No Shelter Trilogy (Omnibus, Books 1-3) Page 8

  Mary makes it to the bottom first. “Are you guys going to be bickering the whole way?” she says as she catches her breath. “I’ll just keep my distance if you don’t mind.”

  I can’t help but roll my eyes as she sets off a few paces ahead of us. Mary is the last person I need a lecture from on bickering.

  Daedric smiles at me as if I have a booger sticking out of my nose.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I saw that look,” he says with a grin. “You’re still peeved about her and Isaac.”

  “Oh, please. I’m over that,” I reply.

  Daedric’s laugh punctures the still forest air. He can see right through me.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Salton Sea is the last city in what is now referred to as the Western Sector. Built just before the ravaging storms of the 21st century, the Salton Sea shelter is supposed to be the last corner of civilization in America, apart from the underground city of Umbra beneath Washington D.C. But the Salton Sea cannot be mistaken for civilization.

  “Do you think he’s still alive?” Mary says, as we munch on bags of potato chips we brought with us from the cabin: our first potato chips in more than two years.

  Daedric pretends not to pay attention as he pokes the fire we’ve built in a small clearing ninety miles north of what used to be Yosemite National Park.

  I fold the top of my bag of chips closed and stuff the bag into my backpack. “I wouldn’t go back if I didn’t think he was alive,” I say. “Besides, we saw the Guardians take him into the holding area in the prison.”

  Then, of course, there’s the secret Isaac is keeping. The secret that Vic, the leader of the Guardians, alluded to during our clash in the Salton Sea seven weeks ago. If Isaac is smart, he’ll hold on to that secret… and his life.

  “You don’t have much to say about it,” Mary says to Daedric.

  Daedric rolls out his sleeping bag, but doesn’t reply. Another perk of the cabin is the four sleeping bags we found rolled up and stored underneath the bunk beds. I unroll mine and unzip it to get inside. It’s huge and heavy but the flannel lining feels like a cloud on my skin.

  “What’s to say?” Daedric says as he sits on top of his sleeping bag and begins tending the fire again. “I don’t know if he’s alive, and it don’t matter because that ain’t why I’m here.”

  Mary rolls her eyes. “Again with the ain’t.”

  Daedric’s Eastern accent is a liability. When the storms hit more than two years ago, the government collapsed and eventually America was divided into four sectors. The only way to distinguish what sector a person came from was by their accent and mannerisms. If you’re caught outside your sector, you’re subject to imprisonment or death at the hands of the Guardians. Daedric is proud of his Eastern roots and almost refuses to dump the accent.

  Mary tucks into her sleeping bag and turns away from Daedric and me. Daedric looks at me and I let out a deep sigh. He breaks into a smile and once again he sees me.

  He crawls around the fire toward me and my stomach spins. He digs his hand into his pocket and produces a ring with a brilliant diamond that glows like amber in the firelight.

  “It was my mom’s,” he says, as he takes a seat next to the head of my sleeping bag. “It was her wedding ring. She must have hidden it in the cabin when she was there with Kane, so he wouldn’t see it. Then she left it behind.”

  I don’t know what to say. President Edward Kane had an affair with Daedric’s mother and his sister Elysia was the result. When their mother died, Daedric and Elysia set out in search of the cabin in the woods, the love nest, which Kane used to carry out their affair. Daedric’s mother’s bad judgment resulted in such fortuitous consequences for us, I can’t be disappointed with her.

  “It’s okay to be angry,” I say.

  Daedric pitches the ring into the fire. “I don’t have anything to be angry about.”

  That night, I dream about Isaac; the kind of dreams I never talk about but I always feel like the evidence of them is written on my forehead. When I open my eyes, Daedric is already awake with his sleeping bag packed.

  “Did you sleep?” I ask him as I unzip my sleeping bag.

  Mary walks out from behind a parched redwood tree.

  “I’ve been awake for three hours,” Daedric replies.

  “Yeah, it seems you were having too much fun dreaming about Isaac to join us for breakfast,” Mary says as she throws me a packet of dried fruit. “Bon appétit.”

