Kimble looks at Marc, hand outspread, palm up. That’s not really one of their signals. It’s universal.What now?
Marc stands up and walks out of the trees. He stands in the open before the gate. ‘Hey!’ he yells. ‘Come out. I want to talk.’
He waits, squinting up at the gate in the bright air. The cicadas sing. Sun beats down on his head.
Marc sees it before he hears it. The bullet hits the tarmac beside him, throwing up a spurt of fine dust. Then the sound of gunshot comes, echoing through the stone passage behind the gate.
Marc turns and runs into the trees towards Kimble. From behind them comes the clamour of metal on metal and a cracked voice screaming, ‘Run! Run!’
They run through the forest, sliding, scrambling away from the screams and the shots. Marc feels the gate at his back like an eye.
They don’t stop until they have left the gate far behind. Marc bends double, hands on his knees. His breath comes in long wheezes. ‘Have to get the leg off,’ he says briefly to Kimble between gasps.
She looks around. ‘Here.’ She leads him to a fallen tree and helps him sit.
Marc eases the prosthetic off with a groan, leaning it carefully against the pine trunk. The stump burns and aches. He massages it, head hanging low. His back heaves. High sounds come from him.
‘Sorry, Marc,’ Kimble says, awkward. ‘I always forget. I shouldn’t have gone so fast, should have helped you …’
Marc raises his head and looks at her. His eyes are full. ‘That was fucking great,’ he whispers, before collapsing into high laughter once more.
Kimble releases a long whoosh and sits beside him on the fallentree. ‘It really was.’ Her hands clench on the pine bark. ‘And I got it all.’
Marc wipes his eyes. ‘Run, run,’ he repeats, thoughtful. ‘Was that the same voice?’ he asks Kimble. ‘The one we heard in our camp the other night?’
She nods.
10Riley
The day is glaring bright again. Riley watches through the trees as Cal approaches across the meadow. The smoking jacket hangs loose on his frame. He is thin and drawn these days. Riley hears him sometimes at night, crying through the wooden stable wall. At first he went out on the range every day looking for his brother. Then it was every other day. Then once or twice a week. He is losing hope. Riley winces as her stomach cramps with emptiness. They are all hungry.
A blight has come over Nowhere. There has been no rain for weeks. There are no apples or little strawberries, no eggs in the birds’ nests. The vegetables have soft black patches all over and the sweet potatoes are filled with worms. For a moment when she saw them, Riley considered eating the worms. She’s always cold now, even in the fierce sun. Sometimes her eyes go weird.
Riley backs further into the shade of the trees as Cal approaches, his feet dragging through the grass. If Cal goes out on the range she likes to watch for his safe return. She doesn’t want him to know.
It’s thin eating again today – graham crackers with water and dried apple slices, packets of jelly with no bread to put it on. Oliverlimps away from Riley to talk to Midnight. He prefers almost anyone to Riley, these days.
They scrape the green off the crackers and eat them slow in little bites.
After, the others stay in the shade of the barn, sheltering from the heat. No one is working. Riley understands why lions spend all their time lying around waiting for the hunt. Only the children seem cheerful. One of the smaller ones, Peach, sings a song to herself, staring at a blade of grass she holds in her hand.
Riley finds Noon behind Home Barn, staring at the trees. Hornets swarm over the apples that hang rotten on the branches. The smell of spoiled fruit is heavy in the air.
Noon looks at her, asking the question with her eyes. Riley shakes her head. ‘No rabbits in the traps.’ The only one they caught this week was sick. Patches of fur were missing and it shook. They burned the corpse. That was difficult. Even through the smell of burning hair Riley could smell the meat and it took all she had not to pull it out of the fire. It’s not just the traps. Riley hasn’t seen another rabbit for a week. They don’t play on the green hills at dusk. They don’t bound through the long grass or nibble young shoots in forest clearings.
‘There were fish floating belly up in the lake yesterday,’ Noon says. ‘The crocodile didn’t come to be fed. And now I have nothing to feed him. Maybe he’s dead too.’ Riley finds herself rubbing her aching stomach and wondering what crocodile tastes like. Her hip bones have that same sharp edge they used to, when she and Oliver first got here.
Riley puts her hand on Noon’s shoulder. ‘The rabbits and the fish will come back.’But when?
Noon puts her hand on Riley’s. ‘I know what must be done.’ She doesn’t seem to be speaking to Riley. She looks so sad. ‘Blood in the land,’ Noon murmurs. She talks like this sometimes, like someone in the Bible or maybe an old tree, if trees could talk.
Riley shakes her hazy head. Hunger brings strange thoughts with it sometimes, vivid and dreamlike. The boy who tasted like Clearasil sometimes had weed and Riley feels like that now, images and ideas streaming brightly through her mind without sense or order.
Noon cups her hands at her mouth. ‘We go to Ault,’ she shouts. Her voice echoes off the valley walls. ‘Raid.’
Dawn waits for them at the edge of the meadow as they come out of the apple trees. She gives them each three sugar cubes. Riley shoves hers into her mouth, crunching hard. The sugar courses through her.
Dawn holds a Tupperware box. Noon takes off something that hangs around her neck, under her shirt. Riley sees that it’s a little bag of washed leather. Dawn holds out the Tupperware box and Noon puts it in gently. Noon says quietly to Dawn, ‘You’ll have everything ready?’
