He turned away from her and grabbed a stick from a group of dry wood she had gathered for the fire. He shoved the stick through the mouth of the animal and held it up, using a paring knife to cut the animal’s belly and remove the organs, which he then threw into the fire. The smell was immediately overwhelming, making her mouth flood with saliva and her stomach growl.
As she watched, he balanced the animal on one of the stones she had used to contain the fire according to his instructions. He then did the same to the other animal, shoving the stick through its mouth and gutting it in two quick movements. Then he used more sticks to balance the animals side by side over the fire.
“Rabbit,” he said to her. She must have looked confused because he gestured at the animals. “They’re jackrabbits. There are hundreds of them around here.”
“They’re safe to eat?”
“Better than that dry stuff they give you girls when they send you out here.”
Dylan laid her hand over the top of her bag. “You search their things.”
“I take what I can use and leave the rest.” He continued to crouch next to the fire, fussing over the sticks holding their meal. “There’s never more than the food, water, matches, and a knife.”
“Should there be?”
He shrugged, his wide shoulders moving with more grace than she would have thought they could. “Don’t you have personal items? Things that matter to you?”
Dylan thought of the compass in her pocket. “It is selfish to cherish a material item over the sisterhood.”
“Is that what they teach you?”
“Don’t they teach you that?”
Wyatt glanced back at her, the vividness in his eyes making them glow almost surreally in the firelight. “When you don’t have anything to cherish, there’s really no reason to teach that cherishing material items is a sin.”
“What do you mean?”
Wyatt turned back to the fire, turning the rabbits slowly. “I bet you had books. Lots of books.”
Dylan thought about the library at D dorm, the books that lined the walls there. “Yes. But we did more of our reading on the computers.”
He made a sound, like a soft snort. “How could you get the real feel of a book if you don’t hold it in your hands?”
“The words are the same.”
“A book is more than its words.”
Dylan didn’t understand. But the tone of his words suggested he wasn’t trying to draw her into a debate. It was his personal belief, and nothing she said would change it. Simple and complicated both at the same time.
“Why are you going to the ruins?” she asked after a few moments of silence.
“To see if there are any provisions there we can use.”
“Like what?”
He turned the rabbits again, lifting one to check its progress. “We need things like tools, good metal, books. Sometimes we can find things like that in the ruins.”
“Doesn’t your council provide those things?”
Again he made that soft snorting sound. He laid the rabbit back against the rack and stood, burying his fingers in the front pockets of his broken coveralls as the studied her. “Not all cities are the same.”
“Do you have a council?”
“We do. But our welfare is not their first concern.”
“Then what is their purpose?”
Wyatt bent low and picked up a dried leaf, tearing it to pieces between his long, thin fingers. “To make us work ourselves to the bone until we die.”
“That doesn’t seem right.”
He glanced at her. “At least they don’t send us out here to our deaths.”
Dylan stared at him, again the image of her dead sisters bursting through her mind in painful clarity. She grabbed her head as a pain flashed through her temples with the image. She leaned forward, laying her head on her knees as a moan of pain slipped from between her lips. Wyatt was immediately at her side, running his hands slowly over her hair. The pain disappeared as quickly as it had come as sparks of pleasure pulsed from his fingers through her mind.
“Oh, wow,” she whispered, pulling back from his touch.
One look at his face, and she could see that the same flash of pleasure had rushed through him. His face had paled and his eyes were wide, the blue even more clear, even deeper, than it had been before.
“What the hell?” he muttered.
Dylan reached up and touched her head again, but the pain was completely gone. The residue of pleasure still lingered, but the intensity was gone. She looked up at him, and he was staring at his hand, turning it as though there was something about it that would tell him why this…whatever it was, had happened.
“Has that ever happened to you before?” she asked.
“No.” His eyes moved slowly to hers. “Has it happened to you?”
She shook her head slowly, never breaking eye contact.
He held up his hand, held it just an inch from the side of her head. He was going to touch her again, she could see the intention in his stare. But before he could, one of the rabbits slipped from its brace and fell into the fire, scattering sparks across their bodies.
Wyatt jumped up, a word she had never heard before slipping between his lips as he grabbed the scorched, ash-covered meat from the fire.
Don’t trust him.
Dylan looked up into the trees, her heart pounding as the words reverberated through her mind.
Chapter 14
They reached the far edge of the ruins midmorning.
Dylan had never seen asphalt, had never felt the smooth surface of a road beneath her feet. It was broken by grass and other plants Wyatt called weeds, but it was still there, the darkness of the crushed rocks visible below all the green. She ran the toe of her boot across it, watching small rocks break off here and there. They were sticky in her hands, the heat of the sun making them worse than they might have otherwise been. Again, that’s what Wyatt said.
Then she saw the sign with writing on it.
Now entering Lubbock, it said. Population 229,573.
