Humanity

by J. D. Knutson

  A separate realization hit me: a stack of flatbreads, wrapped in a cloth, that were going to go moldy if I didn’t get to them in the next few days. “If I don’t come back, there are emergency provisions hidden in the large oak that’s in the front yard of the blue house. Four doors to the left of the compound. In a brown backpack. You can have it if I don’t find you first.”

  She nodded at me. “Agreed.”

  “See you,” I said.

  “See you,” she echoed, and then veered off course, running back in the direction we had come, back towards the heart of the city.

  I kept running away, knowing the man had been heading in this direction before I had gone back for those vitamins. He couldn’t have gotten too far ahead of me.

  There! The doe was still slung on his back as he slowly trotted along.

  I slowed my pace enough to raise my gun, aiming for his leg. I pressed the trigger, cursing as I missed by an inch.

  He immediately dropped his load, raising his gun and firing back.

  I didn’t hesitate, just kept shooting.

  Miss. Miss.

  I ducked behind a tree, reaching the gun around it to keep firing. I pulled the trigger, knowing that, this time, the bullet would hit its mark.

  Nothing happened. My gun wasn’t shooting, even as I repeatedly hit the trigger.

  I pulled my arm in, looking down at the gun. It was out of bullets.

  “Out of ammo, darling?” a deep voice called out to me. “Can’t kill much with an empty gun.”

  I froze, trying to think quickly. Hatred boiled thick in my veins. I wanted to kill this man so badly, but he was right: no bullets meant no death. Why hadn’t I thought to check before heading after him? There had been so many fallen guns by the clearing, so many spare bullets I could have grabbed if I had only realized. . .

  “Look, I won’t shoot you. Nothing fair about shooting a defenseless girl.” His voice wasn’t coming nearer, but I felt the threat in any case. If I ran, he could easily shoot me dead – like I believed he wasn’t going to shoot me. But I couldn’t hide forever. Furthermore, every moment he still breathed made me more and more aware of my aloneness. The aloneness that he had caused.

  I wanted revenge.

  I wanted him dead.

  I clenched my fists in frustration, digging my nails into my skin on one hand as I dug the empty gun into my skin on the other. I wanted to punch something. Someone.

  The man grunted, and I heard him tear a branch off a tree, then another. Did that mean he’d put his gun down? Should I risk running?

  The sound of a match being lit met my ears. He was starting a fire.

  “You can run if you’d like. No point in killing you if you’re leaving me alone. As to that, no point in killing you if you don’t pose a threat.” His voice was coming nearer. Oh God, he was going to kill me. He really was just teasing me about letting me run.

  No, wait. There was one other thing he could want from me, other than killing me. I couldn’t run, though. If I lost sight of him now, I might never see him again. Never seeing him again meant never killing him.

  He appeared from around my tree, coming to face me. As I had noticed before, he was big, but all of his bulk was muscle: his shoulders were wide-set, his arms and chest large under a long-sleeved thermal. His head was covered in shocks of auburn curls, and freckles traced his cheeks, throwing off my ability to determine his age. Dirt rimmed the creases of his face, and caked into the drying sweat on his neck. I stared deep into his dark brown eyes, hoping to communicate my revulsion with him without words.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “Why did you follow me?”

  “I’m going to kill you,” I told him directly, spitting out the words like venom.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Not without bullets you ain’t. Why are you so set on killing me? I let you live back there, didn’t I?” He pointed in the direction we just came from.

  “Let me live?” I demanded. “Might as well have killed me, since you killed both my parents.”

  He took a step back, regarding me. “Huh. Unusual.”

  I couldn’t hold back my rage anymore; I was absolutely seething. I charged at him, the butt of my gun held up threateningly.

  He snatched me by my upheld wrist, pulling me right off my feet and into the air. He held me up and away from him as my left hand clawed at his fingers, trying to get him to let go.

