Scarlett Hopper's Arc

Chapter 16 of 33

By full light Scarlett was on her feet again. Her legs shook but held. She sat John down at the kitchen table and pushed the camera across the wood to him. It was a small camouflaged box with a solar panel on top and a lens like a dark eye. She had traded three jars of tubers for it a season back and never had a reason to use it. Now she did. "Ridge side," she said. "High in the pine fork where the watchers stood. Angle it down. I want their faces when they come back." John turned the camera in his hands. "I can do that." "Duke and I are going out. Seeds if I can find them. Fertilizer. Anything that shoots." She met his eyes. "If I'm not back by ash wind, close the cellar and stay inside." He nodded once. He did not ask her to stay. She took the rolling cooler and her mask and the dog. They cut through the broken blocks past the pier road, into a stretch of houses she had not touched. Duke pushed an image at her — a garage door half off its track, a shape of metal inside. She followed him in. Under a collapsed shelf she found a lockbox split by rust. Two revolvers. A tin of bullets. She wrapped them in a shirt and set them in the cooler. The next house gave her seed packets in a kitchen drawer, dry but sealed. Beans. Squash. A sack of pelleted fertilizer under the sink, half full. She was loading it when Duke went stiff and shoved a picture into her head — a woman crouched behind a fence, gold eyes, bright dress, hands flat to the ground. Scarlett came around the fence slow, revolver low at her side. The woman did not run. She stayed crouched, palms pressed to the dirt like she was listening through it. Gold snake charms caught in her black hair. She looked up and her eyes were the color of old coins. "They're two streets behind me," the woman said. Short. Flat. "I've been walking three days. The spirits said east. You're east." Scarlett lowered the gun. Duke sat down at the woman's knee, which he did for no one. That decided it. "Scarlett." "Maranda." "Can you work?" "I can protect a place. I can tend rows. I don't lie about what I can do." "Then come." They pulled the cooler back together through the wind's first grit. At the homestead John was climbing down from the pine fork, camera fixed in the crook. He stopped when he saw Maranda. Scarlett said, "She stays." He looked at the dog beside her and went back to work. That night Maranda salted the doorframes and slept on the floor by the stove. The camera blinked green on the ridge. Scarlett kept a revolver under her pillow. For the first time since the collapse, three people watched the garden, and the watchers on the ridge would be seen before they were heard.