Breadcrumbs For The Nasties (Book 1): Megan (10 page)

I’m not sure how I thought to reach for the satchel I’d been carrying, or how I managed to find it among the mud and debris, but I did. With shaky hands I dug inside, felt for steel, and grabbed hold. I’d never shot a gun, never even held one, didn’t really know how they worked. None of that mattered. My brain had nothing to do with it. My body was reacting. Tiny hands gripped the handle, arms jutted forward. The
howler
was heading for
Blueeyes,
snarling, a swirling light dragging behind. I steadied my arms, inhaled, and held my breath. When I pulled the trigger, the recoil launched the weapon back, breaking my finger and bouncing off my head. I’m not sure I even hit the monster, or came close. It didn’t matter. It was enough to get the
howler’s
attention, enough to give
Blueeyes
an opening. The pain in my forehead spread out and my brain went loopy. My eyes began to close. I remember
Blueeyes.
I remember seeing him on the creature’s back atop a mountain of crackling flames, engulfed, chopping away, blood everywhere. I knew he’d be okay. I’d done what I needed to do, what he’d have wanted me to do. Nothing could hurt him. 

Nothing would ever hurt him.

The darkness felt good. It felt empty and new, a wonderful nothing. I embraced the sensation, allowed it to wash over me, to seep into my pores and melt away. I wish I could have stayed there. 

It would have been so much easier to stay there. 

The rest of the night was mostly a blur. I faded in and out. I remember the rain,
Blueeyes
standing above me, weightless in his arms. I saw the forest, the clouds and the moon. At some point it stopped raining. Everything turned cold. When I woke it was morning; at least, I think it was morning. Vague hints of sunlight warmed my face. 

Blueeyes
pressed something between my lips, “Gotta eat, kid.” I think I swallowed, not sure. The only thing I tasted was smoke. 

At some point he informed me my finger was broken. He wrapped it with a makeshift splint, told me not to move it. It was a while before the aftertaste of soot disappeared, but it did, mostly. My lungs cleared. The heaviness went away. I woke in the middle of the night and lifted my head from the floor. My weary eyes opened. Once they adjusted to the light, blurry became clear and the fog rolled away. At first glance, I recognized nothing. It was another old house, worn and weather damaged, an old house I hadn’t seen before. Instinctively, I looked for light, to a window on the opposite side of the room. There was
Blueeyes,
a familiar silhouette against the night sky. He was exactly where he’d been since I met him, since he saved me from the compound, exactly where he’d always be. Nothing could change that. At least that’s what I thought.

Children can be so stupid.

11.

The following week things were different.
Blueeyes
began to train me. He taught me about the
howlers
, their weaknesses and strengths, everything I
needed to know.
He said they usually traveled in small packs, kept to the woods, hunted at night. They were big and strong and fast, but maneuvered poorly. He told me that my size was actually an
advantage,
that I could go places they couldn’t, that I could hide. If things ever went badly, I needed to remember that. When we found the corpse of a
howler
on the side of the road, he sliced it open. It had been dead for some time, rotting. Its insides were basically mush, covered in maggots and insects I’d never seen.
Blueeyes
peeled away the skin, showed me its bones, gave them names. He focused mainly on the weak points in the chest. While only a blow to the brain was the only thing that would kill them, the
howlers
felt pain. They weren’t
gimps.
If you cut them, they felt it. When they felt it, they slowed. 

Injuries are opportunities.
That’s what he said. 

When he finished with the
howlers,
he gave me a lesson on the
gimps.
Like the
howlers
, they tended to travel in packs. Packs could be dealt with. Bloated packs of fifty or more were a horde. Hordes were dangerous, too many hands and bodies, too many mouths. Hordes were to be avoided.
Blueeyes
explained that most people turned into a
gimp
when they died. He didn’t know why, didn’t particularly care. There were millions of them. That’s all that mattered. Mostly, they kept to abandoned towns, shopping areas, wandering through vague remembrances of what they’d lost.
Blueeyes
hated the gimps.

