“Swallow,” the eyes said.
I did as the eyes asked, desperately trying to swallow in order to breathe. Finally the lumps slid down my throat. My first breath was more of a gasp, and then I greedily sucked down air as fast as I could.
Cold wetness touched my lips and a hand cupped my cheek, helping me to tilt my head. Rough fingers rubbed water over my dry lips, dripping it into my mouth and onto my tongue. The hand was gentle, caring even, despite the calloused fingers, and more tears burned my eyes. It had been so long since I’d felt a kind or caring touch. My father came to mind, his large hand wrapped around mine, protecting me, defending me. Dying for me.
I could still remember that last kind touch. My father’s soft brown eyes full of fear and sorrow. Now it was slipping away, changing, morphing into something else. Into someone else. Brown eyes darkened and hardened into black eyes full of rage.
I tried to cling to the image of my father, but couldn’t seem to make him out. He was a blur, a smear on a dying backdrop.
The world slipped away as darkness sucked at my memories and pulled me under.
• • •
It was my stomach that woke me. Rumbling loudly, it constricted painfully inside me. My eyelids fluttered open and I found Eagle hunched over me, fiddling with the cloth wrapping around my middle. He glanced up at my face and cocked an eyebrow. “Hungry?”
“Is it bad?” I asked, my voice nothing more than a hoarse rasp. For years I’d gone without speaking; with no one to speak to, what was the point? Although the words seemed to come easy enough, my voice still felt foreign to me.
“It’s better,” he said. “You’ll live.”
My stomach rumbled again, and there was no way to mask the noise. I hadn’t eaten anything substantial in a long time, even before I’d been dragged inside these gates. But he must have been giving me water; my throat didn’t feel dry.
The realization that this man, this man with evil eyes, had been caring for me for what must have been a while now, had me frowning. I had been on my own for so long, surviving, scavenging, and hiding, that the idea of having someone else here, helping me, doing the things I couldn’t do, felt wrong somehow.
And still, I wondered why he’d done it.
Eagle sat back on his haunches and stared at me. His face, strangely free of its usual scowl, gave me a rare glimpse of the man beneath the anger. I’d thought him terrifying and vicious, a vile man full of hate and anger. And although those things were all still there in his expression, there was something else as well. He’d definitely once been a handsome man, but I imagined he’d always been a little rough around the edges. Maybe he’d even been the kind of man who was so good-looking he made your stomach flutter. The sort of man who—
“What the fuck are you staring at?”
My thoughts disintegrated, but I didn’t look away. We continued staring at each other in silence for several long moments, his scowl once again twisting his features.
“I’m going to get some food,” he muttered. Standing, he straightened and headed from the room without looking back.
Curious, I watched him leave. He wore his mask well, but I’d seen it, a glimpse of the man beneath. The one who’d picked me up, a stranger lying in a field, and had since hidden me away and cared for me.
Chapter Eleven
Eagle
She snored.
The girl snored while she slept and not just any sort of snoring, but the kind of grating nasal impediment that could put a grown man to shame. Not only did she snore, but she twitched as well, as if her senses, even while sleeping, were on high alert, detecting even the slightest shift in the air and homing in on it.
Leaning forward in my chair, I inspected her closely with a clinical eye. Her skin was so fair, nearly glowing in the waning light of the bedroom, not one freckle to be found. But her hair and hands told a different story. Matted and starting to dread at the ends, her long brown hair hadn’t seen a brush in years. Callouses covered each of her fingertips, and her fingernails were broken, caked beneath with dirt and who knew what else. I shook my head, snorting softly. She would need a hundred more baths before she could actually be considered clean, but at least she didn’t smell like a worksite outhouse anymore.
Where the fuck had she been living all this time? In a goddamn ditch? And snoring like she did? It was a wonder she hadn’t been found and eaten by every rotter within a mile’s radius.
She hadn’t moved since I’d left her and gone to the market. Her hands still gripped the blanket tightly, her fingers curled around the edge as if her very life depended upon it. A small wrinkle had furrowed between her eyebrows upon my arrival, giving her an overall angry appearance. A determined little wild thing, I thought. But it was that determination that had probably kept her alive all this time.
If I had to guess her age, I’d place her somewhere between seventeen and twenty, which meant she’d been a damn kid when the infection had hit. Kids didn’t survive global catastrophes, not without help, at least, and from the looks of her, the way she’d been reacting to me, I knew she hadn’t had help. Not in a long time.
More than likely she’d watched her entire family torn to shreds; maybe she’d even been forced to take them out herself. And ever since she’d been alone.
Leaning back in my chair, I unwrapped the food I’d brought back and bit into it. Someone had managed to bag themselves a family of wild turkeys, and anyone who’d been lucky enough to have something worth trading was eating well tonight. For me, the meat had cost me a good many rounds of handgun ammunition, and ammunition was quickly growing scarce. It was the reason I hoarded anything of value, because one of these days the old-world supplies would run dry, and as much as I liked proving my point with my bare hands or with a well-honed blade, bullets were a far more efficient way of staying alive.
Improving ammunition production was quickly becoming a necessity, so Mensa needed to up his game in devising a working system to make that happen.
Tearing off another chunk of meat, I popped it into my mouth and chewed slowly, savoring the grease-soaked delicacy. It was rare that I ever experienced a semblance of peace and quiet these days, but as the hot food slid down my throat and into my stomach, filling it, something akin to contentment fell over me.
