In a Handful of Dust (27 page)

At home there had been a few feral cats, generations removed from their domesticated ancestors and mean as hell. Lucy remembered them as half-starved, hissing balls of fur, nothing like the majestic, well-muscled animal sleeping in the middle of the abandoned city.

“Big. It’s a mountain lion,” Nora said. “Group of them moved into that side of town years ago.”

Lucy rolled onto her elbow to look at Nora. “They a problem?”

“
Yes
,” Nora said.

Lynn took the rifle back from Lucy. “Why don’t you run them off?”

“Because you’re holding the only gun in this whole city,” Lander answered.

“And it’s time you handed it back,” Bailey added.

“No, shoot it first.” Nora had come up to the edge of the roof beside Lander, her shadow falling across Lynn and Lucy. “Shoot that one lying out there like she owns the place.”

To Lucy’s surprise, Lynn looked to Lander before sighting the cat again, and she found her gut twisting at the thought of Lynn’s crosshairs on the unsuspecting creature. The rifle cracked, and in the distance Lucy could see a streak of color as the she-cat fled for cover.

“Damn,” Lynn said, shading her eyes. “I missed.”

“Let her have the gun, Lander,” Nora said. Lander was about to object when Nora raised her hand to stop him. “Let her come up here while you or someone else is with her. You know as well as I do there are some buildings we can’t even get to anymore because of the cats and the coyotes. If she picks them off, we can recover all that water.”

Lander gave Nora a hard look but she didn’t drop her gaze, and her next words were directed at Lynn. “I’ll give you part of my water ration for every cat you drop,” she added, defiant eyes still on Lander.

Lynn looked between the two of them and unloaded her gun. “No need. I don’t find myself liking the taste of your water.”

“And why’s that?” Bailey bristled, as if personally insulted.

“Tastes bad,” Lynn said, handing the unspent bullets over to Lander.

“Can I be the one to stay up here with her?” Ben spoke up. “I want to see her get some of the coyotes.”

“Since everyone is assuming she will in fact be shooting,” Lander said, “I’d like to be the one who accompanies her.”

“And you’re all assuming I’m staying here in the first place,” Lynn said, her words casual but her tone stopping the very breeze.

Lander’s smile was back, warm and caring. “Where would you go? Even if we gave you water, once you walk out of here there are no guarantees.”

“You can’t walk anywhere, in your shape,” Nora added. “I wouldn’t let you leave.”

Lucy saw Lynn bristle. “I’m not sure you
letting
me is—”

“We plan on staying until I can find you a good source of freshwater,” Lucy interrupted. “We figure by then Lynn’ll be feeling well enough we can get along and I’ll have repaid our debt to you.”

“That so?” Lander said, holding out his hand for the rifle. “Well, I hope we can convince you to stay, between now and then.”

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“S
o how bad is it, really?” Lucy asked Nora as they stripped the beds she and Lynn had been using.

“What do you mean?” Nora asked, all attention on the sheets.

“If Lander’s willing to give Lynn a gun to free up the route to water you’ve been cut off from, you’ve got limited supplies.”

Lucy moved her small pile of belongings before tearing the dirty sheet off her bed. The clothes she’d been wearing on the road had been washed and returned to her, folded into a tight square so thin she could feel her thumb rubbing her forefinger through it. Her single boot she’d kept, and it stood sentinel on top of her threadbare clothes, waiting to be moved to the new room Nora had cleared them for now that Lynn no longer needed an IV.

“I wouldn’t say they’re limited,” Nora answered.

“You wouldn’t say that ’cause you’re too scared to, or because that’s not the case?” Lynn asked from the corner, where she rested in a wheelchair.

Nora turned to Lynn, irritation chasing manners from her features. “Look, I don’t know why you’ve got it in your head the whole world is made to harm. We’re good people here, and if saving your life without knowing the first thing about you isn’t proof enough, I don’t know what is.” She snapped the final clean sheet onto Lucy’s bed. Lucy could see her teeth digging into her lower lip as she worked.

“That’s great and all, but you didn’t exactly answer the question,” Lynn said, but Nora ignored her, lost in her work.

