Campbell (8 page)

“We came to help. We’re from West,” Tal muttered, as he was shuffled onto the back of a pickup truck. “We’re not here to harm anyone. It’s just the two of us.”

A large machine gun was pointed at the two of them through the window of the cab of the truck. “Shut your trap,” the big guy barked. “And you better be telling the truth, because if you’re not, you’ll wish we’d just killed you on the road.”

Chapter 5

August 2001

Los Angeles, California

“I’m sorry about your dad,” Connor said with a sympathetic, heavy smile as he dipped his feet in the Bauman’s pool. “And your mom, and everyone else.”

“Me too…about yours,” Tal replied, wiping his eyes, embarrassed by the crack in his voice that seemed to have formed from so much crying. “Adam’s figuring out how we…what we do with him now.”

Joe Bauman was in the basement, under a heavy quilt. Cold. Still. One day he’d been teaching his boys how to make a few different easy meals, and the next he was shaking, shivering, unable to get warm. Then all the heat left his body and he’d stopped moving, for the first time in his life.

That was the night before. Tal missed him already, with an indescribable ache in his heart. What didn’t help was that when he thought about his dad, it reminded him of the rest, and he found himself mourning all over again for all of them. His aunt Alex wasn’t doing well either, and they all knew it was a matter of time.

“Do you think we’re next?” Connor asked absentmindedly. “That we’re all just going to go?”

“I don’t know,” Tal shrugged. “Hard to say, I guess.”

“I guess we’ll know when we know.”
 

Both boys looked up to see Adam tapping on the screen door, nodding at them to come inside. They stood and walked into the kitchen to find the Bauman/Schmidt family sitting around the table.

“Alex is gone,” Adam said quietly. “We’ve got to do something with them. Leah was on the phone for an hour trying to get in touch with someone to take them but there’s no one. Everyone’s...” he swallowed, glancing at tiny Rachel, Tal’s littlest cousin, who was seated on the floor between her sister’s legs. “There’s no one to handle this.”

Connor and Tal exchanged a dark look. “Okay?”

“We have to bury them,” Tal’s middle brother Rob said, taking a deep breath as tears welled up behind his eyes. He’d been handling things worse than anyone, and Tal had found him crying more than once in the bathroom, which usually got Tal threats of punching if he told anyone.
 

“You’re just going to bury them?” Connor said in disbelief. “Just dig a hole? You can’t do—”

“Yeah, we can,” Adam said bluntly. “And that’s what we’re doing.”

Connor was Tal’s friend, and he’d been around since he was a toddler, but Adam thought he was easily one of the most annoying kids he’d ever met and had told Tal so several times that week. “It’s not so different from what’s done. We’ve been to enough of these things this year to be able to do one ourselves. Time for you to go home.”

The graveyard was about five miles from their house, and an hour later, Joe Bauman and Alexandra Schmidt were laid to rest in two shallow graves beside their much more elegantly buried spouses. Each kid took their turn tossing dirt on the grave and took a minute to say their goodbyes.
 

Adam, the only one with a driver's license albeit not a full one, drove them home in silence. He, along with his cousin Mark, made dinner for everyone, and provided them with a reassuring smile or a hug if they needed it. They’d all promised their parents they’d do what they needed to to ensure life went on.
 

What that life looked like had yet to be revealed.
 

September 2012

Campbell

“We found them walking through town,” Joey, the big Mormon kid who had once bullied Lucy in school, announced. “They say they’re here to help.”

Lucy glanced at her brother who, arms crossed and scowling replied, “We don’t need any help. Get them out of here.”

Andrew Campbell was the oldest; at twenty-two, one of the oldest anywhere. He looked it. His twenty-two years were really more like forty Lucy often said, and she held onto a lot of the blame for that, no matter how many times he told her she didn’t have to. He looked like Cole and Lucy, with their grey eyes and dark hair, but was broader and stronger, with a great capacity for violence. Without anyone to keep him in check, that violence often manifested itself in ugly ways. The beautiful thing about Andrew though, was his great capacity to love his siblings, which he’d demonstrated time and time again in situations where most would have faltered.
 

