Wolfen

by Alianne Donnelly

  Soon, the sun was above them again, and the ground was drying out. There was still too little in the way of shelter and nothing to burn for a fire, so Bryce kept going. He drove on for miles without a word or a sound, as if the cold couldn’t touch him, but when Sinna shifted position behind the other seat to see him, his lips were blue, his hands very pale on the steering wheel, and his shoulders kept twitching in carefully contained shivers.

  “We need to stop,” she said.

  His jaw muscles worked with effort. “Not yet.”

  “Bryce, you’re freezing to death.”

  He scoffed, mouth pulling into an ugly sneer. “Not even close. Trust me.” So certain. As if he knew from experience.

  “How long can you keep going?”

  “Long as I have to.” He’d dropped the makeshift glasses a while back, but their outline was still there; he was pale where they’d sat, but beneath that, his skin had been stung bright red.

  “Bryce, stop,” she said. “Please.”

  He stubbornly shook his head. “No shelter.”

  “So we’ll make our own.”

  His jaw muscles jumped and his arms twitched, but his hands hadn’t moved an inch from the steering wheel. She worried they were cramped there.

  “Don’t test me. You won’t win. Stop the truck.”

  He ignored her.

  Sinna climbed to the front. “I am not going to let you kill yourself, you stubborn ass.” At their speed, she didn’t dare mess with his steering, but at least she could share what little body heat she’d managed to retain.

  Her hands were cold.

  When she laid them over one of his, it felt like touching ice.

  She shivered but kept them there, warming his fingers enough for him to unclench, and when he did, Sinna gently pulled his hand away. The mule slowed to a stop, and she climbed onto his lap. “Put your arm around me.”

  He did, lightly at first, but enough that she could feel the tremors racking through his body. She hugged him closer, pressing into him, weathering the wind so he wouldn’t have to. Bryce’s arm tightened, and then he was squeezing her so hard, shaking even harder, as if he hadn’t realized how cold he truly was before she showed him.

  “Need to…get out of wet c-clothes.”

  Sinna nodded, but couldn’t bring herself to let go. She was so damned cold.

  Bryce pried her away and set her aside. He got out of the truck to strip, wrung out his clothes, then reached back inside for hers.

  Sinna struggled with her boot laces. When they finally came undone, she quickly took everything off and handed it over. He gave her back a wrinkled wad of material. Almost dry, but not enough. Then he ducked into the back and cut out huge chunks of upholstery off of the bench. Without enough duct tape left to secure it over the back and side windows, Bryce used his smaller knives to pin it in place. He did the same with half of the windows on the other side, then pushed the front seats as far forward as they could go. With their clothes hung over the back rests like curtains, it was as good a shelter as they could manage.

  Bryce wedged into the cramped space on the floor and pulled Sinna on top of him. There, they huddled in a tight clutch of misery until the sun set and took the last of its promise of warmth away.

  With darkness came weariness; the massive surge of adrenaline had long since drained out of Sinna, and hypothermia had stripped away her ability to keep her eyes open. She wasn’t cold anymore, and wasn’t sure what that meant, but she didn’t much care. Bryce’s steady heartbeat thumped beneath her cheek, and with every breath, the rise and fall of his chest rocked her. With one of his arms curled tight around her waist and the other around her shoulders, fingers tangled in her hair, Sinna felt safe, hidden away in secret.

  Her eyelids drooped closed, then opened half-mast.

  One more blink, and they stayed closed.

  “Don’t fall asleep,” Bryce warned.

  Sinna hummed a vague answer, already half a world away.

  ~

  Next morning, a bright shaft of sunlight teased her awake. Sinna turned her face away, needing just a few more minutes. She was warm and so comfortable, she never wanted to move again. Besides, after all of that crap yesterday, she deserved a little rest, didn’t she?

  Her comfy bed inflated in a massive breath, then hardened in a morning stretch. Arms around her tightened and a bristly chin brushed against her temple. Then the whole of it turned sideways, pinned her between it and a cold, hard surface, and curled around her like a vise.

