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I watched everything happen from a shelter, buried in the side of a cliff, as if making it hard to get to made it somehow safer. Well, then, I guess I lived, too, didn’t I.
Things were kind of like a movie, really. That’s what I thought. Watching the cities blow up, all red puff of flame and curling plumes of smoke, was like watching the White House blow up in Independence Day. Not real.
Even the bodies. I stared, sort of stunned silent, and watched the bodies from the shelter of behind other people, living people. Let them shield me from the nearness, although over time I wouldn’t need shelter. I watched people take guns and supplies and clothes from the bodies, the ones that weren’t so messed up and blown apart that they couldn’t clean the mess off. I would point, when I saw good ones.
I was the youngest one in the group. Everyone else was an adult, or at least a teenager. I think they expected me to die, looking back, but I didn’t. Like the others in our shelter, I didn’t die.
There was a woman with me, who held my hand and fretted, and tried to hold me and hug me. I would sit, stiffly, staring into space, as she tried to coax a response from my unmoving body. She had been there with me since my mother disappeared, and wouldn’t answer my question. I hated her, was certain she had kidnapped me. Her name was Elana, or Lana, as everyone called her. I thought of her as the devil.
Lana was beloved by another woman, a slightly older one, with graying hair and a heavy, sturdy frame. She was like someone else’s grandmother, but she was nice to me, too, and would pet my hair. I didn’t move, but I didn’t hate her like I hated Lana. Everyone called her ‘Mae,’ but that wasn’t her real name. No one knew her real name.
There were others, too. Most of them I didn’t care to know at first. , Rreally I wouldn’t want to know any of them, had I had my choice. But no one had their choice, and we were stuck.
A pair of men, one older, gruff, like a cowboy, led us. Clint Eastwood. I remembered the movies. I thought of him as the cowboy, but he wasn’t one. He had lanky hair, and a beard, and smelled sort of sour. He wore a colorful tye-dyed tee-shirt and a bandana, and he limped along and sometimes would talk about being a Vet. After a while, no one cared any more than I did.
The other man was very big, with muscles, and carried a gun. He used to be a cop, he said, and then he’d laugh as if it were very funny. He liked me, too. He would sit next to me—never pulled me into his lap, never touched me unless I touched him. He’d smoke cigarettes, and funny cigarettes with the cowboy, and he’d tell me about his tattoos, or the places he’d been. I asked him, once, to tell me about being a cop. Everyone shut up. I didn’t talk. After I asked where my mom went, I didn’t speak. So everyone just thought I couldn’t talk, which suited me just fine.
The man, Davie, had stared the longest. And then he shook his head and sighed. “Maybe when you’re older,” he said, and reached out to touch my hair. It was the only time he ever touched my hair, and I remembered it later, when I wanted him to touch my hair again.
There were two teenagers, both girls, and they huddled together and cried a lot, in the beginning. I didn’t talk to them. They would sometimes watch me, in their bare eyes, and look away if I looked back. I always knew when they watched, because it tickled my head. The others watched, too. Fred, who wore glasses and a rumpled suit and was always sweating. And Corey, who was not much older than the girls and made them giggle stupidly. There was Jacob, and Marley, his dog, and they always just sat and stared, the man and the dog. And there was another woman, Lucy, who stared off into the distance a lot, and finally wouldn’t move anymore until we left her.
I was always next to Lana, being walked along through city rubble and dry twisted landscapes, over roads that weren’t really roads anymore, that didn’t lead anywhere. No cars. We didn’t see any cars that worked. So we walked.
Lana had a grating quality to her voice when she spoke. As if she wanted something from you, like a little kid, and was whining in hopes you’d give it to her. I hated her voice. I hated everything about her, but especially her voice. She’d always ask, wheedling, “Davieeeeee, can we stop and rest? I think Raelin is tired of walking.”
He’d look back at her, and at me. When I was tired, I kept walking. There was nothing to do but walk, and when it was dark enough I could sleep. So I walked. When we stopped, usually I’d go and pee. And then I’d stand and watch everyone until Davie made me sit down.
But he always would call the breaks for her. For me. I thought it was stupid, I thought he must have been stupid to think I needed to stop. Obviously I didn’t. But he would stop, and make me sit down and feed me and give me water, or else Mae would. I liked them much better than Lana. She was awful.
I don’t know how long I sit, rigid, clinging to my legs. I am not aware of other sounds, except myself. I do not see anything with my eyes shut. And it is not until I feel the pressure of a hand on my shoulder, so careful and gentle, that I open my eyes.
“What’s up, baby girl?” whispers Davie, staring at me.
I wish he could touch my hair, pet it back like he did, but it is shaved off. I shaved it when I was thirteen and got my period, so that no one would get ideas about me. I used the sharp knife he gave me to do it with, and the skin is smooth and soft until the hair starts to grow in. I’m sloppy and let it turn into strange, silky brush before I shave again.
He doesn’t touch my hair, ever. No one has since I shaved it, but Lana and Mae are long gone. Only Davie and Corey remain, of our old group. Even Corey is not stupid enough to touch my head. Was not. Does not want to touch my head or my face, or any part of me again. My eyes well.
