The other two men took to cover, hiding. Scared. It didn’t matter. They were varmints. And they were being hunted by experts. They might be boys, but they were elite trackers already. They both could call on animals to hunt with them, usually raptors. They knew the land. This was their world, and they were merciless when they had to be. By early the next morning, the other two men were dead as well.
They didn’t bother to bury or hide the bodies. The men had gone off trail. The boys had no respect for them, so as far as they were concerned, the vultures could have them. They were many miles from their run-down cabin, and by the time someone did find the bodies—if they did—there would be no tracks leading back to them.
Rubin glanced down at the tracks around his cabin. They were recent. The grass was barely pressed down, as if either the person going in and out of their home didn’t weigh much or enough time had passed that the grass was beginning to stand again. He’d let his brother figure it out. Diego was amazing at tracking.
“You going inside?” Diego’s southern accent had deepened as it often did when they returned to their roots.
“I’m thinking on it,” Rubin said. “It was a long trip and I’m tired, but if I go inside and the place is a mess, I’ll be upset and won’t be able to settle for the night.” He wouldn’t anyway. There were too many memories crowding in. It always happened that way when they came back. He was always conflicted when he first came home. Always. How could he not be? They’d lost so much.
The flu hit the winter they turned thirteen. Ruby, Jayne and their mother all came down with it. Rubin had never felt so helpless in his life. He tried to nurse them back to health. He tried every potion and herbal medicine he knew to cure them. Nothing seemed to work. He couldn’t bring down their fevers. They buried Jayne first. Three days later, Ruby died. Their mother was down for six weeks. She never spoke a single word after that. She sat in a chair and rocked back and forth, humming songs and refusing to eat or acknowledge any of them no matter how much Star tried to coax her.
The winter they turned fourteen was a bad one and they had no choice but to go out hunting, often long distances, or starve. When they returned from one particularly long hunt, Star was sobbing. Their mother’s body swung from a rope hung from the center beam of the miserable little cabin. Star was inconsolable, certain their mother’s death was her fault. She’d fallen asleep for just a few minutes. It was left to Rubin and Diego to cut their mother down and bury her alongside her husband and children in the graveyard behind the cabin, a nearly impossible task in the hard, frozen ground.
They woke the next morning to find a note from their sister explaining she couldn’t stay. She was sorry and hoped they would forgive her, but she was going to the nuns in the neighboring town a good distance away. Rubin and Diego were alarmed. The snow and ice were bad and the distance too far. None of the family had good winter gear. She was dead by the time they found her, frozen in a small crevice near the stream where Lucy and Jayne had been attacked. It took them three days to dig a hole deep enough to bury Star in the family graveyard.
The graveyard was still behind the house. They planted wildflowers over the graves and kept it nice each year they returned. They also worked on the cabin, improving it just a little, knowing they would return to help those who distrusted doctors and refused to go anywhere near cities or towns and outsiders but would trust one of their own.
“You going inside or just going to stand there with your hand on the door?” Diego prompted him again.
“I’m contemplating.” Rubin gave him a look. Sometimes being ten months older meant he could be bossy, not that Diego ever acknowledged anyone was his boss. He preferred to think they were twins and therefore the same age.
Diego flashed a little cocky grin. “If you keep contemplating, we’re both going to have white beards by the time you make up your mind whether to open the door.”
“Did it ever occur to you this could be a trap? Someone might have a grenade strapped to the doorknob, and if I turn it and walk inside, that’s the end of both of us? We’ve got a few enemies. I could be saving your life.”
“I don’t make enemies. No one ever knows I exist. I’m a ghost,” Diego pointed out.
That was true enough, Rubin had to concede. In a forest, or just about anywhere really, Diego was difficult to spot. He was one of the best, and once set on an enemy, he would find them. Animals and birds aided him. He was silent and deadly. Diego appeared mild-mannered, but he truly was a dangerous man.
“Still, step aside. I might have to be the one to open the door. I can’t take chances that the brain in our family gets blown up. I’d have to file all kinds of reports, and I do hate paperwork. Not to mention Ezekiel would be really pissed.”
Ezekiel Fortunes. The man who had ultimately saved their lives. They owed him everything. The two boys had waited until spring before they packed what little they had and hiked to the railway, hopping the train leading out of the mountains. They rode the rails for days, staying hidden, until they got off in a big city thinking they could find work. It was a terrible mistake, one of the worst they’d ever made. There were no jobs. Now they had no home and no forest to hunt or trap in. No stream to fish in.
Everyone they loved was dead. No one knew they even existed. Not a single person cared whether they lived or died. And then they ran into Ezekiel Fortunes. He wasn’t much older than they were, but he knew the streets of Detroit. He had two younger brothers he protected, but he was still willing to take them on as long as they followed his rules.
They believed in Ezekiel so much they ended up following him into the military and ultimately into the GhostWalker program. And yeah, he’d be pissed if they got blown up because they were so careless they didn’t look for a grenade when they knew someone had been in their cabin.
“There’s no grenade,” Rubin admitted. “I’d feel it.” He could too. He could disrupt electronics with the energy in his body and he could feel traps fairly easily.
He’d been enhanced, just as all GhostWalkers had, both psychically and physically. They’d all signed on for the psychic enhancements, but they had been tricked into the physical enhancements. There was no going back. Dr. Peter Whitney had performed the surgeries on all of them, changing their DNA, giving them different traits and abilities, making them into something they were never meant to be.
The first team Whitney had experimented on was “flawed.” Many suffered all kinds of physical problems and needed “anchors” to work outside of their environments without the continual assault from the outside world on their unprotected brains. There were four teams, and Whitney had improved his soldiers with each team. No one realized that prior to working on the soldiers he had performed hundreds of experiments on orphaned girls, believing them to be useless and, in his mind, giving them a higher purpose—serving their country.
Rubin opened the door to the cabin, bracing himself for the flood of memories before walking inside. The cabin should have been dirty. Dusty at the very least. Instead, not only was it immaculate, but someone had fixed it up, repairing the sink that he’d been telling himself he would get to the last two visits. The wood around it had rotted. He was going to replace it but never had enough time. Someone had not only done so, but the job was impeccable.