Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) Read Online Free Page A

him, but taking the three of them away from here to somewhere safe from what was coming down.
    Afterward, embraced, their heartbeats slowing, it seemed they had indeed traveled and passed a long and happy time somewhere else. But here came the real world gathering around them once more, the dangerous world they’d lived in since the day before yesterday.
    He put his hand on her belly. “Jool. Would you please just go? Get the baby, get Momma and Auntie far away and safe? You know me—no way I won’t survive and bring you all back here!”
    “Honey,” she said, “you wouldn’t go, if it was just you. I wouldn’t go, if it was just me. And you and me are who this baby’s gotta live with. Down in the Zoo I dreamt all my life of a place like this. Nothing’s gonna chase me out of it.”
    “What about Auntie and Momma? They’re spry but they’re not young.”
    She smiled. “We can ask ’em to go—do you see ’em doin it?”
    They lay stroking each other, the sky’s silver light like warm drapery on them. Their love began growing again as they fondled and snuggled, involved in that sweet studious wrestling, trying to get closer, and closer still, shedding tears as they came.
    After, they dozed till the sun was rising, and had just dressed and started coffee when Momma and Auntie’s three-wheeler growled down the slope, coming down from The Garden Spot, their “flower ranch” two hills over, with Auntie Drew at the wheel.
    On their runs down to L.A. to bring their household possessions up here to Sunrise, Momma Grace had proved to be God’s own combat-driver when running the Five through the bandit nests, but lately she’d been putting Curtis’s auntie at the wheel to train her. Auntie’s fingers, crooked from years of keyboarding in the ’Rise, were straighter already with her months of gardening, and she loved driving, but that hadn’t made her very good at it yet. Fearless and enthusiastic, yes—and this could make her dangerous if you were in, or near, her path.
    When the coffee was ready they brought it out to the ladies, who were just coming up the steps. They all talked planting and fertilizers, gulping the brew.
    When Jool and Curtis had at last made their pitch, Auntie squawked, “Run us down to Redding? Curtis, you must be trippin! We’re stayin right here, an we mean to cap some studio ass, child.” Her diction had gone downhill up here in Sunrise, even as her fingers and her spine had grown straighter. Her hair was a weedy white ’fro now, like a dandelion puffball. Momma Grace, for her part, must’ve lost sixty pounds—no sylph yet, but a sturdy, tight country momma.
    “Well then,” Jool said, “lemme get you some things we’ve got for you.”
    She brought out the weighty duffel she and Curtis had readied, and took from it first two old shirts. Foam blocks cut from an old cushion were glued inside their right shoulders. “Put these on an button ’em up, dears. Get the foam snug on the front of your shoulders.… Good. Now let’s go on up to that draw there. We’ve got us some practicing to do.”
    Auntie asked, “Practicing what?” But her smile at the satchel said she already knew. As they marched ahead up through the grass it made Curtis sad to watch them. You could see them just loving where they were so much, the grassy hillside, the sun, and the sky.
    A fold in the hillside was their destination. There was a bit of level ground in this nook and some shrubs and small trees half filled it. One big old log, a long-fallen pine, lay at a tilt in the brush, bright green moss wrapping half its bark.
    “We should stand about here,” Curtis told them. “And we’ll do our practicing on that trunk there.”
    “Slip these on round your necks,” Jool said, handing them earmuffs. “You’ll cover your ears when you’re actually firing.”
    Curtis took out the two sawed-off pump-actions. “Take hold of ’em like this … right. Now, snug the stocks against the padding on your