Dark of Winter: Prepper Book Two

Ch. XVIII - Rising Waters

It has been a month since Fish dropped me off in the dead of night near an abandoned house along a stretch of seldom-used dirt road. I spent the next hour or two riding home, towing a cart nearly as heavy as the emotional baggage I carried. A cold front moved through bringing with it a noticeable drop in temperature and a constant drizzle that soaked me to the bone. By the time I arrived within sight of our austere perimeter fortifications I was shivering uncontrollably.

The first patrol I ran into was Sung-Mi and Danny. Danny being a recent addition to the neighbourhood. Turns out Danny wanted to remove himself from some bad influences in the Towers in an attempt to keep the monkey off his back. Sung-Mi threw her arms around me and I hugged her back with what little strength I had left. She helped me back to the house and out of my soaking clothes. I collapsed on the couch and was lights out in under a minute.

I awake some hours later to Merida licking my fingers and the distinctive sound of a page being turned coming from the other room. Rising from the couch I find someone has left a glass of water on the side table and I gulp it down. Everything aches and I let out an involuntary groan.

"You okay?" I hear Sung-Mi call from the other room. I force myself to my feet and pad across the floor in the direction of her voice.

"Yeah." I respond, but the weakness in my voice and lack of conviction say otherwise.

She meets me halfway, she's carries my copy of Two Solitudes in one hand and places it on the dining room table. "I've never read that before," she confides. "It's kind of interesting."

"How long have you been here?" I ask.

"Oh, not that long," she replies. "We've taken turns. Heath and Danny were here for a while, and Ari, then Peter and now me. You snore."

"Huh," is all I can muster in reply.

"Miriam put together some food for you-- you should eat. How's your arm?"

"If I'm being honest, it hurts like a son-of-a-bitch, but so does pretty much everything else," I answer as I move toward the kitchen. Sure enough, Miriam has provided a charcuterie of smoked meat and fish, cheese, grapes, pickles and crackers. I offer Sung-Mi first crack at it and she declines.

"Watching my figure," she declares in jest.

I open a cupboard and retrieve a bottle of red wine. "Join me for a drink?"

"Sure," she says taking a seat across the table.

In the end, she relents and shares both the food and wine with me. We catch up over glasses of Bordeaux and what seems to me to be the best food I've had in weeks. At length I disclose my gruesome discovery at the farm and the subsequent firefight, the long trek to Fish's hideout and the revelation about the border fence to the east. She takes it all in to the point where she even produces a small notebook and jots down a couple key points.

"I'm very sorry about your in-laws," she says when I finally pause my exposition. "Do you think Pelex is involved?"

"Not directly," I admit. "I really don't know what to think at this point, but I don't think it was incidental and by that I mean just some kind of robbery or random attack. I'm fairly certain that they were targeted because of me." And then it dawns on me, "does Heath know?"

"No, we figured you'd want to be the one to tell him."

My mouth goes instantly dry and I knock back the entire glass of wine in a single gulp nearly choking in the process. "Fuck me."

"It's okay Connor."

"You don't get it, all I ever do is give him bad news and it's all due to me. I just bring him pain and misery time after time. It's not fair to him, I should be doing a better job, but everything I do just gets fucked up and it keeps coming back on him."