by LeRoy Clary
Letting her go meant she would return with friends, find and kill me. Taking that option meant that if I released her, I’d have to relocate. I had nowhere else to go.
She abruptly sat in the snow.
Instead of rushing up to her and yanking her to her feet, an action that might allow her to use army training to defeat me, I pulled to a stop and waited. She turned and faced me. “I’m not going any farther. Kill me here if you want, but I’m not making it easy for you to take me to some isolated place and do anything you want to me.”
She acted like she was reading my mind.
She drew in a deep breath and waited for me to speak. I didn’t. She scowled and said in a softer tone, “You look like a good man, a reasonable man. Can you shoot a fourteen-year-old girl?”
Fourteen? That could be a lie. Probably was. I waited.
“Well?”
“I can’t afford to keep a prisoner.”
She was not crying. Her lower lip may have trembled slightly under the facemask, but that was all.
I said, “Can you prove your age?”
She slowly shook her head as if I had asked a silly question. “It’s not like I have a driver’s license or anything. I’m only fourteen so they don’t give them to us.”
“Remove your hat.”
The girl hesitated. Then, in a single motion, snatched it from her head and pulled the elastic mask down from her nose to expose the bottom half of her face. Dark brown braids hung on each side of her face. Red rubber bands held them in place. Her skin was dark. She was Hispanic or something.
My initial reaction was that she might have been less than fourteen. Not older. My secondary reaction was that baby rattlesnakes kill. The thought came unbidden to mind—and I decided to ignore it for the moment. The stinging snow fell harder and a glance behind showed our tracks were already filled in, so others wouldn’t follow them. “Stand up and walk. We’re almost to my cave.”
“Cave?”
“Just do it. We can talk where it’s warm.”
The mention of the cave as a shelter apparently convinced her to move. The stinging snow and cold penetrated right through my winter clothing and I assumed did the same to her. She pulled on the fur hat again and stood. Ten minutes later, we arrived at the base of a granite cliff where an abundance of shrubs flourished, mostly small pine trees only a few feet tall, and many of them carefully planted there by me within the last few days. I’d also dragged brambles and spread them at the base. They concealed the entrance to a mining tunnel dug into the solid stone cliff a hundred or more years ago.
Inside, the tunnel twisted and turned, probably the result of miners following a vein of gold. The floor rose in elevation slightly as we moved, and water trickled down a track in the center. When I’d first built a fire, the smoke drifted deeper inside the tunnel, indicating a vent or another way inside. A search of the hillside above for two days hadn’t located it. I was scared to enter the tunnel further for fear of getting lost or falling down a shaft.
A pool of light from my small LED flashlight showed the way. As we moved, I either avoided or reset my traps and alarms as we passed by. Nobody was going to enter without me hearing rattling tin cans, the fall of rocks that had been precariously balanced, or one of two shotgun blasts when the thin tripwires pulled the triggers.
Video games had inspired most of my static defenses. I’d played them for probably ten years, even more so in the last few. When Dad and Mom died three years earlier, I was their only child and the house became mine along with the payouts from their insurance policies. The drunk driver of the other vehicle also had a good policy and it had paid me six figures for his drunken actions. That was the worth of my parents. Half the sum for each. With the house paid for, and if I was frugal, no need to work, I chose not to and rarely even went upstairs. The basement was my refuge.
We rounded another corner in the tunnel and came to where two shafts joined the main tunnel, creating a tiny room. I had a small firepit, a camp stove with extra fuel, a canvas tarp to sleep on and keep me dry from the persistent moisture seeping up from the ground, and about twenty cans of food. Soup, stew, pears, and even a single can of hated beets waited for my selection. The beets would be eaten just before I starved. All of the food had been raided from a cabin not far away.
I’d managed to bring two bags of Fritos, a few fruit and nut bars, three candy bars, and a case of lemon-flavored water. That inventory tells it all when looking back at how prepared I was. All that stuff would barely last a week.
The girl stood quietly and made a mental inventory as she looked around. I watched her approving eyes move from item to item and a slight smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. She liked what she saw. My chest swelled with pride.
“My name is Sue. Well, Susannah, officially. Teachers call me Susan, but I like Sue better.”
The statement held a wealth of information. At fourteen, she wanted to be taken as older, like all girls that age. The mention of teachers was something an older woman who was trying to lie to me wouldn’t have mentioned. I believed her given age was correct. “I’m William officially, Will, to some, but I prefer Bill.”
She giggled at my mocking of her introduction and I found myself smiling for the first time in many days.
I said, “Make yourself comfortable. We can warm a can of soup and you can tell me your story.”
She nodded, reached for a can with only a cursory glance at the label, and at the hunting knife I used to open cans. After I nodded, she drove the knife down, hit it with the heel of her palm, and worked the blade back and forth until she had an inch-wide jagged hole. She poured the gloppy soup into my only pot and went to work figuring out how to light my camp stove while I built a fire.
I gave her a few instructions and she eagerly watched the chicken-noodle soup with the small bubbles of delicious fat floating on the top. She turned to me. “Bill?”
