I woke up the next morning to voices I didn’t recognize. My head was pounding. My hands and feet were tied with lengths of rope. Three men were standing by the side of the stream with their heads down, talking low and passing around a bottle of water. My rifle was on the other side of the camp near Dad, who was in his place at the mouth of the cave, unmoved. I shifted my weight quietly and sat up, my head swimming as I did it.
“How do you know that?”
“We’re half a day from home, Sam. If they’re spies, they’re the worst damn spies I’ve ever heard of. Besides, he could have killed Jackson and he didn’t. He had him in his sights.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Look at them, Sam. What would Violet say? What would Maureen say, if she was still with us?”
They weren’t slavers, I was fairly sure. Farmers maybe, traders, or — who knew? — maybe even salvagers like me and Dad. The man who’d gone through my backpack the night before stood in the center of the group. He was compact, bald with a band of messy black and gray hair around the sides. Next to him was the man he called Sam, a black man in his fifties who wore a sweat-stained New York Yankees ball cap and had a heavy belly and a thick mustache.
The kid I’d almost shot was next to him. He was heavyset with a pinched, worried-looking face. He kept his head down and his arms crossed over his chest, not meeting anyone’s eye.
Whoever they were, I didn’t know what they intended to do with me and, like Grandpa always said, if they weren’t family, they were trouble. I scanned the ground around my feet and found a rock about the size of a small apple that came to a brutal point at one end. I leaned forward, slipped it into my palm, then pushed myself backward until I was up against the wall of the gorge.
The kid nudged the leader. “He’s awake.”
The bald man was about to step forward, but the one I had shot, a teenager with a shock of golden hair that fell over his eye, appeared out of nowhere.
“Who are you?” he spat. “What are you doing here?” I gripped the rock in my fist, ready to defend myself, but the bald man pushed him out of the way.
“He’s just a kid, Will,” he said. “Not much younger than you. Now step back and let me handle this.”
“We oughta string him up, right here and now, Marcus.”
The bald man, Marcus, looked around the bare walls of the crevasse. “String him up from what?”
“Marcus—”
“No one is getting strung up,” Marcus said sternly, which only enraged Will more.
“He shot me!”
“He grazed you, Will,” Sam said. “You were barely bleeding. You’re not even limping.”
Will ignored him and kept after Marcus. “He’s a spy for Fort Leonard! They both are! When I get home, I’ll tell my father. I’ll tell everyone!”
Marcus took a step closer to Will until their chests were almost touching. Marcus was actually an inch or so shorter, but he had shoulders like a buffalo and something deep and forceful in him.
“Tell them anything you want, Will, but for right now, shut the hell up. You’re giving me a headache.”
The black man laughed at that, a booming “Ha!” that caused Will to shoot him a deadly look before he sneered and, with a chuckle, shook his head in a snotty attempt at saving face. In the end he skulked away downstream, kicking a charred log from the fire with his bad leg. Marcus turned his back on Will and squatted down in front of me. I jerked away instinctively.
Marcus held up his hands, palms out. “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t mean any harm. Will there’s daddy owns a lot of cattle and things. Sometimes he thinks that means he’s next in line to a throne we all keep trying to tell him doesn’t exist.”
Marcus smiled, obviously trying to put me at ease, but I just stared at him, turning the rock around in my palm.
“Looks like Sam gave you a hell of a knock there.”
“Sorry,” Sam said in a deep Northern accent. He dropped his paw of a hand on the kid’s shoulder. “Couldn’t let you shoot Jackson here. We’ve just gotten to like him.”
Jackson shrugged out from under the man’s hand, embarrassed. “Sam…”
“What do you people want?” I asked.
Marcus dropped his grin. “I’m Marcus Green,” he said, then pointed to the kid who stood shyly in the background. “That’s my son, Jackson. His highness there is Will Henry. Sam Turner’s the man who gave you that tap on the head.”
“Howdy,” Sam said.
Marcus looked back at Sam. Something passed between them that ended with Sam looking off after Will, then nodding. Marcus slipped a hunting knife from a sheath on his belt.
I flinched backward, ready to swing the rock as best I could, but Marcus held his hands up again to steady me, then began sawing at the ropes around my wrists. I watched him carefully, even as the ropes popped open and he started on the ones at my feet.
“That your dad?”
Marcus waited, but I said nothing. Grandpa always said you should never tell anyone anything they didn’t need to know.
“Well, whoever he is, he looks like he’s hurt pretty bad.”
Marcus looked up at me as he worked, like he was taking my measure. He was trying to talk himself into something, and the fight was going back and forth. When the ropes snapped under his knife, he glanced back at Sam again. Sam hesitated, then gave a reluctant nod.
“We can help you,” Marcus said under his breath. “We have a town. It’s not too far. My wife, Violet, is a doctor. Not one of those drunks running around claiming to be a doctor either — she’s the real thing. Army doctor before the Collapse. We could bring you both back to town with us and she could take a look at your dad.”
He was lying, of course. If they had medicine, why would they waste it on some guy they didn’t even know? Still…
“I don’t have anything to trade,” I said.
“We’re not asking for anything,” Sam said. “Just offering our help.”
I scanned their faces, searching for some sign of the deception I knew had to be there. But I wasn’t Grandpa; I didn’t have his eye. Whatever they wanted, whatever they were planning, I couldn’t see what it was.
Not that it mattered. Small towns had begun to pop up in the last few years, but Grandpa had always kept us away from them. They were nothing but muddy collections of tumbledown shacks, he said, that stank of people living too close together and bred smallpox and dysentery. Besides that, they were targets for every slave trader, scavenger, or bandit around, like nails begging to be hammered down.
“We just want to be left alone,” I said squarely to Marcus. “We can take care of ourselves.”
“You sure?” Marcus asked.
I nodded. Marcus signaled to Jackson and he stepped forward, his eyes on the ground in front of me. He handed Marcus a small cardboard box, then retreated to the stream’s edge.
“Looked like you were about out,” Marcus said, handing me the box. “You take care of yourself now. Sorry for the trouble. We’re heading west if you change your mind.”
They gathered up their things and turned to head downstream. Jackson lagged behind them, and for the first time that morning, he raised his eyes to meet mine. His were light blue and big and, like a doe’s, smart and skittish at the same time. He looked like he had something to say.
“What?”
Jackson shook his head. “Nothing. Sorry.” Then he turned and followed the others out of our camp.
Only when they were out of sight did I reach for the cardboard box and open it up. Inside were four rows of five gleaming silver-jacketed bullets, set tip-down in a piece of white foam. I pulled one out and rolled the cold metal between my fingers. They were much newer than the ones we had, probably made right before the Collapse.