Chapter 1: Like a Rolling Stone, Pt. 2

In the morning Lily buried the bloody rags and tried not to think about wolves.

74 still wasn’t dead. Worse, he was on his feet, but he was pale as milk and kept an arm pressed to his stomach like he was trying to hold his guts in.

“There’s supposed to be a town near here,” she said, cramming the tarp into her now overstuffed pack and swinging it onto her shoulders.

“Don’t go there.” Three words at once nearly felled him like a rotten tree; he swayed, putting out a hand to steady himself.

Lily kicked at the snow. “How come? Is that where you got shot?”

A long pause. Eons. She felt herself aging. Felt the cold settle into her bones.

“No,” he said.

“Ok then,” Lily sighed. “Guess I’ll be fine.”

The plan was to play it like she wasn’t scared and just walk off. The thought of putting her back to him was unbearable. She did it, though, and immediately heard the crunch of his footsteps.

She stopped. Turned. “What are you doing?”

He blinked at her.

“Go.” Lily pointed east. “That way. Back where you came from.”

He didn’t move. It didn’t seem like he was dying anymore, and she felt a stab of fresh anxiety. What if he lived? What if he noticed she was pointing with his glove?

“I don’t want company. Especially not—” She almost said it, but saw something change in his face. Subtle, like a cloud passing in front of the sun. “Not you. Leave me alone. I’m not helping you anymore. Leave me be.”

Why was she still talking? It was like months of words had built up inside her, sprouting like potatoes in some dark cellar.

This time he didn’t follow when she started walking. After one thousand steps Lily chanced a look back, and saw nothing but her own tracks weaving off into the trees. Satisfied, she moved out.

These woods had been a town. Rows of crooked posts followed the indentations of streets. Foundations and chimneys crumbled amidst the ossified trees, and sometimes old cabling tangled in the naked branches. Echoes. Gone, now, like everything else.

Snow and decades of rotting plant matter made for slow going, and she found a creek by accident when her boot plunged through the crust of ice, soaking her from the knee down.

Her mother had led her once to a well, heaving up the rusted metal cover and holding her by the back of her trousers as she peered into the depths. A different Lily had stared up at her from the bottom of the shaft, distorted and alien.

“This is a killer,” Johanna warned. “Standing water, rain from the west, old wells. Don’t drink it, don’t play in it, don’t even think about it. It’ll give you a cancer. Hear me?”

Lily shuddered. Her leg throbbed from cold and exertion, but she bit down on the pain and pushed forward until she spotted blue smoke curling in ribbons across the sky.

Most of the day was gone. A fire was tempting. But she had a schedule to keep and 74 was an uncomfortable variable; best to get what she needed and push on.

It was barely a town. Two rows of unhappy buildings faced each other like duelists across a muddy dirt track. The air smelled of decay and burnt bone and the sickly trees were thick with crows.

Lily kept her head down and walked fast. She’d forgotten about people. The way they clumped up and stared, coughing, reaching for things.

Inside the trading post a wood stove cut the cold like a dull blade. The shopkeeper, a suspiciously fat middle-aged man with too many fingers, nodded a greeting as she pushed aside the tattered curtain. He didn’t seem surprised to see a stranger.

A Coalition flag hung down the wall behind the counter, faded and inexpertly mended. A round burn blotted out the eagle’s eye.

“Trade,” Lily said. “Clean water.”

She dipped into an inner pocket and produced a handful of clinking brass from the magazine, which she lined up in formation. Three rows of three.

The man whistled through his teeth as their grey-market dealings slid into black.

Lily kept her fingers in a protective cage over the pistol rounds. “Those are field rations under the counter, right? I want them all, and two bottles of drinking water.”

“Hold on, now. How do I know those are real? Where’d you get em?”

Lily didn’t waver. “I want two big bottles of drinking water, and—”

A shrill scream sounded from the street, punctuated by baying dogs. They both turned to look out the glassless window, and a stone dropped into the pit of Lily’s stomach.

The Regulars marched in two orderly rows; over a dozen men in grey coats with longshot rifles and lean black dogs. They split into pairs and began banging on doors.

“Shit,” the shopkeeper muttered, straightening the flag. Smacking dust off it. Anxiously rubbing the burn with his thumb.

Lily pulled her watch cap down over her ears. Her leg twinged. “Are we gonna trade?”

“No,” the shopkeeper hissed. “Put those away before—”

Heavy feet trod the weathered planks outside and Lily shoved the rounds back into her pocket, heart thudding.

Below the curtain she saw the travel-stained hem of a long black wool coat, and black boots gone grey with sticking mud. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth as the boots paused, then pivoted.

She kept her head down as it stepped inside: a vague dark shape, a nightmare come to life. She’d half expected it to smell like burning, but of course it didn’t.

“How can I be of service, sir?”

The shopkeeper’s greasy tone made Lily want to vomit. Her hands curled into fists, bullets digging into her skin.

The Operative tracked mud across the floor. Lily glimpsed fair hair and pale skin and the trademark black uniform as he flashed the screen of a scanner. “I seek a fugitive.”

The man dribbled words of apology and denial, and the Operative spun on his heel to brandish the little machine at Lily. “Have you seen this man.”

