Mule Deer

Day 37

Noah was gone when I came out of the ranger station at first light.

His pack was by the fire. His rifle wasn't.

Dante was crouched over the coals, feeding them sticks one at a time, the way he did everything. Careful. Patient. He'd slept sitting up against the wall with his rifle across his knees, and he hadn't slept much.

"He left an hour ago," he said without looking up. "Didn't say a word."

"He's hunting."

"He's something." Dante set another stick on the fire. "You trust him?"

"No."

"Good."

"He's not trying to be liked, Dante. He told me exactly what he'd do if this goes wrong." I sat down across the fire from him, where the heat couldn't reach me anyway. "Most people don't give you that much."

Dante looked at me then. Something in his face I didn't like. Something tired.

"I'd never hurt you," he said quietly.

"I know."

"He would."

"I know that too."

A rifle shot cracked somewhere up the ridge. One. Clean. Then nothing.

Twenty minutes later Noah came down through the cedars with a young mule deer over his shoulders like it weighed nothing. He dropped it in the snow by the steps, pulled a knife, and opened it up with three quick strokes, the way I'd strip insulation off a line. He cut out the liver, still steaming, and held it out to me on the flat of the blade.

"Breakfast," he said.

Dante stood up. "You don't have to watch her eat."

"Yeah," Noah said. "I do."

I took the liver. I turned my back on both of them and ate it in the trees, and the hunger went quiet, and I hated how good it felt.

[Substitute nourishment detected.]

[Efficiency: Low.]

When I came back, Noah had a haunch on a spit over the fire for Dante, and the two of them were standing on opposite sides of it, not talking. Like two dogs who'd agreed not to fight until somebody gave them a reason.

*****

---

Noah found the scavengers' trail inside an hour.

He read the ground the way my dad did, and better. Bent grass under the snow. A cigarette butt. Boot treads in the mud at a creek crossing, six sets, heavy with packs. He'd point, and I'd see it, and I'd wonder how I ever thought I knew these woods.

"No kid," he said, crouched over the creek crossing.

My stomach dropped. "What?"

"Six adults. No small boots." He touched a print. "They lost him before here."

The trail climbed. The cedars thinned into pine, and the pine thinned into rock, and by midmorning the old highway came into view below us, winding up toward a notch in the ridgeline. High Needle Pass. An old fire watchtower stood at the top of it, black against the gray sky.

There was something on the tower that hadn't been built in 1950. A dish. Big and white and new.

"That's not a fire lookout anymore," Dante said.

We found the scavengers a quarter mile below the road.

Five of them, in a ditch beside a burned-out SUV. Lined up. Shot in the back of the head, every one, neat as fence posts. The snow around them was churned with tire tracks, wide ones, heavy ones. Military tread.

Noah went very still beside me. His heart, for the first time since I'd met him, sped up.

"That's what I heard," he said softly. "That's the engine I heard in Coldwater."

I couldn't look at him. I was counting bodies.

Five.

The red-jacket kid had said six.

The sixth was under the SUV.

I heard him before I saw him. A heartbeat, ragged and slow, and the wet sound of someone trying not to breathe. I got down on my belly in the snow and looked under the frame, and a gray-bearded man with a bullet through his thigh stared back at me with eyes like a cornered animal.

The hunger lifted its head.

[Feeding opportunity detected.]

"No," I said.

[Noted.]

"Please," the man whispered. He was looking at my face. My skin. "Please. I didn't do anything to the kid."

"Where is he?"

"Gone. First day out." He coughed. "We stopped to rest in the high timber. Granite ravine. Kid said he had to piss. Never came back. We figured something got him." His mouth twisted. "Better than what got us."

Gone. In the high timber. Alone. Three days ago.

But not dead. Not here. Not in this ditch.

I put my forehead against the cold steel of the SUV and let myself breathe, even though I didn't need to.

"Who did this?" Noah asked. He'd crouched down beside me with his rifle across his knees.

"Trucks," the man said. "Armored. Snake on the doors. Black snake, all coiled up." He shut his eyes. "They said we were trespassing on Coalition road. Then they just..."

Dante handed a canteen under the frame. Noah got a tourniquet on the leg. I stood back, as far as I could, while they worked. The man watched me the whole time.

Then the ground shook.

It came up through my boots before I heard it. A deep, heavy thump from the top of the pass, and then the sound arrived, a boom that rolled down the mountainside and set snow sliding off the pines. Every light on the watchtower went dark at once.

"Generator," Dante said. He'd know. He'd heard a hundred of them die.

Gunfire. Rifles, then something heavier, then a single long-range crack from the ridge to the west, so far off it sounded like a branch breaking.

And then a light.

It came from the base of the tower. A flash, pale and blue-white and wrong, like a transformer blowing, except I've seen a hundred transformers blow and none of them ever looked like that. Two shapes went off the cliff edge beside the tower, thrown, arms windmilling, and dropped out of sight.

The light faded. The guns went quiet.

Noah had his scope up. "Not soldiers," he said slowly. "Three at the tower. Somebody else on the west ridge. One of the three is a woman."

The letters came up white across everything, faster than I'd ever seen them.

[Rival signature detected.]

[Classification: Sovereign Protocol.]

[Distance: 1.4 miles.]

[Threat to Mother: Critical.]

The cold place behind my ribs went tight as a fist. Somewhere far below, in the cedars by the river, I felt all four of them lift their heads at once.

Toward the tower.

Toward her.