Campbell (17 page)

“If you guys were doing what they’re doing, I never would have scooped Vancouver. I would have set up a meeting with you instead of their disgruntled local leaders.”

He stopped for a minute and looked at her. “You don’t know what West is like.”

“I know what Vancouver was like.” She raised her eyebrows critically. “And I know you do too. Without stability and security, places don’t look like this.”

Tal thought of his recent trip to San Jose, and even his own home, but kept his mouth shut. “Let’s just go meet her.”

Lucy lead the way to the second floor of what Tal imagined had been the administration building, not such a different place from where his mother worked as Dean of Students at UCLA when he was very young.
 

“This looks like my mother’s old office,” Tal said absentmindedly, as they climbed the stairs, after receiving direction from someone seated at the front who seemed to be loosely serving as security. “She used to work at a university.”

“Mmm,” Lucy replied thoughtfully, running her hand over the marble on the walls as she pulled down her sleeves to cover the scratches on her arms. “Fancy.”

The door to Cindy Parker’s office was open a crack, and when Lucy poked her head in, she was met with a bright face about her own age with a mess of auburn curls and almost black eyes.

“You’re the girl from Campbell,” she said with a smile. “They called from the burger place. I own that. Come in. Sit.” She nodded at the chairs in front of her, obviously a relic of the old university.
 

“Laura. And Tyler,” Lucy said, sitting down. “We’re just traveling around a bit. Thought we’d take a road trip.” She beamed at Tal in a way that certainly didn’t indicate that they’d been kidnapped two days earlier, and that made it easy to ignore the bruising on her face. “This is a great town.”

It quickly became obvious that Lucy knew exactly what she was doing, meeting with Cindy.
 

“Thanks!” she said brightly. “We try to keep things going, you know?”

“Yeah, and you’re doing a great job,” Lucy leaned across the table and smiled at her. “So, I know Lucy Campbell pretty well, and—”
 

“Oh!” Cindy squealed with delight. “Oh, I think she’s just great.”

“Me too,” Lucy said, glancing at Tal smugly. “So I was wondering if you might want me to talk to her about trading. I can take her your contact information. I know she’s always interested in cross-breeding cattle, and if your cows taste like that burger I had—”
 

“Oh, that’d be just awesome. She’s so smart and with it. A lot of us down here watch what goes on up there.”

“Pretty exciting about Vancouver, huh?” Lucy leaned back in her chair. “I sat in on the talks for that.”

“Anything that eats away at West is a-okay with me.” Cindy shook her head. “Those assholes, hoarding their movies and blocking our trade route with Asia. They won’t even let us buy access unless we agree to align with them. And we’d be stupid to do that. We need East too, to get stuff from Europe, even though they’re messed up too. They’ve got the connections there.”

“Of course you do,” Lucy said knowingly. “The Asian market has really blown up. Now that we have Vancouver, the sky is really the limit.”

“With all that oil too,” Cindy said thoughtfully. “Yes, I would like to talk to Lucy Campbell.”

Tal resisted the urge to tell Cindy Parker who she was really talking to, and if she wanted to be alone with Lucy to rim her ass, he’d give them a minute. He wondered for a moment if they’d met before, and if this was some giant scheme.

“Thanks, Cindy. I’ll give this to Lucy,” Lucy said, shaking her hand heartily as she tucked a phone number into her pocket. “She’ll be in touch.”

“Tell her I’ll look forward to it.” Cindy continued smiling. “Thanks so much for coming by.”

“Are you going to gloat now, or later?” Tal muttered, as they made their way back to the car. “Because you might as well get it over with.”

“No gloating,” Lucy said, without a hint of smugness. “I just want you to give me some time before you call Connor.”

Tal climbed into the passenger seat and buckled up, his face blank as he tried to think of some sort of comeback for Lucy, but found he had nothing. She was right. Right about all of it. He’d fallen into a trap, created by a need for comfort and security. He’d let his nostalgia for his old life blind him from the potential all around him, the potential that had sprung from so much death, and trudged on, business as usual from the time he was twelve.
 

He’d forgotten to think about what his parents would have done, even though he’d promised.

“I won’t call him,” he said quietly, glancing over at Lucy, whose hair looked almost red with the setting sun. “Right away.”

