Pretty Vicious Read online

  The shot goes wild. They don’t even look in my direction. I let out a huff of breath, focus, and let loose another bullet. One raider stumbles back with a curse, holding his wounded shoulder. I aim, pull the trigger again, and—click. Out of ammo. The idiot raiders wasted it firing after me in the darkness … not that the gun does much good in my unpracticed hands, anyway. All that effort to get it, for this. I sigh and tuck the gun away in my bag, set the pack on the ground, and pass my knife to my right hand. This, at least, is a weapon I can be deadly with.

  Since the wounded raider has pulled away, I run straight for the other one, whose blade is still slashing and hacking, blocked again and again by the shotgun barrel. I stab deep into the flesh and muscle of his back. He cries out, turns, and slams his fist into my jaw. I stumble away, and he follows, spitting curses in a low growl, my knife still buried inside him. I back away as he advances. I spot a knife nearby, clutched in the hand of a dead raider—but as I reach for it, the man runs at me. He slams into me, and we both fall. He’s on top of me, his weight pressing me down, his breath hot and rancid on my face.

  He pins my wrists. Sheer terror pulses through my body as his ugly face looms above mine. It’s the same man who tied me up, who dumped my belongings in the dirt. I’ve met this kind of man a thousand times over, and far too often they’ve made me feel like this: Vulnerable. Weak. Afraid.

  Since leaving the palace, I’ve told myself again and again that I’m not afraid—that there’s no point in being afraid, that nothing could be worse than what I’ve already been through—but oh, god, I am. I’m so afraid.

  Too many times I’ve been held down, too many times I’ve been used, too many times I’ve felt this helpless. As helpless as when I thought I would die, alone and thirsty, out in the wastes; as helpless as when I realized I was pregnant; as helpless as when my daughter was born far too early, so small and frail and sickly. I knew from the moment she was born that I wouldn’t have her long. And there was nothing I could do to stop it. Nothing I could do but watch her wane away. I would wake three times a night, heart pounding, to make sure she was still breathing—knowing the whole time I could do nothing but wait for the morning that she would be gone. And when it came, all I could feel was that horrible, horrible helplessness.

  It wasn’t fair. It isn’t fair. Nothing about this goddamn life is fair, and I’m never going to be helpless like that again.

  As I stare at the man holding me down, rage surges up inside me, boiling in my stomach and burning in my chest, eating away my fear.

  With a cry, I slam my head upward into his nose. There’s a crack of bone, a yelp of pain, and the pressure on my wrists disappears. I knee the man in the groin and fling him off me. He lands on his back, and on the knife still protruding from it, and releases a squeal like a dying pig. I scramble to my feet and slam my foot into his chest, driving the knife farther in—again, and again, until he goes limp. I kick the body over, rip my knife free with a grunt of effort, and wipe the blood off on my pants.

  Breathing hard, hands trembling, I look up in time to see the dreadlocked man finishing off the last raider with a stomp to the face.

  It’s quiet. The lone man and I are the only ones left standing. My chest heaves as I struggle to catch my breath, adrenaline still surging through me, my body hot and crackling with tension. My knuckles are white around the hilt of my knife, my mouth slightly open as I gasp for air. I lock eyes with the dreadlocked man across the mess of bodies between us. A bead of sweat rolls down the side of my face, but I don’t wipe it off.

  He turns away, and my eyes track him as he walks over to the fallen can of beans and crouches down. After a moment, he straightens up and kicks the can aside. He eyes me: frozen in place, disheveled and wide-eyed, clutching my knife. He keeps his shotgun’s bloodied barrel pointed down at the dirt.

  “Well, well,” he says. “You’re not as helpless as you look, eh?”

  I lunge at him.

  The knife stops an inch away from his eye. One of his callused hands grips my wrist, keeping it there. His other lets the shotgun fall, grabs a handful of my hair, and yanks—and his face shifts in surprise as the wig comes off and reveals the sheared-short hair beneath. I jab him in the throat with my free hand. He grunts, releasing my wrist and stumbling back. I raise the knife again.

