The Outside (9 page)

I glanced around the familiar yard. My dogs, Copper and Sunny, were stretched out in the grass. Sunny was nursing her greedy little puppies. Copper was halfheartedly chasing a chicken. He’d chase but never kill.

I could smell supper cooking through the back screen door, and my mouth watered. There would be savory ham and sweet potatoes and my mother’s delicious pumpkin pie with fresh butter and cider.

After supper, we’d read from the
Ausbund
, the Amish prayer book. We might play checkers in the light of the oil lamps until it was time to go to bed. We’d sleep under quilts my mother and I had made, warm and secure in the knowledge that tomorrow would be the same as today, which was the same as yesterday.

My father was walking down the dirt road. I could see his smile above his beard, and I waved. He smiled and waved back. He was carrying a bushel basket of squash. Beside him walked Elijah, who grinned at me over the heavy basket of vegetables he carried. He waved at me and said something I couldn’t hear.

Then, I heard a raven’s hoarse caw.

I peered through the swirling laundry: the dresses and aprons, the bonnets, my father’s britches and shirts. The sheets flapped in the breeze, and it made my skin crawl. It reminded me of something . . . something ghostly . . .

A raven landed on the clothesline. It cocked its head to stare at me, unblinking.

I looked up at it. It opened its beak as if to speak, but no sound came out. A dark figure advanced through the field, one I didn’t recognize. It was a blond English man, wearing a black jacket. The laundry snapped in the rising wind and I reached up to hold it, to keep it from being torn from the lines.

I snatched up pillowcases and shirts before they were lost in the yard. I spun on my heel to look for a basket . . .

. . . and my family was gone.

The silent man stood at a distance. Darkness was gathering behind him, and the raven screamed hoarsely in my ear.

Sensing a cold shadow over me, I jerked awake.

My hands balled automatically into fists, and I flinched.

“Katie. It’s just me.”

Alex crouched over me, tenderly pushing a strand of hair behind my ear. I sucked in a breath, then forced myself to exhale and unwind my fists. I blinked up at him, up at the sky. The sun had lowered a bit.

I looked right and left. Ginger was standing next to Horace, patting him and adjusting his gear, her broken glasses perched on top of her head. The raven fussed with a nut in his talons, cawing softly to himself.

“Good nap, eh?” Alex asked.

I rubbed my eyes. “I can’t believe I fell asleep.”

“Any time you can catch a wink is a good time.” He offered me a hand and pulled me to my feet. “I’m just glad that we found you.”

I grinned. “How did you do that?”

“We just headed where there was the most grass until we saw a speck of white.” His eyes darkened, and he wrapped an arm around me. “But seriously . . . don’t run off like that again.”

“
Ja
, I promise,” I said. I squinted up at the sun, feeling a pang of anxiety. “We have only a few more hours of daylight left.”

“I hope we can find someplace safe to sleep,” Ginger said.

The travel was wearing on all of us. We had slept in bits and snatches when we could, but the exhaustion was making us reckless and sloppy. I could feel it in the way my feet slapped listlessly on the ground, in the ache of my muscles.

Alex spread out one of his maps and fussed with his new compass. I tried not to stare at the bloodstain on his jeans.

“Maybe we could find someplace we could stay for a day or two. Someplace quiet.” I closed my eyes and imagined home, just for a moment. It ached to do so, but I needed to feel the pain. Because I didn’t want to forget. If I forgot, I was pretty sure that I was going to lose all sense of myself, the touchstone to who I was.

And then I’d be little more than one of the hungry shells of the living roaming the world.

***

We pushed on until the sun moved into the western sky. I felt the warmth shifting from the top of my head to my left cheek, and I knew that we’d need to seek shelter soon. Or hope that we were far enough in the hinterlands that the vampires wouldn’t find us.

“Maybe we can find a barn,” Ginger said.

“A hayloft,” I agreed. “Somewhere up high. And a place where we can hide Horace.”

“This looks like farm country to me,” Alex said.

We followed a dirt road tracking along the edge of a fence. At first, the fence seemed to be like ordinary barbed wire. But then it grew to more than eight feet in height, chainlink with razorwire coiled like ribbons at the top.

