None of our previous raids had yielded as much as this latest haul, but the new goods wouldn’t last forever. We’d need the hunting and foraging techniques Ana and Mellie were learning in order to make it through the summer.
But what we needed even worse was fuel. The SUV and truck both guzzled gas at a rate we could not sustain, and the Church had crippled us by cutting off access to their fuel depots. Reese siphoned all the gas from the car we were abandoning while Mellie and Anabelle stocked backpacks full of “up front” supplies. Then Finn and I squeezed into the cab of the cargo truck with Ana and my sister, and we took off into the badlands again on yet another fractured strip of highway, this time headed south, with the descending sun on our right.
I sat as close to Finn as I could get, both to give Melanie more room and because touching him, even casually, still made my head spin and my stomach flip, like when I’d played on the swings as a kid. At first I’d thought that was because touching a boy I wasn’t related to, for any reason other than medical necessity, was strictly forbidden by the Church. But even as the thrill of rebellion had faded, the rush I felt every time Finn looked at me had only grown.
We’d been on the road for about an hour, his arm stretched across the back of the seat so he could play with my hair, when Ana looked up from her book and sucked in a startled breath.
“Holy Reformation . . . !” she swore, and as Finn pressed on the brake I followed her gaze to a car parked on the side of the road a few hundred feet ahead. The windshield was generously splattered with mud, but I couldn’t see any obvious damage to the vehicle. It had probably run out of gas, like dozens of other abandoned cars we’d come across in the badlands.
“Is that—?”
Static crackled from the handheld radio on my lap before I could finish the question, and I picked it up as Reese spoke into a matching radio from the SUV behind us. “You guys see it?” he asked, and Mellie nodded, though he couldn’t see her.
“Yeah,” I said into the handset.
“It’s a long shot, but let’s pull over and check the tank for gas,” he said, and that was when I realized that those in the SUV couldn’t see the detail that had drawn the exclamation from Anabelle. The detail that had captured my attention and Mellie’s heart, and led Finn to put his right blinker on, even though there was no other traffic to warn of his intent to pull over.
“There’s a kid,” I said into the radio, holding down the button with my thumb. The boy standing in the dirt beside the car was small, with dark skin and long, tightly curled hair. His navy pants might have been part of a uniform, but his arms were crossed over a faded, striped short-sleeved shirt instead of the white button-down required for school. “He’s six or seven years old. Appears to be alone.”
Stunned silence dominated the radio channel.
“He can’t have been there long,” Anabelle whispered, as if the child might overhear her through glass and steel from a good hundred feet away. “Where on earth are his parents?”
“In the car.” Finn pulled onto the side of the road several yards from the blue sedan. “Look closer.”
I squinted, and chills popped up all over my skin when I saw two forms slumped over in the front seat. What I’d mistaken for mud sprayed across the outside of the windshield turned out to be blood splattered across the inside.
It was too dark to be anything else.
“Oh no . . .” If the kid’s parents were in that car, they were either dead or dying.
“Stay here.” Finn shifted the truck into park and opened his door, then pulled his rifle from behind the bench seat on his way out of the vehicle. He tried to close the door, but I stopped its swing with my foot.
“Stay here.” I passed his instruction on to Mellie and Anabelle as I climbed down from the truck after Finn.
Seconds later Anabelle’s door squealed open at my back; she’d ignored my instruction as readily as I’d ignored Finn’s.
“Don’t aim that thing,” I whispered when I caught up with him. “He’s probably terrified already, and if there were still anything dangerous nearby, he would be dead.”
We stared at the car for one long moment, but the splatters were too thick to reveal anything except vague shapes behind the blood.
“This isn’t right, Nina,” Finn murmured, and I knew he wasn’t just talking about the gory windshield. Excursions beyond city walls were rare and discouraged, but they weren’t actually prohibited by the Church as long as the proper permits were secured in advance. But . . . “If his parents are dead in that car, how’d they die? Demons in their prime don’t pull people apart. That’d be wasting potential hosts. And degenerates wouldn’t have left the boy alive.”
I shrugged. “Maybe he hid.”
Finn lowered the rifle but didn’t engage the safety. “And maybe whatever killed his parents is still around.”
His words still hung in the air when Anabelle jogged past us, her blond curls flying, her jeans hanging low on her newly narrow hips. “Are you okay?” she called to the child, and I grabbed for her arm but missed.
Finn followed her to the car, the rifle aimed at the ground, and he peeked through the windows while Ana knelt in front of the boy without checking under or behind the vehicle.
I groaned on the inside. Why were the members of our group who were the least able to defend themselves always the most likely to put themselves in danger?
The boy nodded slowly.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” she asked, and I realized there would be no teaching her caution where children were concerned. Ana had spent five years as a grade-school teacher, and she’d found it harder than any of the rest of us to let go of what she’d learned during her Church ordination—not the bullshit creeds and oppressive rules, but the ways of life as we’d known it. Modesty. Service. Sacrifice.
“Tobias.” The boy’s voice was soft and hoarse, as if he’d been crying. His gaze slid from Anabelle to me, and I decided the glazed look in his eyes was from shock.
He reminded me of the kindergartners I’d spent my service hour with every day of my senior year, until the Church had declared me a cancerous wart on mankind’s collective hind end. Tobias could have been any kid in my class, terrified and traumatically orphaned.
We couldn’t leave him alone in the badlands. Yet ours was no life for a kid.
The irony in that thought hit home when my sister waddled past me, one hand on her huge belly. “Melanie,” I called, but she waved off my warning. When I glanced at Finn, he nodded to give me the all clear, the rifle still aimed at the ground. He’d inspected the car from the outside and squatted to peer beneath it, and had found no immediate danger.
Still, Mellie was too pregnant to fight or to flee from sudden danger, so I followed her, ready to pull her out of the path of evil should a demon burst from the bloody car.
“Are you okay, Tobias?” my sister asked, kneeling in front of the child with Anabelle’s help.
For a moment he only stared at her, studying her pale skin and even paler hair. Finally he nodded, his gaze fixated on her stomach, while I tried to calculate the mileage his family must have traveled in that doomed blue car. “You got a baby in there?”
Melanie laughed, and I marveled at the fact that she could find joy where the rest of us saw only tragedy and hardship. “Yes. And I like your name, Tobias.” She laid one hand on her stomach. “Maybe I’ll borrow it if this little one’s a boy.”
Assuming it lived.
Melanie was a tireless optimist, not blind to the dangers of the world,