Read Dust for Free Online

in faster, stronger, more aggressive gangs, but they’d washed out or been thrown out or left thinking they’d be king hoo-killers all on their own, crowned and canonized, and it never happened.
    Because they were old, some of them, older and dustier than they liked to say. Because they were young, and hiding was easier. Because they just didn’t care for killing, not really, not once the hunger that never really left you got put in its place up on the shelf for another few hours, and that was a shameful thing even fleetingly to think so they just kept very quiet.
    And then there was me. And now that I knew I could fight and that it wasn’t hard to hunt I could have left any time, kept to myself for years or decades and avoided all the trouble that came after. I stayed because of Joe—his smile, the loud pounding music in his head, the way he hit right back and looked at me afterward with shrewdness, new respect, and then something more. Every time. What would repulse any sane human, the bugs, the smell, the casual brutality, the gleeful killing, meant less than nothing to me now. Even knowing then and later that I should have collected my strength and wits, turned around and left for good, no looking back. I stayed because of him.
    Like I said, I was fifteen.

3
    Losing my arm and catching such a huge deer and terrorizing a hoocow on a drunk was a lot of excitement for one night, and I could’ve slept right up until sunset. Could have, if not for Billy the Bloater returning from watch and splitting our skulls open with a rusty brain-radio reveille of DA-DA-DA da-da-da da-DA-DA-DAAAAAAAAA , so loud that Florian jumped and cried out and Sam, trailing Billy, let out an embarrassed growl and turned his back.
    Billy, an Old Master’s death’s-head with a bloated, waterlogged tongue lolling perpetually from his mouth, ignored the shouts and showers of crab apples and made an elaborate show of stepping aside, clearing a path. Suddenly it grew quiet and I heard the little rattle of silver rings against finger bones, the barest hiss of breath: Fearless Leader was back. She stood over me, black broom-straw hair airborne in the breeze, and curled what was left of her lip.
    “Up,” she said.
    Joe helped pull me to my feet and I quirked my head at the sound of a meandering little flute, a timid brain wave belonging to none of us, and then the smell of dead flesh plunged in a nasty, astringent chemical bath. It came from the gazebo steps, where something in a mud-caked dress and torn nylons sat with its arms wrapped around its knees, trembling and smiling at nothing. Perfectly rouged cheeks, perfectly red lips, a smooth pink-and-white face and eyes that wouldn’t open and a mouth hovering in delicate, parted-lip repose: a ’maldie, a formaldehyde-pickled hoo, one of the undertaker’s vain, whiny, tenderfooted useless finest. Displeased murmurs all around. Joe, already in a mood from being yanked awake, slammed his hand in frustration against a tree.
    Teresa shuffled up to him, stroking the cottonwood he’d hit like that could bring back the bark. “The deer were out yesterday, I understand. So where’s my share?”
    I knew this would happen. It’s hardly rocket science: You eat what you hunt, period, and if you miss a group hunt like last night’s full of tasty treats, too bad. That’s how it was, anyway, until Teresa suddenly decided that being gang leader meant she doesn’t have to waste time hunting at all, that it’s our job to drag back half what we catch to the gazebo for her to gobble on her own time—to leave her snacks , when even the weakest and oldest of us could kill their own, when anyone who couldn’t met only one end. We’d been devouring all the deer kills and bringing her half-nibbled possum tailbones, muskrats, dainty little bites of field mouse, and now she’d finally decided she was pissed off. Fine with me.
    Joe, unflinching, folded his arms. “So where have you been the last few nights?” he