Strikers (21 page)

When we took off his shirt, we found a spreading bruise bigger than my head on his ribs where he’d been kicked at least once. I didn’t know if he had broken ribs or, even worse, a punctured lung. Jovan had settled the matter by working his hands over the ribs, a flinch ready on his face. But they had felt solid, though no less painful. Now, Maddix’s hand reaches for his side and he presses on them himself before letting his hand fall back to the floor.

“They aren’t broken,” I tell him, leaning over his head so that he won’t have to turn to see me. “Your face is far less pretty and your nose will be interesting, but it’s your leg we need to worry about. I’m going to have to unbandage it and take a look before we lose the daylight.”

I look him in the eyes—or rather in the eye that isn’t swollen shut—until he gives me a small nod of assent. His hand finds Connor’s and I see the knuckles whiten as he squeezes. Jovan and I unwrap the bandages as carefully as we can, but they are stuck near the wound and fresh blood seeps out even after I loosen it with some of the warm water.

When the wound is revealed, both Jovan and I suck in our breaths simultaneously and smile. The flesh is far less red, though still a little puffy around the hole. It is a good sign and I’ll take it.

Once he’s again covered in ointment and bandaged, he settles back and the rigidity leaves him. In our pot is a disgusting mix of blood and dirt and I have no desire to eat out of it ever again. Jovan laughs and takes the pot to do what must be done while I clean up the rest of the mess. We’re all hungry, starving really, so I have no doubt that my squeamishness over the pot will be gone once I smell some cooking grains with jerky in it.

As night falls, I’m delighted to find out that I’m right.

We decide to camp in the big building while Maddix heals. None of us feels very comfortable staying put, especially without knowing who might be left to look for us, but we really don’t have much choice. Maddix is a mess and even if he tried to walk on his wounded leg, his ribs and face would stop him from going. All we can do is just wait it out and try to remain vigilant for any signs of pursuit.

For almost the entirety of the first day I do nothing but sleep, take my turn on watch and then promptly go back to sleep. Everyone does, except for caring for Maddix when he wakes.

On the second morning, I wake feeling well rested and immediately think of Jordan. I really want to find him, or find whatever of him that I can. While we eat, I suggest going back to the tower and seeing what I can see. Jovan and Cassi both insist that I should go no further, and really, neither of them is keen on the idea of me climbing the tower alone. But what good will it do to have someone else there should I fall? Will they catch me? Though I do give in and agree not to go back and search for Jordan at the settlement, I don’t agree not to look for some sign of him.

Jovan gives me a dirty look as I leave like he knows I’m up to something, but I just wave as I head across the lot toward the trees. I walk perhaps a mile back down our old path but there are no new signs of people passing. No cooling campfire, no scuffs or tracks other than the ones I think we left. Best of all, no smell of decay that might signal Jordan made it out only to die on the trail without finding us. I think that would have been the worst thing to find.

Despite what I said, I head to the settlement. There, I find nothing I can definitely say is my father. The buildings are nothing more than blackened piles of wood and gray ash. The body of the man Maddix tangled with is where we left it, but in a condition so awful I have to walk away. There’s a horse, too, and I feel terrible when I see it, knowing it must have been terribly afraid and completely at the mercy of the humans fighting around it. It’s hopeless to try to find anyone inside the piles of debris. I still try, but I find nothing.

Back at the tower, I climb and sit, completely alone except for my hawk friend and the chicks as the day progresses. There’s nothing to be seen for miles. No smoke from any source is a good thing. Either Jordan was able to take out however many came after us or the survivors went a different direction.

The hawk “guh-runks” at me a few times and spreads his wings, making sure I know that the top of the tower belongs to his family. When he hops out and struts along the metal braces of the tower, I hear the piping “klee-uk” of the chicks. Once in a while, I hear the occasional sound from the mother hawk.

He flies off during that day and when he returns bearing a torn-up rabbit for his family, I asked him if he might want to feed me as well since I like rabbit. He hands the rabbit off to his mate with some speed when I say that, perhaps thinking I mean it.

