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And, well, I was empty.
Whatever the situation was, clearly it wasn’t good. Normal people didn’t try to eviscerate helpless women. It spoke of serial killers, psychopaths, or a particularly ruthless gang.
Finn texted a couple minutes after the sun started creeping through the trees, asking for a picture of the girl, saying something about Nia – the new hacker who somehow barged her way onto the team – would try to find some traces of her online.
I took the picture, not bothering to tell him it wouldn’t do much good, not with the damage she had going on. He could see that for himself when it came in.
I went through the motions of making more coffee. Then shredded up some potatoes, onions, spinach, carrots, and peppers, ready to be made into hash browns should she wake up hungry, easily served with some eggs, once I went out to let the chickens loose to crazy, grabbing a few fresh ones from the coop. She likely needed some protein to feel human after that kind of blood loss. Spinach would help with the iron.
I had some frozen berries I could make into a shake.
“Christ,” I hissed, running a hand across the back of my neck, catching my mind shooting off in a thousand directions, each and every one of them trying to figure out how I could make this nameless stranger more comfortable when she woke up, could make the whole situation somewhat less traumatic.
Ordinarily, I would be thinking about the repercussions of this situation, the potential it had to completely change my entire life. I should have been itemizing everything that absolutely had to come with me – the animals, the feed, the medications, my tools, some clothes, my guns and other weapons – both legal and not.
If this came down to the cops and rangers swarming the woods, I would likely never be able to come back to get anything I had accidentally left behind. I wasn’t sentimental by any stretch of the imagination, but I liked a certain amount of order and predictability in my life. I liked having all the supplies I might need on hand so that sudden trips to the store wouldn’t be necessary.
It was fair to say that people and me, yeah, we didn’t exactly get on well. For them, I was big, quiet, brooding, intimidating. To me, they were loud, intrusive, pushy, and fake friendly. Just once it would be nice to hit a store for supplies without having someone walking around talking on their cell phones, bumping into me because – despite being on this earth thirty-plus years – they somehow still didn’t know the width of their own bodies. Without them asking me what kinds of animals I had when I bought food, making uncomfortable, unnecessary small talk in the name of hospitality or friendliness.
I burrowed my way out of the Barrens maybe once every two months, loading my truck down to capacity with dog food, hay, grain, new building supplies – tools, wire, fencing, nails, twine – as well as the foods I didn’t grow for myself – grains, beans, lentils – or that were occasional guilty pleasures – alcohol, ice cream, chips. As a whole, I liked to live off the land, but exceptions had to be made here and there.
The idea of having to head out randomly by the week to grab necessities filled me with dread.
Did you ever think that maybe the reason you don’t like people is because you spend your life avoiding them? Miller had asked me on one of her visits. They weren’t often. Really, no one’s visits ever were. Kai used to come a lot more back before he settled down. But if I saw the team members each twice a year, that was a lot. And when they did visit, there were always talks. About me coming out of the woods, about me rejoining society, of how it wasn’t healthy to be completely alone all of the time.
Maybe a part of me resented it. I didn’t give them much shit about their lifestyle choices. It seemed unbalanced for them to get on me about mine. But the other part of me was glad I had them, glad they gave a shit enough to give me shit. Not all guys like me were that lucky. We got back from that world, were angry and unpredictable and cold, and everyone gave up on us. Or we pushed them away, so they didn’t have to put up with us. And, eventually, they would let us go.
Except for my crew.
Except for the guys who knew what it was like.
So they never gave up, never let go, gave me enough rope that I had some slack, but not enough that I could hang myself with it.
In turn, I tried. Maybe not as hard as I could, maybe not as much as they might want, but more than I was one-hundred percent comfortable with.