Over two hundred thousand people lived here once. It was a staggering figure, a number that was so large Dylan couldn’t even imagine what it looked like. There were sixty girls in her dorm at any one time. No more than eighteen hundred in each compound. No more than five thousand in the entire city of Genero.
Yet there were more than forty times that many who lived in this one city.
It made Dylan’s head spin with the enormity of it.
“How many people live in your city?” she asked Wyatt as she rushed to keep up with him.
“Not many. A few hundred.”
“How is it possible that so many people could live in one city?”
He glanced at her. “Their cities were large, sprawling places. And they had these places called apartments where the people lived stacked on top of each other.”
“Have you seen those? Apartments?”
“Yes.” He gestured toward an unsteady stack of stones off to one side of the road. “I’ve seen a lot of things in these ruins.”
“Do you always come alone?”
“I’m not alone.”
“You were.”
He ignored her as he continued to walk quickly toward the middle of the ruins. Dylan wanted to pursue her questions, but then a shadow fell over them and she became aware of the tall, dark things springing out of the plants around them. So tall, they blocked out the sun in some places. Dylan continued to walk, her head rolled back on her neck so she wouldn’t miss anything. She forgot to keep her eye on Wyatt, to make sure he didn’t move too far in front of her. Instead, she studied each of the buildings they passed, studied the stone and other materials that created their façade, comparing it in the back of her mind with the soft limestone that formed the dorms in Genero.
She had never seen anything as tall as these buildings. D dorm, like the other dorms in Genero, was only three floors high, not counting the stilts on which it sat. That had seemed tall
to her. But these…some of these buildings had fifteen, twenty rows of windows to indicate the floors that filled their interiors. She couldn’t imagine why someone would need that much space, or even how they could walk up that many flights of stairs.
Running up D dorm’s stairs was exercise enough.
Dylan turned as she walked, watching the buildings in front of her as well as those behind. They was so quiet, these forgotten structures. A part of her felt as though it was unnatural. There should be laughter, should be voices, should be people walking through this street with her. When she closed her eyes, she could feel them around her, busy people rushing from place to place, all dressed in clothing she had never seen before and could hardly assign the proper names to. One woman brushed passed her so closely, she could feel the breeze of her movement caress the skin of her bare upper arm. Another, a man in dark clothing with white underneath and something like a rope around his neck, rushed by her other side on the suddenly weed-free street, the windows of the tall buildings beside him unbroken, something small and rectangular pressed to his ear. She could even hear what he was saying, words that meant little to her, but a tone that was familiar.
“I know, darling,” he said. “I will make sure Santa Claus knows you would like an iPad for Christmas.”
A girl about Dylan’s age rushed up the street and wrapped her arms around the shoulders of a young man her own age. The man laughed and spun around until she slipped from his back and moved into his arms. And then he pressed his lips to hers, kissing her in a way Dylan had never seen with an enthusiasm that seemed misplaced, and yet, perfect in some way. Dylan stared at them for a long moment, wondering why they would touch in such a way, what purpose there was in it.
It’s called love, her invisible friend informed her.
That’s not the kind of love we learned in Genero.
No, that is romantic love, between a boy and a girl. It’s one of the many things left behind with this society.
Why?
But, again, her invisible friend chose not to answer her question.
“Dylan.”
She opened her eyes, and the street she had seen in her mind’s eye, the people, disappeared, to be replaced by the weed-choked street and the disintegrating buildings. And Wyatt, standing in front of her with a look of annoyance staining his perfect features.
For a moment Dylan’s eyes moved to his lips, and she found herself wondering what it would feel like to press her lips to his, the way the young couple in her vision had done. What would it feel like to have those thick, full lips on hers? Would she be able to taste his skin? Would he taste her? Would it be pleasant?
The thought sent a little shiver up and down her spine.
“Will you stop daydreaming?” those perfect lips said. “We have work to do.”
“You have work to do,” she clarified.
“As long as you’re traveling with me, it’s your work, too.”
Dylan groaned, but she followed him as he moved farther down the road.
“What are we looking for?” she called after a minute.
“I told you,” he said. “Tools, metal. Anything we can use back at Viti.”
Dylan stooped over and picked up a thin piece of metal from where it had been sticking up out of the weeds. “Like this?” she asked.
He glanced back for only a second, waving his hand to show his impatience. “No, too thin.”
“Thicker, then?”
He didn’t answer. “Are all men this obtuse?” she muttered under her breath, growing annoyed at the lengthening list of unanswered questions that kept sitting in the air between her and her strange companions.
They walked over something Wyatt called a bridge into a narrow grouping of streets where the buildings were a little shorter than the others. Dylan found herself running her fingers over round signs sticking up on silver poles every few feet, faded numbers inside thin pieces of glass, some of which were broken, covering papers with increments of time written across them. She wondered what these were for. Why would the people of the past need posts on the street that kept track of passing time?
