Breadcrumbs For The Nasties (Book 1): Megan (2 page)

Father extended his finger through the browning bush we crouched behind, pointing to a grayish shed just inside the outer wall. “There. Look.”

He was right. I didn’t know how I’d missed it. Just beyond the rusted steel was a man in a dark jacket wearing a gasmask, a rifle tucked to his side. There was another man beside him and there seemed to be movement further back. These were the first
normals
we’d seen in months, and the first in years that didn’t look destitute, or sick, or lost, or all of the above. Suddenly my heart was pounding. My fingers went to my mouth and my teeth to my nails.

“Is this it?”

Father didn’t answer. He was scanning the compound, taking his time, trying to figure out exactly what he was seeing and what it meant. He stood for a moment, looking past the trees and further down the road, attempting to get a better feel for the layout of the structure. When I pulled at the fabric of his jacket, he pushed my hand away. When I tried to stand, he palmed the top of my head and shoved me to the dirt. After a few minutes of quiet examination, he dropped to one knee, placed his hands on my shoulders and turned me in his direction.

His eyes narrowed. “I need you to do exactly as I say, Megan. Do you understand?”

His hand moved from my shoulder, fingers instead tapping lightly against the knife strapped to his thigh. “I need to make sure this is the place we were looking for.” His hand returned to my shoulders for an instant before sliding up my neck and gently cupping my cheek. “And I need you to stay here while I do it.”

My face scrunched. Suddenly my nose tickled, and the tickle shot into my eyes. My cheeks turned warm. My mouth opened, and my head shook. Father moved his other hand to my face and held it in place. “Don’t shake your head at me. This isn’t a request, young lady. You’re going to do exactly as I say. Do you understand me?”

When my eyes began to water, he smeared it away with his thumbs.

“No matter what happens, I need you to stay right here. If I’m not back before the sun begins to set, I want you to make your way back to those houses we ran across an hour ago. Do you remember those houses?”

I didn’t move.

“You go to the houses, you climb into a closet, and you stay there until I come get you. Do you understand?”

I couldn’t answer. There was something in my throat, something massive, something so oversized it was keeping the words at bay. I didn’t want him to leave. Why couldn’t I go with him? The steel structure loomed over his shoulder, a great gray shadow of unknown possibilities. Why couldn’t I go?

Father tightened his grip on my face, his thumbs constantly working to wipe the tears into my freezing cheeks. “You have to stop crying. I know it’s hard, but you have to stop crying. You can’t cry. Not in this place. Not ever. Crying is not allowed.”

Instead of swallowing, I held my breath and thought of my mother, focusing my gaze on the deep-set wrinkles on father’s forehead when looking into his eyes became impossible. There was a single gray hair mixed into one of his eyebrows. I hadn’t noticed it until that very moment. 

“Look at me, Megan.” 

I bit my quivering lip. 

“If I’m not back by tomorrow night, you know what to do. You’ve done it enough times. You’ve done it before, and you can do it again. You’re smart, and you’re strong. You’re stronger than you think.” 

He looked to the dirt, struggling to find the words. When he turned back, his expression had changed. The corner of his lip curled upward ever so slightly. “You look just like your mother.”

Father pulled me to him, pressed his lips against my forehead as he had so many times before and held them there. I closed my eyes. I remember closing my eyes. I remember that I never wanted to open them again.

I’ll never forget that moment, the wonderful sting. 

When Father was done, he stood, pulled the knife from his side and handed it to me. He removed his backpack and dropped it to the dirt. “If I don’t come back, you take all of this with you and head in another direction. Don’t come after me and don’t ever come this way again.” 

I almost followed him. It took everything I had not to follow him. I should have followed him.

I never saw him again.

2.

I waited as long as I could, watching the compound, anticipating his return, counting shadows and seconds. When I got hungry, I ate. When I was done eating I waited some more. For hours I peeked through the twisted patch of bushes, careful to remain hidden while never taking my eyes from the compound. I waited as long as I could. A very real part of me believed I could somehow
will
him to return with the power of thought. It didn’t work. When the sun began to set, I dropped father’s backpack and knife into our wagon and headed for the abandoned houses as instructed. Once there, I found a closet and climbed inside.

