OTHERBORN: IN THE WASTELANDS ALONE

CHAPTER 8

JAYDEN

Able teaches us the ways of his camp. Everyone here seems loyal. The kids care for each other, wash each other at the lake, feed each other, launder each other's clothes.

Custer's men have been spotted down in the ravine. I'm silent and tense. The men move away.

Maybe I should warn them somehow to keep their distance. I don't want our worlds colliding just yet. In fact, maybe I'd prefer they never did.

Night comes quickly.

We sit on logs around a bonfire and trade stories. I tell one about a man with no left arm who saved me from a burning building.

That man is the one who later took me to join Custer's gang, but I don't say that part out loud. Instead I just tell my new group about what matters most: how we were living from one day to the next.

The large pit bull lies on his belly near me as I sit next to a kid with a large build who has introduced himself as Bucket. I am not sure how the boy got a name like that but I don't question their things.

Fact Girl sits intently beside him, her chin on her knees, and shouts "Fact!" after everything Able says. She reminds me of a little elf and walks around without shoes, the balls of her feet gray and probably rock-tough, like the rounded tips of chair legs. She might have some type of disorder because her big toes jut up a bit, reminiscent of the feathered velociraptors I've heard now inhabit the farthest corner of the continent alongside giant, hairy men as tall as giraffes.

A lanky kid next to Bucket gnaws at an old, ragged piece of jerky. I gag, but then want some too.

The pit bull whines and pouts up at the lanky kid.

"Give him a piece, Nail," says Bucket.

I scoff at the names these boys have.

What's their deal?

Nail ignores Bucket.

The pit bull lays a paw on Nail's leg.

Nail kicks the paw away.

I tense, trying to mind my own business, trying to focus on the whipping tongues of the bonfire.

"Fuck off," mutters Nail to the dog.

Maddie, seated across from us, glances at me through the flames.

Nail goes back to chomping at his jerky.

Again the dog's paw touches his leg.

This time, Nail hauls back his foot and kicks the dog hard in the side, and the animal flops over, whimpering.

I stand.

Everyone looks at me.

Nail stops chewing.

I walk casually up to him, rear back, and punch him square in the nose, and he spits out his jerky goop while tumbling off the log, and I kneel over him, and I hit him again, then again, until he's the one whimpering now, and Maddie tells me to stop but I keep punching, and he screams for help, and Able grabs me by the hair and throws me to the ground.

Quiet overtakes us.

Nail coughs up blood as he limps to his feet, nose swollen, and runs off into the darkness.

The pit bull, head low, creeps up to me and begins snuffling my ear.

"His name's Ram," says Bucket.

I scratch the dog behind his flicking ears.

His big, wrinkly face twists and seems to smile as he pants. I guess he's got Mastiff in him somewhere.

"Good boy, Ram," I whisper. "Good boy."

* * *

We scope out the terrain the following morning, and we have never been this far out in the expanses of ancient country.

Maddie and Fin lead the way, hiking together like old pioneers despite being far too young.

I marvel at how different they both look, their faces striped with Able's paint. I also have been colored by it: a green zigzag across my face that gives me pause every time I catch my reflection in a pond, a razorblade, or a gleaming hunk of steel.

Eventually we reach a summit we decide should be called Mount Grumpy because of how murky, foggy even, it is despite the heat. I wonder if the vapor is smog as I listen to huge vehicles roar below, in the distance, where Custer's men toil, and indeed I see that the air along their faraway horizon appears to be the source of the haze.

Here we're unseen. We explore the mountain.

We find several nooks and crevices that would come in handy as strategy points during combat.

Fin says he saw a ghost in one of the hollows.

"No such thing," I tell him.

"How do you know?" he asks. "Tabitha's uncle's a ghost."

The drizzle starts just as Maddie gestures to explain to him how the valley, seen as a map from this height, runs in the shape of a lotus.

Ram skitters up to us, his tail wagging. I haven't seen Nail.

Bucket reaches us soon after, panting, cheeks jiggling, as he climbs boulders toward crest where we are. The pudgy boy falls to his butt and gags, seeming moments from vomiting his breakfast down into the ravine, and his straining face goes redder than a tomato.

"What do you want now?" Maddie is in the midst of tickling her brother to tears. I cringe that they still have fun.

Bucket clears his throat the way the elder generals of Custer's brigade do before a lecture about staying near the barracks and convoy.

"You had better come back to camp," says the large boy.

Maddie struggles futilely to answer as Fin exacts his tickly revenge on her armpits and tummy.

"You had better." Bucket is an unusually grave kid; he'd be a teacher's pet in the old world, for certain.

Maddie wriggles free of her brother and recovers from the residual giggles she must now fake through being disturbed.

"Why are you on us all the time?" she demands.

"I am not on you all the time." Bucket stomps his foot. "Only this day, since something bad's gonna happen! Ram and I snuck into that cluster of bushes down near the adult camp where we go sometimes to, ahem, drop eaves, and I heard the men talking about doing something about us kids! The bastards are probably going to kill us all!"

"Nuh-uh," says Fin.

"Yuh-huh," says Bucket.

All forms of verbal expression are rendered meaningless as the children nuh-uh and yuh-huh one another, while I look at Maddie.

She is immune to the arguments of children.

She's not that surprised. Her calm, patient gaze, arrowed beneath by her furrowed brows, rests on the adults toiling below in their ugly gray smog, and I can't help but suspect that she's already preparing a defense.