by AJ Powers
“Look, I was just trying to help,” he said, gasping for air between words.
The girl remained silent, her stare piercing like she was trying to read his mind and discern his true intentions. Clay closed his eyes and sighed deeply, more from the exhaustion of the scuffle than fear that he was about to die.
The girl lowered the shotgun and then laughed. “You were trying to help me? Seems like the other way around,” she said sarcastically, years beyond her age.
She walked over to the lifeless body pinning Clay to the ground and began pulling on his arm. Her efforts were mostly ineffective, but it was just enough for Clay to maneuver his way out from beneath the hefty body.
He pulled a rag out from his pack and began wiping the blood off of his face. He flinched, realizing just how tender his face was. Another couple of shots like that, and he would have blacked out.
The girl picked up Clay’s pistol which had ended up down the hall a good ways, and then searched the bodies. “That’s what you get for coming into my house,” she jested to the big man’s corpse.
Clay found the one-sided transaction to be a bit creepy for a young girl, but everyone has their way of coping in the world. He wasn’t about to judge.
She returned to the door and invited Clay to follow. Clay was still shaking the cobwebs from his head after the vicious attack, so he hadn’t even noticed she was in possession of his Sig. He slowly stood up and stumbled his way through the door. She locked up behind them and led the way to the cafeteria which was her home. It was the innermost area of the building, and all of the obvious entries were ably barricaded. The only way in or out was the door that they had just come through, and she had the only key. It was actually a pretty nice setup, all things considered. She had turtled herself into a relatively secure area, and Clay could see a few quick escape routes that she had designed in the event someone broke through. Smart kid.
“The name’s Dusty,” she said and extended her hand.
“Clay,” he said and shook her hand.
Dusty walked over to a table stacked with clothing and other fabric and returned with a ratty old bath towel. “Here, take this.”
Clay removed his rag which had become saturated with blood and took the towel from her. He pressed it against the gash over his eye and applied as much pressure as he could tolerate.
“So, what are ya doin’ in my home, Clay?” she got right down to business.
“I was just about dead in the storm last night when I stumbled across the school—I mean you’re home. I found the chained doors ‘round back and managed to get in through your little maze.”
“Yeah, and your tracks to those doors probably lured those two jackals in right behind ya.”
Clay found it quite improbable that the tracks hadn’t been covered by the dumping snow, not to mention he had barely fit through that entrance. There was no way Tons-of-Fun out in the hallway could have made it through. But he didn’t argue. “I’m sorry about that. I wasn’t really thinking. I had been traveling all day, and honestly, I really thought I was going to die last night.”
Dusty put up a good façade. She acted as if she were as tough as nails—a little girl you didn’t want to mess with—but she also wasn’t completely devoid of compassion. She let her guard down a little. “That sucks,” she said with the first sign of emotion since he met her, “I’ve been there before, so I know what you mean.”
Clay finally managed to stop his bleeding long enough to apply a proper bandage with some help from Dusty. His face had already started to swell and turn several shades of purple. “Man, you look terrible,” Dusty said as she examined his wounds. “He really got you good.”
“Yeah. It feels like I stepped into the ring with Ali,” Clay joked.
“You did what with who?” she replied.
“Nevermind.”
Dusty went to the kitchen and returned with some water. Clay quickly indulged in the beverage. “So, what’s your story?” he asked.
“What’s there to tell? My parents are dead; I’m not.”
She kept her cards close. Revealing the past can allow an enemy to exploit a weakness, and she was keenly aware of that fact. She wasn’t treating Clay like a foe, but he was not a friend either, and he didn’t blame her for that. In fact, it was downright smart.
“So, what about you?”
Clay filled her in on some high level details, but, like her, was cautious not to reveal too much. It’s not that he didn’t trust her, but it was just how he did things. Never divulge more than necessary.
“So, how did you end up all the way out here? Isn’t your place like 70 miles away or something?” she asked.
“Not quite that far, but it’s a pretty long hike for sure.” Clay guzzled down the rest of his water before continuing, “I’m out here looking for food.”
“Hah!” she replied sharply. “Good luck finding it out here.”
“Well, you’re surviving.”
“I get by…mostly because I’m a good shot,” she said proudly and nodded towards a lever action rifle leaning against the wall next to her cot. “If you’re looking for stored foods, you can forget it. I haven’t even found a can of beans in a year or more.”
It was apparent she had been living in the school for quite some time: the way the building was locked down; her little home in the cafeteria; those things would have taken a lot of time, especially for a kid her age. He couldn’t imagine how old she was when she had to start fending for herself with no one to care for her and no one to comfort her when the nightmares started. Yet, somehow she had prevailed. Maybe the ‘hard-as-stone’ act wasn’t actually an act at all.
“Well,” Clay said, “it’s the only chance I have, so here I am.”
The two chatted throughout the afternoon. It was evident that Dusty had not had someone to talk to in quite some time and was pleased to have company that wasn’t trying to kill her. She started to warm up to Clay as the day went on, giving him some more insight into her background, but she remained guarded when it came to vulnerabilities.
