And so she waited.
The pack snarled and skinned their lips back from long yellow fangs. She fancied she could smell the foul odour of their breath, and even in the darkness there was light enough from the moon and stars that their eyes shone like silver dollars laid on the orbs of a dead man. She knew the attack was moments away when two of the animals moved, attempting to flank her on both sides. Ears pinned back, they lowered themselves onto their haunches, where massive knots of muscle and meat quivered and twitched with anticipation of the kill. The sound of their growling slowed, like a powerful engine winding down.
Sophia took a long, deep breath.
The pack leader lunged forward ripping out a fusillade of barks, snapping its jaw like a threshing machine, as its pack-mates launched themselves in from the side. They came flying at the girl as though hurled from catapults. But she had already moved, leaping towards the dog to her left as she swung the machete in a vicious blur of sharpened steel that connected with the animal just below its ear. The sickening crunch of blade on bone and gristle was simultaneous with the horrified, outraged howl of the beast and the crack of the pack leader’s skull as it impacted the brick wall where she’d been standing. A fraction of a second later, and she heard the dull thud of the third animal colliding with the top dog as she used the momentum of her first strike to draw the blade down and out while she pivoted around for an upward stroke that sliced off the snout of the nearest dog, halfway along its jawline.
The attack collapsed in a hideous discord of animal shrieks and yelps. She was drenched in hot blood and urine; the dogs’ and her own. But the threat had dissolved in a heartbeat as those that could flee did so. The beast she had all but decapitated spasmed at her feet. She brought one booted foot down on its head in a hammer kick, telling herself she was putting the mutt out of its misery as her father had always taught her. But knowing that, in a darker place, she was punishing the thing for having attacked her, taking vengeance out on a dangerous but defeated enemy.
And then it really was over.
The protests of the vanquished pack drifted further away until she could hear them no more. Adrenaline backwashed through her nervous system, bringing with it nausea and tremors. She had to lean up against the wall and take a minute to breathe deeply and slowly. For the first time since Sofia had realised she was being hunted, she heard the twittering song of night-birds again. She listened hard for any sound of footfall or human voices. But heard nothing. The short, savage caterwauling din of a dogfight was not unusual in Temple, as she had learned.
Time to move.
The grocery market lay next to a railway line that ran through the eastern side of town. On the far side of the tracks, a wasteland of charred ruins stretched away to the horizon. A few houses stood undamaged, but the further away from the train tracks she looked, the more the scene recalled the devastation of a city beset by war. Sofia did not dwell on the reason the firestorm that had burnt so many acres of housing had died out before leaping to this side of the tracks. Fire, she had learned, was as arbitrary as a tornado, sometimes wiping out one half of a street while leaving the other half untouched. Having survived the dog pack, she did not care to spend a second longer than was necessary contemplating the ruins of Temple. She moved off, uncomfortable and a little disgusted in her blood- and piss-stained clothes.
The market had been built right up to the edge of the road surface and a large tarmac remained largely free of vegetation. A few hardy weeds poked through cracks in the concrete here and there, but unlike in so much of this ghost town, she did not have to wade through waist-high grass in which any number of dangers might lay.
The doors of the market were jammed open. They had attempted to close on a trolley on the morning of the Disappearance. No moonlight penetrated the interior. Sofia pushed the trolley out of the way, forcing it over the pile of clothes lying on the floor just behind it. After holstering her Magnum and flicking on a small flashlight, she could see the remains of the Disappeared everywhere. The authorities had not been through here to clean them up, and nor had there been any attempt at salvage. That made sense. Unlike her, the federales could rely on being properly fed and watered, and by now, Sofia knew, most of the contents of this store would be unusable. The fresh food had all rotted away or been eaten by vermin years ago, so too with most of the packaged food. But her needs were simple.
Crossing herself and murmuring a prayer for the dead, she stepped deeper into the gloom. Her senses were still amplified after the fight for her life. She could hear rats scurrying deep inside the market building, but nothing larger than that.
The first of her provisions she found in the third aisle. Five-gallon plastic bottles of water. The contents would taste foul after all this time, but water did not go off as long as the seal on the bottles remained unbroken. With no running water in the motel she’d chosen to lay up in tonight, she had no choice but to seek out potable supplies. Food was more of a challenge. On the journey to KC, they had hunted and trapped wherever possible, but occasionally they came across stores of food preserved well enough to use. Sofia knew what to look for, thanks to Trudi Jessup, who had schooled all of them in the shelf life of canned and dried groceries.
Into her backpack went half-a-dozen cans of corn, a tin of peaches, two packets of vacuum-sealed lentils and - the Lord Jesus be praised - one large canned Christmas cake. A real score. She checked the tins for dents and swelling and the packets of dried food for any sign of insect infestation. She would do a more thorough check once back in her room, but as an experienced scavenger, she was confident she’d just secured enough food and water for three days.
Once upon a time she would’ve thought nothing of walking the ten or twelve blocks back to her new hideout. A trip of maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. But returning from the market this night, she was heavily weighed down as she negotiated a treacherous passage through more streets overgrown with vegetation and blocked by wreckage and fallen trees. Advancing in short bursts of movement. Scurrying from cover to cover. Always watching and listening to avoid being discovered, Sofia took over two hours to return to the Economy Inn, a two-storey motel of brown bricks and weather-faded trim on the southern edge of Temple’s town centre. It was close enough for her to feel as though she was in some sort of contact with the federales, but far enough removed from their comings and goings that she didn’t have to remain in hiding every hour of the day.
Despite the chill of the night, she was sweating by the time she got home.
Home.
How sad that she should think of the Economy Inn as her home.
Although a young teen in years, Sofia Pieraro was experienced in the dictates of survival. She did not hurry into the motel; she remained in cover where she could observe from a safe distance. Having killed bandits who returned to their own camp sites without taking the precaution of checking for ambushes laid in their absence, she knew to wait and watch for at least an hour. Even though, in this instance, she was certain long before then that it was safe to enter, Sofia cleaved to the lessons of the past. Only when a full hour had passed with no sign of anybody lying in wait for her did she complete the last, short leg of her return trip.