Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

“We are one more disaster away from a mob as we speak,” Crandall agreed, crookedly smiling. “I think the space-scout is finally starting to wise up to that and that’s bad for you, sweets. He’s going to need someone else to blame when the shit hits.”

“Keep your head down and your mouth shut,” Eric warned. “For what it’s worth, I actually think you’ve got your head on pretty straight, but I’m not putting my ass on the line to cover yours. Regardless of what that loudmouth says, this isn’t a colony. This is a whole new world, Bierce, and it’s every man for himself.”

3

They hiked for days in the rain, moving the camp piece by heavy piece, following a storm-swelled fall of water up the eastern slope and away from the Pioneer. It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did, but Scott refused to leave anything behind. The purifier, the generator, even the stupid bags of concrete—everything was the property of Manifest Destiny, everything was necessary to the settlement of a self-sustaining colony, and everything came with them.

Amber did not object. She carried her concrete all day and slept in the rain all night and took the single ration she was allotted and did not so much as mutter under her breath. Now and then, Scott came out of his tent long enough to say inspiring things about the indomitable spirit of exploration or the human will to thrive and survive, and it bothered her to see so many people not only listening but smiling and nodding and sometimes clapping their hands, but she didn’t say anything.

The rain began to wind down the same day that they actually made it over the top and started down the other side. The view was pretty much what it had been on the other side of the valley, except that there wasn’t an enormous skid-mark slashed through the middle of it or a pile of melted wreckage entombing fifty thousand human beings. It was just grass. Brown grass and tangles of trees stretching out for God knew how many miles beneath the low, rolling clouds, uninterrupted by even the most ambiguous sign of civilization.

But there was life. The total lack of cities, roads or any other distraction made the small groups of animals grazing on the plains impossible to miss. To Amber, whose personal experience with animals could be almost entirely summed up by dogs, cats, rats and roaches, they didn’t look too scary. Long-necked bodies and four thin legs made them look more or less like deer, except that they also had long tails. Instead of antlers, they had a set of back-sweeping horns, in addition to which they also had two huge jutting tusks. Their shiny, scale-covered skin was brownish on top and black underneath, with a white stripe on their bellies that only showed if they stood up on their hind legs, which two of them kept doing, gronking and clawing at each other with their hoofless, taloned feet.

People began to murmur in an uneasy way.

“They’re not going to bother us tonight,” said Scott firmly. “Let’s establish our camp and secure a perimeter. Over there.”

He pointed at a hilltop not too steep or too far off, with a few trees around it, but not so many that they had grown into impassable thorny walls. It wasn’t right up by the stream anymore, but maybe that was a good thing, if the native animals decided to wander over in the middle of the night for a drink.

That first night wasn’t bad. The wind never let up, but no one complained; it felt good just to dry out a little. There was enough deadwood lying around to start a couple fires and Scott pulled out a pocketknife, of all things, so that people could take turns cutting grass and dried thorns to keep burning. Dag roasted his ration on a stick, so a couple other people did too. Amber didn’t have another ration. She sat next to Nicci, watching her sister try to heat bites of concentrated protein supplement on a stick, and listened to the scaly deer-things bawl and gash at each other.

When it got dark and the talk died down and Nicci wrapped herself inside her laughably ineffective emergency blanket and fell asleep, Amber picked up one of the roasting sticks and fingered thoughtfully at its heat-hardened point.

* * *

Early the following morning, Scott crept out of his tent and gathered the Fleetmen for his usual meeting. Amber woke up as they filed quietly out of the sleeping area and over to the crates and things, stacked at one end of camp to form Scott’s idea of a windbreak. It hadn’t worked.

She drowsed for a few minutes to let them have their male-bonding time during the morning pee, and when she heard their low voices begin to pick up again under the wind, she got up. She rolled up her blanket, stuffed it in her duffel, picked up Nicci’s roasting stick, and headed over to join them.

“—unless we can provide them with some kind of future,” Scott was saying, but he stopped when the others looked at her and turned to see her for himself.

He blushed, which was a weird reaction. “This is a debriefing, Miss Bierce. Please go sit down somewhere. I’ll pass out the MREs when we’re done.”

There were so many things she wanted to say about the democratic process he kept insisting they still had in this so-called colony, but instead, she forced on a smile, held up her hands, and said, “Truce, okay?”

They all looked at the stick she was holding.

