Way off in the distance she heard a roar, and she stopped, whipping out her knife.
It was a cat, a big one.
Las Vegas was less than forty miles from where she stood. Las Vegas used to have those shows with the white tigers and golden lions. There was a zoo behind one of the casinos, with jungle predators of all kinds. When her father was still alive, back when it was just the two of them traveling through the wasteland looking for shelter, they had gone past the old gambling town. They met a half-crazed man who described the terrors of Vegas: the dead constantly at war with tigers and lions for control of the hunting grounds, and the people who tried to survive there.
The crazed man’s stories were all past tense.
Nobody lived in Las Vegas anymore, and the cats—like the dead—had gone into the desert to find fresh meat.
That roar came from way over in the tumble of red rocks to her left. The big cats made that terrible shriek when they’d killed something. It’s part triumph and part warning—I killed this and I’ll defend my meat.
That kitty cat is too durn big and mean, she thought. You don’t want no truck with it, do you, girl?
She often talked to herself as if she were an adult scolding a child. Like there were two of her. It took the edge off being so completely alone.
The girl hurried along the road, wanting no part of whatever red drama was happening behind those rocks. She was hungry, but her hunger had not yet driven her crazy enough to want to fight eight hundred pounds of muscle and claws. She was fifteen, and prolonged hunger had leaned her down to ninety pounds. All that was left of her was bone, hard muscle, and pain.
The road ahead was clear for half a mile before it curved around a big, white piece of junk. The girl thought it was an overturned tractor trailer—they always held the promise of some item left behind after scavengers had come through like locusts. But as she approached, she realized that it wasn’t a truck at all. It was too big.
She hurried to see what it was.
The closer she got, the more she realized that it was massive. Much bigger than she’d thought. The thing had to be well over two hundred feet long with wings nearly as wide. It had once been snow white with a broad sky-blue line that covered the cockpit and ran all the way to the towering tail. But there had been a fire, probably on impact. Much of the white and blue paint was soot-blackened, and in places it had burned completely away to reveal the silvery glint of steel. Rusted now, and pitted by endless blowing sand.
Words had been painted in black along the sides: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
And on the shattered tail there was a number: 28000.
The girl knew about jets, of course. Everybody knew about them. There were airports full of them. The bones of all kinds of aircraft littered the landscape. The girl had even spent two nights camped out in the shell of a Black Hawk helicopter.
But she’d never seen one this big. Not up close.
The four big engines lay half-buried in the sand, torn away by the impact. Behind the jet was a deep trench cut like a rough scar into the landscape and all the way across the blacktop. The jet had spent a long time grinding to a halt, and now it lay still and silent, its engines cold, the windows shattered and filled with shadows.
The jet presented a tricky choice. There could be bottled water, cans of soft drinks, plastic bags of stuff like nuts and crackers. Things that had enough preservatives in them to last. Not good food, but a far mile down the road from no food.
The doors were shut, and the windows were too small to climb through, and it would take some doing to climb up onto the nose of the craft and enter that way. On the up side, it didn’t look like anyone else had been inside the jet, which was odd because it was right there, big as anything. On the downside, if the doors were all closed, then what had happened to the people on board? Had they managed to climb out? If so, how?
If not . . . were they still there?
A jet this size had to have carried a lot of people.
All of them could be dead.
And waiting.
“No,” she said. Her voice sounded as dry as the desert wind.
She stared up longingly at the plane.
If it was empty, then it was high and safe, and out of the wind. It could answer all of her needs. It could be a kind of home.
The wind whipped past her, lashing her cheeks with coarse sand. It stung her scalp. She closed her eyes for a moment, wrestling with herself about this choice.
There was the choice she wanted to believe in, and there was the sensible choice.
You’d have to be dumber than a coal bucket to go up yonder.
“No,” she said again.
With a reluctance so great that it felt like grief, the girl turned away from the jet, dragging her eyes from those smashed-out cockpit windows, turning her whole body with an effort of will. She walked slowly around the jet, studying it from every side, marveling that such a massive thing ever could have flown.
She looked into the desert that ran alongside the road. Far, far in the distance she saw some shapes moving. People. At least a dozen of them, maybe more. She faded into the shadows of the plane and watched them, squinting to try to decide what she was seeing. Were they the gray people? Sometimes they moved in bunches, a small mass of them triggered into movement by passing prey.
There was a flash of sunlight on metal.
No.
Not the dead.
Reapers.
She cupped her hands around her eyes and studied the group, counting the shapes, counting the flashes of sunlight on sharpened steel.
Twenty of them? Twenty-one.
Too many.
There was one shape that walked in front of the others, and it was his weapon that most often caught the sunlight. Even though she was too far away to see him clearly, she thought she knew who this was. Brother Andrew. One of the most senior of the reapers. A bull of a man who carried a two-handed scythe.
“No,” she murmured. “Go away.”
