“Gone for antibiotics.” She shapes the bright red letters exactly like M’s. At the bottom of the note she writes, “Love Always, Mary.”
• • •
A girl can fit everything she needs for Ardmore in a backpack—a compass, a canteen full of water, three days’ supply of food, and her best friend’s diary. Mary tucks a pistol into the waistband of her M-jeans that fit perfectly. The pistol is a six-shot revolver with a mirror finish and a bone grip. Perfect for scaring away coyotes. There are millions of them now that people are gone. They like to eat cats more than anything.
She doesn’t know how many cats will follow her. How many will evaporate before she reaches Ardmore? If the coyotes come around more than six times, the cats are out of luck.
She’s a long way from the cabin by the time Raj tries to call her back. Too far to see him stand in the doorway and cup his hands around his mouth so his words will be loud enough to make it through the trees.
“Maaa—rrry!” He stretches her name into two long syllables that sound like the beginning of a song.
She puts her fingers in her ears so she won’t have to listen. She’s disobeying him for his own good, after all, the way heroines do in books the Cimarron Girls left behind—The Golden Compass, Ella Enchanted, Twilight. The books Raj taught her to read.
His rotten apple taste is still on her tongue. Strong and fermented, like the jugs of cider in the cellar that make your head spin if you drink too much. She clears her throat and spits on the forest floor. That makes the cats disappear, but after a few minutes they return. So do the rotten apples.
The Arbuckle Mountains are full of streams and house-size rocks, so it’s impossible to walk in a straight line. She remembers the double-rutted path that used to connect the cabin to the outside world, but it is full of trees now, and underbrush and poison ivy. Raj says that is nature’s way of hiding them from bad things.
Maybe he’ll tell her more about bad things when she comes back with the antibiotics. Ardmore’s only one day’s walk down I-35, the concrete ribbon that connects old time cities like beads on a string—San Antonio, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Kansas City.
Walking through the trees is difficult when you have an actual destination. Thorn bushes, drop-offs, and walls of stone make her change directions every few minutes. Strange noises in the undergrowth set her nerves on edge, especially when the cats explode in all directions.
Leaf shadows look like jumbled faces on the rocks and dirt, moving their lips as if they’re whispering, “She’ll never find her way to Ardmore.”
Mary touches the bone handle of her six-shooter.
“You guys aren’t real,” she says to nobody. The cats come closer to the sound of her voice. They don’t know about pistols but they know about faces in the shadows.
M says you can whistle ghosts away. That’s near the end of the diary after M had lots of ghost experience. Mary tries to whistle but her lips are too nervous to make the right shape. She licks them and starts over, but the taste of rotten apples gets stronger and she has to give it up. Her temples throb—not a headache exactly— and her throat feels dry and sticky.
One of the cats rubs against her legs, gives her a reason to be brave. She sings a song about cats and girls walking through the woods to Ardmore. Her voice turns rough and smoky, like the villains in the bedtime stories Raj used to tell her. Her song pulls the cats close enough to count. Six, the same number as the bullets in her pistol.
By the time she runs out of words that rhyme, the leaf faces disappear into bigger shadows. Maybe that’s because of the song, but it’s probably because clouds are building up in the southwest.
In the olden days people listened to weather reports on radios in their cars. The weather reports are gone but the weather is still here.
So are the cars. Lots of them. Abandoned on I-35 according to M. Broken, like almost everything in the world, but they’d still keep out the rain, and only a few will have skeletons inside.
She crosses herself the way Raj says Catholics used to do. It might not help, but it certainly won’t hurt. The wind stops turning tree leaves upside down. A beam of sunlight as straight and shiny as a butter knife breaks through the clouds and she sees I-35 for the first time since she was three years old.
She picks up a large round stone, as big as a ripe apple, because there’s a pack of coyotes—more than she has bullets for—clustered inside a knot of rusty cars.
Eating something.
