“And yet she took pity on me. She found me when I was trying desperately to turn a trick. I was willing to take on two of her crew for the price of one because I hadn’t eaten for days. But when I stripped naked they laughed, and one of them wanted to satisfy himself by beating me first. Guess I must have screamed louder than I thought, because she found me. She had this number two called Dimitri, a fat guy with glasses who liked boys. He had a temper almost as bad as hers. The two of them ripped the shit out of these guys and left them chilled. Only thing she moaned about was how the hell was she gonna find replacements at such short notice, and she argued with Dimitri that they should have just beaten them up a little. I swear, I thought they were gonna rip the shit out of each other next.
“Anyway, they noticed I was there eventually, and I guess she remembered why they’d gone in so hard in the first place. She asked me why I was turning tricks when I looked so bad, and I told her. That’s when she offered me the chance to join her convoy. With these guys chilled, she needed someone to act as quartermaster as to cook and clean.
“I figured she must be a little crazy—I was buying the farm— But it was a better offer than anything else I’d had for a long time, so I went with it. Once I was in her convoy, I saw a few people like my self… the lame and the useless, and I figured that it was her hobby. But at least I didn’t have to screw anyone for jack anymore and she was okay if you kept on the right side of her. She had a healer from the bayous by the name of Mama Celeste. She fussed over me for weeks on end, saying that I had something called tuberculosis and a bad thyroid problem. She had a store of medicine she kept in an old footlocker, and she doctored me as if I were her own child. I got better. It wasn’t rad sickness after all. I was going to live.
“Mama Celeste was my savior, and I got strong really quickly, although I never put much weight on again and I looked different from when you knew me,” she said to Dean. “My skin’s still shitty and breaks out sometimes, and I look older than I am, but inside I got a whole lot stronger…stronger than I was before and sure as hell a whole lot stronger than I look, which came in useful sometimes.
“I stayed with the convoy, and I started to do more. And we were a good little outfit. We became the tightest little outfit working this side of the coast, and we were such a stupe-looking bunch that no one figured we’d ever be the trouble we could be. Nyland became the trader that no one ever wanted to cross. Mebbe even more so than Trader,” she said to Ryan.
“Anyway, this went on for some time. I didn’t think much about my old life. Not because I’d forgotten you,” she said to Dean, “but because I figured that wherever you were, you were probably doing better there than you ever would with me, and that’s okay. I just put it out of my mind whenever it came back to me. But then it started to change.
“The people you fought back there were from a ville called Broadmead, and they’re not bad people. They were always fair to us when we traded with them, and we came back to them a few times. But when we were on our way back this time, I couldn’t stop thinking about my son.”
Sharona looked up into the night sky, finding it hard now to express what was inside.
“Dean was always on my mind, and I used to dream about him all the time. I hadn’t done that since the days when the sickness was really bad. I figured that mebbe it was welling up again…but after a few nights I knew it wasn’t about that. I knew that the most stupe, impossible thing was happening. That somehow, in a way I couldn’t explain even if I wanted to, I knew that Dean was coming near to me and that if I followed my instincts, then I would find him.”