Her vision only took in the far places, the places where there may be something to eat, the places that her blistered feet and knotted stomach could never carry her. She was marooned on an island of her own weakness, doomed to only look longingly at distant horizons.

  She didn’t want to look closer. She didn’t want to look at Eduardo.

  He had been a porter like her. Too old to wield a machete, but young enough that he wasn’t killed outright when the Elect captured him, instead he was given a pack of food, a pack he was told on the pain of death not to allow anyone to touch. He had served faithfully, even believing a little in The Pure One and his prophecies.

  Susanna had hated him for that until she realized that he only believed because to not believe would have made him as miserable as she was.

  He wasn’t miserable now. Susanna’s eyes focused on him. He lay on his back, unmoving. He had died early that morning, not of hunger—the Elect gave him extra scraps to keep him honest—but of what appeared to have been a heart attack.

  Susanna had taken his shirt and pants and put them on over her own. Maybe she wouldn’t be so cold this night. Maybe she could get some sleep.

  Eduardo lay a few feet away from her, clad only in his dirty underwear. The slight curves of his arm and leg muscles fascinated her, as did the fact that his stomach wasn’t as caved in as hers. There was still some meat there.

  She thought again, as she had a hundred times since Eduardo died, about the flint and steel and bit of char cloth in her pocket. The firestriker was her sole possession, something so common that the machete men hadn’t taken it from her.

  She could light a fire. Using the last of her energy she could light a fire with grass and sticks and then find a sharp stone or a piece of glass from the Old Times and cut off some meat.

  A terrible, seductive thought. Susanna was appalled that it had occurred to her the moment she realized Eduardo was dead. It had never entirely left her mind in the hours since.

  “No,” she croaked.

  She had said the same several times already today, and each time the little worm that was eating at her soul had wriggled through her conviction, whispering its justifications.

  This isn’t about morality, this is about survival. Only the strong survive in the wildlands. Morality died with the Old Times.

  “No,” she repeated, and felt something harden inside her.

  Susanna reached into her pocket and pulled out her flint and steel. Struggling to her knees, she waited a moment until her head stopped spinning and then threw the flint as far as she could. The char cloth she let drop. The breeze carried it away, a little fluttering sail of black. Then she turned and threw the flat rectangle of steel as far as she could in the opposite direction of the flint.

  The effort of the second throw made her topple over and land hard on her face on the gritty soil. She sobbed tearlessly for several long minutes, unsure if she was miserable because she had just killed herself or happy that she had done the right thing or simply relieved that it was over.

  Eventually she turned herself onto her back and lay like Eduardo looking up at the pale blue sky. The winter breeze carried a sharp chill, and when she wasn’t bent over from the hunger pangs she shivered all over. During one of her spasms her hand brushed a single blade of grass, the only one left within her reach. She pulled it out and started to chew.

  The Elect had attacked her settlement six months before. They’d been living far up north, far enough that New City was only a vague story some far-walking traders and scavengers told. Neither she nor anyone she knew had ever ventured this far south.

  They didn’t need to. They had a good spot—a large, well-watered valley relatively free of toxins. Across this valley, which took two days to walk from side to side, were several little settlements where families farmed and raised cattle and chickens. Each settlement had a blockhouse to hide in when bandits came. Everyone ate well enough and they felt secure.

  Then the Righteous Horde arrived. They only numbered in the hundreds then, led by a wild-eyed priest who called for a purification of the land. Some of the settlements tried to resist, but that terrible machine gun of theirs tore right through their wooden blockhouse walls. Susanna’s people tried to flee but were caught. Those too young or too old to follow the march were killed outright. The rest became porters or machete men. Some of the men tried to resist and were crucified as examples to the rest.

  And now she was here. All her old friends were dead, as she would soon be.

  With an effort she turned her head and looked at Eduardo. He had been the last from their old settlement, a foolish old man whom she never liked. Strange how she ended up spending her last hours with him, and how at the end she had done him a great favor.

  Let him restin dignity, and let me die the same, she thought.

  She felt a hard knot deep inside her that wasn’t hunger, and she realized that if she had the strength to stand, her back would be straight and her chin high. She had been pushed around and passed over her whole life and now that it was ending she had finally said, “No more, this is as far as I’ll bend.” A weaker person would have degraded herself by feasting on Eduardo’s corpse. She had heard of scavengers doing that in lean winters. But not her.

  She looked back at the sky. Let the end come soon.

  “Hey.”

  Susanna blinked. Now she was hearing things. Maybe the end was coming sooner than she thought.

  “Hey, are you alive?”

  Susanna looked over at Eduardo in astonishment. He lay where she had left him, glassy eyes staring at the sky he would never see again.

  “Hello?”

  The sound had come from the other direction. She looked that way and saw a man.

  The first thing she noticed was that he had a paunch. A wave of hunger passed over her, doubling her over so that her knobby knees touched her chin. Tearing her eyes away from that beautiful paunch she looked at the rest of him.

  He was an older man, with white hair and gold-rimmed eyeglasses. He smiled at her and pulled something out of a satchel that hung from his shoulder.

