Winter's Fury - Volume Two of The Saga of the Twelves (37 page)

She walked to another
fixture and chose a plain, tan colored, spaghetti-strapped tank,
tailored to fit the curves of a female. She ducked behind it, out
of Andrew’s view.

“
You won’t look will you?”
she asked.

Andrew was going to answer
in the negative when he noted an inkling of play in her
voice.
What the heck
, he thought.
I hadn’t looked the
first time. Why would she think I would look now?
His mind was still a jumble when she shed her
old, and quite smelly shirt, for the other before he could recover
from her remark. By the time, he looked back in her direction she
had already come forth, having put on the long sweater as fast as
she could.

To his delight, not only
did it fit, it looked nice on her.

“
I guess, I got lucky,”
she added, modeling it for Andrew.

He watched,
rapt.

“
It was the only extra
small in the entire inventory.”

“
I guess you did,” Andrew
agreed, but let his next comment die on his lips as he continued to
drink in the sight of her.

The sweater, though it was
heavier than the one she had been wearing before, still held fast
to her form. She was after all under-sized, but to him was she in
no way girl-ish. It was hopeless, he stared on, his eyes wondering
over the curvature of her hips, the swell of her breasts. She was
almost the woman she would grow into one day, he concluded to
himself.

Yup, she’s definitely not
a little girl.

It struck him again. Much
like it had in the clearing where she had fallen in an exhausted
heap. It had even continued throughout their cart-ride to the mall,
he was as confounded by the notion he knew her. And yet, he was
uncertain how it had to be true. He could not explain why he was so
certain of it. Where had he seen her before? And yet, how? She was
from Arizona. How could he know her?

And still…?

“
Hey, Drew,” beckoned
Marianna.

Andrew’s eyes refocused on
her, realizing she had moved much closer toward him while he was
floundering in thought. He was going to say something, but she put
a small finger on his lips, which made him stop and go stiff at the
same time. He was not prepared to feel her ever-warming skin
against his mouth.

“
I wanted to thank you for
saving me.” Her voice had dropped an octave or two.

Was her throat still
bothering her
, he thought, his mind
racing.
Or was she being sultry for
real?

Oh god!

“
Well, it was every one of
us,” stammered Andrew.

She closed the remaining
distance between them. “I don’t care. I woke-up in your arms, with
your warmth around me and your eyes looking down at me.”

Her stare
intensified.

He found he could not look
away.

Then, she began to speak
about what he known all along. “You looked exactly the same in my
dreams. The dreams I have been having about you each night since I
arrived here in this place. The same dream I had at least one time
when I was still asleep in my bed back home,” she admitted. Her
eyes were boring into his.

He got lost within the
depths of those swirling pools.

“
I knew your name before
you told me when we were outside just now, because you told it to
me, night after night… in my dreams.”

He could only stare back,
his face on the verge of exploding with the realization of the
truth.

“
Do I sound like a crazy
Native American midget?” she purred. The sounds coming from her
felt like velvet caressing his ears.

“
You’re not crazy and
you’re definitely not a mid–,” he began, but he did not
finish.

Marianna pulled him toward
her, closer than before, with both hands, bringing him down to her
level.

Before he could think
about resisting, she kissed him soundly on the lips.

His eyes popped out of his
head in complete disbelief.

After a short time, he
closed them. He let the thousands of emotions and feelings course
through his body unobstructed. He let himself relish the warm,
inviting press of her against him. That’s when he understood this
was not something new. This was familiar. In his heart and in his
mind, he acquiesced and let the concept become fact.

I do know you, Marianna. I
have for quite some time now…

A minute later they came
apart, breathing heavy, staring into each other’s eyes.

There was a sly grin
etched one side of Marianna’s face. “Come on, Drew, let’s go find
me some new jeans to wear.” Her smile was wicked. “I might even let
you watch…”

Oh. My.
God
, was all Andrew could think, thousands
of new images washing over him, drowning.

He knew then, he was in
trouble.

She already had him
wrapped around her little finger.

