by Andrew Post
“Another man came with his own cart. I think he had a big ol’ heap of apples in the back. He tipped his hat and asked if we was havin’ trouble with our cart. Pa said, ‘No, just watching the raccoon out there.’ The man looked, brought his hat low to shield his eyes from the suns. He had to look for only a second before saying, ‘It’s rabid. Don’t be letting the little ones out there near it.’ He seemed mad suddenly, as if he was disappointed in us. I guess it was kind of shameful, us stoppin’ on the side of the road to watch an animal suffer.
“Even after the man had gone, we stayed a while longer. My little sister started askin’ Daddy if we could help it, and Daddy said no. Ma asked why we didn’t keep goin’, because clearly, this was disturbing us kids. He wouldn’t make our donkey go. We simply continued to sit there.
“I watched Pa watchin’ the raccoon as it started weavin’ its way closer to us. It was close enough we could hear it gurglin’ and makin’ this . . . hurt sound, as if it was tryin’ to clear its throat but couldn’t. It had foam around its mouth and nose, and its ears kept flickin’ round this way and that as if it was hearin’ something which wasn’t there. It didn’t seem to notice us.
“Bein’ the oldest of the wee ones, I asked Pa to please get us goin’, ’cause Tilda was cryin’ and George, my little brother, was sittin’ on the other side of me pale as a sheet. But Pa kept us sittin’ there. Even Ma was yellin’ at him, smackin’ his arm and sayin’, ‘Why are you being such a damn fool?’ I thought maybe Pa was thinking about doin’ something, as if he might go out there with the ax he always brought with him, to put the poor blighter out of its misery. But he didn’t. We merely sat still watchin’ it tryin’ hard to get its body to cooperate and get to the woods, where it could hide or maybe die in peace under a log somewhere . . . until it turned again, makin’ these frustrated sounds as if its body had other plans and started makin’ it walk a new direction, away from the woods, back out into the suns.
“I’d never felt so useless in me life, watchin’ the thing struggle and none of us doin’ anything about it. Just watchin’, as if it was a thing worthy of gawkin’—not the sad display it really was. I know it was probably only a handful of minutes, but it felt like hours we sat there watchin’ that raccoon try to make it to the woods but never quite get there, fightin’ with itself, wantin’ it so bad but just . . . couldn’t, because it was stuck in itself, sick and confused and scared.”
When the fire popped, Russell flinched. He snorted a small laugh, meeting eyes with everyone sitting around the fire. “I didn’t mean to go on like that.”
Russell looked at Peter, sitting away from the fire with Teetee. Not so far that the berserker couldn’t have heard the story if he’d wanted to.
Russell lifted the bottom of his leather travel tankard and drained it of coffee, got up, and went walking out in the dark. He was gone for hours. When he returned to get his bed roll laid out, his eyes were puffy, and he kept clearing his throat.
Anoushka considered asking if he was okay but decided against it. She knew how the proud dwarf would answer.
* * *
As the snow deepened, the road became a guessing game. Anoushka used the margins between trees as a guide. When they were on straight prairie paths, the snowy miles became indistinguishable from one to the next. Her focus began to drift. She was thinking about Lodi a lot. Even if the wizardess had been a pain, she’d still been one of them. And she’d given herself to help. No one had asked; she’d simply done it. For two nights in a row, Anoushka had nightmares about her rising up like that, speaking with Lyle’s voice. Each time she woke with a start, gasping. Relieved it’d been nothing but a dream, she still carried the unsettled feeling with her throughout the day.
Every time they approached a fork, Kylie-Nae would call out left or right. Anoushka considered the turns Lyle had taken in life. She wondered if it wasn’t by accident or desperation that he’d ended up as he was—like regular folk opting to become thieves to feed their starving children—but, instead, willingly dived into, headlong, pursuing abhorrence. Why, though? Had he always been cruel? Did he have some locked-away portion of his heart where a darkness crouched, awaiting its freedom?
Anoushka recalled the hue of her inner self, as she’d seen it in the Hall. Its color could’ve easily been much, much lighter as easily as, alternatively, it could’ve been darker. When the prairies became the woods again, she was glad to have a rougher terrain with frequent bends to navigate. Something to keep her hands and mind busy.