“I’ll talk to them later,” Lucy said quietly, giving her brother a weak smile. “See if we can’t sort something out. Joey, take them to the trailer, and stick someone outside the door. Send Chubs to get the plane and tow it to the lot behind the church.”

“There’s not much to discuss,” Andrew grumbled, after Joey had dragged their visitors off. “What are those two assholes going to do for us?”

“Maybe nothing, but we don’t need to start a war on two fronts now, do we?” She turned to face her sibling. “Half their territory wants to join up with us anyway, and if we have to go to war, we’ll need those resources.”

“But we’ll just take them.”

“Maybe there’s a better way,” she said with a shrug. “Or maybe we’ll just take them.”

The two regarded each other for a minute, taking in one another’s appearance. Andrew had a dark tan from his summer up north overseeing the oil fields, a job Lucy had given him to keep him out of situations like the one they found themselves in that day. He was good at controlling the unruly kids that wanted to work out there, and had fostered a weird respect born greatly of his reputation. This respect got results, but Andrew Campbell was no diplomat.

“Ce, you need to eat something,” Andrew said gently, taking in his sister’s exhausted features. “You don’t look right.”

“I’m okay,” she said quietly. “And I’ll eat.”

Lucy and Cole hadn’t spent a night in different houses since they were born. It was quite a feat; twenty years of co-habitation through all they’d gone through. Although they actually hadn’t shared a room since their mother died, without him in the house Lucy felt every second of the day. It was like a quiet hum in the back of her head, one she wasn’t even aware of, had suddenly stopped. The silence was deafening.
 

Lucy hadn’t spent the two weeks since Cole had gone missing in a vegetative state on the couch, as easy as that would have been to do. Quite the opposite, in fact. She’d been to Calgary and then Edmonton for a few days, to evaluate their resources there. She’d sat down with the local leaders there, her oldest and most trusted confidents, to try and devise a plan. The most fruitful meeting was an evening in a sweat lodge with Lucy’s best friend Sitting Bull, a hulking, handsome man with a closely cropped dark hair that had taken up leadership of the Blackfeet, and many of the other aboriginal groups that loosely fell within Campbell. They’d been close since she was eleven and he twelve, and had always worked together. He’d helped Lucy to mastermind their recent oil boom. The result of their meeting was the beginnings of a meticulously planned counter attack on East, once their numbers were increased by securing Seattle and Chicago, both very attainable goals.
 

A counter attack wouldn’t necessarily get the immediate result that Lucy wanted, which was getting Cole back, but it was the smart way to proceed. She had to trust that East wouldn’t hurt him as long as he was a bargaining tool, and he’d continue to be valuable to them for quite some time. If it came down to an ‘if you do X, then we’ll do Y’ situation with him, she’d negotiate, but as much as it pained her, there was a lot more at stake than her twin. She had thousands to consider.
 

It was late afternoon when Lucy woke on the couch, a quilt that she didn’t remember being placed there draping her from head to toe. The smell of something baked made her nostrils twitch and she followed her nose into the kitchen where Andrew and Zoey were standing over what looked like a partially eaten apple pie.

“Someone brought it over. A girl from a farm outside town,” Zoey remarked, her eyes, dark with concern, meeting Lucy’s. Lucy felt a pang of guilt over that, because she’d been unconcerned with everyone lately, least of all Zoey, who’d been forced to spend a lot of time with Andrew due to her absence. “She ate a piece in front of us to show it was okay. You want some?”

Lucy nodded, sitting at the kitchen table. “You should take something out to the boys in the trailer,” she mumbled, wiping the sleep out of her eyes as Zoey cut her a piece and Andrew paced in the kitchen. “Don’t want them using this as an excuse to decide we’re hostile.”
 

“I’ll take it out,” Andrew said, frowning at Zoey disapprovingly. “You need to take better care of Lucy. That’s what you’re here for, not making friendly with a bunch of assholes—”
 

“Zoey, we’ll send dinner later,” Lucy interrupted, giving her a half smile. “She’s not going to go make friendly with anyone,” she said to Andrew. “And she’s not here to take care of me. She’s here because she’s here. You stay away from them. I’m going to deal with them.”