“I’m aware that you haven’t sorted out the priorities yet,” began Amber, picking her way very carefully toward her goal in her most diplomatic tone, “but when you get around to wanting a closer look at those animals, I think it would be a good idea if the people in your scouting party had something like this with them. Just in case, you know?”

Eric reached out and plucked at the tip of the stick.

“You’re not anywhere on my list of people to go on that scouting mission, Miss Bierce,” said Scott bluntly. “So get it out of your head right now. I need people in peak physical condition for that.”

“No fat chicks, I get it.” Amber made herself stop there, then pinned up that smile again and started over. “Even if I can’t do the running around that’s involved, I can at least help with the preparations. If I could borrow your knife, I—”

“Not a chance.”

“—could spend the whole day making grown-up versions of this,” Amber said stubbornly, but softly. “So when you get a team organized—”

“That is not where my priorities are right now, Miss Bierce.”

“Then let me do it. I’ll ask for volunteers, I’ll make the spears—”

Scott stepped forward so fast and so unexpectedly that she jumped back, banged the back of her knees into a crate of pipes, and went down hard on her ass. He leaned over her, absolutely furious, but barely speaking above a whisper, careful not to wake anyone in the camp beyond them. “Before you start re-enacting The Lord of the Flies around here, you might want to remember what happened to Piggy. You’re not the only one who ever thought of sharpening sticks.”

Before Amber could decide how to respond to these bizarre but unmistakably hostile statements, Scott turned around and stalked off.

Baffled, Amber looked over at Eric and Dag. “What the hell was that about?”

Eric shook his head, looking away in a vague manner, frowning.

“It’s from a book they made everyone read in school,” said Crandall. “About some gay Brit kids who get stranded on some island.”

“Did he just call me a pig?”

“There was one in the book.”

Amber eyed him narrowly. “What happened to it?”

“I think the kids fucked it or killed it or both.” Crandall shrugged. “Yeah, it didn’t make a lot of sense in the book either, but I had to write a whole page on how incredibly fucking profound it was, I remember that.”

“So…” Amber sent a searching gaze across the camp, but Scott had gone inside his tent. She tried to laugh the whole thing off, but no one joined her in it and the sound she made was clearly an angry one. “So what the hell kind of threat was that?”

“You just need to back off a little,” said Eric quietly. “That’s all.”

“Back off what? All I want to do is think about hunting! I didn’t say it had to be today! I just want him to plan for it! How is that so wrong?”

Eric and Dag exchanged another set of glances. She followed their gaze afterwards to the stick in her hand.

“What?” she said, tightening her grip.

“It just doesn’t look good,” said Eric. “Arming yourself. Calm down. It’s nothing serious.”

She turned to him fast and hissed, “He! Doesn’t! Feed me! That feels pretty fucking serious to me!”

They shuffled a little and avoided her eyes.

“I asked for his permission! I gave him every opportunity to go back and pretend like it was his idea! Does he think those stupid rations are going to last forever? What does he think we’re going to eat when they’re gone?”

Eric shrugged, still not meeting her eyes. “He’ll come around. Just let him figure it out on his own. Let him decide when it’s time.”

Amber threw up her empty hand and slapped it loudly down on the top of the crate. “Wait until the food runs out, is that it? Look, we don’t have guns here. We don’t even have bows. We have Scott’s pocketknife and a whole lot of stupid sticks.”

“I know, I know—”

“No, I don’t think you do. I don’t think you get it yet that when it comes to hunting, we’re going to have to chase things around and stab them! How many meals do you think we’ll have to skip before that becomes impossible?”

“Okay, calm down.”

“I don’t want to calm down, I want you to get pissed! Scott can talk all he wants about how a human being can live three weeks without food, but I guarantee you, two days after we eat the last of those crappy ration bars, no one is going to be able to run down one of these fucking deer!”

Eric and Dag went for Round Three of the meaningful looks. At the end of it, Eric sighed and raked his hand through his hair. “Yeah, I know,” he said, and sat down on a stack of cement bags.

“Then why aren’t you helping me?” Amber demanded. “If we all talked to him together, we could make him do something!”

“Oh, he’d do something, all right.” Crandall snorted and kicked a crate. “Look, Bierce, you’ve got balls, no one’s saying you don’t, but it’s obvious you didn’t do too well in school.”

“What, because I never heard of the Lord of the Pigs? Who the hell cares about that now?”

