THE DEATH OF JUNE Bug hit us hard. Among us Less Thans, he had always been something of a leader—precisely because he didn’t act like one. Now that he was gone, I realized how much I’d miss him.
We marched eighteen hours straight, through the night and all the next day. Although I wanted to talk with Hope—wanted to see if she was okay—it seemed like she found reasons to steer clear of me. Maybe I was just paranoid, but if she was avoiding me, well, who could blame her?
All I had to do was pick up the spear—it was right there at my feet! Instead, I had been fighting my own demons, the ghoulish images dancing before my eyes. All I could do was fire a few harmless rocks with my slingshot. No wonder she couldn’t take her eyes off Cat.
Despite what Dozer claimed, he hadn’t tried to wake me. It was a lie. But what was the point of trying to convince the others? They could believe what they wanted.
When we finally stopped, we killed some squirrels and rabbits; then we cut them into thin strips and hung them up to dry. When they were shriveled and free of moisture, we wrapped them in torn-out pages from my final book—A Tale of Two Cities. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” echoed in my head.
As we worked, I eased over to Hope. “I’m sorry about your wrist,” I said.
She grunted something like “Thanks.”
“You okay?”
“I’ll live,” she said.
“I guess my slingshot was no match for that wolf.”
“No, I guess not.”
We stuffed the dried meat in our packs.
“Thank God for Cat.”
“I’ll say,” she agreed, a little too quickly. And then she found a reason to move away.
Whatever it was that I felt at that moment—jealousy? hurt?—I could barely acknowledge it. I wished it had been me who’d taken down that wolf—who’d had the sense to pick up Hope’s spear and launch it through the wild beast.
Of course, even as I tried to convince myself of that, I knew better. I’d lost her, plain and simple. I might’ve spoken to her in the barn, might even have been the one who helped her escape the tunnel, but it was Cat who came through when the danger was greatest.
We stumbled down the mountain until we reached the edge of the Flats—a landscape more barren than anything I had ever seen. Pure, white, unblemished desert. Although there was a certain beauty to it, I knew from a glance it was as inhospitable a place as one could ever imagine. Endless miles of nothingness. A white floor under a blue sky. In the far distance, barely visible to the naked eye, was the jagged outline of another mountain range. We had had water up at the mountain. And shelter. Down here, all bets were off.
We rested in the mountain’s shadow, knowing it was the last time we’d escape the sun for several days. Once we started out on the Flats, there’d be no shade. No trees.
No water.
“Why’s it white?” Flush asked.
Unlike the desert back at Camp Liberty—brown sand dotted with small clumps of green—this was snowy white. A painter’s canvas.
“It’s not sand,” Twitch answered. “It’s alkali.” He was rubbing a pinch of it between his fingers. “This was once a big lake. Then it dried up, leaving an enormous salt flat.”
“Recently?”
“If you count a million years ago as recent, yeah.”
We studied the terrain—a mosaic of cracked earth. Hard to imagine we’d be walking across a former lake bed.
The sky began to darken. Still we waited. Although we didn’t think the Brown Shirts had followed us down the mountain, there was no point announcing our presence by emerging onto a barren desert. Better to wait for complete darkness.
Though the wolf attack had forced us to work together, there was still a wariness there, and little interaction between the groups. Less Thans vs. Sisters.
When the sky turned to velvet, Cat said, “Okay. Final sips.”
Everyone removed canteens and measured out their small allotments. Then we shuffled forward. Our feet stirred up a noxious, low-hanging cloud of powdery dust, and we covered the bottom halves of our faces with bandannas.
If the dehydration didn’t kill us, the nuclear fallout would.
I cast my gaze behind me. That’s when I saw them. Wolf eyes. Dozens of them. Gleaming like yellow jewels in the mountainside.
I wondered which was worse: wolves trailing us across the desert . . . or wolves stopping at its edge, wise enough to go no farther. As if they knew something we didn’t.