She offered her unguarded back to the reaper.
The girl left a trail of broken minutes behind her. She was halfway to the horizon line when the first sobs broke in her chest.
5
That night she caught a small turtle and ate it.
And threw it up.
She curled up in the backseat of a highway patrol car that was pocked with bullet holes and surrounded by bones. As night collapsed around her, she used spit and a piece of cloth to try to wipe the blood from her hands and arms. It left a brown stain.
She cried all night and finally fell into a weary slumber before dawn.
The hunger screamed at her until she woke up.
6
As she staggered through the morning, she daydreamed of cool trees and running water. Of leaping fish and bushes heavy with ripe berries.
Way off in the distance she heard a roar, and she stopped, whipping out her knife.
It was a cat, a big one.
Las Vegas was less than forty miles from where she stood. Las Vegas used to have those shows with the white tigers and golden lions. There was a zoo behind one of the casinos, with jungle predators of all kinds. When her father was still alive, back when it was just the two of them traveling through the wasteland looking for shelter, they had gone past the old gambling town. They met a half-crazed man who described the terrors of Vegas: the dead constantly at war with tigers and lions for control of the hunting grounds, and the people who tried to survive there.
The crazed man’s stories were all past tense.
Nobody lived in Las Vegas anymore, and the cats—like the dead—had gone into the desert to find fresh meat.
That roar came from way over in the tumble of red rocks to her left. The big cats made that terrible shriek when they’d killed something. It’s part triumph and part warning—I killed this and I’ll defend my meat.
That kitty cat is too durn big and mean, she thought. You don’t want no truck with it, do you, girl?
She often talked to herself as if she were an adult scolding a child. Like there were two of her. It took the edge off being so completely alone.
The girl hurried along the road, wanting no part of whatever red drama was happening behind those rocks. She was hungry, but her hunger had not yet driven her crazy enough to want to fight eight hundred pounds of muscle and claws. She was fifteen, and prolonged hunger had leaned her down to ninety pounds. All that was left of her was bone, hard muscle, and pain.
The road ahead was clear for half a mile before it curved around a big, white piece of junk. The girl thought it was an overturned tractor trailer—they always held the promise of some item left behind after scavengers had come through like locusts. But as she approached, she realized that it wasn’t a truck at all. It was too big.
She hurried to see what it was.
The closer she got, the more she realized that it was massive. Much bigger than she’d thought. The thing had to be well over two hundred feet long with wings nearly as wide. It had once been snow white with a broad sky-blue line that covered the cockpit and ran all the way to the towering tail. But there had been a fire, probably on impact. Much of the white and blue paint was soot-blackened, and in places it had burned completely away to reveal the silvery glint of steel. Rusted now, and pitted by endless blowing sand.
Words had been painted in black along the sides: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
And on the shattered tail there was a number: 28000.
The girl knew about jets, of course. Everybody knew about them. There were airports full of them. The bones of all kinds of aircraft littered the landscape. The girl had even spent two nights camped out in the shell of a Black Hawk helicopter.
But she’d never seen one this big. Not up close.
The four big engines lay half-buried in the sand, torn away by the impact. Behind the jet was a deep trench cut like a rough scar into the landscape and all the way across the blacktop. The jet had spent a long time grinding to a halt, and now it lay still and silent, its engines cold, the windows shattered and filled with shadows.
The jet presented a tricky choice. There could be bottled water, cans of soft drinks, plastic bags of stuff like nuts and crackers. Things that had enough preservatives in them to last. Not good food, but a far mile down the road from no food.
The doors were shut, and the windows were too small to climb through, and it would take some doing to climb up onto the nose of the craft and enter that way. On the up side, it didn’t look like anyone else had been inside the jet, which was odd because it was right there, big as anything. On the downside, if the doors were all closed, then what had happened to the people on board? Had they managed to climb out? If so, how?
If not . . . were they still there?