“It always gives me the heebie-jeebies to come into one of these old places that’s never been opened,” she said. “I always wonder if the ghosts of the original owners are watching in anger as we invade the space they used to live in.”
“Afraid they’ll pop out and spook ya?”
“I wonder if they can somehow retaliate.”
He looked at her, letting his eyes go big and his lips formed a silent “O”. He set off towards the kitchen, chuckling.
The place had once been a very nice, tight little home, in the middle of what had once been farm country. Even under all the dust he could see that the house, for the most part had been orderly. However, in front of the rusting washing machine, there was a pile of rotting sheets and clothing, all stained, waiting to be washed by owners long gone. Ghost Wind came in and looked at the pile.
“You think they’re still here?” she asked, “Their bodies, I mean?”
“I’d say it’s highly likely that in some of the upper bedrooms you will find bodies in the beds, where they ended their days too sick to rise anymore. That was pretty common, since the bio-plague usually took a couple weeks to kill someone. If not, then someone who wound up immune to the plague may have dragged them outside and hopefully buried them.”
“Let’s hope it’s the latter.”
“Yeah.”
“What exactly are we looking for?” she said, studying his tracks in the dust. She seemed very intent on them and he wondered what she could find so interesting about footprints in fine dust.
“The boys out there were on a drunken spree when they went through my stuff. Some of my gear is either broken, or befouled to the point where I’d prefer to replace it. And, no offense intended, but some of your gear is pretty…marginal.” He looked over, to see if she was taking umbrage at his words, but she seemed to be pragmatic about it. She just nodded.
He continued, “As this is your first B and E, I’d just take a look around and see what you can find that might be useful.”
“B and E?”
“Henh. Breaking and entering.”
“You assume much,” she said with a slight smirk on her face.
Ghost Wind wandered up the staircase, and Eli had to admit, it was enjoyable to watch her climb as he followed. At the top, they went in opposite directions, he turned left into an end bedroom, while she went to the opposite end.
Eli saw dusty blankets on the bed, but he was hoping to find a sleeping bag to replace the one that Benny and Lester had torn so badly. It was okay to lie on and use a blanket, but he didn’t want to trust it in really cold weather. He was opening the closet door when he heard a clattering and a soft, almost inaudible gasp. Moving faster than he should in his painful condition, he came out in the hall to see a small skull bouncing down the stairs.
He looked up at Ghost Wind, dust settling around her feet and a stiff look on her face as the skull came to rest on the ground floor.
“It was leaning against the inside of the door,” she said. “I wasn’t… expecting…”
He realized she was embarrassed at having a human reaction. “Well. I would have screamed like a little girl child, so I don’t know what you’re worried about.”
She frowned. “Did you note the size? So small…”
“A lot of children died in the plague, anyone who wasn’t somehow immune died. It’s sad, but…”
She looked up at him, stricken. “Wait. I want to check something.” She moved to the middle remaining bedroom, and opened the door carefully. No shotguns or skeletons were waiting, and she looked in at the bed. “Were there bodies in the room you chose?”
“Nope, quite empty.”
“It’s as I feared.”
“What?”
“There are no adults here. Unless there are bodies downstairs in the kitchen or den, she died here alone, maybe not even from the plague. Maybe… maybe she starved.”
She looked terribly sad, and something about that reaction made him like her even more. But it was time to get down to business.
“We need to scavenge these rooms. We can grieve over dead people from long ago back at camp.” Her lips tightened, but she nodded and they separated to different rooms.
Forty minutes later, he came down the stairs with several items wrapped in a sheet slung over his shoulder. He saw she had been there ahead of him and left her new belongings on the dining room table. There was a wood handled carbon steel kitchen knife, a stainless steel cooking pot, army surplus mittens and cloth to be used for who knew what.
