Danya Baby

[Grand Moff Hissa]

((Darlene Silva continued from Dead Bxdies in the Lake Part II))

"Hey," Darlene said, "you, uh, whoever's, I mean, you watching, not if you're at ho—if you're, uh..."

This was harder than she'd expected. The camera she was looking at didn't give any indication that her presence was noteworthy. There was no special light that started blinking, no whir, no movement at all. It was perched up in a tree, trained roughly on a somewhat jagged stump, where Darlene was taking a little rest.

Her words weren't scattered just because she wasn't any good at speaking, though that was true too. She'd been running on and off, Arizona's heavy but steadily-lightening bag bouncing against her side or back the entire way, the lumpy, hard objects inside catching her and dragging her this way and that. Darlene had never once in her life played golf, or even been on a golf course that she could remember, and her understanding of caddies was limited to that they were kind of like golf squires, but she thought she understood their plight a little bit more now, because she was like a gun caddie disposing of her bounty one piece at a time.

First to go had been the ammunition for Jonah's gun. Darlene was a lot more clever than she got credit for sometimes. She knew that there were scavengers out there, other people who would find and take whatever they could, people quite possibly scouring this forest even now, and she knew it'd be a whole lot more of a pain in the butt for them if she separated the ammunition from the guns. Anyone could stumble over a simple stash, but if the bullets were somewhere else entirely and all mixed up and dirty, that would be a real kink in anyone's plans. She was going to do this right. She had to, for Jonah and Arizona both, and so the bullets and clips or magazines or whatever had been scattered all around this circle of trees, with dirt and dead leaves kicked over them. The gun was in Darlene's own bag now, because it kept falling out of the back of her skirt. She wasn't really worried about it being useless. Jonah hadn't needed to use it for violence, so he wouldn't mind that capacity being removed. She was only keeping it because it had been his.

Darlene's sides hurt and her throat hurt and she was thirsty and tired but this was important too, far more important than her comfort. And of course, there was something more than just hiding the guns that she had to do, right now while the idea was fresh and she was still brave and there was nobody to overhear or worry. The idea had come to her and it seemed equal parts genius and stupid, and she promised herself she was doing it for good reasons and hoped she was telling the truth.

It was very hard to speak to an audience that offered no response or acknowledgement.

"You, the ones of you running this," Darlene tried again. She looked right at the camera. Her glasses were smudged and her eyes were still watery and it was a blocky black blur.

"I don't, well, I mean... I know that probably right now somebody's chopping somebody else up with a chainsaw or, or like that, and probably that's who you're going to pick for the prize tomorrow and I understand and that's okay. What happened, what I—it wasn't for a prize. It wasn't on purpose. But, but I know Arizona, she didn't do it for a prize either, and she got them anyways, and that's, uh, that means that maybe you might decide..."

Darlene had found the meat in Arizona's bag, wrapped up so nicely, saved away for later. It smelled better than anything else she'd experienced in days and yet at the same time her throat had seized up with guilt at the discovery. It was still there, in her own bag now, because she didn't think she'd be able to even look at it again for a while but throwing food away wouldn't do anyone any good and it was also a reason for her to make sure she made her way back to Abe and Christina, to maybe share with them.

"I know I have a shot. And that's okay. I don't want to win, but I don't, um, I don't want to not win either. I guess."

Sitting still made this harder, so Darlene hopped up off her stump and paced. Not far from it was a fallen, splintered log, possibly the rest of the tree that had been felled. The log was at least ten feet long and sunken several inches into the soil and the center was rotted out and Darlene couldn't see inside very far. She took the short, stubby rifle, and set it at the opening to the log and then kicked it as deep in as she could. She'd been seeing a lot of centipedes around this part of the forest, and she hoped the log was absolutely full of them and that whoever came to eventually clean up when this was all over had to stick their arm way deep into it to dig the gun out and got bit and that they were deadly venomous.

She got down on her knees and peered into the log and squinted and she couldn't see the gun at all. Good. The bullets for this one were these big thick tubes like rolls of quarters, and once Darlene had jogged maybe two hundred feet from the gun's hiding place she began throwing them every few steps, one by one, as hard as she could in random directions, thumping into the dirt and bouncing off trees and crashing into heaps of leaves. Her movement was quick, loud. Animals fled before her. That was okay. Before long, there were no more of the shells left.