It was especially cold that night. My bones shivered, toes went numb. For the first hour I cried into my shirt, biting down on the fabric to keep from making too much noise.  The
howlers
were loud. They sounded close as if they were right outside, drooling, and huffing, and angry. At one point, there was a ruckus from another room; something rattled and broke. Nails dug into rotted wood, grinding it to splinters. Glass shattered. I swear I could hear one of them breathing, sniffing the air, trying desperately to latch onto the barely there scent of human flesh—my human flesh. 

Or maybe I was imagining it.

Whatever the case, they didn’t find me. 

A few hours later it began to rain. The ceiling above me was hardly a ceiling at all. The roof of my hiding place had disappeared years ago. What remained was little more than jagged beams of broken wood and loose tiles. The rain seeped through the cracks with ease, dripping onto my head at a steady pace. In no time at all, I was sitting in at least an inch of water. I told myself it was only a matter of time before father found me; I whispered it into the damp fabric clinging to my chest. I imagined he would find me in the morning, kiss me on my forehead and tell me that the compound was
Homestead.
We’d share some of the food he’d brought back with him, practically a banquet. He’d tell me that we had finally found what we’d spent so many years searching for. I’d convinced myself this was exactly what would happen, and for some silly reason I actually believed it.

By morning I was soaked and freezing, my hair crunchy with ice. Father wasn’t there. He hadn’t found me, or kissed my forehead, or told me that we were done searching. None of that happened. It was still raining and I was still alone. 

Most of the day was spent staring through the cracks of a boarded window facing the road. I saw nothing. The hours rolled on. The sun moved from one side of the sky to the other and dropped below the horizon. The moment it was gone I returned to my closet. 

For three days I waited, hopeless, moving from the closet to the window and back to the closet again. It was longer than my father instructed and I didn’t care. I couldn’t just leave him. I had no idea where I would go. I wasn’t as strong as Father believed or Mother had hoped. I wasn’t very strong at all. At some point during my third night, cramped and shivering in the tiny closet, I stopped crying. I’m not sure why. The tears just dried up and went away. There weren’t any left. My body shut down. I was sore and tired, lips cracked and throat raw. Swallowing was agony and the hunger pangs worse. Somehow, I managed to sleep. A quiet nothing settled in, gentle and weightless.
So quiet.
Father and Mother visited me in my dreams. Mother braided my hair into a tight ponytail to keep it off my neck. She zipped my jacket and wiped a smudge from my face. She gave me an extra helping of food and smiled so earnestly as I gobbled it up, despite her hunger. She kissed me on the cheek, her nose near my ear, warming breath against my face. When she sighed, she tilted her head slightly to the left. I giggled at her dimples. Father appeared over her shoulder, gazing down at me with a grin, the sun peeking through the clouds just over his head. It was all so beautiful. The clouds parted. I’d never seen the sun without the clouds. It was amazing. 

Father brushed the hair from his eyes. “Look at this shit.”

Mother’s expression turned to stone. “Someone’s here.” She squeezed my shoulders, mouth open. Her teeth turned black, crumbling like ash and sliding down her throat.  “Over there.”

Father ripped me from her arms and lifted me into the air. He was terrified. He was disappointed. His grip was like iron and his fingers like
howler
teeth, ripping into my flesh. Behind him the sun began to crumple. It folded inward, cracked like glass, crinkled like burning paper. Father shook his head, mouthing something I couldn’t hear. Suddenly he was moving backward. When I reached for him, I gripped only air. His face turned to dirt, caught a distant breeze and began to scatter. A billion points of sand disappeared into the darkness, swallowing him. His eyes had become the absence of everything. His nose exploded into barely-there shimmers of something unworldly. Before his mouth did the same, the sandy outline his lips had become mouthed a single word: “Run.”

“Holy shit, it’s a kid.” Dirty hands ripped me from the safety of my closet. A crooked grin of yellow teeth greeted me when I opened my eyes. “It’s a goddamn kid!”

