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smackenzie"That's been happening a lot. It's why we put up the sign. You were lost, and now you've found. Come inside. You can bring Oscar." She turned and went back to the house. Marya grabbed Oscar's leash from the well between the front seats, snapped it on his collar, and let him clamber out of the van, and then they followed Martha into the house.
It was a big farmhouse with appropriately large rooms which looked even larger because they weren't very furnished. A couch, a couple of chairs, some side tables. There was a dining room table in what Marya assumed was the dining room - mostly by virtue of it being next to the kitchen - with some chairs spread around against the walls. There were some water glasses, a coffee mug, and a container of Morton's salt sitting at one end of the table. The dining room also had a built-in china cabinet with empty shelves behind its old glass doors and a small stack of books and a wooden mixing bowl on the countertop under the shelves. There was a map of the US pinned to the wall in the front room, with different colored pins stuck in it.
Martha went into the kitchen but Marya wasn't sure if she was supposed to follow, and she didn't think introducing Oscar to a stranger's kitchen so soon was a good idea, so she went back to the living room to look at the map. There was a yellow pushpin stuck in Los Angeles and a red one in Vegas. There were a couple of black pins dotting the southwest and the Rockies, a green pin in Austin, another yellow one in Dallas, and more black ones near Kansas City and on the Texas coast. Marya leaned in close to the map to see where the one in Texas was. Galveston.
"Huh," she said. "What do you think those mean?" she asked Oscar. "Empty cities? Places where there's still electricity?" She pushed gently on the Las Vegas pin and thought of what Spike's cousin had said, that it was empty of people but not empty. She wondered if the cousin had ever made it to Cassandra's place.
Oscar started barking and pulling away from her at the same time she heard someone say "Those are cities we know about." It was a guy's voice, soft, and seeming to come from above Marya's head. A tall guy. Obviously not Martha.
"Know what about?" she asked. She was still looking at the map, curious now why all the pins seemed to mark spots in the western half of the US. "What's the black pin mean?"
"That means the city's gone."
Marya turned around to look at the guy, to ask him what the hell that meant. He was tall and skinny and had long orangeish-blondish hair, and he was wearing jeans and a baggy army green t-shirt. He looked very calm. Oscar barked at him and pulled on the leash and Marya wondered if the guy had bacon in his pockets or something.
"Oscar, stop," she said, trying to pull him back. The guy came over to her and squatted down to get to Oscar's level, and Oscar practically knocked him over to lick his face. "Oh jeez, I'm sorry. Oscar gets a little excited sometimes. You must be a dog person - he can smell them."
The guy finally managed to push Oscar off him long enough so he could stand up. He wiped at his face and grinned. "I like dogs," he said. "I'm Jason."
"Marya. This is Oscar. What did you mean, the city's gone?"
"Gone. Vanished. Destroyed. Just gone."
Marya heard the little old lady who used to live next door to her saying Gone, vanished, poof, and she shivered.
"My mom was in Vegas," Jason went on. "I don't know if she's ok."
"What's the red pin mean?"
"It means the city isn't safe. Not because of people. Because of things."
Empty but not empty.
"A friend of mine from home," she said, "her friend's cousin lived in Vegas. He called her and said he was driving out to see her. So if he got out, maybe your mom did too."
"Maybe. I was on my way to find her. Priest told me not to go."
"Who's Priest?"
"He runs Haven. It belongs to him."
"Where'd you come from? What was it like there?" She was thinking about Columbus and Pittsburgh and home, wondering what the rest of the country looked like. "Did you pass a guy on a bike on the highway?"
"Marya!" Martha called from across the room. "There you are! I was going to feed you." She trotted over to Marya and Jason.
"Oh, uh, thanks, but I'm, um, I'm not hungry." Actually she was, a little bit, but she didn't know this place and didn't know these people - and they didn't know her - and it felt rude to essentially show up on someone's front porch and then make them feed you. Although she hadn't made Martha do anything, Martha volunteered. But still. She hadn't been here that long and she wasn't planning on staying and she didn't want to impose on someone's hospitality.
And besides, she had no way of knowing how much food they had, or what kind, and if they could even afford to feed her. She'd been in the grocery store, she'd experienced the failure of the power grid, she knew fresh food was at a premium now that no one could keep it fresh. She had her own edibles in the van, anyway.
