Ted woke under a now cloudy sky, looking straight up, from the place where he was bundled on the wicker sled. Great spruce and fir soared on either side of the hump in the mountain side in front of which his caretaker, or captor, had dragged him.
“Get Up,” hissed Psycho Girl through his own gritted teeth, so that he sat, not being restrained at all.
The popping of connective tissue in his ribs made him groan as she turned and looked down at him. She could have been Ben’s daughter, and he hoped not. She was pretty, very pretty, for someone who had a face as wide as a cow. She had a distinct Samoan look to her, with long, black curls piled about her wide shoulders. She wore a big blue dress made of various salvaged denim jackets and pants, quite fetching he thought. Her waist was tiny, belted around by a wide leather belt with a rabbit fur sheathed buckle. Her ass was enormous!, her legs thick as Ben’s, her pinkish fists bigger than Ted’s and balled up on her hips as she grinned down at him.
Her voice did sound like water a bit:
“Old Ben sure put the boots to you! I thought Ted the Fed was a mighty man—look at you, matchstick granddad, broken and abed!”
Ted stood with more popping in his chest and noted that the woman might by thirty or forty—it was hard to tell.
“Miss, I have not been briefed on you yet. I am Ted and I am here to help.”
She snorted with disdain then twisted with girlish delight, and with both hands lifted her mop of hair and turned, showing her Uplink chip glowing blue, “You come for this, Ted?”
Ted checked his left knee, swollen to twice its size.
“Miss, if you are Uplinked, which you surely are, I am to offer you Uplift or Remission, either I turn the Link for benediction or I remove it. It is up to you. I also have these supplies from Matt up at Wonderview.”
She walked up to Ted with an arrogant swing to her great hips, her dress dragging on the gravel, for this was a railroad bed, and winked at him, “Ted, before we continue this conversation, I need to go haul water up from the canyon. In the mean time, please enter my humble home and make yourself comfortable before we resolve our dilemma. Now, lets get the sled indoors.”
He bent to lend a hand and she already had the thing slid into the mouth of the old railroad tunnel, a kind of structure he had often emptied of its rails with the other boys of the rail gangs. Most of the entrance was covered by a strong lattice of pine and fir boughs, most as thick as his wrist in the middle and lashed with synthetic rope. Railroad ties had been salvaged and used to frame a doorway, from which this lattice was anchored. In the center was door made of plank panels, limed like the two cabins above.
“Ben made this, didn’t he?”
“Yes, and you killed him, you little shit.”
With those words the woman, yet to introduce herself, suggested, “Please, look after my home while I’m gone.”
She hefted two hand-made five-gallon tin buckets, all of the five gallon plastic buckets burned a decade back, and was off on her way, into the daylight, as Ted turned to look into the fire-lit gloom, where various figures had gathered to greet him. Two lanterns did illuminate a table and chairs near the edge of darkness. There he could see that a bit of sunlight peeped through the demolished east exit. There was no reason to demolish both ends of a tunnel. Fallow Earth permitted closed tunnels to serve as habitation refuges for the marooners. That was in the handbook, that had been read to him in camp thirty-some years ago.
There milled seven, no eight… no, nine, children, for two of the eldest girls, in their early teens, held a baby each. Ted ignored Psycho Girl as she hissed in the back of his head, “Uplinked are not to breed—this woman is a criminal.”
Ted stopped, smiled at the children, and aid, “Hey, y’all and blood ran from his right nostril and his right eye.
He stood, half swooning admiring how the railroad tunnel on the shoulder of the mountain, perhaps 90 feet long, one of the short ones, as it had been closed on the east side, by purposeful military demolition, was by this family of ten, rendered into a perfect habitation.
“Ten of y’all together?”
“Yes,” said the eldest girl, almost a woman herself. “Mamma said the sky bosses might do something to us if we grow our family—but I don’t want to leave. I love my family.”
Ted looked at them all, six girls and four boys, some blond, some ginger, some dark-haired.
“Are you Ted the Fed?” asked the nine-year-old boy with blond hair.
“Yes, afraid I am.”
“I’m Billy, and Daddy Travis said he was doing for you! You better watch out!”
Ted smiled and nodded, “Y’all know Matt, he sent supplies, even a gun fer hunting.”
The oldest boy, a preteen, asked, “Did Daddy Matt ask about me?”
“Sure he did, son, that’s why he sent you a gun.”
More blood ran from his nose and his eye, and Peep Girl whispered, “uncoupling,” and Ted went blind in his right eye as the optic fell to the gravel floor of the foyer. He could see further on, past the hearth, that there was a floor, a deck of close-chinked planks. There were various chairs.
“Nice floor you all have, for your family room.”
The second oldest girl, of eleven years it seemed, a dark-haired beauty already, with a little ginger boy on her hip, sighed, “The Prophet, Benjamin, said he would slay you if he could, but if you came, it meant he failed.”
Ted shed a tear from his left eye as that nostril bled as well. The blood tasted right, rusty, not bright. Thankfully, the nose being left of center sent most of the blood into his already read beard, so he could speak without spitting rudely.
A precocious girl of eight, with wavy blond curls, chirped, “Are you really a devil, a devil from the stars?”
Ted knelt in agony, his blind eye and the base of his brain burning, his teeth on the right side all aching like to explode, his wrist where Mamma was burning. He managed to cut Mamma off with his skinning knife. She fell to the floor with a screech, the pain stabbing through his head.
The children gathered around him with concern, “Ted, Ted?”
“Sorry y’all—were just a kid like ye wit no daddy took up for wrong come here to bring the HDR on offer ta a trip to the stars. Cain’ see no day star in here…”
Little hands helped him over to the rough-hewn and well-sanded plank floor, a floor like he slept on at camp in Bend after the rails were all pulled up…
Psycho Girl hissed low and hurtful in the back of his brain, ‘More then ten, and marooner hunting season is open—it’s the law, Traitor.’
His mouth filled with blood, meaning he was sideways, and he bubbled through it, “Y’all kids, da big girl wit day baby—ged on up to Brie. If we more den ten, won’ be safe here wit me.”
“Listen to him,” whispered the girl of eleven with the ginger boy on her hip, who seemed to be dominant, “Go Betty. And Billy, go get The Prophet’s Bible. He predicted this.”
There Ted nodded off with blood running from his nose, a nose that was not where it should be, the eye in the back of his head seeping, cold, frozen pain into the base of his brain.
