by Eric Wood
"It's okay, Sam, I know what you mean. I may not have grown up in a Colony, but wild game isn't exactly my normal fare, either. You don't need to worry about offending me."
At least he had stopped saving the blood. As awkward as things were now, they had been so, so much worse in the first few days after they had blown up Deacon's base. The queasy mix of contempt, uncertainty, and fear that had been a constant presence on Sam's face had caused her no end of sadness. So many emotions with which she was totally unfamiliar. Abigail had never felt particularly great about herself and her place in the world, but she had never felt worse than when she saw herself through Sam's eyes in the days since he had learned she was a Reaper. And she had never felt better than when she saw herself through his eyes in the days just before. She hated that he had that power over her. She had the sudden urge to punch him square in the nose. It was an urge she was rapidly becoming used to, and despite herself, it brought a small smile to her lips.
"What is it?" Sam asked. The edge had left his voice, which was a nice change of pace from the past few days.
Probably best not to tell the truth now, she thought. "I was just imagining what your meals back at your Colony must have been like." Excellent save. "It all must be vacuum sealed, triple-disinfected, de-moisturized, re-moisturized, un-vacuum-sealed, disinfected again, then inspected by five different guys in glasses and lab coats. I'm surprised your delicate Colony stomach can handle any food from the real world, much less wild squirrel cooked over a campfire."
Sam stared at her across the fire in silence, his expression unreadable. Too far? She wondered. Screw it, he can either take it or he can't. Dancing around the Colony boy's precious feelings was getting very, very old, and she was done with it. If he wanted to be mad, he could be mad. I'm not going to be anyone other than me. Not anymore.
Sam burst out laughing.
"Please tell me that's what you really think meals in the Colony are like," he said. "It's not like we're from another planet." He affected a strange, high-pitched and nasally voice, "'Your unfamiliar earthling organic matter is strange and novel, but we hope to someday be able to consume it unaided as we adjust to your planet.'" He began to laugh again. In his normal voice, he added, "We eat the same food as everyone else, Abigail." He stopped laughing, but his smile remained, and he met her eyes. "We eat the same food as you do. Normal food, just like you. We're all just people."
Abigail smiled, and for the first time in what had come to feel like forever, she relaxed.
Sam took down the now-cooked squirrel and divided the meat between them. As they ate, they talked, and laughed, and Abigail felt the pangs of what she now understood to be happiness, along with the excitement and anxiety she had come to associate with her interactions with Sam. They talked about their tactics: they needed to quicken their pace. The sooner they caught the Ravager and recovered the data drive, the less likely something unforeseen and bad would befall them. They talked about the ground they had covered: Sam had never seen real mountains before, and he was still astonished by the snow-capped peaks that hung like frozen clouds along the western horizon. Abigail had seen the Rockies before, but she had never set foot on them. In fact, even here was further west than she had traveled before. The relatively unsettled lands of the central plains were safer and more lucrative for people like her than were the larger settlements to the west or the irradiated land to the east.
They even talked about the battle at Deacon's camp. Now that the recently formed ice that formed between them was broken, Sam went on and on about how astonishing her idea to drop the herd of cattle on the Ravagers had been, and how she had fallen out of the sky like some sort of comic book hero. Abigail felt the warm rush of blood to her cheeks, and she was glad that the red-orange glow of the fire masked her blush. For her part, she was just relieved they had both survived.
"So we catch the Ravager, put it down, and we have the drive. What do we do then?" The words had left her lips before she thought them through. She didn't want to know the answer, because she knew in her heart what it would be. Sam would take the drive and return to his home. To his Colony, the one place that she couldn't, under any circumstance, follow.
Even a relatively unskilled Reaper could pass among the Uninfected in the Wilds with little effort. Reapers weren't like the over-muscled and slavering Ravagers, nor were they fur-covered and bestial like the Howlers. They certainly weren't mindless vomiting zombies like the hordes of Plague-Heads. They looked, for lack of a better word, human. Furthermore, they were so rare that most of the Uninfected thought of them as a myth. A story to scare their children with. As long as she didn't go around advertising the fact — or receive an injury severe enough to warrant consuming bone marrow — she could live her whole life among the Uninfected without a single one of them so much as raising an eyebrow.
Of course, that was only true outside of the Old World Survivor's Colonies. Each and every Colony's front gates contained the best biometric sensors that Old World wealth could buy, and those sensors could clock her as a Reaper as easily as if she was carrying a neon sign identifying herself as such. Even if Sam could argue her case with the Colony leaders — which he certainly could not — he couldn't argue with their automated machine cannons. No, once they recovered the drive, her time with Sam would rapidly come to an end.
Sam poked at the fire with a stripped tree branch, seemingly considering her question without a good answer. It didn't surprise her; she always knew their time was limited. No matter how well he pretended to ignore it, the fact remained that she was a Reaper, and he was not.
"I've never been much for plans," Sam began. Here it comes, she thought. Some weak excuse to take the place of the truth we both know. "But I think that —"
The sound of the shots pulled her head to the right before her mind consciously registered them.