Lucy smiled knowingly. “I’d never make things worse for you, only better, if you’re open to a new form of better.”

“Tell me, and I’ll decide if I believe that or not,” he muttered. “Tell me everything, then. Sell me on your life.”

Lucy pulled over, tucked her legs under her in the driver’s seat and started at the beginning, told the story of tiny Angela Duncan and her eight hundred head of cattle. She told him how they were useless to Angela, because she was seven and had no idea what to do with cows. She was scared of cows, but they were hers. She didn’t have anything else to her name.

So she, with the help of Lucy and Cole, started selling them for things she needed. A female lactating cow for some firewood, a bull to an older kid for meat. Before she knew it, she had a lot of stuff, and only a few cows.
 

 
She traded some of her other stuff for other things, and other kids started doing the same. Maybe she didn’t need a wheelbarrow, but she knew that her neighbor did, so he could move soil for his garden, which, next summer, would grow the blackberries she loved.

“So there’s this little eight year old with more than she ever needed, in a year, because she’d been kind to others when they needed a hand, and suddenly Angela’s the most popular kid in town, and she wants for nothing, but neither does anyone else. Everyone’s okay. And her cows? They’re breeding like nuts the next spring, all over the place, and then there’s more cows to trade, and Angela starts asking for less and less for them, so more kids can have them.”

“We don’t have cows in LA,” Tal said, aware he was being a jerk. “But I get it. Thanks.”

Lucy ignored his dig. “Now, there aren’t as many of us as there were before. It’s possible now to work together to make things good for everyone. Kids still have to do shit jobs, sure, I mean, my brother up there with the oil? It’s disgusting. But you pay those kids a little more, let them know it’s appreciated, and they know it makes everything else work. You know why I have so many kids at my house all the time? Do you think it’s because I like being social?”

“No.”

“See, look how well you know me already. It’s because if you empower people, and make them feel like they have a say, they become invested in their own future. Kids tell me all the time the way things should be, and I mean, I hear some really stupid things, but there’s some smart in there too, and I listen. When was the last time you listened to just some kid on the street?”

“Oh, will you just give it a break!” Tal snapped, finding himself irrationally irritated. “Fuck, you’re self-righteous.”
 

Lucy just rolled her eyes. “Don’t be an asshole. When was the last time—”
 

“Never,” he admitted. “Well, when it came to what kind of movies they wanted to watch, in the beginning, but not for a long time.”

“So this is a good opportunity for you to listen. For me to listen too. You should never stop listening.”

They stopped for the night at another roadside hotel, this one in northern Missouri by Tal’s calculation when the fuel light came on. He caught a glimpse of Lucy’s cash and noted that they were running low after paying for the hotel and a loaf of bread with some jam for dinner.
 

“My mom used to do a lot of pro bono work,” Tal remarked, not to impress Lucy, but because she’d been on his mind ever since they’d visited the university. “I’m not ignorant to the reality that there are problems with our system.”

“Why don’t you do anything about it then?” Lucy asked, genuinely curious. “If you know.”

“It’s hard.”

“It’s easy,” she countered.

“Boy, you’re not cutting me any slack, are you?” Tal gave her a half smile.

“I think you’re all right,” she said quietly. “And I’m a careful judge of character.”

“You’re okay too,” he admitted. “And I knew you weren’t gaining people’s trust with blind luck. I knew that from the start, and I told Connor that.”

“We’re running out of money,” she mumbled, after they’d crawled into their respective queen sized beds. “And gas.”

“If I can’t call my people, you need to call yours,” Tal muttered back, narrowing his eyes so he could see her across the room. “It’s a long walk north, and it’s starting to get cold.”

“I’ll call tomorrow.”

“Goodnight,” he said, into the dark, after he closed his eyes.

“Night, Tal,” Lucy whispered back, rolling away from him.

***

Lucy didn’t fall right to sleep, and found her cheeks wet as she started thinking about her brother. She’d hardly thought about Cole all day, and the guilt over that ate her up. From where she stood, she wasn’t sure what she could do to try and get him back, but so far, she’d done nothing.