He mentioned the
biters,
but only a little. 

When he was fished with the monsters, he taught me about fire, and shelter, and food, basic survival. I learned what was safe to eat, bugs mostly, and what wasn’t. Plants were off limits. 

We turned them into poison.
That’s what he told me.

Howler
meat was a
no-no
. It was dead flesh, infected, rotting. The
howlers
looked like animals, but they weren’t. They were people once, just like us. 

It’ll be the last thing you ever eat.
That’s how he put it. 

I never considered it anyway.

When we were low on scavenged food, we dug through the dirt for a meal. I’d never eaten a cockroach, didn’t much like the taste. They were crunchy, insides like slime. The first time I bit into one, it exploded in my mouth, coating my tongue in warm goo, spindly legs twitching all the way down. Worms weren’t much better. The spiders? Don’t get me started on the spiders.

When we weren’t walking,
Blueeyes
showed me how to use a weapon. He gave me a knife, taught me how to stab.
Stick and twist.
He made me repeat it:
stick and twist. 

“When you pull your knife out, you want to take as much with you as you can.”

He made a sheath from
howler
skin, attached it to my belt. I practiced as often as I could, throwing my arm forward, twisting my wrist and pulling back. It was heavy, felt awkward.
Blueeyes
said I’d get used to it. He said I
had
to and didn’t let me put it down. I needed to become
comfortable
with it. Using it had to be
second nature
, like an
extension of my arm.
Late one night, he presented me with a bow. It was crudely made, little more than bent wood and string. I loved it. He cut one arrow for me, dropped a pile of wood in my lap and told me to do the rest. I didn’t sleep that night. I carved. When I was done carving, I carved some more. The next morning I asked him if I could use it. He told me to
wait.
A few hours after, I asked again. He said
later.
From that point on, I bugged him about it every ten minutes, fiddling with the bow as we walked, pulling the string and watching it snap, looping it across my chest, playing with ways to carry it. 

“Can we shoot a few?”

“Not yet.”

“How about now?”

“Later.”

“Just one? Can I shoot just one?”

“Once we’re out of town.”

At some point he stopped responding altogether and left me talking to the breeze.

When I finally shot an arrow, it didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. It was harder than I thought. My broken finger wasn’t helping.
Blueeyes
had me aiming at trees. All I hit was air. When I ran through my arrows I collected them and tried again. 

After three rounds of failure I’d had enough. “I can’t do this…my finger.”

“Stop complaining. You have four more.”

I couldn’t complain with
Blueeyes.
He wouldn’t listen to it. With him there were no excuses, no second-guessing. They didn’t serve a purpose, not anymore. They were relics of a bygone world, pointless. You either did or you didn’t, passed or failed. If you failed, you died. The next day my shots were closer, the day after that closer still. The following day I actually hit a tree. Later that night I hit another.

When the sunlight disappeared, we’d talk. Actually, I did most of the talking.
Blueeyes
listened. It made me feel better; took my mind off my hunger pains and the wail of the
howlers
outside. Sometimes, I babbled about the weather, about how I was getting better with the bow. I talked about Mother and Father too, about the places we’d been, things we’d seen. I told
Blueeyes
how beautiful she was, my mother, about her eyes and her dimples. I told him how she would wipe my face clean, how she braided my hair one night and let me braid hers. I told him how she died, how Father buried her on the side of the road, the way her lips felt the last time she kissed my face. After that, I didn’t want to talk about them anymore. 

“Do you have a family?”

Blueeyes
never answered. He never talked about anything other than surviving or killing, or surviving long enough to kill. He just stared. He watched the sky and the road, always scanning, always alert. For him, everything was practical. Every sentence had a reason to be spoken. There was no small talk, idle chatter. I didn’t care. At some point it stopped mattering. He didn’t need to respond. I was going to ask whether he responded or not. 

“Are they gone, your family?”

