Authors: Sophie Littlefield
Chapter 27
THEY PASSED AN uneasy night on a dirt track that had once been used for stock-car racing. By the looks of it, several years had passed since the stands had been filled with crowds, but the travelers were exhausted and on edge. Despite their promises to explain what they were doing on this side of the Rockies, Mayhew and his men kept to themselves, taking posts around the perimeter of the track along with a few of the others, and no one had the energy—or temerity—to complain. Dana and Owen slept under the overhang of the sagging snack stand; everyone else clustered close on the center of the track, where grass once grew and kaysev now provided a soft surface.
In the morning, a hasty meal quickly gave over to repacking the vehicles and other preparations for travel. Yesterday’s fears seemed both distant and magnified; few had slept well, and there was a general sense of wanting to put distance between them and the bloody battlefield they’d left behind. Surely Cass was not the only one to realize that the Beater threat was undiminished, no matter how much ground they covered today—as numerous as grains of sand on the beach, they would always be out there—but by the time the pink dawn gave way to day, they were on the road again.
The progress of the crowd was frustratingly slow. They stuck to the road, leaving the meandering waterways of the Delta behind for the flat farmland south of Sacramento, passing skeletal orchards only now beginning to come back to life, acres of table grapevines that were nothing but dead, woody spirals clinging to supports. At the end of the rows of vines, the rosebushes planted to give farmers early warning of fungal diseases were beginning to send up new shoots from the hardy rootstock that had waited, dormant, for more hospitable times, and Cass tried to interpret the appearance of the reddish canes as a hopeful omen.
They skirted small towns, taking farm roads to avoid the possibility of Beater nests. They passed shacks, ranches, commercial buildings; fairgrounds and schools and stadiums, and at a distance it all seemed almost normal from time to time, a walk in the country on a long-ago day when one’s only concerns were sunburn and getting home in time to catch the game on TV.
At least the day was warm and clear, and the roads were mostly passable. Twice they had to go around obstructions, using the Bronco to drag the little hybrid up a steep grade next to a wreck at one point while the walkers edged past on the narrow shoulder and tried not to look inside the smashed cars at the long-decayed bodies inside. They had spotted no Beaters by the time they paused for lunch in the shade of a billboard advertising the Silver Bear casino, a fact that buoyed flagging spirits and seemed to support the idea that the creatures were avoiding the sparsely populated countryside.
In the afternoon tempers began to fray. Smoke refused to ride until he’d completely exhausted himself, and it was hard to watch his limp get worse as the day wore on. Ruthie and Twyla darted around him playfully when they weren’t riding on the trailer.
Only the children were in good spirits. They danced along the road, gathering pebbles, and picking the occasional dandelion or wild orange poppy growing at the side of the road. Occasionally Ruthie would come to Cass to be picked up, snuggled, reassured. She would bury her face in Cass’s shirt for a few seconds and then she’d wriggle down again, not wanting to miss any of the fun with the other kids.
Cass marveled at this little cycle. Courage was not that hard to come by for children. No matter the hardships they faced, given a little love and encouragement, their spirits rebounded and thrived. After everything Ruthie had been through, she was a normal, happy little girl again.
Adults were different. Their habits and experiences made them inflexible, welding their routines in place, cementing their hurts and joys to create expectations of life that were not in line with the new realities. All around her Cass saw the dazed expressions and bleak weariness that were the hallmarks of the early days of the Siege. When the president made his final broadcast a few days before the media shut off forever, already secured in the secret location from which his administration intended to “navigate the crisis,” a phrase that was repeated first with reverence and then with derision—when the infected entered into the new phase of the disease and began picking at their skin and mumbling, when riots destroyed entire neighborhoods—that was when you began to see people with expressions like these. That was when they first took to the roads, driving their cars until obstacles prevented them from going any farther, then carrying their suitcases and their children until, in so many cases, they simply sat down in the street and gave up.
This lot had not given up, though. They were the ones who survived, who had been tough enough, determined enough, angry enough to keep going, eventually finding their way to New Eden. But as Cass watched Mrs. Kristobal shuffling along with tears leaking silently down her face, as she watched Luddy and Cheddar race along the edge of the crowd on their longboards, taking greater and greater risks, as she glimpsed Dor walking alone, face set in rigid fury, disgraced and powerless—as she took in all of this she knew it was Siege days all over again and she feared for their future.
First they faltered. Then they panicked. And then they began to give up. That was how the cycle went, and Cass knew in her bones they were going to see it all happen again.
When the sun was low in the sky, they had gone a dispiriting ten miles. Mayhew and the other riders stopped in front of a big house set back along a road lined with dead saplings, and the cars pulled off the road and the people followed.
“We’ll go in and clear, but we won’t say no to a couple of you coming along,” Mayhew called out to the crowd, as he jumped to the ground.
“I can take care of the horses.”
