by R. Lee Smith
“Seriously,” she said on her next walk across the camp. “A very good time to run.”
Still none of them moved. Only one had even crept outside the corral.
Sir and the man who liked to kick had finished their conference and separated. Nona slashed the kicker as she passed him and kept going, trusting him to die without any more help. She didn’t dare take her eyes off Sir in case he turned around before she was ready, but he never did. His back stayed to her as she slogged up through the rain and the mud.
“What now?” he asked, lighting a cigarette.
“Now this,” she told him and slashed his throat. She watched while he dropped, bubbling, to his knees. She considered cutting on him some more, since she had the knife and he was right there, taking his sweet time bleeding out, but didn’t. She wasn’t sure if it was mercy that kept her from doing any more damage, or sadism, wanting him to suffer as long as possible. Her own motives were a mystery to her; she could feel nothing.
And yet he’d raised a valid point. What now?
There had to be a hundred men out there. Two hundred. Hell, a thousand for all she knew. She didn’t have a chance of killing them all. It was nothing short of a miracle that she’d killed this many, and once the fog started to burn off, it was going to happen fast and take all her cover away. She had to do something. She—
She’d just killed ten people.
Ten.
Nona looked at herself. Her right arm was soaked in blood, the front of her sweater heavy with it. It was on her face; she could feel it in thick splashes on her skin, chilling fast in the morning air. She’d been on her way to the movies just yesterday. Now she was a multi-murderer.
It was shock, all right. And she was coming out of it. The urge to rip off her bloody clothes came over her and she fought it back, teeth clenched and stomach churning, hammering her brain with the knowledge that the cold would kill her until her squeamish, senseless fit subsided.
Disgusted with herself, Nona wiped the knife clean on the dead man’s pants and took off his jacket. She checked his pockets, found a set of keys she ignored and a lighter she took for herself. Then she took his cigarettes. She didn’t smoke, but like the saying went, it seemed like a hell of a good day to start. She took the gun, although she’d never fired one in her life. She kept it in her hand, since she wasn’t sure the safety was one and didn’t want to shoot herself trying to put it in her pocket. The first gunshot out of her, whether it went into her foot or one of their faces, would bring the whole army down on top of her and now that death was not a foregone certainty, she found herself oddly predisposed to living. That meant leaving now. Quietly.
Nona went back to the corral and looked at the women who were still, unbelievably, standing around. She gave June the jacket, reclaimed her skillet, then she picked up a bag of oranges from one of the supply boxes and looked at them some more, trying to think of something to say that would get them moving. She settled on, “Bye,” and started walking.
To her surprise, some of them followed her.
To her greater surprise, most of them stayed.
4. Out Of The Frying Pan
Nona’s attack on the camp occurred just after dawn of the morning before Gabriel’s last push on the Valley of Hoof and Horn, and while it did not go entirely unnoticed, even by that afternoon, he had far greater things to worry about than a handful of runaway camp-girls. Nona did not know this and would have been offended if she had. She had committed a terrible, violent, murderous act and she had no doubt a terrible, violent, murderous retribution would follow.
As they fled into the wet, concealing fog, they heard gunshots sporadically popping behind them, then a huge barrage of returning fire, and then a very permanent silence. Nona tried to get them to run at that, but two of their number were utterly incapable of it. So they walked and Nona walked with her knife in her hand, continuously looking over her shoulder at shadows in the mist.
When the fog finally burned off, she was astonished to see empty plains behind her. She oriented herself south, reasoning that since her instinct had been to follow the sun, not following it was the best plan. There were mountains to the north, already cap-deep in snow, so south was the way to go. When she announced this, no one objected. No one offered any other ideas or questioned her logic. They just stared at her until she started walking and then they followed. In the twenty-three years of her life on Earth, Nona had never led a sing-along, much less a band of refugees, but here she was and here they were and this was life, so she rolled with it. Between them, they had a ten-pound bag of oranges, a plastic lighter, a pack of cigarettes, a hunting knife, a gun and an iron skillet. Nona didn’t think much of their chances, but she kept that observation to herself. She had no idea how to be a leader, but she guessed morale was important.
