Page 24 of Stone Blind

Yield shook his head, accepting the water and fruit and heading out the door. “Three days tops, and I’m bringing her scary ass back.”

“Three days, and you may not want to,” Apple said, already feeling the loss of her company and she hadn’t even left. He looked at Ricky and said, “Your thoughts.”

“I think I’m in love with her,” Ricky said. “I can’t believe you’re just letting her leave with Mr. One Eye and not put a tracker on her.”

“Hell, he is the tracker I need and the luckiest son of a cracker I know,” Apple said. “She will either learn or burn out. He will teach her how to stalk, among other things. We shall see. Three days.”

“Three days and no Ms. Helen,” Ricky said. “Why do I feel like she and I just broke up and she left me and the kids to fendfor ourselves? I don’t like this. I’m going to my camper and sulk silently in protest.”

“Would you stop pouting and get to work?” Apple asked. “I have to go eat crow with Stephen.”

Ricky leaned against the kitchen sink, half watching Helen and Yield leave the house, feeling every emotion he could imagine. “I feel like I’m watching my teen daughter go off to prom with a dude I know is going to try to fuck her. I don’t like this at all. And what was with the thing you and Mr. One Eyed Willie did to Stephen?”

Apple too had come to the window to watch Helen climb into the front seat of the black Ford-F150. He didn’t like it either, but Kendrick didn’t look good. The last thing he needed was for the woman to be here if things took a turn for the worse, which he expected over the next three days. It would be best if she weren’t attached to the boy if shit came out sideways and ripped up a pucker hole. He thought of Stephen.

“Ricky, at the end of the day, we are men,” he said. “Stephen wants to play on both sides of the world and he can’t. He’s not strong enough yet to truly defend himself against those stronger than himself, which is what Yield and I showed him. He must learn to pick his battles.”

He called for the boy, who came down the stairs in a regular pair of jeans and button-down shirt. It was the most normal Apple had ever seen the kid look since his arrival. Apple instructed him to start breakfast.

Stephen asked, “Where’s the scary man and Ms. Helen?”

“They have work to do, as do you,” Apple said. He noticed the fear in Stephen’s eyes, and his reluctance to turn his back to him. “I will never hurt you. However, in this world, we must learn to blend in, or we are targeted and harmed. Call it code switching or playing into the stereotype, whichever one keeps you the safest. You’re Asian, so this world expects you to be asmart nerd. Use that to your advantage until you find your tribe. Choose wisely. It matters. And you need to learn to fight. Ricky can teach you.”

“I’m not a fighter,” Stephen replied.

“You need to be if you plan to dress like you did this morning,” Apple said. “You can wear that stuff here, but out there, blending is key. Understand?”

“Understood,” Stephen responded, setting about to make breakfast for the family.

“Sorry for scaring you like that, but I did it to make a point that even if you were expecting an attack from me, people who hate travel in packs,” Apple told him. “You may be prepared to deal with one, but it is always the accomplice you don’t see that takes you out.”

YIELD WAS QUIET ASthey drove. He hated Milwaukee and everything about it, but he would start at the Field of Flowers, looking for clues, then back his way out to locate the cocoon where the new field was planted. He had questions for the woman riding shotgun; her silence was fucking with his calm.

He threw out into the quietness of the truck cabin, “So, family huh?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know the family?”

“To what family are you referring, Good Sir?” Helen asked, eyes focused on the road.

“Don’t play coy with me, Cranberry. You made the call to my handler, who called me and instructed me to do this. You have his number, so you know the family,” Yield said.

Helen didn’t see a need to answer a question he already had the answers to and moved on to another subject. “As I said, I know a lot of things, but don’t understand where and how thepieces fit. Like this, for instance; you’re carrying no weapons and are dressed like an unemployed Indiana Jones, and the boots are new and hurting your feet. You’re not a killer; it isn’t in your eyes, so what do you do, track, hunt, or retrieve?”

He couldn’t turn his head to look at her since he needed the right eye to remain on the road. However, he could feel her, and she felt...odd. In some ways, she almost made him feel calm, which unnerved him, making him feel... unsettled. Yet, Cranberry was observant.

“Tracker, the lucky type. He wants me to walk you through this, see what you can deduce on your own, then we find the new Field of Flowers,” he said.

“Okay, help me understand this Field, the cocoon, and Chrysalis shit. Are we talking butterfly themed pedos, running a human trafficking ring?” she asked.

“Close,” Yield replied. “Each region has a group of creeps who like kids or unwanted people society has tossed aside. They pull them off the street if those people aren’t too far gone with drugs or disease. If they can catch them young and pull them into these communities, the butterfly catchers can put them in kind of stasis, training the kids to recruit more kids while protecting, I guess you’d call it, the main one.”

“So, we need to start with food banks and small grocers,” she said.

“What? How did you get there?”

“To make the butterfly grow while it is in stasis or while it metamorphoses, the pupa requires nutrition,” she told him. “As you said, no one wants to screw a sickly person unless that is their thing, which is all kinds of icky. How do they feed a field full of butterflies? Usually, the caterpillar will suspend itself under a leaf out of plain sight, but before the process begins, does the worm eat the leaves for sustenance?”

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