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So she had to leave.
Not soon.
Now.
Get your skinny butt in gear, girl, scolded her inner voice. No handsome prince is going to stroll out of a fairy tale and serve you a hot breakfast of eggs and grits.
“Shut up,” she told herself. Her voice sounded dusty and far older than her fifteen years.
She could see a faintness of green down the road. Sparse woods that had once been vast groves of fruit trees set, improbably, on the edge of the Nevada desert. Patches of scrub pine and weathered creosote bushes were thriving there now as the orchard died. The ghosts of the fruit trees stood like pale sticks. She reckoned that the water pumping stations were dead. All these years of blowing sand and dust had frozen the gears in the rows of tall, white wind turbines. Now they stood above the orchard, silent as clouds, offering the lie of power in a powerless world.
Beyond the forest was a town. It said so on the map she had.
A place called Red Pass, which looked to be have been built into the cleft of a long ridge of low mountains.
Red Pass. The name meant nothing to her, but the fact that it was a town meant that there might be some vittles. Old canned stuff. Maybe some gardens with enough life for wild carrots and potatoes to still be growing. She knew that birds lived in some of the old towns. Even a scrawny pigeon was roast breast for dinner and a day’s worth of soup from the rest. And where there was one pigeon, there would be two.
The town was where she had to go.
Ten miles under the August sun.
It had to be done during the day, though. At night she would not be able to see, or hunt, or defend. And they did not need the light to find her.
They.
The gray people. The wanderers.
The hungry ghosts.
She knew they were not really ghosts. That was just something her father used to call them. Hungry ghosts.
They were also in the towns.
They were always in the towns.
It’s where they’d lived. It’s where they’d died.
It’s where they waited.
And she, hungry and desperate, had no choice but to leave her empty little place of safety and journey into the places of the dead.
Hunger demanded it.
4
“Sister Margaret!”
The words tore her out of a daydream of food and dragged her into horror.
The girl spun around and crouched.
There were three of them. Two men and a woman. They rose from the desert, shedding the sand-colored cloaks that had allowed them to hide and wait until she stumbled right into their trap.
Now you walked into it, girl, said her inner voice. You done gone and stepped right into a snake pit and no mistake.
They were dressed all in black, with red streamers tied to their ankles and wrists. Stylized angel wings were embroidered on their chests. Their heads had been shaved and comprehensively tattooed with complex images of tangled vines and flowers.
Just like hers.