The history between Zoey and Andrew was ugly. Zoey and Lucy’s relationship had begun as a reaction of sorts to an incident with Andrew years earlier. For all his sins, it was the angriest Lucy had ever been with her brother, and a large scar on his forearm served as a reminder of Lucy’s expectations when it came to how to treat women, at least when she was around. When Andrew was out of sight, Lucy had to not think about what he was doing too much, because it had the potential to make her lose her mind.
 

A piece of pie with an oversized scoop of homemade ice cream was placed in front of her, and like she should have been doing instead of napping, she started to think about what to do with the small envoy from West. She tuned out Andrew muttering at Zoey and visitors walking in and out of the kitchen and sorted through the useful thoughts racing through her mind.

West was persistent. It wasn’t so long ago that she’d all but told them to fuck off, and now they’d sent the second in command unarmed, according to Joey. She’d picked up from the conversation around her that there’d been a few guns on the plane and they’d taken a handgun off the pilot, but they certainly hadn’t come to assassinate her. It was a diplomatic mission, without a doubt. East hadn’t even attempted that. West still needed her, maybe more now that East had made a move against her. With them, she could have Seattle, and much, much more at her disposal, which could potentially aid in getting her brother back faster. She’d have to work out some sort of deal with them, but she hadn’t had immediate plans to invade West anyway. Everyone around her agreed that there was more value in doing what she could to secure the Midwest to create a buffer between both adversaries before going after West. West had Mexico. There were a hell of a lot of people in Mexico, and they were connected to the mysterious southern continent, which was ripe with oil and other resources.

“Andrew, can you get me the map?” she asked sometime later, still ignoring the twenty kids that were moving around and through her kitchen for various reasons.

The well-worn map they’d been consulting for a decade was placed in front of her. It was probably time for a new one, Lucy often thought while she was looking at it, but it had served them well over the years and she was sentimental about it. She’d leave them Old California as a starting point, with a promise of a ten year treaty. They could work from there. If they were aligned, she’d ignore their ridiculous capitalist system in the hopes that people in the territory would learn by osmosis and make their own demands. She didn’t need Old California.
 

Without a word, Lucy grabbed the remainder of the pie and two forks, and headed out into the late afternoon sun, grabbing her handgun from the coat closet on her way out. Andrew stood in the doorway silently and watched her walk purposefully to the airstream in the back field.
 

“Shout if you need me,” he called after her. She responded with a nod and a wave, the tall grass hampering her movement slightly, as she followed the path the West boys had beaten down earlier.
 

She acknowledged Lou, the kid that had been assigned to watch them and knocked twice on the trailer door. It whipped open, revealing Juan on the other side, leaning on the fire axe from the cupboard above the fridge.

“The Queen herself,” he muttered disrespectfully, nodding to his left where Lucy assumed Tal was sitting. “Won’t you come in, your grace?”

“Fuck off,” she replied icily. “Or I won’t share my pie.”

“I wasn’t under the impression that you shared your pie,” Juan replied with a chauvinistic smirk, before sitting back at the kitchen table where she assumed he’d been before, his tall, broad frame barely fitting into the small booth. “At least not with the likes of our kind.”

“Juan, take a walk,” Tal barked, standing to acknowledge Lucy’s entry. A copy of the local newspaper from four months earlier was open on the table, the crossword puzzle half-filled in in pencil. His dark eyes met hers, and he smiled graciously. “Please, have a seat,” he gestured at the armchair across from him. “It’s nice of you to think of us, with the pie.”

“It’s nice that one of you is on your best behavior,” she replied pointedly, as Juan slammed the trailer door behind him. “I hope he doesn’t run into my brother out there with that attitude.”

“He’s under the impression that this trip is a waste of time, but he…it’s not up to him to decide that.” Tal took the fork he was handed. “And he’s a bit pissed that we’ve been put under house arrest.”

“Trailer arrest,” she corrected. “I can’t have you out walking around. It’s as much for your safety as ours. Things are tense around here and there aren’t a lot of outsiders in town.”

“No kidding,” Tal said, nodding, as he tried to read her expression. “I am sorry about your brother, for what it’s worth. That was a very hostile move on East’s part.”