Valerie stepped from the crowd. Cass had seen her a few times earlier, walking with Collette’s crowd. At lunch she’d helped serve people, gathering up the cloths and bags in which the cold kaysev cakes had been packed, making sure everyone got some water. Cass had hoped this return to her usual generosity signaled that she was doing better, that she was coming to terms with what had happened between her and Dor, but she meant to keep her distance.
Now she went up to the white horse and stroked its muzzle and patted its muscular neck, speaking quietly to it. She and Mayhew exchanged a few words that Cass couldn’t hear, and then one of the other men helped her tie them to the split-rail fence that lined the drive.
Smoke started to limp toward the men assembling in front of the crowd and Cass ran after him, stopping him with a hand on his arm.
“What are you doing?”
“Going to check out the place.”
“Smoke, don’t be crazy, you’re not strong enough, you can’t—”
Smoke put a hand on her face, forced her to look at him. A couple of days in the sun had restored some of his color, and he looked far better than he had in his sick bed. “I’ll do what I need to to protect my own,” he said coldly. “I’ll thank Dor, later, for taking care of you when I couldn’t. But I’m here now and I’m taking the job back.”
Cass felt the sting of his words, the unspoken anger. Smoke blamed Dor, not her, and that wasn’t right, it wasn’t the whole truth.
When they arrived in New Eden, Dor had been willing to stay away from her. He’d kept his part of the bargain, and for weeks they’d avoided each other, until the day when she begged him to…
Cass felt her face burn with shame, remembering the things she’d begged Dor to do to her, with her, anything to make her forget for a little while, anything to make her feel alive when her path had gone so terribly wrong. All the time she’d told herself she would stop, that she
could
stop, anytime she wanted. But just the memory of him, two nights ago or the time before that or any of the times, just the flash of memory was enough to make her breath catch in her throat.
And she knew now that she couldn’t have stopped. He was her addiction, her vice, her crutch, and just as she waited for that first burning swallow of kaysev wine each night, so she waited for his touch, thinking about it even while she worked the fields or waited for sleep to come, or endured the judgment of the other women.
Cass realized that Smoke was waiting for her to say something, to respond to his declaration. “I still can’t believe you’re here,” she said, a poor substitute for what he wanted to hear, and pressed her face against his chest so he wouldn’t see the turmoil in her eyes.
For a moment they held each other, and then Cass finally pushed him away, not having the right words to make a promise that she wasn’t sure she could keep.
“Go,” she muttered, and it was a condemnation as much as an entreaty.
Chapter 28
TILDY CARMICHAEL JOKED that the house looked a little like her old pool house in Sacramento, but her eyes were red from crying. Her best friends—Collette and Karen and June—were all missing and presumed dead back on the island, blown up in the community-center explosion. Rumors flew about the blast: someone had been careless while packing the explosives for travel; it had been a suicide bombing by Milt or Jack, who had finally been missed enough for people to really begin to speculate upon; it had been a mercy strike meant only for the quarantine house but had somehow jumped to the community center in a secondary explosion. The dead had been counted and then not spoken of again, as though the Edenites feared that the mere mention of their names would bring more bad luck.
The house was enormous, constructed a couple of decades ago when relatively cheap land was enough to entice people to build the houses they could never afford in a city, maybe grow a few grapes or keep some cattle and retire a twenty-first-century DIY gentleman farmer. A for-sale sign still stood, barely, in the yard, rusting. One of hundreds they’d seen so far, sad reminders of the waves of financial crashes that came even before the Siege.
Whoever had built this house had gone in for details that might have looked a little more at home in Tildy’s old neighborhood than in the dusty central valley. The arched windows and columns and faux shutters had not stood the test of time well, cheap construction that was easily defeated by the rigors of Aftertime. The stucco walls had been crushed in places; window glass lay in shards on the ground; and most unsettling, someone had dragged a couple of roomfuls of furniture out into what had been a rose garden. The brocade sofas and chairs were overturned and mildewed, a home to rodents. Some were stained a suspicious red-brown that might have been blood baked by the sun.
Still, there was an empty five-car garage that would make perfect shelter for passing the night. People wandered the rest of the house while there was still daylight, the dormant habit of browsing closets and master baths mindlessly awakened. Open houses used to be one of Mim’s favorite pastimes; she’d pretend that she and Byrn were “looking for a little more space” and poke around the most extravagant listings in Silva, running her fingers along granite countertops and custom draperies and five-inch moldings with all the other looky-loos. The few times Cass went along as a teenager, she looked for clues to the people who lived there, reading the titles on the spines of books, checking out framed photographs and the grocery lists people left on their fridges. She was desperately trying to figure out how other people managed to live.
She suspected that the others, exhausted from fear and the journey, were doing something similar, looking for stories that reminded them of another time. Looking for echoes of their own lost lives in the remains of the American dream.