The prize was a matched set of a .44 caliber Henry lever-action rifle, with intricate engraving on the box and the stalk and a finely detailed .44 magnum revolver. They were obviously show pieces, but the rifle was a Henry and he felt a slight twinge of jealousy. There were also four boxes of cartridges for the rifle (that would also work in the pistol) and they weren’t reloads either.
The cartridges alone were worth more than their weight in gold. You couldn’t shoot gold unless you made it into bullets.
The surprising thing in the pile was two elderly books. One was
Sisters of the Raven/Circle of the Moon
by Barbara Hambly, the second was
The Wanderer
by Kahlil Gibran.
The wolf-woman was evidently a reader.
So much for not wanting extra things to slow her down.
“Now where have you gotten to, wolf lady?” He headed into the kitchen, and looking down, saw a drag mark coming from the stairwell. “No way…
she didn’t…”
****
He was right, she was outside. The trip-wire on the back door had been snipped, and the door was slightly ajar. He walked into the backyard and saw her.
The sky was overcast as Ghost Wind tossed the last shovelful of dirt out onto the long-dead lawn. She set the rusty shovel aside and dusted off her dirty hands. He watched her smell the scent of the far off mountains in the coming rain and for a moment, she looked at peace. She got out of the three-foot deep grave she had dug and walked over to the small bundle wrapped in a dusty sheet she had dragged from the house. She picked it up and ever so carefully lowered it into the hole.
“If you do that with every skeleton you find out here, you’re are going to be spending the rest of your life doing little else but digging.”
“She was just a child; she died all alone. Look closely, there are two other graves over there. She probably had to bury at least one of her parents. I think the plague killed them and left her out here with no power, dwindling food, and no help to fend for herself.” She sighed. “It’s an awful way for one so young to die.”
There wasn’t much he could say to that. He had seen such an amazing amount of death since the Die-Off, much of it brutal, and he realized he had become callous to most of it. If this wolf woman could show a little kindness to a long-dead child, the least he could do was help. He bent over and picked up the shovel, but a wave of dizziness overtook him.
“Stop that, idiot!” she barked at him. “A day and a half ago you were crucified on a makeshift cross. Don’t try to do any heavy labor, you’ll just hurt yourself again. What’s wrong with your head?”
“It seems to be very,… spinny,” he replied, sitting down carefully under an old pine tree. “Please, carry on.”
He watched her begin to shovel dirt into the makeshift grave.
“So, this Clan of the Hawk, I’d guess not an original native group then?” he asked.
“It is a group of all races, who do not hold with the technology of the twenty-first century. They believe the Die-Off was caused by the makers of that technology and have decided to have a simpler life. The only ones who use the new tech are the members of the warrior society.”
“And your scouts are part of that society.”
She stopped digging for a moment. “No. The scouts, with the exception of a few items, make most of their equipment from nature.”
“But why? There’s still a lot of perfectly good stuff lying around rusting or rotting. Why would they do that?”
“The rationale is that the scouts should be able to be left anywhere out in the world with almost nothing and still be able to thrive. It’s the philosophy of the scout society, and while I’m not saying the rules are never bent, for the most part the scouts try to stick to that credo. I personally think it might well be the reason I’m still alive.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. We are tested before we leave our apprenticeship and we are tested hard.”
She took off her strange hybrid coat and a deer skin blouse to reveal a sleeveless hemp undershirt and even feeling dizzy, he was well aware that she had a very fine figure. He also watched the muscles of her upper arm, corded like metal cable when they flexed.
Strong one, this girl. She’ll need to be, out here, all alone.
She looked like a good candidate, but he was hesitant to say anything about inviting her to be part of his own Mountain Folk. She had, after all, been banished from her own group and there had to be a reason for that. Maybe it was just some sort of religious persecution, there sure as shit were plenty of weirdo cults out here since the Die-Off.
What if she’s one of those strange ones, predisposed towards chaos and craziness?
