“We couldn’t just leave her there,” my husband responded.
The Shreiff replied, “You’ve done a good thing.”
Still reeling from the shock of it all I marveled, “I still can’t believe she survived!” Secretly, I wondered if I could. If I would want to.
“Yes, well, if I can just get you to sign-“
“Stop.” The woman in the well tailored, if off the rack, suit put her hand over mine. To the Sheriff she said, “We’ll be taking over. You’re done here.” Two men in suits and dark glasses began flashing badges and directing the sputtering Sheriff and his people in another direction.
The woman turns to us. Petite her small stature does not take away from her aura of command. “He’s right. You and your husband did the right thing. But also a dangerous thing. Some very powerful people wanted that young woman to stay missing. Now, they may want to make an example of you.”
She felt the pinch of the needle and jerked away but could already feel the drug in her system. Grabbing the hypodermic she turned it against her assailant. Who knew her drug using past would actually do her in good stead? She had experience with faking normal while under the influence. The other woman fell to the floor, eyes rolling back in her head. Either she’d been lucky and her attacker had not managed to give her much of the drug or the other woman had no tolerance. Her own tolerance collapsing as darkness claimed her she pressed the emergency beacon hidden under her skin. She’d thought the prison would be safe.
“Shouldn’t he be trying harder to kill us?” I ask.
“This you’re complaining about?” Is my husband’s outraged reply.
“Look at him! He’s still a kid. How’d you get into this life, son?”
“Born into it. Never known any other way.” He was 15. 16, max. The kid’s eyes were almost dead. Almost.
“Would you like to?”
“No, no!” Hubs knows me too well. “We are not bringing this kid with us! He’ll stab us in the back first chance he gets!”
“He could have stabbed us in the front.”
Twenty minutes later the four of us, the kid we came for plus the kid I wasn’t leaving without, are escaping. I open the door and out of nowhere comes a red haired thug with a baseball bat. I manage to dodge and get only a glancing blow, but the fucker is strong and this hit was right to my kidney.
Which wakes me right the fuck up. That hurt. I stay up for an hour, hour and a half. When I go back to sleep I fall right back into the dream.
There was no way I wasn’t peeing blood for the next little while. Dropping to the floor I see the kid sink his knife into the throat of my attacker. Stepping aside in a move that feels well practiced he pulls out the knife managing to escape all but a few drops of the spurt of arterial blood.
Turning away and taking my daughter’s hand he looks at me and says, “I suggest we run.”
It’s one of many alternative communities scattered throughout the nation. Small and both welcoming to, and wary of, outsiders the folks in this particular town were acutely sensitive to electromagnetic waves. Radio and TV broadcasts, wifi, cell, Bluetooth, basically all of the signals used by virtually every wireless device.
The electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) drove them to move near a radio astronomy observatory. Around these telescopes was a radio quiet zone that, for the largest, expanded hundreds of miles in radius where most types of electromagnetic radiation on the radio spectrum were banned. We moved in, a middle aged married couple with our dusky skinned curly haired teen son and our young niece whom we are raising after the tragic loss of my sister and brother in law. We told them our son had developed EHS and we were welcomed.