Chapter 1: Like a Rolling Stone, Pt. 1

The bones of the old world propped up the fresher corpse of the new. All things decayed.

Fat grey snowflakes gathered soft as ash in Lily’s dense black curls. They powdered the dead pines and the rusted fragments of the guardrail, but they hadn’t covered the dead man yet.

She watched snow collect unmelting on his face a while, then went over the rail and down into the ditch. His skin and the snow were the same color. He lay in his blood.

A soft gasp left him as she dug through his rucksack. Lily paused with a hand on her knife, then went back to work.

It was all Coalition-issue gear. Medkit, solar lantern, emergency shelter, dehydrated food enough to get her over the border. She tried to feel something in response to this miracle, then gave up.

Lily wolfed down two bars of compressed protein, considering the corpse as she chewed. Beardless, hair cut down to the skin, and sure enough, the collar of his fine black coat was indented where a pair of insignia had been removed.

He inhaled sharply and released it as a long sigh. Lily chewed a long flap of skin off her lower lip, tasting copper. When he didn’t do it again she resumed her inventory.

In his coat she found a magazine of gleaming bullets. She shoved it into her pocket and dug around for the pistol it belonged to, but it was missing in action. And he ought to have one of those big knives. Had he lost that too?

Last of all she took his gloves, too big for her thin brown fingers and cold when she put them on. By the time she finished repacking the rucksack he had stopped breathing, and the world was a better place for it.

The straps of her plunder cut into her narrow shoulders as she moved out. All around her rotting pines jabbed accusingly at an empty sky, but she’d won a little more time.

Nothing else to be done.

Nothing.

There was an animal inside her. Inside most people, she figured, but hers was mean. It bit. Right now it was worrying at her, urging her to run, but there was something else there too; something small, hiding. Whispering to her.

She sighed, swore, and limped back along her tracks to slide down into the ditch again and shake him by the shoulders.

“Can you hear me?” His hand twitched in the snow, and Lily slapped him across the face. “Wake up!”

His eyelids rose halfway. After a moment he focused on her, his eyes blue and cold.

Losing that much blood meant the wound was mortal. For a person, anyway. Probably for things like him too. She would watch him die, hear his last words, and the soft, cowering thing in her chest would would stay silent as she walked off at last with all his things.

Lily unfolded the tarp. He fell still, air rushing out of him in a puff of condensation.

She raised her hand to smack him again, but lowered it as his eyes rolled open. “You gotta help me. Count of three.”

He did not help. It took four counts of three. Finally she rolled him onto the tarp, leaving behind most of his blood.

Dusk was turning the woods deep dark. Out of sight of the road, Lily rolled her burden unceremoniously off the tarp and rigged a lean-to. Her leg throbbed and her feet were wet. She expanded the lantern, flooding the shelter with soft, immediate light, and collapsed.

Then she remembered the missing gun, and decided to see what sort of implement had killed him. When she drew her knife the man tensed, watching her without expression.

“I’m not gonna kill you,” she sneered, slicing his thin wool shirt up the front. Bandages crisscrossed his stomach, soaked through with blood. Under them a gunshot wound wept blood and the skin was angry and hot.

She worried her lip again. Then she looked at his stuff, at the medkit. Back at the wound. Begrudgingly, she selected a single thin packet of gauze and peeled it open. 

Her patient didn’t flinch when she cleaned the area with snow. He had plenty of scars already. “You got a bag of Coalition stuff.”

The door was open. He could tell her he’d stolen it and been shot for his troubles, and she could pretend to believe him.

No response.

Lily applied the gauze. She resisted the urge to press down. “Are you Coalition?”

He shook his head deliberately, and just in case, she fixed in her mind the way he looked when he lied.

She closed the medkit with a snap and rubbed his blood off her skin with more snow. “What’s your name? Mine’s Lily.”

“74.” His voice was low and hoarse, without inflection.

“That’s not a name.”

74 didn’t disagree. His eyes rolled shut and he slipped away, his breathing shallow but even.

Lily ate until she was full and waited for him to die, but he didn't. This farce had continued too long already. She ought to take her knife and just…

What. Just what.

She could not answer, or act, or sleep.