"Once it all happened, it moved quick. We packed the trailers and trucked them all up here. This is before the roads went to shit. We were up here for about a month when Chad announced his plan to have all the women get pregnant, and there wasn't no one at the station that wasn't wrapped around Chad's pinky finger. He had that way about him."
She sighed, her breath pluming into the cold air. The dead were thin today. They couldn't hear any of them moving anywhere as they stepped out onto the backroad that led to the washout.
"I told him I didn't want to get pregnant. He couldn't understand that. In his mind, if you were a woman, and you loved someone, then you would automatically want to have their baby. But this world isn't right for a baby."
Mort just nodded at her words. He didn't know what to say. He didn't think that she was even talking to him. She seemed to be talking to herself, lost in her own thoughts.
"He didn't care. He told me I could either have a baby, or I could get out. 'Get out where?' I asked. Where the hell was I going to go? There was no place to go. So, I let him…" Her voice catches and hangs in the chill air. "I let him impregnate me."
Dez stopped walking, her eyes darting from side to side as she accessed her memories. "When I missed my first period, my first thought was that I should hang myself." She turned and looked at Mort, a hard look on her face. "I wasn't crazy. I'm not crazy. I just didn't think that there was any point to anything anymore. I didn't want Chad's monster child growing inside of me. I didn't want anything to do with him anymore. The thought of Chad being able to raise a child and warp it to make it like himself sickened me. I knew I was overreacting. Maybe I wasn't thinking straight, so I talked to the only person in camp that I trusted… Theresa. That bitch told on me, and next thing I know, I'm tied up in a bed for months."
"Chad's brother, I guess you guys killed him. That's what Katie says. He used to come in there and look at me. I always thought he would do something, but I think he was afraid of Chad. When I told Chad about it, he just said Reed was weird, and that he didn't mean nothin' by it."
She smiled at Mort then. "I'm glad you killed Reed. He was a bad person."
"Yeah, he didn't seem all there to me," Mort said as they followed his footsteps to the camouflaged truck, its antennae poking up into the sky.
"Are any of us all there anymore?"
Mort shrugged. "Be careful when you go down this. Lots of roots underneath the snow."
Dez nodded her understanding, and they made their way down the ridge into the clearing. "Your friend, Clara. She set me free. I liked her. I'm sorry she's dead."
"Yeah, me too."
Mort and Dez took the time to examine the abandoned camp next to the river. They grabbed the items they thought might be useful, a sleeping bag, some clothing that still looked serviceable, and then they moved on down the river bank.
"Be careful about this ice," Mort said. "It's not thick, and if you fall in that water, you're a goner." They hiked along the snowbank, leaning to their sides to help balance as they trudged along above the icy river. It was a treacherous way to go, but it was the only way to go unless they wanted to jump down from the lip of the washout.
"I got to kill him," Dez said. "Did you know that?"
"Uh-uh," Mort said.
"Well, I did. I stabbed him right up while he was trying to kill your friends."
Mort had nothing to say to that. He didn't know what the woman wanted to hear, so he kept quiet.
"It felt good, you know? I don't think killing people is supposed to feel good, but for what he did to me, I was happy to do it."
Mort stumbled in the snow, and Dez reached out to him to steady his body, preventing him from tumbling onto the ice. The ice might have held his body, but he was glad he didn't have to test it out.
"You probably think I'm crazy, like everyone else. I know it's not supposed to feel good to kill people, but he wasn't a person, I guess."
"Not one that I'd want to know," Mort said.
They reached the spot underneath the washout, and they climbed upwards, digging their hands and feet into the snow until they could find tree roots to pull themselves up by. There was no sign of the dead that he had killed. The snow had covered them up completely. The truck had more powder on its roof, and the carcass of the bear was covered in white snow, the bear's giant head still sticking through the windshield.
They spent the next hours breaking apart the bear's body. Dez said that normally you'd string the bear up and cut it open to pull out all the guts, but the slope was too dangerous for that, and there were no suitable trees within range, so they harvested the bear's meat limb by limb. There was a lot of it.
"You ever eat bear?" Dez asked.
"Nope. Never."
She smiled at Mort, and for a moment, she didn't seem all that crazy.
"Well, you're in for a damn treat."
With their bags loaded down with bear meat, they turned and slid down the washout and down to the river. Mort most definitely didn't want to
