She paced the attic as she waited for the photos to print, walked as far as she could until she hit the wall. It was hard to imagine that Lucy’s mam had really left, that she’d just kept going and going, like this place wasn’t made of walls.
Experimentally, Vern drove her elbow back, preparing to punch through the recently finished plaster in the attic.
“One. Two. Three.”
Nothing. She couldn’t make herself do it.
“One … two … three.”
She punched softly, then harder, then harder still, rubbing her knuckles down.
When the printer stopped clicking, Vern grabbed her magnifying glass from her desk and examined the printed-out photos. Mam thought the lengths Vern went to to get an eye on something were extreme, but Vern appreciated having such a thorough record of her life. Cainland was full of tall tales. Her pictures could give her a hint of what was true.
The first photo showed the woman and Lucy talking. In the next, Lucy was crying. In the next, the woman had wrapped her arm around Lucy’s shoulder, pulling her along. In the last photo, the two were barely in the frame. Just slight gestures of animal forms.
Vern stood from her desk, knocking her chair down in her rush to get to the telescope. She looked through it—no signs of Lucy or her visitor. She moved the camera to the right and farther to the right and nothing, until the lens reached the road past the main gate, where a pickup truck was fleeing Cainland.
Vern didn’t open the window and shout to the Cainites that Lucy was gone. She couldn’t. Everybody here, whether they knew it or not, lived in the mouth of a great beast. As harsh as it felt to be left behind unrescued, Vern wasn’t so lost in bitterness that she would ruin her friend’s chance at escape.
Lucy’s mother left but had sent someone back for her daughter, but Vern’s mam? Well, she was still back at Cainland to this very day, probably doing her chores like a good Cainite woman, no thought for her daughter stuck up in a tree with her babes, a killer lying in wait down below.
Vern rested her head against the trunk of the tree, and Feral’s lips gave a hint of a quiver. No, no, no, no, no, she mouthed.
He yawned silently. Howling, bless him, still slept soundly, the rumble of his sleepy snores inaudible over the noise of the woods.
Feral let out a small whimper. Vern tried to shift him so she could give him her breast, but the unsuitability of the position only frustrated him, and he started to stir awake. Vern plunged her nipple into his mouth. Still, the baby would not latch. He batted at her uselessly with his hands.
Out of options, she pressed her thumb and forefinger around her areola and squeezed, dropping milk into his mouth. Finally, Feral took the milk quietly and fastened his lips to her body.
But all Vern’s fussing over Feral roused Howling. He rammed the sides of his fists into her chest. “Sh, sh, sh,” she said as quietly as she could when his eyes gaped open. She couldn’t wrassle both of them into a tandem feed up in a tree. She’d lose her footing.
“Sh, sh, sh,” she repeated, grateful for the blowing wind.
Howling beat his head side to side, then, struck by the plight of not having fed in three hours, yowled. The volume of the shriek startled Feral into unlatching, and he released his own agonized wail.
“Quiet, babes,” she admonished uselessly. Down below, the fiend cocked his head upward, his face a white blur at this distance. He pointed his rifle to the top of the tree, then fired. The roar scared a mess of kinglets and thrushes from the pines and shocked Vern into slipping from her perch.
She caught herself on a loose branch, the wood cracking beneath her weight. She released her grip and let herself fall onto a sturdier limb. As she heard the click of the fiend’s gun cocking she inhaled a breath, checked that the babes were secure to her, then leapt into the neighboring shortleaf.
She crashed into one of the limbs but gripped tight so she wouldn’t tumble downward. She weaved her way through the branches, counted to three, then jumped to the next tree.
The fiend followed from the forest floor, firing his rifle into the sky as he gave chase. Vern need only make it to the river, where she’d be able to navigate to the other side through the dense overhang of trees. She could lose the fiend while he waded and swam through the slow-moving waters.
Gun smoke scented the air with its sooty musk as shots rippled the air. What ten minutes ago had been a quiet winter morning was now a Fourth of July firecracker show. It only ever took a moment for life to break apart at the seams.
Vern heard moving water. Obscured though it was by lush greenery, the river chugged forward below. She counted one, two, three, then careered forward, prayerful that her feet would land on a bough or that her hand would catch one of the branches of the canopy drooped over the river. Her feet hit wood. Filled with thanks, she closed her eyes for a moment’s benediction. It was a short-lived thankfulness. She lost balance, and the twig-like branches she had grabbed for purchase were too weak to support her.