  A corn cake.

  “Here,” he said.

  Susanna got on her hands and knees. The man stayed where he was a few feet away. She crawled over to him, the allure of food giving her strength. He put the corn cake in her mouth.

  “Eat that, but not too quickly or you’ll hurt yourself,” the man said. He pulled a canteen off his other shoulder and held it to her lips. The water tasted tangy, strange.

  “I put a bit of lemon juice in it,” he explained. “It will build your strength.”

  Susanna ate and drank, feeling nothing. She had resigned herself to death and now this had happened. She didn’t know what to think, so she simply allowed her body to take over the mechanical task of staying alive for one more day.

  “There’s plenty more where that came from,” the man said once she finished.

  Now that she was done eating and drinking, Susanna looked around and noticed that other people had joined them, well-fed men and women carrying guns. One scanned the horizon with a pair of binoculars. Another bent over Eduardo.

  “This one’s a goner,” he said.

  The man who had fed her put a soft hand under her chin and made her look up at him.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Su—Susanna.”

  “I’m Abraham Weissman, and I’m here to help you.”

  The man smiled at her but the smile came out flat. A little tremor of fear fluttered in her chest.

  “Did you say you have more to eat?” she asked.

  Abraham Weissman nodded. “That’s right, but we need to go now. We have a long way to walk. Can you walk?”

  Susanna sank to the ground. It had been too good to be true. They were going to leave her.

  The man whistled and two other men with a stretcher came over and put her on it. They lifted her up and the whole column started walking toward the mountains. Susanna looked around her and saw there were about a dozen of them. Trailing along beside them were ragged, starving men and women who must have come from the Righteous Horde like she had. Some lay in stretchers while others shuffled along as best they could. From what she could see none had been machete men. The only men were too old and The Pure One had made a solemn law against women carrying weapons. These people had all been porters, left behind by the Elect and not strong enough to keep any of the food.

  They walked for the rest of the day, making slow progress because the starving people had to keep stopping to rest. The man who had given her the corn cake grew impatient and kept using a pair of binoculars to look to the south. At noon everyone was given another corn cake and some lemon water.

  Dusk found them about halfway to the mountains. Abraham Weissman shouted at one of the men with the rifles about how they should have made it there already, but the man merely shrugged and gestured to the exhausted cluster of men and women bunched by the campfire.

  Dinner was another corn cake and more lemon water. Susanna had regained enough strength to sit up through the entire meal. Little was said. The leader, whom everyone called Abe, talked quietly with a few of his followers but no one talked with the men and women from the Righteous Horde. And they talked little among themselves.

  After all, what was there to say?

  As the sun set, the men and women with the guns went among those left behind by the Righteous Horde and took their shoes.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Annette Cruz lay in her bed reading. Her ten-year-old son Pablo lay snuggled up beside her. The barroom buzz of $87,953 could be heard faintly through the sound of her closed door.

  She ignored it. Instead she buried herself in one of her favorite books from the Old Times.Evening in Spring, one of what she called “soft novels.” These stories weren’t about war or adventures or romance. Instead they were usually set in small towns where nothing much happened and people lived out lives of minor dramas and quiet struggles. The hero ofEvening in Spring, for example, was a young boy about Pablo’s age whose only problem was that he was sensitive and artistic and while he was well-loved by everyone in town, nobody understood that part of him.

  Imagine that being your only problem in life! Did a world like that ever exist, even in the Old Times?

  Who cares,Annette thought.It exists here in this book.

  And what a lovely book with its quiet descriptions of a peaceful town and its lush, clean countryside all around where farmers grew bumper crops of healthy food and everyone could go down to the river to swim and if they wanted to take a drink all they had to do was open their mouths, confident the water would do them no harm.

  She must have read that book a dozen times and every time it relaxed her.Winesburg, Ohiowas almost as good, but the characters in that one had problems that could almost be called problems soEvening in Spring was better.

  “Show me the first page again,” Pablo said.

  “It’s called a flyleaf.”

  “Show me the flyleaf again.”

  She marked her place with a banknote from the Old Times (otherwise good for starting a fire or cleaning yourself in the outhouse) and turned to the front of the book. Tidy handwriting in pencil filled the page. Her eyes skimmed over a couple of lines.

  “After you dry your baby, rest him on your bare stomach, warming him with your body heat. Cover yourself and your baby with a blanket that’s dry and porous enough to. . .”

  “So he got all that from Radio Hope?” Pablo asked.

  Annette nodded. “Yep. Wrote it down while I had you inside me. You should have seen me. I had a big belly!”

  “Bigger than Roy’s?”

  Annette laughed. Roy was her boss at the bar. “Yes, but filled with a baby instead of beer.”

  Pablo giggled and looked back at the page, suddenly serious. “I wish I could remember Dad.”

  Annette stroked his hair.

  “He was a good man and he loved you very much.”

  “Can you read me some more of the book?”

  “How about you read to me?” she said, turning back to their place.

