“Hey,” whispered a man. “What’s that?”
Wisp froze.
“Looks like a kid,” whispered another.
“It’s a girl!” whispered a third voice, with barely-contained excitement. “Let’s get her.”
She tightened her grip on the rifle and pivoted toward the voices.
Three men in tattered clothing, ripped shirts, jeans, and crumbling shoes, shuffled toward her along the black car-road. They stood so close to each other their shoulders touched. The one in the middle kept trying to hold the others’ hands, but they swatted at him. All had long beards and wild hair, and looked a few years late for their next bath. Wild eyes, twitching lips, and yellowed teeth gave her a distinctly bad feeling about them. They looked at her almost the way she probably had looked at that bird meat cooking.
“Hey,” said the one on the left. “C’mere.”
The middle one reached his arms toward her, which would’ve been terrifying if he hadn’t been thirty feet away still. “Hi pretty. Come here. You shouldn’t be all alone.”
“We won’t hurt you,” said the third man, kneading his hands.
“I have to go.” She pointed the rifle at them. “Dad is waiting for me.”
Middle shuffled closer, no reaction whatsoever to having a rifle aimed at him. “It’s all right, pretty girl. You’re too small to be all alone.”
“Come to us,” said the guy on the left.
She backed up, lowering the rifle. Always try to run. “No.”
Wisp ran away, feet clapping on the people-road. The men sprang after her, calling out at her to stop or lying that they wouldn’t hurt her. Her backpack clattered, wobbling with her sprint. The pistol bounced and tugged heavy on her belt. Their rapid stomping footsteps scuffed closer and closer. Perhaps without all her stuff, she could’ve outrun them, but they had longer legs and the same desperation in their eyes that had taken her when she stole the bird meat.
Not wanting to wind up impaled on a stick and roasted over a fire, she snarled and forced herself to run faster. The men chased her across the fun machine park and around a cabin. She zoomed past three more cabins on the left before one of the men got too close. Right as he tried to grab her backpack, she ducked left in an abrupt turn off the people-road into waist-high grass. The man overextended his grab, lost his balance, and tumbled past her into the greenery. She struggled to fight her way across the tall foliage, frightened at being slowed down so much as the other two men came running up behind her.
She plowed through the grass, heading past the corner of a cabin beyond the tiny meadow, but her hopes for escape shattered at the sight of a huge wooden fence blocking off the entire gap between two cabins. Perhaps she could climb it, but not fast enough to avoid being grabbed. With nowhere to go, she whirled to face the men and again, raised the rifle.
“Stop!” she shouted. “Go away or I’ll shoot you.”
Neither man slowed down, and the one who’d tripped hurried to catch up.
Wisp’s finger slid off the rifle’s frame onto the trigger. “Stop!”
They didn’t.
At a range of perhaps ten feet, she didn’t even need to look through the scope.
Boom!
The butt mushed into her shoulder, knocking her two steps back, ears ringing.
Middle guy lurched to a halt, a small hole at the center of a growing red stain over his green shirt. He glanced down at himself with a vacant expression and open mouth, and fell flat on his face. The other man, who’d been a little behind him, had a spray of blood all over his front. He stopped short, staring at her.
Wisp shifted to aim at him. “Go away!”
The man who’d fallen in the grass skidded to a halt, gawking at the one she’d sent to the Other Place. He screamed, which made the other remaining man scream, and the pair of them whirled around and ran away. She stood still, keeping the rifle generally pointed toward where they’d gone, nothing other than her eyelids moving until the distant wails of terrified men got too far away to hear.
She moved her finger away from the trigger, pressing it against the frame.
“Dad, you’re right. People want to hurt me.”
Wisp stared past the tip of the barrel at the man. The bullet had opened a hole in his back quite a bit bigger than the little one in front. For eleven years, she hadn’t seen another person aside from Dad and Mother, but being a shrine, Mother didn’t really count as another person―she’d become far greater. But now, in mere days, she’d seen many people, and all of them had been scary. With shaggy, long hair, beard, and ripped-up clothes, this creature she’d shot seemed more a monster than a person. Some of her books described monsters that looked like people, zombies or ghouls, or some such thing. They had been people once, but weren’t anymore. That had to be what happened here. Just a monster in a people suit.
I didn’t hurt a person. This only looked like a man.
She crept closer to the body and poked the rifle into his head twice. He didn’t move. With her rifle barrel, she picked at his clothing, searching for anything useful. A big knife had hit the ground by his right hand, an empty sheath on his belt. When she spotted it, a chill ran down her back. He’d been hiding the blade against his arm. Surely, had he caught up to her, he would’ve stabbed her. Any shred of guilt at sending someone to the Other Place faded. This had not been a person at all, only a monster.
Aside from the knife, she found nothing on him but a stinky shirt covered in blood, and even smellier pants loaded with ngh. She used the knife to cut his rope belt open, freeing the sheath.
“I tried to run. You wouldn’t leave me alone. I told you to go away. You didn’t.” Wisp pointed at the large exit wound on his back. “That’s what happens when you’re bad.”
