Whisper

Whisper

Harper Alexander

Copyright
©
April 2012 by Harper Alexander.

All rights reserved.

No part of this product may be reproduced

without prior written permission from the author.

Original cover images courtesy of:

LadyAyslinn.deviantart.com

mizzd-stock.deviantart.com

RavenMaddArtwork.deviantart.com

Cover design and art by:

Laura Gordon (dormantparadox.deviantart.com)

Prologue:

A
man named Godfrey Wilde once told me that there is something latent inside everything. Some sleeping quality just waiting to be awakened. As dormant trees draw from their roots again in spring, so does this 'thing' turn green in its own season. It spreads forth, unfurls with a breathless realization. Sometimes, it may be so sudden that it comes as a shock, and may even wreak havoc on its very own host.

This was the case with the earthquakes.

Godfrey Wilde was a horse whisperer. A man of a lost art, in our evolving society that boasted more horsepower in its ecosystem than any of the live beasts that he preferred. For a long time, I did not understand the implications in Godfrey's words, but I suppose 'understanding' was the latent quality inside them. I see that now. At the time, it took the earthquakes to inspire the budding of my belief in his theory. The great fits of the earth that exploded from within, a nasty dual personality emerging when no one was prepared to ride such a thing out. We had thrived upon what no one suspected was the cocoon of our planet; only the earth itself knew when it was ready to evolve.

The renditions were devastating.

We, revealed simply as the parasites to a much greater beast, were left in those days seeking desperately some new piece of homeland, and some new way of life itself, to latch onto. Thus was born our age of wreckage, of picking up the pieces of a ruptured society. As technology failed and roads crumbled, the people reverted to the ways of the horse.

If Godfrey had survived the quakes, he would have been in heaven. As it was, he was one of many that went down that day, lost beneath the rubble.

He was right, though – about his theory. Years later I would understand that his knack with the horses was the latent thing he had sheltered inside him, awakened and in its place.

It wasn't until I was caught unprepared in a canyon frequented by wild horses – caught there when they descended like a dam breaking and thundered through that gulley, and the dust cleared and I was left standing – that people began to realize I had it, too.

Me, Godfrey Wilde's daughter.

A horse whisperer.

One –

A
clatter rang throughout the camp, accompanied by the thundering tremors that sometimes made us brace for a quake. It was only the clamor of hooves, though, as another trainee got loose.

Shouts echoed in the wake of the escape-artist equine, but he stomped them into dust with his mischief-dancing hooves. He was a stocky buckskin, the beautiful image of golden-bodied glory contrasted by soot-dark mane and tail – a walking eclipse of night and day colliding, head held high to keep his trailing rope from tangling with his feet. I straightened from my task, spine cracking, ready as he came my way. The blood rushed from my head, leaving me feeling light and airy and somewhat euphoric as my encounter with the animal approached.

The euphoria was something I had gotten used to, always keen on painting the encounters like fantasies.

The buckskin approached with a wild look in his eyes. All horses have that look, somewhere inside. It seemed like a game to him, prancing just out of reach when someone got near enough to catch him. Jay emerged from the sidelines – always emerging from the woodwork, it seemed – to try his hand at intervening. He got closer than the rest.

As the buckskin evaded him, I stepped down from my pile of rubble. It was one of many we were still working to excavate, to smooth out and enlarge the boundaries of the camp. The buckskin perked his ears at the sound of rubble shifting beneath me, slowing slightly as I descended to stand in his path. I held out my hands, palm-up in offering, and his gait faltered completely, his nostrils flaring at the blood on my hands.

My lips parted with a flow of crooning words. People asked me, often, what it was that I said to the horses, but I could never really recall. I could not say if it was nonsense, or poetry, or motherly lingo that poured out of me. Only that there was a language, in those moments, that spoke through me.

The buckskin's heaving ribcage began to issue softer breaths, and his eyes were just starting to glaze over when Jay caught up. His gray gaze flashed up to mine as he sidled up next to the animal, breaking the trance I shared with the horse. My own attention flitted down to where he was retrieving the gelding's rope, a protest rising to my lips.

“I can take him,” I said.

“He'd only render those completely shredded,” Jay replied, indicating my hands. I glanced down, taking stock of the nicks. Turning the buckskin, Jay finished over his shoulder, the very subtle drawl in his voice monotonous as always, “You should wear gloves.”

He was a man of few words, which made it all but pointless to argue with him, so I did not bother to remind him I wouldn't have used the rope. The buckskin would not be led astray in his care, so I let it go.

Jay had been what I liked to call an endearing thorn at my side – 'at' being the key word – since the beginning. We had all but grown up together, when his father became a ranch hand at the small operation my father had run. The two of us had run a little wild together, getting under the horses' feet until we were old enough to lend a hand. Jay spoke little as a child and even less once he had the horses for company, but our love for the creatures and the work that went with them had sustained the bond between us over the years. It was only reinforced after the earthquakes ruined my home and claimed my father, and Jay's parents took me in. I had been seven at the time, and Jay an older-brotherly ten.

