer to the buildings, looking for people, trying to find the Ashley that they were supposed to save, but he continued to drift, like a cloud, governed by the direction of the wind. He mentally sighed, relaxing to let what was going to happen happen.
After a minute he was bored. Nothing changed. There were no voices, no sound at all but the orchestra playing their melody. He would have put his chin on his fist, if he hadn’t been disincorporated.
Something was bound to happen. His visions never came without some kind of purpose. There had to be an Ashley around here somewhere.
He waited.
<><><>
Samantha looked at him expectantly.
He blinked, adjusting to being six foot four with hands and knees again.
“Where did you go?” she asked.
“Was hoping you could tell me,” he answered.
“East by northeast, but I have no idea how far,” she told him. “You were a long way away.”
He was scanning the vision in his mind’s eye, rewatching it in the surprising detail that his visions afforded. He shook his head. No clues at all.
“It was weird,” he said.
“Tell me,” she answered, picking up her backpack. He followed suit, feeling the subtle indication that they were going to the car. She was right. Just drive in the right direction, figure everything else out on the way.
“It was like… The Wizard of Oz.”
“Emerald city and ruby red slippers?” Samantha asked. He shook his head.
“No. Kansas.”
Samantha shrugged.
“That’s just Kansas.”
He laughed.
“No, like, it wasn’t in color.”
“Huh?”
“And it had a soundtrack.”
“A what?”
He nodded.
“And I was in a helicopter shot.”
“Of what?”
“Nothing.”
“Helpful.”
“I know. I’d give you more if I had it, but that’s it. It was a little town in the middle of a bunch of fields. Little.”
“People?” she asked, not discouraged. He shook his head.
“I didn’t see any.”
“Okay,” she said nodding. They put the bags in the car and Sam went to drop the keys in the flowerpot where the manager asked him to leave them. Samantha started the engine with a characteristic roar - the car’s name was Justine, and Samantha swore she was feisty all on her own - and Sam slid into the passenger seat.
“Draw it,” she said, fishing around behind her for a moment and coming up with a notebook. She dropped the glove box open to find a pen, then put the car in gear, working from memory to get back to the highway. Sam looked at the blank page for a second.
“I don’t know what to draw,” he said. She shrugged.
“How about a map?”
He sucked on his lower lip for a second, then drew two straight lines and showed it to her. She glanced at it.
“Funny.”
“What? That’s all there was.”
“Gas station? Church? Laundromat? Even the little towns in the corn belt all have two churches and a laundromat.”
He frowned internally, and felt her amusement at the small victory. He pulled the images back up.
“There’s no gas station,” he said.
“Anywhere?”
“No. I don’t think there’s a laundromat, either.”
“Houses?”
He focused harder.
“I don’t know.”
This brought more curiosity.
“Give me more words, Sam. What do you see?”
He tried harder.
“Those are wood shingle siding,” he said. “Sam, I think that’s the grocer.”
It was beginning to hurt his head, focusing that hard, but the details that he had missed the first time began to stand out now.
“What do you see?” Samantha asked again, just coaxing him into working it out, aloud.
“It’s old, Sam. That’s what’s wrong with it. It’s really old.”
“Abandoned?”
“I don’t know. It could be, but the crops around it are healthy. Who would leave an abandoned town in the middle of their field?”
“That’s where you went, then,” Samantha said. “I’m not sure it helps us any, but you were looking at something from years ago.”
Sam sighed, letting his grip on the vision go.
“How in the world are we supposed to find that?”
She shook her head.
“The details we need are there. They always are.”
<><><>
Samantha let Sam rest for a while as she drove, working out how they were going to find the little town he’d seen and where to go from there. They drove down out of the mountains and across the wide empty plain where the year’s crops had come in in preparation for the first frost, due any day. She picked an interstate and headed north as Sam fell asleep with his head against the window.
Ashley.
Samantha had died, years ago, in the middle of a fight. Carter had lost the fight, in the end, but apparently Satan himself had had a side-bet on the whole thing, and didn’t feel like losing. He’d saved Carter, and God had sent Samantha back from the paradise plane with vague instructions: save Carter.
Save Carter.
It had taken years, drifting, giving up, and coming back, and in the end she wasn’t sure which bit had actually saved him. It had been one ongoing work.
She hated to think that she might spend the next half of the decade wandering around looking for the right Ashley to save.
All she could hope was that Sam’s psychic gift would point them in the right direction and let them finish what they needed to do. But a no-name, two-street little farming town in the middle of nowhere, undated, and with nothing but a bearing to work off of? She believed what she’d said, that the details they needed would be there, but she had dearly hoped that this would be a bit more cut-and-dry than that.
She found a hotel advertising free wi-fi just north of the Nebraska state line and pulled into the parking lot. She’d left in a rush that morning in case they needed to be close when they figured out what they were supposed to do, but something that was fifty years in the making - at least - could easily wait another day while they got a solid foothold on things. Like where they were going. And who needed to be saved. And from what.
The simple stuff.
<><><>
They sat facing each other on the bed, surrounded by pages of notes, dueling web browsers pulling up map after map of the Nebraska/South Dakota/Minnesota/Iowa area.
“Okay,” Samantha said. “I’ve got a new idea.”
Sam twitched his attention toward her without looking up. He was listening.
“What did the plants look like?”
“Gold,” Sam said. Samantha looked over a list and then pulled images from a dozen different plants.
“Good. That eliminates a bunch of them. What else?”
“They swayed,” he said.
“Not corn at the end of the season,” she said. “Anything else?”
“Are we playing guess who?” Sam asked. She turned her screen to face him.
“Oats? Wheat?”
Sam looked from one to the next a few times, then she felt him slip away again into the vision. It was different, when he remembered it, but she could still clearly feel him leave when he reviewed it. His eyes lost focus for a moment, then he nodded.
“Wheat.”
“Good,” she said, turning her computer back around.
“Good?”
“If I got my bearing right, we’ve only got a little bit of the two states to look at, because they don’t grow a lot of wheat, further north. I was afraid we’d be chasing something all the way into Canada.”
“You really have no idea how far away it is?” Sam asked. She shook her head, frustrated. Normally, his visions weren’t that far off, in time, which made feeling out how far away they were, geographically, much easier. Sam leaned back over his own laptop again.
“Can you give me the areas I should be looking at?”
She pulled a map and started reading county names. Sam nodded, marking them down.
“You think you’d recognize it?” Samantha asked.
“Don’t know what else to do,” Sam answered. She couldn’t argue with that. She had a narrow corridor to look at, but it was a lot of land to pore through intersection by intersection.
“If the roads even exist, anymore,” Samantha muttered. There was a silent response from Sam that he was feeling the same way. At least they had a box. Samantha was looking for architecture, census data, anything that could make it smaller.
“Wish Simon was helping,” Sam said.
“I know,” Samantha said.
“I don’t like not even knowing what’s wrong,” Sam said. Samantha nodded. She didn’t have to say anything. He knew.
<><><>
Samantha found a woman online who ran a county historical center and Sam called her to make an appointment. Samantha wore her black dress that made her nearly invisible - people just managed to ignore her, dressed like that - and Sam went in to the little country library on his own, looking for the woman from her picture online. She greeted him warmly.
“You’re looking for old family roots, out here?”
“I am,” he said. “I saw a picture of a town where some of our family lived, and I’ve been trying to figure out where it is, but I know almost nothing about it.”
“Can I see it?” she asked, escorting him into a little nook where glass cases held fading photos and worn documents.
