Shifting

Two

It took us about twenty nervous minutes, but we managed to build a crude stretcher out of the dead man’s coat and some branches. I wondered how she would react if she woke up and noticed she was riding on the bloody clothes of her companion.

In the open trunk I spotted a large wad of newspapers. They were copies of the Louisville Courier Journal. I checked the dates, and they were from last month. I decided to take them with us. Outside news was valuable.

While we built the stretcher, I noticed a tripod-shaped print in the mud near the car. It was a deep print, indicating something big had made it. It looked like a hoof-print. I chewed my lip for a second, glancing at Vance. I knew what his reaction would be; he would want to run-right now. I covered the hoof-print with a scoop of dead leaves and worked faster on the stretcher, eyeing the trees around us distrustfully.

“What’s wrong, Gannon?” asked Vance.

“Nothing.”

When it was time to lift her, she seemed to weigh nothing at all stretched out between the two of us. I wondered if we were doing the right thing taking her in. Sometimes, these days, strangers went bad on you. They rotted and changed overnight, like fruit that you had forgotten about and left on the counter for too long.

Vance at first took up the rear position, letting me lead. But almost immediately, he halted.

“Let me lead,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s no good,” he shook his head. “I can’t keep a sharp eye out with her stretched out in front of me, I keep thinking if she’ll die or not and what her voice will sound like and…”

“Okay,” I said, and we switched places. Walking behind him, I noticed he had a new heavy lump weighing down his coat pocket. It had to be the dead man’s pistol. Vance still believed in guns, but I did not. They did not always fire anymore, because like everything else, they had changed. Sometimes, usually when you had a frenzied monster chewing on your foot, they would misfire or jam. That’s why I carried my grandpa’s saber. It always worked. Vance’s theory was to have a lot of guns, hoping at least one of them would go off. I didn’t argue. There was no need. Whoever lived the longest would be proven right.

As we carried her, I thought about the benefits of being attractive. Would we have worked as hard to save the driver, if he had been the one to survive? We had even brought the backpack she had with her in the backseat. True, she didn’t weigh much, but I had to wonder if we would risk so much for someone less interesting. The world was anything but fair.

“You think she’s a hitchhiker?” asked Vance from up ahead between white puffs. We were going uphill and the loose leaves were sliding around, slowing us down.

“I don’t know.”

“How old do you think she is? She looks like she’s maybe twenty.”

“Kind of young for you then,” I remarked.

“Really young for you,” he said with a dark glance.

“You’re still thinking about her, even though we switched,” I said, grinning.

“Yeah. I bet you are, too.”

I didn’t respond, I didn’t have to. We both knew the truth of it. She was possibly the only adult female under thirty left alive in the county. We trudged westward, deeper into the woods and away from the highway. The shores of Lake Monroe were to the left and less than a mile off.

“Who do you think she is?” Vance continued when the land leveled.

“She’s probably up from Louisville. Plenty of people have been trying to get out to the countryside.”

“So what went wrong? Do you think one of them changed and caused the wreck?”

“It would have to be her if that happened, it was the driver’s neck that was ripped.”

“Maybe,” I said, thinking of the hoof-print I’d seen. I had hoped Vance would shut up and walk faster if I didn’t talk much. But as his brother, I knew better.

Vance glanced nervously over his shoulder at the girl between us. “She looks really normal. I bet something got in. Maybe they had a window down, and something flew in there.”

“Could be.”

“I hate the flying ones.

“Yeah.”

“You know, I’m not sure that we should take her back to our cabin.”

It was my turn to frown. I said nothing, but he had a point. You never knew who was dangerous.

“We should take her to the Preacher. We are supposed to be patrolling the highway, and we definitely have something to report,” said Vance, “He’ll know what to do, and I bet he could tell if she’s dangerous or not.”

“We couldn’t make it there before dark.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to carry her that far anyway. We’ll have to take her to the cabin. Then we could get out the Durango and drive her over.”

“It would still be dark before we got back.”

He nodded. We both thought about it as we trudged on. Things always got much worse in the dark. Vance managed to shut up for about twenty minutes, saving our breath for walking.

“What time do you think it is?” I asked him finally. The girl was slowing us down now, getting through the denser trees was a problem with a stretcher, and we had to hunt for open trails.

“It looks like four o’clock at least,” he said. Neither one of us wore a watch, of course. Watches didn’t work right anymore. Complex electronic things were useless now, they either ran too fast, or too slow, or simply spit sparks and died when you turned them on. No one knew why. The Preacher simply said that the laws of the world had changed, and it was time to learn how to live by the new laws.

“Let’s pick it up,” I said.

He glanced back at me, immediately suspicious. “Tell me,” he said with eyes narrowed.

I sighed and told him about the tripod-shaped print in the mud back at the wreck. Half-way through my confession, he dropped his end of the stretcher. The girl rolled partly off the stretcher and her head lolled into the leaves.

“You idiot, Vance,” I said, easing her back onto the stretcher. “What if her spine is damaged?”

“Then she’s dead anyway,” he snapped. “I can’t believe you had me running around in the woods cutting sticks to carry her without telling me something big was out there. I used to wear your hand-me-down feet-pajamas and the moment a girl shows up I can’t trust you anymore?”

“You would have run off.”

He scowled, stamped around and threw up his arms sputtering. “Maybe! But I would have told you, Gannon!”

He had a finger pointed at my chest, and I looked down. “Sorry.”

Getting an apology out of me was rare, and he was impressed, but still angry. “Something is out there and you were letting it follow us back home without even telling me.” He complained further for about a minute before I cut him off.

“It’s getting dark fast, we’ve got a ways to go, let’s just get going and pick up the pace,” I said. I took my end of the stretcher and looked at him.

Vance hesitated. He looked around at the trees, which seemed to crowd in closer every minute. A bird cried and the wind rustled the upper branches of the forest. He looked down at the girl, and I knew he was thinking about ditching her. He lifted an arm that had flopped off and placed it back onto the stretcher. We both saw smudged high cheekbones and eyes that would be wide and bright if they ever opened again. I wondered what color they were. Her hair was a honey-brown blonde. I could tell just by looking at it the color didn’t come out of a bottle.

I could not carry her alone and defend myself if Vance took off, so I was quiet, letting him think it over. We both knew he was deciding if she lived or died. He stared at her.

I think it was her face that saved her in the end. I wondered how many times over the millennia lives had been decided in just such a moment.

With a grunt of annoyance, Vance took up the stretcher again and we hustled deeper into the woods toward our cabin.