“Flies,” Crandall corrected. “And also because you suck at basic math. So let me help you with your homework, honey. The four of us, and maybe Yao, plus alien critters we know nothing about, minus guns, plus pointed sticks, equals somebody getting hurt. Guaranteed.”

“But we can’t just—”

“Shut up a sec, I’m not done. So far we’ve been really lucky and so far people have stayed pretty calm—that’s some more math, see if you can figure it out yourself—but when we come back from our first big hunt carrying some bloody, screaming mess that used to be you, people are going to freak and they might not stop.”

“Used to be me, huh?”

“And when it happens,” Eric said quietly, “Scott is going to be right there telling everybody how sharks can smell blood from ten miles away and who knows what could be out there tracking you down. You’ll be gone, Bierce.”

“He can’t throw me out,” she scoffed. “He can call himself Captain or Commander or King of the fucking Fly-People for all I care, but he can’t make me leave if I don’t want to.”

Crandall gave her a crooked, scornful smile. “There’s this other book they made us read in school called Animal Farm. Bet you never read that one either, huh?”

Amber rolled her eyes. “No. Is there a pig in it?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, there’s two. One’s a real smart pig who wants to help all the dumb sheep and dogs and chickens on the farm, you know, live a better life. The other one’s pretty much a talker. Guess which pig takes over and which one disappears?”

“What happened to the sheep?” asked Amber.

Crandall quit smiling.

“Come on, Bierce, we’re on your side,” said Eric, with a warning glance at Crandall. “All he’s saying is, Scott wouldn’t have to do anything to you but what he already does, and that’s talk.”

“Is that what you’re scared of?” Amber demanded. “That he’ll talk at you?”

“Not at us,” said Eric, with just a hint of disdain in his expression even though his tone remained even. “Against us.”

“I’m shaking.”

“You should be.”

“Basic math,” said Crandall again. “Even if you got the three of us to stand up for you—and I’ll tell you right now, I wouldn’t—and maybe Yao and, sure why not, that whiny little bitch of yours, he’ll get all the rest of them.”

“He’s got most of them already,” Dag commented. “Just because they’re Manifestors like him.”

“He’s out there every day and night telling people they don’t have to worry, this is all temporary and no one will ever get hurt. And what are you saying?” Eric asked, now blatantly contemptuous. “That we have to kill aliens to survive.”

“We do!” Amber exploded. “For God’s sake, I’m not sending anyone out after giant bugs or dinosaurs or those…those fucking black-banana-headed things! They’re deer! They eat grass! They’re tiny!”

“They’re almost as tall as we are, they have horns and tusks, and they fight each other constantly!” Eric shot back. “That’s exactly the kind of bullshit that makes it easy for him to talk people onto his side, because you act like this is no big deal and it fucking well is!”

She’d never heard him swear before and it rattled her. Amber looked at her spear, picking strips of bark away from the unfinished point, still angry but unsure how to argue.

“We need to figure things out. I admit that, Bierce. I agree. I’m on your damn side! But you have got to back off and let Scott come around in his own time!”

“We’ll talk to him,” said Dag. He put out his hand.

She looked at it, at her stick, then at him again. “What?”

Dag sighed and Eric said, “Give it up, Bierce. You’ll get it back, I promise.”

“No.”

“Okay,” said Crandall, smiling. “Give it up or I’ll knock you down and take it.”

Eric murmured something too low for Amber to catch.

“The hell I won’t, man. I show up with that thing in one hand and Bierce with a black eye in the other and that prancing little prick will probably give me a medal. Nothing personal, sweets, but then again, you are starting to piss me off.”

Dag looked at Amber again. He sighed and held his hand out further.

She gave him the stick. “This is wrong and you know it.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t change the way things are and you know it.” He put the stick on his shoulder like a rifle and walked away, heading for Scott’s tent.

Eric followed. Crandall stayed.

“You know what your problem is?” he asked, not without a careless sort of sympathy.

“Pretty sure I’m looking at it.”

“Ha ha, but only sort of. Your problem, Bierce, is that you expect us all to be survivalists just because we’ve survived something. The fact is, those people you’re pinning all our future hopes on are Manifestors. That means they were sheep before the ship crashed, so why the hell you think they’re not going to be sheep now is beyond me.”

“Because our lives are at stake, goddammit.” She kicked at the ground and glared at him. “And some of those sheep are supposed to be soldiers.”

