Winds of Fate Read online

  Winds of Fate

  By Thomas H. Reed

  © Copyright 2014, Thomas H. Reed

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

  ISBN: 978-1-625-17438-3

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents portrayed in this book are fictitious except for the names Tamara Freeman and Mindy Rose.

  I would like to thank everyone who has helped to make the publishing of this book a reality. It has taken a lot of time, hard work and dedication on the part of all those involved. With that said, I want to say how much I appreciate all of the effort put forth by those who not only encouraged me, but also did their part to help me in this endeavor.

  T. H. Reed

  * * *

  Winds of Fate

  A Root from Infertile Ground

  Tramp

  Jump

  Billie’s World

  Desperate Flight

  Turning Fourteen

  Checkmate!

  The Tearth on Tuva

  A Root from Infertile Ground

  As a rule, Jodie was a pro at handling stress, but this morning had morphed from stressful to ridiculous. Two pregnant girls, the youngest a fourteen-year-old, the other one three months shy of sixteen, were waiting to be transported to a home for unwed mothers thirty miles south of Jodie’s small, understaffed clinic.

  The girls had been caught stealing sandwiches and sodas from an Allsup’s store, picked up by a police officer and then taken to juvenile detention. From there, they had been turned over to the state after the authorities had failed to locate even one parent for either girl.

  Jodie knew that she would have to ask her maintenance man, Joseph Payne, to keep an eye on the clinic for over an hour while she drove the girls to the home.

  She glanced at her watch and had an overpowering urge to break something. She had not seen Joseph in the past half-hour and didn’t know if he was still on the grounds. She had called on him for help so often recently that she was surprised he hadn’t asked for a well-deserved raise, or simply drawn his pay and left without giving notice.

  However, that was a different story, one that she didn’t have time to think about or deal with. But the girls had to be delivered to the home with or without Joseph’s help. Reminding herself that she didn’t have time for this task was foolish, there was no one else who could do it, especially since all the new safety rules had been factored into the system. The type of insurance that would allow Joseph to transport the girls did not cover him, otherwise she would have asked him to do it.

  Jodie had learned the hard way that the public transportation of passengers required a special license and insurance. A lesson she had learned after spending most of a day in court trying to fix her last major screw-up.

  While reaching for her handbag and sunshades, Jodie glanced at her growing schedule. In addition to her other tasks, she had two runaways waiting to be dealt with. Both girls were pre-teens, which was probably the only reason that they were not pregnant. According to the report she had received, the younger of the two had been repeatedly raped.

  Before Jodie could dig the keys from her cluttered handbag, she received a call from the county welfare department asking her to check into two separate reports of child abuse that had come to their attention. The report came from a woman who lived next door to a single father who was attempting to raise two young girls on his own. Evidently, the father believed baseball bats and broomsticks were sufficient tools of punishment for disobedience.

  The neighbor had called the information in to the Department of Human Services instead of the local police. The woman said she had heard screams coming from the house next door, and that she had personally witnessed the father beating his youngest daughter. According to the caller, this type of activity was common.

  Jodie called the police station and gave them the information she had received from the social worker, and then seriously considered unplugging her phone for the rest of the day. She still had to drive the girls to the home and then get her paperwork caught up. She also had a dozen telephone calls that needed a response. This was already mid-week, and some of the callers had been waiting since last Friday.

  When two more calls came through before she could make her escape, Jodie was ready to book the next available flight to South America. But what she did was answer the calls, told each party that she had an emergency and would return their call as soon as possible. She then left a recorded message explaining that she would be out of the office for a while, and in case of an emergency to call 911 or the police station.

  Jodie had skipped breakfast, and now it looked as though lunch was out of the question. After she returned from dropping the girls off at the home, she planned to clean her slate before the day’s end.

  By the time Jodie made it back to her office she was in tears. She realized that she had to stop getting emotionally involved with these kids, it was killing her.

  The younger of the two girls was not only pregnant, she was severely scarred from past burns and knife carvings that would follow her to her grave. And the older girl’s body was covered with obscene tattoos and body piercing.

  Jodie swallowed a cup of coffee and two graham crackers and managed to make it through the remainder of the day with relative effectiveness. She had returned all the belated phone calls, had most of her files in order, and was ready to collapse when a final call came in. Jodie listened to the barely audible voice that came through in bits and pieces from a terrified female. She knew the call was coming from a cell phone that had a low battery, or the caller was in an area that was rapidly losing reception.

  Jodie yelled at the female to listen for a minute so she could get pertinent information that she needed in order to help her. When the girl got quiet, Jodie asked, “Where are you?”

