Year One (Chronicles of The One #1)(115)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Lana kept off the main roads for days. She took shelter where she could, scavenging remote houses for clothes and supplies. Along with clothes she found a chain and threaded it through Max’s ring to wear around her neck.

She ate what she could find, and worried about the baby.

Whenever she saw crows circling overhead or heard their call, she changed direction.

Once, exhausted, she dropped down at the base of a dead tree, too steeped in fatigue and grief to go on. Staring at the sky through its skeletal branches, she drifted away, she dreamed. Dreamed of a slim young woman with gray eyes and black hair telling her to get up, to move, to keep going.

So Lana got up, moved, kept going.

One terrible day blurred into every terrible night.

With no sense of time or distance, she slept in an abandoned car on the side of the road, and woke in the shimmer of dawn to the sound of engines.

Her first instinct was to call for help, but the stronger one ordered her to stay still and quiet. The stronger one had her skin shivering as those engines stopped.

Car doors opened, slammed. Men’s voices floated through the windows she’d left open in hopes of a breeze.

“We ought to go back to that shit-hole town, level it. Somebody there knows where the bitch is.”

“The Rev says she ain’t there, she ain’t there.”

She heard footsteps coming closer, tightened her grip on the gun she slept with. Then the distinctive sound of a zipper, the sound of water striking asphalt.

“Waste of gas, you ask me, and if those two freaks want her so bad, they should’ve taken her out when they had the chance. Instead we lost six good men. We’re supposed to be killing freaks not working with them.”

“Don’t see nobody asking you. The Rev knows what he’s doing. He’s got a plan, and I expect we’ll be taking those freaks out after we do the woman. Fucking witch. I got a score to settle with her now.”

“Aw, did she mess up your pretty face when she cut loose?”

“Fuck you, Steed.”

A quick laugh, the jerk of a zipper. “What I know is the freaks are hurting more than you, which is why we’re driving all over hell and back looking for some knocked-up demon whore.”

“I find her first, I’m putting a knife straight through her and the brat inside her.”

“Witches have to hang or burn.”

“That’ll come. We oughta go through these couple of cars here, see if there’s anything worth taking.”

“Forget that. We got a gas mart about twenty miles east. Better pickings.”

Lana kept her grip tight on the gun as she felt the car rock.

“Piece of shit anyway.”

She held her breath as the footsteps moved on, as doors opened and slammed again. She lay still as an engine roared to life, tires squealed.

She counted the knocks of her heart one by one even after the car sped off, as silence fell again.

“I wouldn’t have let them touch you,” she murmured as she crawled out of the backseat on trembling legs. “East. They’re going east, so we’ll go west.”

But not on foot. However long she’d walked and wandered, she hadn’t put enough distance between her child and those who wanted to harm her.

She’d risk the road, for now she’d risk it.

She got behind the wheel, laid the gun on the seat beside her. It took a moment to gather herself, to pull up the power she’d set aside since the day it had ripped through her in a red, killing rage.

When she held her hand out, the engine didn’t roar to life. It sputtered, knocked, caught. With the sun rising behind her, she drove.

The sun hung high when the car died. Leaving it where it stopped, she walked again with mountains rising around her.

Time blurred, walking, driving when she found another car, scavenging for food, for water. Though she asked herself how far would be far enough, she avoided any towns where people might have gathered.

How would she know if they held friend or enemy?

She closed away her old life, killed rabbit and squirrel, dressed them, roasted the meat over a fire made by power to feed herself and her baby.

She who’d once believed food could be, should be, art, ate to live, ate to feed what lived inside her.

Her world became trees, rocks, sky, endless roads, the pitiful thrill of finding a house that had fresh clothes, boots that nearly fit.

Comfort became feeling the baby move inside her. Joy became finding a peach tree and tasting the sweet, fresh fruit, having the juice run down a throat parched from the summer heat.

Safety became hearing no human voice but her own, seeing human shape only in her own shadow.

In those weeks since New Hope, she became a nomad, a wanderer, a hermit with no plan except movement, food, shelter.

Until.

She topped a rise thick with trees, then immediately crouched for cover.

A house sat on land that gently rolled, then flattened again. On the flat an expansive garden spread at summer peak. She dragged at the pack she’d scavenged, pulled out binoculars.

Tomatoes, red and ripe, peas, beans, peppers, carrots. Rows of lettuce, cabbage, hillocks of squashes, eggplant. The rising field of corn brought back the scent of blood, of death.

Of Max.

She curled up a moment, fighting off waves of sorrow and grief, then made herself lift the glasses again.