"Nonsense," Martha said. "Where are you going in such a hurry?"
"California. I need to find my dad." Jason made a sympathetic face. "What's the yellow pin?" she asked him. Her dad was in Santa Barbara, which wasn't far from LA. If LA was unsafe she wanted to know, and if it was safe she wanted to know.
"Yellow means proceed with caution," Martha said. "Think of stoplights. Green means it's ok to go, likewise the green pins mark safe cities. Yellow pins mark cities that may not be safe."
"But because of the people," Jason added. "Not the things."
"What 'things'?" Marya asked. The more pieces of information she got, the less sense everything made. But now she knew LA wasn't entirely safe. But maybe Santa Barbara was far enough away that it wouldn't matter. She could bypass LA when she got there, at least.
"Things. Creatures. Monsters."
"Stop it," Martha told him sharply. "Don't scare her. Priest is out in the orchard laying salt. He might need your help." She gave Jason a gentle push and he left the room and went back towards the kitchen. "Don't mind him," Martha said to Marya. "We don't know what the things are. We've learned salt can repel them, and the twins are outside somewhere running tests with gunpowder." She rolled her eyes. "I don't want to know what they might have found to run their tests on. I should ask but I doubt they'll tell me."
Marya wasn't sure if she should be confused, grateful, freaked out, or disbelieving, and this must have shown on her face as something like fear, because Martha said "Oh, no, now I'm scaring you. I'm sorry, I don't mean to. It's just new, everything is so new."
"You're not scaring me. I don't know what to think."
"Well, come with me into the kitchen and I'll get you something to eat and drink and we can talk. Priest will be a while yet and the twins might not come back until they get hungry, and even then there's no guarantee. I never met a more self-sufficient couple of people in my life. There's a nice couple who came up from Dallas with a friend of theirs, and they're out doing reconnaissance. I sent them to find wood, really, and more oil for the generator, but who knows what they'll find. Come on." She beckoned for Marya and Oscar to follow her into the kitchen, and this time Marya did.
The kitchen was old and had clearly been retrofitted for modern appliances, and not very well at that. The stove was large and old and gas or even wood-fired, the fridge was probably from the 70s, and while the dishwasher looked fairly new, it hadn't been fit very well under the counter. The sink was wide and deep, the enamel on the counter to either side of it was cracked, and there was a large heavy trestle table in the middle of the floor. Martha had apparently meant to feed Marya, because she'd set a place with a plate and silverware and a water glass like the ones on the dining room table. On the plate was a sandwich and an apple and couple of cookies. Marya wondered if the oven was working, and had someone actually baked the cookies?
"Sit," Martha directed, pointing to the bench next to the table. "I'll get some water for the dog. I'm not sure what we have for him to eat, though."
"I have dog food in my van," Marya said. "I'll give him some of my sandwich, it's ok." She pulled out an end of the bench, sat down, picked up the sandwich, examined the bread (wheat), and took a bite. Peanutbutter and jelly. It made her feel about five but it was a comforting kind of five. She broke off a corner and gave it to Oscar, who spend the next ten minutes trying to get all the peanutbutter off his tongue and down his throat. At least it kept him quiet.
Martha pulled a chair around from the other side of the table and sat around the corner from Marya. "So tell me where you came from," she said. "What cities did you see? What do the roads look like? Did you see other people? Anything strange?"
You mean besides a couple of guys in cop cars blocking the access road to Columbus? Marya thought. And a guy on a bike who vanished when my back was turned? No, nothing strange at all.
"I drove into Pittsburgh," she said, swallowing a bite of her sandwich. "It looked empty. But I was there at night and the electricity had gone out, so it was kind of hard to tell how many people were left. But I didn't see any... things. Um... there were a couple of guys trying to keep people out of Columbus - "
"Ohio?" Martha interrupted.
"Yeah."
"I had a friend who used to live in Columbus, Indiana."
"I didn't know there was a Columbus in Indiana. But yeah, Ohio. I got off the highway because I wanted to know how many people were left there and if they had power or not, and these guys had made a roadblock so I couldn't get close enough. I think they were trying to block every way in. They had shotguns." She bit into the sandwich again.