  “You must really be angry at me, to do something as stupid as that,” he said thoughtfully, as if I were simply an interesting phenomena to him. He tilted his head to the side. “Or maybe just stupid.”

  I slapped at his hand, trying to aim a kick at him with my too-short legs.

  He sighed, dropping me to the ground and taking his gun out of his belt. He trained it on me, coarsely rubbing a hand through his hair, seemingly exhausted. “Right. You have a few options. One, walk away, go back to wherever you came from. Move on with your life. Realize your situation isn’t unique in any way. Families? They just don’t work out in this world. Yours would have ended eventually.

  “Option two: attack me again with no ammo, and I’ll shoot you just like I shot your parents. Option three: come eat with me, get some nutrition to that brain of yours so you can think more clearly about the first two options. The deer’s too much for me to eat on my own before it goes rancid anyway.”

  His last sentence fueled my rage even further. “Then why did you kill my parents for it?” I shouted.

  He didn’t lower the gun, just raised an eyebrow. “I don’t kill without good reason. I was already tracking that herd, and was about to take one of those deer down when your lot showed up and got them going. I haven’t eaten anything substantial in weeks, haven’t come across any good prey – been living off of berries and roots. It’s gotten to where I’m going to either die of starvation, or kill for what’s rightfully mine in the first place. I chose the latter.”

  “You didn’t think we’d share with you?”

  He sneered. “Hardly. What kind of fairy tale are you living in?”

  “Then why are you offering to share with me?”

  He shrugged. “Now that I got the doe all to myself, it’s too much food. It’ll go to waste otherwise.”

  I thought about this, sucking at my cheeks, eyeing him up and down as if I could find a previously missed weakness. I didn’t care what his rationale was; I wanted him dead. If he hadn’t existed in the first place, my parents would still be alive. But how would I kill him with no bullets?

  My stomach growled.

  He raised an eyebrow knowingly at me. “Is that a yes, then?”

  I jutted out my chin. “Why haven’t you done anything to me yet?” I asked, rather than answering him.

  “I already told you: I have no reason to kill you unless you pose a threat. Currently, you don’t pose a threat.” He smiled. “And I’m kind of enjoying our interaction at the moment.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not what I mean.” I flushed, looking down at my feet. “It’s very unusual for a male to be alone with me without . . . doing anything.” Would my saying so remind him that that’s exactly what he should be doing? I braced myself, dreading what might come next. If he was going to do anything, though, better to get it over with.

  “Well, I can see why - you’re very pretty. But that’s not my sort of thing.” He stuck his gun back in his belt. “Come on. The fire should have built up nicely by now, but I still need to get this deer cut up before we can cook it. And, as I mentioned before, I’m starving.”

  He walked away from me. Just like that. He walked right past me, leaving his back open for attack as he returned to his prize.

  His confidence was infuriating. Why did he have to be so above me? I wasn’t stupid. I was angry. He had just killed my parents. And now he had the audacity to just walk away, as if I posed absolutely no threat to him.

  In fact, he had said exactly that. I posed no threat to him, because he was bigger than me, stronger than me, and I had no bu
llets.

  I turned and looked around the tree at him; he now knelt beside a roaring fire, and was using a ragged-edged knife to skin the dead doe.

  He had listed my options as he saw them, but, as I thought through those options, as I watched him skin and slice into the deer, I recognized a fourth option.

  I was going to kill him. It might not be today, but it would happen. I just needed an opening and a weapon. And I wasn’t letting him out of my sight until I had those.

  He would die.

  The meat sizzled as he slapped thick strips directly onto the burning wood. It took only moments for the smell to waft through the air toward me.

  My stomach growled again.

  Compelled by my hunger, I started walking forward.

  “Why isn’t rape your sort of thing?” I asked, settling in on the other side of the fire. I had been trying to sound blasé, but the words came out strained.

  He glanced at me as he continued to work on the deer, slicing and slapping meat into the fire. “That’s personal,” he replied shortly.

