Runaway (11 page)

“Please, do something,” Catherine said. “I need more.”

Jan’s lips found a nipple and tugged at it, played with it, lightly bit down. The gasp from Catherine was sharp.

“Yes. That. More.”

That voice was like direct pressure between Jan’s legs. As she moved all over Catherine, she wondered if she’d come without ever being touched. With each moan from Catherine’s mouth she felt a deeper twinge and she became desperate to straddle the slender thigh and ride her. It would just take a moment. But she put her fingers inside Catherine instead and watched her head move from side to side on the pillow, her eyes closed, her hands reaching behind her for the headboard. Jan lowered herself and added her mouth while keeping the fingers moving, and now Catherine’s moans were loud and sustained and her body was writhing, rising up from the bed, moving as if possessed. Jan wanted to possess her, she did possess her. She stayed on her as Catherine came, until the spasms subsided and she pulled away from Jan’s tongue.

She moved up quickly and straddled Catherine’s thigh, moving deeply and rhythmically as she took Catherine’s arms and held them over her head, their eyes now locked on each other. Jan never kept her eyes open while making love. Not before now, with Catherine. She saw the feral look in Catherine’s eyes as she pushed her thigh upward to increase the pressure and soon Jan came in a long orgasm that ripped sounds out of her body she’d never made before.

They lay welded together, sticky and incapable of moving. They were speechless for a long while.

“I’d say that was more than a little trouble we just got into,” Catherine said.

God, yes, Jan thought.

*

Jan woke at ten Saturday morning, the strong eastern sunlight pouring through the windows. She’d managed at some point during the night to untangle herself from Catherine and roll to the edge of the ship-sized mattress. She was asleep when she’d done so. No conscious part of her wanted distance from Catherine. Her unconscious self was a constant and cruel master.

She moved back over and wrapped herself around Catherine. Her body was warm like a baby’s. She tried to stay still to let Catherine sleep, but her hands started to roam. Catherine turned in her arms.

“You’re not much for sleeping in, are you?” she murmured.

“Not much. But it is ten o’clock.”

“Bloody hell!” Catherine threw off the covers and sprang from the bed. She stood there naked, holding her hands to the sides of her head as if it were about to fall apart. “I’m late for my meetings.”

She sounded anguished, at odds with the carefree woman of the night before. Jan watched her sprint to the bathroom. It seemed morning sex was off the table. She followed her and stood at the door.

“You’re the new owner, remember? It’s okay to be late.”

Catherine was checking the temperature of the shower. She glanced at Jan.

“Not the impression I like to give. Listen, I’m sorry for this. Have them charge the valet to my room, will you?” She stepped into the shower.

Jan stared at the figure soaping herself up in the steamy water. She felt sick, dismissed. She got dressed and left the room without saying more. When she got down to the front of the hotel, she paid for her own valet parking.

Chapter Five

Maddy peered from under her camouflaged cap at the large field dotted with obstacle courses, a rifle range, and stretches of bare ground where dozens of uniformed people were doing exercises, breaking down weapons, and throwing each other around in simulated hand-to-hand combat. It was a cloudless day, the autumn foliage brilliant in the woods surrounding the field.

She stood in a long line of men and women wearing the uniforms issued to them the hour before. Standing in front of the line addressing them was a “sergeant” named Drecker. His camos were clean but well worn, his boots shiny but with many miles on them.

“You sorry suckers have one hell of a day ahead of you. Some of you look worn out from getting up early to drive here. Believe me, that was the best part of your day right there. By the time we finish our last field exercise in the middle of the night, you’re going to wish you’d never been born.”

Maddy wanted to push her cap up. It was settling on her head and the brim was covering her eyes. They were standing at ease, with hands clasped behind their backs. She must have looked like a fool, but she didn’t dare move out of position.

“Unlike a full basic training in the military where a soldier’s strength can be built up, we’re going to have to work with what you’ve got, and that ain’t much from the looks of things. You’ll leave camp tomorrow with a written program of how to continue your conditioning.”