When I laugh, he hops closer, peering at me from each side and then straight on, just like my hawk friend at home used to do. It always seemed to me that our laughs fascinate them for some reason. Perhaps they’re just trying to figure out our calls.

A pang goes through me at that. I miss seeing the hawk in the mornings in my garden.

“Will you tell him where I’m at?” I ask the bird. His only reply is to cock his head at me again. After that, he flies away and I make my way back to the camp.

On our third day at camp, it’s Jovan’s turn to scout around, but this time ahead of us. With Maddix on the mend but still weak, the last thing we need is to find more people. People weren’t bringing us a lot of luck up to that point.

He comes back almost at dusk, just as the point where my worry for him has grown so great that I’m actually considering going up on the roof to light a signal fire. That is a stupid idea if ever there was one, but it shows how worried I am. Appearing at the edge of the tree line, he looks none the worse for wear but he’s clearly tired, his head hanging and his hair dark with sweat. It’s not exactly warm, though it was briefly for a little while in the afternoon, so I can only guess that he ran a long way.

I grab the full canteen and jog out to meet him. The way he smiles when he sees me lights a little fire inside me. Though I do my best to restrain it, I know there’s more warmth in my return smile than I might wish. When I extend the canteen, he almost empties it in one long drink.

“Well, anything?” I ask, rather too abruptly. The look he gives me is one I earned. “Sorry. You’ve been gone so long. I got worried.”

Instead of apologizing, he gives me a wolfish grin and says, “You were worried? Hmm.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake. Did you find anything worth telling?” I ask, and snatch the canteen back, motioning for him to come back to the shelter with me.

His grin doesn’t falter as he falls into step beside me and I’d swear on a giant T-bone steak that he’s actually swaggering a little. How do we go from him all but ignoring my existence for two years to this? I give him a sour look and clamber up the platform to our camp.

Maddix is awake and sitting up near the fire, his back braced against the wall. The swelling in his face has gone down considerably and his eye is open, though very bruised. Jovan set his broken nose with a sharp tug the first morning once we knew he was out of the woods with his leg. It’s huge but less painful, he claims, and he sounds hilarious when he talks. Still, it’s an improvement and the ointment takes away much of his pain.

He and the others are playing some weird game they made up using tiny bits of broken pavement, a circle drawn using charcoal from our fire and an assortment of debris we’ve found while prowling around the huge building. I can’t understand it and the rules get more complicated every time I turn around.

“Ha! That’s a chicken scratch, a pie and two mice. My longhorn and two windmills beat that!” Cassi crows after looking at the assorted scattered mess on the floor.

Maddix scowls and grabs up the pieces, but stops when we blot out the lowering light at the door. “Howdy, stranger. What’s up out there?” he asks Jovan.

I’ve saved a little of our meager supper for Jovan. I hand him the cup with his few spoonfuls of grains, fruit and jerky cooked up into a mush. He digs in with a finger and scoops clumps of it into his mouth, making satisfied noises with each bite. It pains me to see him so eager for food since I know he’s used more energy than any of us today. Plus he’s bigger than we are, even Maddix. But our stores are running low and we’ll be out of food completely in another day, two at most.

It’s while he’s wiping out the last remaining bits that I see the smears of blood on his arm and I jerk it up to see where it came from. There’s a matching smear on the bottom of his shirt. “You’re hurt!” I say, plucking at his shirt.

He looks for some injury, confused, then his face clears. He flashes me another of those grins and says, “Nope. That doesn’t belong to me. I’ve got a surprise.” He shrugs out of my pack, the only real pack we have now, and takes out one of the burlap bags. There’s something lumpy and, if the red spots soaking through the fabric are any indicator, bloody inside.

When he pulls out what’s inside, my first thought is that he’s caught rats. But they aren’t exactly rats. More like their much cuter cousins with enormous bushy tails.

“What on earth are those?” I ask.

Jovan shrugs and rolls one of them over in his hands. “I think it might be a squirrel. I’ve never seen one, but I’ve heard of them.” His fingers brush the tail and he adds, “The tail is just like what I’ve heard described. I’ve heard other soldiers say they are really common down south, where there are trees. They’re supposed to be good eating.”

