Her Choice (Mountain Men Of The Apocalypse #5)

1. Chapter One

Chapter One

Eliza

The third trap was empty, like the ones before it.

I crouched over the snare wire, breath smoking in front of my face, and stared at the place where a rabbit should have been.

The wire had sprung. Something tripped it.

But all it held now was a tuft of gray fur frozen to the loop, stiff as a scrap of wire itself, and a dark smear in the snow that the cold had already turned brown.

A fox, maybe. Or something with two legs that got here before me.

I didn't let myself think too hard about which.

My knees screamed when I stood. They'd been doing that for weeks now, a deep grinding ache that lived in the joint and woke me at night when I shifted wrong.

Too many years of sleeping on hard ground.

Too many winters of not enough food to keep meat on the bone.

I was thirty-one and my body kept trying to tell me it was older.

I reset the snare anyway. Fingers clumsy in the half-gloves I cut down from a man's pair two settlements ago. The wool unraveled at the tips so my fingertips poked through, red and stinging, and by the time I had the loop hung right I couldn't feel them anymore.

Four traps left to check. I already knew how that would go.

The forest was quiet in the way it only got in deep winter.

No birds. No wind in the high branches. Just the squeak and crunch of my boots breaking through the crust of old snow, and underneath it, somewhere, the secret trickle of the creek still moving under its skin of ice.

The light came down gray and flat through the pines.

Late morning, though you couldn't have proved it by the sky. The sun hasn’t shown its face in nine days.

I smelled woodsmoke and stopped dead.

My own. It had to be my own, drifting down from the ranger station chimney behind me.

I made myself breathe. Made myself turn a slow circle, reading the trees the way you learned to read them or you died.

Nothing moved. No fresh tracks but mine and a deer's, an old set crossing the clearing days ago. The smoke was mine.

Still. I kept my hand near the rifle the rest of the way.

The other four traps gave me nothing. One had been dug up and abandoned, the bait gone, the wire chewed clean through by teeth too small to bother eating.

By the time I climbed back up the ridge to the station my legs were shaking and my stomach stopped growling, which was worse than the growling.

The growling meant your body still believed food was coming. The silence meant it gave up asking.

The ranger station hunkered against the slope like it was trying to disappear into it.

Once it had been painted forest green, government green, with a little brown sign out front telling hikers about elevation and bear safety.

Now the paint peeled to bare gray wood and the sign lay face-down in the weeds where I left it, because a sign that said anything was a sign that told people you were here.

I've been here for four months. That was three months longer than I stayed anywhere.

I knew it. Knew it the way you know a tooth has gone bad before the pain starts. I stopped moving because I was tired, and tired was how you got dead. I kept telling myself one more week and then the snow came and one more week turned into the only choice I had.

Inside, the cold barely loosened its grip.

I nailed an old wool blanket over the window that wouldn't shut right and stuffed the gaps in the log walls with moss and torn insulation, but the heat from the woodstove leaked out faster than I could make it.

The roof was the real problem. Up in the back corner the ceiling had gone soft and dark, a brown stain spreading wider every time it rained, and three days ago I put a bucket under the worst of it. The bucket had a skin of ice on it now.

I shrugged off my pack and the rifle and stood by the stove until feeling came back into my hands. It came back the way it always did, in a hot ugly throb that made me want to cry and made me grit my teeth instead.

Then I took inventory, because I did that every day whether the numbers changed or not.

Eleven cans. Down from twelve; I ate the corn last night, cold, standing up, scraping the can with two fingers.

Half a sack of cornmeal gone hard and probably going to weevils.

A coffee tin of dried beans. The jerky I made in the fall from a deer I was prouder of than anything I did in years, down to maybe a week's worth if I was careful, and I was always careful. Salt. A little. Not enough.

I did the math I've done a hundred times. The math came out the same way it always did.

I wasn't going to make it to spring.

I sat down on the cot with my back against the cold log wall and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until colors bloomed behind them.

I wouldn't cry. There wasn't anyone to see it, which somehow made it worse, not better.

Crying alone felt like talking to yourself.

It felt like the first thing you did before you stopped being a person at all.

So I didn't.

I'd been alone for a long time. Five years, more or less, since the world came apart and took everyone I belonged to with it.

I learned the rules of it the hard way, the way you learned everything now.

Keep moving. Trust no one. And the rule that kept me breathing when the others failed, don't let them know you're a woman.

I ran a hand over my hair. Short, hacked off with a hunting knife every few weeks, growing out now into something raggedy because I hadn't bothered the last little while.

Out here there was no one to perform for.

Inside my layers, under the man's flannel and the too-big canvas coat and the wrappings I wore so long my ribs had a permanent dent, I half forgot the shape of myself.

It was safer that way. A lone boy on the road got robbed.

A lone woman got worse, and I've seen the worse, seen what happened to women who got caught, and I built my whole self around making sure it never happened to me.

Cut the hair. Bind it down. Drop my voice.

Walk wide and slow and mean. I've gotten so good at being nobody that some mornings I woke up and had to remember my own name.

Eliza.

I said it sometimes, under my breath, just to keep it.

The way Lennon's mug kept Kate, I thought.

I never met either of them, only heard the story the way you heard all the stories now, traded around fires like currency.

The man on the mountain who waited for a ghost. There were a hundred stories like it. Some of them were even true.

The light was already failing. Three o'clock, maybe. The days barely bothered to happen this time of year.

I lit the lamp down to its lowest and ate four pieces of jerky I shouldn't have eaten, chewing each one until it was nothing, until my jaw ached.

The smoke from the stove caught in my throat.

Outside the temperature was dropping the way it did at dusk, and the old building answered it with a chorus of ticks and groans, the wood contracting, settling, complaining.

I was reaching to bank the fire when I heard it. A sound that didn't belong.

Not the building. Not the wind, there wasn't any. Not an animal, animals didn't make that flat deliberate crunch, that one wrong note in the snow somewhere down the slope below the station. One step. Then nothing. Whoever made it stopped the second they realized the snow would give them away.

Which meant they knew what they were doing.

The cold that went through me had nothing to do with the weather.

I moved without deciding to. Lamp out, palm flat over the glass to kill the glow before it could carry.

Rifle up off the peg, into my hands, the wood worn smooth and familiar against my palms. I pressed my back to the wall beside the window and slid the corner of the blanket up with one finger, just enough to see.

Snow. Trees. The blue-gray dark coming down.

And below, where the slope dropped away toward the creek, a shape that was the wrong shape for a tree. Tall. Still. Holding too quiet, the way only a thing that meant something held quiet.

My heart was going hard now but my hands were steady. They were always steady. That was the one thing I kept.

I knew I stayed too long. I knew it for weeks. I just hadn't figured it would find me this soon.

I thumbed the safety off and settled in to wait, and the dark came down the mountain to meet me.