“That mountain lion was something else,” Lucy said, searching for a different subject. “We’ve got coyotes back home, but I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“They’re a menace,” Nora said through gritted teeth as she moved Lynn’s bed. Lucy watched as a clean white sheet sailed overhead. “It began with only one or two down in the residential area. Some of the men would see them when they raided the homes.

“The smaller critters, like skunks and raccoons, came into town shortly after all the water went off. Smelled all the food rotting, guess. Cats followed them, coyotes too. We all hoped enough human activity would keep them away from the strip, but . . .” Nora broke off to tuck the corner of the sheet tightly under the mattress. “We started seeing coyotes in the main roads after a bit, and the lions followed them into the city.”

Nora stood straight and surveyed the bright white of the empty beds, as clean as if Lynn and Lucy had never been there. “I’ll show you your new room,” she said.

They went up a floor, the heat rising enough for them to notice. Lucy cracked the balcony door of their new room to see black clouds piling in the distance. “Might rain,” she called to Lynn, but Nora was the one who joined her outside, the long curtains flapping in between them.

“She’s out of breath,” Nora said. “Your mother is weaker than she looks.”

“She’ll be fine.”

Nora came to the railing beside Lucy. “I know you’ve counted on her for a long time, little one. But the type of bodily injury she suffered . . . some people never come back from that, not fully. I don’t know that leaving would be wise. Ever.”

Lucy nodded, her eyes trained on the darkness rolling in. “I won’t let her leave, if I don’t think she’s able. And if she’s never able, then it is what it is.”

Nora followed Lucy’s gaze to the storm rolling in and reached for the younger girl’s hand. “I know she doesn’t trust us yet, or our ways, but the fact that Lander would let her touch a gun speaks volumes.”

Lucy’s spine stiffened, and she took her hand away from Nora’s. “It’s her gun.”

Nora sighed as a hot wind blew through the city, whipping the curtains around them. A dark streak shot across the road in the face of the storm, and Lucy smiled at the familiar sight of a striped tail. “Never thought I’d miss seeing one of them.”

“Raccoons give you trouble back home?”

“Always. I thought Lynn was going to tear her hair out one year over the sweet corn. Stayed up three days in a row picking raccoons off from the roof, but it didn’t matter. She fell asleep for five minutes and it was a done deal. They stripped every stalk.”

“Lander and Ben keep them out of their garden, though I don’t know how,” Nora admitted. “We do see coyotes up here on the strip occasionally, so they probably keep the population down.”

“But not lions?” Lucy asked, trying to keep her voice casual.

Nora’s mouth tightened. “No, not them, thank God.”

“You hate them.”

The clouds passed over, covering what was left of the sunset and leaving the women in darkness. The air was close and hot, the rain refusing to fall. Lucy could barely see the outline of Nora’s face in the last rays of sun.

“Before the world ended I used to
try
to find them, ridiculous as that seems now,” she said. “I’d go out hiking overnight, take animal distress calls, anything I could do to call them to me. I loved the way they moved, like liquid under fur. They made me realize some animals are better than others, that the food chain in all of its barbarism is exactly what nature intended.”

“So?” Lucy asked, the hot wind pulling her words from her mouth. “What changed?”

Nora looked at her as the clouds scudded across the sky and the last red rays of the setting sun brilliantly lit her eyes. “One of them ate my daughter.”

Lucy grasped the older woman’s hand, covering it completely with both of hers. “I am so, so, sorry. I wouldn’t have asked . . .”

Nora waved the apology away but took her hand back to wipe at some stray tears. “You had no way of knowing.”

“Was this . . . in your time? Before the Shortage?”

“No. It was a few years ago. I had a child very late in life, here in what’s left of the world. I mentioned her to you, do you remember?”

“Little one,” Lucy said quietly. “You called her little one.”

“I did.” Nora nodded, wiping at another errant tear. “She was built small like you, and wiry too. She used to make Lander laugh by showing off how much she could lift. They made a game of it.

