Home Port (A Deep State, Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller) (Long Haul Home Book 4) by Fraser Dana

Author:Fraser, Dana [Fraser, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Published: 2016-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

<Ophelia Among the Reeds>

Meat freshly sliced from the side of a wild boar sizzled on a Coleman stove in the kitchen of a lakeside cabin. The power was out. The original owners were dead, their once costly furniture scarred by cigarette burns and the bored carvings of four co-dependent psychopaths.

Genitalia, male and female, had been scored into the cherry veneer of the Lasalle coffee table. Long slashes marred the heavy cream fabric of the dining room chairs with their tidy pattern of small, stacked chevrons, exposing guts of white stuffing that had been pulled out and scattered around the floor.

The constant rub of handcuffs carved deep lines in the slatted sleigh bed that took up the wall opposite the fireplace. Clothes littered the floor around the frame. The bedding on top was soiled and heaped in the middle, the slight form of a woman in her early fifties all but dissolving into the mattress.

Unattended, the meat stopped sizzling and started smoking. On the edge of waking, the woman coughed, arms jerking on the cuffs as she reflexively sought to cover her mouth.

She always woke in fire, dark smoke filtering into her lungs. The same thick-veined hands always pulled her out of the burning Mercedes she had owned since graduate school. Through the smoke and the throbbing pain along the side of her head, the face of her rescuer always swam into view.

Her rescuers—not one, but many.

Not rescuers at all.

Trying to burrow into the black depths of nothing, Rebecca Sand shook her head and twisted in her sleep, arms twisting around one another as the handcuffs kept her wrists immobile. Numbers danced against the screen of her closed eyelids, her mathematician’s brain working to soothe and distract.

A sharp series of pops and shouting clawed at her attention, attempting to drag her up into consciousness. She pushed deeper into the mattress, defying the reprimand to wake. She would let the smoke claim her this time, the fire it accompanied the only force capable of cleansing her skin of all that had happened since the power went out.

A masculine voice screamed from somewhere outside the cabin. Others joined to form a makeshift quartet. Curses, pleas, admonitions.

The homeowners had begged, too. Bound and gagged in a stolen SUV, she had been able to close her eyes but not her ears. There were no sharp pops, no merciful bullets. The elderly couple had been hacked up and then she had been carried past them as vomit filled her mouth and pushed against the filthy rag muffling her own desperate, hysterical screams.

The numbers danced inside her head. Quadratic polynomials, binomial coefficients, and chi square distributions lined up one after the other, grinding together like gears in a machine until she could no longer smell the smoke or hear the screams.

The skillet pan rattled in the sink, an unfamiliar voice swearing as flesh made contact with a too hot handle. Becca burrowed deeper, her fingers trembling like maple leaves before they dropped in fall. Footsteps traversed

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