Beyond the Barriers (17 page)

“What is it?”

“I thought I saw something. Probably a deer.”

“Hmm, let’s go inside where the animals won’t see the things I am about to do to you,” she purred.

“Wait a minute. I get to do what I want.”

“Right. Same thing.”

* * *

Shadows moved across the wall after I lit candles in the dark. There were a few of them left, and I felt like it was the right thing to do—a romantic gesture. She stretched on the bed as I moved around the room with the lighter.

Earlier we had hauled in some of the fish, changed the water on the others, and then split them and fried them in a bit of olive oil I had saved. There were spices in the cabinets, things that had expired, but they tasted fine to me. Salt and pepper with a dash of powdered garlic that was so old it was turning white. The fish were delicious, and we ate a couple of them. We boiled beans and ate them with the fish, and when we were done, I soaked the pan in some water and took her back to bed.

We lay together again as I tried to find sleep. Her hand was draped across my waist this time, and every once in a while she would flinch, like she was nodding off. I wanted to sleep, but my mind was on all the things that had happened. Spring was on the way, and I was pretty sure we would be able to live on the stuff we caught here. Hunting would turn up some deer, and we would have meat, but we wouldn’t have any produce—no vegetables or fruit. We had some powdered milk, but not a lot, and the calcium would be sorely missed.

Unless we could find some fruit, I worried about us getting scurvy, the way sailors used to when they were at sea for lengths of time. Lack of vitamin C might be worse than lack of anything else.

I started to drift off as well, but something drew my eye to the window. The moon made the outside world murky at best, but the lack of outside light meant there was nothing to reflect off the glass in the cabin, so I had a good view out the window directly across from us. We could have constructed some sort of curtains, but there was no need for privacy out in the middle of nowhere.

Shadows drifted—diffuse shapes that eluded trees and ringed the cabin like silent sentinels. My eyes were drawn to a copse far away. I could just make it out in the dim light, and I could also make out a shape that I thought had green eyes, which stared into my own. I gasped and sat up in bed, clenched my eyes together then stared again, but the shape was gone.

* * *

“It was probably a deer plotting to set a trap for you,” Katherine said the next morning.

We were enjoying breakfast, such as it was. She was sitting across from me, having woken earlier and made coffee and some flat but tasty pancakes. We didn’t have anything to make the things rise, and she used some Cheerios, ground up, to make the mess stick together before baking them in the oven. The coffee was strong, and I enjoyed several cups.

She wore one of my shirts again, and it looked a hell of a lot better on her than on me. Long legs flashed every time she moved around the room, and she wore the top unbuttoned low. She looked rested for the first time, like she had really slept last night. I imagined it was hard to leave the life she had led over the past five or so months and move in with me. All the familiar sights and sounds – just gone.

She cracked the windows so a breeze rolled through the cabin and out the open door. I thought of the shape I had seen the night before, but discounted it as not being real. We were too secluded to attract one of those things.

Then again, why hadn’t I ran some sort of snares or alarms? Bottles hanging from twine might be just the thing to give me a heads up. I would have to scour the cabin for stuff to use. There are probably enough bottles left over from the preserves to make something. The biggest problem would be covering the entire area around the cabin. If I did it, I would have to be careful where I placed everything.

I tossed the rest of my coffee back, wandered to the back window, and stood there for some time. The trees made it hard to see far, so I crouched down to the level where I’d been when I saw the figure and stared for a long time. I found the copse and watched it. Birds flitted from tree to tree, and I heard the unmistakable call of a hawk as it soared somewhere over the woods. It was green, pastoral, and I felt at ease once again. The sense of normalcy, the comfort of having Katherine with me, sank in, and I smiled at my imagined apparition, then went to join her in the other room. The smell was all Pacific Northwest. Trees and fresh dirt. Moisture in the air. Everything just as normal as it should be.

“No monsters?” She sat on the chair, legs crossed demurely while she sipped her coffee.

“Not that I could see.”

“Then come and kiss me.”

* * *

The trail was hard to pick out. I had been this way a few times while hunting last year, but it was far from the lake, and I didn’t think I would have much luck hunting here. Now, with food being scarce and necessary for the two of us, I would settle for cooking squirrels if I was fast enough to take one down.

I was dressed in my jeans and a long flannel shirt. She wore her jeans and a shirt of mine belted at the waist. She had to roll up the sleeves, and she wore one of Ray’s camouflage caps at an angle that made her look just as cute as could be. She followed behind me, hunting rifle pointing at the ground. I had the .20-gauge in hand and one of the handguns in the waistband of my pants.

“I think it was near here,” I said as we crashed through the low vegetation. Any pretense at moving in quietly as we stalked prey was cast aside as we made for the spot. I was still trying to convince myself I hadn’t seen anything at all—just a trick of the light, a ghostly mirage brought on by mist and the low moon.

The air was crisp and clear, and the smell of evergreens was pungent. There were fallen pinecones to crunch across, wild blackberry branches to step over and push aside. Too bad it wasn’t closer to summer. With all the berries, we could solve our vitamin C problem and make a sweet treat. She kept an eye on the ground, because she wanted to find some tubers and cook them. Tubers sounded strange, but she told me they were similar to potatoes.

I dropped to my knees as if I knew what I was doing, looking for footprints or broken vegetation near the ground. Nothing stood out, so I moved around the spot, but still nothing caught my eye. I didn’t really know what to look for anyway. I was far from a scout. In fact, if a game trail jumped up and bit me, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

“See. It was nothing,” she said as she moved behind me.

“I know, but thanks for humoring me.”

“No problem. Someone has to straighten you out, living out here alone for this long. I’m just glad you don’t run around naked with a bunch of paint on your face yelling that the cavalry is coming. A person needs companionship.”

