Defiant: Quantic Dreams Book 2 by Elizabeth McLaughlin (reading list txt) 📗

Another potential food source. Pulling on one of the thin branches I found that the wood was green and flexible. Shit. This wouldn’t be good for starting a fire. I pressed a fingernail into the end of the branch and my worries were confirmed as a bead of water leaked out over it. I thought about trying to dry the wood in the sun but there was no way to do it before I ended up as kitty chow. Knocking shavings off of it with the spade might work, perhaps trying to use some smaller twigs.

I took an experimental whack at the tree’s trunk with the spade and the whole thing swayed. Twigs and leaves fell to the ground and upon inspection I saw that a good sized chunk of tree had been cut away. Even if I chopped the whole thing down, it would probably be a waste of energy to drag the whole thing back to camp. I made the decision to try anyway. If nothing else, hacking at the tree provided a great outlet for the anger and frustration pent up in my veins.

whack

Marcus, Fiona, and Eliza, trapped in an underground bunker with a computerized psychopath.

whack

Allison and Tarik, and countless others who had undoubtedly suffered a horrific death suffocating on their own blood and water.

whack

Me, the idiot who had put a thousand people in mortal danger. Me, who was too weak to take the courageous way out and risk dying alongside my people.

whack

Our chances of survival, winnowing to nothing with every passing minute.

WHACK

The way I was going to rip Gabriel apart, limb by limb, if I made it through this. The tree fell with a massive crack, scaring away every living creature within hearing distance. So much for the hopes of a squirrel dinner. Hefting the tree onto my shoulders I started the long trek back up the hill and to camp. My work was nowhere near finished. The feel of the bark against my neck was rough. As it scraped up and down on my skin, the rhythm became meditative. Scrape, scrape. I would no doubt have a wound by the time I got ‘home’, the tree wearing its own mark into my flesh. I didn’t mind. If the tree was to be the arbiter of my salvation, the least I could do was to let it leave one lasting imprint in this world. I crested the hill to discover that my camp had been invaded. The small prey animals I had scared away with my lumberjack act had apparently discovered my camp-and the food within. I dropped the tree and ran towards my tent.

“Hey!”

A bevy of small mammals leapt out of the grass and bolted. I bent to inspect the damage. A palm sized hole of fabric had been chewed away from my tent fabric. Unzipping the tent, I discovered that the little bastards had made off with most of my would-be crab dinner. As sorry as I was to lose the food, it was stranger to me that what I assumed were prey animals were carnivores. A distant lesson from younger days ripped through my mind. Something about how certain animals could adapt from a primarily herbivore diet to an omnivorous one in times of hardship. Given how wasted away the cat-thing was, I guessed that food was scare out here for everything. The crab meat that remained had been chewed away and I tossed it as far as I could from my campsite. There was no sense in trying to cook through contaminated meat. Plus, with luck, I wouldn’t need more food anytime soon. The second to last survival ration of food served as a decent dinner. A little more water went down with it, the cool liquid making me distinctly aware of how very thirsty I was.

First on the agenda was making my own fire. I ran to retrieve the tree, now stained orange by the late afternoon sun. I dragged it to camp and set about ripping off as many twigs as I could. Thankfully, my invasive little forest friends had largely left the pile of grass and plants I gathered earlier in the day alone. Leaving them in the tent all day had done a good job of leaching any remaining wetness, resulting in a pile of dry tinder. I returned to my little fire pit and laid out the largest plants in a triangle. The smaller plants and scraps of grass went on top, and twigs on top of them. I ripped a patch of grass from the ground and laid it out next to my flint stone. A drag of the spade against the entrance let loose a shower of sparks. They dropped onto the grass and I bent down to blow on them gently, and a tiny flame burst forth. It attached itself to the long plants and grew, the warmth spreading, light dancing. I chopped a couple of larger branches from the tree and laid them into a pyramid. The fire cast a light wide enough for me to work by.

I picked up the remains of my torch from the day before and lit it. It wouldn’t last me very long, but it illuminated the trek from camp to the back boundary of where I wanted the fire to end. I dug a small ring of dirt at the end of the line and set the grass inside it on fire. More theater for my nerves. I figured that if the cat-thing was out there it might see the second fire and decide to stay away for now. The spade Gabriel had provided me was small—only about the size of my forearm—and made digging all the harder. By the time I was finished I had a length of overturned dirt almost a hundred feet long. When I stood, my knees protested. The cloth I had wrapped around my feet was starting to come apart, the ordinary strength of the fibers ripped by rock fragments and the