What Survives of Us (Colorado Chapters Book 1) (14 page)

             
He watched her for a few more seconds, then mercifully turned back around.  Grace drank from the canteen, then poured a little water in the palm of her hand and spread a thin layer of moisture over her forehead and cheeks.  She shut her eyes.

Unbelievable.  Was
this
what her friends had dithered on and on about? Was
this
desire?  And she was feeling it for William’s
brother
?

She would have liked to excuse her feelings as something else, as some sort of anomaly, but self-delusion had always struck her as a waste of time and effort.  Best just to face facts, then figure out how to move ahead.  Tears stung her eyes suddenly, and she blinked hard, struggling to hold them at bay.

She’d never felt desire for William, not the kind that made her tingle, or feel that low, embarrassing, exhilarating burn.  She had liked it when they kissed, and she had felt a surging, thrilling power when he had made it clear how much he wanted her.  But she’d never looked at him like she’d just looked at Quinn.

What an awful betrayal of William.

Grace frowned.  But was it?  Was it really?  William surely wouldn’t have wanted her love life to die with him.  He would have wanted her to go on, to grow up, and fall in love, and make a life with someone.  Maybe he would even have been happy to see her and Quinn together – they had never been competitive the way some brothers were…

Oh my God.  Just
listen
to yourself, she thought.  Rationalizing.  Justifying.  She stared hard at Quinn’s back and forced herself to recite the facts:  She was only 17.  Quinn was just 16.  They had been thrown together under extreme circumstances.  He had not even hinted, by word or deed, to feelings for her that exceeded brotherly concern. 

What she was feeling probably had more to do with the relief of momentarily surrendering the lead to him than with anything else.  Out here, he was the alpha.  She was probably experiencing a primordial desire to ingratiate herself to the leader, nothing more.   It was rather fascinating, from a psychological perspective.  The recitation left her feeling cold and clinical, which was exactly what she’d been shooting for.

And enough with staring at his backside.  She kicked Buttons into a trot, then settled into a walk again when they were side-by-side with Koda and Quinn.

“You should teach me more about the plants,” she said brusquely.  “It’s not like we can run down to the Food Mart and pick up a loaf of bread anymore.  What could we store for the winter?”

Quinn had obliged her request, and had spent the next several hours pointing out plants, then having her spot them.  He had talked about drying and preservation, roasting versus boiling, and by the time lunchtime rolled around, Grace had nearly put her earlier feelings out of her head.

They stopped near a ranch and watered the horses in a trough below a briskly creaking windmill.  Grace eyed the ranch, looking for any sign of life, then looked over at Quinn.  “Should we search it?”

He was studying the house and outbuildings as well.  “Yeah.  People out here usually have food put by.  If they didn’t make it, there might be something we could use.”

They rode slowly up the drive towards the house.  The horses were agitated, snorting and shying a little, which probably meant they were smelling what Grace and Quinn couldn’t yet:  death.  They both dismounted, and Quinn handed Koda’s reins to Grace.

“Wait here.  I’ll check it out.”

He went in the back door, which was unlocked, calling out as soon as the door popped open with a loud creak.  “Hello?  Is anyone here?  We don’t mean any harm.  Is anyone here?”

Grace heard an interior door open, and Quinn stumbled back outside a few moments later, his face grey-going-green.  He leaned against the side of the house, shut his eyes and tipped his head back, swallowing over and over.  Abruptly, he muttered, “I’m sorry,” and leaned over to vomit up his breakfast.

Alarmed, Grace let the reins of both horses drop to the ground and hustled to his side.  She rubbed his back as he heaved a few more times, then hurried back to Koda for his canteen when it looked like he was empty.  Quinn took it from her, swished his mouth out with water, and spat.  He kept his eyes closed the whole time.

“What was it?  Were they dead?  Can you tell me?”

Quinn shook his head.  “I don’t want to say.  Let’s just go on.”

A morbid curiosity seized her.  They had seen some terrible things.  What on earth had shaken him so?  “Did you look for food?”