She invited him to stay for the night since the conditions outside had only slightly improved from earlier. He thanked her for the hospitality and offered her dinner in return. Megan had packed him a half pound of beef that he kept in a small pocket on his pack. With temperatures never getting above 35, there was little chance for spoilage.
“What’s it taste like?” she asked.
“You’ve never had beef?”
“Both my parents were vegans before everything happened. I’ll never forget the night we all had to split a can of pork-n-beans,” she said nearly laughing. “It was either eat it or starve to death. My dad gagged, and my mom cried,” Dusty said as she shook her head with shame.
How did this girl ever survive? Clay thought to himself.
“If my parents hadn’t been killed over a couple of cans of fruit, they surely would have died when I took down my first rabbit; I ate almost half of it raw.”
That bit of information shocked Clay. He had never been desperate enough to eat raw meat. Wild game, especially, came with risks if eating it uncooked. It was not something most people would do unless they fancied a rather unpleasant few days leading to their death. Either she was embellishing the story a tad, or she was lucky she didn’t get sick.
They built a small fire in a pot in the kitchen and sat it beneath the range so most of the smoke would go up through the vent. Clay browned the beef in one of the many pans lying around the industrial-sized kitchen and then served the meal: beef with a side of onion straws, the kind dumped on top of a baked casserole.
Dusty inhaled the food in mere seconds. She was clearly malnourished, but you wouldn’t know that just by looking at her face. She had chubby cheeks—the kind that grandmothers could pinch for hours; freckles dotted all across her face; and dirty blond hair that had clumped together in more places than he could count. But she probably wasn’t an ounce over 60 pounds.
“That… was incredible,”
she said licking the plate.
Clay looked down at his food; he hadn’t eaten but half of his meal. “Here,” he said and handed the plate to her. She stared at him like he was missing his head. “Honestly, I’m not very hungry, plus I really should patch myself up,” he said and pointed at his shoulder.
Dusty snatched the plate from him and began eating, making an effort to savor the bites a little more this time.
Clay took his jacket off and examined his shoulder. He was fortunate that the first barrel the scrawny man fired was birdshot. Had it been the other barrel—which Dusty unloaded on the bigger man—the buckshot would have been much more destructive to Clay. He observed four small wounds and several bruised spots. Birdshot notoriously lacks penetration, and Clay’s extra layers stopped most from going through.
He retrieved a pair of tweezers from his first aid kit and requested Dusty’s help once again. He tore open an alcohol swab, the last one in the kit, and rubbed it on the wounds. The alcohol burned.
Per Clay’s request, Dusty brought a candle over. He stuck the tips of the tweezers into the flame for about 30 seconds and handed them to Dusty who already knew what had to be done.
Without fanfare or dramatic catchphrases, Dusty started digging into the wounds, fishing out each of the tiny pellets lodged in Clay’s shoulder. The pain was intense, but at least he was feeling it, which was more than he could say for the two cold bodies out in the hall.
“Ouch!” Clay exclaimed as she pulled the last pellet out.
“Don’t be such a wuss,” she said callously.
“You ever been shot before?” Clay fired back.
She tried not to grin, but couldn’t help it. “No comment,” she said as she handed him the tweezers. “There you go.”
They both had an appreciation for the moment of camaraderie. It was especially a welcomed change of pace in Dusty’s life.
Dusty grabbed a towel and wiped the blood off her hands while Clay dressed the wound and downed some of the aspirin he had found in the teacher’s desk. His head was already starting to pound, and it would only worsen.
Dusty apologized for not having another cot. She told him where he could find another, but it required leaving the cafeteria and returning to the gym. It was already dark outside, and he was not up for the trip, so he spread his sleeping bag out and got comfortable on the floor.
His body finally started to relax, and he began to doze off when Dusty, who had been silent for the past 20 minutes, spoke.
“So, what do you miss about the old world?” she asked.
Clay hadn’t thought much about it recently. It usually made him think of family and that led him down a path of grief and sorrow. “I miss the unlimited access to food and supplies,” he said. “Even if the weather was bad, if I really needed food, I could find a way to travel; step into a toasty-warm store; buy what I needed; and then get back home to my toasty-warm house.” He thought of the great ice storm around his 11th birthday. He and his dad had to run down to Wal-Mart to pick up a few necessities, and it took nearly four hours to go not even fifteen miles. At the time, Clay thought life could not get any worse. Now, he laughed at his absurd, childish understanding of life back then.
“That sounds nice,” she replied.
“It was. Something we all took for granted, though. What about you? What do you miss?”
She shrugged her shoulders, but it was too dark for Clay to see. “This is really the only life I know. I was only four or five when everything went to hell,” she said, realizing that she had spent more days of her young life in a frozen wasteland than not. “I vaguely remember my uncle taking me fishing just before it all happened, but I might have dreamed about that. He worked for some magazine that sent him to hunt and fish all around the world, and then he would write about his experience.”
“Now that would be a sweet gig,” Clay said enviously.
