Free Apocalyptica (Book 3): Ran by Joshua Guess Page A

house there? Right?”
    “Yep,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “And one of the kids, a girl who never could wrap her head around the rules, managed to get a message to an outsider. Which was what brought the FBI down on them.”
    Jem whistled. “Yeah, I remember that. Big news came a couple years later. She sued the church for their remaining assets…holy shit.”
    I smiled thinly. “I always hated my first name. Putting the name Randie on a girl’s birth certificate should constitute child abuse. So back then I went by my middle name, which is Jennifer.”
    Carla gaped. “That was you.”
    “That was me. Yeah.”
    I turned my wrist over, the scar old and faded but still a darker line of brown against my skin. “That’s where I cut my wrist so they’d send me to the hospital. I managed to get a few minutes with the doctor while he was doing my psych evaluation. Turns out they can make the parents leave for a suicide attempt. I told him why I did it, what that hellhole was doing to the kids, everything.”
    I stood up and clicked my tongue for Nikola. The big guy stopped being a mound of fur on the couch, unfurling into a dog, and padded over to me. “I’m going for a walk. Nik probably has to go to the bathroom.”
    The tears didn’t start until the door closed behind me.
     
     
     
    As a general rule, I’m not weepy. I don’t take things personally. I have enough self-confidence to assume that, when things go bad, I’m not somehow the root cause. I took out an abusive cult before I could legally vote. I’m proud of that.
    But the hard truth stuck with me through the years, which is why I never talked about it. I knew what I did was right, but that didn’t make it easy. My parents became twisted, evil people, but they had been sweet and loving before. I treasured those memories, both for what they were and for the reminder that even the best of people can warp with enough pressure and time. Under those conditions, some people emerge as diamonds, while others are simply crushed to fit whatever squeezes them.
    I like to think of myself as a diamond.
    Nik didn’t need to do his business, but he seemed to sense I needed him. We walked around the yard together, his heavy shoulder bumping my leg every time he paused to sniff a patch of grass. He didn’t run off or even move away, but kept close. I repaid him by scratching behind his ears and telling him what a good boy he was.
    I wondered if the prison my parents were in had been overrun during the outbreak. The news had been rife with stories of nursing homes, facilities for the mentally ill, group homes for developmentally challenged adults, and even jails being protected by good-hearted people who recognized how terribly the sudden and violent shift in the world would be for those people. Part of me hoped someone recognized the basic humanity of the prisoners where my parents were housed, and let them out.
    Another, much more cynical part of me suspected that my parents hadn’t changed. My mom especially. And that maybe literally rotting in a cell after years of figuratively doing so would be a net benefit for the world. At least death would keep them from hurting any more children.
    Family holds the greatest potential for being fucked up of any ties that bind in the world. The cognitive dissonance of loving and utterly despising my parents at the same time is proof of it.
    Jem was both right and wrong. Emotional trauma and harsh experience do have a way of hardening you, preparing you for the unexpected, but mostly in coping with the fallout. No amount of bad shit can stop you from feeling terrified or frightened when you’re in the middle of it. Hell, I had years of fight training under my belt so I could protect myself from ever being helpless again, and I still wanted to puke my heart out in that basement.
    It’s like weather and climate. Dealing with the things I’d lived through made it much harder to harm my overall well-being, but damned if