Two quick cracks, followed by the sustained rolls of multiple automatic weapons in the distance to the west. Sam doused the fire, and they were plunged into darkness. It took only a single heartbeat for her eyes to adjust, and then she could see the near-imperceptible blooms of light. Muzzle flashes, to the west, up among the hills not more than a few hundred yards distant. She was certain Sam still saw nothing but black.
Sam set down the remains of his meal. "Well, sounds like it's time to move," he said.
It was. She had only one path to follow, and that was forward. Wherever it might lead.
6
As evening became night in the forest, Roach began to fall into a rhythm. She would make her way forward ten steps, then find the nearest bit of cover, crouch down, and listen for threats. The sounds of the forest at night — insects buzzing, frogs croaking, wind rustling leaves and the occasional hoot of at least two distinct owls in the area — filled her ears, but she was growing increasingly certain there was something larger out there. She considered stopping, digging out a makeshift bit of shelter and waiting till dawn to continue west. It was an appealing thought, but just as she had the last few times the idea popped into her head, she dismissed it.
She had to think about things rationally. If — and it was still very much an if, she reminded herself — if there was something out there that meant her harm, stopping would do little to help her. If it was Uninfected — hunters or bandits or the like — daylight would only help them catch her that much faster. If it were something else, they would smell her far easier than they would see her, and if she stopped to hide it would only bring them down on her that much quicker. And, there was still that fire she had spotted up on the ridge behind her. Whoever had been up there had battened it down nice and tight, no smoke and barely a sliver of light, but Roach had seen it nonetheless. She couldn't be certain it was Sam and the Reaper, but she could certainly assume, and that limited her options.
No, she thought, the rational thing to do is to keep moving, keep going until I'm through this damned forest and out the other side. She shook her head in disgust. The rational thing? When did I start choosi
ng the rational course of action? Deacon, her mother, all the rest: they definitely wouldn't recognize her anymore.
So, then, ten quick steps forward. She dashed from one tree to the next, picking out and avoiding debris and uneven ground as she counted her steps, picking out her next stopping point at the same time. Eight, nine, ten, and she was at the next tree. She crouched back down, leaning a shoulder against its thick, craggy trunk. She held her breath and listened. Nothing larger than a field mouse in the immediate area; she could hear its tiny feet scurrying over a bed of crinkly leaves ahead and two the right. She turned her head toward the noise and spotted the little thing, its body a black silhouette against the gray background of the leaves.
Could I always see this well? she wondered. Could she always hear this well? The fire, maybe anyone could have picked that out, despite its distance and the precautions its maker had taken to hide it. The ridge had been fairly high up, and it had still been early twilight at the time. But right now, it was a cloudy, moonless night, and for all that she could tell there were exactly zero sources of light anywhere near her. And yet, she could make out the woods well enough to easily make her way forward, even discern details like the field mouse and the deadfall on the ground around her. Had the injection done that to her as well? She looked down at her hands in confused wonder.
Has that serum made me into a Reaper?
She immediately dismissed the thought as ridiculous. She remembered all too clearly the last Reaper she had seen. The girl, dropping out of the sky amidst the rain of cattle, falling a hundred feet like it was nothing. She remembered the Reaper jumping off the stack of cars, sailing over Roach's head like she could fly, and landing blade-first on Deacon, taking him down like he was made of wet paper. Deacon, who Roach had watched lift the side of a school bus off the ground with one hand. Did she somehow think she could now do things like that?
She put a hand flat on the tree next to her, trying to believe. She pushed, as hard as she could. The tree remained standing, unmoved and unimpressed.
Roach knew what the other possibility was, and it was nowhere near as fun as the prospect of Reaper-hood. Deacon had told her, before her first raid, that one of the few advantages that the sheep-men — the Uninfected — had over them was that their senses were better. Ravagers might be stronger, tougher, and wilder, but the sheep-men could see better than she could hope to, as well as hear better and all the rest. Deacon had said the sheep-men needed those sharp senses, as they were natural prey. It had made perfect sense at the time, but she couldn't have said she thought much of that detail between then and now. Now, of course, she had trouble thinking of anything else. It was her worst fear, after all.
She was becoming a sheep-man.
Roach was rousted from her dark thoughts by the crack of wood breaking. Certainly larger than a field mouse, she thought. Her head snapped around, toward the direction of the sound, but she saw only darkness among the trees. She heard nothing, other than the pounding of her heartbeat between her ears.
Then, another crack.
It may as well have been a gunshot, her nerves were wound so tightly. This one was definitely closer.
Roach ran.
There were no thoughts of ten-step dashes this time. All of her instincts screamed that she was being hunted, and that her only hope was to move. Trees whooshed by as she sprinted forward. Branches cut at her shoulders and arms, slapped her in the face. She didn't care. She hopped over a fallen log, threw herself sideways to avoid a leaning oak, and ducked under a tree limb too large to push aside. All the while, she could hear them following, one on either side, shrouded by darkness, unrelenting in their pursuit.
She slipped on a patch of slick leaves, and one leg shot out to the side, twisting her knee and setting off a fresh wave of nausea. She spun around, recovered her footing and kept moving forward until the ground dropped out from underneath her.
