“Remember?” I asked Harry. “We don’t have to hurt anyone unless they push us into it, but we don’t dare let our guard down. We can’t trust people.”
Harry shook his head. “What if I thought that way when I pulled that guy off Zahra?”
I held on to my temper. “Harry, you know I don’t mean we shouldn’t trust or help each other. We know each other. We’ve made a commitment to travel together.”
“I’m not sure we do know each other.”
“I am. And we can’t afford your denial. You can’t afford it.”
He just stared at me.
“Out here, you adapt to your surroundings or you get killed,” I said. “That’s obvious!”
Now he did look at me as though I were a stranger. I looked back, hoping I knew him as well as I thought I did. He had a brain and he had courage. He just didn’t want to change.
“Do you want to break off with us,” Zahra asked, “go your own way without us?”
His gaze softened as he looked at her. “No,” he said. “Of course not. But we don’t have to turn into animals, for godsake.”
“In a way, we do,” I said. “We’re a pack, the three of us, and all those other people out there aren’t in it. If we’re a good pack, and we work together, we have a chance. You can be sure we aren’t the only pack out here.”
He leaned back against a rock, and said with amazement, “You damn sure talk macho enough to be a guy.”
I almost hit him. Maybe Zahra and I would be better off without him. But no, that wasn’t true. Numbers mattered. Friendship mattered. One real male presence mattered.
“Don’t repeat that,” I whispered, leaning close to him. “Never say that again. There are other people all over these hills; you don’t know who’s listening. You give me away and you weaken yourself!”
That reached him. “Sorry,” he said.
“It’s bad out here,” Zahra said. “But most people make it if they’re careful. People weaker than us make it—if they’re careful.”
Harry gave a wan smile. “I hate this world already,” he said.
“It’s not so bad if people stick together.”
He looked from her to me and back to her again. He smiled at her and nodded. It occurred to me then that he liked her, was attracted to her. That could be a problem for her later. She was a beautiful woman, and I would never be beautiful—which didn’t bother me. Boys had always seemed to like me. But Zahra’s looks grabbed male attention. If she and Harry get together, she could wind up carrying two heavy loads northward.
I was lost in thought about the two of them when Zahra nudged me with her foot.
Two big, dirty-looking guys were standing nearby, watching us, watching Zahra in particular.
I stood up, feeling the others stand with me, flanking me. These guys were too close to us. They meant to be too close. As I stood up, I put my hand on the gun.
“Yeah?” I said. “What do you want?”
“Not a thing,” one of them said, smiling at Zahra. Both wore big holstered knives which they fingered.
I drew the gun. “Good deal,” I said.
Their smiles vanished. “What, you going to shoot us for standing here?” the talkative one said.
I thumbed the safety. I would shoot the talker, the leader. The other one would run away. He already wanted to run away. He was staring, open-mouthed, at the gun. By the time I collapsed, he would be gone.
“Hey, no trouble!” the talker raised his hands, backing away. “Take it easy, man.”
I let them go. I think it would have been better to shoot them. I’m afraid of guys like that—guys looking for trouble, looking for victims. But it seems I can’t quite shoot someone just because I’m afraid of him. I killed a man on the night of the fire, and I haven’t thought much about it. But this was different. It was like what Harry said about stealing. I’ve heard, “Thou shalt not kill,” all my life, but when you have to, you kill. I wonder what Dad would say about that. But then, he was the one who taught me to shoot.
“We’d better keep a damn good watch tonight,” I said. I looked at Harry, and was glad to see that he looked the way I probably had a moment before: mad and worried. “Let’s pass your watch and my gun around,” I told him. “Three hours per watcher.”
“You would have done it, wouldn’t you?” he asked. It sounded like a real question.
I nodded. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes. I wouldn’t have wanted to, but those guys were out for fun. Their idea of fun, anyway.” He glanced at Zahra. He had pulled one man off her, and taken a beating for it. Maybe the obvious threat to her would keep him alert. Anything that would keep him alert couldn’t be all bad.
I looked at Zahra, kept my voice very low. “You never went shooting with us, so I have to ask. Do you know how to use this?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Richard let his older kids go out, but he wouldn’t let me. Before he bought me, though, I was a good shot.”
Her alien past again. It distracted me for a moment. I had been waiting to ask her how much a person costs these days. And she had been sold by her mother to a man who couldn’t have been much more than a stranger. He could have been a maniac, a monster. And my father used to worry about future slavery or debt slavery. Had he known? He couldn’t have.
“Have you used a gun like this before?” I asked. I reengaged the safety and handed it to her.
“Hell, yeah,” she said, examining it. “I like this. It’s heavy, but if you shoot somebody with it, they go down.” She released the clip, checked it, reinserted it, rammed it home, and handed it back. “I wish I could have practiced with you all,” she said. “I always wanted to.”
Without warning, I felt a pang of loneliness for the burned neighborhood. It was almost a physical pain. I had been desperate to leave it, but I had expected it still to be there—changed, but surviving. Now that it was gone, there were moments when I couldn’t imagine how I was going to survive without it.
