Humanity (2 page)

Chapter 2

Horror filled my chest at the sight that
met my eyes, and I finally stumbled up to my knees. My mother lay to my right,
facedown, blood forming a pool in her skull and spilling out onto the dirt.

My shock was muted, though. Out of
everything that I had seen in my life, how could it shock me that someone I
loved had finally been killed?

Not someone. Everyone. Everyone I loved.
Two people. Dead.

I snapped my head around, peering around
me. My eyes landed on
his
back, the
beige color of his shirt fading into the trees. Too late, I realized he was
alone. Nausea filled my gut even as hatred filled my heart. Why?
Why
? For that doe? That was
our
hunt! And my parents were dead for
his theft.

I brought to mind the image of their
faces: Mom, excited to give me something beautiful, to give me the silver and
blue bracelet. Dad, indulging her impractical wish because he loved her. Dad,
kissing each of our foreheads.

I couldn’t handle the pain the image
caused me, and so I focused on what I could understand.

I rocked forward, toward my mother’s
body, detangling the backpack from her torso. I placed it on my own back, then
gently touched her hand one more time. I didn’t turn her over; I didn’t want to
look at her face and see the blank, staring eyes that matched my father’s. I
kissed her hand, then shifted to where my father lay. As a rule, his own pack
didn’t have anything valuable in it, so I simply kissed his unblemished
forehead. Then I stood, knowing I didn’t have any time to spare.

“Do you remember that couple my parents
were talking to before the hunt?” I asked Alice, not looking at her but instead
surveying the area, eyes landing on each body I could see before skittering
back to the retreating figure. He had yet to completely disappear, slow under
his burden. He wouldn’t be able to keep even that pace for long. I could catch
up, as long as I knew where to find him.

“Yeah.”

“Where did they fall?”

I looked at her, ready for her to point
me in the right direction.

She was looking at me suspiciously. “Why
do you ask?”

“I’m taking back what my parents gave
them,” I told her scathingly. “Do you know where they fell?”

“Over there,” she said, pointing toward
the clearing.

I jogged in that direction, down the dip
of a hill, and found them lying against the base of the statue, hands still
loosely clasped. I wrinkled my nose against the display of emotion, beginning
to pat down their bodies in search of the bottle.

And there it was, in the deep pocket of
his dirty khakis. I pulled it out, trying not to notice how his leg was still
warm, and then replaced it in my mother’s backpack.

I turned away from them. Then, I started
running.

“Where are you going?” Alice called
softly, falling into step with me.

“I’m going to kill him,” I murmured; the
flame of anger burned like fire in my chest, fueling each stride.

“That’s not going to bring your parents
back,” she told me, still keeping pace with me.

“I don’t care,” I said. “He deserves it.”

“I understand – I did the same when my
parents were killed.”

I snapped a glance at her, startled by
this new information. She had never shared so much of herself with me. We kept
company, but not much else. I hadn’t known her for long, but she’d always been
drawn to me, drawn to my family. I’d already known that she hadn’t always been
alone. She knew what it was like to be a piece of a greater whole, and craved
what came from that.

But I’d puzzled that out for myself – she
hadn’t offered that information.

“What are you going to do after he’s dead?”
she asked.

“I don’t know; I’ll figure it out.”

She paused, keeping pace with me, before
speaking again. “After he’s dead, come find me, if you want. We can stick
together for a while.”

I glanced her way, meeting her eyes for
an instant before continuing to propel myself forward, toward my target. She
might have been willing to help me, but I didn’t ask; this was something I
needed to do myself, and she seemed to understand that.

A separate realization hit me: a stack of
flatbreads, wrapped in a cloth, that were going to go moldy if I didn’t get to
them in the next few days. “If I don’t come back, there are emergency
provisions hidden in the large oak that’s in the front yard of the blue house.
Four doors to the left of the compound. In a brown backpack. You can have it if
I don’t find you first.”

She nodded at me. “Agreed.”

“See you,” I said.

“See you,” she echoed, and then veered
off course, running back in the direction we had come, back towards the heart
of the city.

I kept running away, knowing the man had
been heading in this direction before I had gone back for those vitamins. He
couldn’t have gotten too far ahead of me.

There! The doe was still slung on his
back as he slowly trotted along.

I slowed my pace enough to raise my gun,
aiming for his leg. I pressed the trigger, cursing as I missed by an inch.

He immediately dropped his load, raising
his gun and firing back.

I didn’t hesitate, just kept shooting.

Miss. Miss.

I ducked behind a tree, reaching the gun
around it to keep firing. I pulled the trigger, knowing that, this time, the
bullet would hit its mark.

Nothing happened. My gun wasn’t shooting,
even as I repeatedly hit the trigger.

I pulled my arm in, looking down at the
gun. It was out of bullets.

“Out of ammo, darling?” a deep voice
called out to me. “Can’t kill much with an empty gun.”

I froze, trying to think quickly. Hatred
boiled thick in my veins. I wanted to kill this man so badly, but he was right:
no bullets meant no death. Why hadn’t I thought to check before heading after
him? There had been so many fallen guns by the clearing, so many spare bullets
I could have grabbed if I had only realized. . .

“Look, I won’t shoot you. Nothing fair
about shooting a defenseless girl.” His voice wasn’t coming nearer, but I felt
the threat in any case. If I ran, he could easily shoot me dead – like I
believed he wasn’t going to shoot me. But I couldn’t hide forever. Furthermore,
every moment he still breathed made me more and more aware of my aloneness. The
aloneness that
he
had caused.