“This way,” Wyatt called from farther up the street before he disappeared around a corner.
Dylan rushed to catch up. She turned the corner just in time to see Wyatt walk up the steps to an inconspicuous, squat building with a glass façade that was mostly broken now. She moved into a slow jog to catch up with him, her eyes moving over the details on the outside of the building, a building that looked so much like the ones to the right and left of it. But when she stepped inside, there was very little that was familiar about it.
It was a deep building, one that seemed to go on forever. She couldn’t even see the back wall. A counter stood in front of her, whatever it once held forever gone in the rubble that lay dusty across its surface. Behind that were rows and rows of shelf that looked nothing like the thin glass shelves that filled the library at D dorm. But the books were familiar.
She walked to the first set of shelves. Most of the books had been blown from the dark surface of the shelves, but some remain. She picked one up, held it in her hands as though it were the most precious object she would ever touch. Gone with the Wind, the cover read.
There were others, some with the covers torn off, some missing pages. But the farther she moved into the cavernous room, the more shelves of perfect, completely intact, if dusty and dirty, books she found. Some were familiar, books she had read in her studies at Genero, some she had only heard of in discussions of the things lost in the war that had devastated the previous society. But they weren’t lost. They were sitting right here for anyone to walk in and take.
“What is this place?” Dylan asked as she walked up behind Wyatt. He was studying a shelf of soft-cover books, his fingers moving along their spines as he read the titles. “Is it a library?”
“A bookstore.”
“A bookstore? What is that?”
He glanced over his shoulder at her. “A place where they sold books in the previous society.”
“Why would they sell books? Weren’t they free for everyone to read?”
He shook his head as he continued to search the titles for something in particular. “Their society was obsessed with money. It was how they got the things they needed to live happily.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighed as he slowly turned, his eyes falling immediately to the small stack of books she had gathered almost absentmindedly and held pressed to her breasts. “We only need food, water, and companionship to help us survive. But them…they needed other things, material things.”
“Like books?”
“Like books and clothes and computers and things they called games and these little pieces of plastic that played music.”
“Music?”
“Didn’t your mother ever sing to you?” He turned back to the shelf of books, his finger automatically moving to the last spine he had read.
“Mother?”
He groaned. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I forgot you don’t have families in Genero. Your…” He paused, searching for the right word. “Guardian. Isn’t that what you call them?”
A memory of Davida singing to her in the darkness of her dorm room immediately flashed in her mind. “Davida sang to me sometimes, when I had trouble sleeping.”
“That’s music,” he said, as his fingers tripped over the books, and he finally found something he had been searching for. He tugged the book from the shelf and studied the cover for a long second before shoving it into his own bag. His finger moved back to the shelf, continuing along the remaining books, forcing him to crouch down as he moved to the books on the lower shelves.
Dylan saw more books in a little alcove to his left. She stumbled over some of the debris that was scattered even in this section of the store to reach it. These books were different, bigger and heavier than the ones in her arms. She pulled her bag off her shoulder and shoved the books she had already chosen inside before she began l
ooking through these new books. She pulled one off the shelf and opened it. Inside there were pictures of the human body, but the outer layers had been torn away to reveal bone and muscle, showing the reader how they lay together. Another page showed the bones alone with labels that gave each a name.
Dylan picked up another book, and it showed pictures of people in the same sort of clothing, all the same gray and white colors, including the little hats on top of their heads. There were names of people and places under these pictures, of battles that took place in some long ago war. Another book described another war, showed vehicles that rode on water and others that appeared to ride the air. She ran her fingers over the pages and images flooded her mind, images of a time and a place that was different from hers, different from that of the people who last inhabited this city.
She pushed the book away, her mind too overwhelmed to handle any more information.
She began to turn when she felt a harsh breeze move over her.
Hide.
Chapter 15
“Wyatt!”
Dylan dropped behind the shelves that ran along the sides of her little alcove. A moment later, Wyatt came around the corner in a low crouch.
“Stay here,” he whispered.
“What is it?”
He glanced at her, his blue eyes filled with something she did not understand. “Just stay here,” he said again.
He moved around a low table that marked the entrance to the alcove and disappeared. Dylan dropped to her knees and slipped the knife out of the waistband of her broken coveralls, holding it so tightly in her right hand that her knuckles turned white. She closed her eyes so that she could listen without distraction. In a second she could hear the thump of books falling from shelves. With that came a heavy sound of breathing, almost like the huffing sound she had heard her first night outside of Genero.
They’ve come for you.
Dylan’s eyes opened and she searched the alcove around her. “What do you mean?” she whispered aloud, too distracted to keep her words inside her head.
You must survive. You must fight.
FOUND (Angels and Gargoyles Book 1) Page 6