Moriah (16 page)

“Riley?” Dee touched her shoulder, his tone gentle, concerned. “You okay?”

She wiped away the tears she hadn’t realized were there and nodded. “I wish we had ice.” She turned her attention back to the men and their wounds.

“I think I’m deaf,” yelled Bruce.

Riley nodded back at him.

Concern passed over Kevin’s face as he consulted his dosimeter. “Radiation levels are higher around here now.”

“Who knows what that bomb blew up into the atmosphere.” Dee bared his teeth as Riley applied pressure to his leg. “Those zombies and mutants.”

“We don’t want to stay here forever.”

“Dee.” Riley heeded Kevin’s warning. “I’m going to take your boot down to the water and wash it out. You’re going to put it back on and we’re going to lace it up tight, keep pressure on that foot.” He nodded. “We’re going to need to splint your leg with something, just in case.” She looked around for a suitable splint. “And then I’m going back to my brother’s body and I’m going to…I’m going to…”

“I understand.” Dee gave her a look that said he did. “We’ll go together. On the quads. We’ll get there faster that way. That okay with you guys?”

“Sure,” replied Kevin.

Bruce appeared baffled. “What?”

* * *

He had his leg sticking straight out, over the running board, splinted with a disassembled rifle barrel. The wind whipped against the bug-eyed goggles of Dee’s Oakley Medusa, the cape of his oilskin drover trailing behind him, Riley ducking within its folds, clinging to his back on the four wheeler. Dee watched the terrain ahead and around him, cognizant of the rise and fall of the open country, the grass-covered flatlands, the afternoon sun shining bright above. The quad’s tires took the terrain well, yet periodically his boot made contact with the running board, new pains coursing up Dee’s foot and leg. He would grimace beneath his goggles. Despite the jolts of fresh agony, part of Dee’s mind dwelt on his father.

Bear, just gone like that one day. Dee suspected Tris was right, that Bear knew he was dying. Weighted with such knowledge, his father had sought isolation, better to be alone. His father, Dee knew, was a man among men, but he was also a man who had walked alone much of his life, even when among men. Too much. Dee, on the other hand, didn’t think he would want to be alone when his time came. He’d rather be surrounded by people he cared about, people who cared about him. Unfortunately, that circle had constricted radically since daybreak.

It was amazing he had survived the battle. Amazing any of them had.

Tris, Carrie and Victor. Even the Bishop. Gone, all of them. Just like that. But now there was Riley.
You’re not going to ask me to marry you
. That’s what she’d said to him back in the tent, this woman at his back. That’d been a good one.

She was special, Riley was. Dee recognized this. Special in general, in her own right, and—Dee could admit it to himself—special to himself. More so with every passing hour. The way she’d handled herself out on the battlefield. She’d gone for the redhead and was not pleased when Tris wouldn’t let her have her. The way she’d helped Dee out of there before the bomb went off. Riley was tough enough to survive out here, when all her friends had fallen. Tough enough to avenge her brother. She’d even stood up to Tris and never backed down. Like she’d stood up to him when they’d first met. He thought about that stance she’d assumed, how he could tell in her mind she was going to mess him up if she had to.

When those people had chased her—the little redhead and her friends, the ones who’d taken Victor—Riley had stood her ground. When forced, she’d retreated, but she’d done so to fight again. She’d escaped with every intention of bringing the fight back to the ones who had it coming to them. Dee smiled under his goggles, thinking about the first time he’d seen her: Riley pulling herself out of the river and across the field, in the shirt and jacket of a man she’d killed, looking like she’d been to hell and back. Because she had.

Dee had gone out alone, as he did each year. He’d gone out hoping to find his father, but also hoping he would not. The thing he was most afraid of, each year when he set out, was finding his father’s remains, bones stacked like some ancient cairn. Worse to find his father alive, emaciated and rawboned, wasted and alone. Instead, he’d found Riley. Or she’d found him. Or, Dee granted, some combination of the two.