In time, they did. But they were heading in the same direction she was, northwest, their course paralleling the road. They were miles away, though, following a secondary road. Perhaps they thought she was on that road, that she would take the road less traveled in hopes of eluding pursuit.
The girl crouched in the shadows until Brother Andrew’s party was gone, reduced first to tiny dots and then entirely lost to distance and heat shimmer.
Then she stood and stretched her muscles, trying to ignore the ache in her belly. The girl took a steadying breath and began to walk. She cast a single look over her shoulder, and what she saw made her pause within a few steps.
A turkey buzzard sat on the jet’s broken wing. Its dark wings were threadbare and in disarray, its wattled red throat was thin, and its eyes looked totally dead. For a horrible moment the girl thought that the vulture was dead, that it had somehow caught the plague that had cut like a reaper’s scythe through all of humanity. But then it made a small, plaintive caw.
It wasn’t dead. It was starving.
Like her.
The thought absolutely chilled her and nearly took the heart out of her. If something like this carrion bird—a creature that would eat anything it found—was starving out here, then what hope was there for her?
She turned away from the sight of it.
“No,” she said one more time. She tried to say it with anger, with determination, with purpose.
It sounded like a cry.
The girl hurried away, pushed by fear, pulled by hunger.
7
That night she slept in the back bay of a wrecked Ford Explorer. She had to pull bones out of the front seats. Driver and passenger had bullet holes in their skulls. Someone who knew his business had sent them into the darkness. As she pulled them onto the road—a man in a suit, a woman in the sun-faded rags of a flower-patterned dress—the girl said a little prayer for them. She hoped they had been good people. She hoped they hadn’t suffered much.
Be
fore she climbed into the car to sleep, she walked out among the rough desert brush to see about setting some simple snares. If she did it right, and if she had any luck, maybe she could catch a chipmunk, a gecko, an antelope squirrel, or even a weasel.
She’d eaten worse.
Recently.
The memory of the lizard and the turtle made her stomach churn.
Stop your grousing. . . . You’ll eat what you catch, or you’ll starve and die.
She walked around the area for a while until she found a small game run that showed use by several species. The prints were not as distinct as they would have been on a game trail, but she was experienced enough to determine that the prints were recent. She followed the run until it intersected another, equally as small. The runs led toward the open desert, and in the faded twilight she could see a thick stand of Joshua trees. There must be water down there. Not a lot, or there would be heavier game sign, but enough for these runs to become well traveled by small animals.
The girl backtracked a hundred feet and washed her hands with sand to remove any trace of her skin oils. Only then did she pick up the materials she would use to make the traps. Humans were predators, and their scents scared off most animals.
She dug a pit and carried the fresh dirt out into the desert. Fresh dirt—or any sign of disturbance—warned prey away. When she gathered sticks, she used only those that had fallen and dried out. Freshly cut sticks bled sap, and that carried a smell that warned prey of a disturbance. The girl made sure that she did nothing that would alarm the animals.
One good way to remove human scent was to coat the trap with mud from an area with plenty of rotting vegetation, but in the desert, in the failing light, she did not have the time to find it. She used the last of the light to rig a whip snare that would lash out and kill her prey. It would only work on something small, but it was all she could manage.
She built three traps before the light and her strength failed.
Then she erased all signs of her presence, hoping that she did it so well that in the morning there would be something to eat.
She had a few slivers of hope left. Enough for tonight.
Then she rigged a few pieces of plastic that she carried with her, stretching them off the ground on sticks, setting them where the shade would be in the morning. With luck, condensation would give her at least a mouthful of dew.
As the sun set, the desert turned from a furnace to a freezer. Sand does not hold heat for long, and soon the girl was shivering. Last week she had owned a bedroll and a blanket, but they had become infested with fire ants, and while she was trying to smoke the pests out of the cloth, a sudden wind sent sparks flying into the material. She had been seventy yards away, washing her other clothes in a thin steam. By the time she ran back and stamped out the fire, her bedding was ruined.
Now she stood by the open door of the car looking at the skeletons wearing ancient clothes. The material was thin and weathered and would offer only a little warmth. It was also wrapped around the bones of dead people.
The girl took the clothes.
It was the kind of night her father used to call a “three-dog night.” The kind where everyone, human and animal, crowded together for warmth. She thought about the dog she’d had years ago. Willyhog. He had been caught in a blind alley by four of the gray people. Dad had tried to rescue him, but he was never a fighter, and the girl had been too young to do much good. Dad dragged her away while Willyhog’s screams tore holes in her soul.
She wished that he were still alive, still with her. The two of them would be something. Willyhog could find the shadow of food on a dark night, and no mistake. He had been a bluetick coonhound, and she’d loved him more than anything.
She crawled into the car and closed the door, wincing at the banshee squeak of the old hinges, and huddled in the back. She pulled the dusty old clothes over herself and tried not to notice the chattering of her teeth.
