Wanted (32 page)

“
Didn’t feel like it,” he mumbled, then turned to Tanya. “Hey, you should talk to this girl who helped out today. Shelby Stone, black lady with legs and a back like granite. Pretty sure she could have picked me up under one arm and thrown me a few dozen feet.”

Tanya laughed. “Aggie mentioned her to me today when Dusty and I were helping her do some inventory. Said she used to compete in strongman contests?”

“
Yeah, I guess she was ranked pretty high nationally and worldwide,” he said.

Jessie growled in disgust and stood up abruptly. She stared at Carl for a moment then turned and stormed off, heading out the door and letting it slam shut behind her. Carl stared, completely clueless as to what that had been about. Dustin, now sitting up in bed, swore softly but venomously, glared at Carl, and hopped down to repeat the abuse the door had just received.

“
What the fuck is their problem?” Carl asked a minute later after he accepted he had no idea what was going on.

Tanya actually laughed, though it was short and not overly taunting. “You don’t know?”

Carl’s scowl directed at her answered her question for her.

“
Same problem Dusty has,” she said, enjoying her feelings of superiority. “Jealousy.”

“
What’s he jealous of?” Carl spat out, disgusted at the conceptual answer.

“
You. Jessie is jealous of Shelby because she’s hung up on you.”

“
Oh Christ,” Carl muttered, shaking his head and putting his gun back together before he had even done any serious cleaning. He stood up and stared out the window while Tanya fought to keep from laughing at him.

“
Shelby kind of scares me,” Carl admitted, staring at the retreating forms of Jessie and Dustin. “No way I’d-“

He turned, scowling anew and felt a darker mood threaten him when Tanya let slip a giggle. “That ain’t the point!” he snarled, turning away from Tanya because he really wanted to stay angry and indignant but the young gymnast turned sniper’s humor was dangerously infectious.

“
Dusty’s just a kid,” she said, changing topics to give Carl a few minutes of respite. “Smartest kid I know, and I love him to pieces, but he can be a real shithead too.”

“
Don’t act too smart if you ask me,” Carl muttered. “Kid ought to know I ain’t in his way of Jessie – and he ought to know he ain’t got no chance with her!”

“
You’re not always so smart yourself,” Tanya pointed out.

Carl glared at her and noticed how hard she was fighting to keep from smiling. “Never said I was,” he growled defensively. “Why you say that?”

Tanya rolled her eyes. “Jessie!” she said, as though that should have been all she needed to say. Carl’s eye quivered a little as it narrowed threateningly. “Oh knock it off,” Tanya snapped at him. “You can drag me through the desert and beat the crap out of me for not paying attention and doing my job out there. I get that and I accept. I encourage it, because if I don’t know what I’m doing I deserve to be punished. This is something different, so stop trying to intimidate your way through it.”

Carl took a mental step back, not realizing just how right she was about trying to intimidate her to agreeing with him until she pointed it out. “All right, spit it out, or next time we’re out there you’ll switch outfits with Jessie,” he threatened.

Another eye roll preceded her lecture. “You like her and you know it! Sure, you hate everything about what she did and who she was, we all get that – especially her. Stop and look at her sometime. Talk to her. No, don’t talk to her, listen to her. She sees herself differently now, she sees herself through your eyes because it’s your eyes she wants to look good in. She sees her past and she’s ashamed of it, but she’s trying to move past it because she knows that’s what you would do.”

Carl held up his hand to stop her, he’d heard enough. He walked out onto the porch, surprising Tanya but not stopping her from following him. He pointed, gesturing at the cabins to their right and the empty tent spots in front of them. To their left was the clubhouse and trailers, not to mention the empty pool and shuffleboard courts.

“
You know what’s after us. Sure, maybe you’re the one they want, but there’s a price on all our heads now. All of this… these people, this place, it’s not for us. We can’t stay here.” Carl stared at her and realized he wanted to shake her to make it sink in. He opened his mouth to say more than just shook his head instead. “Forget it,” he muttered. “You’re just a kid too, you don’t get it.”

