“Remove your hat.”
The girl hesitated. Then, in a single motion, snatched it from her head and pulled the elastic mask down from her nose to expose the bottom half of her face. Dark brown braids hung on each side of her face. Red rubber bands held them in place. Her skin was dark. She was Hispanic or something.
My initial reaction was that she might have been less than fourteen. Not older. My secondary reaction was that baby rattlesnakes kill. The thought came unbidden to mind—and I decided to ignore it for the moment. The stinging snow fell harder and a glance behind showed our tracks were already filled in, so others wouldn’t follow them. “Stand up and walk. We’re almost to my cave.”
“Cave?”
“Just do it. We can talk where it’s warm.”
The mention of the cave as a shelter apparently convinced her to move. The stinging snow and cold penetrated right through my winter clothing and I assumed did the same to her. She pulled on the fur hat again and stood. Ten minutes later, we arrived at the base of a granite cliff where an abundance of shrubs flourished, mostly small pine trees only a few feet tall, and many of them carefully planted there by me within the last few days. I’d also dragged brambles and spread them at the base. They concealed the entrance to a mining tunnel dug into the solid stone cliff a hundred or more years ago.
Inside, the tunnel twisted and turned, probably the result of miners following a vein of gold. The floor rose in elevation slightly as we moved, and water trickled down a track in the center. When I’d first built a fire, the smoke drifted deeper inside the tunnel, indicating a vent or another way inside. A search of the hillside above for two days hadn’t located it. I was scared to enter the tunnel further for fear of getting lost or falling down a shaft.
A pool of light from my small LED flashlight showed the way. As we moved, I either avoided or reset my traps and alarms as we passed by. Nobody was going to enter without me hearing rattling tin cans, the fall of rocks that had been precariously balanced, or one of two shotgun blasts when the thin tripwires pulled the triggers.
Video games had inspired most of my static defenses. I’d played them for probably ten years, even more so in the last few. When Dad and Mom died three years earlier, I was their only child and the house became mine along with the payouts from their insurance policies. The drunk driver of the other vehicle also had a good policy and it had paid me six figures for his drunken actions. That was the worth of my parents. Half the sum for each. With the house paid for, and if I was frugal, no need to work, I chose not to and rarely even went upstairs. The basement was my refuge.
We rounded another corner in the tunnel and came to where two shafts joined the main tunnel, creating a tiny room. I had a small firepit, a camp stove with extra fuel, a canvas tarp to sleep on and keep me dry from the persistent moisture seeping up from the ground, and about twenty cans of food. Soup, stew, pears, and even a single can of hated beets waited for my selection. The beets would be eaten just before I starved. All of the food had been raided from a cabin not far away.
I’d managed to bring two bags of Fritos, a few fruit and nut bars, three candy bars, and a case of lemon-flavored water. That inventory tells it all when looking back at how prepared I was. All that stuff would barely last a week.
The girl stood quietly and made a mental inventory as she looked around. I watched her approving eyes move from item to item and a slight smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. She liked what she saw. My chest swelled with pride.
“My name is Sue. Well, Susannah, officially. Teachers call me Susan, but I like Sue better.”
The statement held a wealth of information. At fourteen, she wanted to be taken as older, like all girls that age. The mention of teachers was something an older woman who was trying to lie to me wouldn’t have mentioned. I believed her given age was correct. “I’m William officially, Will, to some, but I prefer Bill.”
She giggled at my mocking of her introduction and I found myself smiling for the first time in many days.
I said, “Make yourself comfortable. We can warm a can of soup and you can tell me your story.”
She nodded, reached for a can with only a cursory glance at the label, and at the hunting knife I used to open cans. After I nodded, she drove the knife down, hit it with the heel of her palm, and worked the blade back and forth until she had an inch-wide jagged hole. She poured the gloppy soup into my only pot and went to work figuring out how to light my camp stove while I built a fire.
I gave her a few instructions and she eagerly watched the chicken-noodle soup with the small bubbles of delicious fat floating on the top. She turned to me. “Bill?”
“Yes.”
“You left my rifle back there in the snow. Why? Are you friggin crazy?”
“Where did you get it?” I asked.
“A dead soldier had it. I didn’t kill him, before you ask.”
That still didn’t sound good. Cautiously, I asked, “Flu? You went near a body that died of the flu?”
“I’m not so ignorant to go around any blight-dead and take a chance to catch it from them. He was already shot. There were others, too. Soldiers, I mean. I grabbed the rifle and ran. Then you went and left it in the snow, a perfectly good military rifle full of bullets. We could go back and get it before it rusts.”
Holding up my hand for her to slow down, I explained. “The shells in it were as big around and as long as my little finger. A single shot from it would echo around these mountains and travel miles in all directions. Anyone alive in these mountains would know a person is here and follow the sound back here to take your rifle and whatever else you have away after killing you.”
“What about your gun? Won’t the same thing happen?” Her eyes drifted to my hip.
I ejected the clip from the pistol and showed her the smaller shells, about the diameter of a pencil and a little over an inch long.
She shrugged and said, “That will do the same thing. Make too much noise, I mean.”
Smart girl. I said, “It will make half the noise. Probably a lot less.”
“That’s what the white plastic pipe taped on the end of the barrel is for, right?”
“Without the silencer, it will make half the noise of your rifle. With it, less. This,” I pointed at the PVC tube, “is something I made. I drilled holes all around and filled the whole thing with cotton balls to absorb the sound. The Internet told me how.”
“Will it work?” she asked with a skeptical frown.
“I don’t know. I think so. The sound will be muffled by the cotton balls and at least some of the sound will be deflected out the side-holes, so the overall result is less. At least, that’s my reasoning. If that doesn’t work, the shell is still so much smaller than one from your rifle, the sound won’t carry as far.”
“Keeping our presence unknown. I like your plan.” Sue removed the pot from the fire and looked around, puzzled. “Bowls?”
I sighed. I hadn’t missed her inclusion as she referred to our presence. “One spoon. Eat from the pot and leave me half.”
She reached for the spoon. It was a simple test of trust to let her eat first. Cans of soup filled the small pot to the second mark on the inside. When she had slurped her last, she handed me the pot. It was filled slightly above the first line, meaning she had eaten less than half. A good sign.
Still, it was my soup, pot, camp stove, and spoon. And I was larger and required more calories. I finished the soup without remorse or regret at taking the larger portion. She sat and waited.
“How long since you’ve eaten?” I asked.
“Two days.”
“Want more?”
“Yes. But, is that smart to eat more now?” She glanced meaningfully at the small pile of cans set to one side. “When will we have the opportunity to find more?”