“She was twelve when it happened. Her job was scavenging on the western end for food, clothes, little things we needed replaced in the day to day, like scissors or can openers. Lander was going to teach her how to manage the garden, and Ben was going to fill her post as a scavenger. She was showing him some of the areas that hadn’t been picked over yet.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a cat hunt, but a lion will stalk its prey same as little tame cats. No matter how many times I tell myself it’s helping nobody, I’ve played it through my head a million times how that cat must’ve followed the two of them, sliding through the shadows and waiting for the chance to pounce.”

Lucy pictured it in her mind as well, drawn in by the grieving mother’s words and the image of two small bodies picking through rubble, hunted by a gliding shadow. She’d seen it in miniature at home before, the silent paws that could deal a crushing velvety blow to the slowest of the stalked.

“But why wouldn’t the cat have gone for Ben?” Lucy asked. “Predators always attack the smallest or the weakest. He would’ve been both.”

The clouds pulsed overhead, refusing to break. Lightning flickered and the thunder rolled in the distance before Nora answered.

“The way he tells it, my girl was outside and he was indoors when it attacked.”

Lucy carefully watched the play of muscles across Nora’s face as they waited for the rain to fall, the flashes of lightning contorting her expression and making it unreadable. “You believe him?”

Nora’s shrug was barely perceptible in the darkness. “Ben wants nothing more than his father’s love and respect. Working that garden with Lander day in and day out is how he thinks he’ll get it. I can’t say for sure what happened the day my daughter died, and knowing wouldn’t change it anyhow.”

“It is what it is,” Lucy said, turning to stand shoulder to shoulder with Nora as the storm passed them by.

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L
ucy felt a distinct sense of unease when she went out to witch with Ben the next day. She could easily picture him sacrificing Nora’s daughter, allowing her to be taken by the big cat to further his own ends. Lucy struggled for nonchalance as they walked out of the shadows of the city’s buildings, into the bright white stretch of desert.

The rain had refused to fall the night before. The clouds had taunted the city as they slid past. The sky was as clear as glass when Lucy stepped out of the shade and into the sun, the sand throwing the heat back up at her and baking her skin from below.

“C’mon then,” she said testily to Ben, who was struggling with an armload of flags. Lander had been overly optimistic when giving them a hundred of the wire flags used to mark buried water lines, but Lucy hadn’t wanted to crush the hope in the big man’s eyes.

“I’m coming,” Ben shot back. “These keep poking me. I don’t see why you can’t carry some.”

“I need my hands free,” Lucy said.

Ben caught up to stand next to her. “So how’s this work, anyway? You walk around with your hands out ’til you feel it?”

Lucy stifled a sigh. “Something like that.”

“No, really, tell me. I want to know how you do it.”

“It’s not something I can teach. People either can, or they can’t.”

Ben made a face at her and she walked away from him, closing her eyes and holding her hands outward, hoping the show of concentration would keep him quiet. Lander had cut her a forked stick from one of the trees in the garden, and while it lacked the smooth contours from years of her grip, it would do the trick.

The power to find water was so sacred that Stebbs had lowered his voice when he spoke to her about it, even in private. Lynn would prefer to never speak of it at all, keeping Lucy’s gift in a quiet place where it would draw no attention. But Lucy had always reveled in the spasm of power that water sent toward her, crying out to her it was there and wanted to be found.

“Here,” she said. “It’s not very deep though.”

Ben pulled a flag from his bundle and jabbed it into the ground. “That’s good, right? Easier to get to.”

“Easier to get at, yeah, but if it’s shallow, it might not last long.” Lucy wandered off in another direction, letting her feet go, her mind drift while waiting for the water to talk to her. The heat was drawing her own moisture straight out of her skin, dotting her pores with beads of sweat. A rifle shot echoed across the flat plain and Lucy jumped, drops falling off her forehead and evaporating on the hot sand.

“Shit,” she said. “Scared me.”

Ben looked back at the city, the flags slung across his shoulders. “Your mom. She’s rather basic, isn’t she?”

“What do you mean?” Lucy asked, her sudden clench making the stick jump in her hands.

“That water?”

“The stick wants to hit you and I’m stopping it.”

Ben smiled, whether he thought she was funny or because he enjoyed getting under her skin she didn’t know. “I mean she’s one-sided. She wants her gun, and she wants to shoot things, and that seems to be about where her interests stop.”