33
ATTICUS
When we crawled from beneath the hood the next morning there wasn’t a cloud in the sky; the summer heat had settled across the landscape in a thick blanket of humidity.
And one horse was gone.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” I stood where the horse stood last night, next to the speckled one. I’d tethered one horse so it couldn’t get away at least, but what was one horse with worn shoes when there were two riders and a small load of gear?
Thais came up beside me; her dress and the cotton pants she wore underneath were soaked all the way through; and filthy, caked with mud and pine needles. Her hair was sodden, tangled, lying ragged against her back; dirt was smeared across her face and neck, and something was crawling in her hair; she casually knocked it out.
I rubbed the back of my head, gritted my teeth in anger thinking about the horse that wandered off with some of our precious gear. I spotted something out ahead then: a heap lying in a puddle. It was my jacket.
“Didn’t make off with my coat, at least,” I said, holding it up; milky mud dripped from the sleeve. I laid it over the horse’s back. “But so much for everything else. Not to mention, we’re a horse short.”
Thais stepped up next to me.
“I’ll walk, you can ride,” I told her.
She leaned over and lifted the horse’s leg to inspect the horseshoe.
“I don’t think either of us should ride him,” she said. “And he probably shouldn’t carry our stuff for much longer, either. It would be cruel.”
I bent to check out her findings. She was right, but I wasn’t convinced the horse was useless.
“He can carry it,” I said with confidence, and set the hoof down in the mud. “How’s your ankle?”
“It’s fine.” Thais raised her foot and moved it around to demonstrate its mobility. “I can walk. You can walk. The horse can, but Atticus, I don’t want to make him carry this stuff much farther.”
I patted the horse on its muscled shoulder and thought about it. Staring westward, I considered how far from the river we were, knowing we had to be close because we’d been traveling for days.
Chewing on the inside of my cheek, I contemplated.
“Actually,” I said, “it’s probably a good idea we let the horse go now. If we let it go at the river, then whoever’s following us will know that we’ve crossed it. Let it go here, and maybe we can confuse our trail. If it can’t carry us or the gear much farther, there’s no reason to keep it.” I thought we could keep it around if we needed it for food, but I had a feeling Thais wouldn’t go for that. Admittedly, I wasn’t too big on the idea of eating horse meat, either.
“They might even think us dead,” Thais said, “if they come across the other horse with our gear still on its back.”
I nodded, agreeing.
After destroying the lean-to so it wouldn’t look like someone took shelter there, I smacked the speckled horse on the rear and sent it galloping in the opposite direction.
We gathered our things and divided the load between us; I took all the heavy items, leaving Thais with the small backpack, and we continued west where we walked another several hours until the sound of rushing water filled my ears.
Out ahead the trees thinned, replaced by blue sky. I reached behind me and pulled my handgun from my pants; I carried the rifle on my back.
“The forest ends just up there,” I said. “But we have to be careful and stay hidden. I’m sure the river is just beyond the tree line.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” she asked, nervously.
“Yes and no,” I said, grabbing her hand. “Yes, because it’s an endless water source. No, because where there are endless water sources, there are people trying to protect them.” I recalled the meeting with William Wolf and the talk of seizing control of the Great Lakes.
We waited until nightfall, hiding out in a small patch of woods near the river before going out into the open. In the darkness, I led Thais northward along the swollen riverbank. When the bridge came into view, we lay on our stomachs against the ground; a small hill rose up in front of us. Still, there were no signs of human life. I expected the river to be flanked by patrols, or at least a few dozen men guarding the bridge. I didn’t know whether to be relieved, or suspicious, that there was neither.
“What are we going to do?” Thais asked anxiously.
“We’ll cross the bridge.” I looked over at her lying next to me on the grass. “Where’s your gun?”
“In my backpack.”
“I want it in your hand, the safety off, and you ready to use it.”
She shrugged her backpack off and searched inside for the gun.
We were at the bridge in under two minutes; I kept Thais close as we went across. Once we made the halfway point, I regretted going over the bridge at all. This is when they’d attack, I thought as I grabbed Thais’ wrist and pulled her along.
When we made it across without incident, we darted into the Shawnee National Forest, our backpacks bouncing heavily against our backs.
