300 Miles to Galveston Read Free

quickly put it away. She’d changed into shorts and a t-shirt, and as she stood up from where she lay on the floor, he realized how strong her legs had gotten.
    “What is it, Thursday?”
    She nodded.
    “Seiyunchin.”
    She nodded again, and they walked to the back yard together, closing the patio gate so the dog wouldn’t bother them.
    Seiyunchin was an Okinawan karate kata, a solo training form against an imaginary enemy, with lots of squats and slow, muscular hand movements, interrupted by bursts of footwork and hip rotation. They did the kata a few times together, and he watched her more carefully than usual in his peripheral vision. Stepping away, he gestured that he wanted to watch her perform it while facing him, as a teacher evaluating a student.
    Something had changed in her eyes as she performed Seiyunchin. At the slow movements, and at the pauses, she wasn’t thinking of the next move, or where her feet were, or how to hold her hands. She wasn’t doing some odd dance routine. She was killing the imaginary enemy.
    That’s when he knew that she had killed those boys, that she wasn’t just making up stories to sound tough.
    When her kata performance was over, she bowed to him, and he bowed to her, and he held his bow a little longer than usual.
    She turned to go back into the house, and when she realized he wasn’t following, asked if there were any more chores to do. Kurt shook his head, and decided to play with the dog for a while.
     
    * * *
     
    Women’s inability to have children added a new fear to the Dallas suburbs. A young child would be discovering flowers, oh look at those, oh look at these, wandering off into the park, and then the mother looked back to where she expected her to be and poof she was gone.
    Usually it was a woman in the same neighborhood, because people kept to themselves. An outsider would have been too obvious.
    Sophie was small for a nine year old, shy, and used to her older sister, her father, and other people telling her what to do. When 33 year-old Jessica Wallace took Sophie’s hand and walked off with her, she just went along.
    A week later she escaped, and it was all she could do to keep her father from walking the two blocks to her house, knocking on the door, and blasting Jessica with a shotgun when she answered the door.
    They went to Brother Travis, who reluctantly held the first church trial in their neighborhood clan.
    Jessica cried and apologized. Losing her pregnancy during the Leonids had broken her. She asked Kurt for forgiveness.
    Kurt had calmed down by then. He forgave her, but did not trust her.
    Brother Travis and the 10 elders and deacons of the church debated in private, and concluded that she was to be banished. It was known that she had a sister in Flower Mound, a farm community 25 miles away that had grown into an operations center for a dozen major companies when DFW airport was built just south of it. Instead of binding her limbs, putting her on a horse, and scaring it off, which is what most folks in that church thought of when they heard the ancient word “banishment,” Brother Travis and two other members helped her pack, and walked her there personally.
    Though that was three years ago, Kurt had been terrified that something would happen again to Sophie. Now, as easily as Jessica Wallace had walked off with tiny, nine year old Sophie, his fears started walking away. She was not a frail child anymore. She was capable of facing enemies, both imaginary and real.
    As Kurt knew well, the ones in your head were the most persistent.
     
    * * *
     
    Sophie cranked the radio several times, then set it to shortwave. WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado, was still broadcasting at 20 MHz, and she found the clicks that marked the seconds soothing. At the hour and half-hour, a synthesized but pleasant voice said, “National Institute of Standards and Technology time. This is Radio Station WWV, Fort Collins, Colorado, broadcasting on internationally allocated