The sun was gone now, and soon the sky was littered with billions of stars. So cold and so distant. But so pretty.
For all that “pretty” mattered to her.
It used to mean something. It used to mean a lot. Now she found it hard to even remember what it was about it that had mattered. She would give all the stars in the sky, and every golden dawn, and all the birds that ever sang a pretty song for a thick steak and a plate of vegetables.
She wondered if she would kill for that.
It troubled her that with each day it was getting harder and harder to decide that she would not.
As starlight painted the landscape in blue-white light, the girl prayed to whoever was listening that tomorrow there would be food.
She did not expect her prayers to be answered. Not because of any lack of faith—the girl did believe that there was something up there or out there or somewhere—but she no longer knew what that was. Her mother and the others in the Night Church had drummed one vision of god into her head, but it was a brutal, harsh, and ugly thing. A faith born when the world died, one that flourished as more and more people died. For years she had been a part of that. For years she had belonged to that.
That time had passed.
Now she was a part of nothing. She belonged to nothing.
Now she was alone.
No, the girl believed that the heat of the day and the cold of the night, the deep hunger and the awful loneliness, the pain and the shame, were all forms of punishment.
As she did every night since she ran away from the Night Church, she murmured these words right at the point where sleep began pulling her down.
“I’m sorry for the pain I caused, the blood I spilled, and the lives I destroyed. With all my heart and soul, I’m sorry.”
Then the ragged claws of sleep dragged her down into dreams of hunger and dying.
8
In the morning something impossible happened.
9
The girl rose with the first light of dawn, her hunter’s mind alert to the touch of sunlight on the smoked-glass windows of the dead SUV. She woke quickly, her senses sharpened by months of surviving on her own.
Slowly and cautiously she looked out of each of the windows, looking for predators, alive or dead.
Looking for reapers.
The desert was empty and vast.
She opened the door of the SUV and moved outside and away from the vehicle, running low and fast and then turning to look back. It was a trick she had learned the hard way. Sometimes predators waited on top of a vehicle. And sometimes there were blind spots when you were inside. From a distance she could see all around the car.
There was no one and nothing. No sign of Sister Connie or Brother Andrew or anyone from the Night Church.
She crept back and examined the plastic she had set up the night before, and for the first time in days she smiled. The center of each sheet of plastic was bellied down, heavy with dew. The girl fetched her canteen and carefully poured the water into it. The combined water filled her canteen nearly to the top. She licked the last drops off the sheeting and carefully folded it and stowed it in her pack. Then she went to check the traps.
From a distance she could tell that all three of the traps had been sprung, and her heart leaped in her chest. She broke into a run, eager to see what kind of meat the night had brought to her.
Almost immediately she slowed from a run to a fast walk to a sudden stillness. She tore the slingshot from her pocket, loaded it with a sharp stone, and wheeled around, looking for an enemy.
For a trickster.
For answers.
Was this some strange and subtle trap set by Brother Andrew?
The desert seemed totally empty.
She turned back to the snares.
What in the sam hill is going on? she demanded, not sure if she thought it or shouted it.
In the center of each one, standing perfectly erect, glinting in the morning sunlight, was an aluminum can.
Not the empty, rusted cans that were everywhere, discarded years ago
by scavengers. These cans were not rusted. And they were not empty.
The girl approached the closest one very cautiously, ready to counterattack if her own snares were baited to catch her. She saw no trip wires, no sticks bent back under pressure. The ground did not look like it had been excavated to dig a pit and then covered over.
The can was still there. A square can. Blue, with an illustration of some kind on it.
She crept closer, and in her belly hunger warred with caution. Hunger became a white-hot screaming thing.
When she was five feet away she could read the label of the can. She mouthed the word.
“Spam.”
She knew what that was. Meat in a can. It was old, but the can was not puffy with expanding gasses the way they got when the contents were spoiled. Cans like that were filled with deadly bacteria.
This can looked fine.
She left it there and moved over to the second snare. That can was round, tall, also blue. It said: DOLE PINEAPPLE CHUNKS—100% PINEAPPLE JUICE.
The third can was red. GOYA KIDNEY BEANS IN SAUCE.
She looked around.
Nothing.
She made a circle around the traps, going out as far as a mile.
Nothing.
No footprints. No sign.
Just three cans. Meat, fruit, beans.
If she was smart, if she was careful, she could live on that for a week. Maybe more. The beans and the meat were both protein.
The girl straightened and eased the tension on the slingshot.
“Who are you?” she yelled. “Where are you?”
The wind answered with a whisper of sand across the landscape.
She grabbed the cans and ran back to the Explorer.
She was laughing.
She was weeping.
She wasn’t going to die today.
10
It was so hard to resist the temptation to open all three cans and have a feast, but that would be a bad choice. She gave it some thought, forcing herself to work it through before she took any action. That caution had kept her alive until now.