“Corey?” he whispers, and I nod. I am helpless to Davie. Corey didn’t see me cry. I didn’t want him to. I can let Davie see.
I don’t talk. I rarely talk. I rest my forehead against his shoulder and let my tears soak into it. He doesn’t hug me, doesn’t try to. And I do not hug him. He leaves his hand on my shoulder, secure, holding my sorrowful weight in place, and that is good enough for both of us.
July and August passed. September and then October. It got cold, and we followed the plains still. The cities were long past. The first year went by in cities. I turned ten. I picked up a gun and shot Fred, because he went crazy and tried to hurt one of the teenaged girls. I heard her screaming even though he was covering her mouth with his hand, and biting her face. His hand was in her pants and she was struggling like a trapped animal, trying to break free but helpless and panicked.
I picked up Davie’s gun, resting beside me on the log. It was shadowy, and they were hidden in the horrible grass. I still saw them, felt them, heard the noises through the wind and the conversation. I grabbed the gun and shot, and hit Fred through the temple.
Everyone jumped up. Davie was shouting at me, his eyes angry, his voice booming and his words incomprehensible. And they found Fred quickly, and the girl. She was sobbing and wretched, huddled into herself, and Mae dragged her to her feet with Lana, and they curled up with her that night among the blankets. I sat up with Davie.
He and the cowboy kept asking me questions. How did I know. How did I shoot. How did I know how to shoot a gun. How did I make a shot like that. Did I see them. Did I hear. How did I know.
I didn’t speak. I just stared at them, let my eyes burn in until they looked away.
I squatted there with them, by the fire, until they took their sleep shifts. Davie made me sleep when he did. I slept next to him, but not close enough to touch. I was afraid, after seeing Fred, after seeing the girl, that they were upset because it was okay for men to hurt girls like that. I did not want Davie to hurt me, even though I knew Davie would never hurt me.
I was good at school, but this was not school. I was never going back to school. I learned other things instead. Watching.
Watching Davie and the cowboy had taught me how to handle a gun. I didn’t quite expect the weight, but I adjusted. After I shot Fred, Davie decided to teach me how to fight and shoot. He didn’t teach me to shoot until I learned to fight first. I had to know how to shift my weight, where to put my fists. It was nice. I could lose myself, no thoughts, no memories, just the weight and whip of my body moving through the air.
Davie was a good teacher. He didn’t go easy on me, either. I learned to take a punch and roll, to stand up and keep going. I calculated the spaces between fists, and made the rough lessons into an art. The cowboy would watch us, sometimes. He was there the first time I managed to knock Davie down. He didn’t say anything, just whistled, very low, and raised his funny-smelling cigarette up to his mouth. I had learned it was called ‘weed’ and it wasn’t always easy to get, but somehow the cowboy always had it.
That night, he let me smoke some. He said I was a grown-up now. I was almost eleven, and I felt the flush of my face, still warm and sweaty from practice, and the cooling breeze rising on the plains. It burned my throat, and I coughed. The cowboy and Davie laughed, and Davie gave me his sharp knife and told me I could fight with them now, when we came on other unfriendlies.
I felt dizzy, but like I was floating. I didn’t quite know. I smiled, and that made them laugh more. Mae glared fiercely and yelled at them, but they waved her away. By then Lana was gone. I didn’t miss her. I kept smiling, my cheeks pinching and sore, and finally Mae went away.
I fell asleep against Davie’s shoulder. When I woke up the next morning, my mouth was very dry and the sun hurt my eyes. Davie was watching me, still smiling faintly, but serious, too. He gave me water, and food, and waited until I was feeling okay before we started out. The sun had gotten high when we started. He was just as tough that night in lessons, and I wasn’t as good. The cowboy offered me more of his weed, but I declined that night. I didn’t try it again for a long time.
I watched Lana, her eyes wild, her arms waving. Her filthy hair and grungy sweater, and the conniving voice. I shifted in my space, now next to Davie on the road, glanced up at him.
Mae was shaking her head in protest. “You wanna end up like Lucy, girl? Or worse?”
Marley growled. Jacob wouldn’t speak, because he never did. He didn’t care who stayed or left. So long as he and Marley were together, nothing else mattered to him. I think he had kids, before. I think they were dead, like my mother, like my little baby brother, like my friend Kellin down the street. I think he knew this, and he only had Marley left, and so only Marley mattered. Before, I would have felt bad for him.
No one else spoke for a moment, looking at Jacob and Marley. It should have been funny, their names. But Marley was an old dog, and Jacob had become an old man very quickly. And nothing was funny, not really, not anymore.
The remaining teenaged girl sniffled loudly. Davie was teaching me to fight, and my reflexes were sharpening. I looked at her so suddenly that she flinched and stared down guiltily. The girl was not learning to fight. Mae could handle a rifle, even Lana would shoot or swing a heavy stick or crowbar if she had to, but the girl only ever sniffled. Since her friend, the one Fred had tried to rape, had wandered off, she was even more pathetic.
