“I wouldn’t say they’re limited,” Nora answered.
“You wouldn’t say that ’cause you’re too scared to, or because that’s not the case?” Lynn asked from the corner, where she rested in a wheelchair.
Nora turned to Lynn, irritation chasing manners from her features. “Look, I don’t know why you’ve got it in your head the whole world is made to harm. We’re good people here, and if saving your life without knowing the first thing about you isn’t proof enough, I don’t know what is.” She snapped the final clean sheet onto Lucy’s bed. Lucy could see her teeth digging into her lower lip as she worked.
“That’s great and all, but you didn’t exactly answer the question,” Lynn said, but Nora ignored her, lost in her work.
“That mountain lion was something else,” Lucy said, searching for a different subject. “We’ve got coyotes back home, but I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“They’re a menace,” Nora said through gritted teeth as she moved to Lynn’s bed. Lucy watched as a clean white sheet sailed overhead. “It began with only one or two down in the residential area. Some of the men would see them when they raided the homes.
“The smaller critters, like skunks and raccoons, came into town shortly after all the water went off. Smelled all the food rotting, I guess. Cats followed them, coyotes too. We all hoped enough human activity would keep them away from the strip, but…” Nora broke off to tuck the corner of the sheet tightly under the mattress. “We started seeing coyotes in the main roads after a bit, and the lions followed them into the city.”
Nora stood straight and surveyed the bright white of the empty beds, as clean as if Lynn and Lucy had never been there. “I’ll show you your new room,” she said.
They went up a floor, the heat rising enough for them to notice. Lucy cracked the balcony door of their new room to see black clouds piling in the distance. “Might rain,” she called to Lynn, but Nora was the one who joined her outside, the long curtains flapping in between them.
“She’s out of breath,” Nora said. “Your mother is weaker than she looks.”
“She’ll be fine.”
Nora came to the railing beside Lucy. “I know you’ve counted on her for a long time, little one. But the type of bodily injury she suffered… some people never come back from that, not fully. I don’t know that leaving would be wise. Ever.”
Lucy nodded, her eyes trained on the darkness rolling in. “I won’t let her leave, if I don’t think she’s able. And if she’s never able, then it is what it is.”
Nora followed Lucy’s gaze to the storm rolling in and reached for the younger girl’s hand. “I know she doesn’t trust us yet, or our ways, but the fact that Lander would let her touch a gun speaks volumes.”
Lucy’s spine stiffened, and she took her hand away from Nora’s. “It’s her gun.”
Nora sighed as a hot wind blew through the city, whipping the curtains around them. A dark streak shot across the road in the face of the storm, and Lucy smiled at the familiar sight of a striped tail. “Never thought I’d miss seeing one of them.”
“Raccoons give you trouble back home?”
“Always. I thought Lynn was going to tear her hair out one year over the sweet corn. Stayed up three days in a row picking raccoons off from the roof, but it didn’t matter. She fell asleep for five minutes and it was a done deal. They stripped every stalk.”
“Lander and Ben keep them out of their garden, though I don’t know how,” Nora admitted. “We do see coyotes up here on the strip occasionally, so they probably keep the population down.”
“But not lions?” Lucy asked, trying to keep her voice casual.
Nora’s mouth tightened. “No, not them, thank God.”
“You hate them.”
The clouds passed over, covering what was left of the sunset and leaving the women in darkness. The air was close and hot, the rain refusing to fall. Lucy could barely see the outline of Nora’s face in the last rays of sun.
“Before the world ended I used to try to find them, ridiculous as that seems now,” she said. “I’d go out hiking overnight, make animal distress calls, anything I could do to call them to me. I loved the way they moved, like liquid under fur. They made me realize some animals are better than others, that the food chain in all of its barbarism is exactly what nature intended.”
“So?” Lucy asked, the hot wind pulling her words from her mouth. “What changed?”
Nora looked at her as the clouds scudded across the sky and the last red rays of the setting sun brilliantly lit her eyes. “One of them ate my daughter.”
Lucy grasped the older woman’s hand, covering it completely with both of hers. “I am so, so, sorry. I wouldn’t have asked…”
Nora waved the apology away but took her hand back to wipe at some stray tears. “You had no way of knowing.”
“Was this… in your time? Before the Shortage?”
“No. It was a few years ago. I had a child very late in life, here in what’s left of the world. I mentioned her to you, do you remember?”
“Little one,” Lucy said quietly. “You called her little one.”
“I did.” Nora nodded, wiping at another errant tear. “She was built small like you, and wiry too. She used to make Lander laugh by showing off how much she could lift. They made a game of it.
“She was twelve when it happened. Her job was scavenging on the western end for food, clothes, little things we needed replaced in the day to day, like scissors or can openers. Lander was going to teach her how to manage the garden, and Ben was going to fill her post as a scavenger. She was showing him some of the areas that hadn’t been picked over yet.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a cat hunt, but a lion will stalk its prey same as little tame cats. No matter how many times I tell myself it’s helping nobody, I’ve played it through my head a million times how that cat must’ve followed the two of them, sliding through the shadows and waiting for the chance to pounce.”
Lucy pictured it in her mind as well, drawn in by the grieving mother’s words and the image of two small bodies picking through rubble, hunted by a gliding shadow. She’d seen it in miniature at home before, the silent paws that could deal a crushing velvety blow to the slowest of the stalked.
“But why wouldn’t the cat have gone for Ben?” Lucy asked. “Predators always attack the smallest or the weakest. He would’ve been both.”
The clouds pulsed overhead, refusing to break. Lightning flickered and the thunder rolled in the distance before Nora answered.
“The way he tells it, my girl was outside and he was indoors when it attacked.”
Lucy carefully watched the play of muscles across Nora’s face as they waited for the rain to fall, the flashes of lightning contorting her expression and making it unreadable. “You believe him?”
Nora’s shrug was barely perceptible in the darkness. “Ben wants nothing more than his father’s love and respect. Working that garden with Lander day in and day out is how he thinks he’ll get it. I can’t say for sure what happened the day my daughter died, and knowing wouldn’t change it anyhow.”
“It is what it is,” Lucy said, turning to stand shoulder to shoulder with Nora as the storm passed them by.
Twenty-Nine
Lucy felt a distinct sense of unease when she went out to witch with Ben the next day. She could easily picture him sacrificing Nora’s daughter, allowing her to be taken by the big cat to further his own ends. Lucy struggled for nonchalance as they walked out of the shadows of the city’s buildings, into the bright white stretch of desert.