Page 68 of Bannerless (The Bannerless Saga 1)

She nodded.

“Thanks for talking to me about this, Miran.”

Sniffing, she scrubbed at her eyes and pulled her shawl more tightly around her. The shawl had a loose lacework pattern in a rust red yarn, pulled and worn. Enid wondered who had knitted it for her—it looked too old to be something Miran had knitted herself. There was history in that shawl.

She said, her voice cracking, “Hard not to feel like it’s all my fault somehow.”

Enid knew exactly what she was talking about. “Miran, one more thing. Can you find Dak and send him here?”

CHAPTER TWELVE • THE COAST ROAD

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The Next Worst Storm

Routine carried Dak and Enid as they trekked from the ruins. They found water, hunted for late-season fruit and edibles. Wasn’t much, but as Enid had said, they weren’t going to starve, not as long as they kept heading toward the Coast Road. Once they found the road, they’d get to a settlement in less than a day’s walk in either direction, or they’d meet other travelers who had food to spare. Imagine, always having food to spare. But the road was still days away.

They made camp, had sex, but it was by rote. Perfunctory, frustrated, and the physical release was palpable but fleeting. She dug fingers into his hips, kneading his skin, trying to hold on to an ephemeral emotion. Was this what it had been like right after the Fall, when Auntie Kath said they’d come up with the implants? Hungry, tired, but they still had sex because it was what they had. Because it meant not thinking so much.

After, they lay next to each other, and she was afraid to touch him. Afraid that he wouldn’t like her, that he would push her away, and she didn’t want to know how she’d respond to that.

Things weren’t going to go on as they were, and that was a hard thing to know because she couldn’t see what would happen next. At least she wouldn’t have to think about it until they got back to Haven. Or until she got back to Haven.

Finally, they left the hills and forests leading out of the ruins, and the world opened up to the plains that they knew. Far ahead, another few days’ travel, was the wide, packed dirt of the Coast Road—a real road, not the shadowed gaps of the ghost road they’d followed in and out of the ruins. Enid spread her arms wide, smiling, taking in a huge breath of clean, familiar air. She’d had an adventure, and she’d appreciated it, but she was glad to be back among the familiar.

“Enid, look.” Dak was studying the sky behind them.

Black clouds gathered. Roiling, angry things, filling the horizon from one end to another. The kind of storm front that you knew had another storm waiting right behind it, and fierce winds pushed them all straight toward you, spawning tornadoes, prompting whole towns to flee into their cellars.

“That thing’s going to pound us when it gets here,” she said. “We need shelter.”

“Yeah.”

But they’d left whatever shelter the ruins offered a couple of days ago. They picked up their pace, driving ahead. Maybe they could beat the storm. But not an hour later, the wind started gusting. She could smell the rain on the wind. The size of those clouds meant it would come in fast and last a long time. Lengths of gray connected the clouds to the ground, rain already pouring. The ruins must have been getting soaked. She hoped the families were tucked away safe.

This all felt familiar—the brimstone scent touching the air, the tension causing her hair to stand up. This was going to be a bad one.

They were still in the wild, not near any settlements she could remember. There might be a way station nearby, if they reached the road at just the right spot. But even that much would take another day of fast walking.

They were out of time.

Best thing would be a sturdy building or cave, even overhanging rocks. Trees would be okay—but all the trees were on low ground, along creek beds, and if the storm was bad enough, the creeks would flood and those gulches would turn deadly. They needed high ground.

“Over here,” she said, grabbing his sleeve and trotting over the next rise.

The wind blew from the west, beating against her, whipping her hair. Dak held up an arm to protect his face and hugged his guitar in a way that reminded her of that woman with the baby. They needed to get to the eastern sheltered side of a rock outcrop or ravine. Ahead, Enid spotted a smudge of rocks with a bramble of scrub oak growing around it. Pathetic as a shelter, but in the wide open, it was better than nothing.

As the rain started falling, they crawled into the scrub oak, up to the outcrop, a section of bedrock that had eroded away. That gave them a wall to brace against at least, and the shrubs kept some of the wind off them. The branches and leaves scratched at them, caught at their clothing, but they picked through it until they found a cave-like space and settled in. Lodging one of their blankets in the branches above them and bracing it with her makeshift staff gave them something of a roof and allowed their little cocoon to hold in some heat. They snuggled together and waited.

The rain pattered softly at first, but quickly turned to sheets of water, solid and endless. The shelter of shrubs and blanket meant the water came to them in drips and trickles rather than buckets. They got soaked slowly instead of all at once.

It went on for hours. Wind pounded, threatening to tear away the blanket that whipped and rippled like the sail on Xander’s ship. Enid held on to the edges until her hands cramped, until she was sure the wind would tear it from her anyway, it was so impossibly strong. For a while, the sound of the rain—a constant background hissing, punctuated by the odd patter and pop of drops striking their shelter or nearby leaves—was worse than the wet. The noise got louder, then started a throbbing in the back of her head. She pressed her hands over her ears, as much to soothe the headache as to stop the sound. The pounding became ubiquitous; the world would never be quiet again.

This, she decided—this was now the worst storm she’d ever lived through. And maybe the worst storms were just the ones where you had a lot to lose.

They huddled together, trying to keep warm. Enid dozed off, then Dak did, and they clapped hands and rubbed each other’s arms for warmth; the movement helped as much as the friction did. But they were only going to get colder as this went on. They didn’t really have space to light a fire without burning themselves up, but she was about ready to try. Clear a little space, light just a little bit of vegetation. As if they could find anything dry enough.

If they had known how close the storm was—how bad it would be—they might have tried to stay in the ruins. The shelter back there wouldn’t have been much, but it would have been better than this. Still, Enid wasn’t sorry they’d left. She thought of those kids, the mother with the baby, and then just couldn’t think of them anymore.

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