Carl stormed past her, heading down the steps. “Maybe I am just a kid,” she railed at him, her tone having switched from humorous to furious that quickly. “But you know what? You’re so caught up in worrying about surviving you forgot that we have to live too!”

Carl stopped, ready to tear her apart with a few choice words but then realized there was more to it than that. It wasn’t just her being upset that she couldn’t go to the movies with her friends, there was something specific, something that really had to be bothering her. Carl knew Tanya well enough to appreciate and respect her, even if he had just acted like an asshole to her.

He turned around and was not surprised to see her take a step back onto the porch. A brief flash of fear crossed her eyes and he realized that his face was still tight with locked, angry muscles. He climbed up the steps and stepped past her to the porch swing, where he sat down. “Come here,” he told her.

She stared at him for a moment then took a step closer. She stopped suddenly, her eyes widening as she stared at him. “You’re not going to, um, spank me or anything, are you?”

“
Spank you?” Carl repeated, shocked by the notion. It was such a shocking thing that he actually laughed and felt a little tension leave his shoulders. Tanya looked to relax a little as well. “No, I want you to sit down.”

She sat down next to him and fell silent, afraid to talk for fear that she had already said too much.

“
So what’s your story?” he asked her. “Dustin’s jealous because of Jessie, Jessie’s jealous because of me, I’m jealous because of these people-“

“
What? Why?” Tanya asked, interrupting him.

“
They’ve got things easy,” Carl said. “Aside from worrying about having enough food for their next meal and fighting off flesh-eating neighbors, they’ve got a nice little setup here.”

“
Oh my god!” Tanya said, surprised at his logic and laughing because of it. “You think our problems are worse than that?”

Carl nodded. “Your brother’s got some hard lessons to learn and they ain’t coming any way except by living them. Meantime, we’re going to have to deal with him. Jessie, well, she’s got enough issues to have her own subscription.”

“
You’re not so uncomplicated yourself,” Tanya said, poking him in the thigh with her finger for emphasis.

“
It’s a package deal darlin’,” he told her. “I make it easy for people to deal with me, so easy that most don’t. Now, what’s eating at you? Where do you fit into this?”

Tanya sighed as she turned her thoughts to herself. “Aggie has a homemade calendar,” she said, staring up at the clubhouse. “I had forgotten all about it, so caught up in living like a gypsy. Next week’s my 18
^th
birthday, Carl. I turn 18!”

Carl nodded. “Don’t worry, legal or not, I ain’t messing around with you,” he said. “Although that does make you old enough to enjoy a spanking.”

She looked at him and shook her head. “You really are bad at this,” she said, bursting into a laugh at the very uncharacteristic thing he had said.

Carl chuckled, pleased to see he had at least distracted her from being upset. She shook her head at him and went on, “Didn’t figure I’d spend it like this, you know? None of my friends or family, just a bunch of strangers in a dusty little campground in the middle of nowhere.”

“
No friends, no family?” Carl asked her, surprised. He felt a twinge of hurt at her words, but managed to ignore it.

“
Well, you guys, sure, but it’s not like we’ve got a lot of history or anything. Sure, Dusty is family but…well.”

“
You missing your mom?”

She nodded, a tear sliding down her cheek. In a move that surprised him, Carl somehow knew to raise his arm and slip it around her shoulders comfortingly. Tanya snuggled into his side and smiled even as she sniffed away the tears.

“
She’d have hated you,” she said with a small laugh. “So strong and opinionated – she had a thing for sensitive and metro guys. I don’t know how she ever hooked up with my dad, except he gave her whatever she wanted. I thought it was because he loved her, but lately I think I’ve realized he just did it to shut her up.”

Carl fought the urge to nod. He could understand that easily enough, even though it had been years since he had even considered having a relationship.

She turned to look at him, her eyes red from fighting tears. “I don’t want to go back Carl… ever.”

“
Whoa! Never?” Carl asked, surprised. “What are you going to do? I’m helping you guys get safe, I ain’t… never?”