  He tackles me, and we both crash into the dirt. I struggle, coughing on dust and slashing wildly with my knife, but he grabs my arm and twists it behind my back. He keeps twisting until my fingers go numb and the knife drops from my grip. I hear him scoop it up, though I can’t see anything, my face half-pressed against the ground. He waits until I stop struggling and lay still, panting for air, before he releases me.

  “Try that again and I’ll kill you,” he says, standing up. He takes both weapons and leaves me in the dirt.

  I remain there, regaining my breath and collecting what’s left of my pride. Somehow, I’m still alive. He let me live.

  So many fools out here.

  Eventually, I push myself upright. The man is sitting cross-legged next to the fire and picking gunk out from under his nails with my knife. His shotgun rests in his lap.

  After watching him for a few moments, I push myself to my feet. I grab my bag off the ground, walk over, and lower myself to my knees across the fire from the man. He continues cleaning his nails. I scrutinize him as my breath settles, and wonder what kind of man I’m dealing with.

  I’ve met many kinds over the years. Mean men, frightened men, self-pitying men, self-aggrandizing men—all of them wanted to hurt me, or fuck me, or both. So many types, and I’ve never met a man that I liked. But something is different about this one. He doesn’t look at me like he wants to own me. In fact, right now, he’s barely paying attention to me at all.

  I reach inside my bag, fumbling around until I find a dress with a pocket hidden within. I rip open the shoddy stitches and pull out my hand. When I unfurl my fingers, a small handful of dried peas rests in my palm. The man still isn’t paying attention to me. I stand up and walk over to him. When he looks up, I hold out half of the peas, and he takes them. I pop one into my mouth to demonstrate its safety and return to my previous position.

  “Peace offering?” he asks, eating his portion in one mouthful and chewing with his mouth open. “Good enough for me,” he says. He stretches out his legs near the fire, looking at me. “So, you wanna tell me how the hell you ended up in the middle of nowhere with five raiders after you?”

  So many things I could tell him: the story of growing up among scavengers, of the Queen saving me, of strangers’ dirty hands running over my body. I could tell him what it felt like to realize a new life was growing inside me, both the most terrifying and the most wondrous thing that had ever happened to me. I could tell him how small and strange my daughter’s hands were when she was born. I could tell him about waking up with a tiny, cold body beside me and waking up every morning afterward with an empty space in my bed. I could tell him about the other girls, and the gun, and the moment I walked into the wastes alone.

  But he wouldn’t understand, so I say nothing and continue eating one pea at a time. He shakes his head and resumes cleaning his nails.

  “Fine. Where you headed, then?”

  This time I don’t give an answer because I don’t have one.

  The man sighs, sets my knife in the dirt, and stares at me.

  “You got a tongue in there or what?” he asks, and my brow furrows.

  “Yes,” I say. He blinks, sits back. After a moment, he lets out a bark of a laugh and shakes his head.

  “Good for you,” he says. “Anyway, wherever you came from, you better go runnin’ back before you get yourself killed. It’s suicide, being alone out here.”

  “You’re alone.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s different for me.”

  “Why?”

  “I do fine by myself,” he says.

  “Why?”

  He gives me an odd look.

  “I’m sup
posed to be the one asking the questions, damn it.”

  I silently warm my hands near the fire.

  “You’re not gonna last out here,” he says after a moment. “Most people are even nastier than those ones.”

  “Not you,” I say, and he scrunches up his face like I insulted him.

  “Don’t you go thinkin’ I saved you or anything.” I look at him; he scowls at me. “I got payback for my dinner being ruined,” he says. “You happened to get saved in the process.” I keep looking at him, and he turns back to the fire, mumbling something inaudible as he feeds it a scrap of wood from his pack.