“Yes.”
“You left my rifle back there in the snow. Why? Are you friggin crazy?”
“Where did you get it?” I asked.
“A dead soldier had it. I didn’t kill him, before you ask.”
That still didn’t sound good. Cautiously, I asked, “Flu? You went near a body that died of the flu?”
“I’m not so ignorant to go around any blight-dead and take a chance to catch it from them. He was already shot. There were others, too. Soldiers, I mean. I grabbed the rifle and ran. Then you went and left it in the snow, a perfectly good military rifle full of bullets. We could go back and get it before it rusts.”
Holding up my hand for her to slow down, I explained. “The shells in it were as big around and as long as my little finger. A single shot from it would echo around these mountains and travel miles in all directions. Anyone alive in these mountains would know a person is here and follow the sound back here to take your rifle and whatever else you have away after killing you.”
“What about your gun? Won’t the same thing happen?” Her eyes drifted to my hip.
I ejected the clip from the pistol and showed her the smaller shells, about the diameter of a pencil and a little over an inch long.
She shrugged and said, “That will do the same thing. Make too much noise, I mean.”
Smart girl. I said, “It will make half the noise. Probably a lot less.”
“That’s what the white plastic pipe taped on the end of the barrel is for, right?”
“Without the silencer, it will make half the noise of your rifle. With it, less. This,” I pointed at the PVC tube, “is something I made. I drilled holes all around and filled the whole thing with cotton balls to absorb the sound. The Internet told me how.”
“Will it work?” she asked with a skeptical frown.
“I don’t know. I think so. The sound will be muffled by the cotton balls and at least some of the sound will be deflected out the side-holes, so the overall result is less. At least, that’s my reasoning. If that doesn’t work, the shell is still so much smaller than
one from your rifle, the sound won’t carry as far.”
“Keeping our presence unknown. I like your plan.” Sue removed the pot from the fire and looked around, puzzled. “Bowls?”
I sighed. I hadn’t missed her inclusion as she referred to our presence. “One spoon. Eat from the pot and leave me half.”
She reached for the spoon. It was a simple test of trust to let her eat first. Cans of soup filled the small pot to the second mark on the inside. When she had slurped her last, she handed me the pot. It was filled slightly above the first line, meaning she had eaten less than half. A good sign.
Still, it was my soup, pot, camp stove, and spoon. And I was larger and required more calories. I finished the soup without remorse or regret at taking the larger portion. She sat and waited.
“How long since you’ve eaten?” I asked.
“Two days.”
“Want more?”
“Yes. But, is that smart to eat more now?” She glanced meaningfully at the small pile of cans set to one side. “When will we have the opportunity to find more?”
I was beginning to like her. It was a good question and I had an answer, and I didn’t miss that she included herself in the we she mentioned. “In the morning. Early. Hopefully, the snow will still be falling to cover our tracks. If so, there’s a nearby cabin where I got the food and part of the supplies stored in here. We’ll make a trip there and back.”
“What if someone else has already taken it?”
“On my first trip, I thought of that, so carried most of it into the woods and hid it in three different places, along with some other stuff.”
She gave me a critical look and eventually managed a smile. She said, “What’d I do, find a survival genius to team up with?”
“Who said anything about teaming up?”
Sue flashed another smile as if she had already twisted her fourteen-year-old personality around my little finger like a tiny python. Now she would begin to constrict until I couldn’t resist her. The freckles across her nose made a sort of mustache and when she smiled, the ends raised. She was probably unaware of the effect she was having on a lonely man who hadn’t had a decent personal conversation in a couple of years, let along with someone of the opposite sex.
Not that I was physically attracted to her. Well, not her body. Her mind was drawing me in and demanding attention. Sue asked, “Where those shotguns back there in the tunnel entrance set to fire if anyone comes inside?”
“They are,” I agreed, expecting her to make a comment about shooting an innocent person, in which case I’d explain that an innocent person would remain outside and call to me. Once inside the tunnel, there were plenty of indicators someone lived inside.
Instead, she said, “Good. You dug the holes covered with cardboard and wood to hide the shotguns. And the can alarms to rattle and warn you. I feel safer than at any time since the flu killed so many.”
That brought up the next question. “Your family?”
“All dead.”
“Were you sick?”
“Nope. I stayed and took care of them, but they died at the very beginning, during the first wave. I buried them in our back yard and lit out.”
“How did you end up in the mountains?”
A tear leaked from one of her eyes. “My dad. Just before he died, he said to come here to the mountains and not to trust anybody.”
That statement was like cold water was thrown on our conversation. I said, “At the cabin where I got the food, there are more sleeping bags. We’ll get you one of those, too.”
She turned to look at the side of the tunnel where I had my sleeping bag on the tarp. The air in the tunnel constantly moved, creating a slight breeze and the nights were cold. I’d resisted building a fire large enough to warm the tunnel because it would be impossible and would take too much firewood in any case. Sue took it all in and looked back at me. “Are you thinking of giving me your sleeping bag while you sit out here and shiver all night long?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Probably dead by morning in those damp clothes. Then you can’t show me to the cabin we’re going to rob. So, listen to me, Bill. We are going to share the sleeping bag.”