* * *
“This feels bad,” Kylie-Nae said.
“Probably because it is bad,” Anoushka said.
“You’re gonna kick it in?”
“I knocked. No one answered. We can’t eat bullets.”
“I understand, but I still don’t like this.”
“Neither do I,” Anoushka said and kicked in the farmhouse’s front door.
It was a halfling family’s farmstead and had halfling dimensions. They ducked to enter and remained ducked inside. One room. Hard-packed dirt floors. Three lumpy hay-stuffed mattresses side by side. A dresser with nothing in its hanging-open drawers. Ashes in the hearth, cold. They’d fled early on.
As gladly as Anoushka would’ve opted to steal from the rich, manor houses weren’t a real common sight in the sticks. However, looters can’t be choosers. And though it was a thing approved by the Ma’am in times of need for contractors, doing acquisition runs were never pleasant. Despite never taking more than necessary, it still always felt like they had. But they were all growing more cheekbony by the day and tempers weren’t exactly growing longer. They were down to half-day crawls. Russell and Zuther were unable to pedal much more than that. They’d taken to sleeping in their pits, too weak to even help gather firewood. Each time Anoushka stood too quickly, her ears rang and her hands went numb.
Kylie-Nae picked up a framed photograph on the mantelpiece. Husband, wife, six small children. Given the rocky patch they were trying to drag a living out of, right outside a place as destitute as Port Pyne, big smiles would’ve been odd.
“I take it back,” Kylie-Nae said. “This feels really bad.”
Using the wobbly kitchen table for a desk, Anoushka began their note of apology. “We’ll round up our reimbursement, by a lot.”
That seemed to put Kylie-Nae’s conscience at ease. With two old potato sacks, they began rooting through the cabinets and drawers. Meager stores. Mostly home-canned vegetables, rows and rows of unmarked jars. Their contents were difficult to discern all smashed in tight. Carrots? Stewed tomatoes? Anoushka held one by the open shutters, but the blue light filtering through the heavy snow clouds didn’t help. But she was so hungry she probably would’ve eaten whatever was in there. Maybe even the jar itself.
“Ruprecht told me who sold our story.”
“Really? Who?”
“Erik.”
“Who’s Erik?”
“My ex. The guy I was talking to, back at the church.”
Kylie-Nae, done with that cabinet, closed it. But her hand lingered on the tiny handle. “So that means he got all those details . . . from you?” She turned. “About everything?”
Son of a bitch. Anoushka hadn’t thought of that, only hoping this would help lift her friend’s spirits, one mystery killed. She sighed to herself. “I suppose he did. Look, we were working a lot then. So I understand why you were . . .”
“Being such a slut?”
“I only wanted to stay busy. You guys wanted days off, and I wanted to give them, but . . . I had to keep us moving. I’m beginning to wonder if that’s why Russ and Tara split up, because he wasn’t home enough.”
“The old potato would’ve split from his lady eventually,” Kylie-Nae said. “Zee said he stayed with them for a week once and noticed Tara kinda had a drifting eye. Do not tell Russ I said that.”
“I won’t. What do you suppose was with his story last night?”
“The one about the raccoon? Dunno. Weird, though. But t
he road does do that. A lot of idle time and your mind wanders.”
“True,” Anoushka agreed. She had some tales, many of which she chose to keep to herself. “What about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you blame me?”
“What? No. Come on, I’ve always been the way I am. You know me. I think you could’ve been snagging us one contract a year, or 300. I probably would’ve been . . . you know, full of wiles, gallivanting prone. Whatever. Just never thought you would judge me for it.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Forget it.” A small smile. Forced. She was still hurt. “It’s okay.”
“What . . . about Matthew? Do you think we could’ve been taking more days off? That he got killed because we were all tired?”
“Again, babe: an accident. Really, not even. It’s a part of the job. We know what we signed up for. Matthew knew.” Kylie-Nae retrieved the swaddled loaf from the sack. After tearing off a hunk, she offered the ripped loaf to Anoushka.
“Gods, this is good.”
