[Longlisted!] -Ghosts of Galena- [#Wattys2018]

The Promise

"Jesse, look," Ree says, and points toward the semi-distant fence. "The horses."

And she's right, because despite the thin barrier of chain-link dividing all of us from them, the horses stand in near-silence, huffing occasionally and tugging at the reins that tie them. The Dead don't acknowledge them, don't so much as reach an arm or a hand or even a finger through the links to touch living flesh. It's another part of the puzzle, because I've seen the undead tear deer to shreds, swallow mice whole, and chase rabbits... to no avail. The animal kingdom isn't immune to their hunger, except--

These are.

"Come on," I tell Ree, and start pulling her toward the fence. If we can get a horse, we can outrun them, we can literally ride off into the sunset or the next town or anywhere but here.

"What are you doing?" She hisses, tugging against me, pulling me toward the opening of our pen. "We can't get through there."

"Yes, we can," I say, distractedly, and let loose of her hand. Ree scuffs her feet for a moment, staring toward apparent freedom, but she stays put, even going so far as to squat down next to me as I kneel by the fence.

"Jesse, how...?"

"It's just chain-link," I tell her, and yank the knife from its makeshift holster. "My uncle showed me this thing..."

When I jam the knife blade into the pinched loop at the base of the fence and lever the metal wire open, she makes a surprised sound at my back. Somewhere in the distance there's a shrill whistle, then silence, but ducked down as we are, I'm not even sure if Lyran and his crew can see us anymore through the milling mass. I pause, waiting, and a few seconds later there's another whistle, not closer, but further away. Satisfied that they're not in our immediate vicinity, I pull the wire free of its moorings and start untwisting it, bending it and looping it through the places where it intersects with the other wires, pulling out one zig-zag-shaped length of metal in order to create a near-perfect slit in the fencing.

There's a huff of frustration from Ree. "This would have come in really handy earlier."

"You're not wrong," I tell her, and slip through the hole I created, pulling the bottom corner back like a curtain so that she can duck through. "But I'm not actually a complete encyclopedia of survival knowledge, and even if I was, I've never actually had to survive anything before."

Panic and fear add a whole other flavor of difficulty to the situation, except now, well, now I'm feeling almost zen.

"I'm just saying—" She grunts, crawling through the space I made.

With a slight eye roll, I quip, "Next time I'll make sure to remember faster."

The minute Ree is through the fence, I take the strip of wire I pulled loose and start threading it back through, because the last thing I want to do is make anything easier for our captors. At the bottom, I make sure to loop it around itself, complicating it just slightly. Granted, they could probably pull a different wire loose, but knowing what I know about people, they're going to see my knot and go straight for it.

"How?" When I turn around, Ree is there, her bloody, dirty, grime-covered hands stroking along the withers of a dappled brown-and-white pinto. Her dark eyes turn toward me, full of questions that I don't have the answers to. She swallows hard, her hands curled around the tan mane of the horse, tears gathering in her eyes again. "How are we not dead right now?"

"I dunno, Ree," I tell her, then add, "but if we don't get out of here quick, we might well be."

Grabbing hold of the reins, I push aside the questions and pull the leather straps free from the fence. The horse shifts a little, huffing at our strangeness, our smell, and tries to back away, but it-- and we-- are standing on a narrow ledge, no more than a few feet across, and there's nothing below us but water.