  A lonely man, I decide. That’s the type he is. Explains why he hasn’t killed me yet. We had men like that at the Queen’s sometimes. I was baffled the first time it happened, when a visiting raider just wanted to sit on the bed and talk to me. He told me all the terrible things he had done, all the worse things he feared he would have to do. When I talked to Ruby, she wasn’t surprised. People get so lonely sometimes that they need to tell someone their story, she said. They want to feel like someone will remember them. They want to feel human. I didn’t understand it at the time.

  “The Queen,” I say. The man looks at me. “That’s where I came from. I worked for the Queen.” I pause. After a moment, his eyebrows rise, and I know that he understands. The Queen is known for many things, but the women of the palace are easily the most famous. I raise my chin to show that I’m not ashamed. “But I’m not going back.”

  “Hmm,” he murmurs. I study his face, expecting judgment, but I find none. “I was headed her way,” he says. “Heard the stories, but I’ve never been. What’s she like?”

  I look into the fire, thinking of my last dinner with the Queen. She usually brought guests to the dining room, and she had a near-constant stream of them coming through to trade or sample the wares. On rare occasions she’d invite all the girls to celebrate, but a private dinner with her was almost unheard of. I was sure she had learned about my plan to leave, and fairly sure she was going to kill me for it.

  But instead she gave me a rare treat of canned fruit and read to me from one of her old books. I hardly understood the words, but I enjoyed listening to her talk in her strange, lilting voice. Nobody else speaks like she does. I love it, like I love her flowing dresses and her colorful makeup and her stories of a world I never knew. She knows so much that everyone else seems to have forgotten, not just words and stories but facts and secrets that are almost like magic. One of them—the secret of how to fix the river water so people can drink it without getting sick—is what made her so powerful. Her control of the water made followers flock to her. I had witnessed the palace grow from a safe house to a fortress to the heart of a trade empire. Now the townies all know her name, and traders say things like All roads lead to the Queen.

  And still she made time to invite me for dinner and read aloud to me. Before I left that night, she even let me try on her red lipstick and showed me my reflection in a handheld mirror. I hardly recognized myself. It made me smile.

  It’s been a long while since I’ve seen that, she said, looking at me. Must be your color, darling.

  “Kind,” I say, my stomach churning with the guilt of my betrayal. “And ruthless. Smart. Unusual.” I shrug my shoulders, still staring at the flames. “She’s royalty,” I say, because that’s truly the best way to explain her.

  “Great,” the man mutters dryly. “Another fuckin’ weirdo, then.”

  My mouth twists with annoyance.

  “She’d kill you for saying that,” I inform him.

  “All right. Noted.”

  I glare at him a moment longer before curiosity gets the better of me.

  “What are you buying?” I ask. People only go to the Queen if they need something.

  “Guns. Ammo.”

  “Why?”

  “Nope, my turn. You learned to kill like that working for the Queen?”

  My eyebrows draw together. The answer seems obvious to me.

  “That’s the first thing we learned,” I say.

  The man smiles, no teeth this time.

  “Guess that makes sense,” he says. “Things are different out here, though. Run into someone with a gun, and you’ll be dead before you get close enough to use that knife.”

  I glance at the body of a raider nearby, a mess of blood and teeth where his face should be. The Queen taught us the basics of how to use a gun, of course, mainly as a way to defend the palace if there was ever an assault from the outside. In a one-on-one fight, she said, by the time someone had a gun aimed at us, we were already dead. Knives were more practical—easier to hide, less likely to turn on you. But as this man said, things are different out in the wastes. If he hadn’t been here tonight, the shots I missed would’ve gotten me killed. I can’t let that happen again.

  “You shoot well,” I say.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How?”

  “The fuck is this, show and tell?” the man mutters to himself, looking down at the shotgun in his lap. After a moment, he sighs and shrugs. “Before the bombs dropped, most people stored away their heirlooms and valuables and shit,” he says. “My parents were cops. They brought guns. They knew things were only gonna get worse.” He glances over his shoulder at the wastes. “Don’t think they knew it would get this fucked, but hey, what can you do?”

  “Cops?”

  “They worked for the law.”

  I nod.

