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She did not expect her prayers to be answered. Not because of any lack of faith—the girl did believe that there was something up there or out there or somewhere—but she no longer knew what that was. Her mother and the others in the Night Church had drummed one vision of god into her head, but it was a brutal, harsh, and ugly thing. A faith born when the world died, one that flourished as more and more people died. For years she had been a part of that. For years she had belonged to that.
That time had passed.
Now she was a part of nothing. She belonged to nothing.
Now she was alone.
No, the girl believed that the heat of the day and the cold of the night, the deep hunger and the awful loneliness, the pain and the shame, were all forms of punishment.
As she did every night since she ran away from the Night Church, she murmured these words right at the point where sleep began pulling her down.
“I’m sorry for the pain I caused, the blood I spilled, and the lives I destroyed. With all my heart and soul, I’m sorry.”
Then the ragged claws of sleep dragged her down into dreams of hunger and dying.
8
In the morning something impossible happened.
9
The girl rose with the first light of dawn, her hunter’s mind alert to the touch of sunlight on the smoked-glass windows of the dead SUV. She woke quickly, her senses sharpened by months of surviving on her own.
Slowly and cautiously she looked out of each of the windows, looking for predators, alive or dead.
Looking for reapers.
The desert was empty and vast.
She opened the door of the SUV and moved outside and away from the vehicle, running low and fast and then turning to look back. It was a trick she had learned the hard way. Sometimes predators waited on top of a vehicle. And sometimes there were blind spots when you were inside. From a distance she could see all around the car.
There was no one and nothing. No sign of Sister Connie or Brother Andrew or anyone from the Night Church.
She crept back and examined the plastic she had set up the night before, and for the first time in days she smiled. The center of each sheet of plastic was bellied down, heavy with dew. The girl fetched her canteen and carefully poured the water into it. The combined water filled her canteen nearly to the top. She licked the last drops off the sheeting and carefully folded it and stowed it in her pack. Then she went to check the traps.
From a distance she could tell that all three of the traps had been sprung, and her heart leaped in her chest. She broke into a run, eager to see what kind of meat the night had brought to her.
Almost immediately she slowed from a run to a fast walk to a sudden stillness. She tore the slingshot from her pocket, loaded it with a sharp stone, and wheeled around, looking for an enemy.
For a trickster.
For answers.
Was this some strange and subtle trap set by Brother Andrew?
The desert seemed totally empty.
She turned back to the snares.
What in the sam hill is going on? she demanded, not sure if she thought it or shouted it.
In the center of each one, standing perfectly erect, glinting in the morning sunlight, was an aluminum can.
Not the empty, rusted cans that were everywhere, discarded years ago
by scavengers. These cans were not rusted. And they were not empty.
The girl approached the closest one very cautiously, ready to counterattack if her own snares were baited to catch her. She saw no trip wires, no sticks bent back under pressure. The ground did not look like it had been excavated to dig a pit and then covered over.
