Hunger had a way of breaking a man down. Travel became less practical, the distance covered growing less each day. Time must be spent setting snares, and more taking them down when they lured nothing into their grasp. Petyr suffered. They both suffered. Streams were helpful for filling their bellies and temporarily tricking the body into believing it was sated, but their stomachs grew distended, the sloshing of liquid causing only further discomfort and a forced, premature need to stop. And thus began the erosion of self. Little mattered in the face of hunger. The warmth of the sun or another body pressed against you, the frozen gust of midnight’s chill wind, the snapping of a twig in the distance all became meaningless in the dizzying reality of a world bereft of nourishment. The mind tricked, coerced, whispering notions that the logical mind would reject: moss, bark, roots all became edible things no matter the toxic ache or sickness they produced later. In that desperation the honed, sharpened mind grew dull and sloppy, crashing through the underbrush where before it would have silently maneuvered.
More than once, Petyr thought of leaving Sansa behind. It ran constantly through his mind, again and again, weathering a stomped path. Once when he awoke in the night, a terrible pain in his gut where nourishment ought be, he thought of strangling her. An understanding, even an empathetic sympathy grew for those who had long ago turned to cannibalism as a form of survival. For surely anything, anything would be better than that feeling of ultimate emptiness, desperation, horror that came from a lack of food.
It was for such a reason that Sansa’s discovery did not immediately bring panic to the man who barely clung to reason. Petyr’s first thought that there would be something to eat; any compound worth defending with spun razor wire was almost certain to have stores of edibles. For a long while he stared towards that break in the wood, watching the hinted remnants of the sun glint from spiraled coils. It didn’t appear to be a prison; the wire had been added later, after the fall of things. It was too sloppy, too new, to have existed for many years, but there was no telling whether it was in active use. Not without getting closer.
Therein existed the problem.
Petyr’s steps were slow, encumbered, weighed down by simple existence, his pack long emptied of rations and supplies. Slung across his back was a rifle to which he had two bullets. Only two. They would have neither the benefit of instinct or reflexes, nor the forethought of careful planning and execution. They were two bodies, nearly finished, wandering aimlessly through the wood. They had nothing to offer, nothing for which to trade, nothing which would make them an asset to any group or compound. They were haggard, run ragged, barely clinging to life, and perhaps that was their only hope: that someone might take pity on them.
For what seemed like an eternity Petyr stood there, silent in thought, looking through the forest. There was a chill pricking at his fingers, but all he could think of was the necessity of sustenance, and that without it, Sansa and he were likely to perish within days, perhaps hours given the potential for an onslaught of unruly weather. What then did they truly have to lose? Where normally Petyr would have passed the compound by, given it a wide berth, he now surrendered to his own mortality, to the ultimate need for life, the most basic and fundamental human instinct to live, and made an uncharacteristically reckless decision. Downward his head tilted, looking to his worn and wearied companion. “Okay.”
There was little to explain, no plan of action to enact, no briefing of Petyr’s master caper. He simply found the path leading towards the compound, a gravelly stretch of road that had been recently patched over with a crude amalgamation of tar and sand. This told Petyr that they had working vehicles, further inciting his need to infiltrate. His reasoning for approaching the place so directly was simple: were they to be spotted skulking about they would be seen as sneaky, rodent-like creatures who could not be trusted. A direct presentation allowed them to be spotted from a distance and appropriately appraised for the worthless whelps that they were. If they were to be gunned down at a distance, they would suffer little and be done away with quickly. A missed shot to the calf or shoulder through the density of the forest would ensure only a prolonged death. As such, when Petyr reached the road and stepped onto it, his first action was to unshoulder his rifle. After a moment of hesitation and total resolve, it slid down his arm, and with a metallic thud he dropped it to the ground, leaving it behind. The same motions were repeated with his pack, until he stood carrying only the clothes he wore and nothing more. With a look, he silently bid Sansa to do the same.
Those first steps towards the encampment were the hardest. A surge of fear-wrought adrenaline coursed through his body, awakening it, urging him to take flight, every fiber of his being screaming at him to flee. He did not. The closer he stepped, the more it became obvious that the compound was, indeed, manned. There were tiny columns of white, vaporous smoke curling into the air further inside, and the faint sounds of life milling about: a hammer’s thudding, what he thought to be some sort of motor flaring to life, the sound of a heavy, metal door opening and closing again. And then the sharp, distinct, aggressive demand shouted down the road, commanding Petyr and Sansa both to stop right where they were.
To a well-nourished, more wily mind his lack of maneuvering would appear sage. Yet in Sansa’s wearied and worn view she could see only a change — abandonment of caution, stark revelation, all risk assumed — from their customary conduct, a deviation which sparked the loudest whisper of panic her hunger-stricken body could muster. Baelish always went first, alert, wary, before motioning her forward into safety; now they had gone without a reliable food source long enough that neither man nor girl stood capable of protecting the other. Were she to know, or guess, at his ruminations on merciful death then her first reaction might not be fear, but incredulity: how possibly could a being so exhausted by simple existence possibly hope to end the life of another?
