Katherine In Trouble

Takes place in late January.

"I'm gonna run to the grocery for a few things," Sebastian called from the kitchen. "D'you need anything?"

Katherine pouted from her place at the window. She spent a lot of time these days just staring out into the same street, the street that was not her street, the street that represented the recent upheaval of her life and that of her family. She hated Oak Street.

"No," she called faintly, then, more loudly, "I'm fine."

"Alright," he replied, stopping by on his way out the front door to place a kiss on her cheek. "Be back in a little."

She watched him leave, watched him walk down the path to the sidewalk, his familiar form clad in his favourite black leather jacket and beloved jeans. He loved the casual, the comfortable. She was more at home with the formal, the serious. He turned the corner and moved off down the hated street, soon lost to view.

He was gone. The house was empty but for Katherine and her helpless anger. Her son was off at the music store again, 'hangin' with his mates', as he said. Her daughter had taken advantage of the slightly warmer-than-average day to take a trip to the local art museum with a friend she'd met since the family had moved here a few months ago.

Everyone had connections here in Springfield. Everyone except her. Katherine's heart belonged in Indianapolis, in that big, beautiful house she'd worked so hard for. All of her favourite things were in that house: the polished hardwood floors, the wide bay window Sebastian so liked to curl up in with his laptop or a novel on a Sunday afternoon, the ample backyard where her son had taught his American mates about Australian sport, the tree swing where her daughter and her schoolmates gossiped after school. The grandfather clock she'd been given after her 10th year with the company stood in the foyer, solemnly ticking time away, though it had been a long while since she had stopped to admire it.

She had only had time to pack a few essentials before she had been whisked away to Springfield, to this little safehouse. How much safer was she here than at home? Sebastian kept insisting that the government was watching the house, and that their agents would be sure to seize any of the family who dared to return. Father Cobra had promised to send someone to retrieve their personal items, but Katherine had heard nothing of when this was expected to happen.

"He's saved our lives, Katherine," Sebastian's voice reminded her in her head, "and helped free our son! He's a busy man; he'll make good on it.  And besides--"

"'Besides,'" she sneered, her voice a cruel mockery of her husband's, "'our family's lives are more important, aren't they?' Of course they are, you ninny, but I want my /things/!"

She turned from the window and stalked into the bedroom. Kneeling by the bed, she reached underneath and pulled out an overnight bag. She didn't need to check its contents; she'd done so a few nights ago, when she'd had twenty minutes' peace from the rest of the family. She slipped its strap over her shoulder and went to the phone.

Two hours later she stepped out of the cab, paid and tipped the driver, and stood looking at her house. Her house. The one she had paid for, hired contractors to redesign, paint, and decorate. Her home.

Katherine headed straight for the front door and let herself in with her key. She inhaled deeply as she stepped into her foyer, filling her nose with the welcome scents of home. The place had been uninhabited too long; it had along with the familiar smells of the wood floor and the somehow-still-lingering scent of incense the smell of disuse, of emptiness. She pressed her lips together and moved on through to the front room, shutting and locking the door behind her.

"There's nobody here, Sebastian," she argued with her absent husband. "No government goons waiting to throw a bag over my head, no oversized bear traps to step into. Just my home."

She climbed the stairs to the second floor and entered the master bedroom, making a beeline for her side of the dresser. She gathered up her ornate jewelry box and her expensive perfume bottles and tucked them into a suitcase she pulled from the closet. When she'd finished loading up her clothing, taking the time to carefully fold each piece, the suits and dresses laid out on the bed in travel bags, she nodded to herself in satisfaction and gathered up the items, carrying them downstairs. She made several trips, placing her treasured items near the foyer doorway before heading back upstairs again.

A view of Sebastian's writing corner, his battered little desk and chair, looking forlorn and shabby against the backdrop of the new, clean furniture of the rest of the house, brought a wistful smile to her face, and for a moment she pondered collecting his manuscripts for him. But the man was disorganised; even if she managed to find all of his writing paperwork there was no guarantee she could carry the lot. She looked into the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet and saw several fat bundles of paper bound with rubber bands, bits of turned edges protruding ever which way. "How does he work like this?" she wondered aloud, shutting the drawer with distaste. "I hope he has these backed up on disc somewhere, because I'd need a truck to haul all this away." She chuckled to herself. "That's what ought to be done with this," she muttered, "haul it away."