Hopeless…
indeed.

~~~~~~~<<<
ᴥ
>>>~~~~~~~

~ 21 ~

Don’t be Such a Pinche Sore
Loser, Esa!

Day Four, Sunday, 10:27
am…

It had been over two hours
since he had last seen her. Despite the passage of time, it still
made him grin when he thought about her. He enjoyed the fact he had
taunted her into an insane fit of rage. She had followed him for
miles before she realized he was deliberately drawing her away. He
was leading her far, far astray from her intended targets – the
children and his son, Andrew.

It had started the morning
four days prior. Before the first storm had struck the land like a
machete through a melón, cutting right through everything warm, it
had left nothing but frozen cold in its’ wake. He had been running,
egging-on the little bitch, and she had followed. She had been smug
at first, certain of her dominance over him, the situation and the
world around her. She was an over-confident little puta, that was
for sure.

She became more and more
pissed off every time he “shifted” from one place to the next,
moving without moving. All he had to do was think about it -
too
will it
and
it happened. But, boy, did it ever get her fucken chones in a
wad.

How and when he’d learned
to do this, he did not know nor had he cared to remember. Maybe it
had happened that first night. The night he had stalked the land
like a mad man - walking, crawling and screaming, on the vestiges
of insanity. To him, that first day in this god forsaken place was
a blur, filled with fear and anguish. He did not care to revisit it
again. There was no use for extraneous bullshit of that
sort.
It was not healthy stuff,
ese.

Instead, he told himself
in simple terms he could move without moving. Yes, he could “phase”
like one of those horny-ass gavachos on Star Trek. He could because
he needed to and that‘s all there was to it. Of course, he did not
need no damned machine to help him. He could do it of his own free
will.
So, take that pinché Spook or Spork,
or whatever your god damned name had been, you pointy-eared
vato!
Whether he had done so out of fear
or the sheer will to stay alive and protect his son, it did not
matter. He could control it; bend his will to his exact location on
this world.

Over time, he began to
understand he could dissipate in one place and aspirate in another.
He could move from one locale to another much quicker than he had
when he had drawn that wicked little bitch down what used to be La
Loma Road. He had become faster, more efficient each time he did
it. He knew his power was growing. The only catch it seemed, was he
needed to either see or know the place he wanted to travel. He had
to know it in the minutest of detail. This bothered him at first.
Yet, the more he “phased” his body through the air - the strange
air of this place - he was somehow able to memorize where he had
been. It was a memory down to the molecular level. Even that, over
time, became almost second nature, like taking a wizz or flapping
out a wet pedo.

Hours and days later, he
found he was sort of “mapping” the landscape he traveled through.
And, he was doing do with such specificity, he could recall
individual trees. He knew how many leaves, living or dead, they
still had upon their branches. He was capable of giving each of
them names, hundreds of them, then thousands, with blinding
alacrity in both mind and body. He was intimate with every bush,
knew every twig. He was familiar with every break or each case of
frost damage they had endured during the course of their lives. He
was able to discern which sides received more sunlight, their
relative age, even when they were most likely to wither and die. He
could delve into the lives of the various grasses and other such
low-lying plant life. It did not matter if they were underneath a
plethora of snow. Still, he could tell which ones had gone dormant,
which ones would not exist much longer in such cold. And, of
course, he could feel those ones that had died and had begun to
nurture the ground with their decaying remains. He knew them all.
They responded. With such individuality, it would take an
encyclopedia sized set of books to describe a mere square foot of
the ground he passed.

And, with every new
detail, with each strand of knowledge, his mind grew.

Not in just size. No, it
was in complexity - dimensional, exponential, to the power of ten
with every passing minute. The more he had shifted down the
Colorado wagon trail. Every step he had egged the insidious,
child-like beast further and further from his son, the more his
mind grew. His knowledge of the Melded World deepened with
recollection so vast, it was accurate in its' most minuscule
aspects. He would have filled terabytes of data in a quarter of an
hour. He would have crashed even the mightiest server farms back in
the World of Man.

He saw it all. He felt it
all. And, he used it to his advantage.

He had drawn her out that
day, almost all the way to what he knew would have been Glendale
back home, before she had bedded down for the night. Not before,
she had yelled at him. She had not known where he was per se, but
she screamed in all directions just the same. She promised she
would eviscerate him. She had elucidated how she would eat his
steaming entrails, how she would devour the whole of him. She had
said she would begin with his genitals, munching upon his juicy
testicles. It had gone on and on, and he had watched it all until
she finally grew fatigued. She ended the day sound asleep in the
clutches of her gargantuan pet.

He jump-phased back the
way they had come. He was able to make much larger “leaps’ since he
had covered the details of that ground already. It was now fused in
his mind. Once he knew the place, he could go there at once. Thus,
his trip back into the area where he had suspected the children
were had been over three times faster. He was glad, because it
allotted him more time to look for them, though he had made only
moderate progress that night.

He had made his way back
to her before she had awakened in the midst of a hammering
blizzard. He had toyed with her some more, leading her away blind,
stumbling over the land. He brought her deep into the area on Earth
he had known as the Sepulveda Basin.

She had stopped early when
night fell, ranting and raving about with her hands digging at
either side of her head. He had always taken her for the devil’s
own. He had been certain beyond certain she was out of her fucking
mind, but that night…

…
She had looked like
something straight out of the Cuckoo’s Nest. The way she had
carried on was nothing short of monstrous.

Hijo de
puta
, was all he could think as he
watched.

The
girl-that-was-not-a-girl was a raving loon.

She had finally fallen
down in the snow like a sack of papas, a few hours after
sunset.

He had phased back to the
big rock pile he had found the night before to search some more.
That was the night he had found the smoke seeping from the ground.
That was when he knew where his boy, his first-born, was hiding.
His heart had ridden the hidden stars that night. Joy had
overwhelmed him. He had known, without a doubt, his boy was safe,
for the time being at least. His search was over, Andrew and the
rest of the children were all right and they had protection. He
felt - for the first time since his transportation to this place -
able to relax, enjoy the possibility of resting at ease.

He had not lingered after
that. He phased back to where the
pinché
hija del diablo
had lay sleeping but had
found her in a completely different state.

She was writhing on the
ground. Her hulking beast had been striding around her, in a
circle, in obvious bewilderment.

That had been the first
time Juan Ibarra had felt an inkling of something unexpected.
Something was occurring upon this strange world that was definitely
out of the ordinary.