Coyote Read Online Free Page B

sure how she was supposed to feel about that. It made no effective difference to her—all that mattered was that the most useful guns were not here.
    Amid what was left, she managed to pull out a shotgun, a .22 target rifle, and a 30.06 hunting rifle. All three looked to be in working order. Scratching around the bottom of the safe, she managed to find two bullets for the .22 and nine for the hunting rifle. There were no shells for the shotgun. She loaded the hunting rifle and put the extra bullets in her pocket. She left the .22 and the shotgun behind. It wasn’t worth the weight to carry a weapon she didn’t have ammunition for.
    The last thing she did was to look into what used to be the kitchen of the house. The dog had already found this area, and was chewing through a packet of ramen noodles with great gusto. She bent over next to the dog to search for things that were easily totable. The dog paid her no mind.
    She found two packets of sunflower seeds, and four cans of food that had survived intact. Kidney beans and canned corn. It wasn’t hard to find food in the wreckage of this world, but it was never tasty food. She put it in a small backpack, originally full of somebody’s schoolbooks, which she had picked up along the way.
    Convinced that she had found all she needed in the house, she turned away. She looked about in the wreckage of the house a bit more, not sure what she might be looking for, finding nothing useful. After a few moments she wandered out to the large, concrete slab that had served as a patio in the back yard. The last time she was here, this space had been her adoptive parents’ pride and joy. They called it their outdoor entertainment space. The concrete patio had sported a gazebo, wired with speakers and ornate lamps, with wooden chairs arranged around a large metal and glass table. On the far side, wicker lawn furniture had stood artfully arranged around a brick fireplace.
    Now the patio was completely bare, all but the brick fireplace swept away. It was an odd sight, to say the least. Stepping to the edge of the patio, she saw that the gazebo and furniture had somehow been lifted off the patio and tossed down the hillside behind the house. How had that happened? And why had the fireplace stayed where it was, now perched alone on the patio? She would never know.
    Looking up from the wreckage, out across hills and valleys that the owners of this house had once paid a considerable amount of money to have a view of, she pondered what she saw. In all the miles she could see, nothing moved. No cars on the roads, no airplanes in the sky. The only things to break the unchanging view were a few plumes of smoke, here and there, serving as reminders of the patchy destruction that had been visited upon the city of Portland and all that surrounded it.
    She heard the clicking of the dog’s paws on the concrete as it came to stand near her. The dog pricked its ears forward, looking out at the view as she was. She wondered what it saw—what it thought. That, too, she would never know.
    She briefly wondered what she was doing here. She wasn’t usually one to stop and take in the view, preferring to deal with what was more immediately in front of her. But it didn’t take much self-analysis to know what made her linger. She had reached her destination, and now she wasn’t sure where to head next.
    In the distance, Mount Hood loomed on the horizon. A vague notion had been growing in her mind about heading east, out of the populated areas, and toward the forests surrounding Mount Hood. That made more sense now that she had a rifle and could hunt game, though having only nine bullets would be a problem.
    She fixed her eyes on the mountain. It would do. It was as good a destination as any in what remained of this world.
    She headed up the street, feeling like she might as well get started now that she had a destination. And at least moving further away from the carnage she had witnessed last night would be