  Sinna shrugged prosaically and settled back into its warmth. Just a few more minutes.

  But her bed wasn’t done moving. Her headrest pulled away, snapping a few strands of hair to get free, then it petted her curls, pulling them straight, and letting them bounce back to tickle her face.

  Sinna wriggled her nose, and frowned. Beds were not supposed to wake people up. Especially not after a traumatic near-death experience. She grumbled, and burrowed her face deeper into a warm crook shaped just for her. Her unruly hair caught on stubbly bristles and brushed from her face all on its own. Sinna sighed, contented for a few more seconds.

  Breath huffed against her neck, while warm hands stroked along her shoulder and back. “Sinna, it’s time to wake up.”

  She groaned, and it somehow turned into a purr. “Fi’ mor’ minis.”

  Lips smiled against her jaw. “We have to keep going.”

  Damn it. “I will bite you.” A useless protest, since she was already awake.

  Bryce chuckled and peeled away, taking her ever-so-comfy warm bed with him.

  Sinna growled and elbowed herself up to sit so she could rub the sleep from her eyes. Clothes rained down on her before her brain fully kicked in, and she stared at them for a moment until she figured out what they were for.

  Oh, right. Naked.

  She ducked her head to sneak a covert glance outside, but Bryce was already dressed, facing away to check out the landscape. Not that she’d been spying or anything!

  Face burning, she shook out her clothes and stuffed her limbs into them.

  Everything smelled like rain. Nature’s most enticing perfume, as far as Sinna was concerned. She dressed, and climbed into the front seat, but her boots were still wet. Wrinkling her nose, Sinna stepped out of the truck barefoot and stretched her arms wide to hug the sun. “Look! It’s back! We are saved!”

  Bryce barely acknowledged her enthusiasm, too busy taking down their shelter. The upholstery went into the storage under the back bench, the knives into their harnesses. “Get back in. We have to go.” It was surly, and as close to an order as he’d ever come.

  Sinna flinched. “Aren’t we going to talk about…you know…” The naked thing?

  Bryce grunted.

  Sinna frowned at his non-answer. “Is something wrong?”

  “Wasted enough time yesterday. Move it, we’re losing daylight.” He never even looked at her, just went around to check the truck bed. He might as well have hit her.

  “Right,” she said softly. “Of course, I understand.” Wasted time. Because of her. Because if she hadn’t been there, hadn’t insisted they care about another human being, Bryce would have kept going. He probably would have driven a hundred more miles before the storm forced him to stop—if it forced him to stop at all.

  It’s not us against them. It’s us against everything else.

  She hadn’t believed him, and it had almost cost them their lives.

  It made Bryce none too happy. Gone was the easy camaraderie of a few days ago when Sinna had felt like she fit in with the brothers, like she was truly one of their own. Now, a deep sense of shame at her own foolishness had created an ache in her chest that wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard she rubbed at it.

  Idiot. It was a wonder Bryce didn’t leave her here on the side of the road. He could teach her archery and knife fighting, and spend hours drilling her on the proper use of firearms, but none of that would change who she was. When push came to shove, Sinna would alw
ays—always—assume someone was a friend until they proved her wrong, even at her own peril. It had always been only a matter of time before the brothers realized she was too much of a liability to keep around.

  Finished with the preparations, Bryce turned on his heels to get going, but pulled up short when Sinna failed to move out of the way fast enough. For the first time that morning, he met her gaze.

  Sinna ducked her head and moved out of his way.

  “Sin—”

  “We’re wasting daylight,” she reminded him.

  With the mule charged as much as it could be, they set off.

  Bryce was silent, intent on the path before them.

  After two dozen miles, Sinna couldn’t take the silence anymore. He didn’t want to talk? Too bad. They had things they needed to discuss. “That place back there,” she said, braving a glance at his profile. “Was it really another den?” From the right, his face was flawless; strong and proud, grizzled with a beard that made him look even more dangerous than she knew him to be. Without his scars, he’d have been just as much a heartthrob as Aiden, but there was something grave about him, a darkness, as if he always walked in shadow, even when standing in the sun.

