Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [118]
A low moan from the shed’s deepest recesses caught his attention, and he peered into the gloom.
The Weatherman lay on a mattress suspended atop a low wooden bed frame, his ancient face twisted with pain, his hands moving under the blankets tucked about him. Hawk took a quick look at the blotches on his face and backed quickly away. “He has the plague,” he said. “You can’t stay here, River.” She replied in a whisper so soft he could barely hear her. “You don’t understand. I have to.”
“He’s an old man,” Hawk objected. “I like him, but it’s—”
“No,” she interrupted quickly. “He isn’t just an old man.” She paused, struggling to get the words out. “He’s my grandfather.”
* * *
SHE TOLD HIM her story then, of her family and of how her grandfather had brought her to Seattle.
Even before there were only the two of them, she was always his favorite.
A quiet, introverted girl with a waif’s big eyes and a skinny, gawky body that she found embarrassing, she followed him everywhere. For his part, he seemed to enjoy her company and never told her to go away like her brothers always did. He enjoyed talking to her and told her things about herself that made her feel better.
“You are a special little girl,” he would say, “because you know how to listen. Not many little girls know how to do that.”
When she cried, he would say, “There is nothing wrong with crying. Your feelings tell you who you are. They tell you what is important. Don’t ever be ashamed of them.”
He was tall and strong back then, even though he was already old, and she had heard that he had once been a professional athlete back before they stopped having teams. She imagined that must have been a long time ago, years before she was born, but he never talked about it. He mostly talked about her, and he was the only one who did so. No one else ever even paid attention to her except when they needed something. Her brothers ignored her. Her mother was a strange, distant presence, physically there, but mentally off in a place only she could visit. She barely acknowledged the rest of the family, lost in distant stares and words spoken so softly that no else could hear. River’s grandfather said it was because her father had broken her mother’s heart.
River didn’t know if this was so, but she supposed it was. She remembered very little about her father. She remembered that he was a big, noisy man who took up a lot of space and made her feel even smaller than she was. She was only three when he left. No one ever knew what caused him to go, but one day he simply walked out the door and never came back. For a long time, she thought he would. She would stand in the yard and look for him in the trees, believing he might be hiding there and daring them to find him. Her brothers laughed at her when she told them what she was doing, and eventually she tired of the game and gave up looking for him.
They lived in a small woodlands community north of the big Washington State cities, out on the Olympic Peninsula where it was still heavily forested and mountainous and empty of people and their problems. Their isolation protected them, they believed, and so they stayed in their small community, a group of about thirty families, waiting for things to change back for the better, keeping hidden and secret as the rest of the world slowly receded into a distant madness they knew about only from listening to radio and from infrequent encounters with travelers. But her grandfather was wary.
“You must never go out alone,” he would tell her, even though the others said it was safe and nothing would happen to her.
He didn’t explain, and she didn’t ask. She believed what he told her, and so she was careful not to go anywhere by herself. She was reminded of the disappearance of her father, even though she did not believe anything bad had happened to him. But when her youngest brother vanished one sunny afternoon without even the smallest trace, she knew that it was because he had ignored her grandfather’s warning. The others laughed,