"That would be a yellow pin," Martha mused. "Potentially dangerous because of people. Pittsburgh, I don't know. We'll ask Priest what he thinks when he comes back. Where did you come from?"
"Massachusetts. Methuen. It's north of Boston. We didn't have power when I left and the place was kind of deserted, but it was ok. I mean, I didn't feel like something was going to jump out from behind a house and attack me." Well, there was the cat-that-wasn't in her backyard, but did one random creature count as a lot of things? After it wandered off she hadn't seen anything other living creatures that were particularly unusual.
"I think that would be a green pin. Do you know what Boston's like?"
"Fewer people? I don't know, I didn't drive that far. I had a really hard time getting any news that made sense. I got some Italian channel on TV, that didn't help. Do you know what happened? Where everybody went? Why?"
"I can tell you that it isn't the Rapture." Martha grinned. "This was a concern earlier, why some people were seemingly raptured up to heaven and some more... observant Christians were not. That isn't it. Priest can explain it to you better than I can, but for now, think of it as a rift between this world and a kind of alternate universe. Where the earth cracked, those are the cities and towns that lost the most people, and in some cases the city itself vanished. Jason's things crawled out of the rifts. There's no telling where they came from, exactly. We've also heard a few reports of ghosts, but they seem to be completely harmless." Marya thought about Castro. Had he been a ghost? That might explain why Oscar was so wigged. But still... ghosts? Monsters? Were they living in a horror movie now?
"It's a theory," Martha went on, possibly sensing Marya's skepticism. "I don't think there's any way to know what exactly happened and why, or why some people disappeared and some didn't. All we can do is live in the world that's left."
"I need to find my dad," Marya said.
"I know. Stay here tonight - it's safe, I promise you - and you can leave in the morning. The roads twist on you when you're not watching."
Marya rolled her eyes like that was the stupidest thing she'd ever heard - it was kind of ridiculous - and Martha chuckled.
"You don't believe me," Martha said. "That's ok. Stay for the night, meet the kids from Dallas, rest up. You can leave bright and early in the morning if you want. We don't have a bed for you, but if you have blankets of your own or a sleeping bag, I can put you in a quiet room. Oscar can stay in the house if he behaves."
"He's used to sleeping with me. I won't let go of him - I don't want him to run off. And he's deaf, he won't hear me calling him." Oscar stood up and tried to rest his chin on the table, apparently having realized that Marya was done with her sandwich and was starting on the cookies. But they were chocolate chip and he wasn't getting any. "It'll be nice to not have to sleep in the car. Thanks."
"No problem. The place is called Haven for a reason." Martha smiled at her and got up. "Sit here, finish your lunch, bring your stuff in, whatever makes you happy. There should be an empty bedroom upstairs, probably the small one, or you can sleep in the parlor. I'll put you to work later, never fear." And with another smile she went out the back door and left Marya and Oscar alone.
"What do you think?" Marya asked him, but he was more interested in the cookies. She patted him on the head and rubbed his ears affectionately. "You're not getting those. Don't even act like you are."
She ate the cookies and the apple, finished the water, and got up to put the dishes in the sink. She looked around for a trash can, didn't see one, and stuck her head out the back door. No one there. She nervously pitched the apple core into the back yard, hoping no one could see her, and then stepped back into the kitchen, closed the door, and took Oscar out the front. She'd bring in her sleeping bag and pillow, Oscar's blanket, and the travel duffle with her roadtrip changes of clothes, and that way she wouldn't have to do it later. If she could find where they kept the colored pushpins she'd even mark some more cities on the map.
She had to make two trips because it was hard carrying a sleeping bag and a pillow and a blanket while trying to contain an excitable dog, and after she deposited her stuff in the one room upstairs that was clearly uninhabited, she went back downstairs to see if she could find the colored pushpins. They were sitting on the counter space of the built-in china closet, inside the wooden bowl. She was trying to find Columbus to stick a yellow pin in it when she heard a couple of people coming in the house.
"...stick to salt," one of them was saying. "Because that was a bust."
"I told you we need something to test it on. We'll go into the orchard tonight. We'll find something."
"And Martha will have our heads. Hello."
Marya looked up at that and realized that she was probably looking at the twins. The guy was a little taller and the girl's hair was much shorter, but otherwise they looked pretty much the same. They were even dressed alike, in camo pants and army boots and army green t-shirts. The guy had long white-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and the girl had almost a buzzcut, but otherwise, yeah, twins.