She returned to the bedroom, giving the place one last look. "Why do we have to live away from here, Sebstian? Why can't we stay in our home?" If there had been a cordon or guard of some kind set up around the house when she'd arrived, she'd have told her driver to drive on and been forced to agree with her husband. But that clearly wasn't the case. "I'm tempted to just stay right here," she thought, "call Sebastian and tell him to stop being foolish and come /home/."

She went to his side of the dresser and opened the small wooden box where he kept his meagre jewelry collection. A silver neck chain he'd fallen out of the habit of wearing, a few drab lapel pins, pair of cufflinks. Even Sebastian's jewelry was boring. A bit of folded paper caught her eye, and she tugged it out from under the silver chain and unfolded it.

A haphazard arrangement of scrawled words and scribbles meandered across the page. She squinted and stared at it, trying to make sense of it all.

Sebastian was a good man, a very good man, who meant well and wanted only the best for his family. She had known for years that he was utterly dedicated to her. There was nothing she could ask of him that he wouldn't give or do. He had said over the years that he would sell his very soul for her, and she took him at his word. There was nothing dishonest or convoluted about Sebastian. He was easy to read. She'd been reading him for years. The trouble was, he was always the same old story. He was strong and persistent, as evidenced by the road he'd had to travel to become a published author. He'd often complained of the hardships of dealing with agents, publishers, and the irrepressible Muse, though he always waited until she'd gotten her troubles off her chest. He put her first in everything.

Yet he had been, and still was, adamant about their family leaving their home. She didn't want to believe him, but his track record was spotless: he honestly believed there was danger here.

The government were obviously not to be trusted, Katherine thought, but then what government is completely honest? Politics and honesty don't mix. The mixup with the INS was obviously a terrible burden for her and the entire family, but did that merit moving on no notice to a tiny little nowhere town?

Sebastian had grown impatient, not wanting to wait for the wheels of justice to turn. Her lawyer had served her corporation steadily for years. He was an expert. He should have gotten the job done. And when he didn't after eighteen months, Sebastian took matters into his own hands and gave the problem to a pair of nobody pro bono lawyers in this little nowhere town. He'd never usurped her authority like that before. At first she'd been certain she could cow him into changing his stance, but to her surprise he didn't back down. He insisted he was right!

He had been right, to a point, about Scott. Their son, held on a charge of misfiled paperwork, had been transferred to a medical facility in Georgia. There was no denying that. And Sebastian, apparently with the help of the pro bono lawyers and this hippie Cobra organisation, stormed in and took Scott away from the government people who'd been holding him. At gunpoint. Her husband, the kind, quiet, mild-mannered science fiction author, stomped into a medical facility with an assault rifle in his hands and forcibly seized their son. The very idea was ludicrous, but it had happened. Well, either that or all parties involved were under the influence of some very unique and interesting drugs, and the government had spontaneously decided to return their son to them. Somehow the idea of her husband going military was more believable than the government returning anything it had seized.

Her eyes focused on the paper again. It looked as if he had been attempting to write something, she decided. A few words popped out at her: endless, complete, soul. He had been writing a poem. Some kind of sappy love poem for her. Her name was scrawled near the bottom of the page.

She folded the paper back up and replaced it under the chain. He wouldn't miss his jewelry, she decided, or his little poetry attempt. He'd used to write poetry for her when they first dated, when they were newly married. But all these years down the road, it was foolish. Useless. Poetry doesn't solve the world's problems, Sebastian, she thought.

She went back downstairs to phone for a cab to take her back to Springfield. True, she could stay here, go back to work at the corporation, but... she shook her head. "Sebastian would lose his mind," she decided.

An unfamiliar sound stopped her midway down the staircase. A snap, a clack. She'd lived here long enough to know the sounds of the house, and this was not one of them. Perhaps one of the garment bags had slid down and fallen over.

But the sound came again, from the back of the house, from the porch door on the other side of the dining room. Glancing toward the foyer, Katherine hurried down the stairs and plucked up the phone. She dialed the local cab company's number automatically, without thinking, having done it so many times before, and had the phone to her ear a moment before she realised she hadn't heard the tones as she'd pressed the buttons. There was no sound coming over the line at all. She hung it up and tried dialling again, but she didn't even hear a dial tone this time.

