Busted Flush

“Wait,” she said, when he trudged off again. “Let’s take a break.” The sand shifted as she sat down, making a depression where she could rest her tail. The sand was damp beneath the surface. It made the seat of her sweatpants clammy, but this was still the most comfortable she’d been since leaving BICC. “Oof. This feels nice. I could lie down right here.”

Drake plopped down unceremoniously, as though a capricious puppeteer had cut his strings altogether. He mumbled something.

“What’s that, Drake?”

“Might flood,” he said.

“We’ll get going in a minute. Just need a breather.”

Niobe knew he was right. He’d warned her about flash flooding in the desert. It didn’t take much for a rainstorm to spawn a deadly gullywasher. But she had larger concerns at the moment. She scooted closer to Drake. Sand trickled into her sweatpants.

“How you doing, kiddo?”

His shrug was so minute as to be almost invisible. She nodded in companionable silence.

A gritty breeze ruffled his hair. It dusted them with ash, traced new patterns of moonlight and sand along the soft bed of the arroyo. She hoped Drake didn’t notice how the wind from Pyote smelled like soot.

She couldn’t see his face; a cloud bank had swallowed the moon. Maybe it was time to get out of the arroyo.

“You know, Drake, there was a time when I hated my power and I hated myself for having it. It just hurt so damn much. But I eventually realized that if I didn’t have my power, I’d miss out on lots of happiness, too.”

He pulled away from her. “I’m not happy about what I . . . about what happened.” His shoulders shook freely now.

“No, no, of course not. I’m not saying that. All I’m saying is that sometimes it takes a while to understand the full extent of these things. I used to think that my power was useless and cruel. But it isn’t. We wouldn’t have made it this far without my children. You see?”

“Nothing . . . good . . .” Drake struggled to force the words out between sobs. He fell against Niobe, pushed his face into her shoulder. “. . . killed them . . .”

He stopped holding everything in. Finally.

She held him while he cried. The moon set. He cried. The clouds thickened. He cried.

It didn’t rain.

Drake was tired from their cross-country journey, but the thought of the BICC and cops on their trail kept him going. He’d done some practicing with his sling when they stopped to rest, but hadn’t come close to hitting what he was aiming at. He was determined to get better at it, though.

They were near Wink, but the blazing remains of Pyote from the previous night were still etched in Drake’s mind. Niobe decided they should move only after dark. Without Zane, a chopper could sneak up on them too easily, given how little cover there was. Tonight they weren’t going any farther, though. Niobe had twisted her ankle earlier and it was still pretty swollen. She’d picked an area of scrub not far from a farmhouse for them to hide out in. It was a moonless night and she’d already crashed out. Her heavy, even breathing annoyed Drake, since he dreaded going to sleep. The dreams didn’t come all the time, but they seemed more real now because he knew they were true.

Drake couldn’t do much about most of the things that were making him miserable, but he had a plan for getting some food. A hope, anyways, if he was lucky; he was due in that department. The nearby farmhouse was a two-story job, which meant the bedrooms were almost certainly upstairs. There hadn’t been a single bark to indicate the presence of a dog, since a pooch would have killed his plan altogether.

Moving as quietly as possible, Drake headed toward the house. There was a chain-link fence around the yard and he walked around it, looking for an alarm sign. Nothing. He struggled over the fence and plopped down on the other side, then crouched and hurried toward a shingled wall. Drake gathered himself for a moment and took deep breaths. The reality of breaking into a house was a little scarier than he’d thought it would be. He walked slowly to the back door, noting that there was no food bowl there. No dog for sure. Drake grasped the cold, metal handle on the screen door and it turned with a click. He crept up the steps and let the door close behind him.

Once inside, he took time to let his eyes adjust to the darkness. There was a single doorway leading into the house proper. He spotted a refrigerator directly on the right. Excited as he was, Drake waited a long time before opening the fridge door.

A rush of cold air from inside the refrigerator ran over Drake, but he hardly noticed. He grabbed a carton of milk and set it on the floor. This was the closest thing to happy he’d been in a long time. He closed the door and took a gulp of milk.

The beam from the flashlight caught him flush in the eyes. “Hold it right there, Mr. Thief.” If the shotgun hadn’t told Drake the man meant business, his voice sure enough did.

Drake raised his arms over his head. “Don’t shoot, mister. I was just hungry.” His heart was thumping in his chest.