Rose Eagle by Joseph Bruchac

after running over to me as I knelt next to the slumped body of a winged nightmare. There was a look of deep concern on his face.
    â€œAre you hurt?”
    â€œNo,” I said, accepting his hand as he pulled me to my feet. “Good shooting . . . partner,” I said.
    We stood there for a minute, my right hand in his, my left hand on his shoulder, both of us smiling. Then I gently took my hand back.
    â€œWe’d better get going, right?” I’d said then, even though I would have liked to have just stayed there like that for a long time.
    â€œRight,” Phil agreed.
    We passed an ancient sign, fallen over by the roadside. The only word still legible on it was WALL, which was strange, there being no walls anywhere in sight on the nearby land.
    Out of the corner of my eye, it looked as if Phil was limping. But as soon as I looked his way, the limp disappeared — though I noticed he was biting his lower lip as he walked.
    I held my hand up to the west, where the sun was only three fingers above the horizon. It would be dark pretty soon, and even though nothing had menaced us since the demise of the demon bat, I had no doubt that the nighttime would bring out more dangers than we wanted to encounter in the open.
    I stopped walking to pull out Uncle Lenard’s map and study it. Yup. There, just as I remembered, was a mark indicating that a safe place to shelter was close by. Likely just beyond the next rise in the road.
    Phil raised an eyebrow as he looked at me. He did that every time he had a question, and it was so endearing that it made me smile.
    â€œAre we close to the next place to spend the night?” he asked.
    I folded the map, put it away, and began walking again, Phil staying half a step behind me to the right.
    It was not over the rise ahead of us, or the next one, but we had to walk no more than two miles before I saw the glint of a metal roof.
    â€œThere,” I said.
    We followed a narrow track, our feet crunching dried brush that had drifted over the trail. All around us the land was brown and dry, as it sometimes got in late summer. It was the kind of dryness that could easily turn into walls of flame rushing across the prairie. We’d have to take care with any fire we made that night.
    Rain, I thought, we need rain.
    But there was not a single cloud in the shimmering sky.
    Long ago, back when the world was ruled by different nations and not an international corporation made up of modified humans who had planned to live forever, there had been the threat of wars. We’d all been taught about that time, a time that no one needed to worry about anymore. Such wars were past threats, as our Overlords had constantly reminded us. Their rule had saved us lucky proles from ever experiencing that sort of danger during our brief, overworked lives.
    The structure ahead was a remnant from that time of one country threatening another with atomic bombs. It was part of what was called a missile silo site, rockets hidden under the ground in concrete tubes from which they could be launched. Those missiles were long gone, of course. But the abandoned structures remained here and there.
    The building where we hoped to spend our night was nowhere near as big as the huge one from the night before. It had to be no more than thirty feet wide and sixty feet long. But it looked solid. Its roof was thick and metallic, its sides made of concrete except for the windows in its walls that were thick, translucent material — blocks of glass, perhaps. The single door did not have a lock or a doorknob. Instead, there was a sort of wheel that could be turned. So anyone — or anything — that could grasp such a wheel could spin it to the left and open that reinforced door.
    But Uncle Lenard had thought ahead. I looked down at the base of the door, and what I saw reassured me. Three small sticks were leaned against that door, sticks that would have been