The rain fell for six days and nights and then turned to snow. Each day, they walked until they came to the relative cover of trees, where they made beds of broken evergreen branches to try and keep them off the cold, wet ground. As they ate the oranges, they at first buried the peels or burned them, in case the bright color could be seen and followed by the pursuit they were certain (erroneously, as things turned out) was coming after them. As they ran low on oranges, Nona noticed some of the women eating the peels. After a lot of discussion and a democratic vote, the decision was made to try and shoot some of the pheasant-like birds that occasionally startled up out of the thickets they passed. None of them had ever fired a real gun before; they gave it to the girl who said she played Call of Duty.
In a just a few frantic seconds, they used all their ammunition, but managed at least to wing one of the pheasants with the very last shot. It flap-hopped through the snow with Nona stumbling and tripping behind it until she managed at last to flatten the fucking thing with the skillet.
They ate it down to the bones. Nona, who had read somewhere that a human could go three weeks or even more without food, let the others have her share. They smoked the cigarettes. One of the women ate the cardboard package they came in. They left the gun, empty, useless now as anything but a reminder of the men who were surely, surely chasing them.
On the same morning that Taryn MacTavish met with Mab in the outer courtyard of Dis, one of the women did not wake up after Nona wearily called an end to their night’s rest. Burial was impossible. They covered her over with the branches of her bed and left her. Her name had been Tanya something, Nona was told. The name stayed with her. She’d known a girl in the third grade named Tanya Casatelli, a girl who might have been her best friend, if she lived the kind of life where that stuff happened. She’d been blonde, too. Nona hadn’t thought of that Tanya in years and hadn’t gotten a very good look at this Tanya before leaving her in her eternal huddle in the snowy woods. Over the next few weeks, the idea that both Tanyas were one dug itself in and could not be reasoned out. She had nightmares.
After two weeks of walking (she marked the days by making scratches on the back of the skillet), another woman, the one who had been so friendly making pancakes for the soldiers that first bloody morning, turned back.
“You can’t be serious,” Nona said, watching her go. “They’ll kill you.”
She kept going. June. Her name was June Stockton.
Nona followed her for maybe half a mile, sometimes shouting, sometimes reasoning, sometimes (scary times) just laughing. But June kept going, and eventually, Nona let her go. The other two, the last two, stayed with her. One of them she recognized from the crosswalk where they’d been taken. The other was a stranger with one hand wrapped in a bloody shirt. After all this time, still a stranger.
“I’m Nona,” she said.
“I’m Heather,” said the girl from the crosswalk.
“Leila,” said the third.
So that was better.
“How’s that doing?” Nona asked, nodding at Leila’s hand, because she didn’t want to say, ‘How long has that been there?’ and admit she hadn’t noticed it until now.
“O
h, it’s not serious. I’m sure it’s not serious.”
“When did that happen?” Heather asked, blinking, so Nona wasn’t a self-centered asshole, or at least, wasn’t the only one.
“It’s nothing,” Leila assured them. “I cut myself last night on some stupid rocks. The dry creek, you know. When we were climbing up the bank. I just…I didn’t want to say anything. I couldn’t believe I actually cut myself.”
“How bad?” Nona asked. “Let me see.”
Leila carefully unbound her hand and held it out, revealing an ugly gash across her palm. The wound was visibly swollen. When Nona cautiously prodded at it, beads of almost clear fluid seeped up around the scabs.
The two women watched Nona’s face as Nona studied it. It bothered her, but she didn’t say so. They had nothing to wash it with, nothing to wrap it in, and just saying, ‘Yeah, that looks infected,’ wasn’t helpful.
But they were looking at her so expectantly, Nona guessed she had to say something.
“It doesn’t look too bad,” she said.
