A Root from Infertile Ground Read online

  Root From

  Infertile Ground

  Thomas H. Reed

  © Copyright 2013, 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: 978-1-625-17309-6

  Thanks go to Sally Williamson

  for the creation of this incredible cover,

  and her dedicated efforts toward

  the publication of-

  A Root From Infertile Ground

  Also…

  Our most sincere thanks go to

  gorgeous cover Model, Geri Earhart

  And last but definitely not least…

  A load of thanks to Misti Tiemann

  for coming to our rescue with her

  trusty camera and making

  everyone’s day much brighter

  About this story

  A root From Infertile Ground

  Jodie McLean had put four years of intensely courageous effort into helping abused children and teenagers that she had taken into her shelter and her heart. Her previous four years of rigorous study and training had given her the tools she needed to reach the youngsters a nation had neglected, or simply thrown away.

  Jodie’s whole purpose and aim in life was to nurture the abused children and teenagers back to physical, mental, and emotional health, and then to find permanent homes, or at least safe shelter that would give them a shot at living normal lives.

  There was only one problem associated with Jodie’s chosen career; she had a tendency to allow her heart to become personally involved with each new ward.

  But a quick glimpse into Jodie’s own battered and abused background will help to understand why she perceives the abuse of these homeless children as a very personal injury.

  As a child, Jodie McClain was prostituted out by a foster mother, and introduced to a world of sex and drugs before she had reached her teens.

  After escaping the abusive clutches of her foster mother, Jodie learned to survive on the streets, an existence that came near destroying her mentally and physically.

  After surviving a beating, followed by a stabbing from a ruthless mercenary leader, and then tossed into a river to drown, Jodie discovers she has acquired an invisible companion in the form of a voice that taunts her every action. But strangely enough she realizes the “voice” is trying to goad her into making decisions for herself that will keep her alive and moving in the right direction. And it was working for her.

  Due to the constant goading from her invisible friend, Jodie decides to at least make an attempt at surviving long enough to seek revenge on the group who tried to kill her.

  After blowing up a compound that, unknown to Jodie, had a huge basement filled to overflowing with drugs and explosives, and maybe even a safe full of cash and possible other valuables, she makes some powerful enemies whose foremost goal is to kill her or die trying.

  But Jodie surprises even the roughest and toughest of her enemies when she suddenly turns combatant and, without the least warning, becomes their very worst nightmare.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 1

  As a rule, Jodie was a pro at handling stress, but this morning had morphed from stressful to utterly ridiculous. Two pregnant girls, the youngest only a month into her fourteenth year, the other three months short of sixteen were waiting to be picked up and taken to a home for unwed mothers. The home was thirty miles south of Jodie’s small, understaffed clinic.

  The girls, who had been caught lifting sandwiches and sodas from an Allsup’s store, were picked up by city cops and taken to Juvenile detention. From there they had been turned over to the state after the authorities failed to locate even one parent for either girl.

  Jodie knew 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 felt like swearing. She hadn’t even seen Joseph in the past half-hour and didn’t know if he was still on the grounds. She’d had to call on him for help so often she was surprised he hadn’t already asked for a well-deserved raise, or simply drawn his pay and left without giving notice.

  But that was a different story, one she didn’t have time to think about or deal with. Nonetheless the girls had to be delivered to the home with or without Joseph’s help, and reminding herself she didn’t have time for this task was a foolish waste of time; there was no one else who could do it. And especially not since all the new safety rules had been factored into the system. Joseph wasn’t covered by the type of insurance that would allow him to drive the girls to the home; otherwise she’d ask him to do it, if she could find him.

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

  While reaching for her handbag and sunshades, she glanced again at her growing schedule. She also had two runaways waiting to be dealt with, both pre-teens, possibly the reason they were not yet pregnant. According to the report she’d gotten, the younger of the two had been repeatedly raped.

  Before Jodie could dig her 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, one of which had come to the department’s attention only ten minutes before they called her. The report had come from a woman who lived next door to a single father who was attempting to raise two young girls alone. Evidently the father believed that baseball bats and broomsticks were sufficient tools of punishment for disobedience.

  The neighbor had called this information to the welfare office instead of to the police. The caller said she’d heard screams coming from the home next door. She told the agent at the welfare office that she’d personally witnesses the father beating his youngest daughter with a broomstick, and it was beginning to get on her nerves. According to the caller, such action from her neighbor was common. Go figure …

  Jodie called the police station and gave them the information she had received from the welfare department, and then seriously considered unplugging her phone for the rest of the day. She had to deliver the girls and get her paperwork caught up. She also had a dozen telephone calls she had to respond to; some that had been waiting since last Friday and today was Wednesday.

