Bad ass moms, p.1
Bad Ass Moms, page 1
Table Of Contents
RUTH by MICHAEL JAN FRIEDMAN
RAISING THE DEAD by HILDY SILVERMAN
WHAT WE BRING WITH US by DEREK TYLER ATTICO
THE SONGBIRD AND HER CAGE by JOANNA SCHNURMAN
HELLBEANS by JENIFER PURCELL ROSENBERG
KRYSTA, WARRIOR PRESIDENT by PETER DAVID
DID THEY DO THAT? by DENISE SUTTON
MAMA BEAR by DANIELLE ACKLEY-McPHAIL
JUPITER JUSTICE by KRIS KATZEN
THE DEVIL YOU KNEW: A SCOUBIDOU MYSTERY by GLENN HAUMAN
MR. EB’S ORGANIC SIDESHOW by PAIGE DANIELS
MATERFAMILIAS by KEITH R.A. DECANDIDO
PRIDE FIGHT by TE BAKUTIS
PERFECT INSANITY by TJ PERKINS
THE ART OF CRAFTING RESISTANCE by KARISSA LAUREL
THE HARDWICKE FILES: THE CASE OF THE FULL MOON by RUSS COLCHAMIRO
“COME IN, SIT DOWN, HAVE A BITE!” by PAUL KUPPERBERG
SHAPE UP, OR SHIP OUT by HEATHER E HUTSELL
SHOOT CENTER by ROBERT GREENBERGER
SHE’S A REAL COUGAR by KATHLEEN O’SHEA DAVID
DUCKBOB IN: RUNNING HOT AND COLD by AARON ROSENBERG
ON MOONLIT WINGS by MARY FAN
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
THANKS TO OUR PATRONS
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the authors’ imaginations or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Compilation copyright © 2020 by Mary Fan
“Come In, Sit Down, Have a Bite!” copyright © 2020 by Paul Kupperberg
“Did THEY Do That?” copyright © 2020 by Denise Sutton
“DuckBob in: Running Hot and Cold” copyright © 2020 by Aaron Rosenberg
“Hellbeans” copyright © 2020 by Jenifer Purcell Rosenberg
“Jupiter Justice” copyright © 2020 by Kris Katzen
“Krysta, Warrior President” copyright © 2020 by Peter David
“Mama Bear” copyright © 2020 by Danielle Ackley-McPhail
“Materfamilias” copyright © 2020 by Keith RA DeCandido
“Mr. EB’s Organic Sideshow” copyright © 2020 by Paige Daniels
“On Moonlit Wings” copyright © 2020 by Mary Fan
“Perfect Insanity” copyright © 2020 by TJ Perkins
“Pride Fight” copyright © 2020 by TE Bakutis
“Raising the Dead” copyright © 2020 by Hildy Silverman
“Ruth” copyright © 2020 by Michael Jan Friedman
“Shape Up, or Ship Out” copyright © 2020 by Heather E Hutsell
“She’s a Real Cougar” copyright © 2020 by Kathleen O’Shea David
“Shoot Center” copyright © 2020 by Robert Greenberger
“The Art of Crafting Resistance” copyright © 2020 by Karissa Laurel
“The Devil You Knew: A Scoubidou Mystery” copyright © 2020 by Glenn Hauman
“The Hardwicke Files: The Case of the Full Moon” copyright © 2020 by Russ Colchamiro
“The Songbird and Her Cage” copyright © 2020 by Joanna Schnurman
“What We Bring With Us” copyright © 2020 by Derek Tyler Attico
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First edition: July 2020
A Crazy 8 Press Production
For all the moms out there. You’re bad ass.
RUTH
by MICHAEL JAN FRIEDMAN
Halfway up the road from the ocean walk, Ruth stopped, put down her worn leather briefcase, and took off her glasses.
I could see her eyes in the bright, brittle sunlight. Like pieces of a broken Coke bottle, sharp and ready to cut. It was the way they always looked to me.
