A few mourning doves cooed angrily from the branches above.īeth touched her thumb and forefinger together and raised them to her lips, then kissed them and opened her hand, gesturing as though to let the kiss take flight like a cartoon chef just after tasting a perfect sauce. Then the arrow hit, punching through his skull with a distant thunk, and he toppled face-first into the pool and lay there, not moving. He drew a breath and for an instant Fran was sure that he would scream, that he would make that horrible fucking sound she heard ring out in choruses every night the second she dropped into REM. The man, far downslope in a basin choked with years of rust-colored fallen pine needles, looked up from the pool, cracked and scabby skin splitting along fresh fissures to reveal raw pink flesh beneath as his face contorted into a snarl, exposing a mouthful of rotting snaggleteeth under a nose pounded flat and smeared onto the thing’s left cheek by God knew how many unset breaks. The arrow buzzed through the air like a thirty-inch hornet, its arc carrying it up, up, up into the branches above. “Lick my taint,” she whispered, and took the shot. “Just do it.”īeth’s smile widened as she nocked a carbon fiber arrow and drew to the bow’s full extension, the muscles in her long, thick arms standing out. “Sixty yards,” she said quietly, smirking so that the scar at the right corner of her mouth drew taut and pulled at her bottom eyelid until a little crescent of wet pink showed under it. Can you one-shot him from here?”īeth was already unlimbering her compound bow. “Well?” asked Beth, kneeling on Fran’s right.įran lowered the binoculars. Fran had seen one choke on a tennis ball. They’d eat pretty much anything if it came down to it.
Mostly they ripped their prey apart and gulped the meat down in chunks, or dug up grubs and beetles and whatever roots they could get their gnarled claws on. They had trouble with swallowing, these things the plague had made out of anyone with enough testosterone in their system to put out a decent crop of back hair. The man’s matted, filthy hair floated on the surface as he gulped down greedy mouthfuls, tilting his head back to swallow like an alligator horking down a fish.
Skinny pines, bare-branched for a good twenty feet under the canopy of needles, surrounded it.
The forest pool was dark and brackish, scummed with blooms of vibrant green algae. Commit suicide now.įran, squinting in the early afternoon glare, watched through her scratched binoculars as the man knelt to drink. Trannies, your families will never love you.
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