She knew her own eyes were steady, and the green of them cold; more to the point, the three-bladed and very pointed head of the bolt in the groove of her cocked crossbow glittered bright and sharp in the cool spring sunshine.
Several of the strangers were literally drooling at the thought of chicken. One shook his aluminum baseball bat.
"You've got chicken, you've got horses, you've got stuff inside that funny wagon!" he shouted; his face was caked with dirt, and brown-and-gray stubble showed through it. "Nobody will give us anything!"
He mastered himself with a visible effort. "Look, just give us what you can spare. We'll… look, is there any sort of work you need done? We're not thieves. We just haven't had anything to eat for a day and a half now, and that was some crackers and olives and some soup we tried to make out of grass."
The child was hugging his mother's leg where she stood beside her bicycle; he had tear-tracks through the dust on his face.
"Hungry, Mommy," he said. "I want something to eat."
She looked at Juniper. "You don't know what it's like back there," she said. "Back in Portland. The whole city's burning, and nobody has anything, criminals are stealing and killing-Terry'll die if he doesn't get some food!"
That set them all off; they crowded closer, leaving their cycles on the kickstands or dropping them and waving their arms and shouting.
Help! Juniper thought, her head going back and forth, trying to keep everyone in view.
These weren't bad people; probably none of them had so much as hit anyone since junior high. But they were desperate.
And so am I, she thought, nerving herself. For Eilir. For Dennis. And yes, for my own sweet life which I'm not ready to give up yet, even to get out of this hell.
Then there was a sharp sound, a snapping tunnnggg of vibrating cord. Juniper's head whipped around; it was Eilir's weapon that had fired, and the Oriental woman was down on the ground screaming and writhing, clutching at a crossbow bolt through the outer part of her thigh. An arrow wobbled off from her bow and landed in the orchard not far from one of the horses, standing in the ground with the feathers up. The others' shouts turned to screams as well; Dennis took the moment to leap forward, roaring and flourishing the great ax overhead.
Eilir dropped the end of the crossbow to the ground, put her foot through the metal stirrup, and dropped the claw of the spanning device at her belt over the string. Then she hooked the other end over the butt of her weapon and whirled the crank-handle around half a dozen times. The mechanism clicked, and she put another quarrel in the groove with fumbling haste.
"Be off!" Juniper shouted at the same time, her weapon scanning back and forth.
She could shoot only one-but nobody wanted to be that one, or so she hoped from the bottom of her peaceful soul.
"Go! Now, while you can!"
They ran; not quite panicked enough to leave their bicycles, but several nearly falling in their haste as they sprang aboard them and pedaled madly westward, back towards I-5. Back towards despair and death in a ditch, most likely.
Eilir kept her crossbow to her shoulder until the last of them was out of sight. Then she dropped it and burst into clumsy racking sobs. Juniper tried to put an arm around her shoulder.
She was going to shoot you! Eilir cried in Sign; then the girl tore away and raced into the orchard, sitting down with her back against a tree and wrapping her arms around her knees, face pressed into the faded denim of her jeans.
Dennis leaned on his ax, taking deep whooping breaths for an instant. "Oh, fuck, that was too close," he said. "Oh, hell"
Something small and hard rammed Juniper in the stomach. After an instant she realized it was the child's head, and he was trying to punch her as well.
"You don't hurt my mom!" he cried; he was sobbing too, but striking out with blind determination. "You don't hurt my mom!"
"I'm not going to hurt her!" Juniper said helplessly.
She wrapped her arms around the boy in self-defense, lifting him and handing the writhing, kicking bundle to Dennis.
"Or you either; be still, for the Goddess' sake!"
The Oriental woman was silent where she lay in the roadway, wide-eyed, clutching at her injured leg. The bolt Eilir had used had a smooth target head, and the blood trickled freely but did not have the fatal spurting flow that would mean a severed artery.
"He's just a little boy," the woman said as Juniper approached. "Please, whoever you are, he's just a little boy. He didn't hurt anyone. You've got to help him."
"And I'm not going to hurt him," the musician replied.
And she's thinking of nothing but her child, with that through her flesh. Damn it!
It would be so much easier just to go away and leave them if the injured woman were a ravening bandit spitting curses, or thinking of nothing but her own hurt.
"Will you let me see to the leg?" she went on aloud. A nod replied. "Toss your knife away, then. I have a daughter depending on me, and I'm not taking any chances."
Juniper used her own dagger to slit the tight cycling shorts up around where the shaft pierced the flesh, wincing as she looked at it. Dennis came up; he had their medicine box, and readied a bandage; the boy was standing behind him, darting looks around his legs and then turning away.
Juniper took a deep breath, gripped the bolt and pulled; it came free easily, and they occupied themselves with salve and tape for a moment.
"I'm Sally Quinn," the wounded woman said when she'd stopped panting and recovered herself somewhat. "My son's Terence, Terry."
She spoke good General American, with a very faint trace of an accent, and looked to be half a decade older than Juniper, though that might be the dirt and desperation and not having eaten much the past week.
Dennis surprised his friend by breaking into another language, fast-paced and with a nasal twang; she didn't think it was Chinese, which she could at least recognize. Sally started in surprise, smiled hesitantly through her pain and replied haltingly in the same tongue. After a moment she relapsed into English:
"But my parents came over in 'seventy-five, when I was very young," she said. "I don't remember all that much."
Juniper looked at Dennis. Well, he's the right age, but he never said a word!
"You were in Vietnam?" she said curiously.
"In the rear with the gear," he said, shrugging. "Supply corporal. But I did pick up some of the language, yeah, dealing with the local economy. And we better didi mao, you bet."
She recalled vaguely from books and movies that that meant get out, and it was true. She looked down at the injured woman; her son had crept close, and now he lay in the dusty grass beside the roadway with his head pillowed on her shoulder, looking at Juniper with enormous silent eyes. He had some of his mother's fine-boned comeliness, but his hair was dark brown and the features sharper.
"Was your husband with the. others here?" Juniper asked.
There was a wedding band on Sally's left hand, she certainly hadn't been born with the surname Quinn, and she had suburban respectability stamped all over her under the layer the days since the Change had left.
"No," Sally replied; her voice was tired and flat, and her face sagged with lack of sleep and food and hope. "Peter was working late at the office at HP. that night, you know what I mean."
They both nodded. "When things Changed," Juniper said, hearing the capital in her own voice.
"He didn't come back. I couldn't go looking for him because of Terry, and it was four days. And then there was nothing left in the apartment, and nothing worked… the water, the toilets… there was fighting in the streets! And some people I knew a little said they were going to go south to where there was food; I think they wanted me to come because I had the bow, I'm in an archery club, we meet every second Saturday… "