Huntress

In the end, Trace did little more than grunt, her gaze downcast and thoughtful as she fingered the shark teeth hanging around her neck.

“Well?” asked Maggie, leaning her elbows against the rails of the fence. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

“You’re lucky to be alive,” replied the old woman. “And if you see that man again, don’t go lusting after his motorcycle ’fore you bust his brains in with that hammer of yours.”

Maggie shook her head. “You should have seen that machine.”

Trace rolled her eyes. “Seen ’em plenty, ’fore you were born. Rode ’em once or twice. Just a way of getting around, Maggie Greene. Nothing worth losing your life over. And,” she added, “leave it to you to care more about metal than about losing your life to a dangerous man.”

“I am what I am,” Maggie replied, which was something her granddaddy had been fond of saying.

And that’s all I am, he would have added.

Trace frowned, tugging one of her thick white braids. Her dark eyes glinted, as though sparked with sunlight. “Long dark hair, you say? Lily white skin, like a corpse?”

“Cold like one, too,” Maggie said, before she could stop herself.

Trace’s gaze snapped up. “Didn’t say he touched you.”

Heat warmed Maggie’s face. “Briefly. It’s how I got … knocked down.”

Anger flittered through the old woman’s gaze. “And he came here … looking just for you.”

“Yes,” Maggie said uneasily, and pushed herself away from the fence. “Come on, I’m fine. And if he comes back, I’ll be ready.”

Trace yanked her braid even harder, her other hand tightening around the shark teeth. Maggie tried not to squirm under her sharp gaze, which suddenly felt more intimidating than any strange motorcycle man.

“We’ll see,” the old woman said ominously, and raked her gaze down Maggie’s body. “You’ve lost weight. Promised your granddaddy I would make sure you stayed strong, and here you are, wasting away.”

Maggie blinked, struggling with the change of subject. “You gained some, looks like.”

Trace grunted. “Found a gentleman down South. Old Mississippi, if you can imagine it on that antique map of yours. He lives near the coast, in Arbo Enclave. Fat, sassy man who makes the meanest, hottest gumbo I ever found.” She paused. “I think you should come with me, next trip down. You’d like him. And you’d like it there.”

Maggie looked down at her boots. “I wish you’d stop asking me to leave home.”

“Gah.” Trace waved her hand, turning in a slow circle to survey the junkyard. “Young people need to see a bit of the world. You, Maggie, you see it all up here, with your books.” She tapped her head with one long brown finger. “But words aren’t living.”

“I’m happy,” she protested.

“You’re a hard girl to bring down,” Trace agreed. “But think about it. You come with me, it’s not permanent. Just a season, on the road.”

It was a familiar speech, but there was an urgency in her voice that was different, and that made the hairs on Maggie’s arms rise.

“Trace,” she said carefully, “forgetting, for a moment, what just happened … is there something else wrong you’re not telling?”

The old woman’s expression turned grave and quiet. Maggie stood very still, watching her. The last time she had seen this look had been months after her grandfather’s funeral, when Trace had returned from her road trip and discovered that her friend was dead.

“Things are changing,” she finally said quietly. “I can taste it. Life was bad after the Big Death, but folks with common sense stepped in and life smoothed out into something I never expected. Peaceful, Maggie. We got peace in place of death.”

“You’re saying that’s no longer the case?”

Trace gave her a sharp worried look. “I’m saying I’ve heard rumors, strange ones, and I don’t know—”

She never finished. A bundle of black feathers tumbled from the sky, landing roughly on her shoulder. Maggie jumped backward, alarmed, but Trace, aside from a slight flinch and the raising of her eyebrows, seemed none too surprised by the creature suddenly perched on her.

Maggie stared. “You have a crow on your shoulder.”

The bird tilted its head, meeting her gaze. Trace shrugged—carefully. “He found me near one of the old city forests, not long ’fore I entered Tennessee. I think he was lonely.”

Maggie made a small, non-committal sound—because that was what one did when old women said that crows were lonely. Although, there was something about the bird that seemed odd—and not just because it had attached itself to a human, out of the blue. She stepped closer, peering at the crow, and felt herself examined in turn, sharply. Maybe too sharply. She felt dizzy, her vision blurring. Again, blurring.

“Maggie,” Trace said, touching her shoulder. “Maggie, girl. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she mumbled, blinking hard. Her dizziness faded. So did her blurred eyesight, though the morning sunlight suddenly seemed too bright, glaring against the old junk and metal heaped around the yard. Everything hurt to look at: the gutted rusting cars, the iron rails, oil drums filled with the detritus of decades past, toasters, hair dryers, television sets, and cell phones. The useful components had already been removed, and what remained suddenly looked less like poetry to Maggie (poetry being the myths that people created) and more like trash.

It unsettled Maggie to feel that way; and it saddened her, too. She liked fiddling with relics from the past. She liked making up stories about objects that had been treasured not so long ago. It made her feel closer to her parents, long dead from the hanta-bola pox. Made her feel close to her granddaddy, too, who had happened to be looking after her when her folks got caught up in the city outbreaks. He had been gone now for five years, taken by the influenza.