We slept another night in the woods, against the base of a tall rock wall. Relieved to have time to make a proper bed, I gathered wood from the forest and constructed a bed to keep us off the ground.
After spending an hour searching for tinder that wasn’t too damp to start a fire with, I found enough to do the job and sparked a fire with a magnesium fire-starter. As we huddled together, we were visited by a small herd of deer that came walking through our camp. I thought about killing one so we could eat, but worried the gunshot would alert others of our presence.
THAIS & (ATTICUS)
By the second night, after we had pushed our way through rough terrain made up of more scaling rocks and thick brush and slippery hills, we came to a rock cave, bigger than the one I had shared with my sister long ago.
My stomach rumbled as I lay next to Atticus. The only thing either of us had had to eat in two days were earthworms, a couple eggs Atticus took from a bird’s nest, and bugs, but it wasn’t enough to replace the calories we’d burned traveling.
“Where are you going?” I raised my body from the cot, holding myself up on my elbow.
“To find you something to eat.”
“But I don’t want you to go alone.”
“I’m not going far. I’ll keep the camp in my sights.”
“But what if somebody hears the gunshot?”
“I don’t plan to use the gun unless I have to.” He patted the side of his boot where his knife was sheathed. “I’m just going to turn over a few dead trees and look under some rocks. I’ll be back.”
He returned thirty minutes later carrying a headless snake, at least a foot long and as big around as my wrist. He skinned it and gutted it and cooked the meat skewered on a tree branch over an open fire.
When another storm came in the next afternoon, we were forced to stay in the cave a third night.
It was the first time in over a week that Atticus took his boots off longer than a few minutes. He sucked air through his teeth as he pulled off the left boot; he complained that the blisters on his heel and the top of his two middle toes pulled away and broke when he peeled off the bloodstained sock afterward.
“Atticus, your feet look awful.” I moved to sit in front of him. I took his left foot into my hands, and when he tried to pull it away, my grip tightened and I glared, daring him to try. (It was the first time I’d smiled in…I couldn’t remember.)
“They’ll be fine,” he said. “I just need to air them out every once in a while.”
I looked at him, my eyes narrowed with lecture. “That’s bullshit,” I said, and Atticus laughed out loud.
“There’s not much I can do about it—they’re the only boots I have, and I’m not walking around barefooted.”
I released his foot gently.
“Well, you can do more than air them out every once in a while,” I echoed. “Just like with your hands, you need to keep them clean. And stop wearing them when you sleep. You only need them for walking.”
I stood up and went over to the small backpack propped against the cave wall.
“I wear them to sleep in case we get attacked,” he reminded me.
“We could get attacked at any time, asleep or awake,” I said as I sifted through the bag. “But if you let them get so bad you can’t walk or run in them at all, what are you going to do when we get attacked then?”
Atticus chuckled. “I’ll let you fight them off,” he joked. A shadow lay across his face, but I could still see his smile beneath it. Despite his feet, I was relieved to see his face was healing nicely, and his ribs didn’t seem to bother him as much.
I tried to wash his feet with the water we kept in a plastic water bottle, but he told me no, that we “won’t be wasting any more of the sterilized water” on his “minor” injuries. Annoyed by his stubbornness, and reminding him that minor could easily become major, I argued with him about it until he took his injured, smelly, moisture-wrinkled feet and wash them out in the rain when it poured again; the rain had been on and off in intervals all afternoon.
It was dusk, and the sun still offered the cave light, but it was fading quickly as the hour wore on. And when we laid down for the night, it had become so natural for me to curl up in his arms by then that Atticus instinctively reached for me as I made my way toward him.
The thought of not having him there—and I thought about it a lot, as it became my biggest fear—put a knot in my stomach I couldn’t push down.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice a warm whisper moving through the top of my hair as I clung to him in the darkness.
“I just don’t want you to get up in the middle of the night,” I answered.
“What if I have to take a piss?”
He pressed his lips to the top of my head.
“Then hold it,” I said seriously, and Atticus snorted. “Or if you have to go really bad, then take me with you.”
I could feel the measure of his big smile in the tightness of his arms.