Alex squinted at it. “I sure hope we’re not in a prison area.”

The barbed wire. It was angled inwardly, as if it was intended to keep something inside. I had never seen a prison. I had occasionally seen pictures of criminals in the police blotter section of the local newspaper when I got ahold of one, but I didn’t understand most of the crimes. I was twelve before I knew what burglary was, and fourteen before I understood the word
rape
. I had never understood the point of robbery, since Plain people would give anything they had to a needy person. I shuddered. “Let’s hope not.”

“There are no paved roads here,” Ginger said. “A prison would have paved roads. All paid for with taxpayer money.”

“Good point,” Alex said. “And that doesn’t look like a prison.”

He pointed ahead of us to a ramshackle collection of buildings. I saw what looked like a barn made out of corrugated metal, a few outbuildings, a house, and what appeared to be cages. It smelled like an outhouse.

My heart thudded in my chest when I saw a black shadow moving behind the chainlink fence.

“What is that?” I whispered.

“Oh, damn,” Ginger said.

I walked up close to the fence, peered in. A languid form slipped between trees, pacing, sinuous. I couldn’t get a complete look at the creature, so I moved closer.

It paused, stared back at me with golden eyes.

It was a cat.

A really, really large cat. It was larger than my golden retrievers, with a head the size of a melon. It was covered in black fur, and it was skinny. So thin that its ribs rippled when it walked and its shoulder bones jutted out of its back. I smelled feces in its pen, and the flies were thick in the air.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a jaguar,” Ginger said.

“It’s starving,” I said, staring at its empty food trough, overturned, on the ground. I realized that the razorwire fence didn’t go entirely around the property. It was in squares and runs—makeshift cages.

“And he’s not the only one.” I heard Alex’s grim tone behind me. He pointed to other enclosures. Tin roofs had been partially torn away by the wind. I saw two bears in one cage. One was clearly dead, covered in flies. The other sat with its back turned to us, its snout on the ground. A pair of wasted striped cats, orange and black, paced agitatedly within another cage. They were as bony as the jaguar.

“Those are tigers?” I asked.

“Yes. But they’re not supposed to look like that.”

I had only seen tigers in books, on my covert trips to the library back home. Those tigers had been plump and well fed, not these skeletons with stripes. Skin hung from their bones, like some kind of gaudy material in a fabric store. Their bellies and legs were covered in mud, and their eyes were hollow.

I approached gingerly.

I heard a deep growling, so deep that it was almost impossible to hear.

And the tiger lunged for me. Its paws slammed up against the chain link fence with an incredible amount of force, bowing it outward with a crash.

I jumped backwards. Claws larger than my fingers hooked in the fence, and the tiger growled again.

My heart hammered, but the fence held.

Alex grabbed my arm. “Don’t tempt them. They’re hungry. And we’re just meat.”

My eyes filled with tears. I knew we were just meat to the vampires. But I saw something different in the eyes of the starving animals. In vampire eyes, I only saw evil. In these, I saw pain.

I heard a thin howling behind me. I wheeled, spied a pack of a half-dozen wolves in a dog run the size of some I’d seen for small dogs. They trotted along their side of the fence, calling, yipping at us. They were dirty, terribly thin, with sores on their paws and tufts of fur missing. Their golden eyes watched me with something like hope.

“Is this a zoo?” I wrinkled my forehead. I had never been to one, but I had heard of them, seen pictures in books. Those facilities had elaborately built habitats, with healthy-looking animals and zookeepers in uniform. This was not what I’d imagined.

“No. This is . . .” I could hear the anger in Alex’s voice. “These are some jerks with a private collection. Who aren’t taking care of their animals. Or can’t.” I could tell by the set of Alex’s jaw that this infuriated him.

With trepidation, we walked the short distance to the house. It was two stories, covered in vinyl siding with plastic shutters. The front door was painted red. Alex pounded on it.

We waited. No one answered.

He pounded again, tried the knob. “It’s locked.”

“I don’t see any cars or trucks around,” Ginger observed. “They must have left.” Her hand was pressed to her mouth, and not just to block out the smell of the animals.