In her distraction, she'd missed the hill in front of her. As she hit the slope, she pitched forward and over, landing hard on her back and sliding down among loose, dirty fallen leaves. She tried to use her momentum to launch herself back to her feet, but she over-adjusted and rolled forward again. Each impact set off fresh explosions of stars in her vision. Her elbow jammed against a squat, jagged tree trunk a moment later, setting her whole arm numb. Finally, she came to a stop at the hill's bottom, flat on her back, with her head still spinning and her entire body awash in pain.
She heard twin snaps and sizzles ahead of her, and a half-heartbeat later the whole forest lit up with blinding white light. Roach sat up and reached for the pistol on her hip, which of course was not there. It must have come loose somewhere during the fall, she realized. Just my luck.
Not that it would have mattered. Sitting up, Roach saw that she was face-to-face with four heavily armed, heavily armored men. Their identical outfits were black, head to toe, and they each wore a billed cap with matching white logos on their fronts. Each stared at her expressionlessly, and each carried a shiny black assault rifle. If she had pulled her weapon, she would likely already be dead.
Though that looks to be coming soon enough now.
"Put your hands behind your head and interlace your fingers," one of them barked, unmoving. It felt to Roach like being ordered about by a particularly gruff and humorless statue.
"Get slowly to your feet, turn around, and walk backward toward us," another one said. "Consider yourself now under the custody of Lawbringer Roosevelt."
There was no point in telling them she had no idea who they were talking about. They had the guns, and she did not. But they are ahead of me, she thought.
If they are ahead of me, then who was behind me? These Uninfected might be pros, but they were still Uninfected. They’d been here, ahead of her, the whole time. But something had been following her through the woods, something fast, and something that could obviously see well enough to move through the pitch black of the forest night at a full sprint. Only one thing on two feet could manage that, and they were still out there. Still close, no doubt.
But where?
That was when she saw the eyes. A single set of yellow, almost-glowing irises, just beyond the edge of the clearing behind the gunmen. Then two more eyes appeared, further over. And then two more...
Roach didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. Both she and the gunmen were surrounded.
Surrounded by Howlers.
7
Roach looked from one soldier to the next. There were five in total, all men, ranging from a pup with a wispy blond beard to an old graybeard who would have already been put down if he had been a Ravager. All five were certainly outfitted as soldiers, but as she took in one face after another, she became increasingly certain that they were little more than a collection of thugs with some fancy equipment and some rich chief's mark adorning their heads. Not that there was anything wrong with that — up until about a week ago she had been among the top thugs within a thousand miles. It was how she could make them so quickly: when you live your whole life among those whose greatest pleasures are robbery, destruction, and general mayhem, you get real familiar with the look. It was a mix of contempt and excitement, around the corners of the eyes and the edges of the mouth. A twinkle and sneer, if you will. These men had it; the question was how she could use it to her advantage.
"Put your hands behind your head and interlace your fingers," the middle thug repeated. "This is your last warning."
He must be the leader. That's the first one to kill, Roach thought. Though the how part of that plan was still a little fuzzy. The five soldier-thugs were arranged in a line about ten yards in front of her. Even if she were her old self, and not the sore, sick mess she had become, she wouldn't be able to cross that distance before all five of them blasted her to hell. And those damned Howlers were just standing there, behind the soldiers, no more than a few inches past the clearing's edge, watching silently with those creepy yellow eyes. Roach briefly considered trying to warn the soldiers — it might gi
ve her some sort of opening — but she couldn't bring herself to say or do anything that might help this scum. I guess I haven't lost all of my spite just yet, she thought.
She slowly raised her open hands and moved them behind her head. Every fiber of her being begged to grab the blade from her belt and hurl it at the leader's head, and just damn the consequences. A week ago, she would have done just that. Now she decided she would bide her time and wait for her opportunity. She scoffed silently at the sheer passivity of it. What is happening to me?
The youngest one, Whispy, was standing on the far left. Roach had noticed, even in the low light, that he had slowly been losing color in his face the longer he stared at her. As she lowered herself to her knees, she watched his eyes finally go wide, and his mouth drop open. She was quite familiar with that look. She groaned. Things were about to get much worse for her.
"Captain!" Whispy shouted, drawing four sets of eyes to him. "That's not a smuggler, that's a goddamn Ravager."
"What are you..." the leader began, all but ready to dismiss his young subordinate before he narrowed his eyes and inspected Roach a bit more closely. He swore under his breath and his whole body tensed. He cocked his rifle, and the rest of the soldiers followed a heartbeat later. All five of those rifles had been pointed at her from the start of this little confrontation, but now the soldiers holding them seemed to really mean it. At least I still look the part, Roach thought with a sigh.
"We need to kill it, Captain," the soldier on the far right said, his voice uneven. "Now."
"The Commander will want to see it himself," the old soldier answered. "We need to bring it in alive, or Roosevelt will have all our hides."
"Quiet, all of you," the captain said. To Roach, he added: "Down on your stomach, now. You move, Ravager, you die."
It seemed useless to point out to him that she wasn't really a Ravager any longer. Not technically, at least. I don't think he's in the right frame of mind to debate fine details.