Coyote Read Online Free

its skull and pointing at her. Good. As she got further away, she felt slightly more relaxed, until she could no longer see the dog for the trees and tall grasses that had come between them.
    She relaxed, at least as much as she was ever able to relax in this new world, extending her awareness to what was ahead rather than behind, searching for new threats.
    As she came to the edge of the wetlands and looked out across the park, she saw nothing. Nobody moving. No signs of life. She had gotten used to the emptiness of the places she’d seen since the Fall, since she started her journey here. Most people were dead or simply gone, and the world was a largely silent place. Even the birds that usually punctuated summer mornings like this one seemed to have moved on.
    But she knew this park, and the silence of this familiar place struck her. Sometimes things like that still caught up with her, all of a sudden—creeping up when she was least prepared and slapping her across the face with the painful facts of this new world.
    It was too early in the morning for the baseball teams to be practicing, or for the playground to be full of preschoolers, but there should be joggers on the paths, suburban moms walking their dogs and their strollers, retired couples out walking for their health, and perhaps a family member or two setting up for an all-day picnic.
    She saw none of that. The world was different now, and that difference was especially wrong in this familiar place. She felt betrayed by her own mind. She knew she shouldn’t have expected anything different here, but somehow her mind had subconsciously built up those expectations anyway. The hope that yes, everything else was gone, everything else had changed irrevocably, but surely here, in these familiar fields, life as she had once known it would carry on.
    It had been a foolish hope, even if she hadn’t really known she had been thinking it, and she chastised herself for it. If she saw anything now, it would probably be a cautious survivor like herself or, more likely, one of the many things that hunted the survivors.
    She saw none of the familiar signs of life that she might have hoped for, but she didn’t see anything threatening either. Cautiously exiting the cover of the trees along the border of the park, she made her way across the park and onto the walking paths that lined the local neighborhood.
    During her journey, she had noticed how random the signs of destruction seemed. It was the same here, in this more familiar territory. One street would still look like the perfect suburban retreat it had been built to be, and the next would be nothing more than a collection of shattered boards and smoking ruins. All of them were equally abandoned, as every place she’d seen since the Fall had been. She’d given up wondering where all the people had gone. They were just… gone.
    Walking the half mile to the street she was looking for, she saw nothing and no one. Perhaps it was better that way.
    Soon she arrived at the street she’d been headed for. It turned out to be one of the unlucky ones—one that was nothing more than a shattered ruin. She should have known. Walking up the street, she arrived at her destination. This was the place she had been headed for ever since the Fall—ever since her old life had ended. [4] This charred ruin of sticks and boards, this scattered debris field with only chunks of foundation to show the outline of where a home had been, this was her parents’ house.
    She didn’t think of it as her house. She had never really felt the warm, fuzzy things everyone told her she should feel about a home. The house had been a place of strained silence, and her parents, though kind, had been nervous strangers to her. There was no attachment here.
    Ever since her parents had brought her home at the age of four, overlooking her difficult background in favor of the sparkling blue eyes peeking through her dark bangs, it had been their one dream to see the