Reapers (Breakers, Book 4)

by Edward W. Robertson

  Ellie threw her rifle over her shoulder. It smelled like spent powder. "Would help if I could hit more than atmosphere."

  "A bird on the wing with a rifle?" Hobson said. "You're a farmer, not John Wayne."

  "It doesn't matter. I need to be better than this."

  She was still angry when they went to bed in a farmhouse. The next afternoon, the sun poked out for the first time in days, but its weak rays did nothing to diminish the snow. They made fewer miles than the first day. Dee complained about her calves and they rested four different times. Ellie's hurt just as bad, but she forced herself to press on. They sheltered the night in a home just off the road. It was small, but that was better. Easier to heat. She plucked pine cones from the yard and they dug out the seeds with their knives.

  On the third day, the rice ran out. Ellie was hungry from the moment she got up till the minute she went to bed. They needed more food than they'd been eating; they were only advancing about fifteen miles a day, but each one was grueling. The best pine cones yielded just a dime-sized pile of seeds and extracting them was laborious. But with such sparse game, and snow covering anything green, that was how they spent their nights, prying seeds lose with the tips of their knives while the fire crackled and their socks steamed. Ellie passed around the chocolate she'd meant to barter. She hadn't eaten chocolate in two years and it tasted so sweet it hurt her mouth.

  She watched the horizons for smoke and the towns for signs of life: anywhere she could trade her tea and silver for bread and meat. Near Kingston, a column of smoke climbed to meet the gray clouds, but it was in the western foothills a half day's walk through the woods. Any survivors from these lands had moved away from the road or learned to hide the evidence of their lives.

  No sooner had the sun come up than Dee shot a squirrel from the tree. As Ellie dressed it, forcing Dee to observe and learn, Hobson blasted a rabbit across the road. He cleaned it and they built a fire and spitted the meat and ate right there. It was greasy and gamey, but after a day of nothing but pine nuts, it tasted like fresh honey.

  After that, they didn't eat for two days.

  They soon grew silent, focused on the snow ahead, on smoothing a trail for the two behind them, on the grumbling of their guts and the aches in their legs and heads. With an hour of daylight left, they quit marching to scour the homes of a subdivision, but the canned corn they turned up was bulging with botulism.

  Ellie stood on the front porch and stared at the snow-clogged street. At the corner, a yellow lab bounded from behind a home, snow spraying with each jerky leap. Ellie raised her rifle and set her eye behind the scope.

  "What are you doing?" Dee said behind her.

  Ellie lowered the gun. "Thought it was chasing a rabbit."

  That night, she ate more pine nuts. She could feel the hollowness in her belly but it no longer hurt. She dreamt she swept the snow away from the back garden and revealed a potato casserole, still warm. Ellie knew it wasn't a sign—it couldn't be—but when she woke, she went out back with a snow shovel and dug down to the grass.

  At best, they were halfway to New York. The snow was an inch or two shallower than it had been outside Albany but still deep enough to snarl bicycles. She figured it would be another five days on foot. With their stomachs empty and their muscles flagging, they wouldn't make it.

  While Dee was out using the bathroom and brushing her teeth, Hobson walked up beside Ellie. "Well?"

  "Well what?" she said.

  "As to the matter of our impending starvation."

  "We'll find something."

  "Perhaps we could hasten that process by dedicating half a day to a deer hunt."

  She scowled into the glare of the snow. "Seen any tracks?"

  "A few," he said, voice pitched high with the concession that he might be generous with his estimate. "And I doubt the game warden will fine us if we happen to bag a doe."

  She laughed dryly. "How can there be so much land and so little to eat?"

  "There's plenty to eat. The problem is nature has helpfully preserved it beneath a foot of goddamn snow."

  "My fear is we go out to hunt and come back with nothing. Meanwhile, there could be a populated settlement two miles down the road, or wasteland all the way to New York. What's the right move?"

  He rubbed his hand across his salt and pepper stubble. "That's the conundrum, isn't it? All we can do is guess."

  "I'm not much for guessing."

  "So I gathered." The back door slammed. Dee scuffed her boots. Hobson raised his eyebrows. "So?"