She glanced at the battered palm-sized screen. 74’s vacant eyes stared back at her.

“Have you seen this man,” the Operative repeated, in the same dead, level tone.
Collaborator, whispered a little voice at the back of her mind.

Lily shook her head.

The Operative waited. His eyes were corpse-blue, pale and empty in his lean face. Lily was hyperaware of the long knife sheathed at his right side, the pistol holstered on the left. The silver insignia on his collar said 86.

She shook her head again.

A Regular burst through the doorway, and the Operative’s sleek blond head snapped around. “Report.”

“We found the healer, sir.” The man was younger than Lily, face flushed like a winter apple beneath his gray cap. Human, normal. His terrified, excited eyes flickered from her to the Operative.

“Show me.”

The man in black strode away, the Regular scrambling after him like a puppy.

Lily slumped against the counter. The shopkeeper wiped sweat from his forehead, all traces of his sickly-sweet demeanor gone. His face had turned grayer than the flag.

“You lied to him,” he whispered.

“No, I—”

“You did. He’s going to come back here.” He patted down the counter nearsightedly. “You have to go.”

“Just hold on, I need to—”

The shopkeeper slammed his palms down. “Out!”

Lily spat on the floor as she left. But he was right, and next time the Operative would do wors than ask questions.

Outside the Regulars herded everyone into the street, shouting orders and gripping their rifles. One of them knocked her shoulder as he brushed past her into the trading post, bayonet fixed to his rifle. Lily took one step back, then another.

A man broke from the crowd and sprinted for an alleyway, and the flat clap of a gunshot sent ragged crows wheeling up into the coal-grey sky.

Lily ducked between two lopsided shacks in the confusion, cinching the straps of her pack tight against her narrow shoulders. Ten yards to the tree line. Fifteen to the deep woods. She could make it —

Her leg did not hold, and she went to one knee behind a rain barrel, breathing hard through her nose.

The Operative cut through the turmoil in the street like a knife. Two Regulars tailed him with an old man suspended between them, feet dragging. They threw him to his knees.

“Where is he.” Operatives didn’t ask questions, didn’t make requests.

“Dead,” the old man rasped. Blood trickled down the lines and seams of his face, reddening his snow-white beard.

“When.”

“Two days ago.” The Regulars gripped the man’s arms tighter, like he was going somewhere.

The Operative drew his pistol. Maybe thirty-five people watched as he pressed the barrel against the old man’s forehead. Thirty-five was enough to fight back, but no one ever did. “Which way did he go.”

“He died,” the healer began, but the gunshot cut off the rest. His body slumped into the red mud.

Then the screaming started.

Fear propelled Lily into an awkward run that ended when her weak leg buckled, sending her tumbling into the grey slush and rotten leaves behind a stand of dead birch trees.

She rolled and tumbled down a mild slope, scrambling to her feet, staying low and limping into the trees as quick and quiet as she could.

Rifles clattered behind her.

Her trail through the woods was as obvious as a scar. Lily followed it back, cursing her idiocy, feeling eyes and hands on the back of her neck. The dogs. The dogs—

She staggered up a hill toward the ruins of a house, little more than a ninety-degree angle of wall that would block line of sight while she figured out her next move.

Only someone else was already there.

Operative 74 sat propped against the crumbling brick, his hand pressed flat over his stomach. His head snapped up when he heard her, and there was the pistol she’d been looking for, pointed at her face.

Snow sifted down from the trees as they regarded each other, frozen.

“What.” 74’s voice rasped and broke; he cleared his throat before continuing. “What did you tell him.”

Maybe it had been charity, him telling her not to come this way, but it was self-preservation that had made him follow her. That was a language Lily spoke fluently.

She drew out the handful of munitions and let them fall, one at a time, into the snow at her feet. “First tell me what you did.”

There might still be a round in the chamber. He could be bluffing. Either way his finger stayed on the trigger.

“I’m not going back,” he said, and beneath the pallid mask of his face something dangerous stirred.

The hair on the back of Lily’s neck lifted. “Neither am I.”

74’s arm and the pistol dropped like they weighed a thousand pounds, and he slumped back. “I deserted.”

“No shit.” Lily pulled off her hat, scraping her fingers through her hair until it puffed out from her head like a storm cloud. “I didn’t tell him anything.”

74 was pale as milk. “He’ll follow you here.”

“I know! Shut up and let me think.”

It was about insurance. If that Operative found her again he’d make her beg for the kind of mercy he’d shown that old man. But if 74 was with her she could hand him over and maybe buy her own safety. Buy just a little more time.

Now that little voice was screaming collaborator. Lily stomped on it.

“If we get back to that creek we might lose the dogs. We have to go fast.” She extended her hand, and 74 looked at it like it was a snake. “I’m trying to help you, come on.”

74 frowned. “Why.”

“I don’t know,” Lily lied. It was easy.

The firing had stopped, and the stink of buildings and trees in flame was overlaid by a different smell. A meat smell. Everything, everything was burning.

She breathed through her mouth, and focused on her wet boots and numb fingers. She was not on Omaha Base. She was in a dead forest, holding out her hand to a dead man.

He reached up and took it.