  I grunted. “Well, I think you owe me whatever I want, considering you killed my parents.”

  He pointed the bloody knife at me. “I owe you a meal, as far as I see things, and that is all.” He stood, grabbing the deer carcass and walking off, knife still in hand.

  “Where are you going?” I asked, hurriedly standing to follow.

  “I’m hiding the deer up a tree for later, and then I’m going to the stream to wash up. You feel free to stay with the fire.”

  I followed beside him.

  “Or not,” he muttered.

  “You said all you owed me was a meal. What if you just leave me back there and I never see you again?”

  “Sentimental, are we?”

  “No,” I responded, irritated. “I’m going to kill you, remember?”

  “So you’re going to follow me to make sure I don’t escape while you’re still unarmed?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what? You’ll wait for bullets to magically appear in your rifle?”

  “I didn’t say I had a perfect plan, but I can’t just let you walk away.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What?”

  “You’re assuming a lot on the possibility of getting a weapon while never leaving my side.”

  “What do you mean? I get a weapon, then you’re dead.”

  “No. If you get a weapon, then you’re dead. Remember? The moment you become a threat, I kill you. Feel free to follow me for as long as you want, but it might not end the way you’d like. In the meantime, I’ll be glad of your company.”

  I twisted my mouth at this. “You will?”

  “Yes,” he said, stopping beside a tree and shoving the still-bloody knife into the bark. “It gets lonely, being on my own. I’m sure, one day, you’ll know the feeling. That is, if you succeed in killing me.” Using the knife to support his weight, he put his toes against the bark and started climbing.

  I couldn’t help but admire the way he managed to climb with one arm, still carrying the doe in the other. Every time he pulled the knife free to replace it further up, there was a split second of free-fall with his toes braced against the bark, knees bent to an acute angle – and then the knife was back in the tree, and he kept climbing, taking a few more steps upward.

  The branch he chose to place the doe upon was only a few heads higher than his height, than that of an abnormally tall male, but it would definitely cut back on other animals finding the food, as well as other humans – as long as they didn’t happen to look directly up this tree.

  He dropped back down to the ground, sparing me a glance as he started for the nearby stream.

  “I already know how it feels to be alone,” I told him bitterly, watching as he squatted down and rinsed his hands and knife; he cupped some water in one hand, splashing it onto his face and neck, rinsing away the grime that had been there.

  “No, you don’t,” he replied, standing and walking past me; he gave me a wide birth as he headed back for the fire. “You only know the initial sting of loss. You haven’t had time to dwell on that loss, and you haven’t had time to really be alone. That’s part of the reason you’re so focused on killing me; it gives you something to focus on, besides the reality of your lonely future.”

  “But I’m already alone,” I insisted.

  “No,” he said, looking at me. “You’re with me. You’re not alone.”

  “You don’t count.”

  He laughed. “Good to know. Ready to eat?”

  The smell of the deer meat made my mouth water; it was still sizzling away, not too far from where we’d gone. The man stuck his knife into a slice, holding it up, out of the flames.

  “You have something to hold this with?” He asked. “I ain’t giving you my knife.”

  “What are you afraid of?” I taunted, turning to rummage in my mother’s backpack, bringing out a flat piece of spare wood she’d stored there for whatever reason. We’d had knives, too, like the one this man had. However, Dad had always been the one to carry them, and I had unthinkingly left them with his body, just as I’d left all the other guns.

  I held out the board, and the man leaned forward, carefully easing the meat off his knife and onto it. The meat was gray and white from the ashes of the fire, but smelled enticingly good. I immediately leaned down and began to tear chunks out of it with my teeth.

  I watched the man as I ate, as he ate, loathing the way he used his jaw to rip the meat away from his knife. He was only eating this meat because he had killed my parents.

  But yet . . . how did I even have an appetite right now? All I could understand was the incurable hunger, and that I had to satisfy it. The hunger was like every single other day of my life, and it didn’t feel any different today, even though my parents were gone. Why was that?