They ate for a couple of minutes, loud and unashamed. Anoushka felt a charge run through her after only two swallows; soul being pulled back to bone with just a couple of bites. Her teeth ached, as if they’d forgotten their job.
“Now, this isn’t meant to undo everything we just established,” Kylie-Nae said, “because I firmly believe you are not to blame—but why did you have us working so hard?” Kylie-Nae tore off another piece. “Not that I really minded; I lived off the cash for quite a while afterward,” she said around her mouthful.
“I simply thought if I had us always on the road for a job, we wouldn’t . . .”
“Stop to realize we were all getting sick of each other’s faces?” Chewing, Kylie-Nae kept her eyes downcast.
“Yeah,” Anoushka said. “Except you and me.”
“Right, not you and me,” Kylie-Nae said—late and a little loud.
Anoushka didn’t call her friend on her slip. There’d been plenty of times when she could’ve booted Kylie-Nae out the side of Joan. But that was old friends: they could inspire a belly laugh or make you tear your hair out quicker than anybody.
“I thought taking on Peter would help,” Anoushka said, rolling a pinch of bread into a sphere between her fingers. “But I think Zee and Russ looked at it as if we, just us, weren’t good enough. I know they’d never say it to my face, but . . .”
“Yeah,” Kylie-Nae said. “They did think that. And Peter, back then as well as now, was never exactly a mood brightener.”
Anoushka ran a hand through her hair. “This was a huge fucking mistake.”
Reaching over the table with their pilfered goods, Kylie-Nae gently took Anoushka’s hand, lacing their fingers together.
“We kill this asshole,” she said, “and when we retire again, whether it’s after this gig or the next if we’re gonna give this another go—hey, look at me—next time, we write each other more often, okay?”
“Yeah.” Anoushka smiled. “Long letters too.”
“Exactly. And visit.”
“And visit, absolutely,” Anoushka said. “I wanna meet Molly.”
“And I want you to meet her.”
It was good, Anoushka knew, to sometimes stake a beacon for yourself, even if it was false. Something to mark the distance between here and there, to make the current stretch tolerable. She left six julas on the kitchen table. Probably three times over what it had taken the family to grow, reap, and can.
Outside, crunching through the snow that had grown a layer of ice during the sadly brief warm-up the day before, Anoushka stopped. She turned with the heavy satchel of jars on her back, listening.
Kylie-Nae stopped. “What is it?”
Behind the farmhouse was a leaning barn, its roof having recently caved in under the weight of the snow. Anoushka set her satchel down and threw one leg over the corral’s rail fence, then the other. Lying in the open barn doorway was a horse, starved to its bones. She thought it was dead at first, but as she shuffled through the pieces of collapsed roof and snow, it raised its head and puffed steam from its flaring nostrils.
It wouldn’t eat anything from the jars. Anoushka kicked away some of the snow in the field, pulled some grass she found underneath, but the horse didn’t want it either. She stood from the bounty they’d presented before the horse, the canned tomatoes and the pile of dirty, limp grass. Behind her, Kylie-Nae clicked back the hammer of her six-gun.
“I know it seems like the right thing to do, but we can’t,” Anoushka said. “Lyle will see us and run if he’s in New Kambleburg and knows we’re on our way.”
Kylie-Nae holstered and wiped a tear from her eye with the back of her bandaged hand. “Why didn’t they let him run when they decided to leave? Why leave him trapped in here?”
“I don’t know.”
“We can’t leave him like this, Annie. He’s in pain.”
After pushing the bar door wide and chocking it in place with a rock so it’d stay open, Anoushka stepped back in and rubbed the horse’s nose. Its breath was warm on her palm but came in quick, short exhales between long intakes of breath that rattled deep in its chest. She left the tomatoes, in case the horse changed its mind after they left, picked up the bag of their remaining acquisitions, and exited the barn. Kylie-Nae didn’t follow for a few minutes, but Anoushka didn’t hear a gunshot, only the crunches of her friend’s boots in the snow and her own muffled sobs in the wool crook of her coat’s elbow.
