The Unwanted Winter - Volume One of the Saga of the Twelves (88 page)

She sighed heavily. “It’s
my real hair, you know?”

“
Yeah, I know.”

“
How do you know?” her
question was pointed and direct.

“
Because, the more I think
about it, the more I’m convinced it is your true hair color. I
mean, if you had been dyeing your hair all your life, you would
look like Amy Winehouse on too much Cocaine. Your hair would be all
frizzed out and spindly looking, like spiders have been nesting in
your wig for like five years or something,” he explained with a
growing smile.

Sophie bounced with
laughter. “Eewww! Thank god for that!”

“
Tell me about it, then
I’d have to be all scared just sitting here next to you, hoping
nothing jumps out of your hair and bites me.” Anthony joined her,
laughing as well. He settled down after a short time. “At least you
won’t have to worry about any of that stuff now. I guess being
here, in this place, has its perks after all.”

Sophie glanced at him out
of the corner of her eyes. “I think I’d have preferred to have
stayed by home, less dangerous, less people trying to kill
me.”

With a loud huff of
agreement, Anthony said, “Yeah, when you put it that way, I think I
would too.”

“
So what did you do in
school, any sports or activities?” she asked.

Anthony caught sight of
the progress Jason and Joaquin (and Louis) were making on the
“bathing” area. He was pleasantly surprised to see they had
actually managed to construct a decent, four sided screen about six
feet by six feet, between the farthest end of the woodpile and the
backmost sleeping area near the deepest recesses of the cave. The
use of the throw blankets and the long branches that Kenai had
collected, tying them securely with bits and pieces of the nylon
rope seemed to have done the trick. Even now, Louis was gathering
two of the largest buckets and some sponges as well as a few wash
cloths and towels, and of course shampoo and body-wash. It seemed
as though the last of the preparations were under way.

Wow
, he thought, more than just a little happy. Soon they’d have
a place where they could wash off some of the grime of the last
day’s toil.

“
Anthony, did you hear
me?” tried Sophie for a second time.

Anthony snapped out of his
reverie with a shake. “Oh, sorry, I was just looking at what the
guys are doing. It seems like very soon we’ll be able to take a
sponge bath.” He pointed toward the newest structure within the
cave.

“
Oh,” Sophie replied,
startled when she saw the screen. She hadn’t realized what the boys
had been doing all of this time. “Jeez, I thought they were just
‘monkeying’ around or something like that. Wow, a place to have a
sponge bath… oh my god, doesn’t that sound nice?” She looked down
at her clothes, which were still muddy and stained from her time in
the snow with Louis, when he had broken down and needed comfort the
day before.

We could all use some
cleaning up
, thought the boy as he glanced
at himself, seeing he too could use a bit of polishing. “Yes, it
does sound nice,” he agreed. His brow furled in concentration when
he remembered she had asked him a question. “So, umm, what did you
ask me?”

“
Ah, I just was curious as
to what you did at school – sports, school government?” she
repeated her question.

Anthony shook his head.
“Naw, none of that stuff. I’m more into music more than anything
else. I hang around a bunch of musicians most of them time. We kick
it by the bungalows on the picnic table they have near the tennis
courts, you know where that is?”

“
I think I do, is it
toward the back of the school?” she wondered, again tilting her
head in question.

“
That’s it,” he affirmed
with a lopsided grin. “We usually just sit on the table or the
benches and listen to each play on our instruments. It’s kinda cool
after having to sit in class and think all the time.”

Sophie perked up. “Oh, you
play an instrument, which one?”

Anthony shriveled as he
had when Joaquin had asked the same question of him the day before.
“No, I don’t play anything, I always wanted to play the guitar, but
I never got around to actually doing anything about it. I do
practice a little with my friend, Richard, but I don’t have my own
or anything like that.” He could feel the self-consciousness
creeping back again.

“
Just haven’t got around
to doing it then, huh?” she soothed, his discomfiture obvious to
her.

“
I just
procrastinate too much, Sophie. It’s one of my ‘things I should
work on’, or so says the school counselor, not to mention my
parents and my grandmother, and just about everyone else,” he said
in a rush. He wasn’t sure why he was being so forthcoming with the
girl, but there was just something about her that made him not want
sugar coat anything. He wanted her to know, for some reason, the
real him, especially since she was a
real
platinum blonde. Thus, he
wanted to show her the real Anthony Herrera.

She put a tentative hand
on his shoulder, her small fingers firming, giving him a small
squeeze. “Don’t worry about all of that crap, Anthony -
.”

“
Tony, call me Tony. All
of my friends call me that,” he said in a rush, enjoying her
touch.

“
Ok… Tony… like you told
me before, most of that stuff isn’t going to matter much here in
the Melded World. I have a distinct feeling our lives are about to
be irrevocably altered by the time all of this is done. Either
we’ll all be dead or we’ll be changed into something quite
different than what we were when we came to this awful place. So,
whether or not you wasted time back home, I’m pretty sure you’re
gonna be making up for it here.”

“
Why do you think so?” he
asked thankful for her kind, encouraging words.

“
You’re the Kring-Hël,
remember?”

Anthony rolled his eyes.
“Do I have too?”

Sophie
chuckled.