"Hi," Marya said. Oscar wagged his tail but did not start jumping and barking - maybe he was actually learning not to attack strangers at the outset. Maybe he could be taught. "It's ok if I put some pins in the map, right? There aren't any for the eastern half of the country."
"Sure," the guy said. "What's your name? You seen any monsters lately?"
"Marya, and no. Well, my ex-girlfriend." She grinned. She liked Cass, really.
"Highgate, Harrow." The guy pointed to himself and then the girl. "Twins."
"I never would've guessed. Uh... Martha said she was going to put me to work later. You wouldn't have anything for me to do, would you?"
"Target practice?" the girl - Harrow - suggested.
"No." Highgate rolled his eyes. "You're not tormenting the new girl."
"It's not torment to teach her how to defend herself."
"It is if you're doing it." Harrow stuck out her tongue at him. He ignored her. "Marya, right?" Marya nodded. "You know anything about loading shotgun shells?"
"Not really."
"It's not hard. We'll show you." Harrow gave him a look that Marya interpreted as We will NOT, but he ignored that too. Marya kind of liked this guy. "Does your dog hunt at all?"
"Nope. He's deaf, for one. And he's not that bright, for another. And he's a city dog."
"Damn," Harrow muttered. "We could use a dog."
"We're doing fine," Highgate told her. Marya felt like she was missing half the conversation. "Come on," he said to Marya, "you can help us if you need something to do."
"I just have to find Columbus," she said, poking at the map with her pushpin.
"Ok. We'll be in the kitchen." The twins turned at the same time and headed into the dining room. Marya watched Highgate sling his arm around his sister's shoulders and pull her close, and then Harrow turned her head and said something to him, and Marya could hear him laugh.
"You wanna learn how to fill shotgun shells?" she asked Oscar. He was preparing to lie down. "Oh no, you're not taking a nap here. If Martha's going to feed us and let us stay here tonight, we're going to do something to help out. I just - oh, there it is." She'd probably been looking right at the little dot on the map that marked Columbus this whole time. She pushed the pin into the map and the wall behind it, tugged on Oscar's leash, and went into the kitchen.
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It was a big farmhouse with appropriately large rooms which looked even larger because they weren't very furnished. A couch, a couple of chairs, some side tables. There was a dining room table in what Marya assumed was the dining room - mostly by virtue of it being next to the kitchen - with some chairs spread around against the walls. There were some water glasses, a coffee mug, and a container of Morton's salt sitting at one end of the table. The dining room also had a built-in china cabinet with empty shelves behind its old glass doors and a small stack of books and a wooden mixing bowl on the countertop under the shelves. There was a map of the US pinned to the wall in the front room, with different colored pins stuck in it.
Martha went into the kitchen but Marya wasn't sure if she was supposed to follow, and she didn't think introducing Oscar to a stranger's kitchen so soon was a good idea, so she went back to the living room to look at the map. There was a yellow pushpin stuck in Los Angeles and a red one in Vegas. There were a couple of black pins dotting the southwest and the Rockies, a green pin in Austin, another yellow one in Dallas, and more black ones near Kansas City and on the Texas coast. Marya leaned in close to the map to see where the one in Texas was. Galveston.
"Huh," she said. "What do you think those mean?" she asked Oscar. "Empty cities? Places where there's still electricity?" She pushed gently on the Las Vegas pin and thought of what Spike's cousin had said, that it was empty of people but not empty. She wondered if the cousin had ever made it to Cassandra's place.
Oscar started barking and pulling away from her at the same time she heard someone say "Those are cities we know about." It was a guy's voice, soft, and seeming to come from above Marya's head. A tall guy. Obviously not Martha.
"Know what about?" she asked. She was still looking at the map, curious now why all the pins seemed to mark spots in the western half of the US. "What's the black pin mean?"
"That means the city's gone."
Marya turned around to look at the guy, to ask him what the hell that meant. He was tall and skinny and had long orangeish-blondish hair, and he was wearing jeans and a baggy army green t-shirt. He looked very calm. Oscar barked at him and pulled on the leash and Marya wondered if the guy had bacon in his pockets or something.
