She returned to the hardware store for a shovel and started digging in a patch of dirt near the backdoor. She spent most of the first day digging, and in the evening, she carefully carried the shopkeeper’s body and his chair out to the grave. It was dark when she placed the marker stone over the loose dirt.
***
The next day, she decided to get some clothes. Her clothes were dirty, and since new clothes were free, it made more sense to get new ones than to waste water on cleaning the dust off of the old ones.
She walked around the shops until she found one that looked like what she wanted. When she went inside, she found that the store, as usual, had been split down the middle, with practical clothes on one side and impractical, easily torn clothes on the other side. She walked back through the store, past the mostly empty racks of adult-sized clothes to the mostly full racks of child-sized clothes. The smaller clothes were almost always still around.
She knew that someday soon she would need those bigger clothes, and she would probably have to visit people’s homes to find them. She dreaded that day. There were always so many bodies in the parts of town where the houses were. She was also noticing that it was getting more difficult to fit into the practical clothes as she got older. Although there were a few pieces on the impractical side that fit, and seemed functional, so that was where most of her clothes came from on that trip.
She spent the entire day looking through the stock. She returned to her new home at nightfall, pushing a wheeled cart filled with clothing and the few blankets and pillows that the looters had missed. Everything was a little dusty, but nothing a good shake didn’t help, and not nearly as bad as her old clothes, which she saw, as she tossed them out onto the street in front of her new home, also had some blood and urine stains on them from when she fell through the stairs.
***
At first, she didn’t recognize the sound. She sat up from her bedroll and listened. Grinding and gurgling from far away. The growling of a sick dog.
In a flash of memory, the sound was clear. The crazies had made that sound the night they came to her house.
It was louder, closer, and mixed with the hoots and hollers that always accompanied the crazies. Father had kept the family inside since the crazies started murdering people on the street. Mostly, people who stayed in their homes were safe.
That time, however, they stopped. One of them broke a window. Another kicked in the door. Gunshots. Mother screamed as Father fell. Sister was slumped across the back of a motorcycle, and they were gone. It was over in seconds, and only she and Mother were left, and Mother couldn’t live in the house anymore.
The girl sprang up and ran toward her pack, knocking over a tall stack of emptied cans with cat’s faces on them, which she’d been building up over the last couple weeks. She paused a moment, thinking to rebuild it, but decided that it could wait.
At the bottom of her pack she found what she was looking for: a rifle scope, and rushed out the heavy door. She sprang past the small grave marker and leaped onto the ladder on the wall of the building.
When she reached the top, she listened again for the sound. The reverberations across the town made it too difficult to figure the direction, but it had to be close. She raised the scope to her eye and searched the streets.
A half-mile away, on the other side of a collapsed shopping center, she saw it: a dirty black motorcycle. Just one, and just one rider. It was driving away from the hole the girl had made in the wall, now cleared enough to let the bike through.
She watched the bike cross the town, slowly, the rider looking left and right at the buildings, until it came to a stop in front of a convenience store only a street away. The rider dismounted, looked around, and took the helmet off.
Long auburn hair, sharp features. Sister!
The girl dropped the scope and clamored down the ladder, falling the last few feet and twisting her ankle against the grave marker. She hobble-ran between mostly fallen walls and steel beams to the convenience store. In moments, she was peering out from between two concrete columns at the store and the big motorcycle. The rider emerged from the store with a small package in her hand: perhaps a pepper meat stick. She sometimes could still find those on the floors and cabinets of the corner stores.
The woman leaned against an old gas pump and opened the package. It wasn’t Sister. She looked a bit like Sister, but she wasn’t Sister. Trying to decide if she should leave her concealment, the girl shifted her weight and knocked a chunk of concrete loose from the pillar. The sound startled the woman and she turned to look, but the girl did not wait to meet the woman’s gaze. She quickly ran back to her store, and after a few minutes, she heard the motorcycle start back up again.
***
She started the next day by sealing up the front of the store. As she nailed a tarp over the broken glass door, she sang a song to herself about a little girl trapping herself in a dangerous dungeon, and tried to ignore the sound of the motorcycle still moving around the city. She was admiring her work when she felt a breeze, somehow still coming through. She checked all the edges of the door and felt nothing, then she remembered the bullet hole. She looked at it. It was surrounded by cracks and looked very weak, but somehow, the window was still in one piece after all this time, so something was strong about it. She looked around the store until she found a wide roll of tape. Carefully, she placed a small square of it over the small hole in the window.
