Not a Drop to Drink

Six

Twilight had fallen by the time Lynn had made a binding for her ankle out of Mother’s shirt. She felt like a vulture as she stripped Mother’s body of anything useful—knife, matches, even the hair tie she’d been using. Nothing should be wasted. Scavenging from bodies was nothing new to Lynn, but taking Mother’s shirt from her as a cold sleet began brought her to her knees. She cried in long, gasping breaths that ripped through her body. Her knees slipped in the blood-soaked mud, and she fell face forward into the muck, where she saw her rifle.

She crawled toward it, wiping it as clean as she could on her shirt. The wind was gusting now, spitting freezing rain into her face and forming her hair into dark icicles around her face. She braced herself against the barrel of the gun and rose to her feet. Agony shot up her leg the second she tried to put any weight on her ankle. Bulging, swollen flesh puffed out from between the strips that she’d used to bind it.

Lynn heard muffled sounds in the grass between the gusts of the wind, and she looked at the pieces of venison still strewn around them. They were drawing predators. She grabbed Mother by the armpits and dragged her away from the circle of blood and meat. Her legs were useless; she settled for crawling, dragging Mother’s corpse behind her. It took an hour for her to get to the driveway. The gravel bit into her flesh as she struggled to pull her own weight and Mother’s.

She pulled Mother’s body under the shelter of a pine tree and rested. The pine offered a little cover from the sleet, and she hoped that the smell might help mask their human scent. She was covered in blood and to an animal nose, Mother would already smell like death. They came and went through the night, fighting over the pieces of salted venison. At one point she heard two raccoons screaming at each other and then the shattering of glass. The smokehouse door had been open. She cracked her head against the trunk of the tree in frustration. All their meat was gone.

Shock had its way with her once the adrenaline was gone and Lynn dozed. When something tried to drag Mother away by her foot Lynn snapped awake and fired blindly. She stared futilely into the black night, launching pinecones and curses at any noises she heard once she’d run out of bullets. When pink stained the sky, she saw that Mother’s eyes were frozen open.

It was two days before she admitted that she would not be able to dig the grave. Her hobbled efforts had yielded a hole a barely a foot deep in the frozen ground. She’d never be able to get Mother deep enough to keep the coyotes from digging her up. The skin around her ankle was green with bruising, the hollow pounding of it echoed in her ears as she dragged herself around on her elbows hour after hour, checking on Mother’s body and attempting to claw away at the ground.

Leaving Mother to the coyotes was unthinkable, burying her impossible. After a long debate, Lynn pulled Mother into what was left of the smokehouse. The left window was broken, the door hung open. Clumps of dried mud formed a path where animals had tromped through the soaked yard to get their share. The few hooks left hanging from the beams had errant strips of meat clinging to them, peppered with teeth marks. Some were large and clearly canine. Tiny mice teeth had nibbled the pieces near the rafters.

Lynn laid Mother on the floor, looking upward through the hole she’d been cutting in the ceiling the day before. Thanks to Mother, Lynn knew what poetic justice was, and a sad smile tugged at her mouth as she used a match taken from the body of a man Mother had shot. The old wood of the outbuilding caught without hesitation, and the plume of smoke that reached into the sky would be visible to the south, Lynn knew. She sat in the tall grass with her injured ankle folded beneath her, and the rifle across her knees, almost hoping that someone would come.

The fire burned hot and fast, bringing down the building in a shower of sparks and leaving behind a pile of coals with no hint of bone among them. Once the last red ember had winked out, Lynn lurched down the stairs and to her cot in misery. She curled into the fetal position and faced the wall, her throbbing ankle resting on top of her healthy foot. The puffy flesh that rose from the top of her makeshift bandage pulsed against the fabric, fighting for the freedom to swell further. She would find no peace in sleep while it throbbed, but she pulled her pillow over her face to muffle her sobs.

She did not gather water for ten days.

Fear drove her from the tomb of the basement. A nightmare, rampant with images of men filing out of the fields and dipping their buckets into her pond had brought her up from her well of grief and pain. Her ankle was not broken; she could put more weight on it. She fashioned a splint for herself by snapping a wooden yardstick in half and binding the two strips to either side of her foot. It wasn’t a cure, but she could hobble well enough to take care of herself.

She needed to get wood downstairs, the tiny pile next to the stove that had kept her alive while she mourned was gone, the level of water in the purified basement tank lower than what she cared for. The mental list of chores assembled in her head made Lynn feel better. The weight of purpose and responsibility helped to erase the feel of Mother’s frozen hand glancing against her hair as Lynn pulled her into the smokehouse.

“‘Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without an object cannot live.’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” Lynn said to herself as she tightened her bootlaces around the homemade splint.

