Starving

Day 36

The tracks ran straight to the river, and the river had one bridge.

Old steel truss, two lanes, rust bleeding down the girders. Somebody had turned the near end into a wall. Two pickups nosed together, a school bus on its side, plywood and razor wire stretched across the gaps. Smoke rose from a barrel fire behind it.

And in the mud at the foot of the bridge, Eli's prints. Lug sole, left heel worn down, walking between the adult boots. Across the bridge and gone.

"They let his group through," Dante said quietly.

"Then they'll let us through."

He gave me a look I knew from a hundred job sites. The look that meant you're about to climb something you shouldn't.

"Let me talk first," he said. "Stay back. Keep your hood up."

I hated it. I did it anyway.

He walked out with his hands raised and his rifle slung behind him. A man stood up on the bus with a deer rifle. Two more appeared behind the trucks. Then a woman with gray braids and a shotgun, who was obviously in charge.

"That's close enough," she called.

"We're looking for a boy," Dante said. "Nine years old. Blond. He came through here with a group, maybe two days ago."

"Lots of people come through." Her eyes moved past him. To me. "Who's that?"

"His mother."

The woman studied me for a long moment. I kept my face down. My hands in my pockets.

But I couldn't make my breath fog.

I watched her see it. I watched her eyes go to the air in front of Dante's mouth, white and warm, and then to the air in front of mine. Nothing.

"Hood down," she said.

"Ma'am—" Dante started.

"Hood down."

I pushed it back.

I'd seen myself in the cabin window that morning. Skin the gray of old snow. Lips pale. Eyes that looked fine until you noticed the color didn't move when the light did.

"She's turned," somebody said behind the bus.

"She's not," Dante said. "Look at her. She's talking. She's—"

The deer rifle went off.

It hit me under the collarbone and knocked me flat in the mud. I lay there staring at the sky, waiting for the pain, and it came. But it came the way sound comes underwater. Far off. Muffled. Something that was happening to someone else.

"Portia!"

Dante. I'd never heard him shout. Not once in fourteen years.

I sat up.

Everything on that bridge went silent. I looked down at the hole in my jacket. There should have been blood, a lot of it. There was a slow dark seep, thick as cold syrup, and then nothing.

"Get down!" the woman screamed. "She's one of them, he's with her, take them both—"

The rifle swung toward Dante.

The letters came up white across the whole world.

[Threat to host detected.]

[Mission available: Defend the Mother.]

I didn't think. I didn't decide. I just reached into that cold place behind my ribs where the four of them were waiting, miles back in my son's cabin, and I pulled.

[Mission accepted.]

They were already running. I could feel them coming through the trees, and I knew they'd be too late. So I picked up my hatchet and went to buy them time.

I hit the barricade before the man on the bus could work his bolt. I went up the side of the pickup the way I'd go up a pole, three points of contact, and the hatchet took the rifle out of his hands and two of his fingers with it. He fell screaming behind the bus.

The shotgun went off. Something tore through my thigh. I barely felt it.

Then the four came out of the trees.

They didn't run like people. They ran like water finds a crack. Over the trucks, under the wire, and the people on that bridge stopped being a checkpoint and started being prey.

Don't kill them, I told them. Drive them off. Don't kill them.

Three of them listened.

The fourth found a young guy in a red hunting jacket trying to climb over the bus. I felt the moment it got him. I felt it through the cold place behind my ribs like a line taking a fault. And I felt, God help me, how good it felt to the thing in my head.

Stop!

It stopped. Too late.

The rest of them ran. The woman with the braids was the last one across the bridge, dragging the man with the ruined hand. She looked back at me once, and I'll remember that look for the rest of whatever I am now.

[Threat neutralized.]

[Humanity: 94% → 85%.]

Nine percent.

The kid in the red jacket was lying against the bus. Still breathing. Barely. I knelt beside him because somebody should.

"The boy," I said. "Blond. Nine. Who did he leave with?"

He looked at me with the kind of terror I used to save for live wires.

"Scavengers," he whispered. "Six of them. Heading for the pass." He swallowed. "Kid kept asking... which way the cedar valley was. Said his grandpa built a cabin there. Said he had to get back to it."

Then he was gone.

A cabin.

Dad had built a cabin with my son, somewhere in these mountains, and I'd never seen it. I'd never even asked. Every summer they'd been out there, I'd been forty feet up a pole three states away, promising I'd make it next year.

I stayed there on my knees. Behind me, I could hear the four of them, waiting. Behind them, I could hear Dante. His heart was going like a jackhammer.

He was standing at the end of the bridge with his rifle hanging loose in one hand. He'd watched all of it. The bullet. The hatchet. The thing I'd called out of the trees, and what it did.

He didn't come closer. He didn't leave.

There was blood everywhere. On the trucks, on the road, soaking into the snow in long red fans. And for the first time since I woke up on that cellar hatch, I was hungry.

No.

I was starving.