Chapter 10 Riley
The day is glaring bright again. Riley watches through the trees as Cal approaches across the meadow.
The smoking jacket hangs loose on his frame.
He is thin and drawn these days. Riley hears him sometimes at night, crying through the wooden stable wall.
At first he went out on the range every day looking for his brother.
Then it was every other day. Then once or twice a week.
He is losing hope. Riley winces as her stomach cramps with emptiness. They are all hungry.
A blight has come over Nowhere. There has been no rain for weeks.
There are no apples or little strawberries, no eggs in the birds’ nests.
The vegetables have soft black patches all over and the sweet potatoes are filled with worms. For a moment when she saw them, Riley considered eating the worms. She’s always cold now, even in the fierce sun. Sometimes her eyes go weird.
Riley backs further into the shade of the trees as Cal approaches, his feet dragging through the grass. If Cal goes out on the range she likes to watch for his safe return. She doesn’t want him to know.
It’s thin eating again today – graham crackers with water and dried apple slices, packets of jelly with no bread to put it on. Oliver limps away from Riley to talk to Midnight. He prefers almost anyone to Riley, these days.
They scrape the green off the crackers and eat them slow in little bites.
After, the others stay in the shade of the barn, sheltering from the heat.
No one is working. Riley understands why lions spend all their time lying around waiting for the hunt.
Only the children seem cheerful. One of the smaller ones, Peach, sings a song to herself, staring at a blade of grass she holds in her hand.
Riley finds Noon behind Home Barn, staring at the trees. Hornets swarm over the apples that hang rotten on the branches. The smell of spoiled fruit is heavy in the air.
Noon looks at her, asking the question with her eyes.
Riley shakes her head. ‘No rabbits in the traps.’ The only one they caught this week was sick.
Patches of fur were missing and it shook.
They burned the corpse. That was difficult.
Even through the smell of burning hair Riley could smell the meat and it took all she had not to pull it out of the fire.
It’s not just the traps. Riley hasn’t seen another rabbit for a week.
They don’t play on the green hills at dusk.
They don’t bound through the long grass or nibble young shoots in forest clearings.
‘There were fish floating belly up in the lake yesterday,’ Noon says.
‘The crocodile didn’t come to be fed. And now I have nothing to feed him.
Maybe he’s dead too.’ Riley finds herself rubbing her aching stomach and wondering what crocodile tastes like.
Her hip bones have that same sharp edge they used to, when she and Oliver first got here.
Riley puts her hand on Noon’s shoulder. ‘The rabbits and the fish will come back.’ But when?
Noon puts her hand on Riley’s. ‘I know what must be done.’ She doesn’t seem to be speaking to Riley. She looks so sad. ‘Blood in the land,’ Noon murmurs. She talks like this sometimes, like someone in the Bible or maybe an old tree, if trees could talk.
Riley shakes her hazy head. Hunger brings strange thoughts with it sometimes, vivid and dreamlike. The boy who tasted like Clearasil sometimes had weed and Riley feels like that now, images and ideas streaming brightly through her mind without sense or order.
Noon cups her hands at her mouth. ‘We go to Ault,’ she shouts. Her voice echoes off the valley walls. ‘Raid.’
Dawn waits for them at the edge of the meadow as they come out of the apple trees. She gives them each three sugar cubes. Riley shoves hers into her mouth, crunching hard. The sugar courses through her.
Dawn holds a Tupperware box. Noon takes off something that hangs around her neck, under her shirt. Riley sees that it’s a little bag of washed leather. Dawn holds out the Tupperware box and Noon puts it in gently. Noon says quietly to Dawn, ‘You’ll have everything ready?’
Dawn nods. Cal watches them with an unreadable expression.
Midnight says, fretful, ‘I don’t like leaving Una.’
‘I’ll take care of her,’ Dawn says. ‘I promise.’
Midnight nods. Her necklace is kind of goth, strung with shining silver lug nuts and chicken bones. She puts it in the Tupperware. Cal does the same. His necklace looks like finger bones – maybe raccoon. Dawn closes the box reverently.
Riley looks away, embarrassed. She feels like she’s been caught looking at someone undressing or something. She lingers behind as the others go towards the fly. ‘Why do they do that? Leave those behind.’
‘It’s like a promise,’ Dawn says. ‘You’re saying that you’ll come back. Plus,’ she adds, ‘Cal loses literally everything. If you haven’t crawled around on a forest floor in the dark helping him look for his pen, you haven’t lived.’ She smiles. ‘See you later.’