  I pack my sleeping bag and eat the fruit as we hike, not wanting to waste any more time. We don’t speak for almost four hours. If we continue this way, the next three to four weeks are going to be unbearable.

  I scour my brain for something to say to ease the tension, but I can’t think of anything. Daedric glances at me and raises his eyebrows. I smile and he lowers his head, but I can barely glimpse a smile on his face.

  We cover the ninety miles to the seared outer edge of Yosemite in three days. The charcoal tree stumps and scorched lands are a harsh reminder of what has become of America and what we’re up against. When there’s nothing left to save, there’s nothing left to lose.

  We hike until just after the sun goes down then we set up camp a mile away from the edge of the park. As I’m rolling out my sleeping bag, I hear a loud crack behind me. Daedric turns to me and I search his eyes for signs of an approaching animal, but he appears more perplexed than frightened.

  “I’ll go check it out,” he whispers.

  Mary pulls her knife, the one with the ivory handle, out of its holster.

  “I’ll go with you,” I say, as Daedric slips his trusty flashlight out of his backpack.

  This is the same flashlight we used to find our way around the Salton Sea sewer system to rescue Elysia. He shines the light on the area of the woods where the sound came from and something scampers off into darkness of the forest. Something big.

  Daedric approaches the tree line and my mind flashes back to the day I met him more than two months ago. I thought I had lost Isaac to a cougar attack, but Daedric saved his life.

  I scurry after him without making a sound. Not making a sound is my specialty. Knives are Mary’s. Daedric’s specialty appears to be being in the right place at the right time.

  Daedric and I inch closer to the dead trees, the light of the four-inch flashlight barely reaching eight feet in front of us. When we reach the trees, he swings the light around attempting to illuminate a larger space, but there’s nothing there.

  “It’d be nice to have Eve around right now,” I whisper, thinking of all the animal traps Eve could set up around the campsite for security.

  “We’ll sleep in shifts,” Daedric says.

  “That’s going to take too much time,” I reply, as we make it back to our sleeping bags.

  “Do you want to wake up with your head in the jaws of a bear or a mountain lion?” he shoots back.

  Mary slips off her belt, but she keeps her machete by her side as she lays down in her sleeping bag. “I’m sleeping first,” she says, as she closes her eyes with her fingers still wrapped around the handle of her machete. “Wake me up in four hours.”

  Daedric and I sit on my sleeping bag and watch the fire consume the twigs we feed it one by one. Every few minutes he throws a glance my way and I can’t help but smile.

  “What are you grinnin’ at?” he says.

  “Nothing.”

  I can feel him staring at me. When I finally look up, he looks away. I can’t help but think that this is the moment where Isaac would have kissed me. And, like that, my smile is gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  I sometimes wonder if my life was truly better before the storms. Sure, I had plenty of food and water and a comfortable home, but if it wasn’t for Lara and my mother I would have been completely alone. I had no friends.

  Though nothing can replace the love I shared with my mother and sister, I can’t help but feel exhilarated by my recent adventures. Sometimes I feel like the wrong person in our fam
ily survived. Of course, if the Fountain of Youth is powered by bad karma, my dad will survive us all.

  I wake unable to feel anything in my fingers and toes. It’s freezing. I spring out of my sleeping bag to get the fire started, but the scene I find makes my whole body freeze.

  The contents of our backpacks are strewn across the campsite. Daedric and Mary’s empty backpacks are lying at the edge of the clearing, but mine is missing.

  I scramble to Mary’s sleeping bag and shake her shoulder. “Wake up!” I shout. “Get up!”

  Mary opens her eyes. “What the hell,” she mutters.

  “We were robbed,” I say as I move toward Daedric, but he’s already sitting up.

  “What happened?” he says, as he surveys the damage.

  In the gray morning light I can see the thieves left behind at least three gallons of water, a few pieces of clothing, and my knife. Why didn’t they take the water?

  “We weren’t robbed,” Daedric says, as he strolls over and picks up a bottle of water. “We were scavenged.”