  "We'll see what the road brings today." Ellie wasn't certain she was making the right call, but the act of deciding brought strength back to her nerves. "If it's more nothing, we'll hunt tomorrow. Wait any longer and we might not have the energy."

  "Fortunately for us, it doesn't take much get up and go to sit behind a tree and wait for a buck to snort." He clapped her shoulder. "We'll make it, Ellie."

  "What are you guys talking about?" Dee said.

  "Think we'll try hunting tomorrow," Ellie said. Maybe it was just the tan she'd earned from the sun on the snow, but Dee's cheeks looked sharper. "Some venison would be pretty good about now, right?"

  "Right now, a pig's asshole would taste pretty good."

  "Jesus!"

  "Wouldn't it? Some butter and pepper? Sweet potatoes on the side?"

  Ellie refused to dignify that. Especially since denying it would be a lie. They strapped on their snowshoes and hefted their packs and continued into the white.

  The cars on the shoulder of the highway were suggestions of steel under snowy drapes. Ellie's knees didn't want to lift, but she forced herself to smooth the trail, one step after another, using the rote repetition of her feet to prevent her head from dwelling on the emptiness of her stomach. She had never been without food for so long. Not even after the collapse. If anything, it had been easier then. Such a swift and total end that kitchens and pantries were full of cans and jars and sealed bags. Every house you visited yielded a new buffet.

  But those days were gone. The leftovers had spoiled or been devoured. The old world was now as bereft as the blank plains of the Hudson Valley. You coaxed your life from that, or you starved.

  They had done that, the people of the lakes. Even George, troubled as his farm became, had built a lasting corner for himself. He and Quinn hadn't wanted, not truly; Ellie's farm produced enough for the lot of them. Self-sufficient, independent, they would have been immune to the tricks and temptations of outsiders.

  But George's shortcuts doomed him. His pride ate holes in that armor of self-sufficiency. He couldn't bring himself to rely on Ellie—whether because she was a woman, or simply a person who wasn't himself—no matter how temporarily, no matter how close their two families were to becoming one. So the offer of the men in the black fedoras had penetrated that armor like a crossbow bolt: take on our line of credit, and everything you deserve can become yours.

  It was a hook like any other, attached to a transparent line of terrible strength. And the mouth at the end was always hungry.

  A fat flake of snow struck her face. She blinked, then laughed. Gone delirious with hunger. She breathed, bringing herself back. And saw a column of smoke not long to the west.

  She stopped and pointed. "Smoke."

  Tired and hungry, the others had been paying all their attention to their feet. They looked up, wary, as if language could no longer be trusted.

  Hobson's whole face brightened. "How interesting."

  "People?" Dee said.

  "Has to be." Ellie brought her binoculars to her face and saw black. She'd left the lens cap on. She pulled it off and tried again. The woods were much too dense, but she didn't need to see the house to know it was there. The smoke of a forest fire would form a plane. This was a single rising line.

  "Shall we approach?" Hobson said. "Or do you deem it too risky?"

  "Everything we do now is a risk." She capped her binoculars, oriented herself to the hills, and stepped off the road.


  Scattered snowflakes sieved through the trees. A squirrel chided them from the branches and Ellie reached for her gun, then thought perhaps it wouldn't do to be shooting at things on their way to a stranger's home. It smelled of snow, like always, but within ten minutes, she smelled smoke, too. Somehow, it reminded her of bacon. Her stomach sprang to life with a fierce ache.

  The home waited in a clearing of tree trunks and drifted snow. Its lower windows were boarded over and the side of the yard was filled with trucks in various states of dismantling. A pillar of gray smoke unfurled from the chimney. The home was painted dull brown with irregular black zebra stripes—woodland camouflage.

  "Careful," Ellie said. "But try not to look like you're being too careful."

  "What?" Dee said.

  Ellie opened her mouth to holler a greeting. The front door parted before she got out a single word. A man stood in the doorway, bearded, rifle in hand. "Keep your hands where I can see them."

  "We're out of food," Ellie said.

  "Eat each other. Problem solved."