Now fury rose in me, too. I had assumed that something had happened to the people. I couldn’t conceive of anyone voluntarily leaving their animals in this condition. I had occasionally heard of stories about Amish puppy mills and animal mistreatment in the Plain community, but I had not witnessed that in my own little village. I didn’t see how that could be tolerated. My parents had always taught me that animals were also God’s creatures and deserved to be cared for with the best of our ability.

“Hopefully the vamps haven’t been here,” Alex said. “If the people left, the vamps wouldn’t tackle a tiger to eat. That’s not as easy a snack as a domestic animal.”

“There’s no sign of a break-in,” Ginger said, peering through a ground-level window. She jiggled the front doorknob. “Locked.”

I stared at it. “Could it be a trap?” We knew the vampires were smart enough for that.

Alex frowned. “Not likely. If this was a trap, they would leave the door open and let the food come to them.”

Alex pulled his jacket down over his knuckles and picked up a brick from the carefully landscaped border. He hurled it at the window and the glass caved in. He cleared the glass from the lower sash with the sleeve of his jacket and climbed through.

I held my breath, waiting, listening to his steps inside. I heard scraping at the front door before it opened.

“C’mon in, ladies,” he said.

I crossed the threshold into the house, sucked in my breath. I didn’t see any signs of violence, but the people who lived here had sure left in a hurry.

To my left, the dining room table was covered in empty plastic bags. To my right, the living area held an overstuffed couch and chairs, but a set of shelves was empty below a giant black television.

I walked over plush carpeting to the kitchen. Cabinets and cupboards had been emptied, doors and drawers standing open. A puddle stood at the bottom of the refrigerator, forming a lake on the tile.

I searched for food for the animals. The garage contained a lawnmower, tool chests, and bags of birdseed occupied only by mice. Cardboard boxes marked
CHRISTMAS
were perched up in the rafters. A chest freezer sat against a wall.

I stared at it, wary. There might be food in there. Or maybe something terrible.

I pressed my ear against the top of the freezer. I heard nothing moving within.

I grabbed a rake. Holding the staff above my head, I opened the lid.

And I immediately turned away in disgust.

There was meat inside, wrapped in white paper turning black as it rotted and liquefied. I slammed the lid quickly and returned to the kitchen.

I heard Alex clomping around upstairs. He returned with a hard expression on his face. “Upstairs has been tossed. Nobody home. Empty gun cabinet, though.”

“They left,” I affirmed. “They left, locked the door behind them, and left those animals to die. And they didn’t even have the decency . . .” I was going to say “to put them out of their misery,” but I couldn’t speak it out loud. The Elders had wanted to do that to Alex when we found him injured just outside our land.

Ginger reached out to hold my hand. “It’s horrible. But at least we have someplace to stay for the night.”

I swallowed, stared out the kitchen window at the scrawny animals in their enclosures. “We can’t leave them out there.”

“They’ll eat us alive if we let them go now,” Ginger said.

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “We can’t. I can’t, and I won’t.”

I turned and walked out the front door, my heart hammering in my chest. Righteous anger glowed within me.

I walked to the first cage. The cage with the wolves. I think that they scared me the least. I circled it, searching for a latch to open it.

“Bonnet, wait.” Alex rushed after me and caught my arm. “They’ll tear you apart.”

I wheeled around. “I will not leave them like this!” There was iron in my voice. It surprised me, and it surprised him. His grip on my arm slackened.

“It’s not right,” I said.

“I know. But they don’t belong here. They’ll hurt people if you let them go.”

I lifted my chin. I could hear my voice rising, yelling. I felt heat rising in my cheeks. Rage. And not at Alex, but at the circumstances we found ourselves in. “There are no people left
to
hurt. And I’m not going to let this . . .” My hand sketched the broken world around us. “I’m not going to let this change or break me. It can kill me, but I won’t let it change me or what I think is right.”

He stood opposite me, staring at me. I was certain that he could physically stop me. He could impose his will on me the way the Elders tried, with the threat of violence or restraint.

But he didn’t. I knew that he respected me.

“I get it,” he sighed. “I don’t want to see you mauled by wild animals. But . . .” He spread his hands, and I could see the helplessness he felt in that gesture. “I can’t protect you. Maybe being food for an animal is better than dying of snake venom or vampires or starvation.”