“Here, baby,” Rabbit says, and holds a tidbit of meat out to the cat. It immediately grabs her hand with its front paws and snags the meat. This delights my daughter and Murr both.
The dragon-man immediately scoops up another cat and checks its eyes, then sets it down. He picks up another, and then another, and when he finds one that needs attention, he brings it over to me. “Eye?”
I nod and wet a fresh corner of the shirt. “Eye cleaning,” I tell him, and then gesture at the tabby in his hands. “Cat.”
“Cat hye cleeeng,” he agrees, pleased.
We clean the eyes of several cats of varying ages while the meat roasts and Rabbit goes through the cart, exclaiming over everything I’ve found. “Vitamins,” she cries. “We’ll be so healthy! And look, shampoo!”
It’s a sad world when your daughter gets excited about vitamins and shampoo. Rabbit reminds me every day to be grateful for what we have, and I want to hug her and squeeze her tight for being so wonderful. I would have given up a dozen times over if it weren’t for her sweet presence. She’s become my family and my everything. “I found a postcard, too. It’s near the bottom.”
Her joy fills my heart, and when I look over, Murr is smiling at me, too. Maybe all he wants is a family, too.
I get it. I really do.
CHAPTER 16
DAKOTA
The next day,Murr brings a dead deer, with small three-pronged antlers. The meat is delicious and we season our portion and roast the larger amount into shreds to feed the cats. Murr doesn’t eat with us, but he never does. He probably eats deer when he’s out hunting.
He hangs around, too. He’s there when I wake up, and while he doesn’t follow us into the bookstore when we head to bed, he’s usually out in the parking lot when we do. It’s like he’s waiting for us to go to sleep before he feels he can.
“He definitely thinks of us as a couple of strays he has to feed,” Rabbit announces to me after a week of this.
I nod agreement, because what else can it be? I’ve never heard of dragons adopting humans as pets, but I’ve also gone out of my way to avoid forts—the human settlements—as much as possible. No one wants a young mother with a daughter unless one of us is willing to open her legs. I’d rather take my chances out in the wild on my own. I just worry it’s not the right choice for Rabbit as a young girl, but leaving her behind in a fort isn’t the answer, either.
Today, when Murr drops a deer for us, I realize immediately that it’s diseased. There’s something wrong with it, the hide mottled and strange. When I cut it open, the organs are discolored and off, and I pull away a kitten that’s trying to climb the hide. “This is bad, Rabbit. We can’t eat this one. It’s sick. I don’t know if the meat is any good or not.”
We examine it together, and Murr arrives while we poke at the deer corpse. I hate to turn down a gift, but I show him the innards of the deer and shake my head. “Meat’s bad.”
“Bad?” he echoes. It’s a word he’s picked up recently. “Meat no good? No cats? No Dakota?”
I’m impressed at his grasp of our language after only a few days. I shake my head. “No, it’s no good for them or for us.”
One of the cats rubs against his leg and meows plaintively. Murr scoops it up and strokes the cat’s head, thinking. He sets the cat down again and gestures at the dead buck. “Meat…” He pauses, trying to find the right words. Through a variety of hand-signals and the few words he does have, he tells us his plan—he’s going to get rid of the bad meat and find something new.
“Murr yes meat Dakotah Ribbit cats,” he declares. Then he gestures at the ground again. “Stay.”
With that, he springs into the air, changing into his dragon form right over our heads and nearly scaring the shit out of me. I bite back a whimper of terror because it’s just Murr, and watch as he scoops up the dead deer and heads off. The cats screech a protest, meowing wildly and circling around us.
“You guys are spoiled,” Rabbit says to them. “He’ll be back.”
I look around the parking lot, and more cats are flooding over, tails up with excitement. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon enough. He knows they’re hungry. We can go ahead and start a fire for now.”
While I pull firewood from our small stack and add it to our designated “firepit” (basically just a pothole in the parkinglot), Rabbit plays with the cats. She’s crafted a feather toy on a shoelace, and the cats go wild for it. Each time they lunge, my daughter laughs with delight, and it’s the best sound in the world. I grew up with pets, and it’s so hard to tell her we can’t take care of one. I know she’s an animal lover and she’s lonely, but we can’t feed a cat. They’re meat eaters. Maybe a dog would be different, but we haven’t had the opportunity to find one to adopt.
I feed tinder to the fire, watching as Rabbit runs circles around the parking lot, chased by a pair of big gray tabbies. I know this is Murr’s home, but he seems to like us, and I love the bookstore we’ve settled in. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to share space for a while…
“Hello, ladies.”
The stranger’s voice calls out across the parking lot, and I jerk to my feet, turning. Rabbit stops in her tracks, looking at me.
A strange man with a battered ten-speed bicycle wheels it toward us. He’s got long, unkempt hair and a scraggly graying beard. His clothes are weatherbeaten, and he has an oversized pack on his shoulders, a bedroll perched atop it.
A fucking nomad. Someone who doesn’t like the rules that the forts lay out, and so they decide to take on the apocalypse solo. Which wouldn’t be such a bad thing in theory, but nomads have gotten a bad reputation for a reason. They’re rapists and murderers, thieves and dealers, and generally the worst people around. Most didn’t leave a fort of their own volition, like we did.
And as a woman alone with a child? I know you don’t trust any man who approaches you with a friendly smile on his face.
