by Kelli Kimble
“You need to keep trying,” I said. “You’ve got to practice. It won’t get better if you don’t practice.”
She frowned but didn’t argue.
“She’s right,” Boyd said. “When I broke my arm, I had to do weeks of exercise to get it back to normal. You need to keep trying to walk on it.”
Every morning, the trek to the coast stretched out before me, seemingly endless. I barely slept; we’d seen signs of cats everywhere, and I woke periodically to scan the area for danger. On top of carrying Gayle, it was getting to be way too much. I kept it to myself, though.
Or, at least, I thought I did.
“Are you okay, Nim? You seem a little . . . tired,” Froyd said, not long after Gayle’s exercise for the day was done. It’d been an effort to get Gayle into the air and moving. We’d only managed to cover six miles from our last camp.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“It’s just – when you picked her up. You were wincing. Like you’re in pain.”
“It doesn’t hurt to carry her.” I trudged forward, trying to keep my face averted towards the trees. Then, I tripped and fell forwards, dropping Gayle and nearly hitting my head against a tree trunk, before Froyd’s grip on my arm jerked me back to my feet.
“Gayle! Are you all right?” I rushed over to her and began sensing for injuries.
She shooed me away. “I’m fine. Just a little surprised, is all.”
When I stood, Froyd was in my face, his arms crossed, and his feet planted wide.
“What?” I asked.
“You need to rest. We’re stopping for today.” He pulled his pack off and began removing the shelter. “Boyd, you want to get some water?”
Boyd nodded. In the distance, we could hear the rushing of a creek or a river. He dropped his pack and collected the canteens before hiking off in that direction. Gayle began arranging rocks in a circle for the fire.
“No,” I protested. “We’ve got a long way to go. We can’t just stop all the time—”
Froyd cut me off. “You’re exhausted. You could’ve hurt Gayle — or yourself. Stop trying to do it all. We’re here, too.” He put his hands on my shoulders and pressed. “Sit. We’ll eat something for lunch, and then you’re going to take a serious nap. You need to recharge.”
“No,” I said, springing back up from the ground. “I’m fine. I can continue. Don’t be ridiculous.”
But he wouldn’t be swayed. He glared at me until I sank back down to a seated position.
Boyd came back with the canteens and a rabbit, and together, they built a fire and roasted the game. Sitting still for so long was hard; I had to keep resisting the urge to close my eyes.
After I’d eaten my fill, Froyd pointed at the shelter. “You. Sleeping. Now.”
There was no point in pretending he wasn’t right. I went to the shelter and collapsed in a heap against my pack without even getting out my bedroll. I fell asleep to the soft sounds of their movements around the camp.
◆◆◆
I woke to them screaming.
Gayle’s screams rose high above Froyd and Boyd’s scratchy rasps. Between her sharp cries, she added my name, yelling it as loudly as she could.
I jumped up and struggled to get out of the shelter. I tripped and fell to the ground through the door flap, scraping my knee raw. “Gayle!” I shouted.
But even as I brought my eyes up to search around, I knew they were already gone. The screams were fading in both distance and enthusiasm.
A cat stood on the opposite side of the fire, eyeing me. I shook my head, trying to clear the cobwebs of sleep. I needed to concentrate on their locations, protect myself from the cat in front of me, and check for other danger around me, as well.
The cat took a step towards me. Its eyes were glued to me, and it looked hungry.
I put out my hand, imagining a wall in front of it. Then, I pushed away from me. The invisible force bumped against the cat’s nose. It blinked in surprise and took a step back. Then, its lips curled up in an approximation of a smile.
Too late, I realized I needed to check around me for other cats. A rustle in the shrubbery behind the shelter caused me to turn — just as an enormous cat leapt over the shelter and struck me in the chest, knocking me to the ground and pinning me there with just a single paw.
My hand went to it, and I would have gasped when my finger caught the edge of a sharp claw — if it hadn’t already knocked the breath out of me. The cat put pressure on my chest, making it even harder to regain air.
