She had to look after herself now; to hunt and build and fish for herself in addition to tending to her own injuries and illnesses. If the last days of walking were anything to gauge her future on, she would be alone until her luck finally ran out.
Shivering, she forced her heavy feet to move again. Placing the first footfall on the start of the rocky slope, she began to climb, the wet dust turned to a cloying mud, causing her to slip and stumble.
About halfway up, filthy and mostly a light gray covering her entire front from the sludge, she landed hard on her knee, prompting a cry of pain. She bit back a shout when she heard something and lifted her head to look around, certain she was being watched.
Sudden and unwelcome memories of the flying silver bugs raced around her mind as they mixed and mingled with the memory of the coyotes snarling when she felt trapped in the diner. Her eyes scanned the surroundings, desperately searching for the source of her unexplained discomfort, only to see nothing beyond twenty feet in either direction.
“Up here,” said a hesitant voice. Unsure if she had imagined it, she raised her head to blink rainwater out of her eyes. She tried to focus on the shape of a person standing another fifteen feet above her on the edge of the summit. She began crawling again, with no idea if she was heading for salvation or incarceration. The figure morphed to become a half-dressed young man of about her own age who wore a look of confusion that she guessed she probably mirrored on her own.
He bent over to grasp her hand as she reached the top. The fingers twitched once as she stared at them, beckoning her to come on, to be safe and get dry.
Devoid of enough energy to be suspicious any longer, she reached out, clasping the hand that radiated a heat, which almost burned through her as the grip strengthened and she felt herself, in spite of the soaked clothing adding to her bodyweight significantly, hauled to her feet to reach the solid ground.
Lina turned to face the person she hoped was her rescuer, seeing the sharp lines of a young man who, under vastly different circumstances, she would find good-looking. Her mouth opened to say something, anything, to convey her thanks. Her gratitude. Her relief.
Nothing came out. No words could be formed in the fog of her brain Exhausted from the days spent on the run, from the mess she had made of herself trying to survive, she collapsed into him.
Lina’s eyes opened, but her body lay still, like some primal instinct to remain totally unmoving in the presence of a predator. She didn’t know if she was in the presence of someone dangerous, only the certain knowledge that anyone surviving out in the wild was either dangerous in their own right or else with them.
She blinked to try and focus on the low light in the room she found herself in. Her gaze took in the flickering orange shapes dancing on the walls as a fire burned in the corner of the room. She could smell wood smoke from the fire and something else. Food? Meat? Damp clothes? Her ears told her very little until the sound of a throat being cleared from behind her made her flip over.
She saw the young man again, panicking as his eyes shot wide and he rapidly turned his back to her and began to mutter noises of embarrassed apology. She felt the cool air on her bare skin as she spilled out of the nest of coats and blankets she was under. She gasped as she peered down, seeing her dimpled copper skin covered only by her underwear.
“My clothes,” she gasped, shooting a look at the young man full of accusation and shock, which was entirely wasted against his back. “Where the hell are my clothes?”
“They’re…” he stammered, stopping as though he wasn’t sure of his words. “They’re hanging by the fire,” he said finally, sounding as awkward as she felt.
“Get out,” she snapped, repeating the order in a voice made shriller by fear and confusion when he didn’t respond fast enough. “Out!”
He fled, a scrape of boot on stone signaling his departure as she clutched a rough spun blanket around her and ignored the itching it tortured her with.
Lina ignored the dampness of the stiff clothes, which had dried hard in places where the flames had done their job. She pulled her new pants on, but abandoned the top as it was still wet on the back and made her shiver.
She retrieved a thick, padded coat from the pile she had slept under and wrapped it almost twice around her thin frame, as it was far too big for her. Holding it tight to her body, she stuffed her bare feet into her damp boots without bothering to lace them up. Looking around, she saw her pack and shotgun resting against a wall, electing to pick up the gun, as it would make her feel more able to hold a safe conversation with whoever this man was.
She stepped outside, her nose filling with the fresh, warm scent of a thirsty landscape so soon after a downpour gratefully received. She saw him standing on the far side of small courtyard and looking in her direction but with his eyes cast slightly downwards as though he couldn’t look directly at her. She stalked straight towards him, faltering only when a growl came from an open doorway to her left. She staggered, struggling to raise the shotgun and point it in the direction of the noise to hold it awkwardly.
“No!” he cried, running towards her with his hands raised. He stopped close to her, keeping his distance but also maintaining an occasional wary glance over his shoulder at the doorway and the source of the growling. “Please don’t,” he said simply.
Lina was confused. Starving. Utterly bewildered by what had happened in the last few hours alone.
“Please don’t,” he said again, softer this time.
“Who are you?” she demanded, the faint sound of a sob edging her words. “What is this place? What’s… what’s in there?” She raised the barrel of the shotgun to point it at the storeroom.
“I’m Cole,” he told her, his voice pleading. “This is my temporary home… and that’s… a coyote.”
She had so many questions. She looked at him and saw that he was not quite the person she had first thought. He was younger, not much older than her.
