Dead & Gone (3 page)

Too many.

There was one shape that walked in front of the others, and it was his weapon that most often caught the sunlight. Even though she was too far away to see him clearly, she thought she knew who this was. Brother Andrew. One of the most senior of the reapers. A bull of a man who carried a two-handed scythe.

“No,” she murmured. “Go away.”

In time, they did. But they were heading in the same direction she was, northwest, their course paralleling the road. They were miles away, though, following a secondary road. Perhaps they thought she was on that road, that she would take the road less traveled in hopes of eluding pursuit.

The girl crouched in the shadows until Brother Andrew’s party was gone, reduced first to tiny dots and then entirely lost to distance and heat shimmer.

Then she stood and stretched her muscles, trying to ignore the ache in her belly. The girl took a steadying breath and began to walk. She cast a single look over her shoulder, and what she saw made her pause within a few steps.

A turkey buzzard sat on the jet’s broken wing. Its dark wings were threadbare and in disarray, its wattled red throat was thin, and its eyes looked totally dead. For a horrible moment the girl thought that the vulture
was
dead, that it had somehow caught the plague that had cut like a reaper’s scythe through all of humanity. But then it made a small, plaintive caw.

It wasn’t dead. It was starving.

Like her.

The thought absolutely chilled her and nearly took the heart out of her. If something like this carrion bird—a creature
that would eat anything it found—was starving out here, then what hope was there for her?

She turned away from the sight of it.

“No,” she said one more time. She tried to say it with anger, with determination, with purpose.

It sounded like a cry.

The girl hurried away, pushed by fear, pulled by hunger.

That night she slept in the back bay of a wrecked Ford Explorer. She had to pull bones out of the front seats. Driver and passenger had bullet holes in their skulls. Someone who knew his business had sent them into the darkness. As she pulled them onto the road—a man in a suit, a woman in the sun-faded rags of a flower-patterned dress—the girl said a little prayer for them. She hoped they had been good people. She hoped they hadn’t suffered much.

Before she climbed into the car to sleep, she walked out among the rough desert brush to see about setting some simple snares. If she did it right, and if she had any luck, maybe she could catch a chipmunk, a gecko, an antelope squirrel, or even a weasel.

She’d eaten worse.

Recently.

The memory of the lizard and the turtle made her stomach churn.

Stop your grousing. . . . You’ll eat what you catch, or you’ll starve and die.

She walked around the area for a while until she found a small game run that showed use by several species. The prints were not as distinct as they would have been on a
game trail, but she was experienced enough to determine that the prints were recent. She followed the run until it intersected another, equally as small. The runs led toward the open desert, and in the faded twilight she could see a thick stand of Joshua trees. There must be water down there. Not a lot, or there would be heavier game sign, but enough for these runs to become well traveled by small animals.

The girl backtracked a hundred feet and washed her hands with sand to remove any trace of her skin oils. Only then did she pick up the materials she would use to make the traps. Humans were predators, and their scents scared off most animals.

She dug a pit and carried the fresh dirt out into the desert. Fresh dirt—or any sign of disturbance—warned prey away. When she gathered sticks, she used only those that had fallen and dried out. Freshly cut sticks bled sap, and that carried a smell that warned prey of a disturbance. The girl made sure that she did nothing that would alarm the animals.

One good way to remove human scent was to coat the trap with mud from an area with plenty of rotting vegetation, but in the desert, in the failing light, she did not have the time to find it. She used the last of the light to rig a whip snare that would lash out and kill her prey. It would only work on something small, but it was all she could manage.

She built three traps before the light and her strength failed.

Then she erased all signs of her presence, hoping that she did it so well that in the morning there would be something to eat.

She had a few slivers of hope left. Enough for tonight.

Then she rigged a few pieces of plastic that she carried with her, stretching them off the ground on sticks, setting them where the shade would be in the morning. With luck, condensation would give her at least a mouthful of dew.

As the sun set, the desert turned from a furnace to a freezer. Sand does not hold heat for long, and soon the girl was shivering. Last week she had owned a bedroll and a blanket, but they had become infested with fire ants, and while she was trying to smoke the pests out of the cloth, a sudden wind sent sparks flying into the material. She had been seventy yards away, washing her other clothes in a thin steam. By the time she ran back and stamped out the fire, her bedding was ruined.

Now she stood by the open door of the car looking at the skeletons wearing ancient clothes. The material was thin and weathered and would offer only a little warmth. It was also wrapped around the bones of dead people.

The girl took the clothes.

It was the kind of night her father used to call a “three-dog night.” The kind where everyone, human and animal, crowded together for warmth. She thought about the dog she’d had years ago.
Willyhog.
He had been caught in a blind alley by four of the gray people. Dad had tried to rescue him, but he was never a fighter, and the girl had been too young to do much good. Dad dragged her away while Willyhog’s screams tore holes in her soul.

She wished that he were still alive, still with her. The two of them would be something. Willyhog could find the shadow of food on a dark night, and no mistake. He had been a bluetick coonhound, and she’d loved him more than anything.

She crawled into the car and closed the door, wincing at the banshee squeak of the old hinges, and huddled in the back. She pulled the dusty old clothes over herself and tried not to notice the chattering of her teeth.

The sun was gone now, and soon the sky was littered with billions of stars. So cold and so distant. But so pretty.

For all that “pretty” mattered to her.

It used to mean something. It used to mean a lot. Now she found it hard to even remember what it was about it that had mattered. She would give all the stars in the sky, and every golden dawn, and all the birds that ever sang a pretty song for a thick steak and a plate of vegetables.

She wondered if she would kill for that.

It troubled her that with each day it was getting harder and harder to decide that she would not.

