Authors: Sophie Littlefield
Down by her feet, Kyra turned over and sighed unconsciously. Sammi couldn’t believe anyone could sleep through this, and Sage was leaning all her weight against Sammi, and if she didn’t move soon both of Sammi’s legs were going to go to sleep. Carefully, slowly, she eased Sage off her and scooted down next to Kyra. Still neither of them woke up.
Sammi wanted to walk, to shake out her legs and work off some of this excess energy. The boys were down helping pile things up and load the vehicles; she wished she was with them. Helping out, keeping her mind off things. Or maybe going for a walk with Colton, one last trip around the island, just to say goodbye—although Colton had been acting weird for a few weeks, hanging around with Shane and that creeper Owen Mason, the guy who grew weed and taught them how to roll. Owen liked to get high, but he liked fires even more—the only useful thing he ever did was to tend the bonfires whenever there was a celebration. There were rumors that he liked fires too much. That he’d set the brush fires up on North Island.
Owen was the kind of guy who—and Sammi knew it was wrong even to think it—you wouldn’t mind if he’d died in the Siege. The kind of guy who made everyone nervous, even if he held a certain kind of fascination, at least for Colton and the other boys, with his personal stash of drug paraphernalia and weird martial-arts weapons and who knew what else.
Sammi hadn’t seen the boys at all since Phillip got locked up, come to think of it. And it made her uneasy, wondering if they were with Owen.
But she didn’t want to leave Sage and Kyra alone. She felt responsible. This was new, and Sammi wasn’t sure she liked it—feeling accountable for people. Her friends…and Ruthie, and Cass. It had been so much easier back when nobody expected much from her at all, when she was just an ordinary kid who was bratty to her parents and maybe a little spoiled, who loved soccer and listening to music and painting her nails and shopping, who wasn’t responsible for anything but keeping curfew and getting her homework done, and half the time she didn’t even manage that, but it never mattered back then.
Now it mattered, the things she did mattered. Or maybe they didn’t. In a couple of hours the sun would rise and they would all set out. It would be their last day on earth or it wouldn’t, and Sammi had watched enough people die to know that none of it was in her control anyway.
Sammi looked around one last time at everyone rushing around in the dark. She sighed and let her eyelids flutter closed, and thought about Jed, about the way they used to stay up talking until they were so tired they fell asleep in the middle of their sentences. After a few minutes she stretched out her legs to get more comfortable, and snuggled a little closer to Sage.
Just resting. Just for a few minutes.
It had been Zihna’s idea to wait until they heard the sound of engines turning over, of the procession starting out. This way, they’d avoid any more of the others’ logistical arguments on the way off the island. By then, presumably, everything would have been worked out—who was riding with whom, who was going to be left behind.
There was the matter of the two dead. Cass had told Red only that they had been trying to drown Smoke. Red was mystified about how an injured, unarmed man could kill two healthy ones, but Cass was not in a mood to talk. In fact, that was the last thing she’d said to him after they’d agreed that Smoke would ride with Ruthie on the trailer and the other three would take turns pulling it.
Red was a little concerned about that. He was in a lot better shape than he looked. He might not be able to erase the effects on his face from all those years on the road, but his body had certainly benefited from several years of his abstemious new life. No drinking or smoking even before the Siege, and the construction work he’d picked up to supplement his income had hardened him. On the island he kept busy. He and Zihna did yoga together, and she could make him break a sweat practicing the most innocuous-looking poses.
The thought made him smile. He and his lovely woman—they had a few surprises in them yet. But still, they were both in their late fifties. Roaming like a bunch of nomads with no camel probably wasn’t AMA-sanctioned exercise in their case.
But it would be what it would be. He had Zihna, he had Cass, he had his granddaughter—a
granddaughter!
How the word could still bring him fresh, amazed, pure joy—and, though perhaps more problematic, he had a fallen hero of the Resistance. A resistance to a Rebuilder movement that no longer existed, but still.
Red had taken a little nap earlier, but at the first sign of dawn, Zihna woke him. Smoke and Cass were napping on the trailer with the little girl between them. They’d moved the trailer to the space between the house and the detached garage, which was hidden from the path by a lattice covered with dead vines. If Craig and the rest came back—or anyone else, for that matter—their hiding place was far from perfect, but it beat waiting in the garage like lame ducks.
Zihna’d handed him a glass of water and reminded him to drink it all, and then she settled into the lawn chair he’d dragged in for her and immediately went to sleep with her hands folded over her stomach. It was one of her gifts, this ability to control her breathing and her worries; she’d been working on it since she started teaching yoga all the way back in the nineties.