  "I've got trade. Gold, silver—"

  He snorted, breath misting in the cold. "I'm a man, not a crow. I don't give a shit about shiny rocks."

  "Coffee," she tried. "Tea. Some medicine, maybe."

  "'Maybe' like St. John's nonsense? Or the good stuff?"

  "Pharmaceutical. And 'maybe' as in I don't want to give it up."

  "There's a reason 'pain' starts with 'pay.'" He glanced between them. "Where you from?"

  "Up north."

  The man smiled. "You ask inside our home, but all you'll trust us with is 'up north'?"

  "Albany," she said. The lie was instinctive, and she knew at once it was a bad one. Her mind had seized the first name that wandered through it. It was the kind of mistake she could only have made after days of nonstop effort without food.

  "Albany," he said, before she could backtrack, rolling the word around his mouth like a piece of hard candy. He was early middle-aged and had an upstate accent whose stretched vowels sounded tailor-made for bellowing across the wooded valleys of New York. "What brings you down here?"

  "Looking for someone."

  "Bet you are," he mused. He tipped his head toward the house. "Come on in."

  They filed up the steps, Hobson taking up the rear. As he entered, the man scanned the yard, face somber, and closed the door. With the windows boarded, the front rooms rested in twilight; in the back of the house, the kitchen was bright with snow-reflected sun.

  Ellie more or less stopped functioning as soon as they got inside. The whole house smelled like roasting chicken.

  "Let me grab my wife," the man said.

  He left them alone in the kitchen where a round-topped wood-fired oven crisped the skin of a bird that had been born for Ellie to eat. Her mouth flooded with saliva. Between the smoke, the smell, and the sudden warmth after hours of cold marching, Ellie was mesmerized. The few non-food thoughts she was capable of fielding were directed toward restructuring the remainder of their trip. If they bartered for enough food that they wouldn't have to forage, they could make the city in five days. Four, if they pressed hard. Meanwhile, the odds of dying in an emaciated huddle in the middle of the road receded beyond the horizon.

  "God damn slavers," a woman said behind them.

  Ellie whirled. A young woman faced them, eyes wide-set and furious. She pointed a double-barreled shotgun at Ellie's chest. Behind her, the bearded man walked across the linoleum, steel handcuffs glinting in his hands.

  19

  "Lucy?" Tilly clung hard to the wall at the edge of the roof, listing like the tower had tilted twenty degrees. "What did you do to me?"

  "I drugged you, idiot." Lucy strolled across the rooftop. "Now be a good girl and go to sleep."

  Tilly's eyes were as wild as a newborn foal's and her knees were just as weak; when she tried to bolt, her leg wobbled and she sat down hard. "Ow."

  "Hold still before you hurt yourself."

  Tilly blinked and slapped at the ground, dragging herself toward the doorway. Lucy sighed and stepped in front of her. Tilly smacked at her shins, limp-handed, then slumped to her back and tried to roll through Lucy like a log on a slope. She banged into Lucy's legs and rocked to a stop.

  "He'll come for me," the girl slurred. Her eyes were outlined with kohl like an Egyptian queen. "He'll rescue me. You'll rue it."

  Lucy laughed. "Rue what, precisely?"

  "All that which is rueful." Tilly gazed up at the clouds and stars, breathing shallowly. Lucy folded her arms and waited. Tilly's eyes closed. She snored softly.

  Lucy went to the edge of the roof for a look at the street, then picked Tilly up and slung her halfway over her shoulder, smelling peach perfume. At the door, Lucy shifted her weight to free her hand and open it, then trudged onto the landing.

  She had a problem. The stairs were pitch black. And there were a lot of them. Tilly weighed on her like a sack of oats; no way she could carry a candle and her friend's fat ass.

  After a moment's thought, she plunked Tilly on the landing, fired up a candle, set it on the landing below, then went back up for Tilly. Bracing herself against the wall, she plodded down the steps, bearing Tilly to the landing below the candle, where it was now too dark to proceed. She lowered Tilly, caught her breath, went up for the candle, and brought it to the landing below the unconscious girl, who she then picked up again and bore another flight lower until the light got too wimpy to go on.