“Soldiers?” He laughed at her. “Lady, I ain’t even old enough to drink. Nine weeks of basic training, twelve weeks of so-called deep space training, and I’m in the Fleet. You call that a soldier? I call it a forty thousand dollar check I’ll never get to cash.” He leaned out to look back toward camp, where more and more people were waking up, then settled back and just studied her for a while. “You gonna live?”

“Are any of us?”

“Little Miss Sunshine.” He glanced over his shoulder at the nearest stand of trees and looked at her again. “Want to fuck?”

“Excuse me?”

“I didn’t stutter. And you ain’t blushing, remember?” He ran an eye over her shirt-front in an interested way, but somehow without leering. “We probably got a few minutes before people really start to get underfoot. I’ll settle for a blowjob.”

“You’ll settle for jerking off.”

“Suit yourself, but this is opportunity knocking here. You ought to know that Scott’s already talking about taking you off the MREs completely.”

“What? He can’t do that!”

Crandall shrugged. “See, this is what happens when you don’t play ball nice. The biggest boy picks it up and goes home.”

“I don’t need you to take care of me.” Amber stood up and pushed past him while he smirked at her. “But you go right ahead and tell Scott I don’t need his rations. If that’s the way he wants to play it, I can make a spear without his stupid knife.”

“Sure you can.”

“And just for shits and giggles, let’s imagine that I actually come back with something, shall we? How many sheep do you think that’ll get me?” She swung around and glared at him. His smile was gone. “If he wants to line everybody up and make them choose sides, that’s what we’ll do. And while all you big boys are off playing with your balls, I’ll be having a barbeque with all my new friends. How does that sound?”

“Like a real nice fantasy, Bierce. You hold on to that. It’ll get you through some cold, rainy nights.”

“Amber?”

Crandall’s gaze shifted past her. He smiled. “Hey, Nicci.”

“Um, hi. Commander Scott wants me to start the fire and I can’t get it to stay lit.”

“I’ll be right there. Go on.”

Nicci turned around, but looked back when Crandall called her name. Smiling, he dipped into his back pocket and came out with a wrapped ration bar.

“Don’t even fucking think it!” Amber snarled, violently enough that Nicci fled.

Crandall grinned and tossed the ration to the crate beside her. “Give it to Babycakes if you want, no strings. But think about it.”

“Fuck you.” She didn’t touch the ration, didn’t even look at it.

“That’s the idea. Listen, Bierce. Seriously. You’re a tough little cookie, but you are in no condition to take care of yourself. I can. I’m not such a bad guy.” He shrugged, ducking his head in a sheepish sort of smile without ever taking his eyes off her. The combination was unsettling. “I’m not looking for a girlfriend. I just want someone who can keep her mouth shut when I want it shut and open when I want it open.”

“Charming.”

“I ain’t a charming guy. I ain’t pretending to be. But I can take care of you. Come on, you’re smart enough to know that you’re not going to have a choice forever.”

The wind didn’t blow any harder, but it got colder.

“What are you talking about now?” Amber asked. She tried to say it hard, like a tough woman right at the end of her patience with little boys and their bullshit, but it didn’t come out that way and she knew it.

“Basic math.” He still wasn’t leering. “There’s eleven of you girls and thirty-seven of us guys.”

“So?”

He rolled his eyes. “Okay, whatever. Play dumb, get mad, do whatever you have to do. When you’re done, I’ll be waiting for that blowjob. Be discreet,” he said, heading back to camp. “I don’t want anybody thinking I’m a chubby-chaser.”

Amber snatched up the ration from the crate beside her and threw it. It whipped through the air, missed him entirely, and landed in the wet grass. He picked it up, laughing. Then he was gone and she was left shaking in the wind and trying to tell herself it was because she was angry.

Just angry.

4

Although the right to move freely between the cities of Gann had been a favorite dream as a boy, Meoraq the man did not enjoy travel. He didn’t hate it; travel was an inevitability of being Sheulek, which was so great a sign of his divine Father’s favor that he could hate nothing that came of it. But the distance between the cities of his circuit was vast and the land that separated them, gone ugly with the coming winter. The wind was always blowing—frequently in his face—and at this time of year, the steady rain necessitated the choice of walking on the road and miring himself in mud or cutting across the wildlands and soaking himself to the hips in wet brush. Meoraq had only one comfort as he walked and it was the knowledge that he was not going home to take possession of House Uyane. The extraordinary honor of entering Xi’Matezh and hearing the voice of God was shamefully secondary, but he was praying about that.