  “Yes,” he grated without glancing her way. A monosyllabic answer to communicate the end to that discussion.

  Sinna persisted. “How many are there?”

  Bryce’s mouth twisted. “Who the hell knows?”

  “How could they have built them without someone taking notice?” Randy’s den had been huge. No way all of that building could have happened in secret. Someone must have seen.

  Bryce said nothing.

  “Do you remember what it was like?”

  He glanced at her, then reached over to take her hand. His thumb traced the thin scar on her forearm. “Like you would imagine: every twisted sci-fi movie ever made.”

  When he released her, Sinna frowned. “I don’t remember.”

  “Good.”

  This time, Sinna didn’t push for more. “Yeah, just being there yesterday was bad enough. You’d think if they were smart enough to create us, they’d have the technology to make quieter generators.”

  “The sound in the walls, you mean?”

  “If you can call it a sound.”

  “That wasn’t a generator.”

  Sinna frowned. “Then what was it?”

  Bryce shrugged. It’d probably take industrial-sized pliers to pull more words out of him.

  Sinna drew her feet up onto her seat, hugged her knees, and let the subject drop. After a while, the tension eased, and she started to enjoy the peace and quiet.

  The road south wasn’t all that terrible. Sign boards, where they could find them, were weathered and broken, but one or two were legible enough to indicate they were going the right way. In between, faded billboards advertised exciting new gadgets and competitive cash back rates on credit cards. The lighted soda sign was a rusted red background dotted with shattered light bulbs.

  They gave cities a wide berth, but in the end, hunger forced them closer. There was no avoiding it if they wanted to stay on solid pavement. But the closer they got to the larger towns, the more obstructed the road became, forcing them down to a snail’s pace, weaving around potholes and sunken cement that stretched for half-mile intervals, abandoned cars and wrecked container trucks.

  At first, they stopped at every stalled car to pilfer for supplies. They found a few bottles of water in one, and drained them on the spot. Another had a blanket in the back seat, and a couple of cheap plastic rain ponchos in the trunk. Bryce used those to cover the rear windows.

  But there was no food anywhere. At least none they could safely eat.

  “Maybe we should go into town somewhere,” Sinna suggested. “We can restock supplies, rest a little.”

  “Too dangerous.”

  “It’s not completely dead here. There are flowers along the road, and I saw birds flying around. How bad can it be?”

  Bryce gave her a look. “You really like tempting fate, don’t you?”

  “Well, let’s see… I came from the city, survived a bunch of Grays—”

  “Only to be almost killed by humans.”

  “—I went out into the middle of nowhere, survived humans, only to be almost killed by Grays. There’s no good answer here, Bryce.”

  He said nothing. She took it as a sign he was at least considering the possibility.

  “How about we compromise?”

  His jaw muscle twitched. “I’m listening.”

  “We only go along the outskirts. You get to choose where, and if you think it’s too dangerous we’ll go back. But we have to try. We can’t keep going this way without food and water. Even you need to eat every once in a while. And unless you know the way to Gilroy by heart, we could probably use a map, too.”

  “Fine. But I doubt there’s anything…”

  As if on cue, they drove past a giant billboard advertising a department store five minutes away in the city of Stockton.

  “You see? It’s a sign.”

  Bryce rolled his eyes. “This is a bad idea.”

  Sinna smiled triumphantly.

  He cut it damned close at the turnoff. Sinna was convinced he would just keep going until he turned the wheel and took the off ramp headed toward the giant blue warehouse building. He parked in front of the entrance and sat pensively for a full ten minutes, staring through the glass walls.

  After so many years, the parking lot was taken over by weeds. Dandelions grew in profusion across the field of concrete, bunches of them lining the building’s perimeter. It was quiet, but for the occasional buzz of insects, but the smattering of green trees and bushes told Sinna it was a lot safer here than some other places she’d been recently.

