3. Chapter Three
Chapter Three
Eliza
He came back on the second day, in the gray hour before noon, and this time he didn't try to be quiet about it.
I heard him a long way out. Boots in the snow, unhurried, taking the slope at an angle a smart person took it—not straight up the fall line where you would be winded and slow, but switchbacking through the trees where the footing held.
He wanted me to hear him. After two days of watching the treeline until my eyes ached, after sleeping in forty-minute pieces with the rifle across my chest, the man decided the kindest thing he could do was announce himself like a church bell.
I hated that it worked. I hated that some animal part of me already matched the rhythm of those boots to the shape I watched melt into the dusk two nights back and felt something loosen in my chest. Not relief. I didn't feel relieved. But the cousin of it.
I had the door open six inches and the rifle through the gap before he cleared the last of the pines.
"Far enough," I said.
He stopped. Maybe forty feet out, in the open where I told him to stay without telling him, because he already worked out that was the rule. He stood there and let me look at him in daylight for the first time, and daylight did him no favors and all the favors at once.
Big. I knew that from the silhouette, but the dark had been generous about the rest. Forties, I guessed, though the apocalypse aged everyone past their years.
There was gray coming in at his temples and salted through the brown beard, and a web of lines at the corners of his eyes that came from squinting into distances.
A face that had been weathered down to the essential parts of itself.
He wore his layers the way a man wears clothes he repaired himself, everything patched and considered, nothing decorative.
A bulky pack rode his shoulders like it weighed nothing.
His eyes found the rifle barrel first, then found me behind it. He didn't raise his hands this time. He decided, somewhere on the walk up, that I wasn't going to shoot him, and the certainty of that annoyed me more than almost anything else about him.
"Brought you some things," he said.
"I didn't ask for things."
"No." He shrugged the pack off one shoulder, slowly, and lowered it to the snow at his feet. "You didn't ask me to leave, either, and I did that. Figured I'd split the difference."
"Take it back down the mountain."
He crouched and opened the top of the pack instead.
I tracked his hands the whole time—a person's hands told you what their mouth wouldn't—but his stayed easy and visible, and what came out of the pack wasn't a weapon.
Cans. He stood them up in the snow in a row, like a man setting up a game.
Beans. Peaches, the syrup kind, the gold-labeled cans I hadn't seen in years.
A wax-paper bundle that could only be meat.
A coffee tin that didn't rattle like beans, which meant coffee, actual coffee, and God help me my mouth watered so fast it hurt.
"There's a storm coming in tonight," he said, not looking up.
"I told you that part already. What I didn't tell you is your woodpile's about a third of what you need to ride it out, your roof's going to come down in that back corner the first time it carries real weight, and you've been eating one meal a day for long enough that your hands shook when you leveled that rifle just now. You think I didn't see it. I saw it."
"My hands are steady."
"Your hands are starving." He said it flat, no cruelty in it, which was worse than if he sneered.
"Steady and starving aren't the same thing.
You can hold a barrel still and still not have the calories to chase a deer that runs, or fight a man who rushes you, or keep your core temperature up when that storm drops the inside of this building below freezing tonight. Which it will."
Everything he said was true. That was the unbearable part.
I've done the same inventory in my own head a dozen times and reached every one of his conclusions and then put them down because there was nothing to be done about any of them.
Hearing them in another person's mouth made them solid in a way I couldn't argue with.
He was reading my death sentence off the side of my own building and he wasn't even being unkind about it.
"You don't know what I've got in here," I said.
"I know it isn't enough, or you wouldn't have run a snare line that long in this cold for nothing.
Nobody works that hard for backup." He nodded at the row of cans.
"Take the food. I'm not asking for anything.
I'm not coming inside. You can stand there and point that thing at me the whole time I walk away if it makes you feel better. "
"Why."
The word came out harder than I meant it. He looked up at that, and something crossed his face, not surprise, more like he waited for that exact question and was deciding how honest to be about the answer.
"Because I've got eighty people that ate last night," he said.
"And I walked up here and watched somebody who's going to be dead by February stretch a pot of nothing into two days of nothing, and I found I couldn't make my feet take me back down the hill and leave the cans in my pack.
That's the whole reason. It's not a trick.
I'm too old and too tired to run a long con on a stranger over a sack of canned peaches. "
Eighty people. He'd said it the way another man might have said my family. I filed it the way I filed everything, in the part of me that was always doing math about other people; who they were, what they had, what they would take from me to keep it.
"Eighty people," I said. "And their—what. You’re their leader?"
A flicker, there and gone, quick as a fish turning under ice. "I keep the lights on," he said, which wasn't an answer, and we both knew it wasn't, and he let it sit there not being an answer until I moved on.
The wind was picking up. I could feel the shift in it, the way the cold went from still and dry to something with a wet edge, the storm's outriders coming ahead of the main body.