“Come on Raelin,” said Lana loudly, breaking the silence, holding out her hand to me. I stared at the hand, and then looked at her, and then crossed my arms silently.
“She ain’t stupid, Lana,” said Davie. He spat in the dirt between them. “She ain’t your kid, either.”
I did not like being talked about as if I were not there, but I was used to it. Not talking means you get talked about a lot. So I just stood there, with my arms crossed, watching them argue.
“Her mother,” shrieked Lana, pointing a livid finger at me, “Gave her to me and told me to take her to the shelter!”
I blinked. I had never heard anything else about my mother, right up until this point.
“That doesn’t mean you should go and kill her and yourself now,” said the cowboy, shifting his gun on his shoulder. The girl sniffled again and Corey shifted to put an arm around her. I didn’t look over at them.
“She’s fucking gene-bred!” shrilled Lana. This made me blink, too. I didn’t know that. It made sense, though. Lana told everything. Given time. To everyone, though. Everyone didn’t need to know. “Can’t you idiots fucking tell?”
Davie looked down at me, standing there. I knew, sort of, what I looked like. Skinny, short for my age. Limp, white-blonde hair that straggled around my cheeks and chin, when I let it get long enough. I cut it off after we left the shelter. I kept it short. My eyes, which were very large, probably too big for my face, and very blue. I didn’t know where my eyes and hair came from. My mother had dark hair and dark eyes. I didn’t know anyone else, just a baby brother who wasn’t born. Mother just brought him home one day.
I don’t know what he saw, but he nodded slowly and then turned back to Lana.
“Then she ain’t a kid. She can decide herself,” he said, glaring.
I kept my arms crossed. My decision was clear, but Lana grabbed for me anyway.
The cowboy yelled. Davie yelled. Mae yelled. Corey yelled. The girl shrieked, and Marley barked and growled. I reached up, snapping to like I’d been taught. It was a few weeks still before I’d beat Davie the first time. I was still good.
There was a sharp crack and everyone fell silent. No one moved for a moment, except Lana. Everyone watched her. I watched her.
She staggered back a step, then two, her arm coming in to her stomach, protective. Her hand was bent wrong, and I knew I’d done it. I was glad. Her face was very white, very pale. Almost gray. Her mouth opened and shut, trying to work words out, and then her face twisted up tearfully.
“You little bitch! You fucking cunt!” she yelled at me.
I crossed my arms again and kept staring.
“You broke my wrist!”
The cowboy shifted his gun back against his shoulder. He’d been pointing it at Lana. Davie shifted his gun up, too, but watched her warily.
“Shouldn’t a grabbed at her, woman,” he growled. He didn’t call her ‘woman’ very much, only when he was pissed. He was pissed now.
“Fuck you! Fuck all of you!” she shouted. She turned away and limped off, through the plains, toward the group of people clustered away. We’d spotted them first. Still too far off to make contact, at least a day of walking. But they looked headed in our direction, even if they were camped. Lana walked all night. I kept Davie’s shifts with him, watching and sleeping. An hour or two before dawn, there were the loud sounds of guns.
I knew Lana was dead. I smiled, and hid it under my sweater.
He complained about a lot. Davie didn’t seem to like him, but he came along with us, the last of the old group. He could shoot a gun, and didn’t mind fighting, and he would take orders except where girls were concerned. I didn’t see what was wrong with him as the first boy, the only boy I’d ever done anything with, except Davie. And Davie didn’t do things like kiss me, or touch me. He taught me to fight. He let me smoke next to him, against his arm, and slept next to me at night, but he didn’t touch me.
I was seventeen. Shaved hair, growing to pale fuzz, thin limbs raw with muscles. Short, still. Someone must have thought that was funny in the biolab where I was created. Corey was taller than me, but next to Davie he seemed short. I sort of always regarded him as short, even though I was shorter.
I was out getting water. It was dark. I heard the noise of boots on concrete nearby and turned, brought my gun up. Corey was there, in just pants and boots, his pale skin iridescent under the night. I looked at him and lowered the gun, slowly.
“Raelin,” he said.
Lana’s name for me. I hated it. Everyone still called me Raelin. No one knew it wasn’t my name.
I blinked and kept watching him. Normally I would have turned back to the water collecting, but something was strange in his tone. Rough, kind of. Grating.
He came closer. “Why are you so quiet?” he asked, soft but still rough.
I shrugged. It was too much to explain.
He crouched in front of me and reached to put his hand under my face. I didn’t react, didn’t blink, just kept watching him. “Raelin, you know you’re pretty. You know that? You are.”
It felt like he’d recited it. I kept watching him. He leaned forward, a bit hesitantly, pausing once or twice along the way, but finally pressed his mouth against mine.
I understood how this was supposed to work. It seemed as good a time to learn it as any. I tilted my head and matched his lips, mimicking his movements with my own. When he pressed me to lie back, I obeyed, helped him pull off my shirt, and our pants. It hurt, but the next time he came up on me like that, it didn’t hurt as much.
We kept to the dark, mostly. I didn’t do anything normal girls would have. So he didn’t help me walk along logs or hold doors or anything like that. Not that there were many doors around anymore.
