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A jet this size had to have carried a lot of people.
All of them could be dead.
And waiting.
“No,” she said. Her voice sounded as dry as the desert wind.
She stared up longingly at the plane.
If it was empty, then it was high and safe, and out of the wind. It could answer all of her needs. It could be a kind of home.
The wind whipped past her, lashing her cheeks with coarse sand. It stung her scalp. She closed her eyes for a moment, wrestling with herself about this choice.
There was the choice she wanted to believe in, and there was the sensible choice.
You’d have to be dumber than a coal bucket to go up yonder.
“No,” she said again.
With a reluctance so great that it felt like grief, the girl turned away from the jet, dragging her eyes from those smashed-out cockpit windows, turning her whole body with an effort of will. She walked slowly around the jet, studying it from every side, marveling that such a massive thing ever could have flown.
She looked into the desert that ran alongside the road. Far, far in the distance she saw some shapes moving. People. At least a dozen of them, maybe more. She faded into the shadows of the plane and watched them, squinting to try to decide what she was seeing. Were they the gray people? Sometimes they moved in bunches, a small mass of them triggered into movement by passing prey.
There was a flash of sunlight on metal.
No.
Not the dead.
Reapers.
She cupped her hands around her eyes and studied the group, counting the shapes, counting the flashes of sunlight on sharpened steel.
Twenty of them? Twenty-one.
Too many.
There was one shape that walked in front of the others, and it was his weapon that most often caught the sunlight. Even though she was too far away to see him clearly, she thought she knew who this was. Brother Andrew. One of the most senior of the reapers. A bull of a man who carried a two-handed scythe.
“No,” she murmured. “Go away.”
In time, they did. But they were heading in the same direction she was, northwest, their course paralleling the road. They were miles away, though, following a secondary road. Perhaps they thought she was on that road, that she would take the road less traveled in hopes of eluding pursuit.
The girl crouched in the shadows until Brother Andrew’s party was gone, reduced first to tiny dots and then entirely lost to distance and heat shimmer.
Then she stood and stretched her muscles, trying to ignore the ache in her belly. The girl took a steadying breath and began to walk. She cast a single look over her shoulder, and what she saw made her pause within a few steps.
A turkey buzzard sat on the jet’s broken wing. Its dark wings were threadbare and in disarray, its wattled red throat was thin, and its eyes looked totally dead. For a horrible moment the girl thought that the vulture was dead, that it had somehow caught the plague that had cut like a reaper’s scythe through all of humanity. But then it made a small, plaintive caw.
It wasn’t dead. It was starving.
Like her.
The thought absolutely chilled her and nearly took the heart out of her. If something like this carrion bird—a creature that would eat anything it found—was starving out here, then what hope was there for her?
She turned away from the sight of it.
“No,” she said one more time. She tried to say it with anger, with determination, with purpose.