"Oscar, stop," she said, trying to pull him back. The guy came over to her and squatted down to get to Oscar's level, and Oscar practically knocked him over to lick his face. "Oh jeez, I'm sorry. Oscar gets a little excited sometimes. You must be a dog person - he can smell them."
The guy finally managed to push Oscar off him long enough so he could stand up. He wiped at his face and grinned. "I like dogs," he said. "I'm Jason."
"Marya. This is Oscar. What did you mean, the city's gone?"
"Gone. Vanished. Destroyed. Just gone."
Marya heard the little old lady who used to live next door to her saying Gone, vanished, poof, and she shivered.
"My mom was in Vegas," Jason went on. "I don't know if she's ok."
"What's the red pin mean?"
"It means the city isn't safe. Not because of people. Because of things."
Empty but not empty.
"A friend of mine from home," she said, "her friend's cousin lived in Vegas. He called her and said he was driving out to see her. So if he got out, maybe your mom did too."
"Maybe. I was on my way to find her. Priest told me not to go."
"Who's Priest?"
"He runs Haven. It belongs to him."
"Where'd you come from? What was it like there?" She was thinking about Columbus and Pittsburgh and home, wondering what the rest of the country looked like. "Did you pass a guy on a bike on the highway?"
"Marya!" Martha called from across the room. "There you are! I was going to feed you." She trotted over to Marya and Jason.
"Oh, uh, thanks, but I'm, um, I'm not hungry." Actually she was, a little bit, but she didn't know this place and didn't know these people - and they didn't know her - and it felt rude to essentially show up on someone's front porch and then make them feed you. Although she hadn't made Martha do anything, Martha volunteered. But still. She hadn't been here that long and she wasn't planning on staying and she didn't want to impose on someone's hospitality.
And besides, she had no way of knowing how much food they had, or what kind, and if they could even afford to feed her. She'd been in the grocery store, she'd experienced the failure of the power grid, she knew fresh food was at a premium now that no one could keep it fresh. She had her own edibles in the van, anyway.
"Nonsense," Martha said. "Where are you going in such a hurry?"
"California. I need to find my dad." Jason made a sympathetic face. "What's the yellow pin?" she asked him. Her dad was in Santa Barbara, which wasn't far from LA. If LA was unsafe she wanted to know, and if it was safe she wanted to know.
"Yellow means proceed with caution," Martha said. "Think of stoplights. Green means it's ok to go, likewise the green pins mark safe cities. Yellow pins mark cities that may not be safe."
"But because of the people," Jason added. "Not the things."
"What 'things'?" Marya asked. The more pieces of information she got, the less sense everything made. But now she knew LA wasn't entirely safe. But maybe Santa Barbara was far enough away that it wouldn't matter. She could bypass LA when she got there, at least.
"Things. Creatures. Monsters."
"Stop it," Martha told him sharply. "Don't scare her. Priest is out in the orchard laying salt. He might need your help." She gave Jason a gentle push and he left the room and went back towards the kitchen. "Don't mind him," Martha said to Marya. "We don't know what the things are. We've learned salt can repel them, and the twins are outside somewhere running tests with gunpowder." She rolled her eyes. "I don't want to know what they might have found to run their tests on. I should ask but I doubt they'll tell me."
Marya wasn't sure if she should be confused, grateful, freaked out, or disbelieving, and this must have shown on her face as something like fear, because Martha said "Oh, no, now I'm scaring you. I'm sorry, I don't mean to. It's just new, everything is so new."
"You're not scaring me. I don't know what to think."
"Well, come with me into the kitchen and I'll get you something to eat and drink and we can talk. Priest will be a while yet and the twins might not come back until they get hungry, and even then there's no guarantee. I never met a more self-sufficient couple of people in my life. There's a nice couple who came up from Dallas with a friend of theirs, and they're out doing reconnaissance. I sent them to find wood, really, and more oil for the generator, but who knows what they'll find. Come on." She beckoned for Marya and Oscar to follow her into the kitchen, and this time Marya did.
The kitchen was old and had clearly been retrofitted for modern appliances, and not very well at that. The stove was large and old and gas or even wood-fired, the fridge was probably from the 70s, and while the dishwasher looked fairly new, it hadn't been fit very well under the counter. The sink was wide and deep, the enamel on the counter to either side of it was cracked, and there was a large heavy trestle table in the middle of the floor. Martha had apparently meant to feed Marya, because she'd set a place with a plate and silverware and a water glass like the ones on the dining room table. On the plate was a sandwich and an apple and couple of cookies. Marya wondered if the oven was working, and had someone actually baked the cookies?
