33
Farley, Wyoming
Her hair changed. When Red called her fire, touched it to the cuff on her wrist and melted the damn thing, she started to glow. A faint orange burnish around her edges. A low pulse moved through the air, like a shock wave, and her hair lifted, settled, and flared, sun-bright. Then it was red again, all the dye burned away.
She looked like someone the ancients might have carved a tribute to in stone. All flame, and light, and warrior hope. He loved her hair that way: real. As fiery as the tender, sweet heart she tried so hard to hide.
She would have made one hell of a Marine.
If she wasn’t…
If she didn’t…
Gunshot.
Blood.
No!
Red!
Rooster woke with a start, dragging a huge breath into his lungs, pushing himself upright, battling through the awful lethargy that always followed a strong dose of her healing power. His eyes were blurry, but he grabbed at his hip, under his arm, fumbled down his legs toward his boots…which weren’t there. Searching for a gun.
“Whoa, whoa, easy, son,” a familiar voice said off to his right.
Rooster lashed out with his bare hand…and overbalanced, toppled off wherever he was laid out and onto the floor. He landed face-down, thick carpet pile going up his nose.
“Well that was graceful,” Jack said.
“Fuck you,” Rooster panted, pushing up on his hands. Both arms held his weight; the healing had worked. He shook his head, and his vision cleared.
Jack sank down on his haunches with a wince and a pop from both knees. His expression was drawn, grave. He looked five years older than the last time Rooster had seen him. “I wasn’t part of it, kid, I swear to you.”
Semper fi, Rooster thought. It was a fellow Marine across from him; the glint in his eyes was one of angry honesty.
“Bullshit,” Rooster said, because he had to.
“Look at me. Do I look like someone who’d let a buncha assholes take a sweet little girl?”
Rooster looked.
He grunted and sat back on his ass, legs out, arms braced across them. It hurt to breathe, and it had nothing to do with old injuries. “They took her.” His voice came out cracked and weak.
“They did,” Jack agreed, face twisting with disgust. And something more urgent. “Motherfuckers.”
Rooster glanced around and found that he was in a bedroom – a guest bedroom at Jack and Vicki’s, if he had to guess. White shiplap walls; a single bed with a patchwork quilt; purple flowers in a vase on the dresser.
“I,” he said, and fell silent.
Jack looked at him steadily. “What do you need?”
“I gotta get her back.”
“I know that, idiot. What do you need to do that?”
~*~
Dan, the iron-haired speaker from the VA meeting, was seated at the kitchen table, along with a few other vets, all of them closer to Rooster’s age than Jack’s.
They’d given chase, they said, when Jake and his crew – his team – had pursued Rooster and Red out of town. By the time they caught up, everyone else was gone, the forest disturbed by the wind from helo blades, and they’d loaded Rooster up in a truck and brought him back to town. To a safe place where he could wake up.
Rooster had a hard time believing it. He knew he was here, and that Red was gone, that these people had chosen to help him. But he didn’t understand why.
“Why?” he said aloud, stupidly, and shook his head in one last attempt to clear it. “I mean. Why would you do anything for me?”
They were seated around the kitchen table, Rooster on one side, opposite Jack and Dan, who shared a look now.
Jack turned then to Rooster, his look pointed. Come on, kid, it said. “I’m old, but I’m not stupid,” he said. “Who do you think we’re gonna side with here? The creeps who set up shop in our town, busted out the diner window, put a whole buncha innocents in danger and kidnapped somebody? Or the fucked-up vet with PTSD and his girl?”
Rooster fought the urge to squirm in his chair. “You wouldn’t have to side with anyone.”
They both snorted in unison.
“Yeah,” Dan said. “Sure.”
Rooster swapped a look between them, and could find no lie. No hesitation.
“So like I said before,” Jack said. “What do you need? How can we help?”
It was…
Too much.
Rooster dropped his head into his hands, tried to massage some of the tension from his scalp. A fruitless effort. “I just…” he started, and trailed off. It was taking every bit of energy to think right now. To move beyond the awful, howling hurt and guilt that was losing Red. He’d failed her. Epically. And he couldn’t–
“Alright, look,” Jack said, leaning across the table toward him. “You’ve got to compartmentalize here. You’re no good to her if you’re freaking out like this. Breathe. Think it through.”
Jack took several slow, deep inhales and exhales, and after a moment Rooster found that he was copying the pattern.
“That’s right,” Jack said.
It was shameful, leaning on an old man like this, needing to be told how to breathe, but it was the best he could do at the moment.
Think. He had to think.