I shook my head. “Your parents wouldn’t approve, so we should respect that.”
“A good man wouldn’t take advantage of me in any situation.” Her voice had hardened.
I waited before answering. “With all that has happened in the past two weeks, I’m not sure I’m a good man. I used to be. But now I think I’m less than a good man in ways that matter.”
“You’ve killed?”
It was a flat statement. Not something to lie about. “I have.”
“Me too. What does that make me? Less than a good woman?”
Woman? Sue was a girl. Fourteen. That age means middle-school or freshman in high school. Yes, she was talking and acting like an adult older than myself, and she had just admitted she’d killed at least one person. It made little difference. With a heavy sigh, I admitted to myself that the world had changed drastically over the last two weeks and I hadn’t managed to keep up with it.
That idea made me wonder what the next two weeks would bring. I suspected sleep wouldn’t come easy and the nightmares that had begun two weeks ago would resurface when I closed my eyes.
CHAPTER TWO
Sue slipped out of her clothing and into the sleeping bag as if we’d slept together a hundred times. I was slower, but the cold got to me, and in the end, I leaped into it as she giggled and zipped the side. I’d warned her it was warmer to sleep without clothing in a cold climate than to sleep in damp pants and shirt. That was another helpful item learned from the Internet, and not first-hand experience. If it turned out to be untrue, I’d feel like a predator.
She wore panties, a bra, and a tee-shirt with a rose printed on the front. I wore shorts and a shirt emblazoned with the logo of a new-age band that probably no longer existed. I tried to be a gentleman and turned away in the confined space, only to feel her shift until she spooned me, either offering her warmth or stealing mine. It didn’t matter.
I talked, she whispered in my ear, and her arm eventually circled around my chest. Sue was chubby, short. When I took the time to notice, Hispanic. At least some of her. Maybe other things too. I’d always had a hard time distinguishing some Asians, Native Americans, and Hispanics from each other as if that mattered. Somewhere not too far back in human history I suspected they had all merged together. If not, in probably the near future only a race of brown people would exist.
In stark contrast to her olive skin and short stature, I was nearly six feet tall, my skin pasty white, and gaining another twenty pounds wouldn’t hurt. My favorite tee-shirt had been green and in large white letters, it said, “Kiss me, I’m Irish” printed around a four-leaf clover. A jock at school who used to tease and embarrass me at every opportunity had pretended to try kissing me one day while I wore it. In retrospect, I should have kissed him back in front of the entire student body, then spread romantic rumors about our relationship. Maybe then, he would have left me alone. It would have spared me months of his endless pranks and crude humor. However, for some crazy reason, I loved that shirt.
Those memories aside, turning over in a sleeping bag made for one but occupied with two people, one heavyset, one tall and skinny, is nearly impossible. Sue was also an aggressive sleeper, taking far more than her fair half. My meager attempts at recovering space were met with angry grunts, shoves, and once, an elbow jammed into my ribs.
The experience was my first. Sleeping with a woman, I mean. Not that I was sleeping a lot. My eyes wouldn’t close, her closeness and the musky smell was strange, welcome, and fearful. I’d been a near-recluse since my parents died, and with the Internet, food was delivered to my door, along with clothing, computer parts, a new large screen monitor, and hundreds of other things. Hardly a day passed without the big brown truck honking a signal that it had left a package on my porch.
But the th
ing on my mind was that I was a cripple when it came to interacting with real people. I was the nerd, the awkward young man who didn’t fit in, the one who was never invited to parties, and the few I’d attended were more torture than fun. Crowds of three were uncomfortable. Ten or more were unbearable.
For three years, those worries, and fears were suppressed as I lived alone in my basement. Now, a fourteen-year-old girl was sleeping beside me. She was going to depend on me. At twenty-nine, she saw me as a responsible adult who could help and protect her. Nothing was farther from the truth.
As I lay awake and evaluated the situation, I came to realize she was more valuable than me. At least she could speak to strangers without stuttering. She had certainly handled me well. In a few minutes, she had gone from being a prisoner to sharing my sleeping bag and making plans for our mutual futures.
The idea that she would see through my veneer of sociability scared me. Right now, she thought of me as a super-survivor, someone that could help her remain alive. Within a short time, she’d see me for what I really was and leave me for the protection of someone better equipped. That was an odd thought because a few hours earlier, I’d dispassionately considered shooting her. Now my biggest fear was that she might leave me alone again.
Sleep refused to come. My thoughts and feelings churned. I wished she had never seen me. I wished she would remain as my companion. I wished I knew how to relate to people and express my feelings.
In the morning, more immediate and practical events revealed themselves when she poked my shoulder until I woke. I looked at her. She said, “Where do I pee? I’m not going outside in the cold snow.”
Again, it was a good question. I pointed to where a small stream of seep water flowed down the stone walls and flowed out of the tunnel via a small trench. Sue gathered her coat and wrapped it around herself, then went to the stream and squatted a few steps from me. I turned away.