This last has my attention. I’m all in favor of anything that could be even remotely classified as tolerable eating, so good eating sounds very fine indeed. I note the blood has come from each of their small heads. “You used my slingshot?”

He nods and produces it, handing it off to me along with my small bag of steel balls. Jovan was always the best at using the slingshot when we were kids, so I shouldn’t be surprised he was able to bring back food using it once he was alone and could control his noise.

Aside from the slingshot, all I have is an old sling. With a sling, I’m hopeless, but Cassi is amazing. She has an eye for it. But slings need space to use and one of the downsides of finally getting to a place with trees is that there’s hardly any place to swing one.

“I even found all the balls,” he adds when he sees me fingering the bag to count how many remain inside.

Connor and I take up the animals and one of the belt knives and go outside to skin and gut them. Animal parts aren’t something I want to leave near where we sleep, so we use a flashlight and go far enough away from our camp to do our bloody business. By the time we get back with the small—yet wonderfully meaty—carcasses, the fire has been built up and three sticks have been scraped clean and soaked in water.

“They look like skinny rabbits,” Cassi says, then cocks her head and adds, “Or rats.”

Connor and I sneak a quick look at each other but no one seems to notice. Cassi doesn’t know, and I don’t necessarily want the others to know, that Connor and I are very familiar with the way a rat looks without his fur suit on. It’s not that I’m embarrassed, because that not’s completely true. What I really don’t want is pity and, at least in this case, I don’t think pity would be necessary.

When we turned thirteen and could legally find work, we joined up to work the compost operation as Turners. Compost is incredibly important in the dry lands. No one would be able to grow enough to eat without that nutrient-rich, black soil. I have my own little pile, fed by my garden prunings, the parts of vegetables I trim away and bundles of dried grass I stockpile to let brown and turn crispy each year. But that wouldn’t be enough, so I, like everyone else, buy it from the composter.

Working there is a great way to balance the cost with earnings. Turners are almost always kids. We’re lighter and more nimble, yet still strong enough to wield a pitchfork. Each of the huge piles has to be turned regularly so that the heat distributes and “cooks” the entire pile.

For Connor and me, as well as a few others, there was the additional income from the rat bounties. After work, we’d station ourselves someplace where we might watch for rats that came to inspect the new piles of compost material. One shot with a steel ball from a slingshot and a rat would inspect no more.

Rats are a problem at the compost station. The amount of fresh material draws them like, well, like rats. And they spread disease as well as breed rapidly. So we earned a small bounty for each one we brought to the supervisor’s shack for inspection. It seemed a shame to let them go to waste. There were many nights that Connor and I improved our protein intake and there’s no shame in that for people who can’t afford to buy the cattle our territory is known for raising.

The smell that comes off the roasting meat draws us all closer to the fire and we pluck the still-sizzling flesh from the bones the moment it’s done, snatching back fingers from the hot meat but not slowing down. There’s almost no fat on them, but that’s fine by me and for the first time since we ran, I go to sleep content and with a full belly.

The morning means checking bandages, my most un-favorite duty of each day. Maddix’s leg is healing and no longer angry-looking, but there is no question he has a substantial hole in it and could use a couple of weeks of peace and rest. After we use up the last of our boiled water to clean up his leg, change bandages and wash the used ones, Jovan heads off to the stream for the daily water run.

It’s a beautiful morning, bright and clear, with skies so blue they’re heartbreaking. The hundreds of birds who’ve made nests on the ragged and uneven roof above us seem to have gotten used to our noise and movements, because they pause for only the briefest moment in their activity when we come out. A line of them, eyes dark and avid, give me the once-over when I step out to enjoy the mild weather and stretch my legs. I give them a little salute and they go back to their business. Something in their posture makes me laugh. It’s as if they’re dismissing me with lots of attitude.

Jovan comes through the undergrowth just like yesterday, but I can tell something is wrong right away. Like the birds, it’s in his posture and the hurried way he shrugs off the greenery.