She throws her rock without aiming. It bounces off a rusty black car and lands in the coyote pack. They look at her, deciding whether to be afraid.
“Go away!” Her voice sounds small and weak and it’s pushed out of her mouth by the most powerful rotten apple stench so far. She spits again and draws her pistol the way Raj says cowboys used to do. She’s never fired a shot because once all the bullets in the world are gone there won’t be any more.
The coyotes form a wall, with the boss coyote in front. He’s bigger than the rest, with the best fur and a look in his eyes that means he’s smart. The shiny pistol glitters in the beam of sunlight that falls on Mary like old time spotlights used to do with actors on a stage.
She pulls back the hammer on her pistol so the coyotes will understand something is up. Something deadly, so they’d better back off and let the last girl in the world and her cats go in peace.
The big male coyote takes a few jittery steps away. He makes a sound halfway between a growl and a song, then trots into the woods on the opposite side of the highway, away from Mary and her cats and her pistol. All the others follow him.
Except for one.
That coyote is hungrier than the rest. She looks at Mary with big brown girl-coyote eyes and goes back to eating whatever died among the cars on I-35.
Raj says things used to die here all the time, armadillos and rabbits and white tail deer, run down by cars going so fast they didn’t even try to stop, but these cars haven’t killed anything for years.
Mary circles the hungry girl-coyote, instead of walking down the road toward Ardmore, because the pistol is full of warm, reassuring power that moves from the bone grip into her hand, clear up to her shoulder, which was aching a minute ago but now feels strong.
She swallows saliva that is thicker than it should be, and tastes more like rotten apples than ever, but she doesn’t spit, because that might make the girl-coyote think she’s weak.
And Mary is not weak. She has a pistol in her hand and it would be only the slightest inconvenience to kill this coyote. Revenge for all the cats it might have eaten. Prevention for the cats it hasn’t eaten yet.
What is the coyote eating now? A few more steps will tell her. The pistol leads the way. The trigger feels soft and flexible, ready to be squeezed into action, ready to show her what it means to be the top link of the food chain.
Until she sees the coyote’s meal.
A man’s face looks at her out of a mask of bloody meat. His belly is ripped open. Ribs are broken. An empty corpse without organs but with enough meat left on his bones to prove he used to be a man.
Someone who didn’t die in the olden days, like Raj said everybody did.
“Things I haven’t told you.” Things Raj would have told her if she’d waited.
How did this man die? Why didn’t he die a long time ago? Why doesn’t someone stop this coyote from eating what’s left of him? Someone besides Mary.
Thunder rumbles in the distance. The beam of light that looked so promising a moment ago is gone, replaced by darkness turning black in the southwest and green directly overhead, almost the color of blood drying over pale dead skin.
“Get away!” She waves the gun in case the coyote hasn’t noticed it yet. She tries to pull the hammer back a little more, but it’s as far as it will go. The firing pin is sharp and ready to strike.
“I’ll do it!”
She squeezes the trigger a tiny bit to prove to herself she can still control her fingers. Her pulse throbs in her temples. Her
thoughts run in circles. She realizes she’s not breathing.
She releases a rotten apple breath and replaces it with air that smells like meat that’s only fit for coyote food.
“Shoo!” She’s never said that word before, but it’s exactly the right way to describe a coyote’s last chance before Mary fires her first bullet ever.
“Shoo!” She almost can’t hear that word above the thunderclap that comes without a lightning flash. The pistol jumps in her hand. Hot sparks touch her face. The smell of burned matches fills the air. The girl-coyote falls beside the dead man, who doesn’t look nearly as important now as the animal Mary’s killed.
Not quite. The girl coyote tries to run away, but her back legs fold like Raj’s did. She drags them through a pool of blood then rolls onto her side so Mary can see the coyote’s ribcage move, trying to take in enough air to make up for the blood she’s lost.
Pregnant!
Why didn’t Mary see that before? Almost full term. Raj told her how all that works, even though she doesn’t really need to know. Wishes she didn’t know about the babies waiting to get out but won’t now.
