“Hey. Hey—fem! Fem! Watch out!”
The girl turns. The vulture—it’s a big one too—descends almost lazily, its heavy black wings sending shivers through the air. Ripple clutches his bad arm, glances to and fro for a weapon—a telephone receiver? A soiled rug? When he looks back, the vulture is perched on the girl’s shoulder. He gapes as she strokes its wrinkled head. The vulture pecks her ear, and she giggles affectionately, as though it just whispered an inside joke.
“The hell?” murmurs Ripple.
“This is Cuyahoga.” The girl reaches into one pocket of her army jacket and removes from it the gray swinging tassel of a dead mouse. The vulture snaps its jaws, leaving only the tip of the tail. “She remembers you from my dream.”
* * *
The last day of taping, after the film crew packed up their cameras and spotlamps, the boom mic and the craft table, and left Ripple just the way they’d found him twelve years earlier—alone in his room, surrounded with his electronic and proactive toys, his bubbling wraparound Brine Shrimp Experience? and patented pain-response punching bag—he felt emptier than a soul-sucked husk. The room looked dimmer, grayer, not bright enough for shooting: they’d taken the light out with them. Defiant, he socked the punching bag (“Ow, my loins!”) and then, in the silence that followed, confronted the showless set with the same glare he’d use to face down an enemy. He was still an icon, even without anyone there to see it.
“Today,” he vowed, “the adventure begins.”
Now the adventure has definitely begun, and Ripple is less than stoked. The girl lives in a former horse trailer, it turns out, one she has bespangled with rusty wind chimes and what appear to be strings of burnt-out holiday lights shaped like chili peppers. Ripple can’t be too sure, because right now he’s keeping his eye on the bird. Cuyahoga is perched on the bald pate of a cracked phrenology head, staring at him and occasionally ruffling her feathers. Ripple, uneasily shirtless, shifts his weight on the girl’s saddle-blanket-and-foam-pad mattress, and takes another look at his arm. It’s tight in the greasy bandanna she used to wrap it. The blood’s stopped seeping through, but he doesn’t want to think about the nasty gash underneath, or the long shard of windshield glass the girl pulled out of it with her nimble fingers. On the outside of the bandage, the wound has left a pattern of brown misshapen blots like an archipelago of islands. Islands—islands of blood—islands like this one. Oh fuck, he’s never getting out of here.
“Hungry?”
The girl stands on the drawn-down ramp of the trailer, backlit by her campfire outside. She holds a steaming cauldron. On her hands, she wears two soiled panda slippers in lieu of oven mitts. Ripple shudders.
“I’m good, thanks.”
“OK.” She joins him on the mattress. The cauldron thunks down on the metal floor before them; stew slops over the sides. At least, it looks like stew. It smells like fish and burned ketchup. The girl pulls the pandas off her hands and shoves the long sleeves of the army jacket up above her elbows. She digs a linty spork out of her hip pocket and tucks in.
“You sure you don’t have any communication with the city?” Ripple asks again, though he knows it’s hopeless. “No ThinkTank? No LookyGlass? No telegraph, no hog radio? We can’t tie a message to your vulture’s leg or something? There’s no way?”
The girl pats his knee. They’ve gone over this once already.
“I’m so screwed.” Ripple slumps back on the bed. “I never even joined swim team back in underschool. All us legacies went out for Power Jousting.”
The girl scoops up another sporkful of steaming dinner and pokes at his mouth with it. “Yum, yum.”
“Why not.” Ripple opens wide. The food is surprisingly good: baked beans, trout, what he really hopes is a noodle. “Mmm.” She feeds him another sporkful, then another, then another. “Hey, that’s your dinner. Save some for yourself.”
“You matter more.” She beams.
Ripple sizes her up. In the dim light of the campfire, her tangled, filthy hair almost looks high fashion, the result of a particularly intense encounter with a wind machine. And her face is cute in a feral sort of way; he noticed that before. She’s practically hot. With some bodywash and a makeover, she could be Toob-worthy—well, almost, considering her tendency to wipe her nose on her sleeve, which she’s doing right now.
“What did you mean, earlier?” he asks. “When you said you prayed for me?”
“The Lady said I was the last one. But I always hoped.”
“You thought you were the last person? On Earth?”
“The last human. At first I was scared you were one of the…others.” She wants to say more, maybe, but she trails off and licks the spork instead. “I should have practiced talking-out-loud. It’s hard to say everything.”
“You’re doing great,” he reassures her. She picks her teeth with a fishbone in lieu of a reply. “What’s your name?” he asks when the silence becomes unbearable.
The girl shrugs. “Dunno.”
“You don’t know your name?”
“Uh-uh. The waves washed it away.”
“Huh. Well, you have—a nickname, or something like that?” She tilts her head, perplexed. “Something people call you?” Wrong question. “Something close to your name?”
“Oh! Abracadabra.”
“Abracadabra?”
“Abracadabra!”
“Abracadabra.”
“Abracadabra!”
Ripple wonders if this is really happening, or if he’s getting the landfill equivalent of jungle madness. “How about I call you Abby? For short.”
“OK!” She bumps her hip into his. He’s still sore from the crash landing, but he manages a wan smile.
“I’m Duncan Ripple. Only fans call me by my whole name, though. They don’t know the real me.”