Astrid swung the pack off her shoulders, loosened the drawstring, and extracted a pair of heavy gloves sized for a grown man.
She surveyed the blackberry bramble for ripe berries. They didn’t all ripen at once, and she never allowed herself to take any before they were fully developed. This was her blackberry patch, the only one she’d located, and she was determined not to be greedy.
Astrid’s stomach rumbled as she dealt with the incredibly sharp thorns—so sharp they sometimes went right through the gloves—and pried berries loose. She took two dozen: dessert for later.
She was at the northern edge of the FAYZ, up where the barrier cut through the Stefano Rey National Park. Here the trees—redwoods, black oak, quaking aspen, ash—grew tall. Some were cut through by the barrier. In places branches went into the barrier. She wondered if they came out the other side.
She wasn’t far inland, just a quarter mile or maybe a little more from the shore, where she often searched for oysters, clams, mussels, and crabs no bigger than large roaches.
Astrid was usually hungry. But she wasn’t starving.
Water was a bigger concern. She’d found a water tank at the ranger station, and she’d found a tiny stream of what seemed like clean, fresh water fed from some underground aquifer, but neither was close to her camp. And since water weighed a lot to carry, she had to watch every drop and—
A sound.
Astrid crouched, swung her shotgun off her shoulder, raised it, sighted along the barrels, all in one fluid, long-practiced move.
She listened. Listened hard. She heard her heart pounding and willed it to slow, slow, quiet so she could listen.
Her breath was ragged but she calmed it a little, at least.
She scanned slowly, turning her upper body left to right, then back, covering the trees where she thought the sound had come from. She listened hard in all directions.
Nothing.
Sound!
Dry leaves and damp earth. Not heavy, whatever it was. It wasn’t a heavy sound. Not a Drake sound. Not even a coyote.
Astrid relaxed a little. Her shoulders were tight. She rolled them, hoping to avoid a cramp.
Something small scuttled away. Probably a possum or a skunk.
Not Drake.
Not the monster with the tentacle for an arm. Not the sadist. The psychopath.
The murderer, Whip Hand.
Astrid stood all the way up and slipped the shotgun back into place.
How many times each day did she endure this same fear? How many hundreds of times had she peered into the trees or bushes or rocks searching for that narrow, dead-eyed face? Day and night. As she dressed. As she cooked. As she used the slit trench. When she slept. How many times? And how many times had she imagined firing both barrels of the shotgun straight into his face, obliterating his features, blood spraying … and knowing that he would still come after her?
She would pump round after round into him and still she would be the one running and gasping for air, tripping through the forest, crying, and knowing that nothing she could do would stop him.
The evil that could not be killed.
The evil that sooner or later would take her.
With her berries safely tucked away in her backpack Astrid headed back toward her camp.
Camp was two tents: one—buff colored—she slept in, and one—green with tan lining—she used for storage of nonfood items scavenged from the various campgrounds, ranger offices, and trash heaps in the Stefano Rey.
Once home Astrid unloaded her berries and the rest of the food she’d brought with her into a red-and-white plastic cooler. She’d dug a hole right up against the barrier, and the cooler fit perfectly into that hole.
She’d learned many things in the four months since she had left everyone and everything behind and gone off into the woods. One thing she had learned was that animals avoided the barrier. Even the insects stayed a few feet back. So storing her food right up against that eye-tricking, pearly gray wall kept her food supply safe.
It also helped to keep her safe. Camping here, this close to the barrier, and right at the cliff’s edge, meant there were fewer ways a predator could come at her.
She had strung a wire in a perimeter around the camp. The wire was hung with bottles containing marbles, and rusty cans. Anything that hit the wire would make a racket.
She couldn’t say she felt safe. A world where Drake was presumably still alive would never be safe. But she felt as safe here as anywhere in the FAYZ.
Astrid flopped into her nylon sling chair, propped her weary feet up on a second chair, and opened a book. Life now was an almost constant search for food, and without any lamp she had only an hour of light at sunset to read.
It was a beautiful location atop a sheer bluff by the ocean. But she turned to the setting sun to catch the red rays on the page of her book.
The book was Heart of Darkness.
I tried to break the spell—the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness—that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations.
Astrid looked up at the trees. Her camp was in a small clearing, but the trees pressed close on two sides. They weren’t as towering here close to the shore as they were farther inland. These seemed friendlier trees than the ones deeper into the forest.
“‘The heavy, mute spell of the wilderness,’” Astrid read aloud.