In the distance, I heard Gayle give one last, terror-filled scream, and then suddenly stop. The cat heard it, too, and looked in the direction it came from. When the sound stopped, it looked down at me and licked its lips.
Let me up, I said to it. Maybe I could startle it into leaving me alone.
The cat blinked. The other cat came to sit beside us. That one’s mine, too, remember, it said. I distracted it, so you could catch it.
Shut up, the cat on top of me snarled. If there’s any left when I’m full, maybe you can have it.
A growl pierced the air. I’ll have my share, the slighted cat said, and I’ll thank you to remember we’re equals.
The pressure of the paw lifted off my chest, and I gasped in a breath. The two cats began circling each other. I shot up off the ground to float above them, finally able to do something to save myself. The cats didn’t notice at first; they snarled and postured at each other as they turned in a slow circle. The one that’d jumped on me swiped one paw across the muzzle of the other, drawing blood. The other cat screamed but regained composure quickly. It drew the other cat near the fire and struck a flaming log in a single snapping motion, causing ashes and coals to fly, singeing the other cat’s fur. I smelled burning hair, and I rose higher.
They suddenly pounced into the air simultaneously, meeting in the middle in a screeching ball of muscle and fur. Their tails whipped around, and they rolled around on the ground: first one, and then the other, gaining control of the fight.
They still hadn’t noticed I was gone, and it dawned on me that I needed to look for the others. I reached out, looking for signs of life around me. There were cats everywhere: in the shrubbery all around camp, in the trees around me, and moving away from me, towards the north. I floated higher, making sure I stayed out of reach of the cats in the nearby trees.
I concentrated my effort on the cats that were moving away. They were surely the ones that had the others.
I couldn’t sense any of them nearby. I stretched my effort, trying to expand my mind to find them. But, I couldn’t. Carrying Gayle all that way had tapped my mental strength much more than I’d imagined. I couldn’t sense any farther away.
I’d have to follow the cats.
The tree canopy broke open, and I moved above it. The leaves covered my view of the ground, but I could still sense the two cats below me, fighting over who was going to eat me. I wanted to shout something at them; something to tell them they were idiots, fighting over nothing — but finding the others was more important than rubbing their noses in their own stupidity.
I flew over the trees, towards the group that was moving away. They were moving slowly, so it wasn’t hard to catch up, but I still couldn’t sense the others. I got closer and began to descend through the trees until I was sure there were no cats lurking in them.
We suddenly broke into a clearing, and I was able to get even closer. They’d stopped in the grass and were now huddled around something in a rough circle.
Straining, I tried to determine what was in the center. It didn’t really feel like anything, whatever it was. A cat stepped backwards, pulling at something with its teeth.
That’s when I realized what was in the center.
It was a person.
A person who was not alive.
Anger swept within me, a rage so deep it couldn’t have belonged to me. But there it was, and it lashed out. The fatigue in my abilities was no match for it. I pressed down on the cats, hard, and
they didn’t crumple to the ground, so much as crunch. They didn’t have time to make any sound; they were immediately dead. I flicked my wrist and pushed them away, leaving whoever was in the center.
The breath sucked out of my lungs, and I dropped to the ground as I realized it wasn’t just one of them.
Gayle, Froyd, and Boyd were all there, recognizable more from the color of their hair and the size of their torsos than from their bloodied faces. I scanned them one last time, with a tiny sliver of hope one of them was still alive, but it was useless.
They were all dead.
Disbelief washed over me in waves. How could they be dead? I’d only just been with them, just talked to them. I stumbled away from the pile of their bodies, mixed together in a horrible jumble. A sob escaped me, followed by wailing.
In the trees behind me, I heard a rustle, and I screamed in rage. My arms swept from the right side of my body towards the woods in a wave, and the roar from the force of my anger clapped through the air like a thunderbolt, just like the first time we’d confronted the cats — but worse.
