It wasn’t really on the way, but it was close enough, and it was also a superb excuse to get to know Ted better. Since Win was nursing a mild crush on him, the trade-off seemed perfectly reasonable.
The mild crush didn’t even last all the way to the ranch, though, because Ted was possibly the worst driver she’d ever shared a car with. She spent the entire trip convinced they were moments away from dying horribly, either because his hatchback, which kept shrieking at him to stop running the engine so hard, was about to explode, or because one of the two dozen cars he tailgated along the way might brake at the same time he happened to be gesturing and looking Win in the eye while speaking, which was often.
Perhaps if this was a side of him she saw after they’d developed a more involved relationship, she would have been able to forgive it, but they weren’t there yet. Win was happy to write it off as an irredeemable character flaw and move on.
Because of this, Ted didn’t even make it past the gate. She had him drop her off at the edge of the property—claiming her mom would already be in bed anyway—so that the weekend didn’t turn into Mother dropping little hints about how nice Ted seemed.
It actually was very late by the time they’d arrived. Win went straight to bed. She undoubtedly engaged with her mom briefly before then, but as it was the usual—they had fifteen ways to have the same conversation—it wasn’t memorable. That was, in hindsight, a shame, as it may have been the last time Win would speak to her mother.
The next morning, Mother was gone and she’d taken the pickup with her. No note. Optimistically, her mom was out getting food, since there wasn’t any in the house. So Win waited, and while waiting went out back to see Bluebell and Max, and Dusty, and Ginger, and Lido. She did like horses, and it had been a while since she’d visited with the gang, and Mother’s guilt trips notwithstanding, she was overdue for a ride around the woods with Max.
Win was alarmed, then, that the horses were gone too. There were six pens for the five horses, yet three didn’t even look like they were lived in. The other three, all along the same wall, looked like they’d contained horses . . . before they had broken out through the back wall.
On closer inspection, that seemed to be exactly what transpired. One of the horses—maybe all of them—had kicked out the wall.
“What the hell went on here?” she asked.
The other discoveries about precisely how amiss things were came gradually over the course of the day. Win tried calling her mom as soon as she saw the conditions in the stable, but her cell phone was dead and the landline had no tone.
The nearest farm was twenty minutes on foot, so she headed there next to ask about borrowing their phone and to see if they knew about a psychotic break involving her mom. But they weren’t home either. Their back door was unlocked, so she checked the place thoroughly enough to confirm that there were no bodies inside, which wasn’t a thing that would have even occurred to her a few hours earlier.
Turned out their phone was dead too.
She returned to the ranch then rather than continue on to the next neighbor. She didn’t know how much farther that would take her from home, and it was getting dark. Mother had to come back eventually.
Nightfall arrived with no sign of life from anybody human. Animal life, however, was thriving locally in a way she’d never seen before. Deer, a howling pack of wolves, a family of badgers, and a couple of wild boars. No horses, though.
By the second morning, Win began to formulate a plan to hike out on her own.
It was hard to know for sure what the prime motivating factor in this decision was: hunger, or fear that something really serious had transpired out there in the world, about which she was somehow neither aware of nor susceptible to personally.
It was probably hunger. At the time she’d struck out, it had been over twenty-four hours since her last bite of food. The well wasn’t dry, so water was no problem, but there weren’t any calories in water. She needed more.
Foraging and hunting for food wasn’t entirely outside the realm of her capabilities. Her dad, when he’d been around, used to take her on his hunts, and even taught her about poisonous versus nonpoisonous berries and whatnot. It’d been a really long time since those lessons, but she thought she could manage to gather some and not kill herself. (Again, that was probably the hunger talking as much as anything.) Unfortunately, when he left, his guns left with him, and Mother didn’t like to keep a gun in the house.
In ninety-nine out of a hundred situations, Win agreed with that stance. This one time, a rifle would’ve been really useful.
The weapons available in the house were a hunting knife, a hammer, and Win’s compound bow with a quiver of steel-tipped arrows.
She also dug out one of her old hiking bags and filled it with water bottles, threw a few yards of rope scrounged from the barn and two books of matches in a second bag, and then took off.
That was five days ago.
3
Win had known she was in legal hunting territory when she saw the hunting blind up in the tree. It was basically just a treehouse floor. Simple, but surprisingly sturdy. It hadn’t been used in a long while, and the surface was one-quarter tree and one-third ant farm, but it didn’t creak much and didn’t feel like it was going to drop her twenty feet to the forest floor with no warning. That was much appreciated. If the boar hadn’t come by, she probably would have slept up there rather than taking shelter in an empty homestead.
After taking her fatal shot, she climbed down the rickety ladder to claim her kill.
Or rather, her near kill; the boar was still twitching.
Kneeling down next to it, she patted the animal on the head, and then cut its throat. Then she stood back and waited for as much blood to drain out as possible—a lot easier when the beast’s heart was still pumping. (This was a lesson she’d learned the hard way after an earlier kill: a goat that bled all over her.)