She slowed her pace some and started looking for a good spot for another of the weapons. A still-standing tree with a hole in the side caught her eye next, but that would be too much like the last spot, so instead she went to the bush next to it. It was a squat, thorny piece of vegetation with little red buds or berries speckling it. It looked incredibly uncomfortable, without even the faint hollow space inside like the place she'd tricked Amelia into going when she ditched the girl. Those traits would be good for keeping people away. Darlene decided to use this spot for the pistol, old and worn and fairly unobtrusive, that had been deep in Arizona's pack. She shoved it as far under the bush as she could reach with her fingertips, then sat down on her butt and kicked it deeper still. The thorns scratched at her legs where they weren't covered by her skirt, and it was a weird awkward position to be in, soil and twigs getting stuck to her skin, but that didn't matter because the gun was gone.

Its ammunition soon followed. That she had no hesitation about dropping into the hole in the tree, where it couldn't be seen at all. A second later she realized she might have just thrown the clips into a squirrel's den, or maybe cracked some bird's eggs in a nest, and that did make her feel a little bad, but then she found a camera pointing her way and that drew her attention again.

"If, um, if I do win, though," Darlene said, feeling worse and better again, feeling guilty and gross and resolved and smart all at once and not sure which was strongest, "if I do win, I have a request.

"I, uh, I'd like maybe peanut butter and jelly sandwiches please."

She looked down at the dirt and watched a few little blurry speckles where teardrops wet the dust.

"It's, I know you want to make everyone jealous and that you make fancy things but something easy is okay too, and that's what I want the most."

She was thinking about a thousand or more lunches, from when she was a little girl until just a few weeks ago. She'd had so many different lunchboxes over the years. At first it had been a little pink one with squishy sides, and then she lost that and got a blue canvas bag someone gave her dad at work, and then that wore out and was replaced with this thick plastic one with hard sides she used to swing around like it was a giant hammer. That one had cracked. In high school she'd mostly just had brown paper because the other stuff seemed kind of juvenile. All of them had been full of peanut butter and jelly more than anything else.

"I don't like chunky peanut butter, though," she said, "because, because this one time I was eating a taffy and my tooth fell out and I chewed it up and—I mean, uh, never mind, just smooth if you can, please, and also my favorite jelly is strawberry."

It wasn't quite true exactly. Darlene's favorite normal jelly was indeed strawberry but her absolute all-time favorite peanut butter and jelly wasn't with jelly at all. Her mom would put peanut butter on one slice of bread and then drizzle honey on the other in a grid and then slice up a banana and lay the discs of banana in between, and Darlene would've given almost anything in the world to have that just one last time because she couldn't even remember how long before the trip it'd been, but also there had to be a line somewhere and she wasn't going to give the people holding her hostage her mom's special recipe. Especially not if she couldn't be absolutely one hundred percent sure she'd get what she wanted out of it.

"I don't mind about crusts. I, I don't like them and I don't eat them but I can just eat around them. White bread or whole wheat, both are okay but I like wheat better, but heels are gross."

She was pacing back and forth now, dragging her feet in the dirt and kicking up little sticks and clumps of grass and that was energy better spent elsewhere, so she started walking, now off on a perpendicular to her previous route. She really hoped she'd be able to find her way back to Abe and Christina. Actually, Darlene was winding generally in the direction she thought they were, just following a circuitous route. She recognized things here and there, an especially big tree or this boulder protruding above the dirt to a point just a bit higher than her head. She'd watched landmarks carefully earlier, when getting separated seemed like the very worst thing that could happen.

Not too far past the giant stone, she found herself standing at the top of a little ridge. The drop-off was steep on this side, and the bottom was a twenty-foot-wide gully totally full of these bushes a lot like the one she'd kicked the pistol under. She couldn't even imagine going down in there, even from the other side where the slope was more gentle. She could see strands of something silky strung between the twigs and brambles, and she wondered for a moment if it was spiders or if it might be tent caterpillars instead. It didn't really matter, though, because either would hopefully be a crawly gross surprise for whoever had to deal with them.