Tanya nodded, moisture threatening to spill again. She laughed and wiped at her eyes, sniffing self-consciously. “This is pathetic,” she mumbled.

Carl stared at her for a moment then looked away. Finally he looked back at her. “Giving up a lot, ain’t you?”

She shrugged. “I guess,” she said. “Carl, I’ve been more alive in the last few days than ever before. Ever! Even when I qualified for the Olympics it was nothing like this.”

“
This ain’t living, this is surviving, remember?” Carl said to her, throwing her own words back at her.

She shook her head. “You’ve been surviving. There’s no reason not to live while you’re at it too.”

Carl sighed. “So is that it, you just want to turn your back on your dad and your old life? What do you think there is for you out here?”

She smiled softly at him and then glanced inside, to where the sniper rifle he had given her was resting against a wall.

“
You’re good,” he admitted. “Most potential I ever seen, but it’s not an easy life living by the gun. You had trouble killing that deer, remember?”

“
Yeah, but the deer was cute. I didn’t have any trouble back at Edland,” she said defensively.

“
What didn’t you have any trouble doing?” Carl pressed.

“
Oh… um… shooting people,” she said a little hesitantly.

“
More than that,” he insisted.

“
Killing?” She asked, her expression seeming to find the phrase distasteful. She took a breath and nodded. “Yeah, killing people.”

“
It ain’t a video game,” Carl said. “The deer was fuzzy and cute and you saw it up close when we went and got it. Those people, they were a quarter mile away. You didn’t see them up close. You couldn’t hear them and smell them and touch them. It’s different, once you know what that’s like.”

Tanya’s lower lip was white where she was biting it as she listened to him. “Maybe they were assholes and losers, maybe they kicked puppies and slapped their women around. And maybe they had a kid at home that’s going to wonder why their daddy never came home to play with them,” he said, driving his point home.

Tanya’s lips parted, shocked at the new thoughts Carl had given her.

“
Hey,” Carl said, realizing he might have hit her too hard with the image. “You did what I told you to do. You did what you had to do if you wanted to see your brother and Jessie alive again. You done the right thing, but you need to know your targets, they ain’t just nameless faces. Out here people fight and kill. Sometimes the reasons don’t make sense, but that don’t make you any less dead if you hesitate or feel sorry for somebody.”

Tanya nodded, her jaw now clenched again.

“
Ready to go back yet?” he asked, smiling.

She shook her head. “I can do it,” she said softly, then she repeated herself more insistently.

“
All right, we’ll see what happens and take it from there,” Carl said, honestly having no idea what to do with her. The immediate future he had figured out, now though he was beginning to wonder. Maybe slipping away some night would be his best bet. Safest for him, anyhow.

He smiled reassuringly to her, even though he didn’t feel it himself. Tanya threw her arm around him and gave him a hug, then a surprising peck on the cheek before she leaned back in the swing. A soft sound drew their attention towards the clubhouse. Jessie was standing there, looking like somebody had just kicked her in the gut.

“
Jessie!” Tanya said, hopping to her feet even as the woman turned and took off again.

“
Now what?” Carl growled, wondering if anything that woman did would ever make sense to him.

“
Now go after her!” Tanya said, turning and pulling on his arm to get him to stand up. “She’s a mess right now Carl, there’s no telling what she’s going to do. You have to let her know you weren’t trying to put the moves on me!”

“
For the love of…”

“
Carl! Go,” she insisted.

Carl just stared at her and shook his head. He picked up his rifle and slung it over his shoulder, then walked off the porch after Jessie, still shaking his head and trying to figure out just how bad his behavior must have been to deserve this.

Carl stalked after her, not certain where she had gone. A quick glance inside the clubhouse showed that she was not in there. Harold was talking to a few men, but Carl ducked out before he drew his attention. He tried the bathroom next, and was similarly disappointed. A search through the grounds, including pausing to ask a few people if they had seen her, finally gave the increasingly frustrated man the lead he needed.