She took her backpack off long enough to stuff the new knife inside, then rubbed her shoulder. The rifle had still kicked like heck, but two years had passed since it flung her to the ground. Her twelve-year-old body handled it better. Though even if firing it had thrown her on her butt, it probably wouldn’t have mattered since the other two monsters ran away.
“They didn’t know what a bullet is until I showed them.” She stood, stepped over the man, and continued walking.
The road led her away from the monster, past many old cabins. She kept her gaze alert for the other two returning, or any other dangerous creature coming to check out the noise of a gunshot. Roads, waist-high grass, more roads, and another dirt lot offered little of interest before she reached a wide one-story cabin that didn’t look as destroyed as the rest. Car hoods and trunk panels covered some of the windows, as though someone had made an effort to repair the place. A rusting wreck of car rotted upon a short section of road leading right up to the cabin, by a huge door. She edged past the broken machine, creeping along a thin strip of people road toward where two steps connected to a raised surface under an overhanging roof.
Wisp pushed the front door aside and stepped into a dimly lit room bigger than her entire cabin. A subtle stink of mildew pervaded the place, mixed with the same odor that followed whenever Dad’s butt made noise. An archway on the right led to another chamber with a counter covered in cans and a whole mess of cabinets. Out the back end of the cabinet room, a hallway led deeper into the massive cabin. To her left, an enormous black rectangle hung on the wall in front of a big, soft chair wide enough for three or four people. The odd wall hanging confused her for a few seconds until she thought of something she’d read, and decided it must be a television. She approached and touched it, running her fingers along the bottom until she found small buttons at the corner. Pushing them didn’t do anything.
“You won’t work, will you? Nothing from Old Earth still works. But you used to show stories like pictures.”
In the far left corner, beyond the television, sat a haven with much thinner bars than hers. She walked over and squatted beside it, scrunching her face up at the flimsy metal, barely as thick as the skewers she used for grubs. Tree Walkers could probably b
end these bars. Heck, even Dad might be able to bend them. A small tag on the left side had the words, “Deluxe Kennel Crate.”
“This will never keep out the Tree Walkers.”
Blood stained the carpet around her feet, and the faint smell of bad water hung in the air. Metal caught her eye inside the crummy haven, which didn’t even have its own lock―an open padlock dangled from the latch. She pulled the door open and plucked the object from a stained, stinky blanket inside. Two rings connected by a short length of chain dangled from her grip, all coated in a thick shell of dried blood. She turned it back and forth, thinking it an unusual piece of jewelry.
“Oh… wait…”
Some of the books told stories about ‘cops,’ who used handcuffs on the people who did bad stuff. Since the Earth didn’t have cops anymore, she didn’t see any purpose to keeping handcuffs. The world still had plenty of bad people though, but it seemed much easier to shoot them than make them wear these. She tossed the useless thing aside and stood. This haven stank too bad to sleep inside it, not to mention she didn’t have an opener for the padlock and… all that blood. The narrow bars also didn’t look like they’d be able to protect her anyway.
Wisp wandered away from the useless haven, exploring a long set of windows covered by gauzy fabric that reminded her of the sacred tiny dress from Mother’s lap. Someone had covered the glass panels with metal sheets on the outside, blocking any view. From there, she wandered down a hallway leading out from the big room to the first doorway on the left, and gasped at the sight of an outhouse inside the cabin. An eye-watering ammonia smell scorched the breath out of her throat. Hand over her mouth, she crept up to a fancy seat with a fluffy, black cushion and peered in, but this outhouse confused her. It didn’t have a hole into the ground, only a small opening containing a lot of nasty, yellow water. Standing close, the fuzzy cushion looked more like a rampant growth of black mold.
“Eeeep.” She backed away, holding her breath.
She stumbled into the hallway, coughing and spitting to the side. Once she caught her breath, she wandered deeper into the cabin, finding a couple of rooms containing broken furniture and moldy beds, one of which stank the same as the bowl of yellow water. Giving up on the cabin’s small rooms, she returned to the space beyond the archway with all the cabinets. Curiosity pulled her over to the countertop covered in cans. She sifted among them, grinning broadly at the prospect of food. She located a promising one without any dents, set it aside, and hunted around the cabinets and drawers until she found an opener machine like the one at home, though she hadn’t needed it in a long time. The last time Dad brought cans back from a hunting trip, she’d been nine. She clamped the device over the can’s edge and squeezed the handles together until it punched a hole. Inch by inch, she twisted the knob on the side, working the opener around all the way until the metal disk popped free.
The can contained pale pillow-shaped pods in red goop. It smelled okay, so she plucked one out and nibbled on it. Nothing alarmed her about the flavor, albeit a touch on the mushy/bland side, so she carried the can with her back into the big room and sat on the wide chair facing the television set. Its cushions reminded her of the soft seats in the old SUV, only smellier.
Wisp set the rifle on the seat beside her, shrugged out of her backpack, and reclined, scooping pillows from the can with her fingers and stuffing them in her mouth while staring at the TV. Though the dead screen displayed only blackness, it filled with her daydreams of what it once might have shown.