So he was deep in the wildlands and wet to the hips, comfortably numbed within his own mind but keeping an idle eye out for danger, alone and expecting nothing but to stay alone for all the days of his journey, when Meoraq saw what was probably the strangest thing he’d ever seen.

His circuit of service was a wide one, encompassing twenty-three of the fifty-one cities in Yroq, and he had been predisposed to wander in his first years of service. He had explored many ruins and seen many forbidden relics, but after close inspection of this new thing, Meoraq decided it wasn’t old. Many of the machines the Ancients left behind them still functioned, maintaining themselves with surprising success even after all this time, but all of them showed their age. No matter how clean a thing was or how often repaired, age got in. The air itself could corrode a thing, given enough time, but this looked new.

Of course, men did fall from Sheul’s laws. Those who lived in wretchedness and sin outside the city walls did occasionally try to remake the machines. Some even succeeded to a small degree. But this was no machine. He didn’t know what it was, but it was no machine.

What it looked like was a bedsheet, blown into a hsul tree where it had been so hopelessly tangled in its thorny branches that the wind could not carry it out again. It was not a bedsheet, however. It was metal. At least, it looked like metal, the shiny grey-white of purest silver, save that it was as pliant as fine cloth and thinner even than a sheet of paper. Although the thorns of the hsul had pierced it and the wind torn its unbound edge to streamers, Meoraq suspected it had begun as a single squarish piece.

He had no idea what it was supposed to be, but clearly he had been meant to find it. Meoraq made his camp there and sat in the open mouth of his tent most of the afternoon, watching the silvery ribbons of the windblown thing snap and flash. When he slept, he dreamed of the tower of fire rising in the night, beckoning.

The silver sheet remained unfathomable by morning’s light and so Meoraq left it. He considered cutting a piece to carry with him, but ultimately decided against it. The thing could not be a relic of the Ancients or the construct of men; therefore, it was a sign from Sheul and as such, it was probably a sin to cut it. It made him uneasy to think that there was nothing in the Word about such manifestations and whether it was safe to touch them, but this was a pilgrimage and tests were to be expected.

His journey continued. The land resumed its customary view of nothing, but his mind at least was occupied. He meditated as he walked, wondering what the silver sheet had been meant to represent to him and feeling more and more like he’d failed in his first ordeal, but he was not so distracted that he failed to see the footprints when he came to fill his travel-flasks at a stream.

So. The wildlands might appear lifeless, the same way they appeared barren, but even as the rolling sameness of the landscape was made up of grass and trees and beasts and a thousand living things, every shadowed dip or stand of trees could hide a raiding party. No, it was not curiosity that made Meoraq crouch down to read the marks better, but the alarm that came from seeing, not a ragged band of six or twelve or even twenty, but a well-shoed troop with numbers great enough to trample down the stream-bank four body-lengths to one side.

He thought of Szadt, the only raider he’d ever heard of that had commanded numbers such as these. He knew Szadt was dead and buried deep in Gann’s cold grip—another brick to add to Uyane Rasozul’s wall of legend—but the thought bit at him all the same. Sheul’s Word said that each generation was given one great plague, one scourge, and one blessing. Szadt had been the scourge of his father; perhaps this one was Meoraq’s own.

He filled only one flask, keeping his burden light, and followed the tracks upstream. He made no camp that night, set no fires. He ate bites of cuuvash when he required them and drank only what his body needed. He found the ash-pits of their many fires, the flattened fields of their many messy encampments, the rain-soaked and half-hidden piles of their stinking dung, and before the sun had reached its highest point on that next day, he had found them.

Soon after, Meoraq lay on his belly in the brush beneath a small stand of prairie trees, trusting to the tall grass to hide him as he watched them. He did not count them; he could see at a glance there were more than he could fight. He saw no sentries, which he did not trust given the size of this band, and so did not dare to approach closer than this ridge, but even at this distance he could see that there was something wrong with them.