If he had to die one day, and Dee knew they were all going to die one day, he wanted to die with someone like Riley at his side. Someone like Riley. Friends like Bruce and Kevin. If that was how he checked out, Dee thought, he’d probably be able to go peacefully enough, not fighting it. He liked to think he’d be satisfied.

The front wheels of the quad dipped in a rut and Riley tightened her grip around his waist. Dee gripped the handlebars tightly until they came up out of it and thumbed the accelerator, roaring along on their way, his leg and foot screaming at him. Kevin and Bruce followed on their respective four-wheelers.

* * *

They’d arrived to find a sacrilege.

“What do you think she’s thinking?” Kevin tossed a branch down into the fire they had going in the pit.

Riley sat on the ground, her arms crossed on knees drawn up to her chin. She stared straight ahead, her eyes occasionally blinking, deep in thought. She was aware of the three men busying themselves around her, Kevin and Dee collecting the remains that were collectable, Bruce scanning the earth for clues.

“She’s sad,” pronounced Dee. “Sad and mad.”

Reaching the place where Riley’s brother had died, they’d found nothing recognizable as her sibling. Dismembered human parts were strewn around the area, most in chunks and pieces so miniscule to be unidentifiable. The sheer amount of dismantled human material and the grounds they covered spoke to more than one body.

Riley had told them about Thomas in the pit, but all that was in the pit were two zombies, each headshot. Even more puzzling was the intact male body that lay off to the side, naked from the waist up. Its face and head were crushed, and its torso was split where natural gases had built up and burst, but aside from this it appeared unmolested.

“This is the one she killed,” Dee remarked of Dalton’s body, recalling Riley’s story. He looked down on the body, oddly fascinated. She’d done that to the man’s face. Yeah, Riley was tough enough all right.

She was aware of their conversing about her, but Riley did not comprehend their words. She remembered mornings at the kitchen nook with her brother, each of them getting ready for work, he to school, she to the
dojang
, both sipping their juice. She recalled camping trips when they were kids, their dad taking them to parts of New Harmony that felt as foreign and desolate as she’d then imagined the Outlands. Now she knew better.

“Someone came back.” Bruce was down on one knee above an imprint in the earth. “Someone came back and did this.”

Dee looked up from gathering remains. Bruce was speaking of the mutilation of Riley’s brother and what must have been Thomas’ body. Whoever had torn these bodies apart had thrown the pieces far and wide, into the trees and bushes, out of sight.

“I’m no Tris...” A look of consternation gripped Bruce’s face. “…but these tracks look fresh.”

“How fresh?”

Bruce shook his head. He had an idea that he wasn’t sharing, and it was apparently an idea he didn’t like. “I don’t know.” When he answered, he spoke too loudly because of his hearing. “Someone got here before we did.”

When she’d lost the second baby—the
second
for goodness’ sake, a part of Riley’s mind beseeched her and she immediately felt guilty for it. Other women Riley knew had lost so many more than two. When she’d lost the second one, she’d gone to the wall, staring into the Outlands, pondering not so much on what the barren wastelands held as on the contents of her own body. Why did that seem so long in the past?

Riley couldn’t kid herself; she’d known coming out here wasn’t a good idea. She couldn’t revise the past, even if it was less than two weeks gone. She’d come along because she didn’t want Anthony to go alone, yes, but also because she’d felt she needed to get away.

“It doesn’t make sense.” Kevin was genuinely perplexed.

“Who’d have done this to either of them?” Dee picked up what might have been part of a lower leg. “And not to him?” Dalton’s body lay where it had for days.

“Something doesn’t sit right with me about this.” Bruce thought he was mumbling when in fact he was loud and clear.

“Imagine how she feels.” Kevin threw something that was recognizable as part of a hand into the flames.