Times were difficult after that, as the extent of the destruction was realized and the notion of recovery put into perspective. America was a shambles. Unrecognizable. Any regular means of survival paled into an irrelevant game plan, and the shelter I found with Jay's family quickly expired into the necessity for every able-bodied person to help pave the way for longevity. As horses became the most practical means of labor and transportation across the wrecked land – land now known collectively as 'the Shardscape' – Jay and I were able to find small jobs here and there until Tara had hired us on officially at her training camp, thanks to Jay's apparent salesman-worthy pitch on our behalf. I would never know what he said to her behind closed doors in her office that day, but it had done the trick. Thereafter we had aided in training and providing horses for the masses, if our clientele could be called that. Business was well enough, but there still weren't crowds lining up at our gates. The population, as yet unmeasured, had clearly been decimated from its previously thriving state.

Not a one of us could be sure the extent of what or who was out there. It was all we could do to pick up the pieces in a small region and glean little bits here and there as word of mouth brought them. Communication was just one of many things reduced to the cumbersome ways of old. Everything was broken, ruined, or otherwise shorted-out, and we could not seem to rebuild to any erstwhile relevant degree due to the recurring aftershocks that shook the planet.

Ten years had passed, and still the world held its breath and waded through the aftermath.

I tucked a strand of dark hair behind my ear and wiped my sullied hands across my tunic. Even our clothing was crude in those days, fashion a dead art in an industry suddenly based on survival. I remember, when I was little, dressing up in my mother's clothes, trying on the single pair of beautiful mother-of-pearl stiletto heels she had for special occasions, dreaming of the day I would stock my own wardrobe as every little girl does. That day had remained a thing of childhood dreams, though, like so many other things tied to that distant world I was born into. As for the mother I so vaguely remembered, even less than I remembered my father, well...

Unfortunately, that latent thing inside my mother had been fate. She died in a vehicle accident – an evil hardly relevant to our world anymore. In fact, her death was one of the early factors that contributed to my familiarity and comfort in an old-fashioned world. Following the accident, my father delved even deeper into his preferred lifestyle with the horses as he developed a special hatred for the modern world.

Climbing back atop my pile of rubble, I heaved another piece of debris into the waiting cart. The muscles in my arms burned, but only as I neared the end of a full morning of the task. I could pack a punch with those arms if I needed to; a valid skill if I were to encounter any of the one-man-for-himself-ers that scavenged the wreckage taking advantage of who and what they could. I hadn't had to employ such methods as of yet, but I liked to know that I could. Jay didn't like to admit it, but he liked to know it, too.

He was protective that way.

Of course, he would just as soon protect me himself, but in desperate times it would not do to leave any one person devoid of defensive means should incidents prove inconvenient in when and where they chose to fall. Incidents had fit many adjectives in my time – 'convenient' had rarely been one of them.

I liked to point out that people wouldn't soon mess with me, anyway, for other obvious reasons – the most prominent being the array of tattoos I now sported across my body. I looked hardcore. Most of us did, thanks to a new method of vaccine going around. With the mass-deaths came unbridled decay, and with that, disease. In the early days when resources were yet to be depleted, a series of new vaccinations were created, crude because of demand but decently affective for the most part, once you got over being rather ill for a few days. The vaccines came in dark, inky substances, affective when placed just beneath the flesh, and so was born a custom of administration via tattoo gun. Naturally, people began to opt to have it administered in art form, and a trend of honoring things dead and buried began. A lot of people had the names of their towns or states – buried places that would not be likewise forgotten – or of loved ones killed in the quakes, beloved names immortalized on our skin. Names from how things used to be, and of spirits of loved ones we could not let go, protecting us against what had come to be. They were still with us, doing their part. I sported the name
Virginia
on my back.
Godfrey
on my wrist. Enduring guardians of old.

Jay returned momentarily, ascending my pile and beginning to toss chunks of the stuff into the cart. I paused, frowning at him, but the heaving muscles of his back were turned on me, so I was forced to speak.

“What are you doing?”

“Saving your appendages.”

Render...appendages...
He may have been a man of few words, but he never failed to make sure the ones he did scrape up were well-versed, speaking well enough for his vocabulary by themselves.

“This is my pile. Get your own. There are plenty to go around,” I said. “My appendages will be just fine.”

“You can't calm horses with the smell of blood, Willow.”

“I just did,” I reminded him, obstinate. It was hard to be obstinate when he called me that, though. It was a nickname that had evolved in my younger days, when my obsession with horses peaked and he began to find me in the stalls as filthy and sweaty as any man, my hair an unmindful disarray that fell in my face. “Look at you,” he would say, brushing the draping locks out of my face. “You're like a willow.”

It had stuck, and he had rarely called me my respective Alannis since.

“I was almost finished,” I protested once more, but he was giving no sign of discontinuing his unsolicited rescue mission.

“Almost finished with a pile reminiscent of Everest,” he denounced.
Reminiscent...