Everything in front of me was flattened to the ground: trees, shrubs, cats, rocks, leaves, dirt. It all blew away from me in a rolling cloud, leaving bald earth behind. I watched as the cloud grew and got darker, as more and more debris got caught up in it. It faded into the distance, and I watched until I couldn’t see it anymore.
I lifted off the ground and went in search of our camp, hoping I hadn’t just wiped out every last supply we’d had. I found it and scanned for cats. There were none nearby — though I could sense a few stragglers moving away from me in the distance.
In my mind, I plucked each one from the ground and threw them as hard as I could into the air. I heard a distant, ungraceful meow, and that was it.
All the cats I could sense were dead.
My teeth were chattering, and my hands were shaking, and I fumbled to get back into the shelter. I wrapped myself up in the bedroll and tried to close my eyes. Distantly, I knew it was foolish to fall asleep here. But whatever it was inside me that had reared up and come out had exhausted me totally.
Slowly, my eyes slid shut, but sleep didn’t come. I kept hearing that last scream from Gayle and seeing the blood everywhere. Why had there been so much blood? How could three people even contain that much blood?
I shoved my fist into my mouth and stifled a sob.
I was alone. Again.
Chapter 13
A wisp of smoke curled above the trees in the distance. I stopped and dropped my pack to the ground for a moment, used one of Gayle’s shirts to wipe the sweat beading on my forehead and neck, then plunked my tired butt on a large boulder. I took out the tablet, and for the millionth time, I touched my fingers to the words Silver had written in the margins. In my mind’s eye, I immediately snapped into his perspective.
He was looking at a woman. Tabby, I supposed. She was smiling, even though she was washing a heavy blanket in a tub, scrubbing it against a ridged board. “I told you not to bring it up. What did I say?” she asked in a teasing voice.
“You said it would blow up in my face.”
She lifted the blanket and slapped another section of it against the board before resuming her scrubbing. “I told you so.”
Silver laughed. “I thought you’d be a little humbler about being right.”
“Says the man who can’t stand being wrong.”
I lifted my hand from the tablet, breaking the connection. Silver and Tabby seemed like good people. Alone, I’d covered an immense amount of ground since I’d buried the others, and I was pretty sure the smoke in the distance was from Silver’s group of people. But, now that I was close, I longed to be far away again. What would people like them think of someone like me? Would they want anything to do with me, now that Gayle was gone?
My instinct was to believe they’d welcome me with open arms, and they’d want to know about Gayle’s last days, and her desire to reunite with her twin sister. But, the rational part of me knew they’d fled the city to get away from something — and I’d brought that thing with me.
Sighing, I took a long slurp of water from my canteen. I had nowhere else to go, right? I couldn’t go back to the city, and there was no one there who wanted to see me or cared about me anyway. Maybe my little cousin, Arisa, would still think of me fondly. Her mother, my aunt Rue, was little more than neutral about me. They were the only family I had left. All my friends were dead.
I stood and heaved the pack over my shoulders, then floated up, intent on reaching the smoke before dusk. As I got closer, it seemed like maybe it wasn’t what I’d thought it was; it certainly was more than just a fire for cooking or warming the camp. I lowered myself into a tree, and after making myself comfortable, I sent my mental self forward to inspect the source of the fire.
It turned out to be a field of grass, burning. There was a ditch dug all the way around, and the fire was contained entirely inside it. I swooped in a circle, searching the edges of the fire. There didn’t seem to be anybody around, but the ditch made it seem like a manmade effort. Why would anyone burn the grass?
Satisfied it was safe, I returned to my body and doubled back to the burning field. Surely, if people had done this, someone should still be around?
When I got back, the fire had nearly spent itself. All that remained was scorched dirt and smoke.
I came to the ground and, this time on foot and staying clear of the smoke, hiked all the way around the field. It must have taken a lot of effort to dig the ditch; it was a foot deep and nearly three feet wide, with the dirt piled up on the outer edge of the ditch. Now that I was close enough to touch, I could see the ditch had a trickle of water at the bottom, like it had been filled, and the ground absorbed it. I looked around but didn’t see a source.
