LeRoy Clary - Humanaty's Blight

But she was still stupid.

“I asked you a question.” Her tone had grown a little sharper, more impatient. “Why not kill you right now?”

“I answered you.” The calmness in my voice surprised me. There was no trembling or fear despite my inward feelings. “Shoot me, if you want. I’m tired of living like this, anyhow.”

She was scared, it was easy to see. Almost as scared as me. And people don’t shoot others from a few steps away—at least, not in the world we’d occupied—until the last two weeks. It had come to an impasse. She looked at me. I looked at her. I waited for my chance.

Behind her, in the forest, another tree limb cracked from the cold. It sounded like a gunshot and the branch rattled down past others as it made its way to the ground, breaking other brittle and frozen branches along the way. At the first hint of the sound, she had spun and dropped to her knees, rifle raised to her shoulder, ready to fire at whatever danger came her way.

Good reactions. Bad timing. My fist struck the back of her head, her rifle fell from limp fingers to the snow. Then I had a new set of choices to make, the first included shooting her or not—in our reversed circumstances.

My little twenty-two semi-automatic pistol had found its way into my hand, the barrel pointed at the back of her motionless head. She didn’t move or attempt to fight. I hesitated. She’d been hit hard, and the soreness in my knuckles attested to that.

Like her, I should have pulled the trigger right then. It made sense to do so. She might be a carrier of the flu. She might wake up and kill me later when she had another chance. My finger never touched the trigger. Perhaps neither of us was as callous as the new world demanded.

She finally moaned.

As she rolled over, I reached for her rifle, finding it both lightweight and hefty at the same time. Rugged is maybe a better description. The magazine ejected at the touch of my gloved thumb. I tossed it aside. A single shell flew off into the snow when I pulled back the cocking lever, or whatever the official name of the lever was. The rifle posed no more danger unless she retrieved it from the snow and used it as a club. I asked in a voice ruder than intended, although to be honest, she had aimed a loaded rifle at me, and I had a right to speak in any tone I wanted. “Any more guns?”

She shook her head and her eyes rolled to the back of her head from the action. Probably dizzy from the blow by my fist to her head. Another man, in an earlier time, might have accepted her answer. I patted her heavy coat, felt around the waist of her snow-pants, and generally searched her from head to foot in ways that would have sent me to prison for touching a woman I didn’t know in that fashion a few weeks ago. But under her heavy winter clothing, there are a dozen places to hide another weapon and I didn’t want to take a chance.

I knew that people hid them for a fact. I had hideout weapons on me; a belt buckle with a razor-sharp edge when exposed, a tiny flat jackknife blade inside the toe of my left boot under the sole insert, and a wire-saw coiled within a “secret” pocket inside my coat. And at the bottom of the square outside pocket of my coat was a nail, a big one, old, rusty, and sharpened to a needle point on a stone only a day ago. One jab would cause a lot of pain, and it might be overlooked as a weapon in a brief search.

She didn’t object to my intensive search. It wouldn’t have done any good and both of us knew it. I said as I wagged the barrel of my pistol to indicate my desire, “Up.”

The girl struggled to get a wobbly knee under herself.

She looked at me as if silently asking for help. It was the same helpless expression that a girl would wear if trying to draw me closer before attacking. I stepped back out of her grasp and waited. No hurry.

Once on her feet, her eyes went to the rifle in the snow as if promising herself she would have the opportunity to use it on me.

“Leave it,” I told her.

The frown was instantaneous. Her voice was soft, “Hey, the army uses those.”

I shrugged and didn’t ask how she’d come to be in possession of it.

“Are you going to just leave it there? That gun will shoot three-shot bursts at a time, or fully automatic. Or one shot. The scope is amazingly accurate.” Her eyes went to my little twenty-two with the six-inch-long PVC pipe duct-taped to the barrel. Her expression was one of serious disdain. It looked like a broken toy. She didn’t even try to conceal her feelings or her contempt for me.

My finger wagged for her attention and finally pointed off to our side in the direction I wanted her to move. She walked ahead. I followed, always ten steps behind, close enough to shoot her if she ran, but far enough behind, that I wouldn’t be surprised by a quick move. More snow was falling; small brittle flakes that felt like they had sharp edges when they touched my cheeks, more ice than snow.

We trudged a step at a time. The depth of the snow sapped our energy. Each step took ten times the effort of a normal one. As we moved laterally around the side of the mountain, my mind reviewed how she had probably watched me with the scope on her rifle and positioned herself in front of me and behind that log then waited for me to approach. Let me walk right into her trap. But she hadn’t shot when she could have. Should have. That meant something.

Until she had stood up from behind a log and pointed her rifle at me, I had no direct knowledge of anyone else on the mountain. The simple fact was that she’d outsmarted me. If she had wished to kill me, she could have done so a dozen times over.

Somewhere in the depths of my mind, that fact bothered me on several levels. I’d believed myself to be smarter than almost everyone. My flight to the mountains, avoiding the outbreak of the blight and locating an old mining tunnel to live in substantiated that idea. Hadn’t I survived when almost all others died? How had the small woman I faced managed to do the same and to trick me so easily?

The rifle. It might be a clue. She could be a soldier and have specialized training. I rejected that idea because while I hadn’t yet seen her full face, she had seemed too young. Again, I rejected my own conclusions.

It was another mistake on my part, another assumption without facts to support it. That sort of thing will get you killed. The woman might be thirty and have ten years of military combat training since all I had seen were her eyes. I let her get a few more steps ahead of me for safety and reconsidered shooting her.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

The voice sounded young and scared. An act? A trick? I was wary. “Keep walking. At that stand of evergreens, turn left and go up the side of the hill.”

A lone man trying to keep a prisoner is worse than stupid. I’d have to feed her. Provide her shelter, and the first time I made a mistake, she would kill me. A knife left in her reach, a rock with a rough edge to saw through the ropes binding her hands, a hundred other mistakes on my part, could be my last. Sleeping would be impossible.

Letting her go meant she would return with friends, find and kill me. Taking that option meant that if I released her, I’d have to relocate. I had nowhere else to go.

She abruptly sat in the snow.

Instead of rushing up to her and yanking her to her feet, an action that might allow her to use army training to defeat me, I pulled to a stop and waited. She turned and faced me. “I’m not going any farther. Kill me here if you want, but I’m not making it easy for you to take me to some isolated place and do anything you want to me.”

She acted like she was reading my mind.

She drew in a deep breath and waited for me to speak. I didn’t. She scowled and said in a softer tone, “You look like a good man, a reasonable man. Can you shoot a fourteen-year-old girl?”