“You guys get some sleep,” I said. “I’m too wound up to sleep now. I’ll take the first watch.”
“We should gather more wood for the fire first,” Harry said. “It’s burning low.”
“Let it go out,” I said. “It’s a spotlight on us, and it messes up our night vision. Other people can see us long before we see them.”
“And sit here in the dark,” he said. It wasn’t a protest. At worst, it was grudging agreement. “I’ll take the watch after you,” he said, lying back and pulling up his sleepsack and positioning the rest of his gear to serve as a pillow. As an afterthought, he took off his wrist watch and gave it to me. “It was a gift from my mother,” he said.
“You know I’ll take care of it,” I told him.
He nodded. “You be careful,” he said, and closed his eyes.
I put the watch on, pulled the elastic of my sleeve down over it so that the glow of the dial wouldn’t be visible by accident, and sat back against the hill to make a few quick notes. While there was still some natural light, I could write and watch.
Zahra watched me for a while, then laid her hand on my arm. “Teach me to do that,” she whispered.
I looked at her, not understanding.
“Teach me to read and write.”
I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. Where, in a life like hers, had there been time or money for school. And once Richard Moss bought her, her jealous co-wives wouldn’t have taught her.
“You should have come to us back in the neighborhood,” I said. “We would have set up lessons for you.”
“Richard wouldn’t let me. He said I already knew enough to suit him.”
I groaned. “I’ll teach you. We can start tomorrow morning if you want.”
“Okay.” She gave me an odd smile and began ordering her bag and her few possessions, bundled in my scavenged pillowcase. She lay down in her bag and turned on her side to look at me. “I didn’t think I’d like you,” she said. “Preacher’s kid, all over the place, teaching
, telling everybody what to do, sticking your damn nose in everything. But you ain’t bad.”
I went from surprise into amusement of my own. “Neither are you,” I said.
“You didn’t like me either?” Her turn to be surprised.
“You were the best looking woman in the neighborhood. No, I wasn’t crazy about you. And remember a couple of years ago when you tried your hardest to make me throw up while I was learning to clean and skin rabbits?”
“Why’d you want to learn that, anyway?” she asked. “Blood, guts, worms… I just figured, There she goes again, sticking her nose where it don’t belong. Well, let her have it!’”
“I wanted to know that I could do that—handle a dead animal, skin it, butcher it, treat its hide to make leather. I wanted to know how to do it, and that I could do it without getting sick.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought someday I might have to. And we might out here. Same reason I put together an emergency pack and kept it where I could grab it.”
“I wondered about that—about you having all that stuff from home, I mean. At first I thought maybe you got it all when you went back. But no, you were ready for all the trouble. You saw it coming.”
“No.” I shook my head, remembering. “No one could have been ready for that. But… I thought something would happen someday. I didn’t know how bad it would be or when it would come. But everything was getting worse: the climate, the economy, crime, drugs, you know. I didn’t believe we would be allowed to sit behind our walls, looking clean and fat and rich to the hungry, thirsty, homeless, jobless, filthy people outside.”
She turned again and lay on her back, staring upward at the stars. “I should have seen some of that stuff,” she said. “But I didn’t. Those big walls. And everybody had a gun. There were guards every night. I thought… I thought we were so strong.”
I put my notebook and pen down, sat on my sleepsack, and put my own pillowcased bundle behind me. Mine was lumpy and uncomfortable to lean on. I wanted it uncomfortable. I was tired. Everything ached. Given a little comfort, I would fall asleep.
The sun was down now, and our fire had gone out except for a few glowing coals. I drew the gun and held it in my lap. If I needed it at all, I would need it fast. We weren’t strong enough to survive slowness or stupid mistakes.
I sat where I was for three weary, terrifying hours. Nothing happened to me, but I could see and hear things happening. There were people moving around the hills, sometimes silhouetting themselves against the sky as they ran or walked over the tops of hills. I saw groups and individuals. Twice I saw dogs, distant, but alarming. I heard a lot of gunfire—individual shots and short bursts of automatic weapons fire. That last and the dogs worried me, scared me. A pistol would be no protection against a machine gun or automatic rifle. And dogs might not know enough to be afraid of guns. Would a pack keep coming if I shot two or three of its members? I sat in a cold sweat, longing for walls—or at least for another magazine or two for the gun.
It was nearly midnight when I woke Harry, gave him the gun and the watch, and made him as uncomfortable as I could by warning him about the dogs, the gunfire, and the many people who wandered around at night. He did look awake and alert enough when I lay down.
I fell asleep at once. Aching and exhausted, I found the hard ground as welcoming as my bed at home.
A shout awoke me. Then I heard gunfire—several single shots, thunderous and nearby. Harry?
Something fell across me before I could get out of my sleep-sack—something big and heavy. It knocked the breath out of me. I struggled to get it off me, knowing that it was a human body, dead or unconscious. As I pushed at it and felt its heavy beard stubble and long hair, I realized it was a man, and not Harry. Some stranger.
