Dead & Gone

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.

Before 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.