Everything dies exactly the same way, hanging on no matter how it hurts. The coyote’s breathing is louder than the thunder. Mary kneels beside her.
“Sorry.” She reaches out to stroke the dying animal, but the coyote still has enough strength to show her teeth.
How long does it take for a wounded animal to die? Mary looks at the pistol. Maybe she should finish it. Definitely she should finish it, but her finger won’t go around the trigger again.
A new sound competes with the throbbing in her head. A little like a heartbeat. A little like drumsticks on a hardwood floor.
She recognizes the sound from descriptions in M’s diary, from sound effects Raj does when he tells cowboy stories. Horse hooves on a solid surface. A horse walking Mary’s way up I-35 where horses were never meant to go. She’s already on her knees, so it’s an easy matter to lie flat—to roll underneath a car and wait until the danger passes. When there’s a dying coyote lying beside a dead man on a dead highway clotted with dead automobiles from the olden times, it’s better safe than sorry.
She sees the horse and rider from underneath the bumper. Appaloosa—that’s what they call horses marked with red and white splotches. And the rider is an Indian.
Native American. Raj told her all about them. How white people took away their land and force-marched them to Oklahoma. That was a long time ago but maybe they still hold a grudge.
This one has a rifle, and a cowboy hat with a feather in the band, and a look on his face that gives nothing away—except danger.
The horse stops beside the dying coyote. She’s looking right at Mary now as if to say—there she is, brother. Under the car. Hidden like a dead girl’s diary.
The coyote takes a breath so deep it expands her chest to its outer limit. She exhales a bloody mist that smells like popcorn. Her eyes glaze over, still full of blame.
Mary doesn’t notice when the horse moves past. Too busy thinking about baby coyotes dying inside their mother. She doesn’t realize she is crying until she feels a cat’s tongue on her cheek.
Salt. That’s why the cat wants her tears. Salt and chemicals that make people feel bad and cats feel good. All six cats join her. She has plenty of tears to go around.
The horse hooves circle the car four times and then move south toward Ardmore, where there are miracle drugs on shelves and other things Raj should have told her about. Like men on horseback.
“Listen to your heart,” was M’s advice for when you see a guy for the first time. Mary’s heart says, “Stay hidden!” in loud, clear, rapid thumps.
The cats purr like there is nothing wrong. Like there isn’t a live man patrolling a dead highway. Like it isn’t starting to rain, and streams of water aren’t going to run underneath the car. Like the dead mother coyote doesn’t have her eyes open, hoping to see Mary die on I-35.
A little stomach acid works its way into Mary’s mouth. She spits it as far away as she can, but not toward the coyote.
The rain turns to hail for a couple of angry minutes, bouncing ice marbles off the dead man and the dead coyote. Then suddenly the storm is gone, leaving irregular balls of ice behind and a fresh, safe smell in the air.
Mary’s headache drifts away with a gust of wind. Her stomach cramps turn into hunger pangs as she crawls out from under the car. Cats rub against her legs as she walks toward the trees, listening to her heart tell her—The forest is safer than the road.
Every step is trouble with six cats in the way, all wanting to be rubbed and fed at the same time.
“Plenty of food in Ardmore.” She looks down the road in the direction of cat food and miracle drugs and wonders if she’ll have to walk all the way in the forest.
The cats arch their backs and twitch their tails, like the biggest cat fight ever is about to happen and they don’t know whether to pick a side or run. They all take off together, tumbling over each other, hissing at the air while they disappear into the trees.
What they’re afraid of is behind them. Behind Mary. She turns slowly, as if whatever scared the cats won’t be there until she sees it.
Nothing at first, just a jumble of dead cars rusting on the highway where their owners abandoned them in the olden days. A flock of starlings lands on the cars, looking for worms that have crawled onto the highway to keep from drowning. They perch on every car but one and shout insults at the world.
