Dani pondered that and nodded. “Maybe. Take over for a while?” She stepped back to let Lynn pass in the narrow opening.
Lynn ducked under a massive branch and then took a shortcut through the branches.
Dani followed her every move.
Skeever took the long way around. He whined when he had to abandon his stick. When Lynn had to chop a path, he soon claimed a new one. Then Lynn spotted a sign, half-hidden by branches and nearly knocked over by the twisted metal of what had once been an overhead crossbeam. She ducked under a thigh-sized branch and tried to get a better look. “Can you read that?”
Dani shook her head. “No. Do you think it’s the sign that says it’s your exit coming up?”
Lynn shrugged. “Maybe. I guess we should check. There’s a branch there that looks strong enough to climb up on.”
Dani nodded and handed Lynn her spear before shrugging off her bag. “I’ll go. I’m a good climber.”
Lynn hesitated. Could she trust Dani to tell her the truth about what the sign said? She’d been very cooperative since their confrontation. What if she was just luring Lynn farther along? There will be more signs. If she lies to you now, you’ll find out soon enough.
Dani was agile, Lynn had to admit. She disappeared into the overhanging branches, and soon the entire canopy shook. Dani poked her head out a few moments later, from a branch Lynn hadn’t expected her to reach yet. “The road splits ahead. According to the map, you’re taking the left lane.”
Lynn nodded. A vague sense of dread gripped her.
Dani disappeared, then dropped down from an overhead branch. She rubbed her green-stained hands on her pants and picked up her bag. “Last few hundred feet or so.” She smiled, but her eyes remained dim and troubled. Before Lynn could inspect her further, she turned away.
Skeever hurried after her, leaving Lynn to catch up through the foliage.
It was slow going. The road worsened. Lynn had to carry Skeever through the trees several times—to his great dismay. The parts of the road that were intact were littered with debris and car husks. It seemed as if there had been an accident here, or maybe the impact from the bombs had thrown the cars around. Those last few hundred feet took probably an hour, but then they reached a split that could only be their point of divergence.
Dani stopped.
Lynn did too.
“Right, try not to die.” Dani gripped her spear, turned on her heel, and walked off.
Lynn’s heart dropped to her stomach. She stared, dumbfounded. She had expected a struggle or at least a last-ditch effort to convince her to come with her, but Dani’s mind seemed made up.
Skeever sauntered past her to catch up with Dani.
Belatedly, she grabbed him.
He pulled against her grip.
“You too!” Lynn called after her.
Dani folded her spear as she walked and slung it across her back. Her shoulders were up high, tense, and she didn’t acknowledge Lynn again before she disappeared into the foliage. Branches snapped, and leaves rustled. Then silence fell.
She was gone.
It took Lynn a minute to put herself in motion again. She guided an unwilling Skeever along the other road of the fork.
He kept doing what she refused to do herself: look in the direction Dani had disappeared in.
Lynn was free; she had Skeever, and she had food. Everything she had planned had come to fruition. It was even better than they’d planned, actually, because she hadn’t had to hurt Dani or abandon her without her knowledge. It was, for all intents and purposes, a perfect getaway.
So why did she feel so shitty?
Well, the answer to that wasn’t hard to find: Dani was going to get herself killed. Maybe not on the way to Richard, but as soon as she dug him up, the scent of his rotting flesh was going to draw any scavenger in the area. Wolves, wild dogs, probably even lions—all would flock to her and rip her to shreds if she got between them and their prey. And Dani would. She wouldn’t let Richard get eaten.
Her stomach twisted, but she chopped at another branch and pushed her way through the narrow opening she created. Another step away. Another. Another. She managed to push forward by focusing on her cutting. Then the road restored itself—one moment it was in crumbles; the next it was made up of four lanes and void of trees. The forest expelled her into bright sunshine, and she had to shield her eyes until the stinging stopped.
Skeever shot ahead.
Lynn shivered despite the heat radiating from the sun. Within seconds, sweat streaked down her back and between her breasts under layers of leather and wool, but she didn’t dare take off either. The sudden openness of the landscape made her feel unsafe in a whole different way than the claustrophobic tunnel she’d just exited. She had gotten used to having someone watching her back while in the open—not consciously, but as soon as she stepped farther into the glare, she became aware of how exposed her back was. She scanned her environment for anything moving that wasn’t vegetation.
Birds chirped leisurely in the branches of trees that swayed in the funneled breeze.
Rabbits were abundant here, making homes in the mulch of leaves accumulated over years. Small shrubs had grown in the mulch, spilling onto the road and providing the rabbits cover from predators like hawks and hungry dogs. They scattered when Skeever charged at them in hot pursuit.
Lynn watched him scramble over half-buried cars and under the last branches extending over the deck for as long as it took her to adjust to seeing the sky again.
Long enough for Skeever to drop a rabbit by her feet.
She smiled. With Skeever by her side, she would be fine.
Well before sunset, Lynn pulled the gate shut on a small loading dock wedged in between three brick buildings. Four steps led up to a cement platform in front of another roll-up door that wouldn’t budge. “Guess we’re roughing it outside tonight.”
Skeever sniffed through his new domain and didn’t pay her any heed.
Lynn didn’t mind. She had a fire to start, water to boil, and dinner to roast. Beside the rabbit, Skeever had also chased down a hare, so dinner would be abundant tonight.
The sun went down long before she’d gotten the fire going. The wood she’d scavenged the last part of today’s hike wasn’t as dry as she’d hoped, but with enough patience and fire starters, she managed. She made quick work of skinning both the rabbit and the hare. She thought about tanning the hides but decided against it once she considered the effort of cleaning and stretching the hides, coupled with the disgusting chore of cooking the brains to make a preserving paste. Besides, that would mean a delay in dinner; with only two hands, she couldn’t both rotate the meat and work the hides. She shook her head and tossed the furs down to the rubble below the platform.
Dani would kill me.
She paused. Where had that come from? Who cared what Dani thought? Dani was gone, history. She didn’t owe Dani anything—least of all some tiny furs she couldn’t properly preserve right now anyway.
“Get out of my head, will you?” For all Lynn knew, Dani was dead. Or dying in a ditch. “Shut up.” She drove a skewer through the rabbit and secured it above the fire.
Beside the risk of death, that was definitely the worst thing about being out in the Wilds alone: far too much time to think.
By the time the rabbit was cooked, the hounds had come out.
Skeever kept rushing the chain link to chase them off, and for now he succeeded.
Lynn watched their vague outlines passing along the gate like shadows, just out of the firelight’s reach. Their eyes caught the light every once in a while. She was worried, but not more than usual. She’d bound the gate with plenty of rope; it wasn’t going anywhere. Since it was also almost twice her height, she didn’t expect the dogs to be able to jump it. Maybe some feline predator could climb it, or a human, but not the dogs. Because of that, the roaming pack served as involuntary guards. Their presence would keep anything else at bay.