“No,” said Leila, plainly relieved, and the hell of it was, neither of them were lying. It looked bad, sure it did, but not too bad. If they were home, it was the sort of thing that might have needed stitching down at the local clinic, but if not, heck, a little soap and hot water, some Neosporin and a bandage would take care of it. It’d leave a scar, but they were all big girls. Scars were no big deal.
They weren’t home. This wasn’t Earth. Nona had no idea what the big deals looked like on this world. She only knew the sight of that open, red wound made her uneasy.
But she didn’t have soap or hot water or Neosporin or bandages, so what could she do? Leila scrubbed it with a bit of snow and they kept walking. At night, Nona made a little extra water to wash Leila’s shirt-bandage and dry it out over the fire. She tried to keep it clean and she prayed that was enough.
It wasn’t.
Day by day, Nona watched the wound swell and worsen, useless to stop or even slow its festering progress. She was afraid of the infection she saw creeping in and she was afraid of the way they seemed to cover less and less ground as Leila weakened, but as it turned out, she still wasn’t afraid enough.
Sometime in the middle of the third week, Leila woke up with an obvious fever. Nona stood at the edge of their makeshift camp, restlessly staring down their backtrail and listening as Leila tried to convince Heather that she was okay to get up and move on. It seemed to be a lot of convincing and not a whole lot of getting up. Nona weighed another mile south against overstressing Leila’s already crumbling reserves. Then she started gathering firewood and making herself comfortable for the day.
“You don’t have to,” Leila said.
“Just rest,” Nona told her trying not to sound as pissed off as she felt, trying not to be pissed off at all. It wasn’t Leila’s fault, she was doing the best she could. Nona could clearly see that. It did no goddamn good to get angry over something no one could do anything to change. “We could all use a break. Tomorrow we’ll—”
And that was all she said as the biggest damn badger she had ever seen came right through the bushes and found them.
It wasn’t really a badger, but that was the only comparison Nona’s startled brain could fish up for her. Whatever it was, it was huge, hip-high at the shoulders, with a squat, powerful body that showed signs of a lean winter. Two teeth dripped down from its wedge-shaped jaw, teeth longer than Nona’s fingers. Its eyes were black beads, devoid of intelligence, but alert and very hungry.
It looked at them, making a low, rhythmic chuffing sound in the back of its throat.
They looked at it, all three of them frozen in place.
Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled.
And then the moment broke. The badger lunged, moving clumsily into a loping run straight for them.
Heather and Leila scattered aside, both screaming. Nona screamed, too. She also leapt forward, the knife in her hands seeming to pull her along behind it as though it were the mind at work here and she just the accessory. In the split-second before they collided, she had a lucid thought—‘What the hell am I doing?’—but by then, of course, it was too late.
The animal saw the human coming for it and roared in challenge, jaws gaping wide. Her arm disappeared right down its throat. Her knife crunched into bone at the back of its mouth, preventing it from biting off the arm it had half-swallowed, and the two of them were suddenly face-to-face and equally astonished at this turn of events.
The beast scrambled backwards, twisting its head violently side to side. It never occurred to Nona to simply let go of her knife. She held on, grabbing at the thing’s jaws in a blind bid for balance as it yanked her off her feet. It tried to bite, but succeeded only in wedging the blade another inch deeper into its skull. It slapped instead, landing blows along Nona’s ribs, but miraculously, the considerable claws of the beast never caught. It dropped, rolling, and Nona rolled with it. Her arm tumbled inside the animal’s open jaws, lacerating itself on its teeth as the two of them struggled. She grabbed onto one of those saber-teeth and pushed against it with all her strength, heaving on her knife.
It broke. Not the tooth. The knife. The fucking steel knife.
Nona fell backwards with the hilt clutched in her hand, to land on her butt with a “wuuff!” in front of the pain-crazed, giant badger. She stared stupidly at maybe one whole inch of broken blade, shiny with badger drool and blood, as the beast thrashed itself onto its feet again. She looked up again just in time to see it pounce.