  Stores like this had been akin to treasure, once infrastructure had broken down, but to loot them was dangerous. Sinna knew from experience, the farther you had to go for supplies, the less you decided you needed them. Most people hit up the small mom-and-pop corner stores near their houses first before venturing farther out. With so much open space around the supermarket, coming here would’ve been either a desperate suicide run, or a stop-over on the way out of town in a fast-moving car. Judging by the number of them stalled and crashed on the freeway, not many had managed to get very far.

  “You go where I tell you,” Bryce said. “Don’t wander off. Look for what we need, and nothing we don’t.”

  “Got it.”

  He gave her a look that spoke volumes about this scavenging mission. If it were up to him, he’d spend three days hunting pigeons and rats to feed them both and if all they needed was food, she might have let him. But it wasn’t, so here they were, sneaking up to the broken-out front door of a CE landmark in case there were boogeymen sleeping behind the cash registers. Which wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility.

  Inside, the cavernous chamber was a mess. Racks and shelves had been toppled over, with shards of glass and pottery everywhere. Sinna’s hopes plummeted at the sight of the piles of rags and debris. She’d be surprised if any of it were still usable. “You were right. This was a bad idea.”

  Bryce shrugged. “We’re here. Might as well check it out.” He righted a cart, took her hand, and led her to a part of the dump that once upon a time used to be the women’s clothing section. “Fill this,” he said.

  Sinna stared at the cart, dumbfounded. “With what?”

  “Whatever you need.”

  “Shouldn’t we fill it with, I don’t know, food?”

  “I doubt there’s going to be that much food around here. I’ll go look, you stay right here and scream if there’s trouble, got it?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  He held her gaze to make sure she understood, then loped off in search of sustenance.

  Sinna sighed and toed at the rags. Slim pickings, to say the least. What few articles had managed to survive the decades of weather, dust, and—she shuddered—vermin, were in pretty bad shape. She did, however, find some socks, a
pair of jeans that might fit, and a small sleeping shirt just short enough on her to be usable, as well as an unopened pack of underwear one size too big. But hey, better than nothing. A quick wardrobe change and she felt like a new person with relatively clean fabric against her skin, even if the jeans were a bit too wide and ended an inch above her ankles.

  As she made her way over to the men’s section, a spot of bright color caught her eye—a white summer dress covered in pink flowers, neatly hung on the rack by the fitting rooms. There was nothing practical about it; it was all frill and girliness, with the skirt flaring just enough to swish around her knees.

  It was useless. A waste of cargo space.

  Still, Sinna couldn’t help having a little feel. The fabric was so soft and clean, the colors as bright today as they’d been twenty years ago when people still wore them.

  Leave it, she thought. You need food and water, not a party dress. Bryce would laugh you out of the store just for looking at it.

  He’d be right, too.

  And yet there went her hand, snatching the dress off its hanger, balling it up, and hiding it inside the sleeping shirt. Shaking her head at her own weakness, Sinna removed herself from further temptation and went over to the men’s section to get something practical for her companion.

  When Bryce came back, he had a plastic storage bin in his cart half filled with bottles of water and empty aluminum canteens. Next to it, another bin held first aid supplies—bandages, antibiotic ointment, alcohol swabs, and pain killers. A veritable pharmacy of goodies they could trade for other things they needed—if they ever found people willing to trade. On the bottom rack, a third bin, wider and flatter, sat filled with duct tape, twine, utility knives, cookware, and two pillowy rolls Sinna assumed were sleeping bags.

  For future reference, this is how one shops, post-apocalypse. She hid her embarrassment by thoroughly checking his loot. “No food?”

  Bryce shook his head. “Would have been the first thing to go. We were lucky the manager had stashed water in his office. There’s nothing on the shelves.”

  Sinna nodded. “Maybe we’ll find something farther south.”