While waiting for the blood to drain, she pulled an apple from her bag and snacked.
Thank God for the orchards, she thought.
She’d been walking only a few hours on the first day when she’d come across the first orchard. The apples there may have saved her life, because she was seriously dizzy from hunger by then. She would still need meat—and found it when she killed a rabbit the next morning—but the apples were her salvation.
“Come on—you done yet?” she asked the now definitely dead boar. She was still wearing the clothes soaked in the goat’s blood and didn’t relish replenishing it with fresh blood any more than she had to, but since the boar was going over her shoulders, it seemed inevitable.
The odor of a fresh kill—which she’d mostly gotten over—was bound to draw attention from some of the larger animals, and it was already late in the day. There was a house she hadn’t visited yet at the end of the trail, so relative safety was near, but hauling the boar all that way was going to take a while, and the weight would seriously slow her down.
And of course, as soon as the concern sprang to mind, she heard a rustling in the forest behind her. Not from the ground—something large was in the trees. She turned, looked up.
It was a cougar. Big one, too.
Tiger in the zoo big.
“Hey, kitty-kitty,” she said.
It purred menacingly. She wiped the blood from the knife on her pant leg and slid it back into the sheath tied to her thigh, to free up her hands.
The cat looked uncertain. It wanted the animal behind her, but didn’t know what to make of Win. She took advantage of the hesitation its confusion had caused by kneeling down to retrieve the compound bow and an arrow.
“Do you want to play, kitty?” she asked, in a tone of voice so far from the marketing executive she’d been not three weeks ago that it sounded alien to her own ears.
She nocked the arrow, aimed, and waited for the cat to make the next move.
Win thought she could probably drop it where it was before it decided to poun
ce. It wasn’t a bad idea, because pouncing would definitely be unfortunate, no matter what. She could put an arrow in its heart while it was in flight, but she’d still have to worry about a hundred-pound cougar landing on top of her from thirty feet up.
She didn’t want to kill it if she didn’t have to, though. This wasn’t out of altruism as much as it was concern over possibly losing an arrow.
The cat roared, and growled, and paced along the branch. This was to see if it could get her to back away, which wasn’t happening.
“Come on, shoo!” she muttered. “Sun’s going down. You don’t like the wolves any more than I do. Git!”
It roared and hissed, and then turned and jumped to the next tree over.
She waited until she was reasonably certain it didn’t double back, and finally exhaled.
“That’s what I thought,” she said quietly.
4
After she broke into her sixth house, a part of her wished that one of these times, she’d be interrupted by the family whose home she was squatting in, if only so they could see the horrible mess she was making.
The gutting and cleaning of the boar carcass was by far the messiest gutting—messier than the goat, and that had been pretty bad. It was also easily the smelliest. If this were anything like normal circumstances, she would have gutted it in the yard and then brought it in. But that would just attract the wrong kind of attention to her location, and she was only staying one night anyway.
Part of the problem, frankly, was that she was self-taught. She got almost no meat from the rabbit, and she ended up wasting half the goat meat because cleaning it became more trouble than it was worth: She got enough to last a couple of days, but probably threw away more of it than she should have.
It was perilous work. She hadn’t been getting a lot of sleep, despite being exhausted from all the running and hunting, and that led to moments when her hands shook at particularly inopportune times. When she was using a large hunting knife on a heavy carcass, for example. Even one cut in this land without other people could end up being fatal if she wasn’t careful, and she wanted to survive at least long enough to understand what the hell had happened.
It was an odd cycle to be stuck in. She was more confident in her ability to hunt without getting hurt than she was in cutting the meat off the bones of the kill, which meant she had to hunt more often.
So far, it was working out, but it probably wasn’t a sustainable existence.
The one thing she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do was eat the meat uncooked. This seemed like a bridge too far, as long as she knew how to make fire.
It helped that a lot of the houses had fireplaces. Not all of them, though; two days before, with the goat, she’d picked a house with a chimney—usually a good sign—but its fireplace was bricked up. It was already dark by then, and she didn’t know how far the next nearest house was. So she built a fire pit on the terrace instead, and crossed her fingers that the smell wouldn’t draw any predators. It took forever, because everything was wet, including her: There had been torrential rains the prior day. But it worked. The meat got cooked and she didn’t have to eat anything raw. It turned out she did not care for goat meat, but it was far too late by then to do anything about it.
This new house had a working fireplace. She opened the flue and got the fire going—hoping the smoke had a clear path up the chimney, or she’d have to abandon the house altogether before carbon monoxide did her in—and went about cooking the boar meat.
About halfway through the night—after eating and a small nap, but before the bulk of the meat was finished cooking—Win ended up at the back of the house, looking out on the yard through a picture window. Safe, not hungry, and not tired. That was when her mind went back to wondering just what in the deep blue hell was going on. It was also when she tended to get emotional.