"Sit," Martha directed, pointing to the bench next to the table. "I'll get some water for the dog. I'm not sure what we have for him to eat, though."
"I have dog food in my van," Marya said. "I'll give him some of my sandwich, it's ok." She pulled out an end of the bench, sat down, picked up the sandwich, examined the bread (wheat), and took a bite. Peanutbutter and jelly. It made her feel about five but it was a comforting kind of five. She broke off a corner and gave it to Oscar, who spend the next ten minutes trying to get all the peanutbutter off his tongue and down his throat. At least it kept him quiet.
Martha pulled a chair around from the other side of the table and sat around the corner from Marya. "So tell me where you came from," she said. "What cities did you see? What do the roads look like? Did you see other people? Anything strange?"
You mean besides a couple of guys in cop cars blocking the access road to Columbus? Marya thought. And a guy on a bike who vanished when my back was turned? No, nothing strange at all.
"I drove into Pittsburgh," she said, swallowing a bite of her sandwich. "It looked empty. But I was there at night and the electricity had gone out, so it was kind of hard to tell how many people were left. But I didn't see any... things. Um... there were a couple of guys trying to keep people out of Columbus - "
"Ohio?" Martha interrupted.
"Yeah."
"I had a friend who used to live in Columbus, Indiana."
"I didn't know there was a Columbus in Indiana. But yeah, Ohio. I got off the highway because I wanted to know how many people were left there and if they had power or not, and these guys had made a roadblock so I couldn't get close enough. I think they were trying to block every way in. They had shotguns." She bit into the sandwich again.
"That would be a yellow pin," Martha mused. "Potentially dangerous because of people. Pittsburgh, I don't know. We'll ask Priest what he thinks when he comes back. Where did you come from?"
"Massachusetts. Methuen. It's north of Boston. We didn't have power when I left and the place was kind of deserted, but it was ok. I mean, I didn't feel like something was going to jump out from behind a house and attack me." Well, there was the cat-that-wasn't in her backyard, but did one random creature count as a lot of things? After it wandered off she hadn't seen anything other living creatures that were particularly unusual.
"I think that would be a green pin. Do you know what Boston's like?"
"Fewer people? I don't know, I didn't drive that far. I had a really hard time getting any news that made sense. I got some Italian channel on TV, that didn't help. Do you know what happened? Where everybody went? Why?"
"I can tell you that it isn't the Rapture." Martha grinned. "This was a concern earlier, why some people were seemingly raptured up to heaven and some more... observant Christians were not. That isn't it. Priest can explain it to you better than I can, but for now, think of it as a rift between this world and a kind of alternate universe. Where the earth cracked, those are the cities and towns that lost the most people, and in some cases the city itself vanished. Jason's things crawled out of the rifts. There's no telling where they came from, exactly. We've also heard a few reports of ghosts, but they seem to be completely harmless." Marya thought about Castro. Had he been a ghost? That might explain why Oscar was so wigged. But still... ghosts? Monsters? Were they living in a horror movie now?
"It's a theory," Martha went on, possibly sensing Marya's skepticism. "I don't think there's any way to know what exactly happened and why, or why some people disappeared and some didn't. All we can do is live in the world that's left."
"I need to find my dad," Marya said.
"I know. Stay here tonight - it's safe, I promise you - and you can leave in the morning. The roads twist on you when you're not watching."
Marya rolled her eyes like that was the stupidest thing she'd ever heard - it was kind of ridiculous - and Martha chuckled.
"You don't believe me," Martha said. "That's ok. Stay for the night, meet the kids from Dallas, rest up. You can leave bright and early in the morning if you want. We don't have a bed for you, but if you have blankets of your own or a sleeping bag, I can put you in a quiet room. Oscar can stay in the house if he behaves."
"He's used to sleeping with me. I won't let go of him - I don't want him to run off. And he's deaf, he won't hear me calling him." Oscar stood up and tried to rest his chin on the table, apparently having realized that Marya was done with her sandwich and was starting on the cookies. But they were chocolate chip and he wasn't getting any. "It'll be nice to not have to sleep in the car. Thanks."