“No.  Let’s just go on.”

“Wait here.”  She ignored his protest, evaded his reaching hand, and stepped through the open doorway and into a mudroom.  Another door was open to a kitchen beyond, and Grace immediately saw what had rattled Quinn so badly.

What was left of a man was seated at the kitchen table.  Curled in his disintegrating lap was a tiny corpse dressed in a Hello Kitty nightgown and wrapped in a fuzzy yellow afghan.  A shotgun lay along the man’s chest, the barrel resting underneath his chin.  Grace could see how he’d rigged it, using a forked stick to push the trigger and blow the top of his head and his brains all over the bright white kitchen cupboards.

A low buzz started in Grace’s ears.  Well, she’d insisted on seeing.  Next time, she’d listen.  She turned away from the table and spotted a walk-in pantry.  Aware of every movement she made, she walked into the pantry and assessed the contents, taking a partial box of rice – why did people always have rice? – a bag of flour, a plastic container with a skiff of sugar in it and a box of powdered milk off the otherwise empty shelves.  She walked back through the kitchen, and found Quinn waiting for her just outside the exterior door.

Without a word, she handed the supplies to him.  She turned to walk back to Buttons, but her legs suddenly wobbled right out from under her and she went down to her hands and knees, feeling the world revolve around her sickeningly.

“Oh, Gracie.”  Quinn moved to shade her head, and his hand rubbed her back, just as she’d rubbed his.  “I told you not to.”

Sheer orneriness kept her from heaving up her breakfast as he’d done.  “’I told you so’ isn’t really helping right now,” she gasped.  “Just give me a second.  I’m alright.”

When the world stopped spinning, she stood up, refusing his help.  She stalked over to Buttons and hauled herself into the saddle.  They rode away in silence, neither one saying a word about the lunch they hadn’t eaten yet.  Quinn led them back to the creek, and they rode on for another hour before he stopped and dismounted.

“The horses need rest, and we need to eat,” he announced.  Grace dismounted and led Buttons to the creek’s edge, allowing her to drink.  She heard Quinn rummaging around in his saddle bags, and swallowed hard, nauseated by the thought of food.  She looped Button’s reins around the saddle horn so they wouldn’t trail in the water and went to sit beside him in the shade.

He had pulled out some of her improvised travel cakes, and he handed her one as she sat down.  Though they tasted okay, they weren’t the most appetizing things to look at – she’d plopped the brownish batter onto baking sheets, the result looking rather like a pile of…well, like a pile of vomit.  She eyed the cake, swallowed again, then looked up to find him watching her.  She smiled weakly, a peace offering and an apology for not listening to him.

“I don’t suppose you have any dandelion greens instead?”

Quinn looked down at the cake, cocked his head to the side, then made a horrific retching sound and pretended to heave into his hand.  He grinned and offered the cake to her, and all of a sudden they were both giggling like little kids.

“Gosh, that is so sweet of you – did you regurgitate that just for me?”

Quinn laughed even harder at her quip.  He took a big bite of his travel cake and chewed with his mouth open, rolling his eyes and smacking his lips.  “Mmmm,” he crooned around his mouthful of food.  “If you’re not going to eat that, can I have it?”

Grace grinned, and took a big bite of her own cake, tasting cinnamon, ginger and cloves.  Some of the horror and sorrow at what they’d seen uncoiled, lifted free of her body, and drifted away on the soft breeze.  “Back off, pal.  This is my lump of puke.  Eat your own.”

They relaxed in the shade, leaning against tree trunks as they finished their lunch, sipping water and watching the horses crop at the soft grass beside the creek.  She was just thinking of suggesting a fifteen minute nap when Quinn surprised her.

“Gracie, have you ever thought about suicide?”

It was unlike him to introduce a topic of conversation, and such a serious one at that.  He wouldn’t look at her, focusing instead on the lines he was scraping in the dirt in front of him with a twig.  She thought for a moment before she answered.