Anthony was sure she was
about to say something about destiny or fate, when Louis came
running up, his face flushed with excitement.

“
Hey, you guys, you guys,
the shower thingy is all ready, either one of you wanted to wash? I
sure know I do! I feel gross after running around this place for a
day. How about you guys?”

Anthony and Sophie glanced
at each other, nodding at the same time.

“
We should probably make a
schedule of some sort, so we all can sponge off some the nastiness,
huh?” asked Sophie.

Anthony nodded and raised
his eyebrows a few times in rapid succession. “Ooo-la-la,” he
mouthed quietly.

Sophie half-smirked and
half-pretended at outrage, she struck him playfully in the
shoulder, following his train of thought. Yet, she didn’t break eye
contact as they stared after one another.

“
Well, you guys going to
get cleaned up or what?” asked Louis, already impatient.

Sophie broke eye contact
first. “Yes, Louis, we sure are. Let’s go and figure out how we are
going to organize the bathing, shall we?” she said, standing and
leading him off toward the screened off area.

The other teenage boys
were standing about it, hands on their hips, their heads bobbing up
and down, obviously proud of their creation.

Time to get clean…,
though Anthony as he too stood and made his way
toward the others.

~~~~~~~~<<<<<<{ ☼
}>>>>>>~~~~~~~~

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Day Two, Friday, 8:56
am…

For the second time, she
awoke within the cold and the clutter of what, at one time, had
been the two-car garage attached to her parent’s new house. It was
supposed to be in Los Angeles, nestled within the neat and
well-kept portion of Eagle Rock immediately surrounding Occidental
College - a private university often tagged as one of the most
exclusive centers of higher learning in southern
California.

Only now, the garage was
no longer a part of the five-bedroom, two-story monster of a home
the Department of Water and Power had helped her father purchase
months ago. No, she wasn’t in Eagle Rock. She wasn’t even in Los
Angeles, not even close. She wasn’t even sure if she was anywhere
close to planet Earth.

The previous morning,
after she’d come to with her eyes
way
too close to her own vomit upon
opening them, she’d spent those first few hours searching the
garage for anything edible. She found only meager fare, not nearly
enough to sustain her for an extended period.

Of course, this was after
she’d scurried outside, yelling for the members of her family only
to find her house, all of her neighbor’s houses, even the street
itself had vanished. She’d been shocked senseless, seeing herself
in a forest, covered in snow so deep it was as though a strong
winter storm had ravaged the land the night before. She had stood
there dumbstruck, mumbling to herself in stark disbelief, trying to
understand what had happened. She had blinked as the landscape for
a long time.

What had
happened?

She remembered she’d been
in the garage, looking for the pot her mother had asked for her to
find. She recalled not finding it, realizing the pot was actually
in the large two-door hutch in the dining room. She could still see
herself turning, reaching for the doorknob when a strange
reverberation echoed about her and through her body, then she
remembered the nausea. Another awful sounding vibration peeled
within minutes, more sickness, a final gong. She had thrown up next
and everything had gone black…

She likely would’ve stayed
outside quite a while longer if her stomach hadn’t growled at her.
So, hunger had driven her back inside where began her search for
food within the small confines of the garage. She hadn’t found much
to eat after an exhaustive search. By then, the twist in her gut
was so severe she had ripped open one of the two boxes she’d found
containing food, of a sort. They were some type of energy bar,
strawberry filled no less. Quickly, she had eaten two of them
without thinking, washing down the granola and fruit filling with a
long pull from the beat up container of water she had scavenged. It
was the one her father used in case of emergency, should his
radiator leak too much water. Over the years, he had probably
filled it a million times and because of that, the water had tasted
a little funny to her. It wasn’t fetid nor did it smell, so she had
drunk it. Still, it was flat and almost brackish.

She had set about rubbing
the overnight residue from her teeth with one of her fingers when
she had drunk her fill. Feeling somewhat satisfied at the moment,
she had glanced around. The chill of the air began to surface in
her mind. She realized she had only been wearing a thin sweater, a
pair of old jeans, and her old, scuffed-up Reeboks when she’d left
the house. She hadn’t planned on being outside the warmth of her
home for long. She’d been dressed in her “homeless” clothes,
because she had been helping her mother in the kitchen.

She told herself she
needed to find something to keep her warm. So, she had begun to
search about the garage again, now with a different purpose in
mind. She had rummaged through the jumble of boxes, trash bags and
various other junk her and her family had piled within the
structure after they had moved from Arizona. It was mostly stuff
that was either old or had broken over the course of the move. It
had been her mother’s intent to go through it all, throw out what
she deemed trash and organize the rest for storage. That had been
over three months ago and still the huge pile of crud
remained.

I guess it worked out for
me
, she had thought as she combed about
the throng of castaway rubbish. A half an hour later, all she’d
unearthed were clothes that were too small for her and a bright
blue
canvas
tarp
looking like its’ best days had been during World War
II.

Probably, it was
grandpa’s…

She had looked around a
bit more, before she decided on the tarp. She had folded it in half
and wrapped it around her shoulders. It was big and bulky, and made
her look about as misshapen as the Blob, but after a while, it
seemed to have captured some of her body heat underneath its thick,
waterproof layers. She began to warm up.