Behind him Sansa shuffled, a depleted pack slung over one shoulder and her blanket — that same woolen expanse used to warm them both in an abandoned car long ago — clutched beneath non-existent breasts. Recently she had taken to shivering, even at midday; the blanket, and keeping both limbs wrapped tightly around her ribs, helped reduce the shudders. If not for that she would reach out and take Petyr’s hand. Whatever seed of intimacy had been sown during their brief time in an abandoned hamlet found itself buried in parched soil, but her memories of that evening transformed Sansa’s companion into an edifice of comfort. Like the blanket brushing and tangling amongst dried undergrowth his touch had risen to near-mystical qualities, thoughts of its possibility leading her throat to tingle and burn with want.
But they were hungry. Weak. Rageful. They hadn’t touched, even incidentally, for days. Lack of contact from one otherwise so close gnawed at Sansa as viciously as the pangs of starvation in her belly.
Just along the road’s edge she watched as all his earthly possessions, ragged and dust-choked they might be, clattered to the ground. Even Baelish’s rifle joined their pile; closing her eyes she could see its muzzle, flat and challenging like a cyclops emerged from some dank cave. That frightened her most of all. Possessing a gun elevated one closer toward divinity, functioning ammunition even more so; the mere sight of a steely barrel, that safety catch discretely clicked back, could intimidate unfortunate interlopers into granting them a wide berth. Now, accompanying two wretched beasts stumbling along a makeshift trail, it only marked them as a potential threat. Whoever skulked behind that metal enclosure held every advantage, leaving Sansa and Petyr to simply hope they indulged benevolence above all else.
She did as he bid. Her pack the girl discarded easily enough; with greater regret, her blanket fluttered down. Yet unlike Baelish no one from tower or guardhouse could see that Sansa carried a pistol at her back. If they were cruel or vicious she had the benefit of surprise…she could stop it…save them… Mere thought caused a right hand to tremble enough so that Sansa clutched it in her left to make the quivering stop. There would be no heroic rescue, by her, today. Slowly, she eased the weapon from beneath ragged shirttails, extending it far out beside her before letting it fall away with a discouraging clatter. Nothing remained except to fix her eyes on Petyr, a mere step and a half ahead on the path, forcing one foot ahead of the other so long as his shoulders bobbed with the distinct motion of one walking. It was their halt, rather than the voice, which stilled her feet.
Not long after barked commands the gate ahead cracked open, enough for a single figure to slip through and begin jogging towards them. As it drew closer they would see he was well-armed, a holstered gun at his hip, a rifle angled at the ready across his chest. The man stopped several yards ahead of them, leveling his weapon with the kind of confident ease that came just before a shot’s report. “Who are you?” It came out as more a statement than a question. “How did you find this place?” When Sansa opened her mouth only garbled, croaking sound came out. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a proper drink; as close to death as she was, the girl still felt embarrassment. To look and smell like this, to appear so irrevocably helpless, more so than even when Baelish found her pilfering berries.
“Christ.” So the scout agreed — they looked like death. Unclipping a walkie-talkie — the cheap, plastic kind you bought children to play with in suburban yards — he began muttering quickly to whomever listened at the other end. A few moments later the gate opened again, wider. Several others walked in a cluster towards them. Yet even as their footsteps grew louder, steps distinguishing themselves from a generalized crunching of gravel, the shadowy mass of bodies remained blurry, indistinct. Sansa’s head swam. As the forest around them melted into a brownish swirl she managed to whisper, “Water,” before the world turned sideways. In the flurry that happened afterwards Sansa tried to tell them, Don’t hurt him, please, though it might have stayed a wish inside her mind.
* * *
Blackness turned to gold, to pink, then finally to a soft whiteness against her lids. When Sansa awoke the light filtering in through the window above suggested morning, meaning she had slept at least a day since their discovery of the compound. Makeshift curtains made from moth-eaten sheets and towels surrounded three-quarters of her bed, suspended from ropes. A hospital. Or what passed for one now, with tightly-packed dirt floors, scrubbed walls, and four metal-framed beds in one large open room with doors at either end. She coughed, lifted an arm to scrub at her eyes but felt a tug, a sting, as her intravenous line protested. An IV. Where did they get an IV? Focusing on her arm Sansa could see it had been washed, along with the rest of her body. Cuts and scrapes had been cleaned, the worst of them wrapped in cloth bandages.
Quiet as she was her rustling must have alerted someone, one door opening, electric light leaking out — an office or storage room perhaps, as very few supplies were scattered about the ward — for a woman to emerge. Older than her mother, grey hairs common atop a dirty blonde scalp, with warm brown eyes that recalled caramel toffee treats at Christmas. She looked kind. “Petyr?” Sansa hadn’t heard a scuffle in the brief moments before losing consciousness, but her fainting spell made all those memories suspect. “Alive,” her nurse answered, checking the cuts along pale arms. “And recovering nicely.” At Sansa’s stricken look, she continued. “From your time in the woods, nothing more. You put us all in quite a panic with that collapse.” Another cough. “How long?” She nodded at the room in general. “Three days. And a good thing you finally woke up; we can’t spare any more of these,” the woman said, meaning the bag of saline she now inspected, “but at least we can wean you onto proper food and drink now.”
A few more checks were done: if Sansa could remember her name and count to ten, how fast her pulse beat and how healthy her heart sounded. To all of them she submitted quietly, yet when the woman clearly made to leave, satisfied, she reached out. The gesture was enough to give her pause. “Petyr, please.” The woman nodded. “I’ll have someone tell him you’re awake.”