Dead & Gone

9

The girl rose with the first light of dawn, her hunter’s mind alert to the touch of sunlight on the smoked-glass windows of the dead SUV. She woke quickly, her senses sharpened by months of surviving on her own.

Slowly and cautiously she looked out of each of the windows, looking for predators, alive or dead.

Looking for reapers.

The desert was empty and vast.

She opened the door of the SUV and moved outside and away from the vehicle, running low and fast and then turning to look back. It was a trick she had learned the hard way. Sometimes predators waited on top of a vehicle. And sometimes there were blind spots when you were inside. From a distance she could see all around the car.

There was no one and nothing. No sign of Sister Connie or Brother Andrew or anyone from the Night Church.

She crept back and examined the plastic she had set up the night before, and for the first time in days she smiled. The center of each sheet of plastic was bellied down, heavy with dew. The girl fetched her canteen and carefully poured the water into it. The combined water filled her canteen nearly to the top. She licked the last drops off the sheeting and carefully folded it and stowed it in her pack. Then she went to check the traps.

From a distance she could tell that all three of the traps had been sprung, and her heart leaped in her chest. She broke into a run, eager to see what kind of meat the night had brought to her.

Almost immediately she slowed from a run to a fast walk to a sudden stillness. She tore the slingshot from her pocket, loaded it with a sharp stone, and wheeled around, looking for an enemy.

For a trickster.

For answers.

Was this some strange and subtle trap set by Brother Andrew?

The desert seemed totally empty.

She turned back to the snares.

What in the sam hill is going on? she demanded, not sure if she thought it or shouted it.

In the center of each one, standing perfectly erect, glinting in the morning sunlight, was an aluminum can.

Not the empty, rusted cans that were everywhere, discarded years ago by scavengers. These cans were not rusted. And they were not empty.

The girl approached the closest one very cautiously, ready to counterattack if her own snares were baited to catch her. She saw no trip wires, no sticks bent back under pressure. The ground did not look like it had been excavated to dig a pit and then covered over.

The can was still there. A square can. Blue, with an illustration of some kind on it.

She crept closer, and in her belly hunger warred with caution. Hunger became a white-hot screaming thing.

When she was five feet away she could read the label of the can. She mouthed the word.

“Spam.”

She knew what that was. Meat in a can. It was old, but the can was not puffy with expanding gasses the way they got when the contents were spoiled. Cans like that were filled with deadly bacteria.

This can looked fine.

She left it there and moved over to the second snare. That can was round, tall, also blue. It said: DOLE PINEAPPLE CHUNKS—100 % PINEAPPLE JUICE.

The third can was red. GOYA KIDNEY BEANS IN SAUCE.

She looked around.

Nothing.

She made a circle around the traps, going out as far as a mile.

Nothing.

No footprints. No sign.

Just three cans. Meat, fruit, beans.

If she was smart, if she was careful, she could live on that for a week. Maybe more. The beans and the meat were both protein.

The girl straightened and eased the tension on the slingshot.

“Who are you?” she yelled. “Where are you?”

The wind answered with a whisper of sand across the landscape.

She grabbed the cans and ran back to the Explorer.

She was laughing.

She was weeping.

She wasn’t going to die today.