He was tall and filthy, face coated in grime, hair wild and stiff.  He lifted me into the air. I was weightless. I was helpless. I kicked my feet defiantly. Another set of hands snagged my legs and pulled them tight. Suddenly I was horizontal, squirming and clawing at anything within reach. When I tried to scream a hand covered my mouth. 

Another voice from somewhere behind, gnarly like cracked glass: “Feisty one!”  

Coarse fingers gripped my ankles. “Hold her legs! Get a hold on her goddamn legs!”

“Won’t stop wiggling!”

“Hold her still, asshole!”

No matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t move. There were too many of them. The group of men surrounded me, laughing, a congealed lump of awful hands and arms foiling every attempt at escape. Out of sheer desperation, I bit one of the fingers covering my mouth. When he screamed, I smiled. I tasted blood. My face hit the floor, and the air left my lungs. 

Everything went black.

When I woke, my legs were bound, arms tied behind my back, the ground bouncing beneath me. We were moving, driving. The interior of my lips tasted like dirt and metal, the aftertaste of blood. Tattered fabric soaked with the accumulated stains of
post war
hell was stuffed in my mouth and knotted at the rear of my head. Duffel bags crammed with scavenged goods boxed me like bookends. Just above me, a pair of legs. I followed them upward to a scruffy dark-haired man nursing a blood-soaked hand. 

He noticed I was awake and smiled a terrifying smile. When he spoke, he growled. “How’ya doin’, precious?”

When I cried, he chuckled.

It wasn’t too long after that I recognized the familiar stone of the compound walls through the soot-coated window to my left. The walls seemed even larger up close, dark and dangerous, the jaws of some great beast. I thought of Father. They were taking me to Father. When the car came to a stop, a door behind me opened. Hands grabbed my ankles, pulled me into the light. A crowd had gathered, one grinning, twisted face after another, lined up like soldiers. A dark-skinned man with a scar running from the top of his head to the hem of his shirt tossed me over his shoulder. Gritty hands with filthy nails pawed at my body. The sunken face of a skeleton leaned in close and wiped the tears from my face, breathily whispering the world
pretty
while licking non-existent lips. 

“What do you want me to do with her?”
Scarface
was talking to someone I couldn’t see. When I tried to wiggle free, someone smacked me on the back of the head. Even after I’d stopped, they smacked me again. The group laughed. 

“Dump her in the east wing. I’ll let Travis know about her.”

A few from the crowd followed along as
Scarface
carried me through the interior of the compound, rotted teeth clattering as they cackled. I opened my eyes in intervals, catching only the briefest glances of my surroundings, unable to get my bearings. There were small fires everywhere, pieces of unspecified meat roasting on spigots just above the flames. We passed a pile of bones, only half of which I recognized. A row of fifteen men crouched against a wall in the distance, thin and shivering, steel collars around their necks with chains attaching them. As we passed, a man at the rear of the chain lifted his head long enough to stare at me, eyes the color of rain, silver-blue and unblinking. He didn’t look away. His eyes narrowed. His brow furrowed. Even as we moved from his line of sight, disappearing behind a row of tents, he never looked away. A moment later we approached a row of unassuming, poorly-made buildings, patched with pieces of scavenged steel. The inhuman screams from inside sent a shiver along my spine and into my legs. I’d heard similar screams before,
howlers,
lots of
howlers
. Whoever these people were, they were keeping
howlers
as pets. 

We stopped at a small shed near the center of the compound.
Scarface
unlocked the door and tossed me inside. I landed on my knees, and then my head. The head hurt more. I rolled to my side, pulled my legs close to my chest, and buried my face in them. I couldn’t stop crying. I wanted to stop crying. I needed to stop crying. Yet I couldn’t stop crying.

Scarface
kicked a cloud of sand in my direction. I inhaled it through my nose, into my lungs. My cried turned to coughs. 

“Shut up.” 

The door slammed shut. The darkness folded in. Three locks clicked. I remember every one of them, so very simple and so very terrifying. They were the worst sounds I’d ever heard, cold and finite, the echoes of my mistakes. Though I tried my best to remove the idea from my head, I couldn’t help but wonder if my father had heard them as well.