The sight of trampled ground around the perimeter of the pond brought her rifle to the ready, safety off. Large coyote prints crisscrossed freely, brave and confident. Smaller tracks littered the shallower bank, where raccoons had been. Among them all, standing out sharply, was a pair of boot prints. Lynn stared at them, fear rising in her throat. By the depth of the print, he’d stood there a while.

Anger joined the fear as she imagined him surveying the property, dragging his eyes over her house while she lay injured and grieving in the basement. She heard something behind her and whirled, frightening a rabbit that had come to drink. The wildlife had become bold with no one to defend the pond, no shots ringing out over its placid surface.

Lynn made the trek to the barn and retrieved her buckets. Pain shot through her foot at the extra weight of ten gallons of water but she struggled up the bank in spite of it, teeth gritted. There was no one to cover her, so she strapped her rifle to her back and hoped that she could be quick if the man returned.

Water seen to, she went back to the basement, unhooked the hinged window, and tossed wood through the hole until her arms couldn’t take it anymore. With two people, the job had never felt hard. But Lynn was alone and injured.

She gathered blankets, extra ammunition, and a pillow. While the weather was warm, she would stay on the roof. Keeping a continuous watch would be impossible, but she could at least make her presence known. The man had been alone, of that she was sure. Whether he was only a traveler come to fill his bucket, or a scout sent by the party that had tried to overwhelm her and Mother, she did not know. Whoever he was, she would be ready if he returned.

Instead of men she saw dogs, and she blew the head off the first coyote that came to the pond for a drink. Boredom had taken a toll as she waited for the return of the mysterious man, but the still-kicking corpse of the coyote filled her with satisfaction. The second coyote came to investigate hours later, and she took him in the rear leg. He made it nearly a mile from the house before collapsing, which brought others out to him. She made short work of two and picked off the slowest ones as the pack bolted away.

It became an obsession, a twisted revenge for the needless death of Mother. The body that had fallen near the pond she dragged out into the field. None ventured any closer. The stink of surprise and death that it had sprayed in its dying throes was too powerful for animals to ignore. When the coyotes learned to skirt the western field, she picked them off in the east, and the buzzards swarmed.

Gathering water became a function she performed out of habit, not the task that used to fill her with a sense of urgency. She ate quickly and tasted nothing, but her real prey never showed his face. Lynn killed fifty coyotes in a few days, but never saw Big Bastard. Her bullets flew without thought for size or guilt, or even the ammunition that Mother had always warned was precious. By the fifth day, the smell of rot filled the air. The only thing that cut through it was the tang of gunpowder when she took another down.

Lynn’s eyelids were growing heavy, her cheek resting against the warm rifle stock when a dark cloud of buzzards rose from the field, cackling anxiously about their disturbed meal. A man was coming across the field from the southwest, a handkerchief across his face to ward off the smell of the dead. Lynn squinted into the scope, watching as the he skirted the corpses scattered in his path. His left leg dragged, the foot turned awkwardly inward.

Recognition startled Lynn. The loss of Mother had struck her so deeply she’d forgotten there was one other person she could name in the world—Stebbs. His halting pace slowed as he came toward a boulder that rested in the middle of the field. He rested on it, mopping his neck from the strain of walking the distance from his cabin.

Lynn studied him through the scope. The twisted foot she remembered from years of watching him lope back and forth on his daily routine in the woods. The red handkerchief she’d seen before too, often tied around his head if he was sweating, which seemed to be always.

He pulled something out of his pocket and held it up in the air. A piece of paper fluttered brightly in the wind. Lynn turned her barrel slightly into the setting sun so that rays flashed off it. He saw her signal and set the paper on the boulder, using another stone to weigh it down. Then he turned and slowly made his way back to his shack in the woods.

Lynn debated. Going out would be difficult. Without Mother, even trips to the pond were a test of nerves. With no one to cover her back, every step felt like a reprieve from death, each silent second without a sniper’s bullet an unprayed-for miracle. The walk itself wouldn’t be easy. Her ankle was much better, but the boulder was a half mile out. She tightened the laces on her boot as she thought through her options. Anyone watching the house would take it now, while she was gone. There would be no chance for her to sprint back and defend it, in her condition.

She slid behind the wheel of the truck cautiously, careful not to bang her ankle against the running board. The old engine fired to life and she backed out of the pole barn, sick at the thought of leaving the house even for a moment. She drove through the field without bothering to swerve around offal, oblivious to the riddled coyote bodies underneath her tires. When she reached the rock she left the engine running, moving as quickly as possible to get the note and drive back home.

She didn’t open the folded paper until she was back on the roof. When she did, she snorted with unexpected laughter.

“Can you read?” it asked.

Lynn wrote her response. “Yes, I can.”

She thought a second, then added another line.

“Asshole.”