Even that time they brought Reese down from the Mountain. Mourning him turned me inside out, but not Ruth. She seemed to feed on her grief, to draw strength from it.
As we stood there in the salt air, she took out a tiny cloth and cleaned her lenses. When you walked the ocean walk on a breezy day, you got sprayed by the surf pounding against the bulwark. If you wore glasses the way Ruth did, you found yourself looking at the world through droplets of dried ocean water.
Of course, there were other ways to get to the courthouse in Vista Azul. Upland ways. But the ocean walk was the fastest for those of us who lived in the vecindario, and the flattest, and outside of the spray the least demanding.
“You all right, Lyndita?” Ruth asked, allowing her gaze to drift in my direction.
“As right as I’ll ever be,” I said.
Ruth nodded. Then she replaced her glasses on the bridge of her nose, picked up her briefcase, and started up the hill again.
“Miss Ginder?” someone called.
I turned in the direction of the voice, thinking someone might be addressing me, until I saw Paulie Sorenson, all long, skinny arms and legs. He’d left a couple of other kids behind to come shambling in our direction. Paulie was Ruth’s biggest fan. Everybody knew that.
“Good morning, Paulie,” Ruth said when he’d gotten close enough.
“Can I carry your bag?” Paulie asked her, his chin slick with spittle.
She waved away the suggestion. “I can manage, Paulie. Thanks all the same.”
“You sure?” the boy asked. “Dad says at your age you need all the help you can get.”
Ruth chuckled. “Your dad’s a good man, Paulie. But he’s wrong about my needing help. I can handle my own things. Always have, always will.”
Paulie shrugged his bony shoulders. “Okey doke,” he said, grinned at Ruth, and ran off to rejoin the other kids.
Ruth watched him go for a moment. Then she said, almost beneath her breath, “At my age.”
Ruth was old when she gave birth to Reese. Almost forty, I’d heard folks reckon. And we’d celebrated Reese’s thirty-eighth birthday a couple of months earlier, so his mom had to be pushing eighty. She never said, of course, but she had to be.
At that age, I’d have let Paulie Sorenson carry my briefcase. Then again, I wasn’t a Ginder. Not by blood, I mean.
“Come on,” Ruth said, and started up the road again.
The courthouse had more than its share of cracks in its white, stucco walls. People said it was just a matter of time before some hidden sinkhole sucked the place down into the ground. And it was true that the ocean was constantly undermining buildings along the ocean walk, slowly folding them in on themselves.
I didn’t know if the courthouse would crumble someday. I was just glad it had lasted this long. Because without it, we’d never have had a chance of seeing justice done for my Reese.
As we entered the courthouse’s slate-floored lobby, two uniformed guards nodded at us. They were on loan to us from Sacramento. Dave, the tall one, had lived in our town till high school, so he knew his way around. Simon, the stocky one, was from way down the coast, where things were really bad.
“Ladies,” said Dave.
We greeted him in turn. But not in a cheerful way. We weren’t there for a cheerful reason, after all.
Beyond the lobby was a set of double wooden doors, and beyond them the courtroom.
As we walked inside, Judge Jurn was turned away from us, bent over an old book.
Ruth cleared her throat.
“I hear you,” the judge said, and put the book away.
Bradon Jurn was a blond, square-jawed man with a twitch in his left eye from Bell’s Palsy. He hadn’t changed much since the day he presided at my wedding, which he’d been glad to do for free because of how much he admired Ruth.
I remembered the judge wishing, as he stood there in front of me and Reese and our families, that the union he was making official would bear fruit. Apparently, he did that at every wedding he presided over—wished the bridge and groom healthy issue, and plenty of it.
Pitifully, few of them got what he wished for.
