Toy Soldiers 4_Adversity by Devon C. Ford

Author:Devon C. Ford [Ford, Devon C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DHP Publishing
Published: 2018-08-24T22:00:00+00:00

Ellie’s own face descended into a mask of neutral hostility. The same bastards the new girl was raging about had taken her away from her daughter, knocked her out cold to stop her struggling before she could say that her baby was still in the house they were dragging her from. By the time she had come round and told them, their leader had sent the men straight back but they had found nobody. Her baby was gone; her little Amber, so innocent and such a good girl, was lost to her forever.

She had steeled herself, cloaked herself in a numbness to just wait out the storm, and when order was restored she would tell the authorities just what these people had done and they would be punished for it. She tried her hardest not to think about her daughter, because the thoughts paralysed her. She had no tears left, no more capacity for anger, just the flickering pilot light of survival that kept her burning at the lowest possible setting.

As selfish as she felt, she could offer Jessica no solace or agreement and talk about these people and what they had done to them. Jessica knew all about Ellie’s story, told to her by Pauline, who shared the room with them, but ripping off the scabs of someone else was a cruel thing to do. She knew that the woman missed her child, just as she missed Peter terribly and broke down every time she imagined him being left behind. Her thoughts of him suffering at the hands of this new world weren’t the worst thing she could imagine, but instead her anger and fear was that he had been left in the dubious care of their parents. She shuddered to think what would happen to him if he’d been left alone with them, but she knew that a violent death at the hands and teeth of the monsters that normal people had become would probably be a blessing.

“I miss my brother,” she told Ellie in a quiet voice, “and I don’t know who would have looked after him when I wasn’t there.”

“How old was he?” Elie asked in a matching low tone.

“He is three years younger than me. He’ll be ten now.”

Ellie bit her lip, not realising she had spoken as though her brother was already dead. He probably was, but that kind of realistic pessimism wouldn’t have gone down well with her.

“What about your parents? Grandparents?”

Jessica scoffed and curled a lip in disgust. “We didn’t have much use for them even before this. He was left alone with them, which is worse than being properly alone.”

“What do you mean?” Ellie asked, sitting forward and feeling suddenly heartbroken for the girl and her missing brother.

“Every day,” she said dully, her eyes unfocused and staring at a blank spot on the wall, “we wouldn’t know what mood she was in. I’d get him up and get him dressed, I’d feed him breakfast and we’d go to school before she woke up.

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