The pines started their restless sound, that long ocean hush through the high needles.
He was right about the weather. He was right about all of it, and the rightness sat in my gut like a swallowed stone.
"Set them by the door," I said. "Then back off. Twenty feet."
I watched something I refused to call satisfaction not-quite-show on his face.
He gathered the cans against his chest, carried them to the porch, and stacked them by the frozen bucket—careful, even, the cans squared up like he couldn't help making things orderly.
Then he stepped back. Ten feet. Fifteen.
Twenty, into the open snow, and stood there with his empty hands loose at his sides while I propped the rifle against the doorframe within reach and ducked out to grab the food.
Up close he smelled like woodsmoke and pine pitch and clean sweat, like a person who worked outdoors and washed when he could.
I hadn’t been near another human being in so long.
The simple animal fact of his warmth and bulk made the hair stand up on my arms. I got the cans inside fast. Stacked them on the table without looking at them.
My heart was doing something stupid and I needed it to stop.
When I came back to the door he hadn't moved.
"You should come down to where we are," he said. "Just to wait out the storm. You can keep your gun. You can leave the second it clears. I'll walk you back up myself."
"No."
"It's four walls and a fire that won't quit at midnight and a roof that—"
"I said no." It came out too loud. I dialed it back, pitched my voice down into the register I lived in for years, the flat hard nothing-voice.
"I don't go places I haven't seen. I don't walk into a building full of strangers because one of them was nice to me with a bag of cans.
You know how many women I've watched do exactly that?
Walk in somewhere because a man seemed kind, because they were tired, because it was cold? "
I heard it the second it left my mouth. Women. I handed it to him, the one thing I spent five years not handing anyone, dropped it right into the snow between us because I was cold and rattled and his eyes were too steady and I let my guard slip a single inch.
He didn't pounce on it. That was the thing.
A different man would have, would have smiled, or softened, or done the thing men did when they realized, that recalibration, that little shift in how they held their body once they knew.
He just looked at me for a moment, and then he looked away, off down the slope, like he was giving me the privacy to put it back.
"Smart," he said. To the trees, not to me.
"Not going anywhere you haven't seen. I tell my own people the same.
" He paused. "Offer stands anyway. You change your mind, you build a fire out front in the daylight, three small ones in a row, and somebody will see the smoke and come up. You don't have to. But you can."
"I won't."
"I know." He hitched the empty pack up his shoulder.
"You're going to ride this storm out alone in a building that's already lost, because the idea of being beholden to somebody scares you more than the cold does.
I understand it. I lived in that exact house for a long time.
" He turned to go, then stopped, and threw the last of it back over his shoulder almost gently.
"Patch that back corner before tonight. You've got maybe a piece of plywood and some bracing in you.
It won't save the roof. It might buy you the hours till morning. "
And then he walked off into the trees, switchbacking down through the pines, not hurrying, not looking back, and I stood in my doorway with my heart pounding and a row of gold-labeled peaches behind me and his voice in my ears telling me how I was going to die.
I shut the door. Barred it. Stood with my back against it and slid down until I was sitting on the cold floor with my knees against my chest.
The plywood was behind the cot. I knew exactly the piece he meant, because I looked at that piece a dozen times and the soft dark corner of the ceiling a dozen times and did the math and put it down.
He walked into my building with his eyes one time and saw the whole shape of my situation, every weakness, every place I was losing, and he named them out loud in order like he was reading a list.
I wanted to be furious. I reached for fury and what came up instead was something thinner and more shaming, because the truth underneath the anger was that no one looked at me in five years.
People on the road looked at you to decide if you were a threat or a meal or a mark.
He looked at me to figure out how to keep me alive, and he did it in the time it took to set up a row of cans, and the competence of it landed somewhere I didn't have armor.
I ate a can of the peaches sitting right there on the floor.
I shouldn't have. I should've rationed them, hidden them, made them last. Instead I worked the lid up with my knife and tipped the can to my mouth and drank the syrup first, the stupid impossible sweetness of it flooding over my tongue until my eyes stung.
Then I ate the slices one by one with my filthy fingers.
It was the best thing I put in my body in longer than I could remember.
My hands shook the whole time. He was right about that too.
When the can was empty I set it down very carefully, like it might break, and I sat there in the failing light and hated him.
Not for being cruel. He hadn't been cruel. I hated him for being right, which was a worse thing to forgive, and I hated the small traitor part of me that already decided I was going to drag that plywood out from behind the cot and brace the corner like he told me to.
Outside, the wind found its full voice and the first hard pellets of the storm came rattling against the blanketed window.
I worked in the last of the light bracing a corner I couldn't save, because a man I didn't trust told me it might buy me till morning.
I wanted to live till morning more than I wanted to spite him.
I told myself that was the only reason.
I almost believed it.