Florence's Tale

by Megan Reilly

October 23 1999

Disclaimer: 1013, Carter, Fox, not me.

Contains some description of wartime atrocities so if you're highly sensitive....

Okay to archive, but let me know where so I can find more fic, okay?

Florence's Tale

by Megan Reilly

She takes care of these men. She keeps them safe and strong. Someone has to.

She was born in Virginia, before any of this started. Her daddy used to say if she wasn't careful, she'd never get off the island. But she didn't care, as long as she could run shoeless through the forest all summer long. She had found more arrowheads than anyone. She was going to find the lost colony, if anyone could. Her daddy used to smile mysteriously and say he was a direct descendent of Virginia Dare. Her daddy used to say a lot of things. He was a veterinarian. Her mother was Native American and a doctor. So caregiving was in her blood.

Santiago's men came to town when she was eighteen, running shoeless through the forest for the last time in that limbo summer after high school. That was ten years ago, 1991. They'd kicked Saddam's ass in the Gulf and in the fall she was going to join the army instead of going to college. They would train her She knew her parents were disappointed, but she didn't care. College was for later, when there weren't so many adventures to be had.

She saw the smoke and smelled the fire from the woods and headed home to help her mother. People would be scared if not hurt. She thought a house was burning until she got closer and saw the whole town was on fire.

Men in uniforms were herding people into trucks. She didn't understand. This was America and things like this didn't happen here She ran, without thinking about it. Home, she thought, her dirty feet flying over the pavement. Her mother was standing on the porch, worried, waiting. Their house wasn't on fire, not yet, but the fire trucks weren't coming and the entire town would burn. Maybe the whole island, maybe the whole world. She'd never seen her mother look so worried to so old.

"Quick," her mother ordered, running with her, into the cool, dark basement where they stored home-canned fruit in the spring. It smelled like mold and paraffin wax. "Be silent," the woman ordered. "Dad," she said, searching her mother's eyes. She didn't understand what the jerk of her mother's head meant as her mother slammed the pantry door closed and latched it. She wrapped her arms around her knees and sat down on the floor, barely daring to breathe.

Heavy footsteps trampled the ceiling above her head and she lay her cheek against her knee, rocking back and forth like she did when she was small and she'd had a nightmare. She wanted to wake up now. The men's voices were as angry as their footsteps. Her mother spoke quietly. She couldn't hear the words.

At the sound of her father's voice, she shot up from the floor. The men demanded his animals, his medicines and his supplies. They ordered him to abandon the house. She pushed against the door, but her mother had locked her inside. Fighting voices now. She pushed harder against the door. Don't argue with them, Dad, she wanted to say, you can get some more supplies, the animals will come back, it's just a bad dream.

But her mother had told her to be silent.

She screamed when she heard the gunshots, as her parents hit the floor above her head with two matching, heavy thumps. Then she put her hands over her mouth, shaking hard.

They stomped down the stairs in their heavy booted feet, talking and laughing. Glass shattered all around the small door she hid behind, and she heard the shelves collapse. "I wonder what's locked in here," one of them said, like it was a game of hide and seek and she was almost the winner, or the first one caught.

She faced them, eye to eye, when they opened the door. The soldier with the fancy uniform and the gun was no older than the guys she'd known in school. He barely looked old enough to shave, and he laughed as he grabbed her arm. "You got something to say, little girl?"

Be silent, her mother whispered desperately.

The soldiers dragged her up the stairs by the long, childish braids she still wore, a symbol of her heritage and easier anyway in the summertime. The broken glass from the jars of fruit cut the tough soles of her feet, but she didn't flinch, even as they marched her through the blood spilling from her parents' bodies.

She'd heard of such atrocities in the books she liked to check out from the library. Her final paper in History had been about Spanish conquistadors and they ways their rape and pillage in South America had been strategic. She'd gotten an A. Roman soldiers before that, when there was still snow on the ground at midterms. Her teachers were surprised a nice girl was so bloodthirsty and studied in her topic.

Be silent, her mother had whispered to her. Oh Mommy, she thought now, as the soldiers pushed her down in the dirt behind the house. She stared up at the bright sun in the sky, fading away as the black smoke from the burning house curled upward, blotting it out like the gods in bedtime stories in a time when her world was safe and secure.

"What the hell are you guys doing?" The soldier let out a groan of disgust at the obvious answer. She turned her head and looked at the spitshine on his boots, wishing they would kill her now like they'd killed her parents and everything she'd ever believed in. "We don't have time for this. Go on," he ordered brusquely.

He must have been in charge because she felt the dirt scuffle as they all hurried away.

She curled onto her side like a poked pillbug and the soldier crouched down. She swallowed hard, disillusioned again. He'd only wanted her himself. "Pick yourself up," he told her. "You're stronger than this."

It was the sort of thing her mother would have told her. What's happened can't be changed, she would say with the memory of atrocities against her own ancestors in the West, barely a hundred years ago. It could happen in America. She'd just been raised to forget.

The soldier had dark blond hair and blue eyes, like her father, but his nose sloped like Mickey O'Malley in her homeroom, Irish to the core.

His smile, had he shown it, would have been lopsided. She was glad she didn't have to look at it. He held her eyes for another moment and got to his feet woodenly, walking away.

He hadn't saved her, but he'd intervened. The one soldier she encountered with a conscience in all her years afterward, in the camps and later, living outside the fence. She'd repaid him the favor one raining day, though she was certain he didn't remember her. How many other women and girls had been raped on his detail in those early years? Thousands. . . millions. . . it was the business of war.

He hadn't remained a soldier. She didn't know why he'd left their ranks, if there had been one incident or the long string of many. It didn't matter. She allied herself with him now because she could see he was their only chance if their mythical savior never arrived. And they wouldn't have a chance if she couldn't teach him. Between the horror of the beginning siege and the eventual finality of death, she'd found her own power, to heal not just herself but others, as her mother had. More than that, she'd found the ability to survive and live with the hatred of those responsible for the wasteland that had once been a great country.

She was stronger than that, just as he'd said. And she'd been silent, all these years, as her mother told her.

Her rubber soled shoes don't make a sound as she walks among the rows of bodies. It's miles she walks, ever day, looking at these men who are dead but not, as their lives continue in a universe different than the one she knows, one programmed by machine and carried out in the collective of their unconscious. She wonders about that world sometimes, if it is as brutal and horrible as the one they left behind.

She doesn't know, but she doesn't think it can be as she watches the news at night with another mass grave uncovered in a far-off place, another dictator, another accident, another irresponsible leader with the lives of many in his hands. Isn't that what they're fighting against in their unnatural sleep, from which none of them may ever awake.

She worries about the fresh faced new recruit and she worries about the one in the corner whose face is half burned away. She doesn't know who she worries about more. There is more potential for damage to the newest one and more promise of horror for the burned soldier who had a perfect face when he first lay down. They would both awaken to find the world had changed around them, if they ever do.

And if they do, will anything be the same for them? Some of them are injured, between the time she turns in her white uniform on the way home to dinner and the evening news and when she returns in the morning and finds it, fresh and ironed on a hanger, waiting for her like these boys' bodies wait for her to bathe and turn them.

"You can't save them all," her CO calls to her, just like they used to tell her when she was in nursing school. She raises her head from where she's been staring and looks at him. "They're not going anywhere.

They'll still be here tomorrow, Florence."

"I know," she says, but it doesn't stop her. She takes care of these men. She keeps them safe and strong. Someone has to.

End