He came back to me again and again, between girls, during girls, whenever he wanted me. Sometimes I caught him looking at me while we walked. I felt his eyes on my face, tracing the lines of the cheeks and nose as I kept pace with Davie.
During the day, I thought. I always thought, but now I had new things to think about. I thought about Davie, surprisingly. I thought about what Corey and I did, and wondered if Davie did it too. I never saw him around girls. I never saw him slip off. He always seemed to be around me, or near me, unless I was off with Corey. I wondered if Davie ever had sex. And I wondered what it would be like to have sex with Davie.
Mecca was messy. It was built from another city before it, ‘Mephis’ and it was all flashing weak lights, multicolored as if to make the world less gray and bleak. The people shuffled around, tired, and poor, and unable to do anything. No one wanted to die, but no one was really alive, either. I hated the city instantly.
But we stayed there. Me and Davie and Corey. Jacob and Marley were there, for a little while. Then one morning we woke up and they didn’t. I helped the boys by carrying the dog out to the street, where I set him next to Jacob as we’d found them. Asleep together. Dead together.
There were other people staying with us, in the dingy flat. Some were kids, younger than me. Only a few. I didn’t talk to them. I didn’t talk to anyone, or go near anyone except for Davie. He gave me weed to smoke with him at night, and I would curl up at his side, barely touching his abdomen, and I was safe in sleep.
Mecca lasted for years. Things were different from the road. They were supposed to be safer, but no one trusted anyone else. There was no government, no law. No one would help you if you got hurt. I never left Davie’s side.
We stayed in that flat, among the strangers, among the kids I didn’t talk to and the adults I didn’t trust, and we kept watch on each other. It was a safe place to be. Under Davie’s eyes I was safe. Next to him I was safe.
We would harvest water, and find food. We had to look harder than we did back in the plains. There were still some plants that manufactured. We thought. Somewhere. Maybe across the sea, where no one would come near us. The crazy ruined Americans. But somehow, they seemed to lurk around.
Once, a year or two after settling there, we came on a man selling the packets of just-add-water meals. He turned, looked at Davie, looked at me. Said:
“Give ye deh whole carton, yeh give’m her.”
My skin crawled as I stared him down. I hoped Davie wouldn’t take his offer, wouldn’t sell me after all. I waited, tense, not looking next to me, hoping.
There was the loud explosion of gunfire. We took the carton of food packets, and survived for months on them. I didn’t look back at the bullet-ridden carcass we left behind. No one stopped us. No one else cared.
Davie kept a closer watch on me, after that. It made it hard to sneak away with Corey, at first, but then I started to get good at it. I don’t know why I felt like Davie shouldn’t know about us, but I did.
I run a hand over the new bristles of my head. Davie glances at me as he adjusts his pack. I am ready, standing, steady. I can’t move, except to go. If I move I’ll break, of that I’m certain. We are armored and supplied and in the dead of night, we are disappearing.
“Ready, baby girl?” says Davie quietly. He’s always called me baby girl. For years now. I have never thought about the nickname, not until now. I watch his face for a long moment, and then I nod.
He reaches over to tighten the rifle strap hanging from my shoulder to hip, an old gesture. Like a mother straightening her child’s collar before school, but much more primitive. He pauses, fingers stiff on the buckle, and tilts his head back on his neck so that we are nose-to-nose.
“You sure about this?” he asks seriously. His eyes, so large and golden, bore into mine. I feel shrunken, tiny. Not just because of Davie’s bulk, not just because he is older and has taken care of me since we came down from the mountain. His stare makes me feel like a little girl again, helpless and confused.
I lick my lips and look away. He is too nearby. He has never pressed the boundaries of my space, even after finding out about Corey and I, even when I started sleeping next to him every night. He has never looked at me the way that other men look at me; he has never looked at anyone that way. My chest feels like a hollow case and I back a step apart.
“Sorry,” he murmurs, straightening up to his full height. I feel startlingly bereft.
“Davie—” I say quietly, or begin to say, but after his name I falter. What can I say to him? I want him to come back to where he was, at Corey proximity. I want him to break the unspoken rule between us and reach up to touch my face, my shoulders, my neck.
But I’m afraid, too, because there isn’t that detached sense that I felt with Corey. The safety of not caring. I care about Davie. He’s taken care of me for years. I love him. I look at him as he turns to stare at me. My eyes feel wide, my face feels young. He blinks several times and sort of shakes his head.
I reach out toward his wrist and he watches my hand. It seems to move too slowly; the air feels like it offers all the resistance in the world, that I must push through it in order to encounter the small patch of skin between his sleeve and his glove. I know, objectively, that I will feel the warm flesh, stretching over tendons, that I will encounter the knob of bone that protrudes faintly, that I will feel the muscles shift underneath, that momentary coil of tension that moves through either Davie or myself when we touch each other.
The air breaks apart under my fingers, shifting and sliding to make way as the slow arch of my hand finally completes itself, finally catches him.
I close my hand around his wrist, to the best of my ability. I am small, and he is large, thick. The warmth under my palm is reassuring, though. I look up at Davie, at his golden eyes, and tighten my hand faintly.