“You need food,” he said, gesturing for her to go inside. She obliged and entered the doorway.
Lina’s eyes took in the boy sitting opposite her and focused on another weapon within an arm’s reach of him. He held both hands up in a placatory gesture, reaching slowly for a bottle of clean plastic with clear water inside.
He held it out for her, his hand shaking slightly as she reached out cautiously to take it from his gentle grasp. He withdrew, reaching to his side away from the gun and coming towards her with a wire tray containing strips of what appeared to be dried meat. She hesitated, then almost snatched the tray from him and began tearing at the meat hungrily.
“Go slow,” he said. His words sounded awkward somehow; stilted, as though he was out of practice at talking. To another person, at least. He held out a small, rough container with a lumpy, purple paste inside. She stopped chewing to stare at the bowl, then at him.
“Juniper berries,” he told her. “It’ll make the turkey sweeter.” She said nothing, instead scooping out a portion of the berry mush with a chunk of meat and stuffing it into her mouth along with the mouthful she hadn’t yet swallowed.
“What’s your name?” Cole asked softly.
“Lina,” she said, looking at his arms. “Are you… are you one of them?” In answer, Cole held up both hands and turned them around to show no indication of markings. She stopped chewing. She’d heard talk in her village of other people who hadn’t fallen under the control of the aliens who’d overturned their planet so long ago, before either of them had been born.
“I’m no one. Just a guy… out here by myself,” Cole told her.
“It’s good to meet you, Cole,” she said before automatically adding an instinctive “yá’át’ééh.” His forehead wrinkled, changing the shape of his face completely until she explained.
“It means hello. It’s the way my people greet each other in our old language,” she told him, her face falling as she realized that, of her people, she might be the last.
“Oh,” Cole answered, eyes still no
t meeting hers, “hello.”
“Where are you from?” she asked as they sat around the low burning fire eating strips of turkey breast. Both had dressed in dry clothes at least, even though the heat outside was fierce enough to dry everything that had become soaked in the massive storm.
“From?”
“Yeah, I mean who are your people? Where do you live?”
Cole frowned, making Lina think he was either struggling to understand her or else was what her mother had called “slow.”
“My people are called the Navajo,” she explained with a proud hand on her chest, feeling her throat constrict at the mention of her people. She carried on before reality caught up with her too much. “We live,” she said slowly as she pointed far to the south, “beyond the hills in a valley.” She watched him looking in the direction of her hand, not at where she pointed but at her actual hand, and sighed to herself.
“At least we did,” she said quietly, talking to herself in a rapid murmur that she was sure he wouldn’t understand because there was clearly something wrong with him. “but then the hovercraft came, and they dropped firebombs. Then we ran, and almost everyone was caught except me, but then they had to send their flying machine bugs after us, then I was on my own and I was chased by animals and then I end up with someone who doesn’t understand what I’m saying…” She choked up, tears threatening to come.
“I’m not from anywhere,” Cole said, his unexpected clarity causing her to stop. He sounded hesitant, but he had a strong voice and a kind of sad maturity to it that made her listen intently. “I’ve always been moving from place to place. Sometimes we would stay somewhere for a while if it was safe, and a few times when I was younger, we lived with other people for a long time until we had to leave, but I don’t think I ever stayed in one spot long enough to be from anywhere.”
She said nothing, only stared at him and willed him to carry on. She listened carefully as he told her about the small commune he remembered from when he was a boy, how a woman there had taught him how to cook and enhance the flavor of the food they caught. He told her how she had smiled at him and said that eating food was a chore, “but if you learned to enjoy the food you ate,” he said as he mimicked the woman Lina would never meet, “then it makes you full in here.” He moved his hand from his flat stomach to his chest, indicating that his heart and feelings were made whole by eating.
Lina understood, but she lacked the words to agree with him and didn’t want to break the spell of the story he was weaving.
“We left that place,” Cole said. “I can’t remember why, but I remember we had to do it quietly at night and I had to carry a lot of heavy stuff. We spent a few years on our own after that, traveling north to where the snow was deep but staying away from the sea because they always took over the cities on the coast.
“You’ve seen the sea?” Lina asked with a gasp. Cole nodded.
“Both sides of it,” he said, “and both sides are as dangerous as the other.”
“You say we a lot,” she asked softly. “Are you not alone up here?” Cole said nothing, sniffing in through his nose and looking away as he used a stick with once charred end to poke at the small fire.
“No,” he finally answered in a whisper. “I’ve been by myself for three summers now.”
A twanging noise in the distance caught their attention at once as both snapped their heads towards the open door nearby. Lina scrambled to pick up the shotgun, but Cole waved her aside.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “That was one of my snare traps. Come on.” He picked up his own gun and pack, making her do the same. “Never go anywhere that you can’t run from,” he said, “and never leave anything you’ll need to go back for,” sounding as though the words belonged to someone else and he was just holding on to them.
