To Thee Is This World Given Read Online Free

even know if they eat anything at all.”
    “Sure as hell looks like they’re eating something when they’re taking a chunk out of somebody’s neck.” He started to limp after her.
    She stopped and turned back to face him, shifting the turkey’s weight in her arms. “But the chunk is all they take and they don’t seem to need it any more than they need canned goods. They keep going whether they get it or not.”
    “That kid on the ground back there had more than a chunk taken out of him.”
    “But I don’t think it’s because they were hungrier or anything. I think it’s just a function of how long it takes for us to lose our sense of self from a given wound. You know? Like how long it takes for us to lose our purpose for being after we’ve been bitten. And since belly wounds, like the one the kid back there had, take longer to do that than neck wounds do, they took more of him.”
    “You lose a lot more than your ‘purpose for being’ when you’re dead.”
    “But they don’t really leave us dead. Just kind of pointless.”
    He stared at her as if he was not quite certain she was joking or not. “I’m pretty sure when they kill you, you’re dead.”
    “Well, obviously not, since you can still die later.”
    “So if you’re not dead, what the hell are you, then?”
    “I don’t know.” She shifted the turkey’s weight in her arms again and turned away from him. “Soulless maybe? Maybe that’s the whole point.”
    As she walked away, his eyes cast about after her. He blinked. “Seriously, how much farther do you plan to walk?”
    • • •
    He caught up to where she and the dogs were resting in the shade of a live oak and dropped his bags on the ground. Rolling his shoulders back, he exhaled loudly. He shook the heavy dampness from his shirt and watched as she glanced first at a disk attached to her jeans and then at the band around her wrist. He looked around, clenching and unclenching his hands, his face petulant and beaded with sweat. “It takes an hour to go five feet waiting for that damn cat every five minutes.”
    “Well, it’s a good thing, then, that no one has to be anywhere anymore, or worry about being late ever again.” She met his gaze with eyes that were not altogether benign. “So I’m free now to take as long as I like getting to wherever it is I end up for whatever reason I want.”
    “Yeah, well, you sure check your watch a lot for somebody with all the time in the world.”
    “It’s not a watch.”
    “So, what is it?”
    “A compass.”
    “And that thing?” He gestured at her waist.
    “A pedometer.”
    “A pedometer?”
    “It tells you how far you’ve come.”
    “Yeah, I know what it does. You sure as hell act like you have to be somewhere.”
    She smiled slightly at the tail picking its way towards them. “Not having to be somewhere doesn’t mean you have nowhere to go.” She bent down and slid her arms under the turkey’s wings, embracing it and lifting it off the ground, and she and the animals continued on.
    He waited, shaking out his arms and staring after them, then he reached for his bags. “We better be running out of steps soon. Just saying.”

4
    T he oak hammock had opened up. The pines and underbrush were gone now—the mature live oaks having pushed out everything between them but the palmetto at the bases of their trunks. Through the broadening canopy, wide swaths of sky were visible and the full moon, faint in the hot afternoon light, could be seen between the clouds stretched into long, thin ribbons by the breeze.
    He tramped along behind her with one eye on the mutt nosing along in front of him and the other on the mastiff ambling at her side. “It was stupid to tie that mutt to your pack to guard it back there. With that pack left out in the open like that, it was just asking to be taken. That dog was a sitting duck.”
    “I didn’t tie him to my pack to guard it. I did it to keep him from rushing the birds.”
    “It was still a