Mecca had fields of people. The way that the people moved around, milling, colorful and crowded in their bleak clothing, reminded me of the spiky grass of the plains. Caught together, weaving, all wretched and crackling and stiff.
I would climb up to the rooftop with Davie, during the daylight hours. Sometimes Corey joined us, but mostly it was just Davie and me. We would stare out at the crowds, watch them. Sometimes point. Davie kept talking, kept making a running commentary. Sometimes, if it was a very special occasion, we would smoke some weed together up there, with our legs dangling over the cement parapets toward the mucky streets below.
I would smile, from time to time. Davie always seemed particularly enchanted by my smiles. One time, after he found out about Corey and me, he caught me off-guard, with some dirty joke about a man who was limping. I blinked, and then grinned, and realized he was staring at me several seconds later. Our eyes met and I thought of a panicked rabbit, and thought of how like one I was. He kept staring, for a long moment.
“Does he get to see you smile?” he asked, watching my face fade into its usual composure of lacking.
I met his gaze, tilting my chin back faintly, rebelliously. And finally, I shook my head and lowered my gaze.
Davie leaned closer, breaking through the yard of space between us.
“You love him?” he asked, again.
I fixed my sight on some stars, distant, hidden by smoky atmosphere and clouds and the world around us. The stars. Maybe that was an answer, some people would whisper. Escaping to the stars. I did not ever mention that to build rockets that powerful would require money that simply didn’t exist in the world any longer. Or at least, not on our isolated block of it.
I stared at those stars as if they did contain my answer, or as if I had to think about the question. What I had to think about, really, was what I would say, if I could. If I were prone to speaking unnecessarily.
‘I love you. Not him.’
And he would recoil, sort of, surprised, and he’d stare at me seriously, the way he stared at me. Amber-gold eyes. Like fancy beer, just as liquid.
‘You sure, baby girl?’ he’d ask. He’d reach, and clasp my forearm in his hand—big fingers, strong gentle pressure around the fragile bone—the way he always would. It would bring his face near to mine, but not too near. In kissing distance, yes, but the kind you had to really lean for.
And I would nod. And I would lean.
Instead, finally, I shook my head. He stared at me the whole time, waiting for my answer, patient. Knowing that I didn’t particularly like being stared at so intently. He did it to make me uncomfortable, I knew, but I couldn’t muster up any anger, not even resentment. I would have done it, too.
He nodded, once, licked his lips. He lit up a cigarette, and then passed me one. I didn’t smoke very often, because cigs were hard to get, very hard to get, and I hadn’t let myself get to needing them like Davie or the cowboy.
I smoked this one, down to the filter, sitting in silence with Davie. At last we flicked them into the crowds below, as drizzling rain began to mist into Mecca. He looked at me and stood, brushing his hands on his pants, against his rear, and I couldn’t help glancing at their path.
He offered one to me, as I sat mutely, and I took it. I was too surprised to do anything else. I let him pull me up, facing him, and didn’t pull my fingers away. Just stared, and didn’t think about Corey at all. I thought about Davie.
“Don’t let him hurt you, okay, baby girl?” he said softly. He let go of my hand then, and turned to go inside.
I stayed out, in the drizzle, until I felt the cold starting to clog my nose and ears and throat, and then I went in and huddled up in the nest of blankets that Davie and I shared together. He wasn’t there. Corey stopped in, but didn’t bother me. He got food and left. I dozed, fitfully, mostly thought and was miserable.
At some point, Davie came back. He lay next to me, his back to me, but I was able to fall asleep when he got there. True sleep, not the frightening kicks of nightmares and bruises.
I stayed next to Davie throughout. He was wary of the idea, afraid it might be a trap of some sort, but he knew of nothing better. We had been traveling for years, now, without aim or objective. Sometimes we would stay in pockets of civilization. We made stops, like when each of the teenaged girls was gone. After Lana died, after I beat Davie, we stopped for nearly a month in a small farming village. I liked that village the best out of everywhere we went.
Mecca was hailed as the biggest city, the place where you went to know, to do. No one knew what there was to know, or to do. No one cared. We had no electronics, and not enough people understood them, or cared to learn, to bring electricity back. Indoor plumbing was a scarce, beautiful luxury. I was more used to squatting down in the woods and using leaves and grass.
Mae was tired. She didn’t know if she could make it to Mecca. We’d been hunting through the plains, searching for places. We’d left the remaining girl in a village a few months back. We’d lost people, gained people, and now were just a scattered few. Mae, the cowboy, Jacob and Marley, Davie, Corey, and me. We were the original few.
I didn’t mind this group, though. This was, to my mind, the best possible group. Well, Corey I could take or leave. The others, I didn’t mind so much. But I knew without hesitation, whichever way I went, I was going to stay with Davie. He, more than any of the others, had protected me. Cared for me. He had given me the love that the others simply did not have the capacity to provide.
