Sighing, Angela turned the radio off, switched it to the TV setting. She had hoped to make at least 50 miles a day at first, putting her on base in a month, but after a four hour trip to get to the local store, which had already been cleaned out, she began to understand that making even twenty a day would be hard. It now came to roughly three months on the road, and her mother's heart cried out again. So long and so many of the odds were against her!
"Gets better when you call the boy's real daddy," the Witch seduced, sending her memories of cool, Harrison nights and the softest, blackest hair she'd ever felt, until their son was born. Angela closed her eyes as pain filled her heart as if it had happened yesterday. She had never forgotten what it felt like to belong to Marc Brady.
"Call him. He's restless, adrift. He will come," the Demon insisted, and the woman huddling in the nicely warming storage room gave the thought serious consideration this time, instead of pushing it away like the fear in her mind wanted. Marc was also a Marine, had been for a long time, and she had no doubt he could make the trip. More importantly, he owed her.
"You can't!" her fear screamed. "Kenny will kill you both!"
She stretched carefully, wincing at a lance of pain. He'd probably try. Kenny would think they had been having an affair all along, even though she hadn't seen Marc in almost fifteen years. There was a spark, a connection between them that was undeniable, and her man would see it right away. Not that it mattered. She'd made her choice, and she would face the consequences when the time came. Nothing would keep her from her son, not after all that she had lost, and maybe, just maybe, her man could be surprised into making a mistake by not only Brady's presence, but by how much she had changed. The Demon inside was awake. She was a slave no more, and Kenny would find out very quickly that she wouldn't go back to her old life of bondage.
First, she had to have time to heal, was scared that even if she managed to leave Ohio without Warren and the others stopping her, she wouldn't be able to handle the trip west. If just surviving in one place was so hard, how bad would a three-month journey across this broken land be? She needed help, and there was no one else she could call. Marc had to come.