  When two more frantic 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, tell each party she had an emergency, and that she would call back as soon as possible. She set up her recorder to explain that she would be out of the office until 1: P.M., and if anyone had an emergency to please call 911 or the local police station.

  Jodie had already skipped breakfast and now it looked as though lunch was out of the question. When she returned from delivering the girls, she would try to clean her slate before the day’s end.

  By the time Jodie got back to her office she was in tears, and only too aware that she had to stop letting her heart get involved with these kids; it was killing her. The youngest of the two girls she�
�d delivered to the home was not only pregnant but she was severely scarred from past cigarette burns, and knife carvings that would follow her to her grave. The older girl’s body was covered with obscene tattoos and body piercings.

  Jodie swallowed the lump in her throat with a cup of coffee and two graham crackers and managed to make it through the remainder of the day with relative effectiveness. She even managed to return all the belated phone calls. She had most of her files in order and was ready to collapse when a final call came through.

  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 to the female to listen to her for a moment while she got pertinent information needed to help her. When the girl got quiet, Jodie asked, “Where are you?”

  “I don’t know.” The girl told her in a frightened voice.

  “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 where you are?”

  “Some men pushed me from their car yesterday, in the desert. I walked a long way before my cell phone would work. The battery’s low because I kept trying to call you. I remembered your name and number because you helped a friend of mine once. 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 when she heard, “My home is ...” and the phone went dead, the only befitting word that came to Jodi’s mind was, “Well, shit!”

  Jodie called the police to report the call, and then she laid her head on her desk and cried. She cried for all the kids who had been forced into the streets to fend for themselves. She cried for all the young girls and boys that had been beaten, raped and maimed, and all the children who would be born in the future that would meet up with similar fates. She cried for the more than half-dozen 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 never in her lifetime be able to fix a world that just didn’t give a damn. At long last, with her face resting in a puddle of tears on a hard, steel desk, she drifted off to sleep, and while she slept, her mind wandered … and remembered …

  Chapter 2

  Jodie woke in a tangle of broken tree branches, rotting weeds and other bits of flotsam that had washed down the stream with her.

  Her body ached and throbbed with pain from the beatings, the repeated rape, and finally the stabbing. Although her thoughts had tripped on the word rape, and she wondered if rape was really 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 that group of men 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, the knife plunged into her chest, just missing her heart, and possibly injuring a lung, along with the subsequent toss into the river, was something entirely new to her ... a first.

  How she had managed to stay afloat was an unsung mystery. The swift current and the riverbed’s boulders and bramble had done more damage than the original beating had done. The traumatic trip down the river had broken—or at least badly fractured—her right forearm and bashed her skull in several places. But somehow she had remained above water, and that had kept her from drowning. Finally lodging in a tangled mass of debris, she’d managed to pull herself up and 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! But did she really want to live? She considered the question and decided she didn’t care if she died now. Living was getting to be too much of a chore. Death would be so easy. She closed her eyes against the stark blueness of the sky and willed herself to die. “No more! I’ve 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 the spray of the 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, she screamed because she had even been 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 into the water. Why waste energy and get blood all over your clothes for a crack whore? Just my luck, I get the remedial murderers, rapists, bunch of assholes. Where in 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, she closed her eyes. As she drifted off, her mind latched onto 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. The girl’s bruised and swollen body was slowly responding to the agonizing heat, pain and itching.

  With much effort, she finally opened painfully swollen eyelids. Her face was swollen and puffy from cuts, tares and bug bites, and all 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 with the next heartbeat. She tried to turn her head away from the sun, and that act brought even more pain, but she had to relieve her eyes of the glare, so she kept moving. She finally reached a point where she could look around.

  Through blurred vision she saw branches swaying rhythmically in a mild breeze, birds chirping happily as they foraged for food, and butterflies flitting over freshly opened desert blossoms. The action frames of dancing color made her want to scream again. “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? So shut the hell up out there!”

  Nearby birds stopped chirping, some taking flight at the strange outburst. Butterflies flitted away for a moment but returned shortly at a more distant range, the birds took up their chirping where they had left off. Damn it to hell!

  The girl tried to raise her voice to where everything within earshot could hear and fear her, but this second outburst came out as 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 and looked down at the dirty, foaming water below her and said. “No thanks I 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 nothing but the sound of the river gurgling through the trapped debris, and the squawking, chirping birds and billions of buzzing insects. “Screw this!” She slowly turned onto her back, and then lifted her upper body as much as possible and braced her feet against a mass of soggy branches. Painfully, she began working her way out of the tangle of broken tree limbs, thorny twigs, and globs of stinking crap.