During a time when lies carry more weight than honor, one woman seeks truths before she can salvage what little remains of her life.
Chapter 1
Plaster crumbled down from the ceiling, landing on the splintered wooden floor and on the once grand dining table whose legs no longer supported it. We sat along the table’s edge, pretending everything was normal: me, the house rat, and the ghosts of the people who once lived here. Molly was outside foraging. A risky undertaking for a child, but I was dead tired, and there wasn’t anybody out there who could hurt her anymore.
Pulling my dagger from its sheath at my waist, I rose off my tattered backpack, crept around the tabletop, and neared the house rat, my mouth salivating at the prospect of eating meat. The rat retreated into the wall.
Grumbling, I shoved my dagger back into its sheath.
The shuffling of small feet neared. I pulled my attention away from dinner prospects and painted on a smile. Molly stopped in the archway leading into the room, her frail body bundled in layers of makeshift outerwear. She watched me for a moment, out of breath, trembling slightly.
She reached out her hand, the holes in her knit gloves widening, exposing her small fingers. Several green sprigs lay limp across her palm. “I found food.”
I neared her, inspecting her find. “You’re amazing.” A handful of semi-frozen dandelion leaves would never sustain us. We were better off waiting for the rat to return. “You eat it.”
She entered the decaying dining hall, rested upon our backpack, and sank her teeth into the greens as if they were savory flanks of meat.
My eyes returned to the rat’s escape route. I was patient. That was one virtue I had retained through the years.
“Reva?” Molly said in a quivering voice. “Are... are we gonna stay here?”
I looked back at her. “Do you want to? We could use the rest.”
Molly didn’t answer. Instead, she stared at the floor. I had recently pulled her out of her unresponsive state, and I didn’t want her to regress now. Not while we still had an undetermined amount of traveling ahead of us.
Sensing something was wrong, I neared her. “What is it, Molly?”
She swallowed her last bite and licked her lips as if searching for food in their cracks. “It’s just that... it stinks here.”
“This entire world stinks.”
Kneeling to her level, I cradled her face in my hands. “Molly, look at me. What is it?”
She pulled the knit hat off her head, her dark curls tumbling over her shoulders. “There’re bodies in the building next door.”
I stiffened. “You didn’t go inside, did you?”
“Uh-uh. I saw them through the window.”
“Stay here.”
I hurried through the empty hallway, slipped through the slack-hinged front door, and stepped outside. Snow spewed from the sky like thick pellets of wet fur. The chill coursed through the opening of my ragged coat as I tromped across the snow-speckled field toward the stone outbuilding.
Oak tree branches stretched outward along my path, revealing the thick woolen threads from Molly’s coat she had tied to them, which guided me to the correct window. Breadcrumbs. It was a trick Molly often used so I could find her if she ventured too far. I would have to talk to her later about using the fibers from her clothing. It was getting colder, and my stash of scrap material for patching the holes left behind was dwindling.
Clearing the fresh snowflakes from the glass, I leaned into the window and peered inside. Old gardening equipment lay scattered along the dirt floor. Wooden planks rested against the wall beyond that. To the left of it all, highlighted in the dim light filtering through the windows, were the badly decomposed bodies.
I stepped away from the window. Remaining as still as possible, I looked around in all directions, wondering how long ago the brain disease struck the household. When had the last person died, or were some of them still alive, watching me, waiting to see what I’d do next?
Why hadn’t anybody burned the bodies? What would Paulo have said? “Burn them, Guerrera. Ahora!”
The brain disease spread through skin contact, bodily fluids, and I suspected airborne particles from clothing of a rotting corpse. Burning was the only way to ensure it didn’t spread. One dead body could doom an entire commune. I’d seen it happen.
I was immune to the brain disease, more commonly referred to as “the sickness.” That’s why Paulo, the egotistic, cruel man who once controlled my life, had put me in charge of the dying at Luchan, the commune from which Molly and I had recently fled. One by one I had watched my housemates slip into madness and die, and one by one I burned their bodies. Then, when the last of them were gone, we abandoned Luchan.