Red was not nearly as good at serenity. He could feel his heart accelerating with anxiety as the sky started to lighten.
It wasn’t long before he heard the rumble of the first car. The rest followed, until the earth thrummed with the rhythm of the engines. Half a dozen vehicles, when you’d heard so few for so long, suddenly sounded like a busy interstate. Red was on his feet in seconds, remembering a motel he once crashed in for a few weeks in San Diego that backed up to the highway; night and day the earth reverberated with the traffic going by. It used to help him sleep, as a matter of fact, and when he moved on he missed it—but now the sound filled him with dread.
“Time to wake the women,” a low voice said behind him. Red turned quickly and realized that he’d momentarily forgotten about their cargo, his daughter’s injured lover. In the faint light of dawn, he found the man making his way to his feet painfully, slowly. But with his jaw-clenching determination, he did not look much like a victim today. He did not intend to be counted out.
Well. That was interesting.
“Yes, indeed, friend,” Red answered, offering a hand to help Smoke. He was not surprised when it was ignored. So he was not to be the only dog in this race, after all.
Red allowed himself the smallest of smiles. He’d had hundreds of friends through the years, though besides Carmy he couldn’t name a single one who stuck or who he missed when the road beckoned and he moved on. Aftertime had brought all kinds of interesting times Red’s way, forcing him to acknowledge things he’d fully expected to go to his grave without knowing.
He’d fully expected to protect these women all by himself. They’d hate the notion—Zihna would, at any rate, and he suspected that his daughter would too—and insist up and down that they could protect themselves just fine. But Red took his late-life transformation seriously and he was damn well going to be a man and take care of his own or go down trying.
He’d never anticipated that he’d have company. Surprisingly, the notion didn’t leave him completely cold.
He hid his smile and clapped Smoke on the shoulder—carefully, since the guy was still looking a little tender.
“Let’s get this show on the road.”
Chapter 24
CASS KNEW THAT Red—that her
father
—was right to wait, but it was damn hard to watch the procession go over the bridge, the vehicles in front followed by the walkers, dozens of people dragging suitcases and pushing shopping carts and baggage carts and in one case a wheelbarrow, carrying packs and gym bags and tote bags, and not feel the terrifying loneliness of being left behind. Ever since she arrived in New Eden, that bridge had been the symbol of safety, with the sturdy metal gate at the water’s edge, its round-the-clock double staffing of armed guards. Seeing the gate open wide, the guard chairs empty, it chilled her. When the last of the pedestrians—Steve, that wasn’t surprising, as well as a few other people who’d volunteered to form the rear guard behind the slowest walkers—had gone a hundred yards down the road toward Hollis, Red said softly, “Okay, now.”
But before they could go more than a few feet Red stopped her.
“Wait,” he whispered urgently, looking back toward the community center.
Cass saw it too, two lean figures racing from the wide-open French doors, across the yard, toward the bridge. One was Owen Mason, a hawk-faced man around thirty who raided occasionally and worked at a few other jobs on the island, none of them with much skill or attention; and wasn’t that—it looked like one of the boys Sammi ran around with. As she watched, they caught up with the stragglers and melted into the back of the crowd. No one seemed to notice.
What had they been up to? If it had only been the boys, Cass might have thought they were saying goodbye to Phillip. Throughout the night people had been leaving things outside the quarantine house, magazines and mugs and T-shirts and dried flowers, a heartbreaking if macabre shrine to the feverish boy inside, who was probably incoherent by now, dementia taking over his brain as he picked at his skin and scalp. Sammi’s friends were good kids, and all of them had been friends with Phillip. But Owen…she’d gotten a bad feeling about him from the start, and avoided him as much as she could. He was just…creepy.
A shout from the front of the crowd interrupted her thoughts. It was repeated, voices joining in, and in seconds it had gone from alarm to panic.
Beaters.
It had to be.
They’d waited too long. The council had been wasting time, figuring that it was too dark to travel safely, and undoubtedly that was true—even if they’d used precious battery power they could not have safely covered any ground in such a large group in the darkness. But apparently, on this day, the dimmest glow of dawn was enough for the Beaters.
“What do we do?” Cass asked, hollow with fear. To the rear of the crowd, they were safe, perhaps, for a little longer. But they had Smoke. There was no way that he was ready to stand and fight—even if he could defend himself as well as anyone as long as he had a gun.
“We can’t stay here.” Red spoke quickly, firmly. “Anyone on this island is as good as dead, because there’s no way to keep them from swimming across now.”