There was still a draft from somewhere. She wandered around the store, feeling for the draft. She was drawn toward the narrow, wooden door leading to the broken staircase. It was still standing open, and it was the source of the draft. She shuddered, but not because it was chilly. Inside, the stairs were ruined; there was no way to reach the second story now. So, instead of seeing what was open upstairs, she nailed the door closed and stuffed bits of cloth into the seams. Then, she did the same with the closet door on the other side of the space. The air was still after that. She would be able to keep warm in here for the entire winter.
She started to feel a bit uncomfortable in the stillness. She realized that she was thinking about something upstairs. That something was right above her, and it would be there all winter, and she couldn’t think about it. She couldn’t think about it if she didn’t want to end up like the crazies.
To distract herself, she climbed back up onto the roof to retrieve her forgotten scope. While she was up there, she took the opportunity to look for the woman again. The sound of the motorcycle had stopped, but she found the woman after only a few minutes of searching. She was at another corner store with gas pumps, and she was standing next to a hole in the ground, running a hose down into it. After a moment, she turned and let the hose drop down by her side, seeming to stare directly at the girl, so the girl dropped behind the lip of the rooftop to hide. When she peeked back over, the woman was still looking her way, and now she was waving.
***
It was three days before she saw the woman again. It had been getting colder than expected in the small shop, and the girl was searching the stores for something to hang in the large front window. She was hoping to find something to keep out the cold at night, but which she could move out of the way in the day, as that window was her only source of light.
The girl was skipping from shop to shop singing a wordless song about dancing with the sun and the moon when she spotted the motorcycle outside of the hardware store on the other side of the cracked four-lane street. She stopped and stared for a moment, and the woman peeked out from behind the doorway of the store, smiling when she saw the girl. The woman slowly stepped out onto the sidewalk on her side of the street. The girl took a step back, bumping against the wall behind her and dropping her pack. She was about to run, and it seemed that the woman could tell because she raised her hands in a sign of non-aggression.
The girl stood still, only watching as the woman slowly crossed the street toward her, hands still raised. When the woman was only a few feet away, she reached a han
d out to the girl. The hand was dirty and the smile was lopsided, and the girl was suddenly reminded of the way she had to approach small animals in the forest for food.
She turned and ran then, visualizing her own blood spilling into the grass or making pretty red clouds around the rocks of a clear stream. She ran, without looking back, all the way to her store. She slammed the heavy steel door behind her and latched it. She collapsed exhausted and crying to the floor.
She spent almost all of the next day building up the courage to go back out. In the evening, she finally crept, as quietly as she could, out of her door and back along the street. When she got there, she was almost surprised to find that her pack was still there, and truly surprised to see that it didn’t even look like it had been touched.
***
A few days later, the girl was entertaining herself in the ruins of an old toy store. She had started by playing a hunting game, where she tried to find as many intact plush animals as she could, singing a song about bears and elephants, but when she had found an entire crate of them pinned under a fallen column, she got bored with the counting.
She spent hours searching through the boxes of electronics at the back of the store, but, as always, there was not one working toy or device. However, she had found a large box full of silver-backed devices that she thought she could decorate the walls of her store with, so she loaded them all into a rope-handled paper bag, and lugged them away from the store, dragging the sturdy bag over and under broken walls and bits of neighboring stores. It was getting dark and the girl was tired, so she headed directly for her home. She picked back up her song about the animals, and so didn’t notice the dog.
It was feral, and starved. Its fur was matted and ill-maintained, and before she could react it was upon her. It leapt first at her throat, and she instinctively swung the bag from the electronics shop, striking the dog away and breaking the bag. Small boxes scattered around the street, some of them flying open, so that their mirrored cargo scuffed and scraped against the pavement.
The dog was back in an instant, and clamped down on her ankle. The girl collapsed, howling in pain, and tried to pull away. This only caused the dog’s grip to tighten. The girl struggled to draw her dagger from its sheath at her belt. The dog was shaking her, and that, combined with fear, was making it difficult to unsnap the clasp and grip the handle, but as soon as she had it free, she stabbed and buried the knife into the dog’s coarse neck.
It let go then and thrashed on the pavement for a moment before falling still. The girl grabbed her ankle with both hands and howled again with pain, then cringed and allowed herself to collapse to the pavement. She watched the clouds for a moment, silently forcing herself to ignore the pain. She needed to get back to the store and clean and bandage the wound.
She forced herself up and took a moment to gather her knife from the dog’s body. Having no way to clean it, she simply held it in her hand as she limped away. Pain pounded against her ankle with every step, and several times she stumbled and fell. It was going to be a long walk home.
Before the girl had gone a block along the road, the woman turned the corner ahead and faced her. She looked worried. She must have heard the pained howling. When the woman spotted the girl, she stopped herself short and took in the scene. She looked from the girl’s face to her knife to the dog behind her, and finally to the bloody hole in the girl’s pant leg.
