Nightmare Kingdom: A Romance of the Future (18 page)

Summer was not the most pleasant season in Oklahoma. By August the grasses were burned yellow, the ponds were low on water and the temperature hit a high of over a hundred day after day.

Jamie, grateful to find both grandparents still alive though fragile and old, strolled over the dam and into the grove of cottonwoods on the south side of the pond and tried to count his blessings.

He’d never wanted to leave this place that had been his childhood refuge. Unlike his little sister, he’d had no longing for adventure and had gone unwillingly with the group of youngsters chosen to be sent to the planet called Sanctuary. Life was funny that way. He’d been given his fill of travels and excitement while Marti had married a neighboring farm boy and lived happily with him and their four children, his nieces and nephews.

The hot day cooled toward evening
when crickets began to chirp and, in the distance, he heard the cry of a bobwhite. It was a small peaceful paradise, little changed from when he’d been so unceremoniously hauled away.

He was lucky to be here, lucky to be alive. After boarding the cruiser on Aremia, he’d collapsed and remained in a coma throughout the journey
as they’d been taken to Earth. He remembered nothing of the trip, nor of their arrival or reception here. Claire told him he’d almost died several times and that only surgery for a blood clot in his brain had saved his life.

Earth had accepted its wayward children back, if not gladly, then with a willingness to placate their distant and
powerful neighbors of the Aremian Empire.

Now he listened as he heard footsteps approaching through the deepening twilight. Claire, come looking for him, still so anxious about his health that she would barely talk about how much she missed her daughters and feared what might be happening to them.

She came into his arms and they clung together and he was reminded how the pioneers who first settled this dry, difficult land had moved away from friends and family to build new homes. Like them, he and Claire were impossibly far from their own closest kin, her daughters and the boy he now admitted was his son.

“How’s Alice?” he whispered against her hair.

“Helping Gran make a plum cobbler. It’s hard to give in to despair around your grandmother. She’s such an upbeat person. Poor Alice, she misses her dad something awful.”

As much as we miss our kids
.  He kissed the top of her head. “We’ll go back, sweetheart. Someday we’ll go back.”

She rested in his arms. “As long as we’re together,” she said. “Here or there, as long as we have each other.”

They stepped only a little apart to look up at the brightening stars. “Jamie, how could Thereon bring us here without Adaeze knowing what was going on?”

She wouldn’t like any answer he could give her. “She had to know, Claire. Nothing significant going on with the Gare is secret from her.”

“Then why didn’t she stop it? Why doesn’t she insist that Earth send us back to her?”

He closed his eyes to listen to the crickets. “She’s thirteen and feeling her independence. I don’t doubt she loves you and wants you to be safe, but that doesn’t mean she wants you looking over her shoulder.”

He knew this had to have occurred to her.

“But she’s so young
; she can’t know what she’s doing. And poor Lillianne, what will happen to her?”

He wanted to say ‘poor New London,’ but didn’t. Adaeze’s reach would go way past the little community he loved.

There was nothing he could say to reassure her.

THE END