All the people Maddy had met at David’s kitchen table were here in line with her, except Ed and Warren. They’d already been through multiple training sessions with this outfit and were out making more preparations for the move. Kristi stood next to her, her piercings removed at Drecker’s command. Her uniform fit snuggly across her large breasts, and Maddy could see sweat trickling down her face, despite the cool temperature. They’d driven together in the back of David’s truck, bundled in blankets and silent the entire way. Occasionally, though, Kristi would give her an encouraging smile and a thumbs-up.

David stood on her other side. She knew he’d been up until very late, long after she’d gone to sleep in her basement bedroom. She’d wake to hear him scraping his chair away from the kitchen table, pacing from one end of the house to the other, scraping the chair back in place. She’d managed to put together enough hours of sleep to make the day bearable. She didn’t know how David would manage. She wasn’t worried anymore about him not being a man of action. He was a man who didn’t know how not to take action.

Before she’d said good night, David put his hand on her forearm. It seemed like something her grandma would do.

“Maddy, I just want you to know how much it’s meant that we got to know each other.”

Maddy looked at his hand on her arm, wondering if he’d start patting her. She didn’t know what to say.

“You’re young, probably younger than you’re admitting to me, but you’ve got an amazing mind. I feel like you get what I’m saying, more than any of the others do.”

She didn’t think that was much of a compliment, but he looked very sincere. She was beginning to believe he genuinely cared for her.

“You and I have a singleness of purpose,” he went on, his hand finally sliding off her arms. “We have a simple goal, but we have to be realistic. There are going to be people and circumstances that will keep things complicated.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just mean that the reason you and I want to leave all this behind”—his arm swept around the decrepit kitchen as if it were a Four Seasons resort—“is probably not the same reasons others have. And that’s okay.”

“Is it?” she asked. “I don’t want to live in the middle of Idaho with a bunch of people who are running from something. I feel like I’m running toward something.”

David smiled as he watched her. “Exactly.”

“What are they running from?” She ignored the fact that she was running from something too.

“I didn’t say they were. I just said their reasons might be different from ours. We’ve decided to withhold our creativity from a society that only punishes us for having it. That’s not something that most people think that much about. Ed and Warren want to go to Idaho to live like pioneers. Tom is a lost soul who just wants to be part of something. He goes with me everywhere.”

“What about Kristi?”

“Well, Kristi is all gruff on the outside, marshmallow on the inside, not an unusual personality profile around here. There are so many people like her that have no job prospects, no special skills, no idea really of what it would be like to have either. Every year she sees her community becoming more hopeless, the people around her more bitter, their resentment poisoning everything. She wants out, but she doesn’t really care what she’s moving into as long as she believes it’s something better. The idea of leaving this place is what’s driving her.”

“So what does she bring to the table?”

“First of all, malleability. Every community has to have worker bees, and that’s what Kristi wants. To be part of something where her labor is valued. She’ll be an exceptional worker bee, but that’s all she’ll ever be. And that’s enough for her.”

“How do you know that? She didn’t come up to you and say, ‘Dude, give me all the shit jobs and I’ll be happy as a clam.’” Maddy couldn’t understand the lack of ambition in that.

“I’ve known Kristi a long time. Just think about it and it all makes sense.”

“Okay. What about Diane? What’s her story?”

“Diane? Diane’s my girlfriend. I don’t want to be entirely self-sufficient.”

Maddy didn’t like the big grin on his face. She generally found men to be quite pathetic when it came to sex. She went downstairs to bed.

*

Sergeant Drecker handed off part of the group to a corporal. They were led away to start their scouting exercises while Maddy, Kristi, Tommy, and Diane stayed behind for weapons training. They marched behind Drecker as he took them to a large rifle range.

Drecker addressed them. “This morning we’re going to train you on how to safely handle and clean your weapon. You will not be allowed to shoot it until you’ve mastered these skills.”

Kristi was next to her again. While Drecker started handing out rifles, she leaned over to whisper, “How cool is this?”

