former ordained Church teacher who’d had to follow us into the badlands because knowing the truth about her superiors was as good as having a noose around her neck. She’d lost everything and everyone she’d ever had, just like the rest of us. But like Mellie, she was largely defenseless against the dangers of the badlands, and she was eager to earn her place in the group any way she could.
“First things first.” Finn pulled the collapsible stairs from a hidden shelf beneath the cargo hold, then stepped up into the truck. “Food. We’ll decide everything else once our brains are fueled.”
While Maddock, Devi, and I stood watch, Reese and Finn began pulling boxes from the truck and stacking them on the ground. Mellie and Anabelle made notes on the inventory sheet until they came to a crate of canned goods, and the chore was suspended in favor of lunch in the library’s vestibule, from which we could watch over our haul through tempered glass walls that appeared to have shattered, yet remained in place.
Finn and I sat down with a jar of peaches and a can of unidentifiable processed meat apiece. Next to us on the granite floor, Anabelle and Melanie shared cans of twisty pasta shapes in red sauce and a box of cheese-flavored crackers.
The remaining four members of Anathema paired off on the other side of the vestibule so that they could see the road leading into Ashland from the larger American wasteland.
Melanie tugged her bag closer and pulled out one of the books she’d scavenged from the library, then flipped through the yellowed pages while she chewed.
“How are your feet?” I asked around a bite of peach.
“Still kind of swollen, but they don’t hurt,” she answered, without looking up from the book. “My hips ache, though.”
“What about that mark on your back?” At first we’d thought it was a bruise—a small spot at the base of her backbone, slightly darker than the rest of her pale skin. But then it had started to stretch along her spine like the inverse of a skunk’s stripe.
Melanie shrugged, and sun-bleached blond hair fell over her shoulder. “I can’t feel it, and all the pregnancy books say some skin discoloration is normal. It’ll fade after the baby’s born.” When she found her place in the book, her pale brows furrowed and she settled in for the read.
“What’s she learning now?” Finn asked, eyeing Mellie with a brotherly affection that made me smile.
I tilted my sister’s book up so I could read the title. “Um . . . Hunting and Gathering for the Modern Paleo.” Another in her small collection of survivalist literature, rescued from multiple crumbling libraries across the small stretch of badlands we’d explored.
Mellie shrugged and held the book up so we could get a better look. “Plants are starting to grow, and we need to know which ones are edible.” She and Anabelle had already taught us to fish, to set basic traps for small game, to start a fire without matches, and to cook our meat evenly on a homemade spit. “Soon we’ll be able to spot wild-growing roots, tubers, and nuts to supplement all this aluminum-flavored cuisine.” She tapped the side of her pasta can and smiled. Then her gaze dropped to the page.
And with that, I lost Mellie to her book. Again.
* * *
In the end, we decided to leave the rusted, shot-up car in favor of the cargo truck.
It took nearly two hours to unload the boxes and set aside the ones we couldn’t use—mostly household cleaners and clothing that fit no one—then divide the food and usable supplies between the truck and the back of the SUV in case we got separated.
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