  The girl replied in a frightened voice “I don’t know!”

  “Okay, look around you, what do you see?”

  “Nothing but bushes … weeds ... dirt.”

  “Are you near a road? Can you see houses or mountains in the distance?”

  “No.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “Yesterday, some men pushed me from their car into the desert and then drove away. I walked forever before I found a place that my cell phone would work. The battery is low because I kept trying to call you. I remembered your name and number because you once helped a friend of mine. I really need some help here; I just can’t walk anymore. I don’t have any water and I’m really thirsty.”

  “Where do you live, what is your address?” Jodie asked, and then she heard, “My home is ...” and then the phone went dead, the only befitting word that came to Jodi’s mind was, “Shit!”

  Jodie called the police to report the call, and then laid her head on the office desk and cried. She cried for all the kids who had been forced into the streets to fend for themselves and for the girls and boys that had been beaten, raped and maimed. She cried for the children who would be born in the future that would meet up with similar fates, and for those that she had dealt with today ... and then she cried for herself.

  No matter how hard she tried, or how many tears she shed, she would be able to fix a world that just did not give a damn. Finally, with her face resting in a puddle of tears on a hard, steel desk, Jodie drifted off to sleep, and while she slept, her mind wandered … and she remembered …

  Jodie awoke in a tangle of broken tree branches, rotting weeds and other bits of flotsam that had washed down stream with her. Her body ached and throbbed with pain from the beatings, the repeated ra
pe, and finally the stabbing. Although her thoughts tripped on the word rape. She wondered if rape was an accurate definition of what had happened to her. How many times had she heard the old cliché? “You can’t rape the willing.” And she had been willing enough in the beginning. After all, what crack head would blink twice about a poke or two, or even six if it meant she could get hooked up?

  No. What those skinheads did to her was wrong, but she could hardly call it rape. She had been beaten before, so she didn’t consider such petty trauma worth writing home about. However, a knife being plunged into her chest, barely missing her heart, and then possibly injuring a lung, along with the subsequent toss into the river was something entirely new to her.

  How Jodie managed to stay afloat was an unsung miracle. The swift current and the riverbed’s boulders and bramble had done more damage than the original beating. The traumatic trip down stream had broken, or badly fractured her right forearm and bashed her skull in, in several places. Somehow, she had remained above water and that had kept her from drowning. Finally, lodging in a tangled mass of debris, she had managed to pull herself out of the water before passing out from hypothermia and sheer exhaustion.

  She looked up into a clear blue sky and thought, “I’m still alive!” However, she had to ask, “Do I really want to live?” She considered the question and decided that this was a good time to die. Living was getting to be too much of a hassle. Death would be so easy. She closed her eyes against the stark blueness of the sky and willed herself to die. “No more! I have had it. I can’t go on like this, better I die here and now. Let the damn buzzards and spiders feast!”

  When she opened her eyes again, it was night, the cool desert wind and spray of water from the river had conspired to wake her from death’s slumber. She screamed, not because of the pain, although there was a sufficient amount of that to give every masochist in the country a thrill; the result was a piercing cry from being cheated out of death. “What kind of bumbling, murdering bastard only stabs you once? Aren’t they supposed to repeatedly stick the damn blade in you at least forty or fifty times in some kind of lunatic rage? But no, not my hero, it’s one jab and then into the water. Why waste energy or get blood all over yourself for a crack whore? Just my luck, I get the remedial murderers, rapists, bunch of assholes. Where to hell is Charley Mansion when you need him? Instead of Jeffrey Dahmer, I get Jeffrey Dumber.”

  Despite her condition, she tried to laugh, setting off a coughing fit and spitting up blood. The moonlight turned the blood black and ominous looking in her hand.

  Well, maybe they weren’t complete bunglers after all.

  Close your eyes girl. Maybe you are dead and your body just doesn’t know it yet.

  She did as the voice suggested and then closed her eyes. As she drifted off, her mind expressed a silent prayer, “Please, please, please, just let me die quickly ...”

  Among the tangle of dead branches, broken bottles, rotting plastic bags and unrecognizable debris that swept down from an upstream campground, lay the body of a very young woman. A fox on the hunt smelled the human odor and shied away. A water snake crawled across her stomach. Flies explored her eyes, nose and mouth. As the eastern horizon slowly brightened, the birds began to chirp and chortle. Insects buzzed and crawled across the girl’s skin. as the sun rose higher, the earth warmed up to an uncomfortable degree. Jodie’s bruised and swollen body was responding to the agonizing heat, pain and itching.

