by Joe Hart
She looks out the window toward the next house over, keeping herself hidden but for one eye and a sliver of face. The day is in early afternoon, the sun hidden behind a sky veiled completely in clouds. The neighboring house is still, windows dark. Water drips off the eaves. Nothing moves in the space between the buildings or in the following yard. Distantly there is the whup of a helicopter.
She settles onto the floor of the room, letting some of the adrenaline leach from her as she stares at the dusty walls and listens for noises. The helicopter comes closer, but not near enough for alarm. After a time it fades away completely, and she wonders if they’ve moved on to another area for their search. She’s sure they’ve left several soldiers in the vicinity just in case they somehow missed her. She looks down and finds that her hand is rubbing lightly at her opposite wrist, realizing only then that there is a phantom feeling of her bracelet still there. She looks at the place where it has always rested, and tears gradually fill her vision.
Zoey curls into a ball and cries silently beneath the grimy window. She sees Meeka bleeding on the floor of the mechanical room, Lily’s scab-encrusted scalp, Crispin’s lifeless eyes, Terra’s broken and hollow-eyed stare. She cries for them all until there are no tears left.
She drifts in and out of consciousness, sleeping even as an internal voice tells her she can’t, that they’ll come back to the house and find her. If they do, she will die. She will end herself before ever returning as a prisoner to the ARC, to suffer the same fate of all the other women before her, to become NOA’s experiment.
It is late afternoon when she wakes again. She can tell the rest did her some good. Her muscles still ache as if she’d fallen down the side of a mountain, but she can move easier and the gash on her stomach hurts less.
Zoey stands and surveys the small neighborhood again. Everything is unchanged. There are no soldiers in sight, no sound of the copter.
But her hunger and thirst are so vivid it’s painful.
She has to leave the house before full dark. In the dark they will have the advantage with their night vision. And she has to eat and drink. Her mind starts to retrace the last time she had a meal and she stops it. Knowing will only make it worse.
Zoey gives the window another cursory glance before moving to the hall and refolding the ladder up overhead. She moves down the stairs and into the kitchen area, pausing at each window before going on. The door she entered through is ajar, the same muddy footprints as upstairs trailing in and out of the house. She finds a small room at the rear of the structure that has some type of torn and rusted screen covering its sides. The wind passes through it creating a mournful hum. Beyond the enclosure is a flat expanse of brown grass that merges into a low set of rolling hills dotted with scrub and bramble. A single scraggly pine tree grows fifty feet away, its needles a shifting, green curtain.
Zoey studies the houses to the left and right before easing onto the porch. She sidles through a long gap in the screen and before her courage can escape her, she sprints to the pine tree, sure that any moment a sniper’s round will rip through her back. But she makes it without hindrance and surveys the rear of the houses through the sweet-smelling needles. The structures remain still in their rotting solitude.
She counts to three hundred before breaking cover again. Her legs burn as she pumps them, holding the rifle before her in case she needs it suddenly. The wind howls in her ears, and dried twigs and grass crackle beneath her feet.
Zoey doesn’t stop when she reaches the first of the hills. She continues on, keeping low, climbing the incline even as the air in her lungs turns to fire. They could be right behind her, running to catch up. She was silly to think they would take her out with a rifle shot. They want her alive. At the very least she’s useful as an example to the other women in the ARC.
She crests the hill and spots a slanted piece of rock the size of her old bed jutting from its top. She slides behind it, laying the rifle across it, ready to fire if need be.
The slope is empty below. Nothing moves but the grass stirred by the breeze.
Slowly her breathing comes back to normal and she slumps to the ground. Her stomach is bleeding again, and she stanches the light flow by pressing part of her shirt to it with her palm. The earth is cool and she prays that the sun will come out, even for a moment to warm her, but it remains concealed by the clouds like the gray-scrimmed eye of a dead man.
18
Zoey watches the silent farmhouse and barn beyond the flowing stream, trying all the while to ignore the rasping thirst in her parched throat.
It is an hour before full dark, and the sky has taken on a beaten look, the clouds becoming waves of purple tinged with threatening veins of black. It is going to rain again.
All afternoon she trekked across the brambled hills in search of water. She found only two shallow, muddied puddles that were so choked with silt she more or less chewed down several mouthfuls. Everywhere else there was the evidence of rain, but the earth had already gotten to any standing water, its barren topsoil greedily drinking down the moisture. No one pursued her, as far as she could tell, and only once she spotted the helicopter as it skimmed across the horizon miles away, its passage soundless and menacing as a stalking predator.
In the hours she walked, the vastness of the world kept distracting her from her vigilance. She would be watching the skyline of a nearby hill, and a fathomless sense of the world would press upon her. How large it truly was. There were no words for it.
She had heard the brook before she saw it, the babbling of water like a half-remembered song. It revitalized her lagging senses, sending her traipsing up the side of a small rise and almost into the farmhouse yard.
Her eyes fall from studying the two structures and trace the level path leading away from the property. It runs over the nearest hill and cuts to the right down and out of sight. She brings her eyes back to the shining, silver water that flows barely a foot wide from the side of the bank before disappearing into a slight, curving channel that winds to lower ground. She waits another minute before she can take it no longer and breaks from her cover to rush to the stream’s side.
