A Touch of the Ruthless

“You again,” Ellen said.

About sixty yards away, in a tall pine to her right, perched on a white, gnarled branch that poked out like a broken bone, a hawk sat watching her. The bird was a beautiful bronze color, with tinges of blue in the tips of its wings. It stared fixedly at her in the morning quiet.

The bird had first appeared about two weeks ago. Sarah, Ellen’s sister, had seen it first. They had just returned to their shelter from an afternoon of foraging, and were getting ready to go down the ladder when Sarah had tugged at Ellen’s coat, pointed and said, “Look at that bird! Isn’t it pretty?”

“It’s a hawk,” Ellen had said matter-of-factly, and then, because Sarah was so delighted with it, she added: “Yes, it is pretty.”

Something about the bird troubled Ellen from the start. Unlike other hawks she had seen, which were always moving nervously about, tilting their heads, and lifting their wings, this one rarely moved. It merely watched as they left their shelter and watched as they returned.

Over the last few days, however, things had changed. The hawk had begun to follow them on their journeys, always staying around fifty to sixty yards away—always watching.

“What do you think she wants?” Sarah asked yesterday, when they went into the forest to gather firewood.

“How do you know it’s a she?” Ellen asked. “Most brightly-colored birds are males.”

“How come the boy birds get to be the pretty ones?” Sarah had asked with a frown. Then, just as quickly, she brightened. “Maybe she’s just lonely and she likes us.”

“Maybe,” Ellen had replied, casting a wary look over her shoulder.

Now, as she stood locked in a staring contest with the hawk, she realized what it was that had made her so uncomfortable from the beginning. The bird’s rigid posture, the way it scarcely moved, the intensity of its stare… All of this reminded Ellen of how she crouched when she spotted a rabbit or a squirrel in the forest, how her body tensed as she trained her rifle on it, tracking its movements, waiting for just the right moment.

“You’re losing your fear, aren’t you?” she said to the bird. Dad had told her that most wild animals were no real threat because they were scared of humans and would usually run away. “It’s when they don’t run off that you’ve got a problem,” he had said. “That’s when they’ve lost their fear, and that’s when you’re in trouble.”

The hawk was hungry, and evidently growing bolder in its desperation. It couldn’t kill them outright, but its strong, hooked beak and razor-sharp talons could inflict serious injuries, and those could kill them. Since Sarah was the smaller of them, it would likely go for her when it finally made its move, and Sarah was never as watchful as she should be.

Too bad, Ellen thought. It really is beautiful.

She raised and shouldered her rifle in one smooth movement. Peering through the rifle’s scope, she centered the crosshairs on the hawk’s broad chest, and squeezed the trigger.

The shot blew the hawk backward. It flipped and tumbled lifelessly through the boughs with its wings splayed out, as if doing a terrible kind of cartwheel, and was lost to sight.

“Ellen?”

She looked down to see Sarah standing at the bottom of the ladder. Her face was a pale, frightened oval in the shadows.

“It’s okay,” Ellen said, lowering her rifle. “I was practicing my aim. Are you ready?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you have it?”

Sarah unzipped the top of her coat. A heart-shaped gold locket hung from her neck. In spite of the heavy overcast, it shone brightly against the dark blue sweater she wore beneath her coat.

Ellen nodded. “Okay, come on up.”

She stepped aside as Sarah came up the ladder. Together, they pushed clumps of dry, dead brush into a heap to cover the entrance to their shelter. Then Sarah turned and smiled, snapping her sister a salute with one gloved hand. “Ready to go!” she said, her cheeks already beginning to flush in the cold air. Between the flush and the smile, she seemed to glow.

Ellen couldn’t help but smile back. “Okay, Puds,” she said, slinging the rifle behind her back and working her arm through the strap.

Sarah’s eyes—as blue as the sky had once been—narrowed, and she quirked her mouth in a frown. “Only Daddy calls me ‘Puds’,” she said in a low voice, not far from tears.

Ellen’s mother had called Sarah ‘Puddin’.’ Predictably, her dad had shortened that to ‘Puds.’ It was his personal pet name for her, just as Ellen’s had once been ‘El.’

Ellen blew out a long-suffering sigh. You’re even starting to think like him. Then she pulled Sarah’s gray woolen cap down over the tops of her ears. “You’re right. Sorry.”

Sarah smiled again, caught Ellen by the hand and tugged. “Come on, Sissy! Let’s go!”

Ellen fell in behind her, casting one last glance at where the hawk had fallen.

Two years ago, a thing like killing the bird would have reduced her to hysteria, if she’d been able to do it at all. She’d been her mother’s clone in those days, her world consisting of dance class, designer clothes, and monthly trips to the hair salon. She had loved her father, but they’d had nothing in common. His world was the outdoors and Sarah had been Daddy’s Girl.

