But she’d never seen one this big. Not up close.
The four big engines lay half-buried in the sand, torn away by the impact. Behind the jet was a deep trench cut like a rough scar into the landscape and all the way across the blacktop. The jet had spent a long time grinding to a halt, and now it lay still and silent, its engines cold, the windows shattered and filled with shadows.
The jet presented a tricky choice. There could be bottled water, cans of soft drinks, plastic bags of stuff like nuts and crackers. Things that had enough preservatives in them to last. Not good food, but a far mile down the road from no food.
The doors were shut, and the windows were too small to climb through, and it would take some doing to climb up onto the nose of the craft and enter that way. On the up side, it didn’t look like anyone else had been inside the jet, which was odd because it was right there, big as anything. On the downside, if the doors were all closed, then what had happened to the people on board? Had they managed to climb out? If so, how?
If not… were they still there?
A jet this size had to have carried a lot of people.
All of them could be dead.
And waiting.
“No,” she said. Her voice sounded as dry as the desert wind.
She stared up longingly at the plane.
If it was empty, then it was high and safe, and out of the wind. It could answer all of her needs. It could be a kind of home.
The wind whipped past her, lashing her cheeks with coarse sand. It stung her scalp. She closed her eyes for a moment, wrestling with herself about this choice.
There was the choice she wanted to believe in, and there was the sensible choice.
You’d have to be dumber than a coal bucket to go up yonder.
“No,” she said again.
With a reluctance so great that it felt like grief, the girl turned away from the jet, dragging her eyes from those smashed-out cockpit windows, turning her whole body with an effort of will. She walked slowly around the jet, studying it from every side, marveling that such a massive thing ever could have flown.
She looked into the desert that ran alongside the road. Far, far in the distance she saw some shapes moving. People. At least a dozen of them, maybe more. She faded into the shadows of the plane and watched them, squinting to try and decide what she was seeing. Were they the gray people? Sometimes they moved in bunches, a small mass of them triggered into movement by passing prey.
There was a flash of sunlight on metal.
No.
Not the dead.
Reapers.
She cupped her hands around her eyes and studied the group, counting the shapes, counting the flashes of sunlight on sharpened steel.
Twenty of them? Twenty-one.
Too many.
There was one shape that walked in front of the others, and it was his weapon that most often caught the sunlight. Even though she was too far away to see him clearly, she thought she knew who this was. Brother Andrew. One of the most senior of the reapers. A bull of a man who carried a two-handed scythe.
“No,” she murmured. “Go away.”
In time, they did. But they were heading in the same direction she was, northwest, their course paralleling the road. They were miles away, though, following a secondary road. Perhaps they thought she was on that road, that she would take the road less traveled in hopes of eluding pursuit.
The girl crouched in the shadows until Brother Andrew’s party was gone, reduced first to tiny dots and then entirely lost to distance and heat shimmer.
Then she stood and stretched her muscles, trying to ignore the ache in her belly. The girl took a steadying breath and began to walk. She cast a single look over her shoulder, and what she saw made her pause within a few steps.
A turkey buzzard sat on the jet’s broken wing. Its dark wings were threadbare and in disarray, its wattled red throat was thin, and its eyes looked totally dead. For a horrible moment the girl thought that the vulture was dead, that it had somehow caught the plague that had cut like a reaper’s scythe through all of humanity. But then it made a small, plaintive caw.
It wasn’t dead. It was starving.
Like her.
The thought absolutely chilled her and nearly took the heart out of her. If something like this carrion bird — a creature that would eat anything it found — was starving out here, then what hope was there for her?
She turned away from the sight of it.
“No,” she said one more time. She tried to say it with anger, with determination, with purpose.
It sounded like a cry.
The girl hurried away, pushed by fear, pulled by hunger.
7
That night she slept in the back bay of a wrecked Ford Explorer. She had to pull bones out of the front seats. Driver and passenger had bullet holes in their skulls. Someone who knew his business had sent them into the darkness. As she pulled them onto the road — a man in a suit, a woman in the sun-faded rags of a flower-patterned dress — the girl said a little prayer for them. She hoped they had been good people. She hoped they hadn’t suffered much.
Before she climbed into the car to sleep, she walked out among the rough desert brush to see about setting some simple snares. If she did it right, and if she had any luck, maybe she could catch a chipmunk, a gecko, an antelope squirrel, or even a weasel.
She’d eaten worse.
Recently.
The memory of the lizard and the turtle made her stomach churn.
Stop your grousing… You’ll eat what you catch, or you’ll starve and die.
She walked around the area for a while until she found a small game run that showed use by several species. The prints were not as distinct as they would have been on a game trail, but she was experienced enough to determine that the prints were recent. She followed the run until it intersected another, equally as small. The runs led toward the open desert, and in the faded twilight she could see a thick stand of Joshua trees. There must be water down there. Not a lot, or there would be heavier game sign, but enough for these runs to become well traveled by small animals.
The girl backtracked a hundred feet and washed her hands with sand to remove any trace of her skin oils. Only then did she pick up the materials she would use to make the traps. Humans were predators, and their scents scared off most animals.
She dug a pit and carried the fresh dirt out into the desert. Fresh dirt — or any sign of disturbance — warned prey away. When she gathered sticks, she used only those that had fallen and dried out. Freshly cut sticks bled sap, and that carried a smell that warned prey of a disturbance. The girl made sure that she did nothing that would alarm the animals.
One good way to remove human scent was to coat the trap with mud from an area with plenty of rotting vegetation, but in the desert, in the failing light, she did not have the time to find it. She used the last of the light to rig a whip snare that would lash out and kill her prey. It would only work on something small, but it was all she could manage.
She built three traps before the light and her strength failed.
Then she erased all signs of her presence, hoping that she did it so well that in the morning there would be something to eat.
She had a few slivers of hope left. Enough for tonight.
Then she rigged a few pieces of plastic that she carried with her, stretching them off the ground on sticks, setting them where the shade would be in the morning. With luck, condensation would give her at least a mouthful of dew.
As the sun set, the desert turned from a furnace to a freezer. Sand does not hold heat for long, and soon the girl was shivering. Last week she had owned a bedroll and a blanket, but they had become infested with fire ants, and while she was trying to smoke the pests out of the cloth, a sudden wind sent sparks flying into the material. She had been seventy yards away, washing her other clothes in a thin steam. By the time she ran back and stamped out the fire, her bedding was ruined.