Wolfen (23 page)

He scratched his head and picked up his boots. “Okay,
thanks.” Cloth would dry quickly, but the soles of his boots would not. He
could walk back barefoot and wait to put them on later.

“Yeah, you’re welcome.” She waved awkwardly. “And now I’m
going to go back. To the fire. Because I’m hungry. Okay, bye!” And then she
ran.

What. The. Hell.

There was a bright side to a man who didn’t like talking: he
didn’t ask questions.

When Sinna returned to the campfire, Bryce was only a few
steps behind. Damn his super speed and long-legged stride. She perched across
the fire pit from him and stayed there for the rest of the night, staring at
the crackling logs. He watched her, and more than once opened his mouth as if
he wanted to say something, but he didn’t.

Thank. God.

Sinna could just die of embarrassment. First, she’d ogled
him like some totally naïve teenager, then she’d made it worse by running away.
Like some demented, socially inept teenager.
What is wrong with me?

Okay. Part of the problem might be that Bryce redefined the
golden ratio of proportions. People just didn’t look like that anymore. Sinna
was used to seeing people pasty from hiding in the dark, emaciated from lack of
food, dirty from lack of washing. And then in walked the Wolfen brothers like
they’d stepped out of a body builder ad, and everyone else was just so far
beneath them, there was no comparison.

She groaned and coughed to disguise the sound, risking a
glance to see if Bryce had noticed. Who was she kidding? She
was
a
naïve, socially inept teenager. In every way, except for age. Gerry’s carefully
structured, pedantic extrapolations on human sexuality had been grossly
inadequate, if she’d managed to leave out how the sight of one naked dude could
scramble a girl’s brains for an indeterminate amount of time.

Thanks, Gerry. Thanks a lot.

How was she supposed to look at him now and
not
see
him naked? Where was her mnemonic memory device for that, huh? Oh, sure, Please
Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. Subtract clothes, add water, divide between and
around the individual muscle groups, multiply by an overabundance of hormones,
encompass in parentheses of one extremely intimate setting, and raise to the
power of We-could-die-at-any-moment.

What did that function equal?

Sinna shoved to her feet so fast she startled Bryce. “I’m
going to bed,” she announced.

He frowned. “Everything okay?”

“What? Yeah. Absolutely. Why wouldn’t it be?” If she
blinked, he’d know something was up, so she kept her eyes open despite the
sting of smoke. They were so wide, he probably thought she’d lost her mind, but
after several tense seconds of piercing perusal, he looked away to add another
log to the flame, and her tension fizzled out.

“All right,” he said. And that was it.

Sinna didn’t stick around; she raced to the mule, slammed
the door, and scrunched into as tight a ball as she could to pretend she was
invisible.

~

When morning came, her stellar sleep tactic backfired. She
was so cramped and sore, her emergence from the truck was not unlike a water
buffalo calf being born. If the door’s opening hadn’t woken the forest, her
graceful thud to the ground certainly did.

Bryce had kept the fire going, and now three more tiny
woodland creatures were roasting on a spit. Had he slept at all last night? He
sat in the exact same position she’d left him: with his back to the mule,
hunching close to the flames, as if deep in thought. In the plaid shirt, black
cargo pants, and army boots, he was half lumberjack, half special ops. He’d
taken off the knife harness, but it was neatly laid out next to him within easy
reach should he need it.

“Morning,” he said without looking at her.

“Hi,” she replied.

“You’ve got an hour to wash up and eat. Then we train.”

Again? “Okay.”

Sinna picked herself up and stretched out her sore muscles, in
no mood to dunk into that river of icy death. But clean was clean, and the cold
might clear her head. She limped downstream to the watering hole Bryce had used
last night. No physical evidence remained of him ever having been there, but
somehow Sinna felt like he’d never left. Her face burned as she stripped down
and waded into the water.

It was much colder than she remembered, and her teeth
chattered as she submerged to her chin. The sun wasn’t high enough yet to reach
this spot and its absence made Sinna feel like she was bathing in the
underworld with a hologram of Bryce standing in the same place, performing the
exact same tasks, only a split second faster or slower, like two pendulums
swinging at slightly different rates. In the moments they coincided exactly,
Sinna shivered, searching the woods for spying eyes.

Paranoid now?

Yep.