Riley follows the others towards the fly.
The long grass kisses her knees. The golden line of light lies along the valley – the sunlight road.
The others walk ahead, leaving trails behind them in the green-gold meadow.
Midnight says something to Cal and touches his shoulder.
He shrugs, not looking at her. He doesn’t look anyone in the eye these days.
Riley turns back and runs after Dawn. ‘Wait!’
Dawn pauses, startled. Riley closes the distance and quickly takes her mother’s locket from around her neck. She presses it into Dawn’s palm. ‘Keep this for me.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a picture of my father, I think,’ Riley says. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never been able to open it. It’s my promise to come back.’
Dawn nods. Then she flings her arms around Riley and hugs her, hard. Riley hugs her back, throat closing. ‘You won’t tell? It’s personal. It’s my most precious thing.’
‘I won’t tell,’ Dawn says, holding Riley tightly. ‘I swear.’ After a moment Dawn steps back. ‘You better catch up with the others,’ she says. ‘They get so crazy when they’re raiding. Don’t get left behind.’
Riley runs through the low afternoon light.
They go south through the woods. White gnats move in clouds over tall nettles, honey-scented mountain alyssum. The scent of lilac lies on the dawn air sweet like death. A fly crawls up Riley’s nostril and she snorts.
‘Quiet,’ Noon says softly. ‘We’re near the main trail.’
They tread light and soft down the mountain, through the woods. If they pass close to a campground or a trail they drop to all fours and crawl in single file. Riley smells the meat on grills, hears children playing ball. But she is a ghost, travelling by unseen. She’s not here. She is nowhere.
The town of Ault comes into view, low buildings scattered across the valley floor. The sunlight has gone and thick clouds are massing to the west. They walk down through scrub, seeing occasional rusty bedsprings or an abandoned washing machine.
‘Once,’ Midnight says in Riley’s ear, ‘we saw a dead girl up here. There was rope around her neck. Her face was like bad fruit.’
‘What did you do?’ Riley’s skin is crawling up and down her back.
‘What were we supposed to do? Next time we came by she was gone, no bones or anything. So someone probably found her.’
They emerge behind a Denny’s. It’s all so weird – the feel of asphalt under Riley’s sneakers. It seems like years since she lived in a place like this. It is impossible that it has only been two months. They pull their ski masks down over their faces.
Above the mountain lightning flickers through the cloud.
Behind the supermarket they fill their backpacks with out-of-date baby formula, cans, dried pasta, flour. They find vitamins, disinfectant.
Riley points up to the corner of the building where a camera sits winking like a shiny black eye.
Noon shrugs and pats Riley’s shoulder. They go. To her surprise they don’t head back towards the Denny’s and the narrow trail back up the mountain. Instead Noon beckons them along another street. They are heading into town.
Noon whispers to Midnight, who nods and jogs away in a different direction.
‘Where is she going?’ Riley asks.
‘To the veterinarian,’ Noon says.
‘Great,’ Cal says. ‘Let’s go home, she’ll catch us up.’ There’s a tightness in his body, a waiting.
‘We’re not done yet.’
‘No,’ Cal says. ‘You promised, Noon.’
‘We have to get off the road.’
The drainage ditch is deep and grass-lined, and dry at the bottom, for which Riley is grateful. Grey storm light falls in, making their faces wax-pale.
‘Stop, Noon,’ Cal says. ‘I won’t. I can’t, not again.’
Noon puts a hand on his face. ‘Whatever choices we had,’ she says, ‘they’re done. We made them long ago.’ She grips the back of his neck. ‘Do you understand?’
After a moment he nods. Noon kisses his cheek gently. ‘It will be ok.’
They crawl along the ditch in single file.
A street sign looms above. Snow Line Rd.
Noon climbs out and beckons. Riley and the others follow her at a jog.
They go into a backyard via a gate with a broken latch.
Then they go down through the small neat yards, hopping fences, until they come to a pretty green garden and a clapboard one-storey house with flowers in boxes at the windows.
A shape detaches from the shadows and Riley catches her breath.
‘Did you get it?’ Noon breathes at Midnight, who nods and raises the plastic bag she holds tight in her fist.
‘What are we doing?’ Riley’s voice comes out louder than she meant. She doesn’t like this.
Noon puts a finger to her lips. ‘We’re waiting,’ she says, softly. ‘And watching.’