In a Handful of Dust

by McGinnis,Mindy

  “Lander and Ben keep them out of their garden, though I don’t know how,” Nora admitted. “We do see coyotes up here on the strip occasionally, so they probably keep the population down.”

  “But not lions?” Lucy asked, trying to keep her voice casual.

  Nora’s mouth tightened. “No, not them, thank God.”

  “You hate them.”

  The clouds passed over, covering what was left of the sunset and leaving the women in darkness. The air was close and hot, the rain refusing to fall. Lucy could barely see the outline of Nora’s face in the last rays of sun.

  “Before the world ended I used to try to find them, ridiculous as that seems now,” she said. “I’d go out hiking overnight, take animal distress calls, anything I could do to call them to me. I loved the way they moved, like liquid under fur. They made me realize some animals are better than others, that the food chain in all of its barbarism is exactly what nature intended.”

  “So?” Lucy asked, the hot wind pulling her words from her mouth. “What changed?”

  Nora looked at her as the clouds scudded across the sky and the last red rays of the setting sun brilliantly lit her eyes. “One of them ate my daughter.”

  Lucy grasped the older woman’s hand, covering it completely with both of hers. “I am so, so, sorry. I wouldn’t have asked . . .”

  Nora waved the apology away but took her hand back to wipe at some stray tears. “You had no way of knowing.”

  “Was this . . . in your time? Before the Shortage?”

  “No. It was a few years ago. I had a child very late in life, here in what’s left of the world. I mentioned her to you, do you remember?”

  “Little one,” Lucy said quietly. “You called her little one.”

  “I did.” Nora nodded, wiping at another errant tear. “She was built small like you, and wiry too. She used to make Lander laugh by showing off how much she could lift. They made a game of it.

  “She was twelve when it happened. Her job was scavenging on the western end for food, clothes, little things we needed replaced in the day to day, like scissors or can openers. Lander was going to teach her how to manage the garden, and Ben was going to fill her post as a scavenger. She was showing him some of the areas that hadn’t been picked over yet.

  “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a cat hunt, but a lion will stalk its prey same as little tame cats. No matter how many times I tell myself it’s helping nobody, I’ve played it through my head a million times how that cat must’ve followed the two of them, sliding through the shadows and waiting for the chance to pounce.”

  Lucy pictured it in her mind as well, drawn in by the grieving mother’s words and the image of two small bodies picking through rubble, hunted by a gliding shadow. She’d seen it in miniature at home before, the silent paws that could deal a crushing velvety blow to the slowest of the stalked.

  “But why wouldn’t the cat have gone for Ben?” Lucy asked. “Predators always attack the smallest or the weakest. He would’ve been both.”

  The clouds pulsed overhead, refusing to break. Lightning flickered and the thunder rolled in the distance before Nora answered.

  “The way he tells it, my girl was outside and he was indoors when it attacked.”

  Lucy carefully watched the play of muscles across Nora’s face as they waited for the rain to fall, the flashes of lightning contorting her expression and making it unreadable. “You believe him?”

  Nora’s shrug was barely perceptible in the darkness. “Ben wants nothing more than his father’s love and respect. Working that garden with Lander day in and day out is how he thinks he’ll get it. I can’t say for sure what happened the day my daughter died, and knowing wouldn’t change it anyhow.”

  “It is what it is,” Lucy said, turning to stand shoulder to shoulder with Nora as the storm passed them by.

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  Twenty-Nine

  Lucy felt a distinct sense of unease when she went out to witch with Ben the next day. She could easily picture him sacrificing Nora’s daughter, allowing her to be taken by the big cat to further his own ends. Lucy struggled for nonchalance as they walked out of the shadows of the city’s buildings, into the bright white stretch of desert.

  The rain had refused to fall the night before. The clouds had taunted the city as they slid past. The sky was as clear as glass when Lucy stepped out of the shade and into the sun, the sand throwing the heat back up at her and baking her skin from below.

  “C’mon then,” she said testily to Ben, who was struggling with an armload of flags. Lander had been overly optimistic when giving them a hundred of the wire flags used to mark buried water lines, but Lucy hadn’t wanted to crush the hope in the big man’s eyes.

  “I’m coming,” Ben shot back. “These keep poking me. I don’t see why you can’t carry some.”

  “I need my hands free,” Lucy said.

  Ben caught up to stand next to her. “So how’s this work, anyway? You walk around with your hands out ’til you feel it?”

  Lucy stifled a sigh. “Something like that.”

  “No, really, tell me. I want to know how you do it.”

  “It’s not something I can teach. People either can, or they can’t.”

  Ben made a face at her and she walked away from him, closing her eyes and holding her hands outward, hoping the show of concentration would keep him quiet. Lander had cut her a forked stick from one of the trees in the garden, and while it lacked the smooth contours from years of her grip, it would do the trick.

  The power to find water was so sacred that Stebbs had lowered his voice when he spoke to her about it, even in private. Lynn would prefer to never speak of it at all, keeping Lucy’s gift in a quiet place where it would draw no attention. But Lucy had always reveled in the spasm of power that water sent toward her, crying out to her it was there and wanted to be found.

