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“Of himself,” he said as they began climbing a steep hill. He moved well for his age, but she could see that he moved with care. “Neeko hasn’t received a lot of support in his life; he was never properly nurtured. Abusive homes are like that. He was told that he was worthless so often by the authority figures in his life that he came to accept that as an inarguable truth.” Church took hold of a sturdy maple sapling and used it to pull himself up onto flat ground. “You started that process, Dahlia. You trusted him as a scout and praised him for the things he did right.”
She scrambled up after him, only slightly winded from the climb. Beneath her extra pounds was a lot of useful muscle. The weapons and tools she wore were all in padded holsters or sheaths, and Church had taught her how to move through the woods without making noise or leaving sign of her passage. She felt a little like a girl version of the ranger, Strider, from The Fellowship of the Ring.
“I was hard on Neeko when he screwed up, though,” she said.
Church shook his head. “From what he said, you corrected him pretty sternly, but there’s nothing wrong with that. You needed him to be safe and you wanted his intel to be accurate. That’s discipline, not abuse.”
She started to argue, but let it go. She never won those kinds of arguments with the old man. They moved deeper into the woods. Old oaks and sycamores rose high above them and the air was filled with bees and butterflies. Clouds hid the sun and cast the forest in a softness of gray-brown shadows.
“Neeko will continue to mature and grow stronger,” Church said after a moment. “I have high hopes for him.”
“He deserves to survive,” she said, and was surprised at her own words.
Church turned to her. “Most people deserve to survive,” he said. “More importantly, most people deserve some measure of enduring happiness. Even now. Even after all of this.”
Dahlia studied him for a long while. “You don’t look happy.”
Church turned away. “I said that most people deserve happiness. Not everyone.”
She asked him what that meant, but he didn’t answer. Instead they walked for nearly an hour though the forest. Finally, he checked the angle of the sun and told her to continue the patrol while he went back to camp to give another lesson to the some of the newer recruits.
When she was alone, Dahlia felt strangely vulnerable and had to work to shake that off. It was easy to lean on Church, or lean close to his power, and she did not want that. Nor, she suspected, did the old man. He wanted her to be strong and self-reliant. Sometimes that was like pushing a rock uphill. Easy at first, but every time she paused for a breath it got heavy and wanted to roll down.
Like her ego. Like her feeling of personal power.
She spent a little time mentally telling herself to grow the fuck up and get a fucking clue.
Then she began moving through the woods again.
Beyond a stand of trees ahead of her there was a patch of brighter light. Not sunlight, but less of a canopy of leaves to block the glare from the cloudy sky. Dahlia removed her compact binoculars and adjusted the focus, seeing a patch of dusty black. A road. When she shifted the binoculars again she saw that there were three figures on that road. People . . . though it was impossible to tell more than that.
Dahlia nearly cried out when she saw them, and if the sound had escaped it would have been a scream. She bit down on it, clamped it in.
Trash was there.
He was right fucking there.
Talking with two other people. She wanted to keep staring at Trash, but she forced herself to follow her training. Learn everything about a situation that you can, Church had told her. Don’t be distracted by any one thing.
So she forced herself to study the other men with her former lover, and Dahlia immediately felt a sudden coldness grip her. The men were older, in their thirties, dressed in camouflage clothing that had a military or paramilitary feel to them. Lots of gun belts with bulging ammunition pouches; lots of knives. Lots of guns. Each wore at least one holstered handgun and held automatic rifles. One had a combat shotgun slung over his shoulder. They looked hard and hardened, as if the end of the world had driven them away from all traces of ordinary humanity. Their eyes were cold, their mouths smiling but without humor. One of them, a big man with enormous shoulders and what looked like shrapnel scars on his face, wore a necklace of some kind around his bull neck. It took Dahlia a long time to understand what was wrong with the necklace. It was big and chunky, set with oversized and unusual stones.
Except they weren’t stones at all.
She tightened the focus on the binoculars and stared in horror.
The necklace was strung with human ears.
Forty-one of them.
The man to his right wore a similar necklace, though his was made up of thumbs. Some of them looked fresh. Dahlia’s heart hammered in her chest. She stared through the lenses at the grisly objects. If the world was still kind, if the world had not torn free of the hinges of sanity, then those trophies would have all been caked with blood that was as black as night. With the blood of the dead.
But the world was offering no mercy that day. It offered no kindness and the very air seemed to babble with madness. The blood—dried now to a chocolatey brown—was not from the infected. It was human blood.
Then the day, already spiraling down toward darkness, got so much worse. Trash said something to the men, then turned and pointed into the woods.
Pointing to where Old Man Church’s camp was.
Pointing to where Dahlia lived.