They could not have been long in this camp, he decided. There were no hides hanging from the trees, no bone-midden, no sign of any shelter apart from a handful of flimsy, silvery tents. He could see crates, presumably for trade (for there would always be men wicked enough to develop that evil hunger for phesok and strong drink), but no sleds or carts. The mystery of the curious depth of the tracks he had followed seemed to be solved, but the mystery of why they were carrying their goods in arms only deepened. He supposed some of those he saw might be slaves, but all the prints he’d seen were those of very well-made boots and what raider would shoe a slave?

Then there was the matter of their dress. They did not wear hides, nor could he make out the lines of any belt or harness cut across their colorful clothing. He could see no weapons strapped to any back or slung in a communal heap for the easy reach of all. In fact, many of them appeared to be gloved and hooded, because what he could see of their hands and faces looked pale. Not merely grey, as with youth or bad diet, but really pale. He couldn’t imagine how they could be covering their faces like that and still see.

Then one of them got up and turned to the side and Meoraq realized they had not covered their faces after all.

They had none.

5

At the center of camp, unaware of the new eyes watching them from the shadows, the survivors of the crash of the Pioneer prepared for their first Stone Age hunt. Amber was right in the thick of them, heating up the tips of the spears she’d helped cut earlier that morning. Scott had deigned to give her his approval, and she knew she’d ought to be wired up with the thrill of that victory if nothing else, but she wasn’t. She wouldn’t leave camp at all today if it weren’t for the fact that she knew Scott expected her to chicken out when it came time to actually get out there and stab a scaly deer. He probably already had some kind of speech prepared to the effect that she was a whiny little bitch and if she didn’t like the way he did the leading around here, she could leave.

She didn’t need Scott’s help to feel like shit today, anyway. That had started last night, when the skies ripped open and dumped what felt like a bucket of water directly over her head. The rain hadn’t lasted long, but it had been just exactly like standing in the shower while it was happening. Or lying in the shower, rather. Covered in an emergency blanket that couldn’t keep the wet out no matter how she wrapped herself in it, so tired that she didn’t even care that she was lying in rainwater, Amber had thought she felt as bad as it was humanly possible to feel.

And then she’d heard Eric, jogging back from a brief midnight trip to the bushes, pause beside Maria’s blanket. “You sure you don’t want to get cozy?” he’d asked. He’d had to shout it, really. So much rain. “Two people can fit if they’re cozy.”

Amber raised her head to watch, expecting a tirade that might actually end in some kind of fair tent rotation since it wasn’t coming from Amber herself. Instead, Maria threw back her blanket almost at once, snarling, “I am so ready to get cozy. Let’s go.”

If Eric was surprised by the speed and ease of this capitulation, he hid it well. He helped her up, grabbed her pack, and the two of them splashed through the soggy grass to his bivy. It bucked and rolled for a few minutes as they worked their way in and then the flap zipped shut.

Amber put her head back down and listened to their two voices, unintelligible beneath the rain. In the dark, she could make out only the faintest outline of the bivy. When it started moving, she closed her eyes. She pulled her emergency blanket over her ears so the rain could hammer out the identity of the women who went to the other bivies. She just put her arm around Nicci to make sure she couldn’t be one of them. She pretended not to know why when Nicci started crying.

And she slept, eventually, because she was just so damned tired.

She woke up before dawn, soaked to the pruny skin, and hobbled into the bushes to pee. She thought the low ache in her belly was hunger right up until she got her pants down and saw the blood.

Terror woke her all the way up before she realized what she was looking at. Of course. Her implant was gone and the stupid umbilicus in the Sleeper had been giving her works a tune-up and oil all the way here, wherever here was. She wasn’t dying; she’d gotten her period. Her very first period. Wearing a pair of white pants.

Motherfuck.

“Suck it up, little girl,” she hissed at herself, absolutely disgusted. “Grow a goddamn sense of proportion. This shouldn’t even make your list of problems.”

So she went back for her duffel bag and took it a little deeper into the trees. She pulled some grass and wadded it into a pad of sorts and stuffed that in her panties. Off came the white pants with the red badge of womanhood stamped across the crotch and on went her only pair of jeans. As for the evidence, she stuffed it under the exposed roots of one of the trees, scraping up handfuls of wet earth to push into the hole until it was good and buried. She felt guilty doing it since they were perfectly good pants, but she was never going to get that blood out and if she had to listen to just one joke, she was going to have to kill someone. After washing the (blood) mud off her hands at the stream, she’d gone back to camp, walking right past Scott and his loyal lieutenants at their morning debriefing so she could curl up in her blanket and pretend nothing had happened.