  Even though there was a certain shock churning in my skull, tying my gut into knots, I had always known this would happen. That they would be gone one day. That they could be gone any day. That was how the world was: ripping life away with absolutely no notice.

  That knowledge did not stop me from wanting to kill this man, from wanting to rip his throat out the same way he ripped my parents’ lives away, the same way he was ripping the deer flesh with his teeth before chewing and swallowing it.

  “Want seconds?” he asked.

  I glared at him with all the hatred I felt. Him. He represented all the evils of the world. Why should anyone be separated from their loved ones?

  He faltered at my glare. “Er, is that a no?”

  “No, it’s a yes. Give it to me.”

  “Right.” He speared the meat with his knife and leaned forward to place it on my proffered plate. He muttered something under his breath.

  “What was that?” I asked, regaining my composure as I began to eat again.

  “I called you a crazy chick.”

  “Yes. Be careful, because one of these days I’m going to rip your throat out.” I gave him a meaningful look.

  He chuckled. “I understand you’re serious, but you need to relax a little. It’s going to be a while before the opportunity presents itself – if ever.”

  I wanted to punch him for suggesting I relax, but he’d shoot me if I tried, so instead I just finished my dinner.

  “Are you thinking more clearly now?” he asked.

  “If by ‘thinking clearly’ you mean, am I going to let you live, then no,” I replied, settling more comfortably against my tree, staring him down as he wiped his hands and knife clean on a rag.

  “That’s unfortunate,” he replied amiably, sticking the knife in his pocket and reclining backward. “I was truly hoping you’d be more reasonable.”

  I didn’t grace his comment with an answer, focusing instead on how nice it would feel to strangle him. The fire cracked, and darkness settled. When I was certain he wouldn’t see in the shadows cast by the fire, I pulled the bracelet from my shirtsleeve, grasping it in my hands and finally allowing a
few tears to trickle out. The sound of the fire was soothing, but not soothing enough to push away the ache in my chest as I recognized that, if my parents were still alive, we would by lying together now, my hand grasped in Mom’s, and Dad’s arm wrapped around her.

  Slowly, though, before I truly recognized I was doing so, I fell asleep.

  Chapter 3

  The sun beat against my eyelids, and I squeezed them more tightly shut to block out the light, my fist crushing the object in my hand. My eyes felt heavy, worn, sore. I floated between the states of sleep and wakefulness, my mother’s face dancing in front of me.

  I heard the crunch of boots near my head, and reality came flooding back.

  My eyes were sore because I’d cried as I fell asleep, missing the feel of Mom’s hand in mine. The object I was crushing in my fist was the silver and blue bracelet, her last token of affection for me. The crunch of boot was almost assuredly her escaping murderer.

  I jumped to my feet, shoving the bracelet back up my arm and looking around for a glimpse of him.

  The fire was a dead pile of ashes now, and the man was just beyond that, disappearing into the trees.

  I ran to catch up with him.

  “You left without me!” I accused.

  He rolled his eyes. “I have a skinny teenaged girl on my tail trying to kill me, and you think I’m just going to sit around and wait for her to wake up?”

  “But I thought you enjoyed my company.”

  “To an extent. It’s bad for morale to be glared at all the time by your sole companion. I’m not going out of my way to let you tag along; I’m not that lonely. Though I did appreciate you not trying to steal my knife and kill me in my sleep last night.”

  His last words were like a knock to the head. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I was so exhausted after the big meal, and had just wanted to lay down, and had been missing my parents’ presence so much. . .

  “Though now that I’m mentioning it, don’t try it. I’m a light sleeper; it’s a good way to get yourself strangled.”

  I grunted, annoyed.

  After a moment, though, I couldn’t help asking. “What’s on the agenda today?” Maybe if I knew what the day held in store for me, I’d be able to see my opening in advance – the opening I needed to kill him.