Camping
. They’d been planning on going camping like when they’d been kids. Before Mickey and Gary wandered into their lives. What if the autistic man and the plague victim hadn’t walked right up to Evan? Evan of all people. What if they hadn’t had the picture on them or if Anthony hadn’t looked
exactly
like his father, exactly like the man Mickey had known? What if Gary hadn’t been there to communicate, to translate, for his rotting friend? So many
what if’s
.

“Talk to us, Bruce.”

“Okay, follow me on this.” Bruce laid it out as he saw it. “I’m a munt, what’s my motivation?”

“Your motivation?” asked Kevin. “You’re pissed.”

“Huh?”

“You’re pissed,” Kevin nearly shouted.

“I’m more than pissed. Remember what Riley told us. When those people ‘rescued’ her and her friends from them, they were effectively declaring war on the munts. So if I’m a munt, and I come across this scene, I drag the old man’s body out of the pit—sure it’s chewed up good from Zed, but there’s still something left for me to take my anger out on, and I do.”

“The old man’s body, okay.” Dee could see it. “But what about her brother’s?”

“Yeah, I know. So our munt leaves, but it’s going to come back later to do the same thing.”

Growing up in New Harmony, you knew you had to be wary of those from the Outlands. Krieger, for one, Riley thought. He’d been damaged worse than any of them could imagine. She didn’t think the old tracker had purposefully sent them astray. In fact, Riley was fairly certain they’d misunderstood his directions, blindly wandering into the territory of that savage family. The mutants.
Has anybody seen my sister Mergatroid
? one of them had asked when they’d lined up on the river bank, looking to deliver the coup de grace to Riley, Dee and Kevin. Mergatroid had been the name of the female.

Which reminded Riley of something Gary had said in passing in the hospital.
Gotta watch out for Mergatroid
. Gary said it when she and Anthony were standing over Mickey’s bed.
You don’t want to meet Mergatroid
. She’d thought it was just Gary rambling, trading old movie or television lines back and forth with his rotting friend. But no, now she understood that Gary and Mickey must have had some kind of contact with the mutants in their journeys. For some reason, the munts hadn’t harmed the two, or, if they had, the evidence of such hadn’t been obvious.

“Why would it come back?” Kevin had one hand resting on top of his AK’s barrel. “Why would it do this to Riley’s brother?”

“Can you say that again?” Bruce touched his ear. Kevin repeated his questions, louder.

“Maybe it saw what we did to its brothers and sister.” Bruce thought about the way the mutant’s bodies had flown apart when he’d laid into them with the Hawk MM-1. “To its father.”

“That still doesn’t tell us why it would come back here.”

“Yes it does if
you’re
listening to me, Dee. I think
it
was
listening
to us. I think it was close enough to hear us.”

“What?” Kevin started in disbelief. “We would have—”

“No, we wouldn’t have.”

“He’s right.” Dee didn’t want to sound spooked, though he eyed the woods about them warily. “Remember the dosimeter.”

Not for the first time in several days, Riley wished Mickey and Gary had never come to New Harmony, that Evan had not been on the wall when they did. She wished that Anthony hadn’t gotten it into his head to come out here and look for whatever he thought he was going to find. That her father had forbidden them to go, that he had physically disallowed their exit. That she hadn’t been so foolish as to accompany and encourage Anthony. She’d lost his beanie in the river and that, for some inexplicable reason, bothered her more than a lot of the other stuff. The fact of its loss irritated her and her irritation brought her back to their present reality.

“Bruce, if you’re right…” Kevin checked the dosimeter as they spoke. If Bruce was right, the mutant might still be around. The radiation detector read normal now. “It’s not.”

“It could be watching us,” Bruce ventured.

Dee agreed. “It could be.”

“We
are
being watched.” Riley had spoken. “It’s watching us.” They turned to her and she was standing, brushing the dirt and twigs from her legs and backside. “I can
feel
it. I felt this way when we destroyed their house. Their barn.”

Kevin took his hand from the top of his AK’s barrel and wrapped it around the foregrip.

“If it was going to attack us,” she continued, “it would have already.”