His head lowered. He turned away from his window, staring at me from across the room. His mouth moved; hesitant lips parted, then closed. 

He looked away. “Go to sleep.”

I had him. Even at ten, I knew I had him. He wanted to say something, to talk about something other than monsters and weapons and where we’d find our next meal. If
Blueeyes
was capable of getting comfortable, he was getting comfortable. I saw it in his eyes, the wrinkles on his forehead, the way his chin touched his neck when his head dropped. I couldn’t stop.

I reworded the question, changed the topic slightly, “What did you do? You know, before the bombs?”

Nothing.

Sitting up, I leaned myself against the leg of a nearby table. “Father didn’t like talking about it either…sometimes, I guess. Once he told me he flew a lot, like a bird, meeting people in other places, staying in big buildings. Mother said he looked handsome in his
suit
and they kissed.” My voice lowered to a whisper: “I liked seeing them kiss.” 

Still nothing. 

“Were you ever in a
suit?
What’s a
suit?
”

He chuckled; at least, I think he chuckled. I’d never seen
Blueeyes
chuckle and I wasn’t sure what it looked like. The right side of his lip curled upward for a moment, immediately turned back. When he spoke, he shook his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

He sighed. I think he rolled his eyes. I was wearing him down. “Never needed one, I guess…never had the money.”

“What’s
money?
”

I didn’t know. I still don’t.

“It was just something, paper and coins…just nonsense. We used it to buy things we didn’t need for people who didn’t need them. Made some of us feel better about ourselves…inflated egos, lack of perspective.”

I didn’t know what he meant. I didn’t care. I liked the way he said it, liked listening to him talk, feeling like there was someone in the room with me. I didn’t want him to stop.

“Tell me something else.”

“Like what?”

“Anything. If you were never in a
suit,
what did you do?” 

He sighed again and leaned back in his chair and scratched his beard. Outside the
howlers
moaned. “I guess I didn’t do much…moved from job to job. I washed dishes for a while, little dump outside of town. Had a warehouse job, delivered packages around the holidays. For a year or so I was getting up at four in the morning to vacuum an electronics store, scrubbed the toilets…bloody tampons from the ladies room.”

“What’s a
tampon?
”

He chuckled again, more noticeably than the last. “Nothing you need to worry about.” His attention moved to the window, the darkening sky: yellow, orange and crimson. “Alex was disappointed in me, had to have been. Can’t say I blame her.”

A name. He said a name. “Who’s Alex?”

“My wife.” And just like that I wasn’t in the room anymore, at least not from his perspective. He was just talking to himself, to the sky, and to his conscience. He was talking to ghosts. His voice transformed to something soft, unfamiliar. “She smiled politely when I brought home those checks…a hundred bucks here, fifty there. She told me it didn’t matter. She never said anything, but I could tell. Three of us crammed into a shitty apartment, thrift store clothes. Wasn’t exactly what she’d imagined. I wasn’t a provider, didn’t take care of them the way I should have. Failure. I didn’t even fight when she finally had enough and took off. I just let them go.”

His face went soft. “I should have fought.”

“Who’s
them?
”

Soft turned hard. His eyes narrowed, back straightened. I’d asked one too many questions. “
Them
is no one.” He was done.

Before I could say anything else,
Blueeyes
stood and headed for a doorway on the opposite side of the room. “Enough for tonight. Go to sleep.” 

He didn’t return for twenty minutes.

Things were quiet the next day. He stopped answering my questions, mumbled responses with gravely breath. Late afternoon we happened across a pack of
gimps
outside an old shopping center. They were mindlessly roaming the parking lot, pawing at reflections in windows, rotted heads hanging loose. We watched them from a hill behind the twisted steel of a crumpled sign. It was nothing we hadn’t seen before. The creatures were everywhere, a constant threat. They were practically traveling companions. Until
Blueeyes
told me to
get my bow,
I wasn’t sure why we’d stopped to look. 

“What?”