Excerpt: After the Rain (working title)

Naomi scowled crossly at her captors. She probably wouldn’t have been able to get away with impudent looks like that were she not twelve and adorable, but she was, indeed, twelve and adorable, and so they completely ignored the fact that she was being a complete brat because, she didn’t know, they must have found it endearingly adorable or something, like a harmless kitten. She hated that, and her scowl darkened.

“Now now,” said one of the men sitting across from her on the train seat, catching her gaze. She had picked up from their conversation that his name was Dwight, but Naomi stubbornly referred to him as Glasses Man in her head because he had enormous round glasses perched on his nose that seemed to cover over half his face. “We’ll get you back to your friends safe and sound in a matter of weeks,” he continued. “We just want to make sure they follow through on their end of the bargain.

“What bargain?” Naomi spat. “They tried to return the money to you.”

“Ah,” said Glasses Man’s companion, a woman named Rebeccah who Naomi thought of as Red Hair Woman, “so you do actually pay attention to what we say. And here I thought you just sat there and scowled your way into oblivion the entire time while completely ignoring us.”

“I don’t listen to what you tell me to do,” Naomi said, “just what you say to each other.”

Red Hair Woman laughed coarsely. Naomi was so glad she found her so amusing. No, really, she was. Go on. Condescend to her some more. She kept these thoughts bottled up inside, though, not because of a fear of anything Glasses Man or Red Hair Woman might do to her - say to her, more likely, because they certainly did like to talk. No, they weren’t worrisome at all, but Big and Scary sitting next to her, he was, well, big and scary. She’d tried out other mental nicknames for him like Scar Over the Eye or Likes to Polish His Guns A Lot, but Big and Scary won out in the end. It was just so descriptive and evocative, and really, really true. He wasn’t as Scary (though still Big) when he was joking with his companions - which he didn’t do frequently but when he did it was usually humorous (he clearly thought) anecdotes about people he had killed. But when he turned his stare on Naomi when she tried to sidle away (she just needed to use the bathroom, she promised!) she felt like he was contemplating squashing her like a bug beneath his thumb. And he was sitting right next to her now, too, blocking her access to the aisle so she couldn’t try anything funny like that one time she claimed she needed to go to the bathroom, or the other time when she was sure she’d dropped something and it had rolled out of the train car, she’d just get it and come right back, she swore! At least with him on the seat next to her, she didn’t have him sitting on the seat across from her so that she would have to avoid looking at him. Instead, it left her free to stare at Glasses and Red Hair, though now she tired of this exercise in cross futility and returned to staring out the window, her arms stubbornly crossed on her chest.

Big and Scary was telling the tail end of one of his jokes right now. Naomi had actually stopped paying attention to what he was saying a while ago. Something about a man with his leg cut off. Big and Scary began to laugh uproariously, Red Hair laughing right along with him, but Glasses sitting directly across from her just chuckled a bit for show, and then began to polish his glasses. Naomi watched him out of the corner of her eye, still apparently looking at the landscape zooming by outside the train window. She noticed that Glasses did that fairly often when Big and Scary told one of his cruel jokes, and she thought he might be doing it because he was nervous. It looked like she wasn’t the only one afraid of Big and Scary.

Big and Scary had pulled out his gun and was cleaning it again. She didn’t see why. She was pretty sure he hadn’t shot anyone since he’d last taken it out for a cleaning. She would have noticed. Maybe it was just something to do with his hands. She was sure she preferred this to other things he could do, like strangle her with one hand. He probably wasn’t any bigger than Sampson, but while Sampson was big and hairy, he was also gentle like a gigantic overstuffed teddy bear who would play poker with her. Big and Scary, on the other hand, seemed much bigger looming next to her because he was big in a hard way, and riddled with scars and pock marks. He was so terrifying, Naomi certainly didn’t want to meet the others who had managed to get close enough to mark him like that. He also had a tattoo on his arm that she could sometimes see when he moved a certain way and his shirt sleeve rode up. She caught him looking at her out of the corner of his eye and quickly returned her attention to the window, hoping the fact that he wasn’t looking at her straight on meant he might have missed her staring. She hadn’t meant to, honestly.

The movement of the landscape out her window began to slow as the train began grinding to a halt, its brakes screeching on the tracks. Red Hair stood up, picking up her belt and holster she had removed and placed on her lap and strapped it back around her waist. Big and Scary stood up as well, sliding his pistol back into his shoulder holster and following Red Hair out of the train car. Naomi knew the drill by now. She got up and walked behind Big and Scary, and Glasses Man followed behind her. She much preferred this to the first couple of days she had been traveling with the group, during which either Big and Scary or Red Hair Woman hauled her around by the arm whenever they went anywhere.

Naomi dropped back as far behind Big and Scary as she could, until she felt Glasses Man place a hand on her back to push her along. She looked up at him. “You’re not going to kill anyone this time, are you?” she asked.

Glasses Man laughed nervously, and Naomi wondered if he wanted to take his glasses off and polish them right then. Only she hadn’t been making a joke, and she knew if she did it wouldn’t be as awful as Big and Scary’s jokes were.

“No,” Glasses man said at last. “The train is just stopping to get loaded up with more supplies. We’ll eat lunch and then be on our way again.”

Naomi nodded and digested this information. “Are you sure you’re not going to kill anyone?” she asked. “I mean, not you, but any of you. Because your big friend over there went and disappeared for a while the last time we stopped, and he spent an extra long time cleaning his gun after that.”

Naomi stared up at Glasses Man until he looked away, which didn’t take long. “Yes, well, uh… I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“He likes cleaning his gun a lot,” Naomi said. “I’ve noticed.”

“Yes, he does indeed,” Glasses said. “Look, now, why don’t we just walk without talking and go get something to eat, okay? I bet you’re hungry.”

Naomi suspected she should have been hungry because she had turned down breakfast due to not being hungry, but she wasn’t hungry now either. That was odd. Usually she liked to eat food, unless it was something Sampson had cooked. She suspected that somewhere deep down inside she was hungry after all, but she was too scared to notice. Maybe if Big and Scary went away again she’d be able to wolf something down, but she wasn’t sure that would help. After all, then she’d have to be thinking of all the awful things he was doing while absent, and that was almost worse than having him present. She’d only seen him actually kill someone once, and he just shot that guy in the head once before he fell over dead, but he did like telling stories about people he had killed and she was inclined to believe he wasn’t making them up. He seemed like an awful enough person that she didn’t put any one of those jokes past him. And even if he were making them up, he was still an awful person for doing so.

He wasn’t going to kill her, though. Both Glasses and Red Hair had taken the time to separately confirm that to her, even though she hadn’t asked. She supposed it was a little bit up in the air, what with the way he had been behaving when she first met him, he waving his gun around and pointing it at her frequently until she had been so scared she couldn’t move, and then he yelled at her when she wasn’t able to walk where he told her to. But it was important that she was kept alive, and so no matter how much Big and Scary ranted and yelled, or as had become more frequent, fixed her with scary looks whenever he caught her looking at him, he wasn’t going to kill her. Well, that was good.