Acting on instinct alone, Nona flung herself straight back, lying flat as the animal jumped over her. She slashed at it with her ridiculous inch of steel as it sailed overhead, catching nothing but fur, grown thick against winter cold. Or maybe not. She might have cut it. She saw no blood, but the thing screamed as it landed. It staggered, turned around and swung one claw-studded paw aimlessly through the air, staggered again and fell.
Nona rolled over and stared, still clutching and half-raising her broken knife. She still saw no sign of blood on its belly, but there was a steady trickle of the stuff coming out its mouth and flecks of red in the snot blowing out its nose. Slowly, not taking her eyes off it even to blink, Nona stood.
The badger attempted to do the same, shoving itself forward through the mud with increasing effort before collapsing onto its side again. Its glaring eyes rolled. Its jaws moved in sluggish biting motions. Its claws flexed and its legs moved in sleepwalking motions where it lay splayed on the ground. Once in a while, it managed a gurgling roar. Mostly, it just panted.
Gradually, the other two women came creeping back. “You did it,” Leila said, sounding almost as shocked as Nona felt.
“Not yet,” said Nona, adjusting her grip on her knife…her hilt. She circled around the monster’s twitching paws until she was behind its flat, heavy head. Warily, she felt around its neck, flinching hard at every spastic dying movement, until she found a soft place under the jawbone. And then she stabbed it to the best of her broken knife’s ability, sawing and hacking through the fur until she found the vein she knew had to be hiding.
Blood gushed out with diminishing vigor, soaking into the badger’s fur and staining the mud beneath its body.
“Now it’s dead,” panted Nona and now it finally was.
They ate it, as much as they could eat, and filled the orange bag with as much as it could hold to eat later. Then they left, Leila leaning on Nona’s arm, to get as much distance between them and the carcass as possible before more of the monsters showed up, attracted by the smell of blood.
But they carried the smell of blood with them, Nona knew. No matter how many times they rinsed their clothes, they carried it. In Leila’s hand.
Over the next few days, the little pockets of trees which they sought out to make their nightly camps became larger and closer together. And then one morning, the fog rolled back and there was a forest in front of them. It kept on appearing as the fog kept receding, stretching from hori
zon to horizon and up on hills into the close winter clouds. The first forest. The Forest God.
“What do we do now?” Leila asked.
How was she supposed to know? She didn’t know anything.
It started to snow again.
“We go in,” Nona said. At least it was shelter.
5. Kruin
Tusker spore. Many days old, but fresher than any other sign Kruin had seen. The summer had been too hot and dry for far too long, and the rains had not come until well into autumn. All the game of the Wyvern’s Wood had moved on, and now that it was winter, most were certain not to return. The plants that had sustained the wolves of High Pack had long since died away into their yearly sleep, and so it was meat again and meat was scarce.
Yet for all his present hardship, it was not so terrible a winter. The first snows had fallen only recently. The spring would be green and lush. Kruin, chief of High Pack and Lord of the Land of Tooth and Claw, was one of a very few who could think so easily through the troubles of now to a time of ease to come. He knew this and was vaguely proud of it, but he kept such thoughts to himself. His people could not understand such assurances and they could not eat them anyway. So they hunted, and hunted closer to the Valley than Kruin otherwise would have allowed, hoping to spy the grass-dwelling prey that seemed so plentiful in the Cerosan’s holdings. He found tusker spore instead, wandering back into the Wood.
Kruin considered this new prey. The marks of its hooves were nearly the size of Kruin’s own feet. The scars left in the trunks of trees proved a male, old and strong and, to judge by the evident frustration in its gorings, mateless. Kruin’s hunting party this day was large—there had been wyvern spore also in the forest of late—but most were inexperienced hunters. He was certain of only himself and Nakaroth, his second. Alorak, his son, was a strong wolf, and his reason had cooled somewhat since summer and the time of his challenge, but he was still prone to youth’s recklessness. The rest were young males of low rank, some of whom were yet unblooded and could not even be considered true wolves of High Pack.