But all that was back before the sky split open and rained fire on the earth, raising dust into the atmosphere, turning summer into winter and winter into something that tried very hard to kill you. Mom had died from drinking contaminated water. Dad had taken Ellen and Sarah and fled the city, where things were quickly becoming, in his words, “medieval.” Ellen had been fourteen at the time, and had thought herself so grown up, but she had been more of a child than she’d ever realized.

Sarah had been nine at the time, and was now eleven. She was still very much a child herself, but then she probably always would be. They’d known she was different even before the world changed. “She’ll always need help,” her teachers and therapists had said, “but she’s the sweetest little thing.”

They tramped over frozen pine needles and hard-packed ground for about twenty minutes, their breath puffing out in little clouds, the crunching of their footsteps the only sounds to be heard, before they finally reached the clearing and Sarah’s special rock. It was a flat-topped boulder protruding from the mountainside, with a hollow underneath that usually remained free from snow.

Ellen held Sarah back within the tree line for a moment until she was satisfied that all was well and they were alone.

At last, she nodded to Sarah and said, “Okay, let’s go.”

Sarah ran out ahead of her and knelt down in the snow beside the boulder. She took her cap off, slipped the locket over her head, kissed it, and placed it as far under the rock as she could reach. Then she stood, brushing snow from the knees of her jeans, and wiped her red nose with the back of her glove.

“How long, do you think?”

“Better give it about two days,” Ellen said. “It’s been colder lately.”

Sarah looked down at the snow and shuffled her feet. “So long,” she said quietly.

Ellen felt something clench in the back of her throat. “It’ll pass before you know it,” she said, hoping Sarah would think the rasp in her voice was from the cold. Then she smiled as brightly as she could, and held out her hand. “Wanna go back and throw the Frisbee?”

On the way back, they gathered firewood and Ellen did the funny voices she knew would make Sarah laugh. They threw the Frisbee for awhile, but not long because it was just too cold today.

“We’ll go back inside and play board games instead,” Ellen said as they cleared the entrance to their shelter.

“Mousetrap?” Sarah asked with wide, hopeful eyes.

“Sure.”

Their shelter was nothing short of a miracle: a National Guard tractor trailer that had been washed off the highway in a flood when a dam or lake bed had burst somewhere nearby. “Maybe a fragment of the comet hit somewhere around here,” Dad had speculated. The truck was almost completely buried in the cold mud. Dad had broken into it with a pickaxe and put a makeshift ladder together so they could get down into it. The trailer was filled with supplies, mostly canned goods, but some clothing and assorted other items like batteries as well. It was underground, out of the wind, and easily heated by a small stove Dad had fashioned from metal and dried mud. Dad had been both an outdoorsman and a craftsman.

Other vehicles were also buried in the valley, and they were a rich source of supplies as well. People had fled the cities with all sorts of things they thought they might need when the disaster hit: food, clothing, blankets, first-aid kits, and firearms like Ellen’s rifle. Taking these things felt a little like grave-robbing to Ellen, but it was keeping them alive.

They played a few games of Mousetrap by fire and lantern light, then had a lunch of MREs from the supply stash. Afterward, Ellen read to Sarah from the one of the few books Dad had let her carry in her backpack when they left the city, and finally said they needed to take a nap.

When they were huddled under their blankets, listening to the snap and pop of the fire, Sarah asked, as she always did when they went to sleep: “When will Daddy be back?”

Ellen smoothed Sarah’s hair back, put her arm around her, and said in reply, as she always did, “When the sky is blue and the light feels warm again.”

You lie so easily now, she thought. Just like you kill and rob the valley tombs.

“A touch of the ruthless,” Dad had called it. “You do what it takes to survive.”

“How do you keep from turning into a monster?” Ellen had asked.

“You do it for love,” he had said. “Love is ruthless sometimes.”

So Ellen killed, and she lied, and she robbed the dead, for the love of her sister.

When she was sure Sarah was asleep, she would get up and go back to the special rock. She would get the locket and read the note Sarah had written to Dad and placed inside it. It was one of their special things: the locket. Before the world had gone dark, they used to take turns writing little notes to one another and hiding the locket around the house.

The day Dad had fallen and broken his back in the valley, and died with his head in Ellen’s lap, she had come back to the shelter and told Sarah that he had gone to look for a town.

“He has to be careful not to bring bad people back,” she explained when Sarah began to cry.

Then she had seen the locket around her sister’s neck.

“You can write him notes, though, like you used to do. Remember? And he can write you back.”

And so, once a week, they went to the rock and Sarah left her locket with a note. Then Ellen would return by herself, read the note, and leave a reply. Sarah kept all the notes under her pillow and read each one daily.

“You’re the parent now,” Dad had said when the end came. “Don’t just protect her. Don’t just teach her. Love her.”

“Tell me again, Ellen,” Sarah murmured, nearly asleep now. “When is Daddy coming back?”

“When the sky is blue, and the light feels warm again,” Ellen whispered.