  A sense of relief flushes the tension from my frozen limbs. It was probably just raccoons.

  We clean up the mess and I find my backpack a few yards beyond the tree line. I have to hunt if we want to eat today, but I’m uneasy in this injured forest. This wood is a predator unchained and wild with freedom. I have nowhere to hide, but the hollowed out trunks of blackened pine trees.

  I find the gloves Isaac got me for hunting still tucked inside my backpack. I slip them on and a chill passes over my skin.

  “You need some help?” Daedric asks, as I set off toward the trees.

  “Nada hunts alone,” Mary says. “You should know that by now.”

  I enter the woods without looking back to see Daedric’s reaction. I can’t worry whether he’s offended. I have to be mentally prepared to kill.

  I listen carefully for the sounds of animals: birds chirping, squirrels skittering, anything. The forest holds its breath. Something—or someone—has scared everything away.

  I move farther away from the campsite. We’re five days from the cabin; too far to make it back without food. My feet become accustomed to the forest floor quickly and every step I take falls quieter than the last. Finally, I hear chirping.

  It’s not what I want to hear. Without leaves or brush to conceal me, I can’t surprise a bird. My eyes probe the woods until I find three blue jays pecking the forest floor twenty yards away from me. Blue jays won’t sustain us.

  We need a fox or a bobcat even, but they’ve long abandoned this territory. Forget finding any sheep. This territory abandoned them. A bitter wind sweeps the woods and the blue jays take flight—except one.

  I inch closer as it lets out a desolate, gurgling chirp and I see it: the bird is struggling against the jaws of a snake with red and black stripes painted across its slender body. Its jaws open wider to draw in the bird, which has now resigned to its fate.

  A Mountain Kingsnake. I can’t remember if they’re poisonous.

  I’ve eaten snake before and the flavor is a cross between chicken and crab, but the texture is like shoelaces between your teeth. Not the best game, but a three-foot snake could sustain us for the rest of the day, maybe even until tomorrow afternoon.

  I creep closer and wait until the snake’s mouth and throat are stuffed with just a few blue feathers poking out. I’m within a few yards when the snake attempts to bolt, but it can’t move fast enough. I catch its tail before it slithers under a log and it tries to strike out at my arm. Its fangs puncture through the leather glove on my right arm. I grab the snake’s jaws with my left hand, put its head on the floor, and stomp on it with my right boot. Once. It’s still writhing. Twice. Crunch. It’s still.

  I drag the snake by the tail back to the campsite and throw it at Mary’s feet. She stares in horror at the snake with its mangled skull and half-consumed bird in its mouth.

  “You scare me,” she says.

  “The feeling’s mutual,” I say, as I slip out of my gloves to examine the puncture wound on my arm.

  The hole is bleeding and swollen, but I don’t feel any pain outside the wound. It’s not venomous.

  I sit on my rolled up sleeping bag and try not to cry. My life was definitely better before the storm.

  The snow starts coming down around noon. My best guess at the date is October or November 2048, but I could be off by a month or two… or three. Once Isaac and I got rid of our radio, we lost track of the date pretty quickly. At first it felt good, as if we had severed the last string tying us to the former world. When the first snowstorm caught us off-guard, we realized how essential the radio was to our survival.

  We’re entering farmland where there are no caves to hide. We try to make it to the interstate freeway to sleep under an overpass, but our boots are soaked through and frozen with snow. We stop and set up camp in the middle of what used to be an almond tree grove.

  “You can share a sleeping bag with me,” I offer Mary. “It will be warmer.”

  Mary stares at me for a moment as if I’ve just suggested we become clowns and join the circus. “Yeah… That’s not going to happen, Nada,” she says, shivering as she tries to light the fire. “I think I’ll just stuff my sleeping bag inside Daedric’s and you two can sleep together.”

  I glance at Daedric where he’s breaking off branches of a dead almond tree behind Mary. He mimes a cat roaring and scratching and I try not to laugh.

  He throws the branches into the small fire Mary has built then he sits next to me on my sleeping bag. “Don’t try anything funny tonight,” he says and I laugh out loud. “I’m serious! I’ve caught you looking at my butt.”

