Free The Outside by Laura Bickle Page A

sound of something flammable under pressure or the keening of something dying. For good this time, hopefully.
    And more black smoke poured up into the sky, darkening heaven.
    ***
    â€œI’m all right.”
    I reached for Alex, placing my hand on his cheek. I felt stubble growing there and a worrisome smudge of blood on his lip. A bruise was darkening over his right eye, and I could see a piece of metal jutting out from the top of his thigh.
    â€œI’m all right,” he repeated.
    We were relatively unscathed. Ginger had cracked her glasses, but no one had been bitten, and there were no broken bones. Ginger plucked the piece of metal out of Alex’s leg without warning him, and he swore at her.
    Nonetheless, we truly had God’s favor.
    Except the horse was gone, with all our gear. Horace was understandably spooked, and had run off with all our scavenged supplies. I was the fastest runner and took off after him. Alex and Ginger followed, but fell behind. Alex limped along, pressing his hand to his leg.
    I chased Horace, a receding white speck in the distance. He raced away from the city, away from the fire and the smoke. I chased him past the road we’d come in on, through a field pocked with drainage ditches, across an empty freeway. My snakebitten hand still throbbed with every step. I whistled and called for him, but he galloped as if the Devil himself was after him. I lost sight of him once or twice, beyond the edge of the horizon that kept falling farther and farther away.
    Outside was much larger than I’d ever dreamed. Endless.
    I knew that Horace’s panic would drain away, that he would stop at some point. He had to. It happened to all of us. The poor horse was without any logical explanation for what was happening to him, to us. He knew only fear.
    But even fear gave way to exhaustion.
    I found him, at last, in a soybean field. The yellow leaves curled against each other like closed fists. I could see his white figure standing beneath a hickory tree at the edge of the field. His pack was askew, and there were leaves tangled in his mane and tail.
    I approached him slowly, well within his sight. He was breathing hard, his nostrils flaring as he watched me.
    I sat down on a grassy spot beneath the hickory tree, opposite the horse. I pressed my back against the trunk. Shade made me nervous, but the early November wind had stripped almost all the orange leaves from the tree.
    I picked up a hickory nut and thumbed the ridges of its shell, found the sweet spot that would release the meat when struck. I took off my shoe and crushed the nut against a root.
    Horace flinched, but his ears pressed forward.
    I tossed him a piece of the nut meat. He lipped it up from the ground, blew out his breath. I threw another piece, closer this time.
    I continued to crack the nuts, feeding him the pieces. I took a few too. When a raven fluttered down from the naked tree, I tossed it a piece as well.
    I regarded the raven as it grasped the piece of nut and wolfed it down. The ravens had been the first to sense something was wrong, to flee the apocalypse. They had left in great masses, blotting out the light in the sky one morning. My father had told me that the correct term for a group of ravens was
an unkindness
. It sounded strange to me, imputing an impure motive to an animal.
    But this one seemed all alone. A straggler. When I looked closer, I saw why he had not fled—the feathers of his left wing were bent back. He was injured and could not fly far.
    I tossed him more food. He was one of God’s creatures, after all. And I knew that for all his intelligence, he was unable to crack hickory nuts. I had seen some very clever ones back home who would drop nuts on the stone lid of our well at great heights to break them open. But I saw no such stones here.
    Dragging his reins on the ground, Horace approached me. He stood over me for a moment, looking down his long nose with his sad