Chapter 47
Chapter Forty-Seven
In the morning, Raven awoke before dawn. Shadow was already up and outside somewhere. Her lower back spasmed as she crawled out from beneath the mossy ledge, brushing a few crawling bugs from her legs.
She was sore and achy all over, dirty and thirsty. She ran her tongue over her fuzzy teeth, longing for a hot shower. How she’d taken things like a soft mattress and running water and electricity for granted.
The rising sun transformed the sky above the trees in vivid shades of sherbet orange and cotton candy pink. Shivering against the chill, Raven drank from her water bottle and ate one of the granola bars.
Gingerly, she raised her shirt and took stock of the damage. A garish watercolor painting of blue, purple, and yellowish green bruised the right side of her ribcage from her bra line to her hip. She sucked in her breath. It hurt to look at it.
Lowering her shirt, she changed the bandage on her neck, then checked her rifle and zipped her pack. Once she was ready, she headed through the trees across the rocky ground toward the outcropping.
Last night, it had been too dark to see anything. Now, as rays of golden sunlight speared the cottony clouds, she stood at the tip of the outcropping and looked across the great expanse of forest, split by roads and trails with a few buildings clustered here and there.
From here, she couldn’t make out any signs of life. All was silent, still. The ravages of the Hydra Virus invisible from this height, from this distance.
Somewhere out there was the small town of Elijay, her mother’s last known location. Was her mother still out there? Was anyone?
So much nothingness. Far beyond the bounds of the wilderness, the mountains, the small towns and the larger cities. All lightless now, and perhaps lifeless. Peaceful, finally, in death.
And beyond the towns and cities of Georgia, the other states sprawled outward—Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas, Illinois, and Ohio. The boundaries of the United States, of Canada and Mexico, and then the world beyond North America, other countries and continents, once brimming with billions.
Now empty. Now quiet and still. No one busy working or commuting to work or going to high school or college, attending classes or buying things or eating out or playing or laughing.
There were the dead, the dying, and those fighting not to die.
Was that it? Was that all? Had this virus truly taken hold of the whole world and crushed it beneath its vile, diseased jaws?
For days, she had focused solely on survival, on keeping herself and then the animals alive. No time or thought was spared for what came after.
This was the after. She felt like weeping. She felt like crumpling into a heap and never getting up again. You could know something logically in your head without feeling the truth of it in your bones, without understanding how it could break you.
The world out there was a void of emptiness so enormous, so vast, so endless, it took her breath away. It was too much. Too big to take in.
It was over. History. Civilization. The human race. All of it. The tattered remnants of the whole world left to scavengers and vultures, the worst of the worst.
Her brain throbbed dully. Her thoughts skittered over the oily black hole of a reality too bleak to comprehend in all its horrors.
She could only accept it gradually. Piece by piece. Day by day. Hour by hour.
That was the only way she knew how to make it.
You survived. With every breath, with every stumbling step, you survived. No matter what they took from you. No matter the devastation, the grief, the death, the travesties happening all around you, every second of every day.
You breathed. You walked. You kept going. You survived.
And she wasn’t completely alone. She still had Shadow.
Raven whistled for the wolf. Through the trees, he responded with a single sharp yip. He bounded through the trees and trotted to her side. She petted his huge head.
“We’re going to follow the river,” she told him. “It’ll take us where we need to go.”
While she no longer had the map, the wilderness of the Blue Ridge Mountains still seemed like a safe bet. Fewer people. The protection of the forest. Rivers and streams for fishing, cleaning, and drinking. She’d figure it out as she went.
For a few days, Raven and Shadow traveled from dawn to dusk, resting when they needed to do so, leaving the empty roads and seeking the shelter of the woods at night.
Each night, Shadow howled his sorrow and grief. Each night, Raven wept with him. She mourned everything and everyone she’d lost.
The world was broken. It felt empty, forsaken. Bleak and hopeless.
But within the suffering, their shared loss, she felt the connection—silvery, thin as a spider’s web, but strong—threaded between herself and the wolf howling his misery into the sky.
Each morning, they rose and walked again.
As they traveled, she kept roughly parallel to the road, tracking north with her compass and using her LifeStraw to filter drinking water from any streams or creeks they passed.
She foraged for food, gathering fallen hazelnuts, hickory nuts, and black walnuts to boil over a fire for dinner.