She washed faster, eager to get out of there. Her hair was a
mess, and she had to finger comb the worst of the tangles from the curls. It’d
be a whole lot easier to just cut it all off, but she couldn’t bear the
thought. Not because she was vain, but because keeping her hair long reminded
her of better times, when Gerry used to comb it out at night and braid it into
pigtails. Cutting it would sever her last connection to the life she once used
to have, and relinquish any remaining hope of ever being that happy and
carefree again. She wasn’t ready to do that.

When her fingers started to go numb, she called it good
enough and waded back to shore. Her clothes were mostly…okay. Unlike Bryce, her
pants were blood free and only needed a good shake to dislodge the road dust.
Her tank top was fine as well. Her overshirt had sustained most of the damage
with the blood.

Sinna worked out her stiff fingers, then went back to the
stream to wash the shirt. Dried blood was a bitch to clean. The stains were so
set, they didn’t come out completely, but at least most of the smell washed
out. She’d hang it by the fire to dry while she ate.

Speaking of which, a little extra heat would not go amiss
right about now.

Luckily, Bryce had kept the fire burning hot for her. She
huddled close to it while she ate a gourmet breakfast of fresh squirrel and
itty-bitty fish. It beat the hell out of decades-old cans of chili. With a
little salt, it’d be fantastic.

“How are your arms?” Bryce asked.

Sinna shrugged. “A bit sore,” she said around a mouthful of
fish. “But not too bad.”

Their tea had been brewed from young pine needles in a
rusted old can. Sinna didn’t ask where he’d found it; she just drank. It warmed
her insides, and despite the strong resin taste, the vitamin C would do her a
world of good. This was a feast! So hearty and delicious, her unease around
Bryce magically melted away. Amazing what a simple hot meal could do.

Her quiet companion had returned to his whittling. Made
sense, now that she knew what he was making. They’d broken about half of the
arrows he’d made yesterday and she’d worried they wouldn’t have enough when it
would count. In these woods, he had a veritable arrow-making factory, and
already a decent stack sat next to him, but he was still going. One could never
have enough ammunition.

Practical busywork. Sinna could admire that. And he was so
efficient; he could sharpen a tip and carve a nock in under a minute. She
counted.

“Can I ask you something?” she asked, breaking the
comfortable silence.

“Can’t stop you.”

“Har har.”
Smartass.
“If your Montana den is so
great, why aren’t you and Aiden back there?”

“We go on periodic provision runs.”

“But you made it sound like the den is completely
self-sufficient. What provisions do you need?”

“Things we can’t make.”

“Like…?”

“Unmakable things.”

She rolled her eyes.

“My turn,” he said. “What happened to you after Gerry died?”

Sinna almost choked on a bite of squirrel. She coughed, and
took a sip of pine tea to clear her airways. “Where did that come from?”

He shrugged, set a finished arrow aside, and took up another
raw stick. “You’re so good at coaxing others to talk, you never say much
yourself.”

“There’s not much to say, really,” she hedged.

“Event A: Your caretaker and the only person you’ve ever
known and lived with since Chernobyl, dies. Event B: Aiden and I find you shot
and bleeding to death in the company of several other people. Discuss.”

When she didn’t answer right away, Bryce set down his tools
and braced his elbows on his knees, giving her his full attention, which made
it even more difficult to unravel her tongue.

Sinna didn’t know where to start. She opened her mouth a
couple of times, but couldn’t find the right words to explain.

“Take your time,” Bryce said gently, almost as if she were a
wild animal he didn’t want to spook.

Sinna poked at the biggest burning log to break it apart.
When it kicked up a shower of sparks, they brought back a memory. “Gerry used
to save her notes on an old voice recorder. It ran on batteries, and for a long
time we had plenty of them. She didn’t tell me when she put the last ones in.”
God, this was harder than she thought.

“She died on my birthday,” Sinna said. “We were going to
have a huge meal, and she had this bracelet all wrapped up in a fancy box and
Christmas ribbons. And then I had to go and leave her. Afterwards I… I sat
there for hours, just playing back her voice. I listened to her talk about the
Grays, and me—things she never told me directly. She worried about how safe our
house was, and where there was still food to be found, and how she wished the
world could be better for me. I can recite those recordings by heart now, but I
couldn’t tell you what her voice sounded like. All I remember is her screams.”