Zoey falls to her hands and her knees, the rifle dropping to the ground beside her. She plunges her face into the water and nearly shrieks at how cold it is. The water burns her face, so shocking that all the hairs stand on the back of her neck. But nothing can keep her from sucking up huge mouthfuls and swallowing them.
It is bliss beyond words.
Just when she thinks she’s slaked her thirst, she drinks again, the water more sweet, more satisfying than anything she’s ever experienced. She drinks until dizziness swarms her head and she gasps for breath; face barely an inch above the stream. Her stomach is swollen and heavy but still her throat aches. She takes several, more measured drinks before finally settling back on her haunches. The first drops of rain fall on the stream’s surface, creating expanding silver rings. She gazes up at the sky and shakes her head in disbelief.
“Great timing,” she says.
The storm coalesces quickly, and soon a torrent of water falls from the sky, soaking her meager clothing. She watches the dark windows of the farmhouse for another minute before heading toward it.
Keeping the rifle level on the door that sits above a sagging, covered porch, she creeps up the steps and leans her back against the wall beside the jamb. Lightning arcs across the sky, sizzling to the ground a mile away. Thunder echoes the flash, and beneath its cover, she turns the knob and steps inside.
The air is dank but dry. She can make out only a dozen feet in front of her before darkness consumes everything. She shuts the door and steps to the side, kneeling below the closest window. With a flick of her fingers she turns on the flashlight and sweeps the room before her.
It is large, with wooden floors that run to walls covered by garish, green paper that peels and hangs like dry skin. There is a strange, long chair in the center of the room, its hide dark brown with tufts of white poking from a dozen hol
es. A huge desk stands in the farthest corner, a chair toppled and broken to pieces before it. A stone alcove, pitted with ancient soot, is centered on the right wall and a set of stairs extends up to a darkened hallway above.
Zoey stands and hurries to the closest doorway. Inside is an empty kitchen, long counters covered with black dots and dust. A mane of green mold adorns the far wall and extends nearly to the floor. She turns and moves through the first larger room, finding an empty bedroom with cracked windows on its other end as well as a bathroom with a pedestal sink and a huge tub made of white stone, its inside obscured by a torn plastic curtain.
The upstairs holds a strange, wild smell that reminds her a bit of Zipper. One wall is buckled, the wooden structure beneath bared like bones in a wound. There is a scatter of insulation trailed across the floor and a rounded nest of papers and cloth in one corner. She picks up the cloth, which turns out to be a stained, long-sleeved shirt. She puts it on, noting it’s slightly too large for her but happy to have it nonetheless.
Zoey stands in the quiet of the empty room, listening to the flow of wind through broken windows. It seems to have its own voice out here, not like the breeze that blew over the top of the ARC.
She shivers and finally slings the rifle over her shoulder. There is no one here. Not that she truly expected anyone. The plague did its work and moved on like all things. She is cold, but the hunger in her stomach is somewhat quelled from all the water. She feels sleep tugging at her again from the miles she covered to get here. She gives the room a last look in the dying light and makes her way back down the stairs, pausing only a second at the door before going outside.
The barn is well built, with heavy timbers that have weathered time with ease. The double doors are open, one of them battered and nearly broken from its hinges. Inside is cavernous night, a musty scent drifting from within.
Zoey approaches the opening and shines her light inside. There are wooden partitions that section the barn off into quarters with an alley that bisects them. Cobwebs churn against the ceiling, and broken chaff of some sort litters the concrete floor. The back of the barn has another set of doors that are slightly open. All is still.
She makes her way inside, sweeping the light around the space just to be sure nothing hides within the shadows. At the rear of the structure she finds moldy straws of some type of grass, their lengths scattered in piles that have turned the color of the stormy sky.
Zoey sits in the largest pile and pulls the heady-smelling grass up over her. The rain drums on the roof, splashes in puddles outside the doors. She clutches the rifle close, turning off its light, and darkness rushes in to embrace her. She closes her eyes to her first day of freedom and is asleep in seconds.
19
Blades of sunlight force their way beneath her eyelids and she groans, turning her head to the side.
She is warm and comfortable, and there is nothing else she would like to do but lie there, affirmed by the knowledge that if she moves it will hurt.
A faint popping floats through the open doors, and it takes less than a second for her to leap to her feet, eyes wide, fully awake.
The helicopter is coming.
She scrambles to the front doors on legs made of wood, hobbling so badly she almost stumbles. The world outside is bathed in golden light, the storm long since departed to the east. Everything shines with moisture, and a vaporous fog rises from the ground in hazy tendrils. The rotors continue cutting the air, louder than before. Zoey grips the rifle so tight her knuckles crack.
Where? Where is it? How close?
She strains her eyes against the blinding light, frantically searching. She has to know which way to run. The copter is closer, she can feel its beat in her ears like a second heart.
It emerges from behind the farthest hill she can make out, its shape detaching from the land to steadily grow. She waits two seconds, confirming its direction.
It’s coming straight for the farm.
Zoey runs.
