All The Dark Places

21. Everything Is Different Now

      Life had not been this way before, in Oregon, where John Creedie had been there watching over her and, if she was honest with herself, doing most of the work. But John Creedie wasn't there this time and no one was holding her hand. It was a messy business, but she held her stomach in and tried not to wretch. It was skin and bone and guts and meat, butchered harshly but well. Ethan Noble did indeed have a skill at this, having hunted with his father and grandfather as a young man. He told her stories of hunting trips to America, Alaska to be exact, where he and his father hunted bear and elk and Ethan was taught to butcher the animals and preserve as much of the meat as possible; a valuable skill to have now.

"I can do this myself if you want," Ethan offered, taking pity on her as she grew feverish and clammy with nausea.

"No, I want to learn. I'm a quick study, and I need to learn how to do this. After all, you aren't staying around, so someone has to be able to do this."

"Hmm," he grunted, wiping sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. "I wanted to talk to you about that. It seems to me that you could use a good hunter around here. I noticed your food supply is low, and I doubt folks around here help out much with the procuring of food and supplies. I think you'll find me useful. I can offer my services as a hunter and gatherer - I know a bit about foraging too."

Rosalind considered this a while and then went back to slicing flesh and feeling ill.

"How do I know you are as capable as you claim to be?"

"Go ahead then, test me. I guarantee you'll get your sixty pounds of meat from this kill. More than that, I can guarantee I can bag another one. I have a rifle in my car, and it's not far from here. Maybe twenty miles. I didn't bring it with me. If you carry around a gun, no one will take you in. When that bang happened," he hesitated.

"We call it The Crush," she said.

"Fitting name. When The Crush happened, I packed up what I could and headed out toward my aunt Maggie's place in Bothelby. I stayed with her a while, helped her out, but she was elderly, and the stress of all this got to her heart. She passed away two weeks ago. Since then I've been making my way North trying to get to my cousin's farm. My car stopped about fifteen twenty miles from here. I worked on a farm nearby a while, but I overstayed my welcome. My cousin's farm is not far, but he has little space, assuming his kids are well and fine. It's a small house. I'd be sleeping in a barn, which I am not looking forward to. If you're looking for hunters, farmhands and someone to butcher for you, I could be here most of the week and go to his farm a few days a month and help out there. I think that arrangement would benefit both of us."

She took a gulp of water from her bottle and sat down, looking up at him, her hair escaping her pony-tail, long curls of it falling around her face and into her eyes.

"You can stay until we have a hunting test for you. How about this: you bag us 60 more pounds of meat, butcher it, cure it and help out around here for a couple of weeks. If you're as good as you claim, I'll find you accommodations at the castle. If not, you move along to your cousin's farm. Sound reasonable?"

"It does."

"And how about tomorrow we go and get that rifle of yours?"

"It would be better if we went with a group of maybe three or four. There are some dangerous people on the road, even out this far."

"What have you seen?" she asked, taking up the knife again.

"I was attacked by a group of kids. Teenagers mostly. They were out roaming the roads. I guess they fancy themselves bandits of some sort. Leather jackets, punk band patches sewn on, mohawks, the whole works. Any other time I might have had a laugh about that. None of it seemed genuine. But they were tough enough, and there were a dozen of them, maybe more. They are attacking anyone who has anything of value. They took what food I had. I've been hearing from the villages around here that they come in like a blitz and grab whatever they can. The more genteel places, they have no way to defend themselves."