“Ah.” She looked around. “Where should I change?”
“What you see is what there is,” Nathan said, with just the faintest trace of amusement. “You can strip down in the bag, put your clothes on the same way.”
Her cheeks heated, but Nathan was already working his stick into the adjacent hole, and Chris was plunging his knife into the snow near the entrance. Neither looked at her. After unlacing her boots, she grabbed up the clothes—camouflage pants, a fresh set of long underwear, socks, a long-sleeved black tee, a green scarf and matching sweater—and then ducked down in the bag until only her head showed. Working quickly, she stripped off her damp socks, her jeans, the sodden thermal pants, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, her underpants. Might as well go all the way. She hitched up her butt and started working her legs into the silk drawers. “What are you doing?”
“Notching out space for the stove.” Chunking out a square with the knife, Chris stamped the snow flat with his boot. “This way, it vents to the outside and any melt is down here, not up there with us.”
She was swimming in Chris’s camo pants, but they were nylon and fleece-lined, with a drawstring closure and elastic around the ankles. Most importantly, they were dry. Still deep in the bag, she shucked her shirt and silk top and unhooked her bra, then pulled on the dry silk shirt. “What about the horses?”
“They’ll be all right,” Nathan said. “Lucky for us, we haven’t blanketed them much, so they got good winter coats. Long as they keep their butts to the wind and stay in the trees, they’ll be fine.”
“What about food?”
He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “There’s feed in the saddlebags. That runs out, we’ll strip bark.”
“We can stay here that long?” She slipped on the sweater, then pulled her long hair free and began to finger-comb the tangles.
“We’ll stay as long as we have to,” Nathan said as Chris swarmed up the snow steps. With the three of them, the fit was tight, but there was enough room to lie flat and turn. “This is one helluva blow. Storms like this get stalled around Superior, and then we could be in for four, five days. Even if the snow quits, unless the wind dies down, we’ll have to stay put. That windchill will kill you just as fast. So we could be here a while.”
“Won’t they come after us?” she asked.
“Probably not,” he said. “Even if we didn’t have Weller to make sure Rule keeps looking in all the wrong places, no one is crazy enough to come after us in this weather.”
“But we’re out here.”
Nathan shrugged. “Like I said.”
They were stuck in that snow cave four miserable days, which was, Lena thought, about three and a half days too long. With no privacy and nothing to do but think, she was starting to go a little crazy. Her head was really no place she liked living very long, and her dreams were so bad she kept jolting awake, convinced she’d been talking in her sleep. Or screaming. Neither Chris nor Nathan ever mentioned it, but she’d caught the old man turning a quizzical eye her way more than once. For the most part, Chris just kept to himself and simmered. Which meant things were awfully quiet.
On the morning of the fifth day, Nathan squirmed through the tunnel and said, “Blow’s over. Pack up. I’ll get the horses ready.”
“Thank God,” Lena said as Nathan ducked out again. Rolling to a sit, she had to hold herself still a moment and wait for the wave of nausea to pass. Weird. Her stomach still wasn’t settling; she’d managed broth but very little else. Too long to be the flu, and no one else was sick.
Could it be her period? Maybe. The problem was, she had no way of knowing. When she was thirteen, her pediatrician had put her on birth control pills for her periods, which were irregular and so ghastly she understood why it was called the curse. She sometimes wondered if the pills were the reason Crusher Karl dared. No inconvenient little pregnancies to try and explain away.
She’d told no one about the pills, and certainly not Jess. What was the point? Once the world crashed, no one was going to be churning out birth control pills anytime soon, that was for sure. She had no way of getting more anyway. Now that she was off, she didn’t know what to expect. She’d thought her periods would start right up again after the first month, but nothing.
So maybe that’s why I don’t feel well. Maybe this is what happens after you’ve been on the pill for a long time. Which would be just so her luck to have the world’s worst case of PMS. Stifling a sigh, she slid off the platform, grabbed up one of the backpacks, and started stuffing in gear. She eyed Chris, who was working over a sleeping bag, and said, “Are you going to keep this up forever?”
His back stiffened, but he didn’t look round. “Keep what up forever?”
“Oh, come on, Chris. You haven’t said three paragraphs in four days. I know you’re pissed. You might feel better if you talked about it.”
“Lena.” Chris slid his sleeping bag into its carry sack and jerked the drawstring tight. “Just let it go, okay?”