  It was a hell of a lot of work. Especially heaving Tilly up off the cement each time. But it beat the tar out of stumbling in the dark and breaking both their necks. The stairwell was nearly as cold as the night, but by the time she got downstairs, she was damp with sweat, tremble-legged, and utterly out of breath.

  She rested on the lobby's cool tile, Tilly sprawled beside her. Among her other preparations, she'd gone to a gardening supply store for a wheelbarrow, which she'd left in the front corner of the lobby where Tilly would be unlikely to see it. Or to care, even if she did notice. All kinds of junk was abandoned at odd places around the city. The cause was obvious: with all this free shit lying around, scavengers gathered it up by the packload, only to swiftly decide that it was too heavy, bulky, or outright useless to carry after all. As a result, debris was scattered hither and yon, and tended to pile up at places where transportation was difficult (such as stairs; Lucy had had to clean this building's stairwell top to bottom before enacting her plan) or where a sudden case of reality set in (like outside doorways, where people remembered just how long of a walk they had ahead of them, or at curbs, where they tried to hop on bikes and discovered they were too top-heavy to continue). After a while, you got to where you hardly noticed, but every now and then, when you stumbled over a speaker on a staircase or a herd of Beanie Babies on the sidewalk, you'd swear that, now all the humans were gone, the objects had decided to get up and walk around like the tiger in Calvin and Hobbes.

  As soon as Lucy had the strength to stand again, she hoisted Tilly inside the wheelbarrow, careful not to whack the girl's lolling head on the metal rim, shouldered her pack, and pushed her way out the front door, rubber wheel bouncing down the steps.

  She grinned at the night. The next few miles would be a bitch, but they were all that stood between her and getting out of this wretched place.

  She got less than a block before footsteps pounded down the street.

  Lucy swerved into the nearest storefront and leaned around the corner. Five men ran down the street and headed straight for the apartment she'd just extracted Tilly from. One of the runners kept his back so straight it didn't look like he was moving at all. Dark as it was, Lucy knew that stillness anywhere. Nerve.

  He headed into the apartment building with two of the men. The other pair stayed outside, eyes on the street. Tilly made a choking noise, like she was gagging on her own spit. Lucy grabbed her chin and turned it sideways and the noise stopped.

  Five minutes later, Nerve walked out the front door and sp
oke to his people. While two remained streetside, the other three went door to door. Lucy wheeled Tilly inside the store. It smelled heavily of leather. Coats hung from racks, but others had been cast to the floor, snarling the lanes. She powered through them and located a staircase that fed into the upstairs apartments. Quietly as she could, she ran up to the third floor, found an unlocked door, stashed her bag, and came back for Tilly, whose white shins dangled from the edges of the wheelbarrow, legs spread most unladylike. Outside, men called back and forth, growing nearer.

  Lucy picked Tilly up. Her back twinged. Halfway up the third floor, she slipped on a step and crashed down on the side of her foot. Her ankle collapsed. Pain rifled up her ligaments. Somehow, she hung tight to Tilly, mashing the girl into the wall to prevent them both from falling. Someone shouted, muffled. Using the wall for support, Lucy slid upright. White heat shot directly from her leg to her brain, but the initial pain had already begun to fade, and she forced herself to climb on. Tilly's warm body dragged her down like a thousand pounds of sun-baked sidewalk. She got to the third floor landing, gasped for breath, then limped her way to the apartment and locked the door.

  She threw Tilly down on the bed, generating a cloud of dust, and slumped her back against the door. Tears of pain slid down her cheeks. Things had gone from swell to fucked in a hurry. Tilly must have left the forged note in her apartment. Nerve found it, saw his faked handwriting, gathered his people, and ran straight for the address. That was some garbage luck right there. Ten more minutes and she'd have been half a mile away. Another hour and she could have been up into Kono territory. Ghosted, gone.

  She went to the window and parted the blinds. Two men had run off to have a scout around, but the others continued their methodical sweep of the street. They weren't in much hurry. But she'd left a time on the note, too. Nerve would know she couldn't have gotten far.

  "Tilly?" he called, voice echoing down the channels between the buildings. "Are you there?"