Maddy saw the gleam in Kristi’s eye. “Very cool?”

“Damn right.”

Maddy thought about what David told her about Kristi. She was glad Kristi was excited and she was glad they were going through training together. Other than that, she felt like she’d been dropped into an alien nation.

“You two,” Drecker barked, pointing at Maddy and Kristi. “Step forward.”

Kristi did as she was told. Maddy followed a moment later.

“First rule of camp is that you do not speak while in formation or in the presence of a superior unless you are spoken to first. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Kristi said.

Drecker stared at Maddy.

“Yes, sir.”

“Drop and give me ten.”

“Ten what?” Maddy said. She heard Diane stifle a laugh behind her.

“Ten push-ups,” Drecker said. “Didn’t they teach you how to do a push-up in your fancy schools?”

Kristi had already dropped to the ground and was grinding out her first push-up. Maddy was wondering how Decker knew she went to “fancy schools.”

“Wait a second,” she said. “Shouldn’t we be told the rules before we’re punished for breaking them?”

Drecker moved to within an inch of Maddy’s face. She stepped back and he followed her.

“That just earned you another ten, private. Now drop.”

Maddy looked behind her. Tommy looked back at her nervously while the others avoided her eyes. She sighed and got down on the ground, doing her twenty push-ups in the time it took Kristi to finish her ten. Kristi lay face down, her body heaving as she caught her breath.

“Now get back in line so we can get some work done.”

Maddy had read as much as she could about the militias. She knew they operated under a military chain of command. But who had made her a private? She was just here to learn to shoot, which she wanted to do. She wasn’t here to join a militia. The last chain of command she ever wanted to be part of was the one she’d just fled: father/mother/Maddy.

Once everyone had a rifle, they got on their knees and learned how to disassemble and load them. Their first cartridges were blanks. Two hours later, Maddy was shooting with real bullets, blasting the heads off of targets that looked like someone’s version of an Arab terrorist. She tried to ignore the implications of that as she shot round after round. When she paused to reload, she looked over at Kristi. They beamed at each other and bumped fists.

The afternoon was packed with instruction on how to operate covertly in the woods. Since it was hunting season in Michigan, they were issued bright orange hats and vests.

“You’ll be in full uniform for tonight’s maneuvers,” Drecker said.

Maddy and Kristin were teamed up to learn about stealth movement and sensory awareness in the woods, which Maddy took to mean walking quietly with her headphones off. When Drecker started talking about identifying booby traps, she paid more attention. They were operating under a different definition of survival training. This wasn’t about building animal traps and picking berries. It was all about outsmarting people who were trying to kill them. They learned to build an Apache limp wire trip set. Maddy had a quick fantasy of her father being strung up by one as he walked in from the garage after another night out carousing. Other than that, she couldn’t imagine a scenario where she’d need one.

During a break mid-afternoon, Maddy sat with Kristi and Tommy at the edge of the field. Diane had run off to find David, who’d disappeared during target practice. Tommy looked confused, as if he’d signed up for calculus and found himself in a pottery class. He seemed much more naïve than Maddy about what the training camp would be like. At least she knew these soldiers were preparing for one or more unlikely scenarios: the end of the world as we know it, government breakdown and anarchy, a terrorist attack.

“I don’t really need to know how to set traps for humans,” Maddy said.

Kristi was sitting against a tree, her rifle across her lap. “Oh, hell yes, you do. What if we’re invaded?”

“Invaded?” Tommy said. “Why would anyone invade us?”

“Exactly. One of the reasons we’re going there is to be out of everyone’s way. We don’t bother them and they don’t bother us,” Maddy said.

“You two are living in a dream world,” Kristi said. “There’s always someone who wants what’s not theirs. We have to know how to protect ourselves.”

“It doesn’t hurt to be ready, I suppose,” Maddy said “And the training’s a blast. I can’t wait for maneuvers tonight.”

Kristi was smiling again. “Right? We are going to kick some ass.”

Tommy was sitting on the ground with his legs crossed, his head bent over his lap.