Sebastian's warning came to her in a flash, and she forced down a pang of rising panic. "Don't be ridiculous," she chided him in her mind, "that kind of thing only happens in the movies. No one's cut the phone line and no one's going to --"

The back door slammed open with a crash - the force of its opening had probably shattered the glass, Katherine reasoned, alarmed that she was reasoning about such an insignificant detail. The sound of booted feet advanced toward her. She heard the change in pitch of their footfalls as they crossed from the tiled mudroom into the parquet dining room.

She ran toward the foyer, bending automatically to snatch up her things. She'd come all this way to retrieve her belongings. She wasn't going to leave them behind.

The front door threw itself open and three uniformed men came charging toward her. They wore black uniforms with a government logo on the breast. They carried assault rifles.

"Don't move!" one shouted, his rifle trained on her.

Without conscious thought, Katherine grabbed up a letter opener that had slid out of her suitcase and stabbed at the soldier's face. The man cried out, dropping his rifle as he clutched his hands to his bleeding face. The other soldiers, startled by her reaction, stood by for a moment, long enough for her to push past them and out into the front yard, her precious favourites forgotten.

Katherine saw the military vehicle parked in front of her house as she ran across the yard. A man in the front seat of the truck followed her with his gaze, then reached down for something.

She slowed down only long enough to kick off her heels, leaving them abandoned in the grass, then took off down the pavement. She heard the shouts of the men, heard the static of their radios. Her blood froze at the sound of what was surely the bolt of an assault rifle being pulled back. But her legs kept on pumping. Katherine ran for her life.

Cutting through yards, climbing over fences, Katherine tried to put distance and direction between herself and the pursuing soldiers. Her lungs bursting, her legs rubber, she finally ran into the loading dock of the local grocery chain and ducked down behind an eight-foot-high stack of shrink-wrapped palleted goods.

She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out her cellphone, dialling her husband's phone without thinking about it. She tried to breathe more quietly as she waited an eternity for him to answer, but her aching lungs would not keep silent, protesting in wheezes about her treatment of them.

"Katherine?" Sebastian's worried voice came over the line. She had never been so relieved to hear him in her life.

"Oh my God, Sebastian, you were right," she half-sobbed into the phone, crouching down a little lower behind the pallet stack.

"What? Katherine, where are you?"

"I went -- I went home."

"WHAT?!"

"They're after me," she panted, "the men with guns! Soldiers ..." She trailed off.

There was a brief pause; Katherine could envision her husband closing his eyes and taking a deep breath to steady himself before replying. "You've got to get out of Indy," he said, his voice wavering only a little. "Find a bus stop, come back here to Springfield. My God, Katherine, if they catch you--"

"I'm at Wheedly's," she interrupted, "there's a stop nearby." She paused to look around, listen for the booted feet. The only sounds nearby were the electric motors of forklifts, the clacking and banging of equipment in the storage area. "I don't hear them now... maybe they went away."

"They won't just go away, Katherine. I can't help you." His voice broke on the word 'help'; he cleared his throat. "You have to get clear of there. I'll call Father Cobra and ask him to send someone--"

"There's no time, Sebastian. I'll get to the stop," she assured him. "I have some cash; I'll make it."

"Please, /please/ be careful, love." He sounded weak and terrified. He'd sounded that way often over the last several months, when they'd spoken about their son Scott's dilemma. Then it had repulsed her. Now...

"I will, Bast, I promise," she replied. She paused. She hadn't used that nickname in a very long time. She hadn't been so close to her husband in a very long time. "I'm so sorry," she whispered. "You were right."

"I love you, Kat."

"Love you. See you soon." She forced herself to hang up the phone. His voice in her ear was comforting, and her immediate situation was frightening, but she couldn't solve her troubles by hiding from them.

She stood up slowly, carefully looking around. A man in grimy overalls spied her and came over, a perplexed expression on his face.

"Lady, you can't be in here," he said in a deep, gruff voice.

"I'm sorry," she said, looking down at her rumpled clothes and her stocking feet. "I was ... I was being followed by someone," she admitted, hating herself for playing the 'damsel in distress' card. "I just wanted to wait for them to go away. I need to get to the bus stop."

The man frowned, glanced out the loading bay doors. "You can go through here, go out through the store," he replied, pointing.

"Oh, thank you," Katherine said, doing her utmost to smile at him, though in her view there was little worth smiling about.