  Pablo snuggled a bit closer so he could get a better view of the page and read, “The wind had gone down entirely now, and the night was fragrant beyond words with the freshness of rain, the rich aroma of earth riding the wind from over the newly ploughed fields on the prairie west of the village. We walked along, saying nothing, just breathing in the sweet air. . .”

  There was a soft knock at the door. Pablo got up and opened it a crack.

  “We’re done counting,” Roy’s voice came from the other room.

  Pablo hurried back and gave his mother a hug.

  “You’re going to win, I just know it!”

  “I better or I’m in deep shit,” Annette said, getting up and putting the book on the side table.

  “You swore!” Pablo laughed.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  She stepped out of the back room that was her and Pablo’s home and appeared behind the counter at $87,953, the biggest and most popular bar in the Burbs. Even citizens from New City came out from behind their walls to drink there.

  The crowd filling the bar roared its approval at her appearance. The place was packed for the first election in the history of the Burbs. She could see all the regulars as well as a fair number of scavengers and a few citizens. Assistant Mayor Marcus Callahan was there, as was Clyde Devon, the Head of the Watch. They’d both pushed for her to be sheriff of the Burbs but the man whose idea it originally was, The Doctor, was significant by his absence. The mayor of New City and the Burbs had stayed home.

  She didn’t have to ask why. The day after he named her sheriff she had resigned and called an election. She didn’t want to be his appointee; she wanted to be her own woman. The Doctor didn’t take kindly to defiance, especially of this kind. The Doctor had never been elected.

  Roy, the owner of $87,953, raised his hands in the air, a big smile spreading across his dark brown face. His voice boomed out over the crowd. “Quiet everyone, quiet! The votes are tallied. Will the candidates line up in front of the bar, please?”

  Annette came around the bar and stood next to Charley Shibell and Frank Edgerton. Frank was $87,953’s other bouncer, a bear of a man who worked alternate shifts from Annette. He was a good friend and had gone on the ballot to make sure she wasn’t running unchallenged. That would have looked bad. Charley was a scavenger who had settled in the Burbs after the Righteous Horde had ravaged the countryside. He’d put his name in at the last minute.

  Another scavenger named Milos Artur, who had announced his candidacy by standing on the bar, dropping his pants and declaring he was from the planet Sedna and had arrived on a spaceship to bring order to the Burbs, wasn’t present. He’d been last seen talking to a large boulder outside of town. The wildlands brought forth all sorts.

  Roy produced a piece of paper, put on his reading glasses, and read aloud from a tally sheet.

  “The official count for the election of sheriff of the Burbs is in. I and three other observers, Ahmed Abd-al-Karim of the Burb Council, Assistant Mayor Marcus Callahan, and scavenger Yoon Iseul have checked and rechecked the figures. From order of least votes to greatest, the results are. . .”

  A snare drum tapped out a rapid tattoo. Annette looked around and saw the drummer was one of the regulars, a red-nosed man who owned a chicken farm a couple of miles away. Annette rolled her eyes. This was Roy’s doing. He had a cheesy sense of the dramatic.

  “. . . Milos Artur, zero votes.”

  Snickers from the crowd. The guy had forgotten to vote for himself.

  Another drum roll.

  “Charley Shibell, 287 votes.”

  Shibell grimaced in disappointment. Another drum roll.

  “Frank Edgerton, 598 votes.”

  Annette looked at him with surprise. She thought Frank’s candidacy was just a formality. Apparently he had people behind him.

  “And the winner with the most votes, the candidate who will be our first sheriff of the Burbs is. . .”

  Another drum roll.

  Oh get on with it! Annette thought.

  “Annette Cruz with 2,070 votes!”

  The crowd cheered. Pablo jumped up and down beside her. She gave him a hug, and then shook Frank and Charley’s hands.

  “Speech! Speech!” the crowd called.

  “All right, all right,” Annette said. “First off, thanks for electing me.”

  “Thanks for calling an election,” someone in the crowd called out. “Even though I voted for you I didn’t want you shoved down our throats like those snobs in New City tried to do.”

  “None of that, please,” Annette said. “This marks a new chapter in the relations between the Burbs and New City. When the Righteous Horde attacked it changed everything. We all had to fight together to survive. . .”

  “Except for the Merchants Association, the selfish bastards!” someone else interrupted. An angry growl of agreement rumbled through the crowd.

  “Enough already!” Annette said. Yeah, they were right, but couldn’t they see she was walking a tightrope here? “There were plenty of mistakes made, but we have to move on. There’s a Burb Council now, and precedent for sheltering within the walls when there’s an attack. And now there’s a sheriff. For too long the Burbs have been a place where decent people can’t walk alone at night. Too many shootings, too many knife fights, too many rapes. That’s going to change.”

  The crowd applauded.

  “We’re going to be a city worthy of the name,” she went on. “So as my first act as sheriff, I’m calling on the Burb Council to raise money for a jailhouse. Mostly we’ve just banished or lynched the bad offenders and let the minor offenders go. No more. Even minor offenses will carry penalties. It used to be that if you stole an apple from the market you had to give two apples back. Now you’re going to have to do that and spend a day behind bars at your own expense. I’ll be writing up a list of offenses and punishments and posting it all around town.”

 

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