Traveler trilogy Book 2, updates every Friday!
Five years after killing Levi Cornwall, Arthur Morgan is happy. He has a wife who loves him, an honest job he enjoys, and two beautiful children named Sadie and Hiram. All of it is turned on its head, h...
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Arthur stared at Jenny in stunned silence as he watched her tear the skin from a man's head with the wildest, angriest look in her eye he'd ever seen. Her brown eyes glittered black in the darkness, and her lips parted over her white teeth like some sort of carnivore as she cut, soaking her hands and her clothes in the unfortunate man's blood. From her mouth came a scream that sounded like some sort of demon. A rabid, feral sound of unspeakable pain.
Arthur had never seen more pain and anger in another human's face before. She was like a coyote, forced to chew its own foot off to free itself from a hunter's trap. Her eyes were wild and almost shell-shocked, and to anyone else it might have appeared that she'd gone crazy. But to Arthur, her demeanor gave him a strange sense of deja vu.
This was some form of PTSD. He was sure of it. He knew firsthand what the disease felt like; what it looked like. He'd have bet all the money they'd stolen in Blackwater that this was Jenny's problem. Along with this realization came a terrible thought: PTSD did not exist in a vacuum. It had a cause, which begged one simple question.
Where had Jenny's PTSD come from?
As Jenny lifted the Braithwaite boy's scalp from his skull and started on the one next to him, Arthur realized he had to do something fast. He knew more waves of men were coming, and for everything to play out right, they needed to get inside.
"Jenny," he said softly, placing his hand on her shoulder. He used this method on his daughter sometimes when she was upset about something.
Her shoulder stiffened at his touch and her frantic cutting slowed, but she still did not stop. "Jenny," Arthur repeated, squeezing slightly. "It's okay."
The hand holding the knife paused. "No it's not," she said after a moment. Her hands began cutting again. "No, it's not fucking okay." She cut through the last few inches of skin that held the skin of the man's scalp to his skull and stood up, holding both scalps in her hand by their hair as though they were nothing more than dirty dishrags.
"Nothing is ever okay anymore!" she said, shouting now as she sheathed her knife. "Not even this place!"
Her anger and sadness continued to grow in her face until she was sobbing, clenching her scalps so hard that her knuckles would have probably turned white if they hadn't been caked with blood. She tried in vain to wipe the tears away with the back of her hand, but the blood and saltwater mixed together to leave tracks of red across her face that looked almost like war paint.
"Fuck these people!" she shouted, staring at the Braithwaites lying at her feet. "Fuck this place! Fuck everyone here!" Her eyes slid to Dutch's, and she stared at him with such a look of anger that Arthur's blood ran cold.
Somehow, for some reason, she hated Dutch. She'd come to the correct conclusion about him early, and was rightly incensed at the mess he'd made of things. But there was something else, some other hurt, that consumed her. Something beyond Dutch. Something Arthur had a feeling she'd developed PTSD from. And he also knew there was absolutely nothing he could do to help her, because actual, working treatments for the condition hadn't been invented yet. Doctors were still prescribing electrical shocks and lobotomies for brain fevers these days.