It was quiet for a few seconds before she asked, “What don’t you miss about it?”
That was a new one. Anytime people reminisced about the past it always revolved around luxuries and hobbies that no longer existed. Oddly enough, Clay had plenty of answers for that question too. “The blissful ignorance that captivated most of the population.”
“Huh?”
“For example, most people cared more about celebrity gossip or trying to prevent the world from getting too hot…” he stopped to laugh at the irony of that statement, then continued, “People were never satisfied and constantly sought to find new ways to entertain and distract themselves from the realities of the world. Preoccupied with things that were utterly pointless wastes of time.
“Ridiculous amounts of people spent thousands of hours and piles of money to play a video game about farming, yet when the time came when knowing how to actually plant and harvest crops would become a life-saving skill, most could only hope that someone else would be willing to do it for them. Pretty ironic, huh?”
“Wow,” she replied.
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg, kid. People lived and died for their phones and computers. It got to the point where you really couldn’t operate without one or the other. Everything was done on the internet.” Clay had to detour for a moment to explain what the internet was before continuing. “From ordering food, to people letting friends in Europe know what movie they were watching, computers became the primary way to socialize.
“Our culture drastically changed in a very short time. There were no more family meals at the dinner table or lively discussions in the living room. Hours of outdoor play were replaced by kids glued to the television screen for entertainment. Moms traded the challenge of calling out the front door for the kids to come home for dinner for the challenge of getting them outside for some fresh air.” Clay sighed deeply as he recalled many times when he had fit the same bill. He was an active kid and spent plenty of time outside playing sports or doing chores, but he often found himself glued to the screen as a kid, especially the final few months before the eruption.
Dusty was overwhelmed by what Clay had told her. The thought of clicking a few buttons and having food at your door a short time later sounded like fiction. At one point in her short life, she went six days without a bite to eat. And before Clay shared some of his food with her, she hadn’t eaten in almost 48 hours.
She was jealous of those who were able to live back in such a wonderful time. Overindulgence in food, round-the-clock entertainment, distractions with the flick of a finger—all things she would kill for. Dusty could see what Clay was getting at, though. People had become so wrapped up with irrelevant trends and fads that most of them couldn’t provide for themselves once the store shelves were empty. Her parents aptly demonstrated that mindset. They were among the technologically addicted group that lacked survival skills. Their life of convenience and prosperity came at a steep cost.
Chapter 19
Clay woke up to the sound of a locking door. Since there were no windows in the room, it was nearly pitch black, but Dusty was carrying a flashlight. She walked over to a table and lit a few candles and a hanging lantern.
“I just looked outside; it stopped snowing. You should be able to leave today,” she said.
Clay couldn’t tell if she was just giving him a weather report or an eviction notice. It made no difference anyhow; he needed to get back on the move as soon as possible. He tried to sit up, but his body cruelly reminded him of the beating he took last night. He grimaced and fished for some pills to help with the swelling—this time some ibuprofen from his first aid kit which was getting a lot of use since he found his way into this school.
Dusty handed him his pistol, “Sorry, I forgot to give this back to you last night.”
Clay took it. The shell was still jammed in the port which he promptly cleared. He vaguely remembered the last shot having a much weaker sound to it; an indication of an undercharge. He wasn’t sure if it was his reload or Charlie’s—it didn’t matter.
He unzipped his bag and pulled out the book he
found in the locker. “I grabbed this before I knew anyone lived here. I wouldn’t feel right just taking it.” He handed it to her.
“You keep it,” she said and gently pushed the book back at him, “Don’t know how to read anyway.”
Clay wasn’t about to let her have the bottle of liquor; he didn’t feel guilty about hiding that from her.
“Is that a .22 over there?” Clay asked, pointing at the lever action rifle she had.
“Yep. It was my Grandpa’s. Found it up in the attic with a box of bullets shortly after my parents died. It used to be my Grandpa’s house, so I am not even sure they knew it was up there. My dad was terrified of guns. My mom said she knew how shoot them but never seemed interested.”
“Where’d you learn to shoot?”
“The neighbor,” she said with no further explanation.
Clay walked over to the rifle and saw there was only a few dozen rounds left in the brick sitting on the bedside table. He reached into his pack and pulled out a quart-sized Ziploc bag filled with various calibers of bullets inside. He began to sift through them, picking out a few.
Dusty gave him a puzzled look. She was by no means an expert in firearms, but she could tell there were at least a dozen different calibers in the bag, plus a handful of shotgun shells. “Sooooo, you just carry around a bag of bullets to guns that aren’t actually with you?” she quipped.
As he plucked a few more cartridges out of the bag, he replied “If you’re not always prepared, you’re never prepared. My father told me that all the time as a kid. I never gave it much thought before, but now I never leave home without thinking about it.”
“So, how does this help you prepare?”
“Carrying bullets—even for guns I don’t have—has saved my neck more than once. You never know when it will come in handy,” he said, dumping the handful of .22 cartridges into the nearly empty box. “And today, my preparations will benefit you,” he said with a smile.
