The Rifters by M. Pax

Chapter 4

You can download this book at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, iBooks, Googleplay, and Smashwords. Until 12/31/14, it's free on all sites. Prior to 10/20/14, you can preorder the second book in the Rifters series, The Initiate for only 99 cents at Amazon, B&N, GooglePlay, and iTunes.

*****

Chapter 4

Standing in the middle of nowhere with a shotgun pointed at her by a crazy woman in an aluminum foil hat wasn’t what Daelin pictured as a fresh start. Charming had chattered on about chaste air and mountains, lots of sunshine and sky, not weirdoes acting as crazy as loons on the subway. And why wasn’t she here yet? “Do you know where my sister is?” Maybe she was stuck at work. “Which way is the Paleo Institute?”

Shotgun Evita took three steps backwards, whirled, then ran across a meadow of brush to a grouping of five dilapidated trailers the next street over. Nuttier things had happened in New York: naked people on the train in a snowstorm, a pink bear racing down Fifth Avenue, men in bras and lipstick. One loony woman with a gun didn’t faze Daelin.

She took the prepaid phone out of her pocket and tried her sister again. It went to voice mail. “Charm, I’m running out of minutes, I can’t find your key, and I’m standing out here in the freezing cold. You should have said Settler was like Alaska and full of half-baked fish.”

The phone tucked away, Daelin surveyed the whole of the town. Charming lived on Madeline Street, number 24, atop a knoll. Closer to East Lake than Gold Lake on the south side of town, she had a nice view of them both. No building rose higher than three stories, most two or less. Houses dotted the blocks, no more than nine to each one, grouped like well-edited paragraphs. Charming’s cottage stood alone at the end of Madeline, which stretched farther into the wilds than the other streets, giving an unobstructed view of nature to the west, the center of town across some scrub brush to the north, and the quiet neighborhoods to the west and north.

The unblemished soul-quaking vista of unpopulated lands spread before her as fine as classic literature, finer than lines of poetry — snowcapped mountains, pine trees, two blue lakes, a cinder cone, tumbleweeds, and a field of black rock, which appeared to be asphalt but wasn’t. From her research on Settler, she knew it was lava. Miles and miles of lava. The town seemed so lonely, the edge of the world.

Daelin shivered and reached for another frog. A mob of them thronged her sister’s gardens. The first fifteen croakers hadn’t had the spare key, but one of them did. So Charming had said.

“The key isn’t under that one. I believe it’s under a frog on the side of the house. A blue one.”

Daelin dropped the frog, braced her hands on her hips, and spun around. Holding a U.S. Postal Service pouch and dressed in a blue uniform, the man had no gun. He stood a few feet away next to her car. The cock of his hip and the hitch of his lips marked him as a once-was bad boy who hadn’t completely outgrown his rakish ways. Dark hair flirted with his eyes, partially covering them, definitely calling attention to their inky depths.

“At least you’re not holding a shotgun.” Daelin crossed her arms, waiting for what he had to say for himself.

His fingers fiddled with the old-fashioned aviator goggles hanging around his neck. “You met my cousin then?”

“Little thing with messy dark curls?”

“That’s her. Trinidad Cepeda, and I’m Culver Swit. Descendents of the illustrious Patrick Swit.” He said it as if it meant something, puffing his chest and raising his chin. The world beyond urban boundaries was strange.