When she was sure Tal was asleep, she dressed and went downstairs to use the pay phone she’d noticed in the lobby, once there was no one around to overhear her. Minimal lights were on and the front door was locked up, which she hoped meant whoever was running the place had gone to bed.
 

Lucy had memorized the calling card number her mother had forced each of them to know when they were small. It hadn’t worked again until the systems all fell apart, and she’d tried it on a chance one night in Calgary a few years earlier when she’d run out of quarters and was desperate to talk to Zoey. She called the one person who she knew would know she was alive.
 

“Bull?” she said hopefully when the line clicked. “Hey.”

“Where the fuck are you?” he roared, the concern in his voice thrust through the line. “Shit, Ce. I’ve been looking everywhere…they all thought—”

“I’m in Missouri. North Missouri. At a hotel.”

“How the fuck did you get there?”
 

“I drove. From Arkansas. After we killed the kids that took us. From East.”

“Fucking East,” Bull muttered. “You and the West kid?”

“Yeah.”

“You okay?”

“I’m as okay as I ever am. Listen, what’s happening up there?”

“Your brother is losing his mind. They’re up here, him and Zoey.”

“They’re there?” It was surprising that Andrew would have gone to Bull for help. They’d never gotten along or agreed on anything.

Their affection for her was the exception.
 

“They drove up yesterday. Wanted to see what kind of plan you and I’d cooked up—”
 

“Don’t tell Zoey anything.”

Bull sighed on the line. “She’s fucking distraught over you, and no, I didn’t tell her anything. I assume your brother is okay to talk to? He’s a poor fucking substitute for you since his strategy is just to kill everyone—”
 

“I think Zoey’s working with East.”

Bull snorted. “I think you have trust issues.”

“You don’t think—”
 

“I think if she was working with East, she wouldn’t be here, sobbing her eyes out for no one’s benefit and not trying to involve herself in anything political. If she’s a plant, she’s the world’s worst.”

Lucy squeezed her eyes shut and pulled her knees to her chest, a wave of relief flooding her. “You think she’s okay?”

“I don’t know,” Bull muttered. “I’ll keep an eye on her. You need to get back up here. Kids are really angry.”

“I’m not ready to be a martyr yet. Don’t worry.”

Bull was silent for a long minute.

“You know what? Don’t come back yet. Let me see…I want to figure out who’s behind this. No use in you coming back if it’s not safe.”

“You want me to stay away?”

“Give me a week. We haven’t even got a ransom note for you. They keep sending shit about Cole though. Fucked up shit,” he said, lowering his voice. “I shouldn’t have told you that. I just…they…we all thought they had you too.”

Lucy felt like she was falling, as her mind processed his words. “What do they want?”

“Everything. Assimilation. We won’t do it, even if you were to agree under duress. It’s not what you want.”

Lucy found herself brokenhearted and grateful knowing that. “I…I need money. I don’t have any money.”

Bull was quiet again. “Go to Oklahoma. Not too far from you. Get to Grove, on the lake. Look for Red Cloud.”

Her years with Bull had taught her a lot about Aboriginal heroes. He loved the stories. “You’re not very inventive with your names, are you?”

“They’re good ones,” Bull said, unapologetically. “They honor our ancestors.”

She rolled her eyes. Bull wasn’t Sioux. He was Blackfoot. He just thought Bull was a cool name. Cooler than James. “I’ll get there.”

“I’ll meet you there, as soon as I can. Red Cloud, he’ll take care of you. I’ll call him tonight.”

“Thanks,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’ll be okay.”

“Of course you will be. Goose, I’ll see you in a few days. Don’t worry about Campbell,” he said reassuringly. “Everyone up here is fighting for you. I’ll keep the war on simmer until we know where to fight it.”

“I love you,” Lucy whispered. “And thank you.”

“I love you too, old friend,” Bull whispered back. “And thank you for letting me get some sleep. You’ve been screaming in my head for two nights now, not making a lick of sense. I thought they were hurting you, bad.”

Lucy decided against telling him the specifics of her ordeal. “It’s been…stressful. I’ll try and be quiet tonight. I haven’t been sleeping right,” she said, frowning to herself as she hung up and thought about her twin, who, under any other circumstance would have been her next call.