“Come on,” Trace said gently. “You head in. I’ll take care of my babies, but after that, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

Maggie said nothing, just started walking through the junkyard to the old farmhouse. She looked back once, watching Trace stride down the drive to the road, and saw the crow perched now on the gate, staring back at Maggie. It had a peculiar gaze. She felt assessed and judged all in the same moment, and it made her skin crawl—but in a different way than it felt with the motorcycle man. She was not afraid of the crow. His presence seemed to tickle memories in her brain. Like dreams, forgotten.

Secret histories, whispered a small voice in her mind.

Maggie went into the house and shut the door.

Her grandfather had been a junk man, but only because he had trouble throwing things away. Maggie had a similar problem, but she drew the line at dirty toothbrushes, used floss, underwear past its prime (though nowadays, with cloth at a premium, you would have had to go without it, if you got too picky), and other items that tended to accumulate mold or germs, or were just plain unsightly to behold. Her grandfather, bless him, had not been so discerning, and after he died, it had taken Maggie three years to clean out the house. The problem was twofold: Some things, no matter how disgusting, had sentimental value; and as for the things that could be tossed, there was no good place to put them, so they had to be burned, buried, or stored elsewhere.

The kitchen was clean, though. So was her bedroom. And now there was a much wider path that led through the house to the stairs, and even to the musty couch in the living room, which was only half-covered in books and old newspapers, and glossy magazines with pictures of places, things, and people that Maggie would never have believed or imagined had she not seen them for herself, on the page.

She fixed breakfast for Trace. Eggs were something she had plenty of—animals thrived under her care, unlike plants—and she had made a small business for herself on the side creating odd little toys for children, as well as fixing machinery, whenever she could. Enough to trade for butter and meat, and for some much-needed gardening help from several local teens whom Maggie had taught to read.

She went into the cellar to cut some ham for them both—a special treat—and by the time she returned to the kitchen, Trace was already there, boots off, washing her hands under the pump in the sink. Maggie was grateful that the crow had remained outside.

The old woman was quiet while she ate, and Maggie could not help but notice how her gaze roved from the door to the windows, and flicked back to her, again and again, as though—like the damn bird—she was taking her measure.

“What?” Maggie finally asked, sorely tempted to lick her plate.

Trace looked down at her own plate, pushed her thumb against a small shred of egg her fork could not pick up, and placed it in her mouth.

“Rumors. Rumors about men.” Uneasiness filled the old woman’s eyes. “A gang of men who travel from Enclave to Enclave, stealing women, sometimes men. Just a handful, here and there.”

“They take only people?”

“What food they can carry—but the living seem to take priority. And ’fore you ask, I don’t know where they go with ’em, if they go far at all.”

Maggie had read stories about this kind of thing in her books, and in magazines, too—stories about wars where lives were worth more in slavery and in death than in freedom. “You think the man who came here this morning is one of them?”

Trace watched her carefully, tugging the shark teeth hanging around her neck. “Been told they ride motorcycles. Old-time muscle machines. A friend of a friend saw ’em from a distance, out west ’round Oklahoma. He knows what a motorcycle looks like.”

And now so did Maggie. Chills rushed through her. She could certainly believe that Irdu might be a kidnapper, and a thief. Though he had not, in the end, hurt her. Or stolen her belongings. He had kept his word, in a rough manner.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Maggie said. “I’ve been trying to figure it ever since he left. Motorcycles take fuel. Only the government has access to that, and most solar cells aren’t good enough to power a vehicle. Not so that it moves faster than a horse or bicycle, anyway.”

“You trust what you saw, and I trust what I was told,” replied the old woman solemnly. “ ’Sides, you’re forgetting something. There is gasoline available. Lots of it.”

“No,” Maggie replied automatically. But as Trace’s meaning became clear, the very thing that Maggie had been trying not to consider reared its ugly, horrifying head. “You’re crazy.”

“It’s been long enough.”

“There are still bones there.”

“Viruses don’t live in bones,” Trace replied. “I don’t think.”

Maggie suddenly felt ill. “The government would have opened up the cities if it was safe.”

“There’s barely a government at all. And after almost twenty years of farting around and letting the forests grow in, and the infrastructure crumble, it would be easier, and cheaper, for ’em to start over somewhere else.” Trace leaned forward, drumming her knuckles on the table. “There’s gas there, Maggie. Gas in the old cities. Who knows what else?”

Maggie hardly heard the old woman. She had been only a child, but she had lost her parents to the hanta-bola pox, and most everyone knew what that was like: to lose someone, maybe everyone, and not in a good, clean way, but in the virus way, which had been spread by breathing and by touch—the virus penetrating into cells, removing skin with neat efficiency, coring people like apples until they flushed their guts and blood. No cure. No time. Death occurred in two days. And almost everyone had started dying at once.

Murder, survivors said. Terrorists.

But the scale of the crime still baffled, and haunted. Not just America had suffered, but everyone everywhere. Maggie still had old newspapers from those days, before they quit printing. Europe, Asia, South America, Africa—no one had been spared. And for folks who had survived, there was still famine and lawlessness, and other diseases, to contend with.