It hadn’t been six months since I turned eleven. I was gangly, and now that I could defend myself, I didn’t let anyone hug or kiss me, or touch my hair. I kept cutting it shorter and shorter, to keep it from growing back too quickly. It seemed to grow faster because of it, though. My pants were much too large, stolen from a teenaged girl, and my sweater, more often than not, was tied around my hips, leaving only a stained tank top underneath, also a bit too large.
It was cold at night, still, though, so I was wearing my sweater while they argued. Mae wanted to try and settle somewhere nearby. She couldn’t travel any more. She had had enough. Her voice broke, slightly, as she tried to explain, in her unwavering, blunt tone, that she couldn’t take much more of this.
The cowboy offered her some of his weed—he always did, but she refused most of the time—and she took it, inhaled sharply and shut her eyes. I could feel the sting in them, and I blinked several times. It was like smoke from the fire, but with water in there. The water wasn’t soothing, though. The water was what burned Mae’s eyes.
“We hafta find us somewhere,” he grunted, nodding around at the open field where we camped. “Can’t go on like this forever, I agree, Mae. Why not try for it, why not try for Mecca? It’s a place, ain’t it? A place to be.”
“I never liked cities,” grumbled Mae, and took another drag of the joint before she gave it back to the cowboy. He jerked his head at Davie, who took it in his stead.
I frankly didn’t care one way or another. Traveling was something to do. But there were things to do in other villages, in other places. Where people grouped and clustered and tried to create what they could never have again.
The farming village, I liked it. I would be happy to stay there. But no one else would want to stay long. Even though we had, when we were there. Davie had kept us behind, insisted on it, though I never quite understood why. No one actually spoke about it to me, or around me, although they looked sharply at me at night, or when they saw me in the daytime.
The cowboy was shaking his head. “Well, what, you gonna herd cows an’ shit all day?”
Mae snorted. “I never touched a cow in my damn life, so don’t start on me!” But she was grinning. The argument was soon forgotten as everyone drifted toward sleep. I smoked, too, and felt woozy and giggly with the others, and kept Davie’s shifts with him as I always did.
But when we woke up in the morning, Mae had left. We didn’t track her, because, as he stared into the distance north, at the prints leaving camp, the cowboy announced that she wanted to go on her own. She clearly had no plan to die—she’d taken her share of supplies and ammo, and brought her trusty rifle—but she clearly had no plan to continue on to Mecca.
I stood next to Davie as we looked out. I could not imagine how it would be without Mae. I did not know why she had not spoken to me. I had thought she loved me, loved me in place of Lana or because of Lana or because I was stuck with Lana for so long.
But she had left without a word to anyone. I stared, emptily, at her retreating form, back in the direction we’d gone. I suddenly felt the burn of her eyes, last night, at the fire. I blinked, and felt moisture trailing down my face. I was crying.
Davie looked down at me, and then he did a double take. At first he was awkward, standing there, watching me cry silently, without expression. And he was still awkward, hesitant, as he crouched in front of me and reached to sort of pat my shoulder. I blinked, and took a long breath, and looked at him.
“Let’s go,” I said. He sort of blanched, and his warm skin looked almost white, just as always happened when I spoke. But then he nodded, and squeezed my shoulder before he stood and shouted.
“You heard her. Let’s get a move on!”
Corey had been devoted to me for a few days, had followed me everywhere and stared at me like some kind of idiot dog—not a smart one like Marley, a really dumb one you want to kick—and gave us away like that.
He cornered me, up on the roof, which is where I spent most of my free time, which I had far too much of for my tastes. I was content to let him amuse me for the time being, to kill those spare hours when there was no Davie around to kill them with.
“You’re so pretty, Rae,” he said, touching my face and kissing me. “So beautiful.”
I stood, against the wall, watching him through lowered eyelids. He wasn’t aware that I watched him, watched his face, most of the time when he was close. I was wary of him, tense and coiled, but he never hurt me, not really. So I let him be close, and kiss me, and used him to figure out the first fumblings of adolescence. I think, underneath his youthful apprehension, he knew that I didn’t care about him except as far as he was useful to me. Eventually, finally, it drove him away.
“Give me a kiss, baby,” he said. Obediently, I leaned forward and mashed my lips to his.
This was when Davie walked up.
I heard the creak-bang of the door and snapped away from Corey instantly. I was around him, not caught against the wall, before he had time to blink. But I was focused on Davie, who was staring, open-mouthed.
I was trembling.
“It’s not—I’m not—” stammered Corey.
“Shut the fuck up,” said Davie, completely deadpan. He was completely cold, so furious he couldn’t even feel the part of him that was rational, that wasn’t furious. It left an eerie calm wake.
Corey shut the fuck up.
Davie’s eyes fixed on my face. They were blazing, energetic, almost green through the hazel-gold. They burned, from the inside. I felt my too-tense muscles knot again.
“What the fuck kind of a joke is this?” he said flatly.
I shook my head. It wasn’t a joke. I was sleeping with Corey. I couldn’t speak.
He took a step closer and Corey, foolishly, tried to insert himself between us.
“It wasn’t her fault! It was mine! Don’t hurt—” he began, but Davie shoved him roughly aside. My elbow kept him from getting in the way further.