“I guess I haven’t, at least not as something I’d do,” she said.  “When that girl, Angela, killed herself last year, I guess I thought about it.  I wondered what made her hurt so much, that she thought dying was the only way out.  Did you know her?”

Quinn nodded.  “I did.  We started kindergarten together.  We weren’t friends, but I knew her.  People were saying her boyfriend broke up with her, and that was why she did it.”

Grace had heard the same thing, and she felt ashamed of the contempt she’d felt at the time.  She had a deeper
understanding of pain and loss now.  “Why did you ask?  Have you thought about it?”

Quinn shook his head.  “No.  I can’t imagine wanting to die.”  He slid a look sideways at her, then focused fiercely on his lines and his twig.  “You didn’t think about it, even when you found out William was dead?”

Grace’s heart rate kicked up a notch, and she was suddenly as interested in the tuft of grass in front of her as Quinn was in his lines in the dirt.  She started braiding the grass into a 4-strand plait while she scrambled for something to say. 

“I cared about William a lot,” she began, then faltered to a stop.  She took a swig of water from her canteen to relieve her suddenly dry mouth.  “I…don’t really think about losing him.  Or my mom, or Benji, or Wayne.  I can’t think about those things.”

“You don’t cry,” Quinn said softly.  She could feel him looking at her now, but she couldn’t lift her head.  “Why don’t you cry?”

Ridiculous, that him pointing that out made her want to do just that:  cry.  Sob out loud like a child.  Wail at the sky and pound her chest.  “If I start,” she said finally, “I’ll never stop.  I can’t do that.  I can’t give in to that.”

She rose to her feet and dusted off her seat, 100% aware that she was running away from this conversation.  “Let’s go.  We’ve got some ground to cover if we want to make Peyton tonight.”

They rode long and steady through the afternoon, stopping once to water the horses, stopping again to check out another ranch.  A scruffy border collie came to the edge of the property before they got close to the house, barking and snarling, and Quinn shook his head, turning Koda away.  “Someone’s still there, I can feel it,” he said.  “Let’s get out of here.”

Grace didn’t question his certainty.  During the long hours in the saddle, she’d had plenty of time to think back over the confrontation with the men in Limon, how both she and Quinn had seemed to
know
things without explanation or reason.  It stood to reason, she had concluded, that surviving the plague had gifted them both with a heightened awareness, an instinct for survival.  It would be interesting to see if their perceptions returned to normal when life stabilized, or if the changes were permanent.

They reached the end of the Big Sandy Creek late that afternoon.  Quinn guided them away from open country and led them down a dirt road, heading south towards Peyton.  After days of riding across the prairie, Grace felt exposed and uncomfortable on the road; by the hunch in Quinn’s shoulders, she was guessing he felt the same way.  Their horses’ hooves crunched loudly on the gravel, and clopped even louder when they transitioned to pavement.  Quinn moved Koda to the grassy shoulder, and Grace followed suit.

They were starting to pass more and more houses, and the sensation of occasionally being watched was making Grace’s skin crawl.  She couldn’t stop checking behind them.  Buttons was tired, and Grace’s tension was making her fractious.  She shied at nothing once, then did it again, nearly unseating her.  Quinn looked back, his face tight with the same tension she was feeling.

“I’ve got the hinks, Gracie.  Something feels wrong.  Let’s find someplace to settle in for the night.”

They found what they were looking for on a quiet knoll: a deserted horse property with a well, and a pump powered by a generator.  Quinn winced at the noise when he fired up the generator, and they ran it just long enough to pump water for the horses and their own needs for the night.  A fire seemed too risky – too easy to see and smell – so they spread out their sleeping bags on the ground underneath a big cottonwood beside the barn.  The sun was just touching the top of the mountains when they finished setting up camp, and they sat watching it slide away as they munched on granola and dandelion greens. 

Quinn pulled out the map to go over the route he had planned for the next day.  From Peyton, they would travel southwest as the crow flew, angling north of Highway 24 and cutting across suburban neighborhoods when they left the plains.  They would pick up 24 again where it headed up into the mountains outside of Manitou Springs.