I suspected that she was right. Anyway, it was a pleasure to have her talk me into something I already wanted so much to do.
I put my filthy, wet clothes into a plastic bag, sealed it, and stuffed it into my pack. If any of the dead had owned clothing that would fit me, and that was still in wearable condition, I would have thrown mine away.
As it was, I would keep them and wash them the next time we came to a water station or a store that permitted washing. We had collected money from the corpses, but it would be best to use that for necessities.
We had taken about twenty-five hundred dollars in all from the four corpses— along with two knives that we could sell or pass on to the two girls, and one gun pulled by a man Harry had shot. The gun turned out to be an empty, dirty Beretta nine millimeter. Its owner had had no ammunition, but we can buy that-maybe from Bankole. For that we will spend money.
I had found a few pieces of jewelry in the pocket of the man who attacked me— two gold rings, a necklace of polished blue stones that I thought were lapis lazuli, and a single earring which turned out to be a radio. The radio we would keep. It could give us information about the world beyond the highway. It would be good not to be cut off any longer. I wondered who my attacker had robbed to get it.
All four of the corpses had little plastic pill boxes hidden somewhere on them. Two boxes contained a couple of pills each. The other two were empty. So these people who carried neither food nor water nor adequate weapons did carry pills when they could steal them or steal enough to buy them. Junkies.
What was their drug of choice, I wondered. Pyro?
For the first time in days, I found myself thinking of my brother Keith. Had he dealt in the round purple pills we kept finding on people who attacked us?
Was that why he died?
A few miles later along the highway, we saw some cops in cars, heading south toward what must now be a burned out hulk of a community with a lot of corpses. Perhaps the cops would arrest a few late-arriving scavengers. Perhaps they would scavenge a little themselves. Or perhaps they would just have a look and drive away. What had cops done for my community when it was burning?
Nothing.
The two women we’d dug out of the rubble want to stay with us. Allison and Jillian Gilchrist are their names. They are sisters, 24 and 25 years old, poor, running away from a life of prostitution. Their pimp was their father. The house that had fallen on them was empty when they took shelter in it the night before. It looked long abandoned.
“Abandoned buildings are traps,” Zahra told them as we walked. “Out here in the middle of nowhere, they’re targets for all kinds of people.”
“Nobody bothered us,” Jill said. “But then the house fell on us, and nobody helped us either, until you guys came along.”
“You’re very fortunate,” Bankole told her. He was still with us, and walking next to me. “People don’t help each other much out here.”
“We know,” Jill admitted. “We’re grateful. Who are you guys, anyway?”
Harry gave her an odd little smile. “Earthseed,” he said, and glanced at me. You have to watch out for Harry when he smiles that way.
“What’s Earthseed?” Jill asked, right on cue. She had let Harry direct her gaze to me.
“We share some ideas,” I said. “We intend to settle up north, and found a community.”
“Where up north?” Allie demanded. Her mouth was still hurting, and I felt it more when I paid attention to her. At least her bleeding had almost stopped.
“We’re looking for jobs that pay salaries and we’re watching water prices,” I said. “We want to settle where water isn’t such a big problem.”
“Water’s a problem everywhere,” she proclaimed.
Then, “What are you? Some kind of cult or something?”
“We believe in some of the same things,” I said.
She turned to stare at me with what looked like hostility. “I think religion is dog shit,” she announced.
“It’s either phony or crazy.”
I shrugged. “You can travel with us or you can walk away.”
“But what the hell do you stand for?” she demanded.
“What do you pray to?
“Ourselves,” I said. “What else is there?”
She turned away in disgust, then turned back. “Do we have to join your cult if we travel with you?”
“No.”
“All right then!” She turned her back and walked ahead of me as though she’d won something.
I raised my voice just enough to startle and projected it at the back of her head. I said, “We risked ourselves for you today.”
She jumped, but refused to look back.
I continued. “You don’t owe us anything for that. It isn’t something you could buy from us. But if you travel with us, and there’s trouble, you stand by us, stand with us. Now will you do that or not?”
Allie swung around, stiff with anger. She stopped right in front of me and stood there.
I didn’t stop or turn. It wasn’t a time for giving way. I needed to know what her pride and anger might
drive her to. How much of that apparent hostility of hers was real, and how much might be due to her pain? Was she going to be more trouble than she was worth?
When she realized that I meant to walk over her if I had to, that I would do it, she slid around me to walk beside me as though she had intended to do that all along.
“If you hadn’t been the ones to dig us out,” she said, “we wouldn’t bother with you at all.” She drew a deep, ragged breath. “We know how to pull our own weight. We can help our friends and fight our enemies. We’ve been doing that since we were kids.”
I looked at her, thinking of the little that she and her sister had told us about their lives: prostitution, pimp father… . Hell of a story if it were true. No doubt the details would be even more interesting. How had they gotten away from their father, anyway? They would bear watching, but they might turn out to be worth something.
“Welcome.” I said.
She stared at me, nodded, then walked ahead of me in long quick strides. Her sister, who had dropped to walk near us while we were talking, now walked faster to join her. And Zahra, who had dropped back to keep an eye on the sister, grinned at me and shook her head. She went up to join Harry who was leading the group.
Bankole came up beside me again, and I realized he had gotten out of the way as soon as he saw trouble between Allie and me.
“One fight a day is enough for me,” he said when he saw me looking at him.
I smiled. “Thank you for standing by us back there.”
He shrugged. “I was surprised to see that anyone else cared what happened to a couple of strangers.”
“You cared.”
“Yes. That kind of thing will get me killed someday. If you don’t mind, I’d like to travel with your group, too.”
“You have been. You’re welcome.”
“Thank you,” he said, and smiled back at me. He had clear eyes with deep brown irises— attractive eyes. I like him too much already. I’ll have to be careful.
Late today we reached Salinas, a small city that seemed little touched by the quake and its aftershocks. The ground has been shuddering off and on all day. Also, Salinas seemed untouched by the hordes of overeager scavengers that we had been seeing since that first burning community this morning. That was a surprise. Almost all of the smaller communities we’d passed had been burning and swarming with scavengers. It was as though the quake had given yesterday’s quiet, plodding paupers permission to go animal and prey on anyone who still lives in a house.
I suspected that the bulk of the predatory scavengers were still behind us, still killing and dying and fighting over the spoils. I’ve never worked as hard at not seeing what was going on around me as I did today. The smoke and the noise helped veil things from me. I had enough to do dealing with Allie’s throbbing face and mouth and the ambient misery of the highway.