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The can was still there. A square can. Blue, with an illustration of some kind on it.
She crept closer, and in her belly hunger warred with caution. Hunger became a white-hot screaming thing.
When she was five feet away she could read the label of the can. She mouthed the word.
“Spam.”
She knew what that was. Meat in a can. It was old, but the can was not puffy with expanding gasses the way they got when the contents were spoiled. Cans like that were filled with deadly bacteria.
This can looked fine.
She left it there and moved over to the second snare. That can was round, tall, also blue. It said: DOLE PINEAPPLE CHUNKS—100% PINEAPPLE JUICE.
The third can was red. GOYA KIDNEY BEANS IN SAUCE.
She looked around.
Nothing.
She made a circle around the traps, going out as far as a mile.
Nothing.
No footprints. No sign.
Just three cans. Meat, fruit, beans.
If she was smart, if she was careful, she could live on that for a week. Maybe more. The beans and the meat were both protein.
The girl straightened and eased the tension on the slingshot.
“Who are you?” she yelled. “Where are you?”
The wind answered with a whisper of sand across the landscape.
She grabbed the cans and ran back to the Explorer.
She was laughing.
She was weeping.
She wasn’t going to die today.
10
It was so hard to resist the temptation to open all three cans and have a feast, but that would be a bad choice. She gave it some thought, forcing herself to work it through before she took any action. That caution had kept her alive until now.
The meat would keep as long as the can stayed sealed and out of direct sunlight. To open it now, in this heat, without any means of keeping it cold, would mean that she would have to eat it within a day or so before it spoiled. The fruit, as much fun as it would be to taste something cool and sweet, had no protein.
The beans were the smarter choice. She could eat them throughout the day, and they would keep her going as she continued on toward the town.
It would mean leaving this place, and leaving whoever had left the food for her.
She half believed that it was one of the loners. There were a few of them even out here in the desert—people who could not abide company, who preferred the absolute stillness of a world on the brink of death. Most of the loners were crazy, and a lot of them were downright murderous. There were so many tales—not all of them tall—about loners who trapped unwary wanderers and killed them. Sometimes in order to loot their supplies. Sometimes to enforce their own isolation. And, if some of the tales were to be believed, because a lone traveler was a handy source of food.
It hurt the girl’s mind to think that anyone would turn to cannibalism in a world where everyone who died had been reborn as a flesh-eating monster. But the stories were there, and many of them were told by people who weren’t prone to exaggeration. That made them all the more frightening. These weren’t scary stories told in the dark to frighten children. These were firsthand accounts by hardened travelers who had nothing to gain by making up such tales.
Avoiding loners was a smart habit of anyone who traveled the wastelands.