He pushed out another shaky breath, and though it filled him with impossible guilt, he knew that he couldn’t do this alone. Not anymore.
He said, “I gotta make a phone call.”
~*~
“You gotta slow down,” Deshawn said on the other end of the line. “What do you mean they took her?”
Rooster had badly underestimated how much it would shake his tenuous grip on sanity to hear his best friend’s voice over the phone. The story that he’d rehearsed in his head had collapsed the moment Deshawn said, “What’s up, brother?” and all Rooster wanted was for someone he cared about to tell him it would be alright. A childlike need for comfort.
He took a breath and leaned a little more heavily against the porch column. “They ambushed us. Took me out. When I came to, she was gone, and so were they.”
“Those Institute creeps? Shit. Okay, you’re gonna have to explain it, man.”
Slowly, shaking the whole time, he did. Peppered the story with self-inflicted insults. How fucking stupid he was for believing there was such a thing as a safe place for the two of them.
“I let my guard down,” he said, choking on the words, “and I let her–”
“Whoa. Okay, hold up,” Deshawn said, voice stern. “You didn’t let anything happen. Okay? If you thought these people were legit, then they were really smooth. They were really good actors. I know you, and you’re gonna spend the next two weeks beating yourself stupid about this, so save us the time and just don’t.”
Rooster let out a deep breath. “Fuck you.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re welcome for the free mental health advice.” A rustling in the background, papers shuffling. Deshawn had been retired and back home for a year now; he managed his own landscaping business. Had a warehouse where they kept the fleet of mowers and bags of mulch, and everything. “Where are you?”
“The middle of fucking nowhere.”
“No, I meant actually. I need coordinates.”
Rooster had thought he was done panicking, but a wave shook loose in his chest. “Deshawn. No.”
“Don’t tell me no.” Mild, distracted. More rustling. A quiet “ah.” “Okay. I’ve got a pen. Whenever you’re ready.”
Rooster’s heart slammed against his ribs. “Deshawn.”
“We’ve established that’s my name, yeah. You having a stroke?”
“You can’t come here.” Desperate. Sweating.
“Last I checked, I was retired, and I can do whatever I feel like doing.” Calm. Deliberate.
Rooster squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed fruitlessly at the tension between his brows. “It’s dangerous.”
“Good thing I’m a Marine then, huh?”
“But Ash and Desiree–”
“Can hold down the fort.”
Rooster groaned.
“Ash,” Deshawn said, voice moving away from the phone. “Talk some sense into this idiot.”
There was a muffled sound, and then Ashley’s voice said, “Let him come help you, you idiot.”
His throat grew tight. It was difficult to speak. “Ash, I’m sorry–” Tremor in his voice, watery and awful.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said firmly, “but don’t be stupid either. Give him the coordinates so y’all can go get your girl.”
“I’ll be on the next flight,” Deshawn promised.
And there was only so much arguing a man could do.
Rooster, shaking all over, said, “Okay.”
~*~
He stood on the porch for a long time afterward, until the shadows grew long and the birdsong swelled with the last eagerness of evening. Until Jack came outside with two cold Buds in longneck bottles and said, “Sit before you fall, son,” with the simple observation of a parent.
Rooster sat in one of the rocking chairs and allowed a beer to be pressed into his hand. “I shouldn’t,” he said, numbly. “I’ve tried to quit a buncha times.”
“When you met her?” Jack asked, taking the beer back.
“Yeah.”
“Can’t be vigilant when you’re drunk,” Jack said, taking a sip of his own beer.
“Yeah.”
“I won’t ask outright,” Jack said. “But I’ll listen, if you want to tell me about it.” His shirt collar rustled as he turned to look at Rooster; his gaze was too sympathetic to look it. “About her. Just if you want.”
Rooster imagined the way the beer would taste; the fizzy bitterness of it over his tongue. He shouldn’t talk about Red, but he realized that he wanted to. That, or go find Jack’s liquor cabinet and scope out his bourbon selection.
He took a breath and said, “She was brought up like a lab experiment.”
The words came with difficulty at first; he tripped over them, feeling terribly guilty. Telling would get them found, get them caught. But Red was already caught, wasn’t she? How much worse could it get? And then the dam broke open, and he couldn’t stop talking.
“God knows what they’re gonna do to her,” he said, out of breath after the telling. “I can’t…” And then words dried up, his panic absorbing them like a sponge.
Jack let out a deep, tired-sounding breath. “Ah, kid.” He leaned over and patted Rooster’s forearm. “You did the best you could.”
“But that wasn’t good enough.”
Jack sent him a level look. “Most of the time it’s not. Mainly because the world is full of people who don’t try to be anything – good or otherwise.”