As we watched, Jurn stood up, took his black robe off a wooden coat stand behind him, and slipped it on, covering his work clothes. He’d been harvesting crops that morning, like everyone else in the uplands. Sweating, getting his hands dirty, taking care to preserve every last runty strawberry. But now that we’d entered his courtroom, he was all business.
He eyed Ruth. “You look like you could use some water.”
She shook her head. “Don’t need it. Have some yourself, if you want.”
Jurn chuckled. “If an old bird like you can go without, so can I. Go ahead, have a seat. Both of you.”
We sat down behind a table in the front of the courtroom, Ruth and I. Then she said, “You’re going to tell me there’s a problem.”
“You don’t need me to tell you,” said the judge. “You’ve been doing this long enough to know it for yourself.”
“There’s not enough evidence,” Ruth conceded.
“There’s no evidence at all,” said Jurn. “Look, I’d like to put this sonuvabitch away too. You know that. But we’re lacking here. We’ve got half a dozen witnesses among those who followed Reese up the Mountain, but none who saw the actual murder.”
“They saw Darron shoot,”
“But not so they could say unequivocally it was Darron who killed Reese. He wasn’t the only one shooting, after all. There was only one man close enough to know for certain, and—”
“And he’s up on the Mountain,” Ruth said.
Jurn sighed. You could hear the sound come up from his heart. “That’s what they said. I’m sorry, Ruth. I really am.”
She pointed a spindly finger at the judge. “You’re not going to let Darron go.” It wasn’t a question.
“I’m not going to have a choice. The world may be going to hell but this is still a courtroom. I can’t send a man upstate without evidence.”
“You’re not going to let him go,” Ruth repeated.
Jurn sat there for a while, meeting her gaze, his eye twitching every so often. Then he said, “I’ll keep him as long as I can. But it won’t be much—a couple of days at the outside. You know that.”
Just then, the court clerk—a bony, blonde woman named Abigail—came in. She nodded to Ruth and me. Then she handed the judge a folded piece of paper.
Jurn read it. Without looking up, he said, “He’s asking to speak with you.” He cleared his throat. “With both of you.”
“Darron…?” I blurted.
“Yes,” said the judge. He looked up at me. “Mind you, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. But—”
Ruth held a hand up. “I’ll speak with him. That’s all. There’s no way. My daughter-in-law—”
“It’s all right,” I said.
Ruth shot me a sidelong look. “You certain, Lyndita?”
I hated the idea of seeing Darron. But if I saw him, he might say something that would incriminate him. I didn’t know—I wasn’t a lawyer like Ruth. But maybe.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m certain.”
As we walked into a little side room, I saw Darron. He was sitting in a wooden chair with his hands manacled and placed on the table in front of him.
His lawyer, a man with a large, grey moustache and a paunch, was there too. Dave stood in the corner, his hand on his gun, making sure Darron didn’t try to hurt us or anything.
Like he could have hurt us more than he already had.
Darron was the same as I remembered him—ruddy, mostly bald, with broad features and big, pale blue eyes. The kind of eyes one would expect to see in the face of a child.
But he was no child.
It hadn’t been easy for the cops to get their hands on him. Apparently, he’d had a girlfriend outside town that no one knew about. He’d made her mad somehow—mad enough to tell the authorities when he was paying her another visit.
It was a stroke of crazy good luck, one shot in a million. And even then, Darron had almost gotten away. He was strong, slippery, smart—which was how he’d gotten to be who he was, I figured.
“Whatever you have to say,” Ruth told him, “say it quickly.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Darron said—to both of us. He spoke softly, evenly. There was no threat in his voice, no emotion at all.
“Don’t I?” Ruth asked.
“You’re thinking about what happened on the Mountain,” he said. “I don’t blame you. He was your son. But there are other things to consider.”
“Not for me,” Ruth snapped.
“You know what kind of world this is,” Darron continued. “How important it is to keep healthy bloodlines going. And your family’s known for the health of its bloodlines.”
A muscle quivered near Ruth’s eye. “My… family.”