I wanted revenge.

I wanted him
dead
.

I clenched my fists in frustration,
digging my nails into my skin on one hand as I dug the empty gun into my skin
on the other. I wanted to
punch
something. Someone.

The man grunted, and I heard him tear a
branch off a tree, then another. Did that mean he’d put his gun down? Should I
risk running?

The sound of a match being lit met my
ears. He was starting a fire.

“You can run if you’d like. No point in
killing you if you’re leaving me alone. As to that, no point in killing you if
you don’t pose a threat.” His voice was coming nearer. Oh
God
, he was going to kill me. He really was just
teasing me about letting me run.

No, wait. There was one other thing he
could want from me, other than killing me. I couldn’t run, though. If I lost
sight of him now, I might never see him again. Never seeing him again meant
never killing him.

He appeared from around my tree, coming
to face me. As I had noticed before, he was big, but all of his bulk was
muscle: his shoulders were wide-set, his arms and chest large under a
long-sleeved thermal. His head was covered in shocks of auburn curls, and
freckles traced his cheeks, throwing off my ability to determine his age. Dirt
rimmed the creases of his face, and caked into the drying sweat on his neck. I
stared deep into his dark brown eyes, hoping to communicate my revulsion with
him without words.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “Why did
you follow me?”

“I’m going to kill you,” I told him
directly, spitting out the words like venom.

He raised his eyebrows. “Not without
bullets you ain’t. Why are you so set on killing me? I let you live back there,
didn’t I?” He pointed in the direction we just came from.

“
Let
me live?” I demanded. “Might as well have killed me, since you killed both my
parents.”

He took a step back, regarding me. “Huh.
Unusual.”

I couldn’t hold back my rage anymore; I
was absolutely seething. I charged at him, the butt of my gun held up
threateningly.

He snatched me by my upheld wrist,
pulling me right off my feet and into the air. He held me up and away from him
as my left hand clawed at his fingers, trying to get him to let go.

“You must really be angry at me, to do
something as stupid as that,” he said thoughtfully, as if I were simply an
interesting phenomena to him. He tilted his head to the side. “Or maybe just
stupid.”

I slapped at his hand, trying to aim a
kick at him with my too-short legs.

He sighed, dropping me to the ground and
taking his gun out of his belt. He trained it on me, coarsely rubbing a hand
through his hair, seemingly exhausted. “Right. You have a few options. One,
walk away, go back to wherever you came from. Move on with your life. Realize
your situation isn’t unique in any way. Families? They just don’t work out in
this world. Yours would have ended eventually.

“Option two: attack me again with no
ammo, and I’ll shoot you just like I shot your parents. Option three: come eat
with me, get some nutrition to that brain of yours so you can think more
clearly about the first two options. The deer’s too much for me to eat on my
own before it goes rancid anyway.”

His last sentence fueled my rage even
further. “
Then why did you kill my
parents for it
?” I shouted.

He didn’t lower the gun, just raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t kill without good reason. I was already tracking that herd, and was
about to take one of those deer down when your lot showed up and got them
going. I haven’t eaten anything substantial in
weeks
, haven’t come across any good prey – been living off of
berries and roots. It’s gotten to where I’m going to either die of starvation,
or kill for what’s rightfully mine in the first place. I chose the latter.”

“You didn’t think we’d share with you?”

He sneered. “Hardly. What kind of fairy
tale are you living in?”

“Then why are you offering to share with
me?”

He shrugged. “Now that I got the doe all
to myself, it’s too much food. It’ll go to waste otherwise.”

I thought about this, sucking at my
cheeks, eyeing him up and down as if I could find a previously missed weakness.
I didn’t care what his rationale was; I wanted him dead. If he hadn’t existed
in the first place, my parents would still be alive. But how would I kill him
with no bullets?

My stomach growled.

He raised an eyebrow knowingly at me. “Is
that a yes, then?”

I jutted out my chin. “Why haven’t you
done anything to me yet?” I asked, rather than answering him.

“I already told you: I have no reason to
kill you unless you pose a threat. Currently, you don’t pose a threat.” He
smiled. “And I’m kind of enjoying our interaction at the moment.”

I shook my head. “That’s not what I
mean.” I flushed, looking down at my feet. “It’s very unusual for a male to be
alone with me without . . . doing anything.” Would my saying so remind him that
that’s exactly what he
should
be
doing? I braced myself, dreading what might come next. If he was going to do
anything, though, better to get it over with.

“Well, I can see why - you’re very
pretty. But that’s not my sort of thing.” He stuck his gun back in his belt.
“Come on. The fire should have built up nicely by now, but I still need to get
this deer cut up before we can cook it. And, as I mentioned before, I’m
starving
.”

He walked away from me. Just like that.
He walked right past me, leaving his back open for attack as he returned to his
prize.

His confidence was infuriating. Why did
he have to be so
above
me? I wasn’t
stupid. I was angry.
He had just killed
my parents
. And now he had the audacity to just walk away, as if I posed
absolutely no threat to him.

In fact, he had said exactly that. I
posed no threat to him, because he was bigger than me, stronger than me, and I
had no bullets.

I turned and looked around the tree at
him; he now knelt beside a roaring fire, and was using a ragged-edged knife to
skin the dead doe.

He had listed my options as he saw them,
but, as I thought through those options, as I watched him skin and slice into
the deer, I recognized a fourth option.

I
was
going to kill him. It might not be today, but it would happen. I just needed an
opening and a weapon. And I wasn’t letting him out of my sight until I had
those.