“All right. Let’s go.” Zihna didn’t hesitate. She pushed Ruthie’s stroller with surprising speed, and Cass followed. The trailer moved easily and it was not at all difficult to pull across flat ground.
“Let me help,” Smoke protested. In the early morning, after several hours’ rest, he seemed more recovered than last night. He was sitting up in the trailer, surrounded by the cans and water bottles they’d packed, in a pile of mussed blankets.
Cass put her hands on his shoulders. “Hush now. Close your eyes. Rest. Please, Smoke, please just trust me this time. We can talk about it later.”
“Go, go,” Red urged.
They caught up with the group by the time they reached the bridge. But there was a problem: the people running back across in the other direction, back onto the island—June, Karen and then Collette, the ringleader of their little group, her hands raised to cover her ears as though she could protect herself by shutting out the screaming. They raced past, heading for the community center, and others followed.
The crowd had stalled on the other side of the bridge, people shifting around inside it strangely so that it was like a living organism, ebbing and flowing across the road, spilling over onto the land on either side. A cardboard box lay crushed, bright-colored fabric spilled out, the sleeve of a shirt flung out as if an invisible arm was pointing the way. Cass scanned the scene for Dor, for Sammi, but saw neither, and then she heard the cries above the din of the crowd.
There were five of them, standing together on the other side of the road, past the drainage ditch and the cattle fencing. They must have come across ragged land rather than by the pathway—and worse, they must have been making their way entirely by memory, instinct, smell, because in this light they would be essentially blind, only able to detect the most basic shapes. Judging by how the things clutched at each other and stumbled, they might have been seeing almost nothing at all.
Suddenly there was a deafening explosion behind the citizens on the bridge, followed by a second, smaller blast.
Cass spun around to see the community center in flames, the top of it blown clear off, debris swirling in a red-orange cloud. Behind it, the quarantine house was nothing but a pile of burning rubble. Someone staggered out the front of the community center and collapsed on the porch, hair on fire. The screaming grew even louder, the terrified crowd caught between the ruination of the island and the Beaters ahead.
“What the hell was that?”
Cass demanded.
“Holy…who would have done such a thing?” Zihna said. “And how—where would they get the…”
“There were explosives in the storehouse,” Red said grimly. “Someone must have gotten into them, after it was unlocked last night.”
“But why? What’s the point of—anyone in there was doomed anyway.”
Maybe this was a more compassionate death, Cass thought, at least for Phillip. But if Owen had been involved, she somehow didn’t think compassion was what drove him.
Yet there wasn’t time to worry about it. The Beaters had paused at the first flash of the explosions, but now they were staggering forward again, testing the air with their outstretched hands.
“They must be able to hear our voices, or the rumble of the cars,” Red said.
“They’ve probably been here all night. After they all took off, what do you want to bet some of them came back? Too chicken to come all the way to the water but…”
“Why doesn’t someone shoot them?” Cass cried, but it looked like none of the people close to the Beaters were armed.
An escalating roar came from the front of the crowd, and then two vehicles—the old dented Accord and a motorcycle—hurtled straight for the things. The motorcycle gained speed incredibly fast, and when it reached the edge of the ditch the driver leaned forward and lifted off the seat a few inches. Cass’s breath caught as she watched the bike shudder and jerk on impact but after a split second the rider miraculously righted the bike—
black hair flashing silver
—and
oh my God it was Dor,
it was Dor on the bike and he was headed straight for the clump of Beaters—
And Cass was running, running through the edge of the crowd, knocking into people—why was everyone just standing there letting him do this crazy thing?—and then there was an earthshaking crash because the car following seconds behind Dor hit the ditch and couldn’t make the jump, its front bumper smashed into the earth, and she saw it crumple, saw the hood accordion against the berm
what the hell had the driver been thinking
and who would have even taken such a crazy chance—
Cass ran past the smoking wreck, a burning smell coming off it, engine whining like no engine should and then going silent, a pop, another, a small defeated dying sound. And the windshield was red. It was splintered and red and what was that oh God, against the glass, inside the car, that thing that was someone’s head no matter how many times you saw the many ways a person could die you never got used to it, not ever—
But Cass was not fast enough to catch Dor and he circled once and came back at the Beaters, who were moving at full sprinting speed now, at full speed himself and smashed into them and two went flying and one went down and one, somehow, got latched onto the bike and dragged and the bike tipped and hovered, defying gravity, before it slow-mo wobbled and fell and by then Cass was there.