For as long as it took to finish her meal, she pretended to be an ancient from one of her books, relaxing and ‘watching television.’
The Ancients’ World
-17-
Her meal done and her right hand coated in a stubborn orange stain, Wisp collected the remainder of the intact food cans―five of them―and packed the opener as well. Her pack rattled a little louder as she left the ancients’ massive cabin behind and resumed her journey. The Mother Twig guided her into the forest beyond the other side of the abandoned settlement.
Fearing those monsters would return, she kept the rifle in her hands despite her arms protesting the weight. Every now and then, she thought twenty, the number of shots left in the weapon. The magazine held twenty, but Dad always kept a bullet inside the barrel, so she’d started with twenty-one shots. Hopefully, she’d be able to give the rifle back to him still with twenty left.
Leaves and mulch crinkled under her feet as she reentered the forest. She paused for a few seconds, gazing back at the giant cabins the ancients used to live in. The small city looked as though it once held quite a few people, and she tried to imagine what it must’ve been like, having others nearby you could talk to who wouldn’t try to hurt each other as soon as say hello. If Dad was here, they probably would’ve have spent a few days searching everywhere for useful stuff.
With a sigh, she bowed her head and trudged onward into the woods.
A few hours away from the settlement, she found a tiny creek where she stopped to rest and refill the canteens. After drinking a few handfuls, she stretched out on her back, letting her feet dangle in the water while staring up at the sky. Sleep tempted her, but late afternoon was too early to settle down for the night. A battle of urgency and tiredness took a few minutes before she managed to drag herself upright. Determination to find Dad and go home added speed to her step, but she didn’t break into a jog. Running wasted energy and would wear her out faster. Over the course of a day, she could cover more ground at a constant walk despite moving slower, because she wouldn’t need to stop and rest as much.
She stepped out of the tress into a light breeze blowing along a broken strip of road, decomposed to little more than gravel and dirt cutting through the forest across her path. For good measure, she checked the Mother Twig again. It spun back and forth for a little while before lining up with the road to the right, so she went that way. Before long, her feet had turned pale grey from a coating of dust. Many pointy rocks kept her grimacing and grumbling. Each time she stepped on ouch and stumbled, she promised herself that after the next one, she’d move off the road… but never wound up doing it.
She walked until a mesh barrier came into view up ahead on the left by a slight bend in the road. It reminded her of the green wall around the place where she’d taken the bird meat, but this one didn’t have colored cloth strips tied to it. A big car, a bit like the SUV but more boxy, had evidently crashed into the middle part, bending the wire mesh and mushing up its nose end. Hundreds of tiny holes dotted the vehicle’s side.
Drawn by curiosity of the ancients, she pulled the rifle around into a ready position and approached the strange box on wheels, searching the area for any sign of danger.
This fence stood twice as tall as the one she’d seen around the settlement. Not only did it lack the camouflage strips, it had a large spiral of wire along the top studded with triangular blades. Ouch! She cringed, deciding not to climb it, and walked around the back end of the boxy car, noting silver letters E250 near the bottom of one of its two rear doors beneath a blue oval containing the word ‘Ford.’
Dozens of skeletons lay along the road nearby, some still with their bony fingers clutching the wire mesh. Counting skulls got her to twenty-three before she lost track of which ones she’d tallied. The back doors of the wheeled box hung open, revealing a big open space with only two seats up front. Unlike the SUV, it only had windows up front. The rest of the inside contained a handful more skeletons collapsed on top of each other. Thin shafts of sunlight crisscrossed the dusty interior from all the little holes in the walls. Old, dried blood spattered everywhere. Another skeleton lay slumped over the wheel up front, most of the skull broken away.
“Is this a shrine? Do you want me to go away?”
She waited for a ten count, and decided it safe to keep exploring since no one said a word. After making her way around the boxy vehicle, she approached the fence. A short distance past it, the tiniest cabin she’d ever seen perched beside th
e road with a long yellow and black pole extended out as if to block cars. A white sign on the front of the cabin bore bright red letters:
Restricted Area: US Department of Defense. Trespassers will be shot.
“Restricted…” She tilted her head, thinking. “Department of de fence… is this the place that made walls?”
Wisp ducked and slipped into a gap in the metal mesh where the crash had broken it apart, crawling among a scattering of empty bullet casings all over the road. She pulled herself free of the twisted mesh, stood, and glanced back at the pile of skeletons, then to the brass littered around her feet, thinking that people standing inside must have shot the ‘trespassers’ outside.
Huh. Trespasser bones look like people bones.
“Trespassers must be really bad if people shoot them.” She tried to think of what kind of monster could be so dangerous that it had to be killed right away like that. Could that shaggy human-like monster she had to send to the Other Place have been a trespasser? Here, they couldn’t get past the wire mesh, so why did they have to be shot? Maybe they had mind-control powers like the Tree Walkers who could make her hand over the opener to her Haven. She approached the fence near the pile of bones leaning on the other side and squatted.
The Forest Beyond the Earth Page 14