  With much effort, the young woman gradually opened painfully swollen eyelids that almost concealed blood-red eyes. Her face was puffy from cuts, tears and bug bites, and the flesh around her eyes had begun to turn purple and green. The bright sunlight brought excruciating pain that felt as though her skull would split within the next second. Jodie tried to turn her head away from the sun, which brought even more pain, but she had to relieve her eyes of the glare, and decided to keep moving.

  Jodie finally reached a point where she could look around. Through blurred vision, she saw branches swaying rhythmically in a mild breeze. Birds chirped happily as they foraged for food, and butterflies flitted over freshly opened desert blossoms. The action frames of dancing color made her want to scream. “Damn, damn, damn!” She uttered. “This dying crap is no easy chore!”

  Angrily, she tried to yell, but only a gravelly and raucous sound escaped, “Can’t you see I am dying here? Would you just shut the hell up, out there?”

  Nearby birds ceased their chirping and took flight at the strange outburst, butterflies flitted away for a moment and then returned. At a more distant range, persistent birds took up their chirping where they had left off.

  “Damn it to hell!” The girl tried to raise her voice to a pitch that everything within earshot could hear and fear her, but the second outburst was barely audible, her throat was as sore as the rest of her body. She lay back weakly, “I guess this is not going to work.”

  “Hey, crazy girl! All you got to do is roll back into the water and it will all be over in a few minutes!”

  She craned her neck, looked down at the dirty, foaming water below and said, “No thanks I’ve had my fill of water for a while.”

  “For someone wanting to die you sure are picky about how it gets done.”

  “Keep out of this, you ... freak!”

  Just trying to help out with a suggestion or two, that’s all.

  “When I want your advice I’ll ask for it, okay? And where in hell did you come from anyway?”

  Oh, I come from everywhere. I’m a friend to all and always on call. A real little helper. Whatever you want girl. Whatever you want! But first, I do need to know what it is that you want?

  “What I want is for you to shut the hell up!”

  The voice in her head went silent, leaving her with only the sound of the river gurgling through the trapped debris, squawking birds, and billions of buzzing insects.

  “Screw this!” She turned onto her back, and then lifted her upper body as much as possible and braced her feet against a mass of soggy branches. The river had been formed, or at least aided by a flash flood from somewhere above her and had washed all sorts of stuff downstream with the flood.

  She painstakingly worked her way out of the tangle of broken tree limbs, thorny twigs, and globs of stinking crap. As she trudged through the maze, suddenly, Jodie was alerted by a loud, cracking sound. A whole section of branches had broken loose overhead and shifted toward her. Her heart jumped as the mass begin to slide into the water. She scrambled in an attempt to free herself, but instead, sank to the river below with a splash. As Jodie flailed, she struck her foot against a boulder and cried out in pain.

  While she drifted in and out of consciousness, the river had receded. Once again, she began her trek through the tangled mass back to the river’s edge. With a fractured arm, and a stab wound to the chest, the effort of pulling herself up and out of the river was a new experience in pain.

  The morning air rapidly became hotter. A new run of sweat had collected over Jodie’s body leaving it sticky and smelling like garbage, and flies buzzed like a swarm of bees. A few feasted on the stab wound while small gnats and insects were attacking and sticking to her skin. Her effort to fight them off threatened to send her back down the steep slope.

  By the time Jodie reached the top, her arm throbbed and ached like hell and a rush of nausea hit her like a ton of brick. The chest wound started bleeding again and blood began to ooze from her forehead. She reached up to check the extent of the damage to her head and then shuddered as she probed a swollen, gooey mess. Her skull didn’t feel as if it was broken, but there was a large gash just under her hairline, and her head pulsed as if something inside was trying to escape.

  She stared at the swollen arm with an apathetic eye: There were no protruding bones, nothing was crooked or misshapen, just swollen. She thought to herself, “It must be what they call a green break.” Still it was not good to move it around much. Jodie knew that she needed a sling or something to support it, but had nothing t
hat she could use.

  She glanced down at herself, and for the first time, noticed that she was as naked as the day she was born. The only thing covering her skin was black, purple and yellow bruises. Not to mention that the one-inch wide, nasty stab wound was raw, infected, and had developed a purplish-red glow. She looked at the wound and saw a soupy, rust-colored liquid oozing freely. She wrapped her arms around her naked body and shivered in the late morning heat.

  Girl, you may be having second thoughts about dying, but you sure don’t look like you are in any shape to keep on living, not for very long anyway. You got choices though. You can listen to the wise one here, or you can just go on and jump back in the river. You got a broken arm, a hole in your chest and no clothes. Just how do you plan to stay alive out here? Better yet, where is ‘out here?’ Seems to me those boys took you on one hell of a long ride.