She followed him across the damp square outside as only patches of it had returned to dry dust in the day’s sunshine. He slid over a low wall beside a gap they could easily fit through and he pointed to the gap in warning. She saw the glint of thin wire before she was on top of it, following where he’d gone to avoid the dangerous obstacle. Both of them crossed the hill, not crouching low or moving like they were in any kind of danger, and her eyes were drawn to the desperate, shaking movement in a small tree ahead of them.
A rabbit, all long legs and nervous tension, thrashed as it tried to run in midair, only tightening the noose around its neck.
“I set this trap for the turkeys, but I won’t say no to a bit of rabbit.” As if suddenly remembering he had company, he turned to the young woman and smiled nervously.
“You, err, you like rabbit?” he asked her.
“I do,” she said, “and I have some apples we can cook up with it in my pack.”
Lina was accustomed to eating three or four times a day at set intervals. She rose and had breakfast, she ate a meal around the middle of the day, another when the sun set surrounded by family and friends, then a small meal before bed.
The rabbit, meager as it was, would never fill both of them up, but they planned to add some applesauce to it. He carried it up the hill by the hind legs, its long ears flopping with each step he took. He dropped the carcass on a wooden table and drew a knife, but she stopped him.
“May I?” she asked, holding out a hand for the blade. Curious, he handed it to her and stepped aside to watch. She muttered some words under her breath, which he almost heard but didn’t understand. She placed her hand on her chest as she spoke, then on the chest of the dead rabbit, then again to her chest until she stopped murmuring and opened her eyes.
He stoked the fire, bringing up the flames with more dried wood to cook the little beast on a spit he was hastily fashioning. She skinned and cleaned the rabbit and wiped her bloody hands on a rag before rummaging in her bag for the apples, which she started to chop into chunks, adding a couple of green leaves to the pot. Cole added the meat to a spit, the meat crackling over the flames, and soon the smell of roasting rabbit filled the room.
“Put it straight in the pot,” she said gently, unsure if she was overstepping or if either of them was planning on taking charge of the meal overall. He said nothing, simply took the meat off the spit, and handed it to her, as unsure as she’d been. She chopped it up into smaller portions, leaving the bones untouched. Cole removed the neck, adding the pelt and the head to the bowl with the guts before taking it outside and disappearing. Lina craned her neck around the open door to see him approaching the storeroom and sliding the bowl far inside without stepping foot in there.
Chapter 21
Dex
His gut told him the two Roamers had left together. It used to happen far more often. A couple of people would grow attached at a worksite, factory, field, wherever, and make a vow to leave together. Judging by the bios, he wasn’t sure that was the case this time, but he couldn’t confirm it. All he did know was the odds were that they headed west, not east.
Most people avoided hitting the Atlantic because there was nowhere to go or hide along the coast. With the heavy population of Boston, New York, and Washington, there were far more Overseers, so Dex took the long way around and traveled north before turning east through Springfield. He had to detour around the city because it was a wasteland, essentially a crater in the Earth for miles and miles.
They’d decimated a lot of the country, but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason behind their actions. Dex didn’t presume to understand the minds of the Overseers. They were as unfathomable to him as he would be to a whale in the ocean.
It had been a long day even before he wound his way through the busier roads, where cars, trucks, vans, and motorbikes cluttered the highways. There was a time when the Hunters tried to band together to clear off major roadways, but there weren’t enough of them to pull it off, and the aliens didn’t seem to give a crap about the Hunters’ ability to drive on the streets. Why should they care? They had spaceships and hovercars to get around.
To them, humans’ vehicles were another useless t
ool, like a monkey using a rock to beat open a nut. It was unnerving. Dex hated being near the Overseers. Their yellow eyes, the casual saunter they had walking around unarmored, often unarmed. They had every expectation they were the superior beings, and it rubbed Dex up the wrong way.
“Just get the targets before anyone else. Take your three months off and figure it out later,” he told himself. Still, he’d been feeling on edge since his encounter with Trent James. If that guy had given up his cushy gig based on morals, what was Dex doing? Was there any way to stop the Overseers? What was in the locker at the University of Nebraska?
“Stop it!” he shouted to himself and rolled down the window, letting warm summer air penetrate the inside of his car. He flicked the stereo on and cranked up the song, singing along as he cruised a solid thirty miles an hour along the rough road. “Whole lotta love!” he shouted in key with the lead singer. A mile or two later, he slowed, lifting his foot off the pedal as he saw the road torn apart in front of him. Green foliage grew through it, pushing concrete chunks to the side. A tree had sprouted in the middle of the road.
Dex stopped the car, leaving it running, and he stepped out. “Crap.” He pulled his pack of smokes from his pocket and put one in his mouth, fumbling in his pocket for matches. He found an older book, and after two tries, a flame sputtered, giving him enough spark to light the stick.
He was about twenty miles from the next major intersection, and he didn’t want to backtrack, not this late in the day. Dex considered staying here, opening a bottle of whiskey, and rocking out to his favorite band before camping out, but he decided not to. The ditch was too steep, and there were several cars blocking the only flat way through; each of them covered in rust, with long ago flattened tires.
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