* * *
The next day the terrain shifted drastically. You could almost see the line on the ground. Nothing but pines for the longest stretch and—snap—barren. Just spindly, twisted things. They hadn’t shed their leaves for winter; they grew that way, black and gnarled. The edge of the Scorch. They ambled on, coming to the perimeter of Edgewatch. Unlike Yarnigrad, this town was never for citizenry. A corral for horses, another for pigs, a corrugated steel barracks, a dumpy little brick armory, and a row of outdoor latrines.
As Joan rumbled near, two soldiers stepped out from under a lean-to. Anoushka recalled Sir Gunnar saying it’d be impossible to outrun the wire.
“Everyone stay calm,” Anoushka said to her squad. Braking to a halt, she slid open the slot next to her.
The two soldiers took their rifles off their shoulders and weighed them in their hands. “Hello, there,” one shouted over Joan’s long creak as her springs bled out their tension.
“Morning. We have orders to move through the Scorch to New Kambleburg,” Anoushka shouted out.
One soldier pulled the scarf down from a young face. “Not sure if you’ve heard, but New Kambleburg is under enemy control.”
“That’s why we’re heading there. Under contact by the Committee.”
Though they could see it shortly after leaving Yarnigrad, Burned Mountain was close now, a mere 200 miles off. Edgewatch, under its shadow, was probably 2,000 strong. A good number of cannons and a handful of ballistae stood pointed, ready. But with the estimation that Skivvit was pouring most of his army under the Mountain, Edgewatch couldn’t expect to be more than a momentary annoyance, a mere speed bump. But they had to wait, nonetheless, for the moment they broke through, witness it, and shoot a deet back to New Delta City and mark the beginning of the invasion. In most cases, soldiers assigned to await an enemy’s arrival would post up near the presumed breach point. But tasking them to wait in the Scorch for weeks on end would only mean needing constant replacements; it wasn’t a place to dillydally or to sit idly with nothing but your thoughts, ripe for the Scorch to sour them in your head, for weeks on end. So, from a distance, they waited, close but not too close, and watched.
Anoushka flicked her gaze to the Mountain. “Any activity?”
“We hear them blasting,” the soldier said. “Day and night.”
“Any word from the other side?”
“They’re slowing them down on the primary. They’ve been raiding the greenies’ mining camps, but the sons of bitches get replacemen
t greenies sent in the next morning. Our boys can’t figure out where they’re coming from. Next objective, last I heard, was to try to hit the supply routes, tear up their roads.” He glanced back at the Mountain. He’d seen combat; she could tell. “Maybe that’ll do the trick.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” Anoushka said amiably. “Well, we should get going. Permission to pass on through?”
The soldier’s gaze shifted, ahead, to Peter on his horse waiting at the gate. “How many did you say is in your squad?”
Shit. “My crew of four in here,” Anoushka said, “our bard behind, and our man ahead.”
The young soldier continued estimating Peter in his saddle staring back at him. “Would you mind if I had my CO come over and have a quick chat with you guys? Ten minutes and you can be on your way.” He met Anoushka’s eyes again. “He’s probably got some advice on going through the Scorch. He’s done it more times than even he would like to count.” A thin, brief smile.
Anoushka counted on the soldier being able to see only her eyes and nose in the armor’s narrow side slot. But there was no hiding her heritage. The smoky voice, her complexion. She motioned to her crew ahead of her, her hand unseen by the soldier, a downward swipe. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see both Zuther and Kylie-Nae quietly drawing their guns.
“Sure, yeah,” Anoushka said. “I’d never turn down free advice.” She looked at her squad, saying without words, Don’t do anything stupid. Anoushka remained buckled in, her gaze falling to the periscope viewfinder. In the crosshairs, directly ahead, Peter remained on his horse, faceplate closed, one hand on his scattergun’s pommel. She couldn’t meet his gaze, couldn’t beg him not to do anything brash. Behind, Ruprecht held the reins to his caravan pullers, eyes flicking nervously.
“One minute,” the soldier said.
As the two young men rushed off, trailing sooty puffs as they ran, Anoushka adjusted the periscope’s focus to what lay beyond Peter. The gate was cobbled from twigs and twine. It wouldn’t even slow Joan.