“Well, I have you now. You’ll just have to stick around for a while and make sure I’m not crazy.” I grinned at her. “I was thinking of running some sort of alarm. Just some fishing wire with bottles. It would alert us if something was trying to get to the cabin.”

“Good idea. There is a lot of land to cover. How are you going to differentiate between game and a green-eyed asshole?”

I shrugged. She had a good point. We should be so lucky as to have a buck wander near the cabin and alert us to his presence. He might as well show up with a dinner bib on.

She blew a piece of hair out of her face where it escaped her cap. Her eyes had a bit of tightness to them, like she was still holding back. I was willing to wait her out. She was worth it. All the horror of the world that we lost, she had seen it. She witnessed the worst and came out of it stronger. I admired her willpower, and promised myself I would keep her safe. Of course, she was one tough cookie. She would probably end up keeping me safe. I smiled at myself. Later I would ask her to spar with me, teach me some of those reverse hook punches I had seen the first night. She put a wicked snap on them.

As if one of them had read my thoughts, I managed to bring down a deer a few hours later. We dragged the whole thing back to the cabin and butchered it. She even sipped at some of the blood, so I joined her. When I looked up at her, I recoiled. She reminded me of the ghouls we’d fought just a few days ago with the blood dripping down her mouth and chin.

I shuddered and looked away.

* * *

We cut up the meat, and then she showed me how to make strips of it so we could smoke it. I made a fire outside, and we used an old barrel lined with small branches to chamber the smoke. We put as much meat in as we could, and let it sit outside all evening. We had fresh steaks, and then I made a stew with some of the meat and rice. It wouldn’t last long. In fact, none of the meat would.

“We can’t stay here,” I said.

“I know. We have no way to refrigerate stuff, and if we don’t cure the meat before smoking it, we run the chance of getting sick. We would need a lot of salt for that.”

“Think we should go back to that store and see if we can find some?”

“It’s worth a try, but I think we should try for Portland.”

I had to agree with her. The thought of staying in the cabin was one I found hard not to love. I wanted to spend as much time as I could with her. I wanted to make her happy, and show her how much she meant to me now that she had rescued me from loneliness. She stared into my eyes in a challenging way. I think that if I’d said no, she would have tried to go without me.

“I think so too. It’s a good idea to go soon, since we may have wiped out a lot of those ghouls from town. We can probably zip through that barricade, or what’s left of it, and then set out after the group.”

She leaned over and kissed me, but I caught a hint of sadness in the gesture. I looked away, because I was reminded of Pat’s sacrifice at the barrier.

We buried the remains of the deer a ways from our home. I went out with an old shovel while she straightened up the cabin. I put all the parts in an old, black plastic bag I had been using for various functions and dragged it away. The thing had a hole in it somewhere, so it leaked a trail of blood behind me. At first I tried to flip the bag over, but it was overloaded, and I was afraid it would break. I tried to cover it up by kicking leaves and pine needles over the stain, but I knew it was useless. A predator would smell the blood from a mile away.

I found a patch of ground and went at it with the shovel. It was hard, and there were a lot of roots in the way. I had to really work at it, but it felt good to stretch my muscles. At one point, I found a thick root and went back to the cabin for my axe. I tugged it from under the edge of a bench on the porch. When I looked in the window, I saw Katherine with her back to me. She was standing in the kitchen, staring out the window. I watched her for almost a minute, but she didn’t move. Then her hand went to her forehead, and I saw her shoulders move up and down as if she were sobbing.

I walked back to the hole and finished with some judicious use of the sharp blade. As I dug, I thought of my companion. She was close to me in years, but she had the weariness of someone much older. I found it very hard to put myself in her shoes, to imagine losing my entire family to those things. I knew that it made her a bit of a wildcard; I had seen the battle and the way she reacted to the things at the barricade. She had been almost gleeful while she fired into their ranks. As we drove away, she had swerved to hit some of them with my car. Just ran them down, even though they were trying to get out of the way. I had a feeling that when, and if, we did battle again, I would need to keep a close eye on her.

I looked up, because I had a strange feeling between my shoulder blades, like someone just ran a feather over my skin. I had that feeling before, a few times, when the action was hot in Iraq. Ducking had usually been the thing to do, reacting to the strange sixth sense that we humans had when being watched.

I spun in a circle as I studied the thick vegetation. It was probably Katherine coming to get me for help with something.

“That you, babe?” I called out with a smile, determined not to let her know I had seen her earlier.

Nothing.

I walked around the spot and looked toward the cabin. I sighed, dumped the bag in the hole, and pushed dirt over it. Covered in sweat, I slipped my shirt off, just as I heard movement in the distance. I snapped my gaze up, and could have sworn I saw a man walking away from the site, a good fifty feet away. Goosebumps burst out all over my body, and I reached to the back of my pants for the gun.

Only I had left the gun at the cabin.

I should have gone back and grabbed a weapon, gotten Katherine, made sure it wasn’t her I had seen. I should have done a lot of things, but instead I picked up the axe and walked toward the place where I had seen the shape. I moved as quietly as I could for a man in size 12 iron-toed boots, which wasn’t very quietly at all. Branches and twigs crunched under me, as did pinecones and green needles left to rot.

A pair of birds shot out of the woods ahead. I gasped when they took flight, but kept my cool. If I had my shotgun, I might have dropped them and had roast bird tonight. They weren’t quail, but they looked very tasty after the stuff I had fed on for the last few days. Deer was tasty but gamey, with a slight musk that reminded me of lamb. The little birds, though, with some salt and pepper on the open fire would be quite a fine meal, even if I had to spit out buckshot.