Good riddance Luchan. Good riddance, Paulo!
The job left me numb, and I often had to disengage my emotions just to see it done. I was getting better now that Molly and I set out to find the safe house, the compound where she once lived, the place where I had promised her father to take her if anything should happen to him. But it was taking us longer to find than we thought. Stumbling upon this old homestead with its intact roof, sturdy walls, and the grand old wooden table we could chop up and burn for heat gave us hope that we might have a place to rest for a while. At least until the weather cleared.
But finding the bodies changed things.
The last thing I wanted was to expose Molly to the sickness again. She might not survive it a second time.
I hurried back to the house. It was still early morning. We had plenty of time to find another shelter before nightfall. The stars might not return for days, leaving us at a disadvantage since we relied on them to map out our journey. Regardless, we needed to move on.
Molly expressed no objections to leaving. The thin soles of our boots would never see us through the day, so I filled them with insulation I pulled from the walls and wrapped the top of Molly’s boots with remnants of cloth to prevent the snow from falling down them. I bundled her up, covered my head with an old shirt I tied down beneath my chin, and strapped our backpack over my shoulder. And off we went.
The old homestead drifted out of our sight as the snow encased it in a white tomb, and I couldn’t help wondering if its occupants’ final days had been as terrifying as Molly and mine had been at Luchan.
People do horrific things to each other when they know they’re going to die.
#
The snow continued to fall as we traveled through the day, and all we saw in every direction was miles of emptiness. After the Indo-Western War ended, good shelter had been hard to find, but now stumbling upon it seemed impossible. The Midwest had once been a great place to live, with its eco-friendly towns, and farms with fields laden with crops. I could always spot the incoming drones coming to deliver goods, and jet crafts and bullet trains filled the air with sounds of newly arriving visitors. Ten years had passed since the war ended, and all traces of the life I once knew were gone.
Finding the countryside empty of good shelter stilled me, but the fact that the people were gone haunted me senseless. During the months leading up to my final days at Luchan, there had been rumors that most war survivors had been wiped out by the sickness. I suppose the rumors weren’t rumors after all.
It would make life easier if there were others--the foraging, the strengthening of walls, having someone to hold at the end of the day--but Molly and I had been out here a long time, and I was convinced everyone was dead. The war destroyed the country, and the sickness, it seemed, eradicated the survivors.
Maybe it was for the best. Now, there were fewer people who could harm Molly and me. Fewer people I felt compelled to kill.
Molly started to lag behind. Pausing, I waited for her to catch up. Her wispy legs lifted and fell, breaking through the soft snow like feathers as she neared me. I handed her the old flask I kept strapped to the side of my pack and let her drink her fill. Then I finished what was left and filled the flask with snow. I studied her face, making sure she was still there, and then took her small hand in mine and trudged onward.
“Reva?” she began. “There’s nobody alive anymore, is there?”
I sighed. What do you say to an eight-year-old who had witnessed what she had witnessed? How do you justify your own life when there were no others? When do you give up? Molly displayed unwavering strength despite her fragile body, yet I knew if I said “enough,” she would drop in the snow and never get up. And I would probably join her.
“They’ve all gone looking for us.”
“I’m sorry we lost the stars.”
“Oh, Molly, that wasn’t your fault. We’ll pick up the trail again soon, when the nights stay clear. For now, we need to find a safe place to rest.”
We trudged onward, up a gradual hill. The snow was to Molly’s knees now. She followed behind me in my tracks to alleviate the hard work needed to plow through it. We reached the top of the hill just as my insides imploded from hunger pains, and I thought about that rat and wished we had stayed at the homestead just a little while longer.
I stopped suddenly. Molly looked outward. She lifted an arm, pointing it toward the sight in front of us.
Ahead sprawled a large weather-glazed structure. Smoke seeped from
its chimneystacks. This wasn’t the safe house we were looking for. I knew that the moment the men emerged from the front door.
I reached for the hilt of my dagger.