“I thought you were smarter than that, better than that,” he said, looking at Corey with a sort of distasteful twist to his nose and mouth as he said ‘that.’ He looked back to me, eyes running swiftly from my feet to my head. “But you’re grown-up. You’re young, but you’re not a kid.”
I opened my mouth, as if to protest, and then blinked and shut it. I wanted to cry. My eyes hurt. My stomach shot through with pain. I wanted to vomit, and weep, and curl up with Davie simultaneously. I shut my mouth and shook my head, then forced my face back into stillness.
He backed up a few steps, reached for the door. “Gotta let you make your own mistakes,” he said quietly, almost inaudible. I heard him, barely, and felt my gut twist, and my chest ache. The clawing of tears at my eyes was unbearable. I licked my lips and nodded slightly as he disappeared through the door.
Jacob spoke no more than I did, now. Everyone seemed to assume this was the natural course, though. Just as they’d grown accustomed to my not speaking, except that they shrugged it off as normal, as expected. I did, too.
The cowboy was strained with the journey. Since Mae had left, he’d seemed to feel his limp more, seemed to age more. He’d seemed to be stuck, permanently, at the age he was walking into the shelter, fiftysomething and smoky and grinning. But he’d drooped. You could see the years and the world catching him, hunching his shoulders. Even around the fire, with a flask of whiskey and a joint, he was somber.
Corey was tired, too, but in a more irritable way. I had learned, over the course of our journey, that he was actually a few months older than Davie. I had always assumed that Davie was older, though, because he was responsible. He fought. He led. He didn’t hesitate to take control, whereas Corey was more prone to be flighty or whiney.
I was tired, too. I was tired of having nowhere to go, of not looking forward to anything. I didn’t look forward to Mecca, I never did, but with it in sight, there was the faint taste of a goal within reach. It was more dizzying, more glorious than anything weed or whiskey could do to me.
Davie was as bad as anyone else. He was tired, and grouchy, and worried. Sometimes, he’d reach down and touch my shoulder, checking that I was still there. I didn’t mind it, the spontaneous touching, because I knew that Davie needed it, and I did, too. In my way.
Davie showed his wear in the way his movements seemed to be slowed, lazier. Our pace had become a crawl, until we finally caught sight of the plume in the distance. Civilization. People. A real city.
Everyone seemed to straighten, except for the cowboy. Everyone moved quicker, jerkier. Our feet ate the ground. At night, we’d twitch around the fire, trade stories of cities. I listened, and watched, and took some sips from the bottle when Davie passed it to me. We were tired, and sore, but we couldn’t sleep.
I would wake up an hour before dawn, normally. Now, two hours, and Davie would be waking up with me. We were the first ones up, always, and would sit, in the mornings, making coffee over the cooling coals of the fire.
Davie was not a morning person, so the ritual was completed in silence. He’d let me have a few puffs of his cigarette, and then we would drink the first cups of coffee as the others began to rise. Jacob and Marley, and then the cowboy, and Corey the last.
I didn’t realize how much I liked those mornings until we were in the city and didn’t have them anymore.
At night, we burrow down together. There is still the odd space between our bodies, which now feels like a vacuum, an unpleasant suction between my back and his chest. I stare at the fire for hours before sleep reaches me, and it is only in time to Davie’s even breaths. We still wake up an hour before dawn. We have our coffee again.
While we walk, in the daytime, we are quiet. Just like before. Sometimes I will pause, at the top of a hill or against a tree, and I catch the amber-gold of his eyes. He watches me, cautious, nervous. Ambivalent.
I hate it.
I want him to stop worrying about what I think. I know he is. I know he believes me to be very strong, and very fragile at the same time. He is mistaken. I am not delicate, I am not a treasure. I am not breakable. He makes my stomach ache, and my shoulders tighten. I am still too frightened to touch him. I don’t know how to.
One night, as we finish eating our gamey dinner, Davie sits back and watches me for a long time.
“I didn’t want to believe in God, you know. After all that… happened.”
I blink. I tilt my head to the side and raise my eyebrows.
He shakes his head, glances into the dark somewhere to his right, and continues. “I don’t want to believe in God, but you make me believe, baby girl.” The firelight catches the twin sparks of his eyes as they fix on my face. I freeze under his scrutiny. “You make me think there’s gotta be something, ’cause even though he tore the world down, God left you there. For me.”
I lick my lips. My whole mouth is dry. Worse than weed. It feels like the moisture has been sucked away ruthlessly.
He continues to watch me, for a few minutes. I don’t move until he looks away. And then I get up, and walk over to his side of the fire. Without a word, I sit next to him.
I want to hold him, to kiss him; I want to tell him he makes me believe in God, too.
I rest my head against his arm. He shifts, and glances down at me, and then he smiles. I wonder if he thinks of me still as a child, even though he’s told me a million times that I’m not one. I wonder if that’s why he doesn’t want me.
“Let’s go to sleep,” he says after a while of me leaning there comfortably. I nod drowsily and we spread the blankets on the ground, and then over ourselves.
I am unaccountably tense, though, lying next to him. The vacuum seems painful tonight.