While there wasn’t as much food to find in the fall, when it was spring and summer, she could forage for highbush blueberries, elderberries, and sawtooth blackberries, wild sweet potato and wild ginger roots, cattails and clover, and of course, dandelions.
The entire plant—flower, leaves, and roots—was edible, if a bit bitter.
Her father had taken her on numerous trips to the hunting cabin. Each visit, he’d shown her edible plants, made her memorize them, and then had her forage for them on her own.
“You can’t depend on anyone but yourself,” he’d said.
Her heart ached at the memory. In some ways, he’d been right. But in other ways, he was wrong.
Because of the things he’d taught her, she could survive.
The awareness came upon her gradually and then all at once: she wasn’t sick. She wasn’t dying. She hadn’t suffered so much as a cough since Zachariah had splattered infected blood in her face.
That was three weeks ago.
There were two possible reasons she wasn’t dead.
The infected blood had missed her eyes, her mouth, her nostrils. Or it hadn’t, and she was one of the few immune. Either way, she’d gotten lucky as hell.
But she didn’t just want to survive. She wanted to live.
She understood the difference now.
Isolation wasn’t the answer. It couldn’t be. Not anymore.
She didn’t want to be her father, with his small limited life, his clenched fist of a heart.
She wanted more.
There had to be more.
Even with Shadow at her side, that deep, abiding loneliness never left her. The grief, always like an open wound. All the things she had believed she could leave behind were the things she needed most.
Gradually, as they made their way further north, the pain that haunted her every step lessened. Her swollen eye and split lip healed. The ugly yellowish-green bruises marring her ribs faded.
Dekker had beaten her badly. But she was alive, and he wasn’t. She thought of Vlad and hoped he was at peace. The tiger had saved her life, after all.
In the evening, she set her snares, searching the underbrush until she discovered a well-used trail leading to a rabbit burrow. After three days of empty snares, she finally caught dinner.
She skinned and dressed the rabbit. She built a fire the way her father had taught her. The first time, she worried she wouldn’t remember the steps correctly, but she did.
Her chest ached, that urge to weep stinging her throat as she dug two holes, each eight inches across, and a couple of feet deep. She made a tunnel between the two at the base to connect them and filled one with twigs, bark, and small sticks.
The second hole acted as a chimney to suck oxygen down to feed the fire. The fire was nearly smokeless, and the flames couldn’t be seen from afar.
There were others like the Headhunters out there. She had to remain vigilant at all times. The forest would protect her, but only if she was smart and cautious.
Raven crouched over the small ball of tinder she’d gathered, mostly dried moss and pine needles, struck the flint with the edge of the steel with a glancing motion, and gently fanned the sparks into a tiny flame.
While she waited for the rabbit to roast, and during moments of rest, she whittled.
She carved little birds, wolves, bears, and a small, fierce tiger.
How she loved the feel of the wood beneath her fingers, the shape of something hidden within waiting for her to bring it out into the open, fully formed.
She’d allowed her bitterness and resentment to take something precious from her. Not only her carvings, but also the good memories of her parents. Not anymore. She held onto every memory—the good and the bad. They were all she had left.
She left the wooden figures on stumps, in nooks between branches, or nestled in the hollow of a tree. Maybe someone would find them. Maybe it would make them smile, give them a tiny sliver of hope. Sometimes that was enough to keep going, to keep trying.
Perhaps one day Damien would find another one to join the wooden raven she’d given him. She thought often of Damien, wondered what he was doing, if he was thinking of her, if he would one day leave the Headhunters.
She didn’t know. It probably didn’t matter. How could he find her in this empty, ruined, perilous world? How could anyone find anything—?
The forest echoed with a loud, eerie howl.
At first, Raven thought it was Shadow. But the black wolf lounged across the fire, not twenty feet away. The howl had not come from him.
Shadow leaped to his paws. His coat bristled, ears up. He raised his snout and sniffed the air. A warning growl started low in his throat.
Raven rose to her feet, tensing, her gaze searching the clearing, the woods.
Across the clearing, in the purple-gray of twilight, a large canine shape appeared through the tall grasses. Its muzzle was narrow, its coat a tawny mix of brown, gray, and black, with reddish fur along the creature’s ears, face, and legs. Its bushy, black-tipped tail lowered to the ground.
It was a red wolf.