Every car but one. Mary sees it now. How could she have missed the Indian in the driver’s seat, behind the steering wheel of the car the starlings have rejected? He tips his hat. He smiles, and she can see immediately he has a plan.
The kind of plan coyotes have for cats. The kind of plan the big bad wolf had for Little Red Riding Hood. The kind of plan bad men have always had for girls like her.
Pretty girl. The words are in his smile. So are the things he wants to do with pretty girls. M’s diary doesn’t describe those things and Mary doesn’t know exactly what they are, but she doesn’t want to know.
When the car door opens, she sprints toward the forest. She shouldn’t look behind her, but she can’t help herself. The bad man isn’t running. Doesn’t have to because he’ll never stop. He’ll keep on chasing her until she is too tired to run, until she falls, until she has to rest, because even though she’s never seen a man like this before, Mary knows he won’t give up until he gets what he is after.
Pretty girl.
She doesn’t realize she’s not running anymore until she sees those words take shape on the bad man’s lips. And when she starts running again, her legs don’t move as fast as they should, because somewhere inside her a decision has been reached—he’ll get her in the end.
Branches snap and leaves rustle no matter where she puts her feet. One panicked step after another until she finds the perfect hiding place. The live oak straight ahead. Tall and rambling with lots of branches. Perfect for climbing. Perfect for hiding from a bad man with a wide-brimmed cowboy hat.
The treetop is full of leaves and branches dressed with Virginia creeper and mistletoe. It doesn’t look high from the forest floor, but from the top it’s different.
Dangerous-different.
Forked branches hold her like a crippled hand that might lose its grip any second. She presses her cheek against bark and prays the limbs will hide her. It has to be enough because there is nowhere left to run.
Birds abandon the live oak as if she is a feral cat on a search for dinner. The bubble of silence surrounds her hiding place like a bull’s-eye on a target, but the quiet only lasts until she gets her breathing under control. Then the birds return, complaining about the intruder hiding in the branches from a killer on the ground.
He follows her as if he has a map. Indians can do that, at least in Raj’s stories. Indians can talk to the trees and the grass in a silent language no one else understands.
He stops underneath her hiding-branch. He snif
fs the air for the scent of a pretty girl whose breath smells like rotten apples.
She peeks around limbs that should be thick enough to hide her but aren’t. The bad man has taken off his wide-brimmed hat. He smiles at her as if he sees her clearly through her leaves. He reaches up with a calloused right hand that she can feel even though it’s twenty feet below her. A spirit touch, like ticks crawling on her skin, looking for a place to bite.
Images flash behind her eyes. Pictures she doesn’t want to see. Things she shouldn’t know about but suddenly does.
The man under the tree extends his hand another few inches, as if she is a ripe peach in an orchard from the olden days. When he flexes his fingers she can feel him pulling her toward him. A magical connection. Raj would say it’s her imagination.
But it’s real. As real as a dead coyote full of babies. As real as the pistol in the waistband of her M jeans that are suddenly too tight. She draws the pistol and the pants fit perfectly again. Mary feels the killing power in the pistol grip. She points the weapon at the bad man on the ground who’s calling her without saying a word, who’s pulling her out of the tree with the force of his desire.
He smiles and flexes his fingers, leaving the decision up to her. Whether he lives or dies. Whether she can kill a man—even a dangerous man—the way she killed a coyote who was only trying to keep her babies alive.
The weapon is heavy in her hand, almost enough to tip her out of the tree. She wraps both arms around the tree trunk, holds the pistol in both hands, and orders her finger to squeeze the trigger.
Now. She waits for the thunderclap, the feel of the pistol bucking in her hands, the smell of burned matches, the guilt. But those things don’t happen. The bad man underneath her doesn’t drag himself away leaving a blood trail behind. He smiles.
She slides the pistol back into her waistband. She stands on the branch of the live oak tree that wasn’t big enough to hide her, pushes herself off from the trunk, and leaps onto a branch of the tree next door.
Sacred Alarm Clock Page 17