As starlight painted the landscape in blue-white light, the girl prayed to whoever was listening that tomorrow there would be food.

She did not expect her prayers to be answered. Not because of any lack of faith—the girl did believe that there was something up there or out there or somewhere—but she no longer knew what that was. Her mother and the others in the Night Church had drummed one vision of god into her head, but it was a brutal, harsh, and ugly thing. A faith born when the world died, one that flourished as more and more people died. For years she had been a part of that. For years she had belonged to that.

That time had passed.

Now she was a part of nothing. She belonged to nothing.

Now she was alone.

No, the girl believed that the heat of the day and the cold of the night, the deep hunger and the awful loneliness,
the pain and the shame, were all forms of punishment.

As she did every night since she ran away from the Night Church, she murmured these words right at the point where sleep began pulling her down.

“I’m sorry for the pain I caused, the blood I spilled, and the lives I destroyed. With all my heart and soul, I’m sorry.”

Then the ragged claws of sleep dragged her down into dreams of hunger and dying.

In the morning something impossible happened.

The girl rose with the first light of dawn, her hunter’s mind alert to the touch of sunlight on the smoked-glass windows of the dead SUV. She woke quickly, her senses sharpened by months of surviving on her own.

Slowly and cautiously she looked out of each of the windows, looking for predators, alive or dead.

Looking for reapers.

The desert was empty and vast.

She opened the door of the SUV and moved outside and away from the vehicle, running low and fast and then turning to look back. It was a trick she had learned the hard way. Sometimes predators waited on top of a vehicle. And sometimes there were blind spots when you were inside. From a distance she could see all around the car.

There was no one and nothing. No sign of Sister Connie or Brother Andrew or anyone from the Night Church.

She crept back and examined the plastic she had set up the night before, and for the first time in days she smiled. The center of each sheet of plastic was bellied down, heavy with dew. The girl fetched her canteen and carefully poured the water into it. The combined water filled her canteen nearly to the top. She licked the last drops off the sheeting
and carefully folded it and stowed it in her pack. Then she went to check the traps.

From a distance she could tell that all three of the traps had been sprung, and her heart leaped in her chest. She broke into a run, eager to see what kind of meat the night had brought to her.

Almost immediately she slowed from a run to a fast walk to a sudden stillness. She tore the slingshot from her pocket, loaded it with a sharp stone, and wheeled around, looking for an enemy.

For a trickster.

For answers.

Was this some strange and subtle trap set by Brother Andrew?

The desert seemed totally empty.

She turned back to the snares.

What in the sam hill is going on?
she demanded, not sure if she thought it or shouted it.

In the center of each one, standing perfectly erect, glinting in the morning sunlight, was an aluminum can.

Not the empty, rusted cans that were everywhere, discarded years ago by scavengers. These cans were not rusted. And they were not empty.

The girl approached the closest one very cautiously, ready to counterattack if her own snares were baited to catch her. She saw no trip wires, no sticks bent back under pressure. The ground did not look like it had been excavated to dig a pit and then covered over.

The can was still there. A square can. Blue, with an illustration of some kind on it.

She crept closer, and in her belly hunger warred with caution. Hunger became a white-hot screaming thing.

When she was five feet away she could read the label of the can. She mouthed the word.

“Spam.”

She knew what that was. Meat in a can. It was old, but the can was not puffy with expanding gasses the way they got when the contents were spoiled. Cans like that were filled with deadly bacteria.

This can looked fine.

She left it there and moved over to the second snare. That can was round, tall, also blue. It said:
DOLE PINEAPPLE CHUNKS—100% PINEAPPLE JUICE.

The third can was red.
GOYA KIDNEY BEANS IN SAUCE.

She looked around.

Nothing.

She made a circle around the traps, going out as far as a mile.

Nothing.

No footprints. No sign.

Just three cans. Meat, fruit, beans.

If she was smart, if she was careful, she could live on that for a week. Maybe more. The beans and the meat were both protein.

The girl straightened and eased the tension on the slingshot.

“Who are you?” she yelled. “Where are you?”

The wind answered with a whisper of sand across the landscape.

She grabbed the cans and ran back to the Explorer.

She was laughing.

She was weeping.

She wasn’t going to die today.

It was so hard to resist the temptation to open all three cans and have a feast, but that would be a bad choice. She gave it some thought, forcing herself to work it through before she took any action. That caution had kept her alive until now.

The meat would keep as long as the can stayed sealed and out of direct sunlight. To open it now, in this heat, without any means of keeping it cold, would mean that she would have to eat it within a day or so before it spoiled. The fruit, as much fun as it would be to taste something cool and sweet, had no protein.

The beans were the smarter choice. She could eat them throughout the day, and they would keep her going as she continued on toward the town.

It would mean leaving this place, and leaving whoever had left the food for her.

She half believed that it was one of the loners. There were a few of them even out here in the desert—people who could not abide company, who preferred the absolute stillness of a world on the brink of death. Most of the loners were crazy, and a lot of them were downright murderous. There were so many tales—not all of them tall—about
loners who trapped unwary wanderers and killed them. Sometimes in order to loot their supplies. Sometimes to enforce their own isolation. And, if some of the tales were to be believed, because a lone traveler was a handy source of food.

It hurt the girl’s mind to think that anyone would turn to cannibalism in a world where everyone who died had been reborn as a flesh-eating monster. But the stories were there, and many of them were told by people who weren’t prone to exaggeration. That made them all the more frightening. These weren’t scary stories told in the dark to frighten children. These were firsthand accounts by hardened travelers who had nothing to gain by making up such tales.

Avoiding loners was a smart habit of anyone who traveled the wastelands.