The woman held up one finger, and the girl watched as the woman brought a smaller, leather bag out of her pack. She searched around in this smaller bag for a minute before she brought out a small, plastic card with her picture on it and a clip on one end. The girl had seen these before in office buildings, but couldn’t read the words.
With her ankle in this shape, she couldn’t run anyway, so she let the woman approach, holding out the badge in front of her. When she reached the girl, she motioned for her to sit down on the curb a few feet away. The girl complied, in too much pain to protest.
Once the girl was seated, the woman started unloading her small bag onto the street around her. She carefully laid out about a dozen small, silver tools, along with various little bottles and rolls of gauze. The girl understood then what the woman was doing and relaxed a bit. The woman cut away the bottom half of that pant leg, and carefully removed it to get at the bite.
The wound stung as the woman poured clear fluid over it from a plastic bottle, but it was easier to handle when someone else was doing the pouring. The girl saw that the wound was not as bad as it felt, and as she calmed down from the attack, the pain also started to fade.
When the woman was done with her work, she tried to help the girl up, but the girl refused. She didn’t want help walking either, so the woman left her alone to continue on by herself. However, the girl had the feeling, the whole way back to the little store, that she was being watched.
***
The day of the first snowfall, the girl saw smoke rising a few streets away. She was walking the streets, singing a song about dancing snowflakes as the new snow crunched under foot. She had bundled herself into a bright blue snowsuit and pink rubber boots. Some years there was no snow at all, but she liked the few days when it did snow, as it was the only way that the dark world ever looked clean.
The dark, billowy column was coming from a restaurant on the main street which was still mostly intact. The girl walked around the building until she found a small window, and looked in. The woman was sitting before a fireplace against one wall. She had broken apart most of the tables and chairs, and stacked them against the wall for firewood. She was sitting in a large armchair with a book open in her lap. The inside of the restaurant, where the woman had obviously been living, was much different from the girl’s home in the store. The walls and floors were mostly wood and stone, rather than concrete, and the floor wasn’t covered in empty cans or discarded wrappers. The girl suddenly felt a little ashamed that she never cleaned up after herself in her own place.
The girl was starting to get uncomfortably cold standing in one place, so she decided to move on. As she passed the front of the restaurant again, she heard a door open behind her. She turned to see that the woman was standing in the doorway of the restaurant, staring at her. When their eyes met, the woman motioned to the girl that she should follow, and then walked back inside, leaving the door open behind her.
Slowly, warily, the girl padded up to the door and felt the warmer air escaping into the cold day. She stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind her. She could see the bar area of the restaurant now, and noticed that the bar was stacked high with cans of various shapes and sizes, and that a door leading into what must once have been the kitchen was covered with a blanket nailed into the wall. The motorcycle was propped in a corner next to a bedroll. She set her pack down on the floor next to the door and sat beside it, pulling up her knees and hugging them to her chest. The woman watched from the middle of the room as the girl settled in, and then smiled once more before returning to her armchair and her book.
The two sat this way for some time before the girl finally removed her snowsuit. Seeing this, the woman set down her book and walked over to her bar. She selected a can from the stacks and carried it with her back to the fireplace. After adding a few more chair legs and stoking the fire a bit, she opened the can and poured the contents into a small pot, which she placed over the fire.
The smell of broth slowly filled the cozy room over the next few minutes, and when the woman finally removed the pot from the fire, the girl’s mouth was watering. The woman produced two bowls from behind the bar and set them out on a table, which had been left whole in the middle of the room. She set two places, complete with placemats and flatware, and then filled the bowls from the pot. She sat at one of the places, looked at the girl, and waited patiently.
Staring at the woman the whole time, the girl moved slowly over to the table and sat at the other place. The woman began to eat then, and the girl joined her, slurping hungrily at the soup.
&nb
sp; When the meal was done, the girl bundled herself back up and left the small restaurant for her own home, singing a song of warm soup on the way back.
***
The snow melted the next day, and the next few weeks were a bit warmer again. The next time it snowed, the girl returned to the restaurant and received the same welcome and a similar meal. Then she started visiting almost every day, looking forward to the hot meal and the silent company of the woman. A few times she fell asleep in the woman’s big comfortable armchair, and she would wake in the morning with a blanket over her. After the third time this happened, the woman added a second bedroll to the floor.
As winter deepened, and it became more obvious that it would be a very cold one, perhaps the coldest that the girl had ever had to live through, she spent more and more time in the warm restaurant. The woman showed her how to tend the fire, and convinced her to stop eating from the cans with the cats on them, even though those were once the girl’s favorite.
2013: The Aftermath Page 22