“Over here!” someone shouted.
“I’m coming already,” another voice returned, this one closer.
I dropped to the ground and tried to hide behind the loosely-piled dirt. Then, I reached out, sensing who was there.
“It’s almost done. Can we get your dad now?” The voice was close by. It was a boy, not much older than I was, and he was walking through the woods, towards the burning field. Behind him, another person was approaching — a girl. As she came closer, she seemed familiar.
“No,” the girl said, throwing her hands in the air. “Why do I have to keep explaining this? We have to have results before we show my dad.”
“But there won’t be results for months,” he said. He had an almost disturbingly bright head of red hair, and he ruffled one hand through it as he stood at the edge of the burnt field.
She shook her head but didn’t respond. As she came even closer, I recognized her as the girl who wasn’t allowed to go to the beach that night I’d observed through Silver’s eyes. She climbed up and over the dirt mound, then down into the ditch. Then, she leaned over the smoking dirt to poke at it with a stick.
“Careful,” the boy said. “You’re going to burn yourself.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s all burned-out.” But even as she said it, she rested her hand on the ground, then quickly pulled it away, jamming a burnt fingertip into her mouth.
“Told you,” he said.
She rolled her eyes but quickly got over it. “Tomorrow, I bet we’ll be able to start. We’re going to be the heroes of the group. I’m telling you: After we get a crop going, we’re hardly ever going to have to eat seafood again.”
I watched as they stood together, their heads tipped together and nearly touching, as they discussed their plans to plant different vegetables. It gave me a little twinge to see them together. It reminded me of my friendship with Elton. Would I ever have a friend my own age again? Would anyone ever love me in any capacity? My thoughts turned dark, and I stopped paying attention to them.
“Hey. Who are you?” The boy was suddenly at the top of the dirt mound, looking down at me.
“Uh, hi,” I said.
There was a scrabb
ling sound as the girl climbed up the dirt, then she was peering down at me, too. “Where did you come from?” Her face turned pale. “You aren’t – you aren’t from the city, are you? Are you a searcher?”
My tongue felt like lead in my mouth. I nodded, but then shook my head.
“Which is it?” the boy demanded.
I licked my lips. “I’m from the city, yeah. Salt Lake City?”
“Shit,” the girl said. She lifted a shaking hand to push a lock of hair behind her ear.
“But, I’m not a searcher,” I said, holding up my hands in what I hoped looked like a gesture of peace. “I’m actually afraid of them, too. They were hunting me.”
The pair exchanged a look. She shrugged.
“I’m Nimisila,” I said. “I came out here with some others, but I’m the only one left.” My voice hitched in my throat. Rather than start crying, I clamped my mouth shut.
They stared at me, neither of them offering any indication they’d heard me.
“Um, what are your names?” I asked.
The boy started to speak, but the girl shushed him. “Don’t tell her who we are. We don’t know anything about her.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Now, I remember. You’re Tikka. Yeah, that’s your name. Tikka. You’re Leif’s daughter, right?”
Her eyes opened wide, and she took a step backwards, down the pile of dirt. The movement caused the dirt to shift, and she lost her balance. She tumbled backwards into the ditch.
The boy reached out to help her, but he wasn’t quick enough. “Tikka,” he said. He squatted and slid down the loose dirt, then jumped into the ditch to help her up. “Are you all right?”
Tikka stood and brushed dirt from her clothes, while she eyed me from the ground. “Yes,” she said through clenched teeth. “I’m fine.”
He stiffened. He’d given away that her name was indeed Tikka. He thrust his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “She already knew.”
“Yes, but how?” Tikka said quietly. I was obviously not meant to hear.
“We’ve never met,” I said, breaking the tension between them. They both turned back to look up at me. I’d climbed to the top of the dirt pile and was looking down at them. I took off my pack and pulled the tablet out. Tikka’s eyes flashed when she saw it. I turned on the tablet and navigated to the photos of Silver in the tank. “I’m looking for this guy. Silver? I think he’s with your dad.”