Chosen by Christine Pope (free children's ebooks pdf txt) 📕

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And like that, Jason Little River came to live at the compound. He took over the larger of the secondary bedrooms, putting his meager belongings in the closet there. I noticed that he hadn’t brought any personal items with him, no photographs of family or anything like that, unlike the wedding photo of my parents that now lived on the mantel in the living room, or the shot of all of us at one of Devin’s football games, which was now sitting on the dresser in the master bedroom.

When I asked him about his family, his expression grew shuttered. “All gone now,” he said, and didn’t seem to want to talk about it anymore. Since I understood all too well what it felt like to lose everyone around you, I didn’t press the issue. Although I didn’t know a whole lot about life on the pueblo, I knew it had to be a fairly close-knit community, a sort of huge extended family very unlike what I’d grown up with. His loss was probably even more painful than mine. If he wanted to open up about it later, after he’d had time to work through it in his own way, then I would be there to listen to him.

He was impressed by the compound, by all the lengths its builder had gone to so it would be self-sustaining. Even so, after one morning of walking around and inspecting everything, just a day or two after he moved in, he told me, “We should really be thinking about getting some livestock. This place isn’t big enough for cattle, but maybe some goats?”

“Goats?” I repeated, not bothering to keep the skepticism out of my voice. “You’re not suggesting we eat a goat, are you?”

His teeth flashed in the morning sun as he grinned at me. It was a bright, brisk day, the sky dappled with clouds, but the sunlight still fiercely bright. Despite the glaring sun, I could feel the bite in the wind, the unmistakable signs that winter was coming…and that it was going to be a lot colder than anything I’d experienced down in Albuquerque.

“The original barbacoa was made with goat,” he pointed out. I only raised an eyebrow, and he laughed and went on, “I was thinking more in terms of milk and cheese. The cheese you have now isn’t going to last forever.”

Well, that was true. We had plenty of other staples, but some of the perishables like the cheese and the butter were about on their last legs. “Do you know how to milk a goat?” I asked.

“No, but I’ve milked cows. The technique can’t be all that different.”

The way he said it, halfway arch, halfway teasing, just made me shake my head. “Okay, I’ll let you do it. Assuming we can even find any goats. They weren’t exactly thick on the ground, the last time I checked.”

“Maybe not, but there were probably people on the outskirts of town who kept livestock, and I know I saw animal pens up in Nambe as I came down into town.”

“Oh?” I asked. It was the first time he’d made any mention of his journey here. I hadn’t pressed, because I knew better than anyone else that there were some things people just didn’t want to talk about. Even so, I’d wondered about the long walk from Taos, and what he’d encountered on it.

“Yeah.” He wasn’t looking at me, was instead staring to the north and east, presumably in the direction from which he’d come. “Part of the reason it took me so long to get here was that I took the High Road down from Taos. I figured it might be safer to stay off the main roads.”

“And you walked that whole way?” I asked, staring at him with some incredulity. I’d heard of the High Road, but I’d never been on it. The scenic side trip was one that my family had discussed taking a few times, but those plans had never materialized. My father had always been a Point A to Point B kind of guy and was more intent on the destination than on the road that led to it.

Jace gave me a rueful smile. “Not at first. I had a motorcycle, and I’d ridden it before with my backpack, although I know that’s not really recommended. But I thought I could do it if I kept my speed down. Besides, a motorcycle is a lot easier to maneuver around abandoned vehicles.”

I couldn’t argue with that. But a motorcycle wouldn’t have worked for me. I had too much stuff to bring, and besides, there was Dutchie. Well, maybe a sidecar….

Turning away from me, Jason surveyed the horizon again. The wind picked up, pulling strands of heavy dark hair out of the piece of thin leather he had wrapped around his ponytail. His hair hung a few inches below his shoulders, and so far I hadn’t seen it in anything but that heavy tail down his back. That hadn’t stopped me from wondering what it would look like, sleek and loose over those broad shoulders.

Which was exactly the wrong thing to be thinking. After I’d lost it the day we’d met, and he’d held me and comforted me, we’d maintained a careful distance between us. I hadn’t noted even a flicker of interest from him. Maybe I wasn’t his type, or maybe it was the far more stark fact that he’d lost not just his family, but his people, his entire way of life. He seemed to be bouncing back fairly well, but it was probably a little self-absorbed of me to think he’d be interested in any sort of romantic entanglements so soon after suffering that kind of shock.

Besides, I wasn’t even sure whether I was interested in anything like that. Yes, Jace was extremely good-looking, and he had an easygoing way about him that I appreciated, after some of the high-strung guys I’d dated in the past, but our focus should be on survival first and foremost. Those other sorts of complications were pretty far down my list of priorities.

And anyway, break-ups were bad enough when you had a decent chance of never seeing the other person again. I didn’t exactly have that luxury at the moment.

Jace didn’t seem to have noticed my preoccupation, since he appeared to be absorbed in studying the far-off outlines of the Jemez mountain range. I noticed that he held something in his hand, a leather thong knotted through a hole in a smooth-polished black stone. His thumb moved over it, the motion reminding me of the worry beads sometimes used by Greek men.

Then he said, “But I picked up something in my tire in Placita. I had a patch kit in my backpack, but it wasn’t just a nail that had blown the tire, but a sharp rock. I lost two nights there, trying to fix it, scavenging around to see if I could find anything to replace it with, but that was a no-go.”

“No one there, either?” I asked, although I already knew what the answer would be.

“No. Not a soul. I did some foraging to replenish my supplies, which was what delayed me even more. Or maybe I just wasn’t looking forward to that long, long walk.”

It would have been that. Even with the part of the trip he’d shaved off by riding his motorcycle, he still had to have walked a good forty miles or so. Farther, actually, because it was still about fifteen miles from Nambe to the heart of Santa Fe, and then another five miles to this hidden fold of the hills where the compound was located.

“But you did it anyway.”

He nodded, then shoved the polished stone he’d been holding back into his pocket. “There was nothing left in Taos. I wandered there for about a day and a half — I was at the pueblo when the illness hit, and our healers couldn’t do anything to combat it. No one could. People were being told to stay at home, that the local medical center didn’t have the resources to treat that many victims at once. So…I stayed there and watched everyone die around me.”

“And waited to find out when it would be your turn,” I said quietly.

Finally, he shifted so his gaze fell upon me, rather than that far-off, jagged horizon. Those jet-black eyes, in their fringe of equally black lashes, were startled, but then he nodded in understanding. “Yes. That’s exactly what I did. But then after another day passed, and everyone was gone, leaving behind only dust, I realized I wouldn’t be lucky enough to join all my people in the afterlife. I was doomed to drift here, in a world I hadn’t chosen.”

I probably wouldn’t have phrased it that way, but he was right — that’s exactly what it felt like. Being cast adrift on dark waters, paddling desperately, although you had no idea why you’d been pushed out onto that black ocean in the first place. “So you left then?”

He nodded, and once again his attention moved back to the horizon, to the mountains that blocked his view of the place he had once called home. “Well, I went from the pueblo to my apartment. At least I’d had the motorcycle with me at the pueblo, so the trip didn’t take long. The whole way I didn’t see anyone, just