  “What about yours?” he asks, and I shrug. “Well, lucky you. You didn’t have to see what the end of the world turned them into.” He says it like he’s making a joke, but the words come out bitter. I don’t ask more; that seems like a wound that doesn’t need salting. Quiet follows, and in the silence, unwanted questions slither up in my thoughts. What would my daughter have thought of me? Would she be ashamed? Would she—

  I shake my head and push away the questions.

  “Anyway, I’m—”

  “Teach me how to shoot,” I say quietly, and the man stops. He stares at me blankly for a moment, and then the corner of his mouth quirks up.

  “You kidding?”

  “I’m a good learner,” I say.

  “Well, I’m no goddamn teacher,” he says. “And I’m not looking to pick up strays, all right?”

  I sit back, hug my knees to my chest, and look into the fire, pushing my disappointment deep down so it won’t show on my face. On the other side of the flames, the man sighs.

  “What’s your name, anyway?” he asks.

  “Dolly.”

  “That’s not a real name.”

  I shrug. “Yours?”

  His eyes narrow, and his jaw works like he’s chewing something tough. Finally, he says, “Wolf.”

  I pause, studying him.

  “You just made that up,” I say.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s no worse than your fake name.”

  “Mine’s not fake.”

  “Well, it sure as hell ain’t what your momma named you.”

  My mouth opens and shuts. I don’t remember my mother—she died shortly after I was born—but he’s right, there was another name. It’s been so many years since I’ve spoken it or heard it, it hardly seems to belong to me now. But the Queen called me it when I was younger, when she wasn’t the Queen yet, when she was only Elizabeth. This was before the nicknames, before the palace. This was when I was just a desperate teenage girl in a group of scavengers that was dying off one by one, and she was just a kind old woman passing through. A group of hard-eyed folk with guns followed her—and, peeking out from behind them, a small handful of other girls around my own age.

  The Queen was a wondrous sight, wearing all red in a world of brown and gray, like a picture from a book. I was so weak and ill that I half-thought I imagined her. She pressed a bottle of water into my hands and asked my name, and I told her through tears of relief, and she said, Come with us. We’re going to make a safe place for girls like you—

  “Hana.”

  �
��What?”

  “My name,” I say. “But call me Dolly.”

  “You’re right, Dolly is better.” I frown at him, and he chuckles. “Aw, hell, I’m joking. Lighten up.”

  “Yours?”

  He leans back, shrugs his shoulders.

  “Wolf,” he says. “Already told you.”

  I let out a huff of air, and he releases a surprisingly loud laugh. I don’t ask again. I know he won’t answer.

  “Anyway,” he says, “I dunno about you, but I’m pretty wiped out after all that fighting. You can show me the way to the Queen’s in the morning.”

  “I’m not going back.”

  “Well, you better think long and hard about if you’d rather die in the wastes,” he says. “Nobody makes it long out here alone.”

  I look down at my hands, sitting in my lap covered in dried blood. I’ve spent only a single day out in the wastelands. A single day close to the Queen’s palace, nonetheless, the so-called safest area around here, since she chases away the raiders and crazies who harass trade caravans on their way through. And already I’ve ended up in this mess. I’m tired and sore, my gun is out of ammo, and my water is gone. I could very well die tomorrow.

  And living at the palace wasn’t so bad. I had a roof over my head, a bed to sleep in, all the food and water I could ask for. My body was a small price to pay. I learned early on to distance myself—to make my body a tool, a weapon. After that, it wasn’t so hard. Many people would kill for the life I had. Maybe it doesn’t get any better than that.

  When I look up again, Wolf is sifting through his pack. He opens the barrel of his shotgun, discards the shells over his shoulder, and lowers it into his lap to reload. It seems intentional, like he wants me to see—a warning, I assume. With that done, he pulls out a ratty blanket, covers himself, and curls up near the fire with the gun tucked under his arm. Surely he’s not going to sleep like that; surely he’s not just going to fall asleep in front of a near-total stranger who killed a handful of people in front of him.