Free World War Moo by Michael Logan Page A

trigger. She saw the woman and her arm dropped. It all came flooding back: her failed stew heist, the flight through the forest, the hand reaching out to her.
    After they’d been sure the pursuers were shaken off, the woman had doubled back. Ruan had tried to talk, but her new companion held a finger to her lips. She led Ruan high around Arrochar at a jog and curved back toward the road, following it around the loch from just inside the tree line. There were no streetlights on this bank, so when the woman crossed the road and plunged into the bushes Ruan was surprised to find more tarmac beneath her feet. After a few more minutes they came out onto the side of the loch.
    A hulk of a building sat on a pier that ran out into the water. At the end of the platform, Ruan spotted a small group sitting in lotus position around a roaring fire, encircled by flickering candles stuck into glass jars. Beyond, the reflection of the moon shimmered on the black water. It would have seemed almost idyllic were it not for the jumble of old machinery and rubble by the water’s edge. Ruan moved toward the light, but the woman put a hand on her shoulder and shook her head. It had been seven months since Ruan had spoken to anybody—in fact, she’d barely said a word, since she considered talking to herself an early sign of going loopy—so she didn’t know how to break the silence that had built up between them. Ruan allowed herself to be led into the house—one of around a half-a-dozen that sat shoulder to shoulder. She’d collapsed onto the mattress and, her guard lowered by the thought of so many clearly uninfected people around her, shucked off her clothes and slipped under the sheets to fall instantly asleep.
    Now, in full daylight for the first time, she took in the woman’s face properly. With no shadows to act as a soothing visual balm, the scars presented themselves in full pink and twisted glory. The worst was a bite mark on her left cheek, a crater so deep Ruan could have put her pinkie in up to the first knuckle. The same bite had removed a chunk from one side of a long, sharp nose. Other deep grooves and troughs pitted her face, running up into the gray hair she wore close to her scalp and plunging below the neckline of a long-sleeved black cotton top. Strangely, her face looked peaceful, like the ruins of an old castle. Her watery blue eyes betrayed no signs of bitterness at what had befallen her. When she smiled they seemed to lighten in the same way as a sun-dappled swimming pool.
    â€œI see you’ve noticed my scars,” the woman said.
    Ruan’s cheeks flushed and the instinctive urge to apologize nudged her vocal cords into life. Her voice sounded low and hoarse. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to stare. It’s been a while since I’ve had company. My social skills are a bit rusty.”
    â€œIt’s okay. If it was a problem, I would wear a mask. I want people to see them.”
    Something about the forthright way the woman spoke, about the way her gaze was challenging and encouraging at the same time, emboldened Ruan to ask a question that seemed rude the moment she said it. “Why? I mean, not that you should hide your face if you don’t want to, or that I don’t want to look at it…”
    Ruan trailed off. She was sounding even more insulting with every word she added. The woman seemed unfazed. “It reminds me that I’m not the person I used to be.”
    Staring into the ravaged face, Ruan felt she’d seen this woman before. She closed her eyes and held the face in her mind. Ruan had always been highly visual, able to store near-photographic shots of any face or scene and conjure up images of startling clarity. She examined the mental picture of the face, turning it left and right like an animator playing with a 3-D model. There had been no scars, so she filled them in with healthy, if rather pallid, flesh. The woman’s hair wasn’t