The man climbed into the cab.
Red didnt move. He slid his .38 from his waistband. Fuck this, man. Im done.
The gun made a tiny noise in Reds mouth, a quick, muted pop. A spray of blood, flesh, bone and brain matter colored the sky momentarily, and then his lifeless body tumbled over, and slid into the pit.
The girl is gone when the truck lumbers toward the gate after the third consecutive night of attacks. There are mutters from the men near the fence, mutters of creatures not afraid of death, a host of horrors willing to run themselves onto a stake, clawed hands and yellow teeth snapping at the air. The black eyes, they say, are the worst. The Ruined Ones have lost their fear of the moon. Casualties are high, and the man looks away when a tiny, shrouded body is loaded on the truck.
He drives alone, in silence, the Luger sitting on the empty seat next to him. The grind of rubber tires against packed desert sings through the metal of the truck. At the pit, the work is hard for one man, but no one else will come. No one else dares the awful, pungent stench of burnt flesh. No one else carries enough courage to tread in the silent, dead places of the world. He pulls the bodies from the bed one by one, saving the small, shrouded victim for last.
He avoids it until
It shifts.
He staggers back.
A thin hand pokes through the fold, and the man wishes for his gun. The girls face emerges from the shroud. Her cheeks are smudged and dirty, but her eyes steal the blue from the sky.
She doesnt move for a few, sluggish seconds. Sorry, she says. She stretches and dusts off her clothes, and the cloth falls to the bed like a discarded shadow. Desert winds kick up and chase her hair across her face.
I wanted to see outside the village.
Dangerous, he mutters.
She nods. Her eyes soften. Sorry.
The man hoists the girl to the desert floor. Her body doesnt weigh much. For a moment, they stare at each other, the girl with her blue eyes and the man behind his shell. Smoke winds from the bottom of the pit. The girls eyes follow a tendril of dark grey until it fades into the clouds. She climbs into the cab as the man brushes sweat from his face, realizing the girl must have crawled into that shroud before the night had ended, before the men near the gate had collected all the bodies from the nights butchery. He climbs into the drivers seat.
Whered you get that scar? she asks.
The man touches his face, runs a finger over the shallow groove in his skin. Beforethis, he says.
Neither speaks for a minute. The man pinches the wires together, starting the truck. The engine spits and growls to life. Another gust tosses some dirt into the air, and the dusty cloud gallops across the flats. Behind them, in the distance, the remains of the city stand out like a smudge of black in the tan wasteland not much different than the pit.
Whats your name? she asks, eyes forward.
Does it matter?
She studies him. Not really, I guess.
He forces the metal beast into gear. Neither speaks as they crawl toward the remnants of civilization. The flats stretch on, seemingly an endless plain of brown nothing.
Id like to help you.
He shakes his head.
When Im older, she adds quickly. When I have to choose something for my life, I want to help you do what you do.
He drives, thinking of the choices already made for her, for all of them. Back inside the fence, the truck slows. She glances at the man as the truck idles in front of her shack. The weight of her blue eyes presses against his chest. He looks away and watches the volunteers work the defenses, string barbed wire, and push sharpened stakes into the ground.
Less than a year, and the Ruined Ones are this strong?
He closes his eyes. Maybe.
Her hand brushes against the rough skin on the back of his. In a moment, shes gone, running into the shack. A voice rises over the grumbling engineher grandfathers, berating her for being gone, asking why she was with the man in the truck. The reaper. The man who will always be unclean.
He smiles,
village, but this was coming of age, our ritual. Plenty of other dumb bastards snuck out of the compound before they officially became men; Dad even admitted to sneaking out just before his brothers eighteenth.
I glanced back over my shoulder at the wall: randomly fused sections of steel, brick, concrete, and stone. Originally a desperate measure against the walking dead, that wall had stood for something like eighty years. For boys raised in captivity, the world outside the wall reeked with mystery, and we devoured grand lies that became our motivation to hop the walla mans right to be free, all that crap. The older men in the compound filled us with stories, baiting us like a lantern to a moth, knowing wed bite, go over, and look for danger. The stifling closeness behind the wall pushed us, toopersonally caught me in the throat.
Whatll it be boys? Davin asked once we found the shadows. The moon shone pretty bright that night, drawing the silver out of the world. Davin shimmered like a bit of fresh aluminum.