Everything ached. Given a little comfort, I would fall asleep.
The sun was down now, and our fire had gone out except for a few glowing coals. I drew the gun and held it in my lap. If I needed it at all, I would need it fast. We weren’t strong enough to survive slowness or stupid mistakes.
I sat where I was for three weary, terrifying hours.
Nothing happened to me, but I could see and hear things happening. There were people moving around the hills, sometimes silhouetting themselves against the sky as they ran or walked over the tops of hills. I saw groups and individuals. Twice I saw dogs, distant, but alarming. I heard a lot of gunfire-individual shots and short bursts of automatic weapons fire. That last and the dogs worried me, scared me. A pistol would be no protection against a machine gun or automatic rifle. And dogs might not know enough to be afraid of guns. Would a pack keep coming if I shot two or three of its members? I sat in a cold sweat, longing for walls— or at least for another magazine or two for the gun.
It was nearly midnight when I woke Harry, gave him the gun and the watch, and made him as uncomfortable as I could by warning him about the dogs, the gunfire, and the many people who wandered around at night. He did look awake and alert enough when I lay down.
I fell asleep at once. Aching and exhausted, I found the hard ground as welcoming as my bed at home.
A shout awoke me. Then I heard gunfire— several single shots, thunderous and nearby. Harry?
Something fell across me before I could get out of my sleepsack— something big and heavy. It knocked the breath out of me. I struggled to get it off me, knowing that it was a human body, dead or unconscious. As I pushed at it and felt its heavy beard stubble and long hair, I realized it was a man, and not Harry. Some stranger.
I heard scrambling and thrashing near me. There were grunts and sounds of blows. A fight. I could see them in the darkness— two figures struggling on the ground. The one on the bottom was Harry.
He was fighting someone over the gun, and he was losing. The muzzle was being forced toward him.
That couldn’t happen. We couldn’t lose the gun or Harry. I took a small granite boulder from our fire pit, set my teeth,and brought it down with all my strength on the back of the intruder’s head. And I brought myself down.
It wasn’t the worst pain I had ever shared, but it came close. I was worthless after delivering that one blow. I think I was unconscious for a while.
Then Zahra appeared from somewhere, feeling me, trying to see me. She wouldn’t find a wound, of course.
I sat up, fending her off, and saw that Harry was there too.
“Are they dead?” I asked.
“Never mind them,” he said. “Are you all right?”
I got up, swaying from the residual shock of the blow. I felt sick and dizzy, and my head hurt. A few days before, Harry had made me feel that way and we’d both recovered. Did that mean the man I’d hit would recover?
I checked him. He was still alive, unconscious, not feeling any pain now. What I was feeling was my own reaction to the blow I’d struck.
“The other one’s dead,” Harry said. “This one… .
Well, you caved in the back of his head. I don’t know why he’s still alive.”
“Oh, no,” I whispered. “Oh hell.” And then to Harry.
“Give me the gun.”
“Why?” he asked.
My fingers had found the blood and broken skull, soft and pulpy at the back of the stranger’s head.
Harry was right. He should have been dead.
“Give me the gun.” I repeated, and held out a bloody hand for it. “Unless you want to do this yourself.”
“You can’t shoot him. You can’t just… .”
“I hope you’d find the courage to shoot me if I were like that, and out here with no medical care to be had. We shoot him, or leave him here alive. How long do you think it will take him to die?”
“Maybe he won’t die.”
I went to my pack, struggling to navigate without throwing up. I pulled it away from the dead man, groped within it, and found my knife. It was a good knife, sharp and strong. I flicked it open and cut the unconscious man’s throat with it.
Not until the flow of blood stopped did I feel safe.
The man’s heart had pumped his life away into the ground. He could not regain consciousness and involve me in his agony.
But, of course, I was far from safe. Perhaps the last two people from my old life were about to leave me. I had shocked and horrified them. I wouldn’t blame them for leaving.
“Strip the bodies,” I said. “Take what they have, then
we’ll put them into the scrub oaks down the hill where we gathered wood.”
I searched the man I had killed, found a small amount of money in his pants pocket and a larger amount in his right sock. Matches, a packet of almonds, a packet of dried meat, and a packet of small, round, purple pills. I found no knife, no weapon of any kind. So this was not one of the pair that sized us up earlier in the night. I hadn’t thought so. Neither of them had been long-haired. Both of these were.
I put the pills back in the pocket I had taken them from. Everything else, I kept. The money would help sustain us. The food might or might or might not be edible. I would decide that when I could see it clearly.
“No,” I said. “I don’t get the damage. Just the pain.”
“But, I mean it felt like you hit yourself?”
I nodded. “Close enough. When I was little, I used to bleed along with people if I hurt them or even if I saw them hurt. I haven’t done that for a few years.”
“But if they’re unconscious or dead, you don’t feel anything.”
“That’s right.”
“So that’s why you killed that guy?”
“I killed him because he was a threat to us. To me in
a special way, but to you too. What could we have done about him? Abandon him to the flies, the ants, and the dogs? You might have been willing to do that, but would Harry? Could we stay with him? For how long? To what purpose? Or would we dare to hunt up a cop and try to report seeing a guy hurt without involving ourselves. Cops are not trusting people. I think they would want to check us out, hang on to us for a while, maybe charge us with attacking the guy and killing his friend. I turned to look at Harry who had not said a word. “What would you have done?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice hard with disapproval. “I only know I wouldn’t have done what you did.”
“I wouldn’t have asked you to do it,” I said. “I didn’t ask you. But, Harry, I would do it again. I might have to do it again. That’s why I’m telling you this.” I glanced at Zahra. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I knew I should, but talking about it is…hard. Very hard. I’ve never told anyone before. Now… .” I took a deep breath. “Now everything’s up to you.”
“What do you mean?” Harry demanded.
I looked at him, wishing I could see his expression well enough to know whether this was a real question. I didn’t think it was. I decided to ignore him.
“So what do you think?” I asked, looking at Zahra.
Neither of them said anything for a minute. Then Zahra began to speak, began to say such terrible things in that soft voice of hers. After a moment, I wasn’t sure she was talking to us.
I took his hands, looked at their big, pale, blunt fingers. They had a lot of strength in them, I knew, but I had never seen him use it to bully anyone. He was worth some trouble, Harry was.
“No one is who we think they are,” I said. “That’s what we get for not being telepathic. But you’ve trusted me so far— and I’ve trusted you. I’ve just put my life in your hands. What are you going to do?”
Was he going to abandon me now to my “infirmity”-instead of me maybe abandoning him at some future time due to a theoretical broken arm. And I thought: One oldest kid to another, Harry; would that be responsible behavior?