Marta Mitchell's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

By the second day south, Marta's shadow was the only thing walking with her. The map said three days to the circled dot. Her canteens were already lighter than she liked. She kept the bone-marked stone at her back and the sun on her right cheek, the way the old man had taught her to hold a line in open country. She walked until the heat bent the air, then sat in the thin shade of a thorn bush to chew a strip of dried meat. That was when she heard the first low laugh behind her. She turned slow. Three shapes moved at the edge of the heat shimmer. They were lean, dog-shaped, with quills bristling along their backs and ragged wings folded tight to their ribs. One lifted its muzzle and tasted her scent. Another circled wide to her left. She had heard the old man call them by a name once, when he warned her off a dry wash. He had said if you see one, there are five. She counted four now. The fifth would be somewhere she could not see. She stood. She made herself tall and walked, not ran, toward a low rise ahead. At the top she saw what they were guarding. A truck cab squatted in the flat below, canvas tarps lashed over it with driftwood poles. Bones lay around it in a rough ring. A stone well stood off to one side, its roof half fallen, the rope rotted to gray fluff. The ground near the well was dark with old stains. She had walked straight into their den. She dropped behind a rock and emptied her pack on the sand. Knife. Canteen. Map. The old man's watch. And at the bottom, wrapped in oilcloth, the curved bone horn he kept on the high shelf. She had grabbed it without thinking, the morning she left. She did not know if it would make a sound. She fit the narrow end to her mouth, filled her lungs, and blew. The horn cut a flat, ugly note across the flat. The nearest scavenger flinched and skidded sideways. She blew again, longer, and the note climbed. The pack broke. Two ran back toward the truck. One snapped at the air and bolted west. She kept the horn pressed to her mouth until her chest burned and the shapes were gone behind the rise. She lowered the horn. Her hands shook. The sound had carried far, farther than she meant. Anything within a mile of the den now knew exactly where she stood, and the den itself was between her and the line south. She wrapped the horn, shouldered her pack, and cut a wide arc east around the truck. The circled dot was still three days off. She would have to reach it without making another sound.