The last gun left to dump was the big blocky one, the heaviest. It looked like a science fiction rifle, like something the main character of a really violent video game would use, and it too was scuffed and dinged. It would be hard to hide, but that didn't matter too much because Darlene was going to be taking the ammunition for this one a long ways from here, just to be sure. She slipped her bags off her shoulders entirely, to better free her arms, and them she hoisted the gun above her head with both hands. The stretch made her shoulder ache in protest where the barbed bat had cut and bruised her, and she might be putting strain on half-healed wounds, but just this once she had to. She hurled the gun with all her force and it flipped and spun and landed with a crash dead center of one of the thickest bushes in the middle of the gulf. The gun crunched through the first layer of greenery and swept some of the webbing along in its wake and she thought it was at least a tiny bit camouflaged, though the tail was still sticking out. But it still didn't matter because if someone wanted to bushwhack all the way through the thorns and spiders and caterpillars, they'd still just find it empty, and that would show them.

Darlene took a few seconds to rest, drinking some more dirty gritty lake water from a bottle. She looked around, found a camera. It was getting easier to do that.

"Also, I know it's, it isn't how you usually do it, but if I win I was wondering please if you could maybe send me back to the waterfall?" she asked. "Up by, by the caves, where... you know. I just, I didn't really think about it, but now that it's off-limits, I just wish...

"Never mind. Just, I know I probably won't, and, and maybe you have a really good reason why you pick each spot, but it would mean a lot to me. That's all."

She sucked down more water, finished the bottle. A bit of mud had pooled at the bottom and splashed against her upper lip and she wiped it off with her hand and tried to flick it away, but when that didn't work she just rubbed it on her skirt.

Backtracking a little, Darlene reached the boulder again and scrambled her way up the side with the gentlest slope, which still had her grabbing with her fingers and scraping with her toes. The rock was covered in this dry grey-green moss that was still almost soft to the touch. Her new perspective, with her feet about six feet above the forest floor, allowed her to see only a little further than she had before, but she thought she recognized an area of disturbed dirt as marking the path she'd originally taken to find some privacy. She could also see another heap of rocks about halfway between her and there, and so she headed in that direction. While she briefly considered jumping off the rock, she thought for only a moment about what it would be like to break her ankle, and went the slow way instead.

When she reached the heap, maybe three hundred feet from her lookout point, she set a couple of the cylinders down at the base of the side shielded from view from the boulder and the direction where the rifle was. At first she thought to maybe just grab the biggest rock she could and smash it down on them as hard as she was able, but she didn't know enough about bullets and wasn't sure if it would explode and she had to get back to Abe and Christina still, so instead she just took some smaller loose rocks and heaped them gently on top of the cylinders, burying the ammunition in a shallow stone tomb. The rocks were warm and rough and pulled at the skin on her fingers, but she made sure as she could to do a good job.

She hoped that Arizona's friends and family hadn't been watching or listening to her broken, ongoing ramble. She didn't think they'd understand. She didn't think Abe or Christina would, either, for that matter.

Max might, and might even approve. Jonah and Arizona, of course, would probably get it, or at least they'd let her explain herself. They'd be proud or sad maybe, think she was very cunning or else explain to her why she was totally off-base. And even if she was being very stupid, they'd make sure she didn't feel that way.

There were still two more cylinders for the big sci fi gun, but aside from that Arizona's bag was devoid of weapons. Darlene removed those last two cylinders (and the remaining first aid supplies and scraps of food) and transferred them to her own bag and then ditched the spare by hanging it off a tree branch. The weight wasn't so bad now, but she was tired. She'd been in constant motion and her throat was still tight and now and then her nose trickled or her eyes watered still and she just wanted to lie down and sleep or sob. It had been, who knew how long now? Half an hour since she first left the others? Could things have really changed so much in such a short time? It was hard to say. Time was difficult for her.

Darlene found a trail of scattered dirt and snapped twigs, and took off along it at a quick walk, wiping at her face with her sleeve. She'd make it back, find the others, admit what happened, and then...

Then...

Then see what the rest of the day brought. And, if she was alive to see it, the next morning.

((Darlene Silva continued in Mama's Gonna Look So Great))