  “Here,” she said. “It’s not very deep though.”

  Ben pulled a flag from his bundle and jabbed it into the ground. “That’s good, right? Easier to get to.”

  “Easier to get at, yeah, but if it’s shallow, it might not last long.” Lucy wandered off in another direction, letting her feet go, her mind drift while waiting for the water to talk to her. The heat was drawing her own moisture straight out of her skin, dotting her pores with beads of sweat. A rifle shot echoed across the flat plain and Lucy jumped, drops falling off her forehead and evaporating on the hot sand.

  “Shit,” she said. “Scared me.”

  Ben looked back at the city, the flags slung across his shoulders. “Your mom. She’s rather basic, isn’t she?”

  “What do you mean?” Lucy asked, her sudden clench making the stick jump in her hands.

  “That water?”

  “The stick wants to hit you and I’m stopping it.”

  Ben smiled, whether he thought she was funny or because he enjoyed getting under her skin she didn’t know. “I mean she’s one-sided. She wants her gun, and she wants to shoot things, and that seems to be about where her interests stop.”

  “Well, she’s good at it,” Lynn said, repositioning the stick and walking away from Ben.

  “You ask questions about the garden, and our people. You want to know how we manage, but all she wants to do is get her gun and move on.”

  “Yes, she does,” Lucy agreed. The stick leapt in her hands, viciously jabbing downward, but she felt no rush of pride. “Here.”

  Ben planted a flag, eyes still on Lucy. “What if she wants to go, and you don’t?”

  “What about it?”

  “Would you stay?”

  “I don’t . . .” Lucy looked off into the distance at the blue mountains not unlike the ones Lynn had nearly died getting across, all because Lucy had asked her to. She dropped her stick and glared down at Ben, unsure how he could look so smug when he had to look
up to meet her eye. “Lynn and I go together or we stay together. End of story.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “What do you care?”

  Ben dropped his armload of flags to the ground. “I wouldn’t say I care. It’s obvious you like it here and your mom doesn’t. Did you mean what you said about finding us a clean source of water and moving on?”

  “Yes,” Lucy said, taking the bottle of water Ben handed to her from his backpack.

  “Because that’s what she wants, or what you want?”

  The odd-tasting water slid down her throat, coating her tongue with the residue she could never quite wash away. But it was water, and two weeks ago she would’ve licked puddles off the hot road to save her life.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said, handing the water back to Ben.

  His smile was honest, and it nearly made his awkward face handsome. Lucy smiled back, unable to help herself. “You almost looked like your dad there for a second.”

  Ben rolled his eyes. “Better than my mom.”

  Lucy dried her palms on her jeans before taking the stick back up. “What’s she look like?”

  “Bailey’s my mom.”

  “Bailey? The nurse?”

  Ben sighed and re-shouldered his backpack. “Oh, I know. How did such a little shrimp of a guy come out of Bailey and Lander? It’s a genetic joke that gets trotted out for a laugh all the time, so go ahead and have your giggle.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that so much as . . . ugh,” Lucy said, turning red for reasons that had nothing to do with the heat.

  “Well, yeah, there’s that too,” Ben agreed, falling into step beside her with his armload of blue flags. “But my dad can’t exactly be picky, you know? He had a kid with Nora and that didn’t turn out so great—”

  “Wait, Nora’s daughter was Lander’s?”

  “She told you about that?”

  “Yeah.” Lucy looked away, answering the tiny vibe the earth had thrown her. “Here.”

  “There was nothing I could do,” Ben said stiffly as he planted the flag.

  “So she was your sister then?”

  “Half sister, yeah,” Ben answered as they veered away from the smattering of blue flags waving behind them. “Anyway, after Rachel got killed by the lion, Dad started showing me how to manage the garden right, measure the acid in the dirt for the different vegetables and make sure they each have the proper sun exposure. It’s not an easy thing, if you want to do it right.”

  Ben was swept away in the surge of importance as he talked about his duties, and Lucy let him go on through the next two flags before asking a question. “So was your dad hoping he and Bailey would be able to . . .” She trailed off, unable to finish the sentence politely.

  “Make a big, healthy baby?” Ben asked, his eyebrows raised in two mocking points. “Maybe. That or by then he’d realized Nora wasn’t going to be having any more kids and he realized it was Bailey or bust.” He giggled at his own joke, but Lucy didn’t join in.

  “What do you mean? Surely there’s someone else willing to . . .”

  All humor slid from Ben’s face as he looked at her. “You seriously didn’t know? Jeez, Lucy, open your eyes. How many women have you seen around here?”

  A cold tremor passed over Lucy despite the heat, and her witching stick jumped even though there was no water beneath it. “I thought . . .” Her words gave out as her mind jumped back to Lynn’s first shooting session from on top of the hotel. People had littered the streets, staring up at them with their eyes shaded. But none of them had been women.

  “Thought what?”

  “I don’t know. I guess maybe that they were out . . . you know, just doing things.”