  “Shut up!” I say through my laughter.

  He stands so I can get inside the sleeping bag. I peel off my boots, silently wondering if there are any snake bits left on the sole of my right boot, and throw my boots next to my backpack. I slip inside and Daedric slides in next to me.

  I feel a fit of giggles coming as if a cute boy has just showed up to my slumber party. He zips the sleeping bag up and turns to me. I swallow the pool of saliva in my mouth. I’m salivating. This is not good.

  He reaches up and brushes the hair out of my face. A deep chill passes through me and my leg twitches.

  He smiles. “You don’t have to kick me. Just tell me if you want me to stop.”

  “It’s cold,” I whisper.

  He rubs my arm with his hand to warm me up. “Better?”

  “My feet are frozen.”

  He rubs his foot against mine and another shiver passes through me. His gaze moves over every inch of my face. I can’t take it anymore. I lean in to kiss him and he turns his head so my lips land on his cheek.

  He smiles at me then he kisses my forehead. I inhale as he moves down and lays a soft kiss my temple. I exhale when he kisses my earlobe. His lips graze my jaw as he moves to my mouth.

  His hand grasps my neck lightly as we share the kind of kiss I thought only existed in movies. His hand moves over my shoulder, down my arm, and lands on my back. I press my body against his, my back arching, as he kisses my neck.

  His hand slips beneath my shirt and I flinch. “Sorry,” he says, as he slips it out again.

  “It’s okay. It’s just cold,” I say.

  He kisses me fast on the lips. “Good night, Nada.”

  I kiss him on the cheek before I turn around. He pulls me closer to him and brushes my hair down so he can lay his face next to my head. His left hand grabs my right hand as if he’s about to twirl me around on a dance floor.

  “I love you,” he whispers in my ear.

  I shiver as I exhale the breath caught in my chest.

  CHAPTER 4

  For the next three days, the cold weather continues, as does Daedric’s chilly mood. For the third night in a row, Daedric and I tuck into my sleeping bag and promptly say our goodnights.

  I’m the first to rise in the morning and I bring back two dead vole rats before Daedric has rolled up the sleeping bag.
Mary works methodically with her switchblade to skin and gut the rats without contaminating the meat. She packs one of the carcasses in fresh snow for later and we feast.

  We boil more snow to replenish our water supply and Daedric hands me a bottle of water without a word. I pack the rubber bottle in my backpack and cinch my belt onto the next rung while trying to ignore the hunger pangs in my belly. We set off on our thirteenth day of hiking.

  “Where are we?” Mary asks, when the snow finally stops and we reach a steep cliff.

  Daedric puts his hand on her back and points into the distance. “You see those two white spots? That’s the old Air Force base.”

  Mary smiles as she recognizes it and Daedric smiles back. I try not to vomit.

  I know this behavior is a response to my lack of response when Daedric told me he loved me. It’s not that I don’t feel the same, I just don’t know if what I’m feeling is real or due to our proximity. As I watch him lead Mary away from the cliff I’m even more conflicted.

  We find our way off the cliff and down to the desert. The bitter cold follows us, but the snow stays behind. As the sun begins to set, we encounter a desert tortoise burrowing under a bush. It’s too easy and I don’t feel good about making such an easy kill, so Mary cleanly chops off its head.

  Daedric carries the carcass until we find an abandoned building on the Air Force base. Mary uses a utility sink to clean the tortoise. The animal yields at least seven pounds of meat.

  “You need to eat,” Daedric insists as he tries to get me to accept a piece of charred tortoise.

  I don’t know if it’s the way the tortoise was killed or if I’m losing my mind, but I can’t touch it. The smell of the meat makes my stomach roil. I lay in my sleeping bag and close my eyes.

  I miss Isaac. He wouldn’t make me eat that animal.

  Four more days of traveling through the desert and we’re down to a gallon and a half of water.

  “We need to find a trading post,” Daedric says.

  “We don’t have anything to trade for water,” Mary replies.