In The Ruins

by Lilith Saintcrow

  No shit. “You did real good, darlin. But they may be comin up the road. Grab your bag, let’s go.”

  “Okay.” She nodded. Blue veins stood out against her paleness. She was almost transparent. “Okay.” She didn’t move. Her hands clutched the steering wheel, her arms tense. Soft grey sunlight fell across her wrists, sparkling on those thin gold bangles caught below the cuff of her jacket. Tiny gold hoops in her ears.

  Even in the middle of all this, she had earrings. Soft and classy and civilized, and whatever the bastards with their big truck and sealed-up RV at the rest stop wanted, it wasn’t anything nice at all if they were gonna shoot to get it. A hot complex burst of something too sharp to be relief and too crooked to be clean fury filled Lee’s chest, and he had to exhale sharply to shove it all back down and clap a lid on. “Ginny.” He jostled her shoulder again, as gently as possible. “Come on. We’ve got to move.”

  “All right.” Still, she didn’t let go of the wheel. Shock. If she hadn’t headed for the exit, God alone knows what would have happened.

  Now ain’t the time for that, Lee. She probably thought she was moving already. “Ginny.” It had to be right tone—firm, but not commanding. “Undo your seatbelt.”

  When she didn’t move, he hit the catch. It unrolled over her chest, and that made her look up at him.

  Those big dark eyes, pupils too far dilated, were now swimming.

  Christ. “Come on.” He had to work her fingers free of the wheel. “You got anything in here you can’t leave?” Most of their luggage was in the back of the truck, but she needed something to focus on.

  “J-just my purse.” She blinked at him, and a single tear tracked down her left cheek. “I’m sorry. I…I think I killed the car.”

  “You did good, darlin.” More than good, she’d done fantastic, especially for a civilian. He found her leather purse, thankfully unopened, and scooped it up. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  Plumbdamn Insane

  “Why would they do that?” Steph hugged herself, pushing back into her seat with her legs like she thought she was driving and wanted to slow down. “Why?”

  “Some people are assholes.” Mark, his arm over her shoulder, glanced guiltily at Juju in the driver’s seat. It was pretty lucky a bullet hadn’t tumbled into the four-by’s engine; they’d been shooting mostly at the RV to bottle up their victims. It was a plain miracle Miz Ginny had been able to ram past the wreck blocking the exit, too.

  For a librarian, that was some damn fine driving.

  “That they are.” Juju didn’t quite have the shakes, but it was close. Nobody ever liked getting shot at, but it was worse when you were almost helpless, crouching in the driver’s seat and praying nothing would give out while training fought with the body’s idiot responses, adrenaline soaking every tissue it could reach and your balls crawling northward to find a more congenial home. Worst was trying to look everywhere at once, because tunnel vision snuck up on you. “But it don’t matter why they shot at us, kids. What matters is we got away.”

  “Yeah.” Mark, his skinny shoulders hunched, squeezed Steph’s shoulder again, awkwardly. “Everyone’s okay. Lee said Miss Ginny was fine.”

  Traveller hunched next to Steph, his slobbery wet nose pressed to the window Juju refused to roll down for him. The dog didn’t like being separated from Ginny, but he put up with it. And Juju was damn glad that French fellow wasn’t in his four-by. The blond man just would not shut up, he needed Maalox for the mouth. I don’t want him in with the kids, Lee had said, glowering, and that gave Juju a whole lot to think about.

  All of it was unpleasant.

  To cap it all, the temperature was dropping. This melt, forgiving and sloppy as it was, wouldn’t last forever, and they were heading northeast. Right through mountains, and towards winter’s icy heart. Lee kept poring over atlases when they stopped, the old worry-line between his eyebrows and his expression just the same as it had been in the jungle once or twice, when he was chewing on how to get his team out of deep shit the brass had landed them in. You didn’t have to worry too much when you were one of Little Lee’s folk, long as you kept your head down and did your damn job.

  But the man was not thinking straight, taking them towards the North Pole in winter during the Pocalypse. The library gal had him all turned around. And even if she had done Juju a good turn or two, he was about wishing Lee had never laid eyes on her.