  “Doing things?” Ben laughed outright. “You’re something. No, it’s been Bailey and Nora for a long time. Then here comes your mom into town with her long hair and her birthing hips—”

  “You can’t be serious,” Lucy interrupted. “Lander wants to get Lynn pregnant?”

  “Sure, why do you think he’s the one that’s sitting with her while she’s shooting? You really think he doesn’t have better things to do?”

  Lucy looked to the city, shading her eyes against the glare and searching for the flash of the rifle among the thousands of panes of glass. “He wouldn’t force her, would he?”

  “What, rape her? My dad? Nah.” Ben dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “He likes to get people to do what he wants, not make them.”

  “No danger of that then,” she said. “Lynn’s not interested.”

  Ben reached up and awkwardly patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, I don’t like the idea either. I might be small, but I’m still my dad’s son. And right now, I’m the only one he’s got. I’m hoping he’ll realize you turned out small, and kinda stupid too, so he’ll give up the idea of making a baby with your mom.”

  “Well, let’s hope so,” Lucy said through gritted teeth, and swept her stick across the sand. The rush of surprise and anger was sending tremors through her skin, making it impossible to listen for the quiet pull of water.

  “Oh, and speaking of rape,” Ben said casually, taking his backpack off again. “I have something for you.”

  The stick jumped in her hands, and Lucy rested one end on the sand. “You are the worst person in the world to try to do this with,” she said.

  “Sorry,” Ben mumbled as he dug in his pack. “Here, these are for you and your mom.” He handed Lucy two black rectangles with prongs at the top.

  “What’s this?”

  “Push the button on the side,” Ben said.

  She did, and a bright-blue arc of light jumped from one prong to the other. The rectangle buzzed in her hand and Lucy yelped, dropping it to the ground. “What the hell?”

  “It’s electricity,” Ben explained. “Nora and Bailey carry them too, although I don’t think any of the men would ever consider touching you while my dad forbids it.”

  Lucy toed the black object in the sand mistrustfully. “So it shocks people?”

  “Yeah, anybody gives you trouble, you—ZZZZZZ—” Ben imitated jerking motions. “Zap ’em. It’s really pretty neat. Catch a turtle and I’ll show you how it works.”

  “I think I’m okay,” Lucy said, putting both in her own backpack. She picked her stick up and looked behind them at the handful of blue flags spotting the desert. “We should keep going.”

  “Dad wanted us to place all of these,” Ben said, looking doubtfully at the pile still at his feet. “We should stick some in random places.”

  Lucy shook her head. “And then people would be digging for no reason. I can’t always be sure what I find is a solid bet, but I won’t set people looking where I know there’s nothing.”

  Ben blew out his cheeks in frustration. “Have it your way then.”

  She flapped her arms about her, muscles cramping from holding them straight for so long. “Give me a sec, I’ll be ready soon.”

  “Whenever,” Ben said, flopping to the desert floor.

  “So, were there ever other women? Has it always been just Nora and Bailey?”

  “Huh? Oh no, there used to be a whole lot more people here, in general. Then cholera swept through right around the time I was born, and it wiped out a lot of us.”

  “Cholera’s bad stuff.”

  “We’d taken in some new people and one of them was falling sick but hiding it. Probably one of the females, because not long after that their water supply was infected.”

  “The women drank from different water?”

  Ben shaded his eyes to look up at her. “Dad said it caused too much trouble and distraction to have everybody doing as they pleased, so men and women lived apart.”

  “And people were okay with that?”

  “I guess they had water and food, so they were okay with anything.”

  Lucy dropped down next to Ben in the sand, pulling out her water bottle. “So one of the women was sick with cholera?”

  “Yeah. Whoever it was, they
were all drawing out of the same tank in the women and children’s hotel, and a few days later most of them were dead. Dad said it was such a stink they ended up torching the place, hoping to kill off the bug.”

  “It work?”

  “Seems so. We haven’t had a case of cholera since then, although it made Nora straight paranoid. She made Lander take her out to the hospital—the real one—and the library to get medical books so she could know all there was to know about waterborne illnesses. She had groups of men carrying boxes of books that weighed more than me up into her hotel room for days.”

  Lucy’s hand stopped cold on the cap of her bottle, as a bubble of hope rose from her long-dormant heart. “She know about polio?”

  “She knows about damn near everything. Even if she doesn’t, I guarantee you anything anybody needs to know is in those books.”

  Lucy jammed her bottle into the depths of her pack to hide the quaking of her hands. “All right then, let’s get moving.”

  Ben remained where he was, lying in the sun like the big cat she’d seen through Lynn’s scope. “So it doesn’t bother you?”

  “What’s that?”

  Ben’s smile was slow and measured, nothing like the spontaneous one that had burst across his face earlier. “You gave up your secret way too early.”

  Lucy’s eyebrows came together as she looked at him, comprehension only dawning as she remembered the look on the men’s faces as they’d carefully bundled Lynn’s nearly lifeless body into the backseat of the car. In her own state she’d not questioned why perfect strangers would be scared at the thought of Lynn dying.

  “You would’ve saved us anyway,” Lucy said slowly, “whether I could witch or not. Because you need women.”

  “Well,” Ben said, “you’re not so stupid after all.”

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