“No,” she said. Chris muttered something she couldn’t quite catch. “I’m sorry?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“God!” He pitched the sleeping bag toward the tunnel. “You always push things. Can’t you just leave me alone? This is nothing to discuss. This is not about you, okay? For once?”
That stung. “But it is. You’re here because of me. Because you wouldn’t, you know, tell that I was the one who told you about the kids still around Oren.”
“Ratting you out to my grandfather wouldn’t have made a difference. He’d made his mind up before he even walked in the room. Of course, it didn’t help that I told him to go to hell.” Chris gave a bitter laugh. “My big stand. Let it go, Lena. It was my choice to keep going back.”
“But I shouldn’t have kept pushing you.” There was a quick twinkle of pain as her teeth worried skin from her lower lip. “If you’d only stuck with Peter and the others . . .”
“I’d be dead, too. And Alex would still—” His throat moved in a hard swallow. He looked away again. “Anyway.”
“Chris.” She put a tentative hand on his arm. His flesh jumped, and she half-expected him to shake her off, but he didn’t. “You don’t know that she’s dead.”
“I’d like to believe that. The thing is, I don’t see how she can be alive, not if Weller and the others are right. Even if they were wrong, it’s been, what, twelve days now? And snowing for the last four? The only reason we’ve done okay is all that gear Weller scrounged. Alex had nothing but a rifle and a backpack.”
“She’s pretty smart.”
“Alex is good, but she’s one person, and her ammunition wouldn’t last forever. Lena, it would take incredible luck for her to avoid the Changed. She must’ve run into them by now.”
“Or maybe not. Weller said they were just guessing. You heard them. Not one of those guys has set foot outside the Zone.”
“I’d say it’s a pretty damned good guess, though.” A long pause, and then he raised his eyes. The skin beneath them was darker than coal, and the whites were bloodshot with pain and, she thought, regret. “I think I always knew, Lena. About what was outside the Zone, I mean. Why we didn’t need to post as many guards, why raiders never seemed to come from that direction. If I’d given it two seconds’ thought, I’d have seen it. Hell.” He let out a bleak laugh. “Peter pretty much laid it out for me. He made sure we steered clear. If Rule’s the center of a watch, then this big region, from seven o’clock to eleven, is crawling with the Changed—and Peter saw to it that we went through only at very specific times. It doesn’t get any more obvious than that, Lena.”
“Look, it’s easy to realize this, you know, in hindsight. But, Chris, the world died, okay? People dropped, for God’s sake. Peter was doing the best he could. He was trying to take care of us.”
“There were plenty of other ways. He didn’t have to go this route. I just wish I understood why. Because I don’t get that. What made Peter think this was a good idea?”
“You don’t know that it was his idea.” That sounded weak even to her ears, and she added, “Maybe he was just following orders.”
“Well, they were terrible orders, and he shouldn’t have gone along with them.”
“That is so lame, I can’t stand it,” she snapped. “You’ve followed orders. You did what Peter said. You let your grandfather enforce the Ban; you didn’t complain when Peter and the Council decided who got to stay and who got turned away.”
His cheeks went hectic with color. “That . . . that was different.”
“How? Because those orders weren’t terrible, just bad? ?”
“Jesus, you don’t think I’ve thought about that? God.” He pulled his arm from beneath her hand and knotted his fists in his hair. “How could I have been so stupid? There were all these signs I decided to ignore. Like when that guy, Harlan, the one who had Alex’s stuff and shot her friend, Tom, and all that . . . when my grandfather threw Harlan out, I knew the chances were pretty good he’d die out there. I was fine with that. He’d hurt Alex. I thought, okay, dude, sucks to be you.”
“All that means is you cared about Alex. She got hurt, you were pissed.”
“Lena, it’s not like someone dissed her in the cafeteria. I decided it was fine for Harlan to die. And I had a pretty good idea how it was going to happen, too. We all know the Changed are out there. I just didn’t know they were therethere; that Peter had this system going, and it was right in front of me, the whole time. Like, a couple times, Peter split off by himself. You know, the same way I would go to Oren? He’d take a wagon with supplies and just leave—and always around the same general areas. He’d come back, and the wagon would be empty. When I asked where all the supplies went, he wouldn’t say. I mean, it was obvious he was giving food away, and I just let it go.”
