Page 3 of The Orc Outcast's Conquest

No. Not just someone.

She would make it to the base camp and search the crowd for their faces, strain her ears over the symphony of voices. Their eyes would meet despite the chaos.

Taylor. Or Josephine. Or Robby. Or any one of the other toddlers she looked after during her shifts at Riverside Daycare.

Her babies.

They would be there, right? They had to be. Maybe their parents or her co-workers were the ones lighting up these signs.

No. Not maybe. Definitely.

Her babies and the people who saved them had definitely been the ones to get these road signs working. They were the ones guiding her this way. They were.

She hadn’t gone back for them, but someone had. Someone must have saved them. Surely they had.

Miranda’s stomach heaved, her eyes burned, and her body shook under the relentless weight crushing around her heart.

She should have been there. She should have been there that day to save them. She shouldn’t have taken that job at the bank, no matter how good the pay was. No matter how nice her new boss was. No matter how badly she needed more stable hours so she could eventually get a promotion and quit the night shifts at the daycare and finally—finally!—be able to adopt children of her own.

She’d left them. All those little ones she loved so much. She’d been selfish and abandoned them, and now they were?—

Breathe. Calm.

Miranda forced a shaky breath.If she fell apart here, if she let herself succumb to the agony growing in her chest, she would not have the strength to get back up.

She would never see them again.

They hadn’t been at the daycare when the bombs dropped. She knew it. Parents always had a sixth sense about these things. They would have woken up with an odd tingling in their stomach or a burning at the back of their mind. They would have squeezed their little ones tight and called the daycare and told them their babies would be absent that day and they would have gotten to a bomb shelter in time and now they were hiking across the desolation, like her. Just like Miranda was now.

They would meet at the ocean.

And then they would all get on the boat together. Traveling to their new home somewhere nuclear bombs couldn’t reach. She’d hold those babies close, watch them so their parents could get some much-needed sleep. Warm little bodies all snuggled up. Soak up their life. They were alive.

So was she.

Her eyes prickled with tears as she slung her bag back over her shoulder, and turned her gaze upward, toward the endless blue sky.

“Five things I can see,” Miranda mouthed, careful not to make a sound because the dogs. Her lips were cracking, her tongue was sticking, and she ignored it as she began her usual exercise for soothing anxiety.

Miranda doubted the inventor had thought it might be useful for someone who’d survived the apocalypse.

“Stumps,” she exhaled slowly, eyes falling to the landscape once more as she picked up the pace again. “Five black stumps.” There were well over five. There were hundreds. Thousands. She couldn’t see anything else. She was supposed to be in the national park nestled between the city and the sea,but it was a burned black waste now.

Four things she could feel. “The back of my shoe scraping my heel, the hard pavement, the scorching sun, and my sandy tongue.” There was no wind. No movement of air other than what her own steady pace provided. It was like the bombs had wiped out the breeze along with everything else.

“Three things I can hear,” she shivered, hugged herself, and pressed her hands together. “My breathing, my steps, and my heart.” She didn’t want to think about what she couldn’t hear. The ocean was still too far away. The crashing waves and rumble of the survivors’ voices wouldn’t reach her until she was at the top.

Miranda sniffed quickly, cutting off the inhale as her nose burned. “Bleach. All I can smell is bleach.”

Better than a lot of other things. She’d found the bleach citrus spray in the second car. Right after the one where she found her pilfered clothes. She knew the pungent scent of chlorine would hide her scent and throw the dogs off her trail. Those horrible mangy beasts who howled every night and haunted every scrap of her waking hours.

Just keep going.

“One to taste.” She almost laughed at her folly. She didn’t want to focus on her mouth’s muddy grit. What would she do for a gulp of clean water? A bite of a cheeseburger? What wouldn’t she do?

In desperation, Miranda pulled her bag forward and dug around. Her hand closed around the last item she had with any liquid in it.

A bingo dauber. The kind you used on actual paper.

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