Hunter slept, his chest rising with even breaths. At least he wasn’t snoring. All traces of his smirk dissipated after the wreck, obliterated by the pain.
Catherine lay peacefully beside him. She exhaled and blonde strands of hair lying across her face billowed like a curtain in front of an open window.
Scout completed wrapping Hunter’s arm in the splint with the clean shirt he’d torn into strips. He felt pretty good about setting the break, thinking he’d got it right, hopefully. Accidents and broken bones happened in the Big Bad, and Scout tried to counter them by always being prepared. In Hunter’s case, he was lucky Scout was along. Otherwise, the fool would probably be dead from a lethal combination of shock, exposure and stupidity.
Now because of his brainless riding, Hunter had probably gone and messed up a good thing. Jimmy would be upset and worried, and he and Vanessa would blow the whole incident out of proportion forcing Hunter and Scout into the buddy system again. That’s what happened when parents died. The oldest sibling took charge.
Unlike Hunter, Scout never complained. If it weren’t for Vanessa being strong for the both of them in those early years, he would be just another casualty. She was a trouper. They endured through so many days of no food and shelter when she made the difficult decisions that kept them both alive. Scout learned quickly to stick close to his big sister.
But riding with Hunter again wasn’t something Scout wanted. They shared an amount of job-related camaraderie and even lived in the same house, but that didn’t mean they wanted to ride together. Sometimes, a little space was nice.
Scout built up the fire to keep Hunter warm. Catherine stirred as light from the flames flickered across her face. She was a big mystery. Hunter had found himself a little girl surviving alone. At least that’s the story she was trying to sell, but Scout wasn’t buying. More than likely, she carried another story giving her nightmares, a story she refused to bring out into the light.
He poked at the fire and Catherine stirred again, folding her arms together against the cool night air. Scout dusted off his hands on his pants and unhooked the sleeping bag from his motorbike. He zipped it open like a blanket and covered Catherine, who snuggled under with a contented smile.
Then Hunter started snoring like a chainsaw ripping through a forest. Scout groaned, cringing with each thunderous inhalation, and within moments, tension throbbed between his shoulder blades. He snatched up the water bottles and scampered out of earshot.
His eyes adjusted away from the fire, picking a path down to the stream he’d located earlier for fresh water. The shimmering stars reflected off the creek, causing a phosphorescent band that laced over the plains. Scout dipped the bottles into the flow and waited for the gurgling to cease. He retrieved the iodine from his pocket and added a couple drops into each bottle. Then he screwed the lids tightly and leaned back on his hands for a little stargazing.
Scout couldn’t remember what the starry sky looked like before the plague. In the middle of the city, he thought there were only a couple hundred stars total because all you saw were the brightest ones. The first time he looked into the night sky after the power winked out, he saw billions of stars sparkling from every direction in the thick soup of space.
Tonight, he thought about how lucky he was with a billion possibilities shining back at him, even if he wasn’t sure that God was up there watching his back.
“There you are,” Catherine said behind him.
Scout flopped on the grassy bank as if he’d just been hooked out of the stream. He sat back up after controlling the initial surprise, but he still had difficulty catching his breath.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. What’re you doing?”
Scout pulled in a deep breath through his nose before speaking. “Just sitting here, looking at the stars. You can join me if you want.”
She sat close beside him. It was nice. Her presence radiated a warm energy that refreshed his sleepy mind.
He smiled at her. “Was it tough being on your own?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you, being all alone for as long as you were. I have a hard time just being out by myself for a week. Then I get back to town around people again and it’s hard adjusting to them and all the noise.”
“I wasn’t alone, silly. My tree was with me the whole time, and there was a family of robins upstairs, and a squirrel would come by to chat. The wind brought me news from around the world and when the raindrops fell, I listened to them patter about all the neat places they had visited.” She smiled into the night sky. “The stars are really pretty, aren’t they?”
“Uh, yeah.” Scout worried that she’d bonked her head when Hunter flipped the bike. He locked onto an eerie feeling though; maybe she wasn’t making her story up. And then he remembered she was a little kid. Of course she was making it up.
Another question crossed his mind. “So was Hunter the first person you ever met?” Scout gave himself a mental pat on the back. She couldn’t avoid that one with a vague answer.
The corners of her mouth dropped and she brought her knees to her chest and wrapped them up in her arms. “No. I’ve known lots of people, but that was long ago in a different time and place. Those people have all passed on. I was a much different person then with a very different life.”
Scout crinkled his brow. “Catherine, you don’t sound like a six-year-old girl.”
“Well who said I was six? It’s not appropriate to talk about a girl’s age, you know.”
The night breeze rolled through the prairie grass and broke upon their backs. Then the wind disappeared again, leaving behind the steady sound of the creek.
“I guess I’m confused,” Scout said. “It’s not every day we come across someone your, uh… size out in the middle of nowhere. Were you traveling with your friends when you got separated?”
“No, we were separated ages ago.” She stood and regarded the sky. “But I have new friends now.”
Scout nodded and rose up beside her. He decided to put the questions away; someone in town would get her to talk and crack open the answers. “That’s right, you have us,” he said simply. “Let’s get back to the fire. I should check on Hunter, and you need more sleep.”
She hugged him. “I love you, Scout.”
Her affection caught him off guard. He offered her an awkward pat on the back.
She released him without a struggle and cocked her head at an angle as though measuring him for a new winter coat.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“You really don’t believe anymore?”
Scout crossed his arms, feeling exposed. “I don’t know what to believe in.”
Catherine bent down and collected the water bottles. “I’ll just have to fix that, won’t I?”
“What are you talking about?”
Catherine smiled. “Let’s go check on Hunter.” She skipped ahead, leaving him standing there befuddled.
Along the way Scout gathered more sizable sticks under the branches of slumbering elm trees to feed the fire’s hunger back at camp. When he added them, the coals brightened and soon the flames popped and snapped over the new wood. Hunter hadn’t budged from the spot where he’d landed.
“He was making a funny noise earlier,” Catherine said. “That’s what woke me up.”
“Yeah, funny’s one way to put it.”
She knelt and placed her hand on Hunter’s head. Scout smiled at her concern. Maybe she was feeling for his temperature.
“I think I got his arm set right,” Scout said, consoling any fears she might possess. “Now it’s just going to take time for him to heal.”
Catherine laid her hands on the splint. “You did very well.”
Scout rushed forward in a surge of panic. “Be careful, you might mess up the set.”
“Don’t worry, silly. I’m just going to heal him so you believe again.”
She seemed careful about not moving or placing any pressure on Hunter’s arm and that decreased Scout’s anxiety. He shook his head. Catherine was laying hands like an evangelist performing miracle nonsense. He plunked his tired bottom by the fire and felt the crush of drowsiness the moment he was settled.
His head was just starting to loll when a yellow light pulsed underneath Catherine’s hands. Her forehead creased in concentration with sweat beading in the folds and instantly running down the sides of her face. The light crept up her arms like water soaking into a sponge.