He didn’t think so. She was cool and calm in dangerous situations, and his conversations with her told him she was very intelligent. But the thing that really convinced him at a gut level was happening right before him. Ghost Wind was trying to give a little dignity to a long dead-child in a world where most people were used to stumbling over and ignoring skulls and bones.
She had just tamped down the earth of the grave, then added a little more, tamped that down. He watched her take paving stones from the garden and lay them in an oval around the grave, then put the remainder over where the child’s body lay. She finished by stacking the last few at the head of the grave.
“Go, little one,” she said, lowering her head. “Leave this sad place and be with your people. Do not stay here, go where the light is.” He saw her eyes glimmer with tears, and after all these years, even with all the bodies he had seen, he felt his own sting a little.
Jesus, have I really become this unfeeling? To forget this simple emotion?
Ghost Wind started toward the house, shovel in hand and he called after her, “You don’t really need to put that back, Ghost Wind, these folks are done with it.”
She looked down at the shovel for a moment, “Someone may need it someday. I find it… offensive to leave a good tool to rot and rust,” she continued into the back door.
He carefully got to his feet and followed.
At the shelter, listening to a light rain, they were going through their scavenging finds. Ghost Wind had been almost silent since finding the small skeleton. Eli had made his decision.
“Ahhh… so…” he started, carefully,
“what are your plans, if I may ask?”
“To hunt, wander, rest when I can,” she replied, suddenly intent on the cleaning job she had started on the revolver.
“That’s it?” He knew he was pushing it, but he hoped she might loosen up, at least a little.
“I don’t know where I’m going,” she said, her hands finally stopping their work. “I have no idea what I’ll do, or how long I’ll live on my own. I plan on searching for my teacher’s murderer, but how I’ll ever find him in all this vastness, I have no idea.”
She looked at him with intent eyes. “One thing I’m not going to do is roll over and die, just because I was judged unfairly by my people.”
“I’m very glad to hear that,” he said. “ There’s an alternative to the lone wolf future you’re planning.”
“Planning,” she said, bitter laughter creeping into her voice. “Oh yes, some plan I have there.”
“Ghost Wind, are you willing to listen to what I have to offer?”
She looked at him suspiciously. “This had better not have anything to do with shucking me out of my trousers. I’ve sworn off men, particularly smooth talkers such as yourself. Nothing but pain and trouble.”
He might have been offended by her words at one time, but the experiences of a long life, much of it harsh, had blunted such tender sensibilities. “That is not what I want to talk to you about.”
“Then let’s hear it.”
“I actually am not as much of a lone entity as you might think. I have people who, to some degree, help me, and we’ve formed a community up in the mountains. Originally, it was made up of ex-slaves, many of whom I rescued from their captivity personally.” He paused to see her reaction. Her face had become a mask, giving away nothing. “They’ve found some peace, away from the roads and they’re making a life for themselves. We still scavenge on occasion, but we mostly grow our own food and some of the people have become halfway decent hunters.”
When she finally said something, he could barely hear her soft reply. “And what do you want from me?”
The softness of that reply hurt his heart. It was the voice of someone who had given up hope, someone who couldn’t trust that anything good would ever again come to her in life. He hated the thought of her wandering the wastelands alone and friendless. He hated that she couldn’t trust anyone anymore.
“What do I want? Ghost Wind, I want to offer you a place with us. Is that so hard to believe?”
She didn’t say anything, she just sat, head bowed. The wings of her hair obscured all but the end of her nose and the edge of her lips, but it was enough for him to see she was trembling. He hoped it hadn’t been too much, too fast. He was usually pretty good at subtle, but this offer had been made on the fly.
He probably should have built up to this. He didn’t mean to overwhelm her, but community was obviously a painful button for her, and he had pushed it.
“I’m going to give you a little while to think on this. This is not a one-time offer, it’s open-ended and you don’t have to make a decision right now, or tomorrow or a week from Tuesday,” he said. “You savvy open-ended?”