She scrambles to the rear doorway and explodes through it into the morning light. Legs pumping, hands clutching the rifle, the sound of the copter mounting between each hurried breath.
The land dips hard behind the barn, and she nearly loses her footing as her momentum takes her faster and faster. There is a dotting of pines and sage to her left. Not enough cover for her to hide. Ahead the ground falls away harder, the land becoming more and more rocky. She risks a glance over her shoulder, but the barn is almost out of sight, the chopper hidden behind it.
When she looks forward again, the ground has disappeared.
Zoey releases a small cry of terror and jams her feet to a stop. The rocky outcropping ahead ends at a razored edge that leads into open air. Beyond is the twist of a narrow river far below.
She slides over the brink, falling hard to her side, feet flying into nothing.
She drops the rifle, her hands scramble, slide on stone, slip free, catch again.
Zoey jerks to a stop and flops against the side of the stone wall she hangs from. Her feet pedal but find no purchase. She squints through tears that turn the sunlight into a thousand bleeding prisms. She pulls, trying to hoist herself up, but the strength is gone from her arms. Slowly it leaches from her hands as well.
The skin of her palms tears.
She utters a hoarse cry as her fingers rip free of the rock and she falls.
Her feet land a foot down, jarring her to a stop.
The arrestment from her fall is so sudden and unexpected she can’t breathe.
Eyes bulging, she turns around. She stands on a narrow outcropping of rock. Below the drop is at least sixty feet, straight down with no hand- or footholds. To her right the outcropping widens and descends in a ramp-like fashion to a silt washout that ends just before the riverbank.
Zoey glances up and sees the rifle sling hanging over the edge. She leaps and snatches the loop, yanking the weapon down to her. The helicopter’s thrum is slower.
They’re landing.
She sidles close to the cliff wall, her shoulder blades rubbing against the rough rock, until she can walk comfortably. As soon as she’s able, she runs. She jogs down the path and descends to the washout of loose rock and sand. Her feet sink in the softness of it and she slogs on, falling twice before making it to clearer ground.
How long until they check the house? A minute? Two? Will they see her footprints from her inspection the day before? She’s nearly sure of it.
Zoey runs between the flowing water and the sheer cliff face, the land chunky with broken rock. The unstable footing tries to turn her ankle twice but she remains upright, skipping along as fast as she can while the sound of the copter slowly lessens to nothing until she can only hear the rush of the river.
She stops beneath the shade of a lone pine tree after what feels like a lifetime of running. The sun has risen high enough to shine into the river valley and its warmth is now uncomfortable. Zoey sits on a wide, flat boulder below the tree’s heavy branches and lets her heart come back to a normal pace. She’s thirsty again and makes her way to the river’s edge to drink. The water is a pale greenish-blue in the light of the sun, a color she’s never seen before. She lets herself marvel at its beauty for a moment before stooping to drink. The river tastes clean with a slightly chalky undertone. When she’s finished she returns to the tree and sits once more, gazing back the way she came.
“Maybe they didn’t see the footprints,” she says aloud. Her voice is coming back to normal, but she can still feel Carter’s hands there, squeezing the life from her. She grunts, placing her fingers beneath her chin, traces the tender flesh. “Never again,” she murmurs. Her eyes unfocus and she stares through the opposite valley wall, not seeing anything that surrounds her.
After another five minutes of rest, she hauls herself to her feet, wincing at the pain in her stomach as she straightens. When she checks the wound beneath her shirt, her mouth goes dry.
It is bleeding again, but that isn’t what concerns her. The
edges of the gash are an inflamed red and a milky coating rims the borders of dried blood. When she places her palm over the wound it is hot, much warmer than the flesh surrounding it.
Zoey blinks, swallowing the knot in her throat. She considers washing the cut in the river, but thinks better of it and simply covers it again. The sun ripples across the water, blinding and harsh.
She continues on throughout the morning, climbing over ragged boulders and the odd trunk of a decaying tree that has washed up on the bank. Several times she has to wade into the river to circumvent a cliff face that is so sheer it actually curves out as it rises. The wound gains a heartbeat of its own, throbbing in time to each step she takes, but the pain is nothing compared to the hunger that gnaws at her stomach like a starving animal. More water does almost nothing to stop the pangs that fill her. She begins to imagine the food being served now in the cafeteria. All disgust she harbored for the mostly tasteless meals is gone. It is replaced by the certainty that she would shove handfuls of the food into her mouth if set before her now. She wouldn’t even bother with utensils.
She is so engrossed by the fantasy of consuming a buttery pile of potatoes, she doesn’t hear the rotors until the chopper appears over the rim of the canyon.
It erupts into sight a hundred yards ahead, its black form like the carapace of some flying beetle. Zoey reacts immediately, collapsing to her left behind a slanted piece of rock twice her height. She squeezes into the angle created by the boulder and the valley wall, pressing her shoulder into its uneven hardness.
Did they see her? Oh God, did they? Are they making a turn right now? Maybe priming some type of tranquilizer to shoot her with? She risks a glance around the side of the rock and sees the copter disappear over the opposite ridge of stone that rises a hundred feet into the sky.