“That’s right.”
I understood where Darron was going with this. So did Ruth, it seemed. “And if I see you pay for your crime,” she said, “my family’s future will suffer.”
He shrugged. “It’s a certainty.”
She planted her blue-veined hands on the table and glared at Darron. “You honestly think what you’re saying is going to change my mind?”
“It should,” he said, still unruffled. “Unless you’re not as smart as I thought you were.”
A bitter smile spread across Ruth’s face. “I’m smart enough to convict you. Think about that.”
Seeing he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Ruth, Darron turned to me. “I’m sorry about your husband,” he said in the same soft, unoffending voice. “It was just something I had to do.”
I believed he thought so. It didn’t change anything. “You didn’t know him well enough to be sorry,” I said. Darron looked like he was going to object, but I didn’t give him a chance. “So let me tell you about him. He was kind and loving and generous, and he had a laugh loud enough to frighten dogs, and he wanted more than anything to have a family and watch them grow.” Tears rolled down my cheeks. I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t Ruth. “And you took that away from him. And from me.”
Darron was silent for a moment. Then he said, with just a hint of an edge in his voice, “What I told her about her family’s future… make sure she thinks about it. Make sure she thinks hard.”
As if I was on his side. As if I was one of the low-life scum who worked for him.
I could feel my anger and grief and despair climbing the inside of my throat, threatening to drown me. I tried to say something in return, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t get a single word out.
The next thing I knew we were out of the room, and Ruth was grabbing my sleeve. “Are you all right?” she was asking.
I drew a ragged breath. “I’m fine.”
She didn’t argue with me.
“What are we going to do?” I asked, a whimper in my voice.
Ruth frowned. “I have an idea. But first I need to see Ralph.”
Once, Vista Azul had been a tourist town, where people came to sit on the beach and swim in the ocean and forget the weight of their city jobs. But that was a hundred years earlier, when the ocean was farther away and a lot kinder to us.
Since those days the Pacific had eaten up the beach and the lower half of town. Not all at once, of course. Year by hard, dismal year. It had salted our ponds and our streams. It had even invaded the water table so we couldn’t get drinking water from our wells.
People were healthier before the waters rose. At least, that’s what you hear. They gave birth more often, and to healthy babies, who grew up to become healthy adults and make more babies.
Not everyone. Just most people.
The world had changed in that regard. And not just our part of it, though I couldn’t say I’d seen it with my own eyes. But it made sense. If the water rose in one place, it was bound to rise in others.
So maybe it was all over the world that families with healthy babies had become an uncommon thing, and getting more uncommon all the time. People went to a lot of trouble to marry into those families. They were the ones that were likely to go on, after all. They were the future, if there was one.
Families like the Ginders. Darron had been right about that. The Ginders were rare in the way they knocked out one healthy baby after another. But even they couldn’t have survived without the River.
It might have had a name at one time. Now folks just called it by what it was: the River.
Folks who were dead now used to say they had seen the start of it, way up in the hills, and how it flowed clean and clear until it mixed with the brackish stuff in town. When everything else was ruined by the rise of the ocean, it became our only reliable source of drinking water. That made it precious to us.
So precious that greedy men saw an opportunity in it.
Darron wasn’t the first of them. There were water lords before I was born, men who’d gotten the idea to control the River after drinkable water became scarce. But Darron was the best there’d ever been at squeezing the opportunity for all it was worth.
He moved boulders and sealed up the cracks between them, and finally dammed up the River so not a drop reached Vista Azul on its own. He knew full well what a cruel thing he was doing, but he knew too that there was no law against it. Then he raised the price of the water.
Nobody had to buy it. Unless, of course, we wanted to live, and to see our families do the same.
The only other water available to us was bottled stuff that came in a truck from up north. But it was more expensive than what Darron charged us, and it wasn’t always as clean as it might have been, and lots of people wanted it up and down the coast so you never knew when it would be available.
