Free New World Order by S.M. McEachern

week’s lead on us, and Eli’s pretty sure he knows where they’re going. We should keep moving.” I chugged back some of my mush.
    “They’ll be traveling a lot slower than us,” Eli said. “The bears hauling the carts don’t move very fast, especially down a mountainside. They’ll have to pick their way down, all the while looking for more recruits.”
    Summer took the flask away from hermouth. “Bears?” she choked. “They use bears to haul the carts?”
    “Yeah,” Eli said, as if it were a widely known fact. “They’re big enough to pull a cart full of recruits and surefooted on just about any terrain, including in water.”
    “They are huge,” I agreed. Jack and I had spotted one a few miles from our city when we were out for an afternoon of target practice. “A lot bigger than the onesrecorded before the War. I wonder why?”
    Reyes swallowed some mush and cleared his throat. “Gee, if only I knew someone who always had her nose stuck in a nature book.” He looked at me. “Oh, wait. I do.”
    His tone was kind of friendly, and it caught me off guard. I regarded him with suspicion. Was he being nice to me? Better to go on the assumption that he was and keep the peace. “I don’t know.Because…” I tried to think of a reason why. “Bears eat fish and berries, right? Obviously there wouldn’t be any berries for them to eat during a nuclear winter, but maybe fish?” Even as I said it, I knew my logic was flawed. Without sunlight, the aquatic food chain would’ve broken down during the nuclear winter too.
    Both Jin and Eli gave me a weird look. “Berries?” Eli asked. “Bears eat meat.Humans, small game, fish, insects—”
    “Did you just say humans ?” Reyes interjected.
    A little bit of my mush regurgitated on me and I swallowed it back down. Of course he said humans. Only meat-eaters survived the nuclear winter. And I had learned from Dena that human meat was a key source of nutrition in the years immediately following the War, which made sense since the global population wasclose to eight billion. People were the most abundant source of food.
    “It explains why they survived,” I said. “They could’ve hibernated through most of the nuclear winter, waking only long enough to replenish their fat stores. It makes sense that the only thing to eat when they did wake was meat, anything and any one that had managed to survive in a world without sunlight. Cross-mating withother species would have contributed to their evolution and size.”
    “I knew all that dry reading would pay off one day,” Reyes said and downed the rest of his food.
    Was he really being friendly or was it a reminder that he had always hated it when I’d chosen a book over his company? I didn’t want to ask though. I preferred this friendliness to our usual uneasy conversations.
    I directedmy gaze to the stark forest behind us. Winter had not fully given way to spring, although the patches of snow that clung to the ground were no longer white as their melt had mixed with the thawing ground to make a cold, slippery mud. The trees and brush were still dormant, their branches bare of any foliage, so even though they were fairly dense, they didn’t provide much privacy. And I really neededto pee.
    Hey, little guy , I thought, casting a covert glance at my belly. Why do you want water all the time if you’re just going to make me get rid of it?
    “We can have a quick look around,” I said to Jin-Sook and Summer.
    Summer caught on immediately, the way only a best friend could. “We’ll be right back,” she said to the men.
    We didn’t stray too far from the shore, choosing a suitableboulder to squat behind. Doc had thought of everything when he designed the suits, so it wasn’t difficult. We took turns, two keeping a watchful eye for anything that might cross our path. I looked for signs of recruiters having passed through, but found nothing, not even small animal prints.
    A cold breeze blew through the