May Dawney - Survival Instincts

They ate without speaking, but it wasn’t quiet. Skeever hadn’t quite finished his meal—he liked to play with it, Lynn had discovered—and the sound of snapping bones and scraping nails rose up from the corner. The wind rustled the leaves of the trees all around them. Owls hooted. The fire popped and crackled. In the distance something howled.

Lynn shivered. She scooted forward a bit to chase away the sudden chill that seeped into her bones. She scraped her spoon along the bottom of her bowl and finished off her first portion, then her second after it finished cooking.

Dani had finished too. She stared into the fire with half-lidded eyes. Fatigue radiated off her.

The silence between them stretched to the point where it got uncomfortable to Lynn. Despite herself, she put her bowl down loudly. The spoon rattled against the edge.

Dani’s head shot up, and her now-alert gaze settled upon Lynn.

“How are your feet?”

Dani squinted. “Why do you ask?”

“I think you should take your boots off. If you have blisters, they could get infected if you don’t air ’em.” She nodded toward the leather-and-rubber contraptions around Dani’s feet.

Dani looked down too. She hesitated, then untangled her legs and went to work untying the leather strings. Her jaw set as if to steady herself before she pulled her boots off. She put them by the fire with a slightly trembling hand.

Even from here, Lynn could see blisters along the edges of her little and big toes. She’d guessed correctly: Dani wasn’t used to walking this long. The chapel had been an outpost for the Homesteaders—and it was almost within spitting distance of the Homestead. It had been a long time since Lynn had suffered from sore feet, but she could imagine the discomfort.

Dani produced Ren’s medicine from her pack and spot-treated each blister in turn. She muffled a groan that mixed pain and relief as she applied the ointment.

Skeever entered the circle of light while busily licking his muzzle. He brushed against Lynn’s back before he lay down with his head on her lap.

She tore her gaze away from Dani and smiled at him. “Hey, boy, good food?”

He sighed and licked his lips again.

Lynn stroked Skeever’s head. I haven’t sat by a campfire with other people since that couple near Plattsburgh. How long ago had that been? Two months? Of course she’d sat by the Homestead fire with the others yesterday, but that was different. Settlement fires weren’t like campfires made on the fly, kept small so as not to attract anything or anyone. Settlement fires never went out. They became beacons of homeliness: three meals a day, heat at night, all produced on flames easily brought back to life from dulled but still lively embers. They were kept differently, smelled differently, served a different purpose. The contrast had never been as stark as now, with the ambivalent memories of the Homestead still so fresh.

“Here.” Dani extended the jar. “For your arm.”

“Thanks.” Lynn took it. She considered packing it away, but since she would use it on her arm later, she decided to put it by her tomahawk instead.

Dani stretched her legs out and wiggled her now-glistening toes.

“Better?” It fell from Lynn’s lips before she could stop it.

Dani’s toes stopped moving. She nodded slowly. “Yeah.” A pause. “Thanks.”

“Welcome. How much longer until we can turn north?”

Dani hesitated. “Somewhere in the afternoon, I think.”

“Afternoon?” She frowned. “It took me, like, two hours to get from the interstate to where you guys hunted the elephant.” It was a vague estimate; connecting passing time with distance was not her strong suit.

“Yeah, but I don’t know that route.” Dani ran her finger along the inside of her bowl. She sucked the digit clean with an air of nonchalance that was incongruent with the tension in her shoulders and the way she avoided Lynn’s gaze.

Lynn squinted at her. Was there something going on? Something she needed to worry about? She could see no possible advantage for Dani if she deliberately lengthened their journey—unless she planned to lead Lynn into a trap. Then a thought struck her. “Do you even know where we are?”

Dani tensed even more, then shrugged. “Sort of.”

“Sort of?” She didn’t hold back the sharpness in her tone.

Dani glared at her. “Hey, don’t even start! We don’t come out this far! Flint told me the routes out of New York that he knows are still intact—or at least which were intact a few years ago—and I’m just… working with that.”

Lynn rolled her eyes emphatically. “So, basically you have no idea where we are or where we’re going.”

“Well…” Dani plucked at her pant leg. “I just need to find the bridge.”

Lynn fought her impatience. “Which bridge?”

The shadows the fire cast made it hard to read Dani’s expression as she looked up. “Um, a bridge with two pointy towers that leads to Bronx.” She hesitated. “We should have made it across today. According to Flint, it was maybe an hour away from the cemetery, along the big 278 street.”

An hour? They’d walked at least half a day since the cemetery. Anger bubbled as hotly as the stew had in the cans. “So you’re basically saying we walked half a day in the wrong direction and you have no idea where we are?”

Dani’s silence spoke volumes.

Lynn’s mind raced. She’d counted on Dani to take her out of the city or at least toward the edge of it. Once she ditched Dani, she had planned on heading straight on, leaving New York behind, and never looking back. Now straight on might lead her deeper into the city. If that happened, it could take days, even weeks to get free from New York’s clutches. “Shit!”

“We can backtrack tomorrow.” Dani’s tone had lost its bravado. “Follow the road back to the cemetery and then past it. I’m sure we’re on the right road. We just… went the wrong way.”

Lynn sighed. Shake it off. It happened. Move on. Nothing can be done about it now. “ Yeah, I guess we don’t have a choice.”

Dani swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

Lynn snorted. “I bet. Next time you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, tell me, okay?”

Instead of rising to the bait as Lynn had expected, Dani met her gaze and nodded. She appeared to be on the verge of tears. “I will.”

LYNN CURSED HERSELF FOR NOT paying better attention yesterday; they’d gone almost straight south instead of west. The position of the sun as it rose to the left was a glaringly obvious sign that Dani hadn’t had a clue where they were going. She should have noticed, but the pain in her arm had increased to the point of distraction—which had caused her to focus more on her immediate surroundings instead of something as far away as the sun. That was her excuse, anyway. Now she trudged back along the remnants of the same broad street they had taken yesterday.

Dani walked parallel to her whenever the rugged terrain allowed, keeping a steady five feet between them. The night hadn’t done her a kindness. In the pale light of morning her expression was truly blank, not just shielded like before.

Lynn suspected that the reality of her situation had sunk in. Unlike Lynn, who had settled into her well-practiced habit of dozing without ever falling fully asleep, Dani had drifted into sleep only to awake with a start whenever something scurried, howled, or otherwise made noise nearby. In the darkest hours before daybreak, she’d curled up into a ball and sobbed noiselessly until she’d drifted off into fitful sleep once more.

The blankness of Dani’s mood worried Lynn a little, but her thoughts were occupied with a much more pressing issue: she couldn’t tell if her arm hurt worse or less today. It felt different: tight and stinging. She’d cleaned the bite marks yesterday evening and again this morning. At least a few of the wounds needed stitches; they’d begun to bleed again at the lightest of touches, and the wool she’d tied over it with leather strips had greedily sucked up its share.