Harry was right. He should have been dead.
“Give me the gun.” I repeated, and held out a bloody hand for it. “Unless you want to do this yourself.”
“You can’t shoot him. You can’t just… .”
“I hope you’d find the courage to shoot me if I were like that, and out here with no medical care to be had. We shoot him, or leave him here alive. How long do you think it will take him to die?”
“Maybe he won’t die.”
I went to my pack, struggling to navigate without throwing up. I pulled it away from the dead man, groped within it, and found my knife. It was a good knife, sharp and strong. I flicked it open and cut the unconscious man’s throat with it.
Not until the flow of blood stopped did I feel safe.
The man’s heart had pumped his life away into the ground. He could not regain consciousness and involve me in his agony.
But, of course, I was far from safe. Perhaps the last two people from my old life were about to leave me. I had shocked and horrified them. I wouldn’t blame them for leaving.
“Strip the bodies,” I said. “Take what they have, then
we’ll put them into the scrub oaks down the hill where we gathered wood.”
I searched the man I had killed, found a small amount of money in his pants pocket and a larger amount in his right sock. Matches, a packet of almonds, a packet of dried meat, and a packet of small, round, purple pills. I found no knife, no weapon of any kind. So this was not one of the pair that sized us up earlier in the night. I hadn’t thought so. Neither of them had been long-haired. Both of these were.
I put the pills back in the pocket I had taken them from. Everything else, I kept. The money would help sustain us. The food might or might or might not be edible. I would decide that when I could see it clearly.
“No,” I said. “I don’t get the damage. Just the pain.”
“But, I mean it felt like you hit yourself?”
I nodded. “Close enough. When I was little, I used to bleed along with people if I hurt them or even if I saw them hurt. I haven’t done that for a few years.”
“But if they’re unconscious or dead, you don’t feel anything.”
“That’s right.”
“So that’s why you killed that guy?”
“I killed him because he was a threat to us. To me in
a special way, but to you too. What could we have done about him? Abandon him to the flies, the ants, and the dogs? You might have been willing to do that, but would Harry? Could we stay with him? For how long? To what purpose? Or would we dare to hunt up a cop and try to report seeing a guy hurt without involving ourselves. Cops are not trusting people. I think they would want to check us out, hang on to us for a while, maybe charge us with attacking the guy and killing his friend. I turned to look at Harry who had not said a word. “What would you have done?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice hard with disapproval. “I only know I wouldn’t have done what you did.”
“I wouldn’t have asked you to do it,” I said. “I didn’t ask you. But, Harry, I would do it again. I might have to do it again. That’s why I’m telling you this.” I glanced at Zahra. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I knew I should, but talking about it is…hard. Very hard. I’ve never told anyone before. Now… .” I took a deep breath. “Now everything’s up to you.”
“What do you mean?” Harry demanded.
I looked at him, wishing I could see his expression well enough to know whether this was a real question. I didn’t think it was. I decided to ignore him.
“So what do you think?” I asked, looking at Zahra.
Neither of them said anything for a minute. Then Zahra began to speak, began to say such terrible things in that soft voice of hers. After a moment, I wasn’t sure she was talking to us.
I took his hands, looked at their big, pale, blunt fingers. They had a lot of strength in them, I knew, but I had never seen him use it to bully anyone. He was worth some trouble, Harry was.
“No one is who we think they are,” I said. “That’s what we get for not being telepathic. But you’ve trusted me so far— and I’ve trusted you. I’ve just put my life in your hands. What are you going to do?”
Was he going to abandon me now to my “infirmity”-instead of me maybe abandoning him at some future time due to a theoretical broken arm. And I thought: One oldest kid to another, Harry; would that be responsible behavior?
He took his hands back. “Well, I did know you were a manipulative bitch,” he said.
Zahra smothered a laugh. I was surprised. I’d never heard him use the word before. I heard it now as a sound of frustration. He wasn’t going to leave. He was a last bit of home that I didn’t have to give up yet. How did he feel about that? Was he angry with me for almost breaking up the group? He had reason to be, I suppose.
“I don’t understand how you could have been like this all the time,” he said. “How could you hide your sharing from everyone?”
“My father taught me to hide it,” I told him. “He was right. In this world, there isn’t any room for housebound, frightened, squeamish people, and that’s what I might have become if everyone had known about me— all the other kids, for instance.
Little kids are vicious. Haven’t you noticed?”
“But your brothers must have known.”
“My father put the fear of God into them about it. He could do that. As far as I know, they never told anyone.