How had her blade come to be in her hand, it was her nature now, as running had become her nature in the days when she thought everything had been taken from her but she didn’t know the half of it, the days when she first found comfort in the tarry punishing blacktop of a summer afternoon. Sweat and ravaged lungs and legs pushed past their limit. And now she was a machine of a different sort, one who could wield a blade that had become like another arm, slash it down on the Beater who was crawling on top of Dor, watch the man who’d held her only days ago as he was sprayed with the blood of the monster and heave the thing off of him and step on its skull as she leaped to the next one.
Behind her there was screaming but where were they, where was help? The closest ones backed away and ran, good God they were running, didn’t they know they couldn’t outrun this? They had to kill them, kill them all because a Beater would never stop. The cunning hesitation of moments ago, when they shuffled and snorted and bided their time, that was all over now as their instincts kicked in. Kill them or be killed. Kill them or be eaten.
Dor rolled to his knees and swung his arm up and he took his shot before Cass could find the killing cut and its skull exploded, brains chucking on the ground like a spilled snow cone. And then she was being hauled roughly up by the armpit, Dor yelling
to your right
and with their backs against each other they stood in the field of gore waiting for the attack and finally, finally someone else joined in the fight, two more shots from the crowd and Dor took the last one down with the gun barrel pressed to its throat as it reached for him, hands scrabbling, humming-keening, like a lover reaching for him, and it never took its eyes off him even as it slowly dropped to its knees, a hole in its throat, its head finally toppling forward onto its chest as the rest of it sank to the earth.
“Are you hurt?”
His hands on her arms hurt, his grip was iron. Cass shook her head, then did the mental checklist—none of them had been close enough to bite her. The blood alone could not infect; the pathogens were in the saliva. It didn’t matter anyway, in her case, because she was an outlier. But Dor…
Already he was stripping out of his coat, his shirt, his body steaming in the morning chill. The sun had inched higher in the sky, and his burnished skin glowed rosy. Cass saw the fine hairs that trailed to his navel, the smooth planes of his chest bisected by two scars; she knew the map of his body like a town she’d lived in forever and she did not look away. She knew they all watched but she did not look away.
She was pushed roughly aside. “I’ll check him.”
Dana. Of course it was Dana. Though where the hell had he been during the fight, that’s what Cass wanted to know, as the crowd pressed forward, stopping at the edge of the rusted and ruined cattle fence. Some stood in the ditch. Many crowded around the busted car and then a gasp went up as a small man opened the door and pulled the body from the dashboard so they could see who had died, who among them had been brave enough to fight.
Dor, grimacing, put up his hands and turned slowly for Dana’s inspection. There were no marks on him, no new ones, anyway. Dor was blessed, if you could say that; he’d been in a dozen Beater attacks and survived them all. He nodded curtly at Dana and started getting dressed; Dana took off at a half jog to the car.
“That car’s not going anywhere, but Dana’ll probably appoint a fucking committee to make sure,” Dor muttered.
“What were you thinking?” Cass demanded, trying to keep the hysteria out of her voice. “The odds of you landing that jump—you could have gone on foot—they weren’t going anywhere—one more minute, or you could have, you could have shot them from this side of the fence, you could have—”
“Cass.” Dor paused with only one arm through a sleeve, and reached for her. He cupped her face with one strong hand and forced her to look at him. “This isn’t the Box. Or haven’t you noticed that? Ten of these people aren’t the man George was, or Three-High or Joe or Elaine. If I’d waited, the Beaters would have split up and surged into the group and there’s no way this crowd could have responded, they’d still be standing there with their mouths hanging open and their pants down as they were tore into and there’s no telling how many we would’ve lost.”
He let go of her, but Cass could feel the mark of his fingers on her skin. She felt bruised. But he was right. There had been no training in New Eden like there was in the Box. No drills. No security. They had the bridge and they had weapons and they thought that was enough. It was enough, until the day it wasn’t, and no one, including her, had seen it coming.
“Who was in the car?” she asked softly, acknowledging that he had been right.
Dor frowned. “Pulte. Should’ve been Hank, but he let Pulte drive first.”
“Oh, no…”
“Yeah, they were going to take turns. Hank’s—there he is. He’s got the fuel wagon.”
Cass looked where he was pointing; there—on the other side of the crowd—was the three-wheeler Elsa had lovingly maintained and even took the kids for rides in it a few times in the yard, on special occasions. It was pulling a beat-up U-Haul trailer loaded with cans and gallon jugs and soda bottles, all of them filled with gas.