I heard scrambling and thrashing near me. There were grunts and sounds of blows. A fight. I could see them in the darkness—two figures struggling on the ground. The one on the bottom was Harry.
He was fighting someone over the gun, and he was losing. The muzzle was being forced toward him.
That couldn’t happen. We couldn’t lose the gun or Harry. I took a small granite boulder from our fire pit, set my teeth, and brought it down with all my strength on the back of the intruder’s head. And I brought myself down.
It wasn’t the worst pain I had ever shared, but it came close. I was worthless after delivering that one blow. I think I was unconscious for a while.
Then Zahra appeared from somewhere, feeling me, trying to see me. She wouldn’t find a wound, of course.
I sat up, fending her off, and saw that Harry was there, too.
“Are they dead?” I asked.
“Never mind them,” he said. “Are you all right?”
I got up, swaying from the residual shock of the blow. I felt sick and dizzy, and my head hurt. A few days before, Harry had made me feel that way and we’d both recovered. Did that mean the man I’d hit would recover?
I checked him. He was still alive, unconscious, not feeling any pain now. What I was feeling was my own reaction to the blow I’d struck.
“The other one’s dead,” Harry said. “This one… Well, you caved in the back of his head. I don’t know why he’s still alive.”
“Oh, no,” I whispered. “Oh hell.” And then to Harry, “Give me the gun.”
“Why?” he asked.
My fingers had found the blood and broken skull, soft and pulpy at the back of the stranger’s head. Harry was right. He should have been dead.
“Give me the gun,” I repeated, and held out a bloody hand for it. “Unless you want to do this yourself.”
“You can’t shoot him. You can’t just…”
“I hope you’d find the courage to shoot me if I were like that, and out here with no medical care to be had. We shoot him, or leave him here alive. How long do you think it will take him to die?”
“Maybe he won’t die.”
I went to my pack, struggling to navigate without throwing up. I pulled it away from the dead man, groped within it, and found my knife. It was a good knife, sharp and strong. I flicked it open and cut the unconscious man’s throat with it.
Not until the flow of blood stopped did I feel safe. The man’s heart had pumped his life away into the ground. He could not regain consciousness and involve me in his agony.
But, of course, I was far from safe. Perhaps the last two people from my old life were about to leave me. I had shocked and horrified them. I wouldn’t blame them for leaving.
“Strip the bodies,” I said. “Take what they have, then we’ll put them into the scrub oaks down the hill where we gathered wood.”
I searched the man I had killed, found a small amount of money in his pants pocket and a larger amount in his right sock. Matches, a packet of almonds, a packet of dried meat, and a packet of small, round, purple pills. I found no knife, no weapon of any kind. So this was not one of the pair that sized us up earlier in the night. I hadn’t thought so. Neither of them had been long-haired. Both of these were.
I put the pills back in the pocket I had taken them from. Everything else, I kept. The money would help sustain us. The food might or might not be edible. I would decide that when I could see it clearly.
I looked to see what the others were doing, and was relieved to find them stripping the other body. Harry turned it over, then kept watch as Zahra went through the clothing, shoes, socks, and hair. She was even more thorough than I had been. With no hint of squeamishness, she hauled off the man’s clothing and examined its greasy pockets, seams, and hems. I got the feeling she had done this before.
“Money, food, and a knife,” she whispered at last.
“The other one didn’t have a knife,” I said, crouching beside them. “Harry, what—?”
“He had one,” Harry whispered. “He pulled it when I yelled for them to stop. It’s probably on the ground somewhere. Let’s put these two down in the oaks.”
“You and I can do it,” I said. “Give Zahra the gun. S
he can guard us.”
I was glad to see him hand her the gun without protest. He had not made a move to hand it to me when I asked, but that had been different.
We took the bodies down to the scrub oaks and rolled them into cover. Then we kicked dirt over all the blood that we could see and the urine that one of the men had released.
That wasn’t enough. By mutual consent, we moved camp. This meant nothing more than gathering our bundles and sleepsacks and carrying them over the next low ridge and out of sight of where we had been.
If you camped on a hill between any two of the many low, riblike ridges, you could have, almost, the privacy of a big, open-topped, three-walled room. You were vulnerable from hill or ridge tops, but if you camped on the ridges, you would be noticed by far more people. We chose a spot between two ridges, settled, and sat silent for some time. I felt set-apart. I knew I had to speak, and I was afraid that nothing I could say would help. They might leave me. In disgust, in distrust, in fear, they might decide that they couldn’t travel with me any longer. Best to try to get ahead of them.
“I’m going to tell you about myself,” I said. “I don’t know whether it will help you to understand me, but I have to tell you. You have a right to know.”
And in low whispers, I told them about my mother—my biological mother—and about my sharing.
When I finished, there was another long silence. Then Zahra spoke, and I was so startled by the sound of her soft voice that I jumped.
“So when you hit that guy,” she said, “it was like you hitting yourself.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t get the damage. Just the pain.”
“But, I mean it felt like you hit yourself?”
I nodded. “Close enough. When I was little, I used to bleed along with people if I hurt them or even if I saw them hurt. I haven’t done that for a few years.”