Sinna shook her head. If only it was that easy to forget;
just shake it off like a dog shook off bothersome fleas. But those fleas kept
coming back, just like her memories. “Anyway, that recorder and the bracelet
was all I took with me, besides food. The batteries had died, but I figured as
long as the chip was okay, I could maybe find more and get it working again.
Stupid, I know. I should have taken something worth trading. I didn’t think of that.

“I found a group of stragglers in an abandoned church.
Twenty-six of them at the time, all crammed into this underground rectory. They
didn’t have much, but they had enough to get by, and they knew where the
pickings were still decent, so we managed. I traded five cans of tuna for a
pair of batteries. Then I changed them out and discovered the memory had gotten
wiped somehow. I cried so hard that day. It was like I’d lost her all over
again, you know?”

“There were only six of you when we found you.”

“Yeah, well. Shit happened. People left, hoping to find some
promised land out east. Others just disappeared, and the rest died off. One by
one. After half of them were gone, we didn’t bother mourning anymore. Fewer
people meant fewer mouths to feed. Easier to sleep without all the noise, and
our meals were a little bigger; turns out there’s more power in smaller
numbers.

“There was this one girl, eighteen-year-old smartmouth, who
liked to huff paint thinner. She spent most of her time in a daze, watching us
and smirking every so often, like she was thinking ‘I wonder which one of you
will be next.’ She used to try to make us take bets on whether or not the
gatherers would come back from their trips. I hated her so much. Then, one day,
she just got up and walked out, like she was done with it all.

“And then there were ten. Harli went first. She was out on a
gathering trip and fell ten stories out of a broken window. At least that’s how
Connor told it. But since he’s the one who tried to kill me, I find myself
questioning everything he’d ever said and done.”

“That’s right, Connor was the blademan.”

“Yeah. He used to be a butcher. Real handy with a knife.
Like when he stuck it into James’ heart. But that was a mercy. Jimmy had a bad
infection that had gotten him more than halfway to the grave. Connor just
nudged him over the threshold.”

“And the rest?”

Sinna bit down on her lip. “Nate killed Tam.” She had to
force the words out. “Jimmy was the love of her life, and when he died, he took
her soul with him.” The rest came out in a rush. “We ran out of food, we
decided it was time to bug out, but Nate didn’t want to drag her along. So he
killed her while the rest of us were sleeping.

“Isaac died in the chase with Grays. We got separated. The
rest of them hid in an elevator shaft but I couldn’t… I… It just reminded me
too much of Chernobyl. I ran a different way. When I found them later, they
told me Isaac’s heart had given out. And then Connor shot me, and I woke up in
a cute little house with two new Wolfen friends. The End.”

Sinna expected Bryce to ask more questions. She almost
wished he would; give her an excuse to snap at him, take some of this anger out
on someone. All of those people dead and gone, and she’d just stood by and let
it happen. Oh, sure, she’d talked a big game with Nate over Tam, but he’d
gotten the last laugh anyway. Sure, she’d helped Isaac get out of harm’s way,
but he’d died there all on his own. Even when she helped, she didn’t help.

She owed them her life; because of them, she was sitting here
now, alive and well. It pissed her off, even more so because she had no one to
blame but herself. So yeah, a verbal spat would be nice about now, just to get
it out of her system.

But Bryce said nothing, just looked at her, and when she
didn’t go on, he nodded and went back to whittling those damned arrows, leaving
Sinna to self-destruct in the silence.

Rather than sit there and do nothing—the surest way to drive
her bonkers—Sinna retrieved an arrow from yesterday’s bunch and studied the
fletching. It looked simple enough, just a bit of duct tape cut into triangles
and curved to steady the arrow’s trajectory. She took the bit of remaining
tape, claimed one of the smaller, very sharp knives from Bryce’s collection,
and sat on the other side of his arrow stack to fletch her useless little heart
out.

After that, she practiced archery. She had the mechanics
down now, so Bryce didn’t need to instruct her. He just pointed out the target,
and let her have at it, and for a while, it was relatively easy going. The old
ache of strain eased, and Sinna was able to shoot like a pro before a new ache
set in. The final score: Sinna seventy, woodland targets three. And the best
part was no arrows were lost during the honing of her skills.