Rooster…couldn’t disagree with that.
“Sometimes enough isn’t possible, and all you can do is good.”
“I…yeah.”
Jack nodded, point made, and pulled his hand back. Took another sip of beer and gazed out across the yard. “When’s your friend gonna get here?”
“He said five hours. Which isn’t possible.”
“Well. Maybe he’s got some tricks up his sleeve.”
~*~
It turned out that he did.
Five hours later, Rooster got a text: Field west of town. Bring whatever you need to leave.
Vicki had made enough peanut butter sandwiches for ten men, and packed them all up along with some Coke, coffee, water bottles, and protein bars in a massive waterproof backpack. Rooster had gone to the garage and cleaned out his truck, duffel after duffel of weapons, ammo, and gear.
Last thing, he flipped down the driver-side sun visor, and a strip of photos fell out into the seat. It was a set of three, bought at one of their many roadside carnivals. He remembered: Kansas City, Oklahoma, nothing but open skies and the lights of the Ferris wheel. Red had dragged him after her show, tired but glowing, his wallet thick with cash. In the photos, she was beaming, bridge of her nose scattered with freckles. By contrast, he looked stern and awkward. Hunted.
He tucked the photos carefully in an interior jacket pocket and zipped it closed.
Jack drove him out. Rooster glimpsed the town sliding away in the rearview mirror, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe, chest squeezed tight by the thought that Red had liked it here. Had wanted to stay. Gaudy leather jackets, milkshakes, friends, vast western sunsets.
But none of that had been real – that was what he told himself to ease the ache.
Because some of it had been real: Jack, his kindness. Vicki. The poor souls at the VA who weren’t Jake or his men.
“I can’t believe I fell for it,” he murmured bitterly.
“We all did.” Jack sounded grim, both hands tight on the wheel.
Farley turned to houses, to outskirts, and finally to fields, and Rooster spotted an unmistakable shape in the middle of one of them. He sat up hard, seat belt catching him across the chest.
“Is that a…?” Jack started, leaning forward to peer through the windshield as he turned off the road and onto the crushed grass.
“How the hell, Deshawn?” Rooster wondered aloud.
Perched on the grass like a waiting bird of prey was a Bell AH-1W Super Cobra helicopter, clearly an escort for the pristine Huey that waited behind it. Deshawn stood in the shade cast by the Huey’s rotors, and he wasn’t alone: he and another, similarly built man were dressed in tac gear.
Rooster popped the door before the truck came to a full stop, and Deshawn came to meet him, wide, white smile breaking across his face.
It was more collision than hug when they met each other; Deshawn hugged the breath out of him, slapped him hard on the back. Rooster allowed himself a weak moment and leaned into it, into his friend. He realized, to his embarrassment, that he was shaking, and that his eyes burned.
“I know, I know,” Deshawn murmured in his ear. “We’ll get her back.” Rooster nodded.
Deshawn pulled back, and his tone was normal again; it gave Rooster the strength to blink and pull himself back together. “Look at you, man,” he said with a laugh, tugging on a too-long lock of Rooster’s sandy hair. “You tryna turn into a Viking?”
“Yeah, yeah.” He pushed his hair back, a touch self-conscious. “What about you? What the fuck are you doing with a skinny bird?”
Deshawn’s grin widened. “You remember Dunbar?” He jerked a thumb to indicate the man still standing by the helo.
Rooster squinted at him, and then felt his brows go up. “Double Dee?”
“You know it!” the man in question called through cupped hands, grinning too.
Rooster looked between the two of them. “What?”
Deshawn patted his shoulder. “You’ve been outta the loop, brother, but we’ll get you caught up on the way. You gonna introduce me to your friend?” He lifted his chin toward Jack.
“Oh, yeah.” He made quick introductions.
“I appreciate you looking after my boy here,” Deshawn said, and Rooster could tell he meant it. “He’s kinda stupid sometimes.”
Jack chuckled. “Yeah, I picked up on that.”
Deshawn stuck out a hand. “Seriously, though, thank you.”
Jack accepted the shake with a nod. “Any time. You boys need anything else?”
“No,” Rooster said, automatically, and sadness twisted his insides when he watched Jack’s face fall. He had no idea when he’d meet kind strangers again – if ever – and he knew a sudden reluctance to part that didn’t make a lick of sense. “But thank you.”
Jack fished a card from his pocket. “This is my cell. Call if you need to. And I mean that,” he added sternly.
Rooster tucked it into the same pocket that held Red’s photos. “I will.” He even thought he meant it.