Sophie Littlefield - Rebirth

Mim had fallen in love with the development-granite countertops, his-and-her sinks in the bathrooms, three garage stalls, architectural columns separating the dining room from the great room-and would not be swayed, especially when a bank-reclaimed model came on the market cheap. She and Byrn spent their weekends shopping for outdoor furniture and bar stools, and Cass wandered down to the park and found this secret place where no one came.

The developers put in the usual specimens, agapanthus and gaillardia, dwarf Japanese maples and society garlic. Hedge roses lined split-wood fencing, and ornamental plums shaded banks of New Guinea impatiens and dianthus, snapdragons and alyssum. But after all the houses were sold, the association hired a cut-rate gardener who did little more than mow and blow, and within a year the plants were stunted and dying.

Hardly anyone came to the park. Kids in this neighborhood-with the exception of Cass-were overscheduled after school: lessons, sports, art classes. And there were no old people. Other than a few mothers with toddlers, it was usually just Cass.

Her special tree was really an overgrown madrone bush. Cass had been attracted to its red-brown smooth bark and gnarled branches. Along the base of the trunk where she liked to sit, the bark had peeled away, revealing a silvery-green surface underneath that she loved to run her fingertips along. It was so smooth, smoother than any other tree she’d ever seen. Cass had always been fascinated by different types of bark. On the old redwoods she’d seen on a class trip to Muir Woods, it was so light and porous that it seemed impossible it could protect a tree so massive. Sycamore bark was scaly and split. The old oaks in the foothills were rough and splintery.

In the late summer, little red berries appeared on the madrone’s branches. The berry clusters had sharp thorns, and Cass broke them off and wove them into long strands, like a necklace of teeth, of claws. She peeled away the bark with a fingernail, leaving curls of it like wood shavings to fall to the dried grasses. Sometimes she gathered stones from the creek and made little cairns around wildflowers that took root in the richer soil of the creek bed. Later, much later, she would learn the names of the plants, but then she thought of them by their flowers. Fringed purple; bright yellow puff; white-going-to-pink star.

She sat in the embrace of her tree and ran her hands along the smooth bark and breathed the faint sage scent of the sunbaked weeds and listened to dogs barking several blocks away, the faraway roar of the freeway half a mile to the south. She concentrated hard on all of these things, sense-memories and wishes, and in this way she made them disappear-the two men who’d dragged her to the broom closet, the one who held her hair in his fist and the one who was unbuckling his pants-taking herself back in time to her secret garden.

She breathed the scents of that other place and time and thought of the butterflies and ladybugs and bees that landed on the leaves of the shrubs and flowers, and when there was an enraged shout and her head was jerked up hard, her eyes flew open just in time to see Jimbo teeter and fall as a second and third burst of sound echoed off the room’s walls.

A man stepped into the light of the lantern Jimbo had set on the floor.

Dor

And clinging to him, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck, her face pressed to his shirt, was Ruthie. “Take Ruthie. Go in the other room,” Dor growled.

Cass reached for Ruthie, seized her out of his arms.

“Wait for me there,” he said.

Cass did.

The man had gone down on his good knee, clutching the other one where blood was spurting out, basting his boot with hot red blood. The other, the one who’d been stripping off his pants-Dor’s vision went black at the thought-was slumped to the ground. The dart was imbedded in his shoulder; even if only a fraction of the toxin entered his system, he would be out for many hours, and not feel very good when he woke-especially when he saw what Dor had done to him with his own blade.

Dor grabbed the unconscious man’s collar and dragged him to the side of the small room, his belt buckle banging against the floor as he went. The man was not light, but adrenaline and fury pounded in Dor’s blood and it felt good to slam the man’s limp form into the wall.

Dor snapped on the man’s flashlight, arcing it back and forth. The room had been used for a supply closet of some sort; on one high shelf were spray bottles partially filled with pinkish liquid, but otherwise there were only cans of powder, a few crumpled pieces of paper, water stains on the walls, tiny black pellets on the floor signaling that rodents still thrived down here. A bucket in the corner had the stink of human waste; Dor guessed that the guards used it as a lavatory, emptying it only at shift change.

In the beam of the flashlight the man on the floor looked even paler, his eyes wide with fear, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a parody of a grin.

“What do you want,” he said.

“What’s your name?”

“Ni-Nigel Ralston.”

“Where are you from?”

“What the fuck do you care? What do you want?”

Dor delivered a rake-fist jab to Ralston’s sternum, a baji quan move he’d practiced a thousand times. Ralston coughed and cried at the same time, doubling over. That seemed to make his knee hurt even worse, and Dor waited until he stopped writhing.

“I want to know something very specific from you,” Dor continued, crouching down so he could look the man more or less eye to eye. “I want you to answer right the first time. I don’t want to hear ‘I don’t know.’ It will go badly for you if I hear ‘I don’t know,’ which I can appreciate is not what you wanted me to say right now, seeing as there’s a good chance that you won’t be able to help me.”

Dor waited for the man to nod that he understood.

“If you can’t help me, and you tell me that, I’m going to kill you.”

The man made a frightened little gasp.

“I know, I know, it’s not fair, is it? Just like it’s not fair that you were about to rape a defenseless woman a few minutes ago.”

He leaned in closer. Inches from Ralston’s face, he could see that tears leaked from the outer corners of his eyes, and a thin line of drool trailed down his chin. The stench grew stronger; the man had soiled himself. Well, a shattered kneecap probably hurt like hell.

“A girl was brought here in the last few days. Fourteen years old. Dark hair, light brown eyes, five feet four inches tall. She was with a group sheltering in a school half a mile southwest of Silva.”

“I wasn’t there when they came in, I didn’t see them, I don’t-”

Dor jabbed the barrel of his stolen gun into the soft flesh along the man’s jaw. “Don’t say you don’t know,” he said softly. “Shut the fuck up for a minute and listen, and think about the fact that I already killed one man tonight.” He waited until Ralston nodded, choking back a trembling whimper.

“I’m going to let your buddy on the floor there live. You saw what I did to him-he’s gonna have a hell of a time pissing for a while, but he might live, if he practices good hygiene.”

Ralston squeezed his eyes shut and nodded harder.

“Okay. I don’t care about any of the people that were brought in except that one girl. I need to know exactly where they would have taken such a girl and how I can get there. Tell me everything you know about security, who and what I’ll need to bypass in order to get to her. Think hard and convince me you’re not leaving anything out, because you know what happens if I’m not convinced-I kill you.”

Ralston told. He cried while he did it, ropy threads of mucus running from his nose, and his voice cracked and broke, but he told. When he was done it took everything Dor had not to kill him then, not to take his boot and crush the man’s skull against the floor.