  Tires shushed through slush; Lee’s taillights up ahead glowing as the truck sped up a little. In a half-hour they’d have another check-in with the walkie talkies. This stretch of freeway was deserted, and it was a nice change. Juju forced his fingers to stop clutching the wheel. His legs were steady enough, especially since he was sitting down. Steph sniffled a little, and Mark said something in her ear, soft and soothing. The two of them were a pair of turtledoves, all right.

  Christ, he wished Tip was here. He’d have a thing or two to say about Brandon French. The two of them could even suss out how to solve the damn problem for Lee. What the man didn’t know wouldn’t hurt, right? You did for your own, and if he and Billy Tipton had any “own” to speak of, it was Lee Quartine.

  Except Tip was dead, his head beaten in with his own flea-market lamp, and the fact that he’d been trying to chew his buddy’s throat out at the time didn’t change the fact of murder.

  The sky was getting uglier and uglier. The walkie-talkie on the dashboard crackled, but it was just a little static. French was probably filling up the Chevy’s cab with noise, and Lee was probably wearing that faint grimace he got when brass dogs was barking and the shit was rolling downhill. Traveller whined a little, and Mark freed up on Steph’s shoulder to pat the dog’s head, smoothing behind his left ear.

  “Mr Thurgood?” Steph’s voice was a pale copy of its usual self. “Sir?”

  “Huh?” A few spatters hit the windshield. It wasn’t quite sleet or snow, just a sloppy in-between mix. The Chevy slowed, brake lights brightening, and a green sign proclaiming they were ten miles from Evansboro hunched against the cold. At least they’d made it over Ole Miss.

  “I got a question.” Soft, and tentative.

  Well, obviously. He swallowed a sudden hot bite of irritation. “Uh-huh?”

  Steph cleared her throat, nervously, then jumped right in. “You think anyone else we come across is gonna shoot at us?”

  Christ, you mean you think there’s a chance they won’t? “I ain’t sure,” he hedged. “But if they do, we gotta be ready.”

  “It’s like in the movies.” Mark squeezed Steph tighter, and Juju forced himself to look away from the rearview and at the road in front of them. The freeway dipped and rose, gently, and there was a four-car smashup looming on the horizon. Looked like it had been one of those damn checkpoints. Wouldn’t that have been a shit duty, waving cars past or checking them for sick ’uns? “First people die, then the survivors go crazy.”

  “I ain’t fixin to go crazy anytime soon, kid.” Juju watched as Lee’s truck swung wide, creeping around bleached bones of twisted metal. Snow still lingered in the hollows and shadows, turning the wrecks—looked like one car had rammed another, then both had piled into a third, and the fourth who knew, maybe it had happened along later—into one of those farfetched modern art pieces.

  “Well, I mean, nobody ever wants to go crazy.” Kasprak said it like he’d thought the matter over.

  A half-snort of laughter caught in the back of Juju’s throat. He coughed, and almost spat on the windshield. “Wellnow, Mark, let me tell you somethin. Most people were plumbdamn insane before this Pocalypse. This just lets ’em all the way loose, steada worrying about what the neighbors gonna think.”

  Neither of them had anything to say to that, and it was just as well. Juju had some hard thinkin to do. He squinted at the sky again, and turned the wipers on.

  Looked like it was deciding to snow instead of sleet.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks are due to Mel Sanders, who keeps asking, “Wh
at next?” and to Skyla Dawn Cameron, who keeps saying, “Sure, we can do that.” And to my children, who keep asking, “But will the dog be all right?”

  A generous helping of gratitude goes to my lovely Patreon subscribers, who made it possible to write this particular tale—and the next two seasons as well.

  Last but not least, my constant, faithful, and beloved Readers…come in, take off your coat, and let me thank you the way we both like best, with yet another story.

  About the Author

  Lilith Saintcrow lives in Vancouver, Washington, and can’t stop writing.

  www.lilithsaintcrow.com