Devils Unto Dust(2)
Light from my lamp illuminates a patch along the wood and the prickly poppies that are dying by the steps. The scratching stops, and I wait a moment before opening the door farther. Lamplight floods the porch and the dirt beyond, and I take a step forward, scanning the ground with my gun pointed at what I hope is chest level. A flick of movement and my stomach drops as my finger tightens around the trigger.
But it’s only a rabbit, a cottontail I think, though it’s hard to say for sure with the tail and most of its backside missing. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one; between shakes and hungry townsfolk, slow and soft creatures don’t last long. I don’t know if a coyote or a shake got to it, and the callous part of me is angry because I can’t take the chance it’s sick and it’s a waste of perfectly good meat. It scratches at the dirt, inching itself forward, somehow still moving. I don’t know how it got under the fence without back legs, let alone how it made it this far without bleeding to death. I lower my gun and walk over, setting the lantern down close. It blinks round wet eyes at me and I sigh. I take no joy in killing things, but it’s kinder to put it down than to let it suffer. The noise of a gunshot will wake up the twins, so I put my hand on its back, feeling the soft flutter of its heart under thick fur.
“Sorry, boy,” I tell it quietly. “It’s no safer in here than it is out there.”
I break its neck quickly and cleanly, flinching only a little when the bones snap. I use my fingers to dig a hole, the dry dirt crumbling quickly. When I’m done I dust off my hands and stand up, my breath hissing out slowly. I stamp down the grave with my foot and consider going back to bed, but it is close to dawn. I stare out into the night, the land made unfamiliar by the darkness, the shapeless ground receding and melding into the blackened sky. The view is no better by day; our acres are scant and unlovely. I pick up the lamp and watch the light quaver around me, feeling alone and insignificant in this small bright circle.
“Morning,” a voice says, and I jump so hard I’m lucky my gun doesn’t go off. I swear and turn to see the tall frame of my brother standing in the doorway.
“Or is it morning yet?” Micah asks. He sees my face, lit up by the light. “Sorry, Will, didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t scare me,” I say crossly, walking up the steps.
“Liar,” he says. Micah never lets me get away with anything less than the bone’s honest truth. He’s a stickler, that one, but then Ma was the same way; she had no use for sugarcoating.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks when I get close, his brows knitted together over dark eyes.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I say, which doesn’t answer his question.
Micah glances at the gun in my hand and frowns. He’s a worrier; it comes from being inside his own head so much. He’s smart, smarter than most in this place, and it hurts me to think of what he could be if things were different.
“I’m gonna make biscuits for breakfast,” I say to distract him.
“What’s the occasion?”
“I’m as sick of grits as you are, that’s what.”
The truth is I need a way to save this morning. I don’t like waking up to blood and death, I get enough of that in my dreams. I don’t want to remember this day as the day I killed a rabbit; instead, it will be the day I made biscuits.
I follow Micah inside and take one last look at the small mound of fresh dirt before I shut the door and bolt it fast. Poor, stupid thing. It should have known better. This is no place for the weak.
2.
I put the gun back in the rack and take a long drink of water from the bucket we keep in the kitchen. I’ll have to boil more from the pump soon. It is a lengthy and tiresome process, but necessary. The shakes don’t seem to like water, or fire, but it’s still possible one of them could contaminate the pump. We can’t take any chances, not when the sickness spreads so easily.
The floor is dirty. I can feel grit beneath my bare feet, and I really should try and sweep, but that can wait until after the biscuits. I can tell how much flour we have left simply by holding the flour sack, a skill we all learn early in Glory. A knot in my stomach is directly related to that sack, and it gets tighter and tighter as the sack becomes lighter. I will have to go to the Homestead and barter for more soon. We can’t afford to buy it, not with the first of the month coming and our dues still to pay to the Judge. The prospect of talking to him leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth. The Judge has little patience for women, and I have little patience for a man that cruel and greedy. He’s technically the governor now, or at least he fancies himself as such, but everyone still calls him the Judge. I don’t even know what his real name is, nor do I care. In Glory, his word is law, and if we cannot pay our dues, we lose the protection of the perimeter and are left to the mercy of the desert.
It wasn’t always this way. Sure, Glory has always been a rougher kind of place, on account of us being the last town before the land gets too harsh to farm and too brutal to settle. Mostly folks just passed through on the way east to Best or north to Plainview. But when the Judge took over, he put the word out that he would grant clemency to anyone willing to turn shake hunter. Maybe he even meant for it to help, maybe he really thought he could kill all the infected and that would be the end of it. But the more men he sent out, the more the sickness spread. All it takes is a bite or scratch and it’s only a matter of time before the fever and the ague and the tremors start. And now our town is crawling with former criminals, murderers and thieves, foul men who choke up our streets. There aren’t enough jobs to go around, not with the number of hunters who swarmed to Glory. Mostly they drink and fight one another, waiting to go back out to the desert and shoot those left to a fate worse than death. What they can’t take out on the shakes they visit on the rest of us, stealing and brawling and killing without consequence. I can’t tell anymore which are worse, the shakes or the ones who took to hunting them. The hunters, I think, because when they kill they know exactly what they are doing.