“Because you have lovely hands, you don’t want to ruin them.”
She glanced at her fingers and palms. They were strong but far from lovely; rough with callus’ and hangnails, feint traces of old cuts and even a small, fresh bruise on the back of her thumb.
“Lovely?” She found the idea that her hands were ‘lovely’ hysterically funny.
Sharon Parsons laughed as she said, “My hands are scarred and battered. They haven’t been lovely in a good many years.”
Evan told her, “They are lovely because they wear the marks of a person who works with her hands in the Earth. They are lovely because you have used them to build something amazing. They are lovely because I can see how strong they are.”
“You have quite a way with words, Mr. Godfrey.”
“The name is Evan, and you’re avoiding the subject. Tell me the truth about your husband.”
She nodded as if saying, ‘okay, okay,’ then she glanced skyward, perhaps hoping to find the right words there.
“He was certainly a gentleman. How handsome he was on our wedding day in his perfectly pressed uniform marching me in his arm down the aisle. Little did I know that the perfectly pressed uniform and the ‘yes ma’ams’ and the chivalry hid much. We weren’t married a year before he hit me for the first time.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, Evan, ‘oh.’ That wasn’t quite my response, of course. By the time I realized that his backhands were becoming a regular occurrence, Tory was born. Then I hoped our child would change things. It did, for a week or two.”
“I’m sorry,” Evan said honestly.
“And I realized then that there is no such thing as a weekend warrior. There are two kinds of people in the world, Mr. Godfrey. Those who live by the sword and those who don’t. A man cannot spend his day training to kill and then come home and be a peaceful husband, a peaceful father. It is not possible.”
“No one? Never?”
She sighed. “Not in my world, no.”
“That’s why New Winnabow is so important to you, why you are so quick to protect it from all outsiders. This is your personal refuge.”
“Not all outsiders,” she countered. “From those who resort to violence. From those who live by the sword. Which are you, Evan? Are you a man of war or a man of peace?”
“I am a man of peace.”
“A man of peace? And you’ve been sent here to convince us to let your war machine march through our lands. I suspect that you will also tell us that if we don’t comply, your armies will come here and kill us. Is that not so?”
“That’s what they want me to do, yes. They sent me because they figured I could relate to you better than they could. The truth is that Trevor does not trust me and does not like me. I am-I must admit-his rival.”
“So why doesn’t your all-powerful Emperor have you killed?”
Evan told her and himself at the same time, “Because even he must live with political pressures and consequences. Even he knows he cannot kill off his rivals, or slaughter a town full of innocent people.”
“So what is it you propose to do?”
Evan drifted into thought. He saw the lines of his life, the lines of the new world, the lines of Trevor’s Empire…converging to a single point. He saw it perfectly clear and in that moment he knew fate delivered to him the chance he waited for since the first monster stepped foot on Earth.
“I’m not sure,” Evan lied. “But I’ll save New Winnabow, I promise you,” he lied again.
Evan eventually convinced Sharon to return to the dinner table where three hours of conversation followed the meal.
“So you have a basic plurality vote?”
“Have you considered the Borda count?”
“Transitivity of the process was a concern…”
“Reversal symmetry is encountered in any of the advanced electoral models but…”
On and on they droned about election and political theory. Dante nearly fell asleep.
In any case, the evening turned into night. Parsons postponed the council meeting until tomorrow and the two ambassadors from The Empire accepted an invitation to spend the night in a guesthouse.
Despite the lack of guards, helicopters, and tanks, the two men felt safe and slept peacefully.
Dante and Evan occupied single beds in the same room. A solitary window offered a view north toward an old barn turned workshop. That’s the first thing Dante saw as the alarm bells shocked him awake so fast that he jumped to his feet before realizing he was not dreaming.
“Wh-what? What is that?” Evan said groggily as he pulled his head from under a pillow.
Dante shook away the cobwebs and pulled on his pants and shirt. In addition to the bells, he heard people running through the streets shouting.
“Sounds like they’re calling out the garrison. Must be an attack of some sort.”
“Trevor? Did Trevor attack the city? I can’t believe it!”
“Evan,” Dante interrupted as Godfrey started pulling together his clothes. “If The Empire were attacking it’d be over by now.”
The two men jogged out from the guesthouse. The morning dew gave the fresh air a sharp cold sting.
They saw groups of children, women, and men running southeast. They saw smaller groups of armed men and women running northwest.
Dante and Evan followed the latter group.
As they crossed an intersection between a pottery shop and barber, they saw Billy Ray Phelps, the Sergeant-at-Arms. He glanced at them but did not stop. He held a shotgun.
“What is it? What is going on?” Evan called as he and Dante ran to keep pace with the armed man.
“Something came out of the swamp,” he said. “A big red and black bug of some kind. Go back to your room. We don’t need your help.”
Billy Ray accelerated away from the men. Evan and Dante stopped and glanced at one another.
“A Skip-Beetle I’d bet,” Dante figured.
“We’ve got to go help! Hey, wait up,” Evan chased after the militiamen rushing toward the scene.
Dante did not follow. Instead, he glanced around and realized he was surrounded by what might be considered a shopping district. One store in particular grabbed his attention…
… A strip of land that changed from golden fields to a thin tree line to wet ground and then to pure bog comprised the northwestern quadrant of New Winnabow.
A Giant Skip-Beetle came out of that bog: a massive beetle with rear legs resembling a grasshopper’s.
The mouth garnered the most attention. At first glance, it looked as if the creature had a tarantula stuffed in its maw. Further observation proved that its mouth was, in fact, surrounded by a tangled mass of furry leg-like appendages.
Above that gruesome orifice watched two red eyes appearing more mammal-like than insect or arachnid.
This Giant Skip-Beetle stood taller than a bus and as thick as a doublewide, making it slightly larger than average. It had come out of the swamp, pushed through the trees, and grabbed a cow from a grazing herd.
As Evan, Billy Ray, and a group of ten militiamen approached, the Skip-Beetle swallowed one last bite of its bovine treat.
“Set up a defense line!” Phelps ordered his militiamen who carried hunting rifles and shot guns.
The group did so but only after prodding. A few of the men-unable to pull their eyes from the creature- stumbled over stones or their own feet while moving into position. Part of their fear came from the size and hideous appearance of the creature. Another part from the noxious odor it exuded.
The Skip-Beetle hovered fifty yards in front of the defensive line. That line stood, in turn, another fifty yards from the buildings of New Winnabow.
“It ate something already,” one of the militia said hopefully. “Now it’ll just go away.”
