Armageddon world knew that danger sill lurked.
Nina moved out from underneath a drooping branch.
'Jake won’t be here tonight.'
Denise froze. Her eyes shot in every direction except at Nina. Mom could nearly see the cogs and wheels churning in the daughter’s mind searching for an excuse, a lie, a story.
'I, hey, mom, hey, yeah, well I was just-'
Nina raised a hand in the universal signal for stop.
'Don’t bother, Denise. You’ve been doing this just about every night now for the two weeks I’ve been home. Lord knows how many times you snuck past Barney.' Barney, a vet who had lost an arm on the battlefield, served as the resident nanny and hall monitor in their apartment complex. Denise stopped babbling, stuck her lip out, and threw a hand on her hip. 'You’re not going to go running off with boys in the middle of the night.' 'Boy.' 'Huh?'
Denise spat, 'Not boys. Boy. One. Jake. And I’m sixteen.'
'That’s right. Sixteen,' Nina agreed. 'That’s too young for skipping out in the night like this, especially with a boy a couple of years older than you. I won’t have it.'
'Mom. It’s no biggy. I mean, you’d like Jake. And I like him,' Denise considered her words then drove her eyes onto mom’s and said, 'I love him.' Nina’s jaw dropped. 'Love? You love him? Denise, you’re only sixteen. That’s too young-' The teenager cut off her mom and broke into a tirade that began with well-chosen words but ended in poorer ones.
'Too young? Too young to love someone? Is that what you think? But I wasn’t too young for you to teach me to shoot, or how to fight, or how to kill with a knife. I’m too young to care about anyone but I wasn’t too young for you to teach me all about the bad things out there and how they can kill me and how nasty they are. I was never too young for you to make me into a little soldier just like you!'
'Denise…'
'And what do you know about it? What do you know about love? Every man who’s ever tried to get close to you you’ve driven away! You don’t know anything about people and relationships! Well I’m sorry, mom, but I’m not the same robot you are! I have a heart!'
The teenager stopped ranting. Her breath eased in and out and in and out in big deep huffs. Her fists clenched but her angry eyes wavered in the slightest, as if fearing she had driven their confrontation over a cliff. Nina stood still, her eyes fixed on her daughter, her brow pulled taut. Two seconds, then three, then five past. Nina finally spoke a grumbled order. 'Go to your room. And stay there.'
Denise grunted and stomped off, pushing through the lower branches of the White Ash trees. Nina listened to the angry teen march away until she heard the front door close, confirming Denise had made it safely inside.
After hearing that sound, Nina exhaled and closed her eyes.
What do you know about love?
Nina knew Denise’s words had been spoken in frustration. She knew her daughter loved her. She knew that, in the morning, they would share a joke over breakfast then maybe play racquetball after school, or go to the bay for a crab dinner at night.
She also knew Denise’s words held truth.
Over the last five years she taught her daughter to be strong, to protect herself, and to understand the deadly world in which they lived. But she could tell little of relationships.
Before the world had been invaded by a host of alien wildlife and extraterrestrial militia, Nina Forest had been a shy woman who always felt the outcast. She committed herself to the one natural talent she possessed; a talent for fighting.
She found direction as a pilot in the National Guard and as an officer on a Philadelphia SWAT team, maturing far beyond her years when it came to soldiering. Yet the world of passion, love, and heart eluded her understanding.
Things had improved in the years after Armageddon. In man’s old civilization, an expert woman soldier had been an oddity. Not now. The war to save humanity allowed her to truly be herself, to explore her natural instincts to their fullest.
The more comfortable she became with the new world, the more she felt willing to take chances. She dated on occasion, dabbling in both serious attempts at building lasting relationships and short-lived affairs. Both always ended in failure.
The latter simply felt wrong; she would not give away her body and heart lightly.
As for longer relationships, she could not decide what she wanted and thus walked away, or the man grew frustrated in trying to break through her armor-plating.
At thirty-three years old, Nina knew it strange that her heart remained sealed away. Even a broken heart would be better than a hidden one.
Still, she knew something lay dormant inside. Sometimes she felt it, struggling to break free. Alas, she could not find the combination to that lock.
Nina strolled through the trees as she considered her daughter’s words. She wondered if, in a world of monsters and alien armies, it might be too much to expect Denise to be the same sixteen year old girl Nina had been. A recluse. An outcast. Why would she even want Denise to be the same? Perhaps this whole motherhood thing had been a mistake after all.
She shoved aside those thoughts and approached the figure bound to the tree.
He wore the gray pants and white dress shirt of an academy cadet. His complexion hinted at Middle Eastern descent but the new world taught that things such as ethnicity, religion and race were thin, unimportant shells painted over the common bond of humanity. Nina sighed and pulled the gag from his mouth. 'I’m sorry Captain Forest I’m really sorry I’ll never do-' 'Listen,' she forced the words. 'You want to see my daughter? What is it… Jake?'
He stopped babbling. The cautious gaze in his eyes suggested he could not be sure she honestly wanted an answer, so he stayed silent.
'Okay, look, if you want to see my daughter you come by tomorrow night at a decent time. But you come to the front door, understand?' Again caution kept his tongue in check, but the young man nodded slowly. 'All right then,' Denise’s mom finished. 'We’ll see you tomorrow night.' Nina took a step, stopped, and then added, 'Bring her some flowers or something. Flowers are nice.' Nina walked away, nodding to herself in agreement with that line of thinking.
Jake relaxed as he realized that the woman’s threats to his body parts were not to be carried through. He only relaxed for a moment, however.
'Um…Captain Forest…um,' he wriggled his hands in the tight ropes. 'Um…Captain Forest…I…uh, could use some help here…with the…ropes…'
– The Bell UH-1 'Huey' helicopter produced a steady chop-chop-chop bouncing off the flatiron foothills to the west and echoing around Boulder Valley.
Jerry Shepherd rubbed frost from the window and eyed those famous tilted slabs of sedimentary stone for a long second, allowing the impressive sight to steal his thoughts away from the reason for his side trip to Boulder.
Shep knew that, somewhere deep in his soul, lurked the heart of a cowboy. There had been a time in his life when he pictured himself retiring to the Rocky Mountains. What a way to cap off his military and law enforcement career with a couple of years of fishing, hunting, and napping in hammocks in the shadow of grand mountains.
Such dreams evaporated when the extraterrestrial armies and alien animals came pouring through the gateways.
Shep sighed and pulled the zipper on his parka another inch higher.
The foothills he admired remained capped in white frosting that reflected the sun brilliantly. For all its beauty, the snow in a place such as Boulder, Colorado, often grew into an impenetrable barrier. He wondered why any settlers would choose to re-open a city that not only sat in isolation, but had suffered so many horrors in the early days of Armageddon.
To Shepherd, much of The Empire’s push westward had felt like McArthur’s 'Island Hopping' campaign during World War II in that the military commanders carefully picked where to strike and where to leave alone.
Boulder had been one of those islands left alone during the push to the Rockies. Denver, on the other hand, had been cleared, particularly the sections east of Interstate 25, including the International Airport and the Buckley