One of his hands touches my waist, tentatively. I blink. For a while neither of us moves. Seconds stretch to minutes, and every breath is an hour in the mind, drawn in and released at the pace of snails.
Slowly, I start to shift. There is the horrible, loud noise of my body moving inch by inch across the blankets. I wince, though Davie can’t see it in the dark. This whole awkward dance is wretched, but I don’t know how to work it, not really. All I learned from Corey was that there was sex, and there was more than sex, but I certainly never saw it in him.
I flinch when I encounter his chest against my back. I did not expect it so soon. I flinch and feel the shock of it: together and apart. I quickly press back, mold myself to him. His arm closes around me, and the other one, too, across my shoulders. He somehow finds my hands, laces his fingers with mine.
The cocoon of his body. I lay so carefully apart from it for nearly a decade.
That night, around the fire, we laughed and celebrated. Davie and the cowboy had a whole flask to pass around, and even Jacob had some. We drank until the sky moved in slow spirals around us. Davie had to hold me upright, to walk me to our blankets. The next day, we were slower than usual, we slept in.
The cowboy was angry. The sharp smoke of his cigarettes, the bite of his stare: he was angry at our lost time. He wanted to be done with the road forever, with the endless walking, with the constant searching for food. He wanted a place to sleep at night, a place he could always go back to when he needed rest. He was sick of the traipsing around, of the aching limbs, of the people that kept dying and getting hurt. He was sick of the unfriendlies, and the hostility, and the constant fearful wariness.
The problem with unfriendlies is, everyone can be one. If you have guns, if you have arguments, if you are jumpy, you are unfriendlies. No one can tell. We were lucky not to have gotten gunned down much sooner.
And no one really cares, in the end, when they kill someone they don’t care about. After a while, it doesn’t really feel like people. It feels like dolls, maybe. Or targets. And people you don’t know are the easiest to not care about.
Maybe it was the cowboy’s stupid fucking rainbow tye-dyed tee shirt that he wouldn’t get rid of. Maybe it was God, saving him before he could reach Mecca and have his heart ripped out by the horrific city. Maybe it was the fact that he left ahead of us, on his guard shift, while Davie and I slept. Marley was too tired to do anything, and the others too asleep.
He went out, four hours ahead of everyone else’s awakening, the day before we were to arrive in Mecca. It took us another hour to get on the road, where normally we’d take two. The long years in the plains had left us sort of idle and lazy.
And there were some unfriendlies. They shot. We never got a close look at them. Just heard the shot and began to rush forward. Davie and I got there first. We sprinted. The whole way, the miles that he’d limped to his death. My chest was utterly empty as I stared at the body, twisted with bullets, limp.
Davie knelt down and checked his pulse, even though there was no point. Maybe he died waiting for us. But he looked like he’d been dead a few hours. Which was pretty well on the money.
We sat there, side by side, staring at the body as we waited for the others to arrive. Davie didn’t smoke, or anything, didn’t take the cowboy’s supplies or his weed or his cigarettes or his guns.
He reached for my hand. It was the first time he’d actually reached for my hand, not to swing me across a river or up a tree, but to hold my hand. I held his fingers tightly in mine, offering him my strength through that small physical contact.
I could feel, very faintly, the burn, but it was very far back. Davie didn’t cry. He would never cry. And if holding my hand would help him not to cry, then he could hold my hand. He gently squeezed back, as if afraid to crush the bones of my hand, and did not look at me.
We both stared, fixed, at the body of the cowboy.
We walk the road every day, but in no hurry, and we camp at night. We fall asleep close together, limbs and fingers tangled. Every morning, I wake up warm, his face pressed to the top of my head. My hair is growing. He doesn’t touch it, not yet.
I am impatient. He finds it amusing. But he will not press me or pressure me, and he will not be like Corey. I do not know how to make advances. I can lean forward and kiss him, but I am unable to do more. So I kiss him. I reach up and touch his hair when I do, and I tremble slightly. He is sturdy. His arm props up my waist, and the other one holds my back.
We talk, in small spurts, at random intervals throughout the day. He will look at me, or at something in the distance only he can see, or he will point something out. And sometimes I will ask questions, or make a comment.
“I like hearing you talk, Raelin,” he says one day.
We are paused, having lunch, our blankets spread like picnics. Having eaten, and shared a cigarette, we are reclined, facing each other. Talking about stars. He had to argue me out of my ‘no money’ stance. He kept insisting I ‘imagine.’
But he says that name. That word. I freeze.
“That’s not my name.”
He blinks. He stares at me, and reaches up, very slowly, to touch my cheekbone. Studying the colors of our skin, side-by-side, maybe.
“How many years?”
I shrug. I may talk a bit, but I am not necessarily talkative. And only with Davie, anyway.
He shakes his head, and then grins at me. “Figures. So do you have a name?”
I stare at him. I watch the slow movement of amber flecks in his eyes, and I chew my lip. My mother used to call me, at home. Before. I have been Raelin for ten years, but I hate that name. That’s what Lana called me. I don’t want Davie to call me that.
“Helene.”