“That’s it, girl,” she said, wiping her eyes, “budget your time. No room for this tomorrow.”
It must have been a trick the firelight played on her, or maybe that she was just bone-tired from all of this, but for barely a blink of an eye she caught a reflection of someone standing behind her. A neon ghost.
She spun around, but there was nobody there.
Obviously.
Glow-in-the-dark phantoms?
“I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids,” she said. Then she laughed entirely too hard, and wondered what it would take to find just one house with some alcohol still on the shelf.
She turned back to the window in time to see something large emerge from the edge of the woods below the property. By now, she thought she’d seen every animal that shared this neighborhood with her, at least once. She was wrong.
It was a horse.
5
Win was up and out of the house by first light. The tracks in the yard were still fresh, and she knew well enough what a horse’s tracks looked like, so following them wasn’t all that hard.
The question was whether it would do any good. It looked like it was just wandering around the area, but if the horse decided to run, she’d never catch it. And if she did catch up, she had no idea what to do next.
She didn’t know whose horse it was, but there was no saddle, and from the way it looked out the window, the animal didn’t think it was lost. It seemed just beyond the realm of the possible that she’d witnessed a feral horse from the picture window—this wasn’t the Old West, and packs of mustangs didn’t roam New England—but that didn’t mean it was tame, either.
Win knew a lot about horses, but she’d never broken one. Given this horse wasn’t standing in a corral, she didn’t have a lot of room to get it wrong.
She followed the tracks for most of the morning. They circled back toward the house a couple of times, inspiring an optimistic—and irrational—notion that maybe the horse was out looking for her while she was looking for it.
The sun was high in the sky by the time she tracked it down in a meadow, dining alone on the thick grass.
Win stepped out of the tree line and into the sun, at the far end of the meadow. The horse raised its head and gave her one look, and then went back to eating. That was, she decided, a good sign. It didn’t see her as a threat. So far.
“Hi,” she said, as she got closer. “I’m Win.”
The horse snorted, looked at her again, and resumed eating.
“I was just wondering . . . I could use a ride. Just to go out, to . . . well, somewhere. I haven’t worked out where exactly yet. Someplace where there are people. I’m going to run out of arrows, see, and I don’t know how to make more. Not soon, but . . . it’s not a lifetime supply. Unless I die soon. Then I guess it is. You could take me to a weapons depot, maybe. Really, anywhere. I’ve been out here for like a week, and look at me. I’m rambling, sorry. So anyway, that’s me. Probably sound crazy, huh? Oh, hey, do you like apples?”
She pulled an apple out of her bag and held it up for the horse. When it didn’t show any particular interest, she stepped closer until she couldn’t be ignored any longer.
The horse sniffed the apple, then looked at her, then took it from her and started eating. While it was eating, she scratched the hair behind its ear. Max always liked that.
When the horse finished with the apple, it turned and silently asked for another, which she provided. Then she pulled out a few yards of rope.
“There’s a stable, back where you and I met last night. I haven’t checked inside, but I bet we can find a proper brush in there somewhere. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
She looped the rope around its neck and knotted it up.
“What do you say? Friends?”
She took two steps ahead of the horse, until the rope was taut. Then she gave it a gentle tug.
The horse looked confused. She gave a second gentle tug. It snorted, but then began to follow.
“Awesome,” she said. “Now we have to come up with a name for you.”
6
They debated names all the way back to the stable, before finally settling on Elton. It was her tenth choice, so it was possible the horse was just sick of her asking which one he liked by then and agreed if only to get her to shut up about it.
She’d come up with the theme—in which he was a knight, coming to her rescue—early on, and then just went through all the names of knights she could think of. She ran out of the standard Arthurian monikers pretty early, as she evidently didn’t know as much about English knighthood as she thought. Elton was what she came up with after remembering that Elton John was knighted.
The knight theme was really just to convince Elton to be chivalrous enough to let her sit on his back. It was hard to tell if this was sinking in.
He seemed even-tempered enough. She wondered if he was alone in the woods or if there was a team of horses out there somewhere. He was on the young side, a little thin but otherwise healthy. Possibly, there were few grazing opportunities in the area he was familiar with. Or he spent as much time as she had, over the past week, evading predators. That can wear you down. Not that there were a lot of things in the world eager to challenge an adult horse.
He didn’t look happy about entering the stable, but he did it with the offer of another apple. She tied him up inside, gave him a little hay, and looked around until she found a stiff-bristle brush and a saddle.
The brush was no surprise. She figured just about every stable had at least one. It was next to a pile of torn clothes, in a corner. The clothing was a little odd, but only a little; it wasn’t the first time she discovered bits of clothing in her wanderings. There was never anything useful about these discoveries, clue-wise.
The saddle, however, was a surprise, and a welcome one. She really didn’t expect that she’d be so lucky, and in fact had already been parsing the logistics of trying to ride bareback while keeping all the gear she expected to need. It wouldn’t have been easy.
The Apocalypse Seven Page 8