"No problem. The place is called Haven for a reason." Martha smiled at her and got up. "Sit here, finish your lunch, bring your stuff in, whatever makes you happy. There should be an empty bedroom upstairs, probably the small one, or you can sleep in the parlor. I'll put you to work later, never fear." And with another smile she went out the back door and left Marya and Oscar alone.
"What do you think?" Marya asked him, but he was more interested in the cookies. She patted him on the head and rubbed his ears affectionately. "You're not getting those. Don't even act like you are."
She ate the cookies and the apple, finished the water, and got up to put the dishes in the sink. She looked around for a trash can, didn't see one, and stuck her head out the back door. No one there. She nervously pitched the apple core into the back yard, hoping no one could see her, and then stepped back into the kitchen, closed the door, and took Oscar out the front. She'd bring in her sleeping bag and pillow, Oscar's blanket, and the travel duffle with her roadtrip changes of clothes, and that way she wouldn't have to do it later. If she could find where they kept the colored pushpins she'd even mark some more cities on the map.
She had to make two trips because it was hard carrying a sleeping bag and a pillow and a blanket while trying to contain an excitable dog, and after she deposited her stuff in the one room upstairs that was clearly uninhabited, she went back downstairs to see if she could find the colored pushpins. They were sitting on the counter space of the built-in china closet, inside the wooden bowl. She was trying to find Columbus to stick a yellow pin in it when she heard a couple of people coming in the house.
"...stick to salt," one of them was saying. "Because that was a bust."
"I told you we need something to test it on. We'll go into the orchard tonight. We'll find something."
"And Martha will have our heads. Hello."
Marya looked up at that and realized that she was probably looking at the twins. The guy was a little taller and the girl's hair was much shorter, but otherwise they looked pretty much the same. They were even dressed alike, in camo pants and army boots and army green t-shirts. The guy had long white-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and the girl had almost a buzzcut, but otherwise, yeah, twins.
"Hi," Marya said. Oscar wagged his tail but did not start jumping and barking - maybe he was actually learning not to attack strangers at the outset. Maybe he could be taught. "It's ok if I put some pins in the map, right? There aren't any for the eastern half of the country."
"Sure," the guy said. "What's your name? You seen any monsters lately?"
"Marya, and no. Well, my ex-girlfriend." She grinned. She liked Cass, really.
"Highgate, Harrow." The guy pointed to himself and then the girl. "Twins."
"I never would've guessed. Uh... Martha said she was going to put me to work later. You wouldn't have anything for me to do, would you?"
"Target practice?" the girl - Harrow - suggested.
"No." Highgate rolled his eyes. "You're not tormenting the new girl."
"It's not torment to teach her how to defend herself."
"It is if you're doing it." Harrow stuck out her tongue at him. He ignored her. "Marya, right?" Marya nodded. "You know anything about loading shotgun shells?"
"Not really."
"It's not hard. We'll show you." Harrow gave him a look that Marya interpreted as We will NOT, but he ignored that too. Marya kind of liked this guy. "Does your dog hunt at all?"
"Nope. He's deaf, for one. And he's not that bright, for another. And he's a city dog."
"Damn," Harrow muttered. "We could use a dog."
"We're doing fine," Highgate told her. Marya felt like she was missing half the conversation. "Come on," he said to Marya, "you can help us if you need something to do."
"I just have to find Columbus," she said, poking at the map with her pushpin.
"Ok. We'll be in the kitchen." The twins turned at the same time and headed into the dining room. Marya watched Highgate sling his arm around his sister's shoulders and pull her close, and then Harrow turned her head and said something to him, and Marya could hear him laugh.
"You wanna learn how to fill shotgun shells?" she asked Oscar. He was preparing to lie down. "Oh no, you're not taking a nap here. If Martha's going to feed us and let us stay here tonight, we're going to do something to help out. I just - oh, there it is." She'd probably been looking right at the little dot on the map that marked Columbus this whole time. She pushed the pin into the map and the wall behind it, tugged on Oscar's leash, and went into the kitchen.
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-29 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-29 02:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-29 04:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-30 08:20 pm (UTC)Also, GIP.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-05 03:32 pm (UTC)