The house had already been picked bare by raiders and vandalized, mirrors smashed and the remains of unidentifiable food and cleaning products strewn across the floors. There was an abandoned Beater nest in the formal living room, a pile of rags whose stench drove them to close the French doors. Still, if you didn’t look too closely, if you let your imagination fill in the holes, you could imagine the holiday dinners that had taken place in the dining room, the kids who might have lived in the rooms upstairs with their wallpaper borders of ballerinas and airplanes.
Cass took the kids to the backyard with Ingrid and Suzanne. A play structure stood more or less intact, and Cass pushed the little ones by turns in the bucket swing, trying to come up with the right words to talk to the others, who sat at a picnic table chatting quietly.
Dor came around the house and, ignoring Ingrid and Suzanne, joined her at the swing set with a stony expression on his face. “I want you and Ruthie with me. There’s a room upstairs we can use, I can secure the door.”
“We all shelter together,” Cass said, echoing what Mayhew had announced when he and the others emerged from checking the house.
“Fuck that.” Dor’s eyes flashed angrily. “I’m getting Sammi too. Maybe her friends. I can guard a door as well as any of these guys. No—I can do it better.”
Cass could sense the fury of his gaze on her, and she felt her skin flush. Ingrid and Suzanne glanced at each other, and Cass could only imagine what they were thinking. She’d caught people staring—at her, at Dor, at Valerie—and she could only guess where she fit into their assessment.
“They’ve got a system,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “And it’s only one night. We can—”
“It’s
not
only one night. It’s every night we’re on the goddamn road, and those dickheads don’t know what they’re doing.”
“They’ve gotten us this far…we haven’t lost anyone since they got here, right?”
“Cass,” Dor muttered, voice like grinding metal, abrading her senses. He was angry, yes, but something else, as well.
Not pleading, but—
A man like Dor did not plead. He did not even ask. But in his way, in ordering her around, he was—what? Staking his claim on her? Reminding her that she belonged with him, at any rate. And Cass knew she should rebel, because no one told her what to do anymore, she did what was right for Ruthie and right for her, and now for Smoke, and everyone else would just have to look out for themselves because she couldn’t let them matter.
So why was she still standing here, rooted to the spot, the dangerous connection between them unbroken, staring into his flinty ebony eyes, letting her gaze drift down to his mouth, that mouth that was both hard and soft and—
“We’ll talk later,” she snapped, forcing herself to look away, and then she took Ruthie out of the swing and walked purposefully past the other women. She gave them a fake smile to cover the fact that she was shaking all over, and went around to the front of the house where they were setting up the evening meal.
At dinner she sat with Red and Zihna and the girls. Sammi was there, and though she said nothing, she moved over to make room for Cass on the soft patch of kaysev where they were sitting.
“Won’t Smoke be joining us?” Zihna asked, and Cass followed her gaze and saw that he was sitting with what Cass supposed had emerged as the new leadership. Two of the men from the East were busy with the horses; that left Mayhew and Bart, along with Shannon and Harris and Neal, engrossed in what looked like urgent conversation.
At the fringe of the group sat Dana, his back to the others, facing Owen, who sat alone twenty feet away. By morning, Owen would be cleared to rejoin the group—the fever never took more than a few hours to take hold, and the physical signs quickly followed. For a moment Cass’s heart constricted at the thought of Phillip, abandoned in the quarantine house, blown into a thousand pieces, dead and disappeared on a deserted island where nothing human remained.
Still, that was a better fate than the alternative. The slow madness, the feverish twitching. The picking of the skin and pulling of the hair that slowly morphed into an unnatural, unquenchable hunger. The first nip at your own skin, finding it pleasing, the pain was nothing against the need. The hunger, growing and overwhelming, whispering in your ear as the last of your sanity slipped away, stoking the furnace of desire, until you went out into the world, no longer human but a thing of singular purpose: a hunter of flesh.
Cass had known it.
She felt her blood warm in horror and shame. This was a place she never let herself go. This was dangerous. But there was Owen…and in his expression was the faintest doubt, wasn’t there? A darkness that weighed on his features, even as he joked with Dana and spit kaysev beans off into the side yard. He was wondering, wasn’t he? Wondering what it would be like? And Cass was the only person here who could tell him.
Except she couldn’t remember.
Frustration racked her, stinging her eyes with tears and making her dig her fingers into the dry earth, breaking her nails and scraping her knuckles. Pain helped, pain always helped; it was her last and often her only defense against the burgeoning anxiety. Cass was masterful with pain, having learned early; during the bad days with Byrn, after Cass realized that even her mother would not listen and would not help, she learned to use the pain to control the panic. After…he was done, she would go to the bathroom, and once she’d scrubbed herself raw she would get the nail clippers out and use them to snip away bits of her flesh. Places no one would ever see, the tough skin of her heels, the calluses on her fingers and the soles of her feet. And when that wasn’t enough, she got the X-Acto knife from the garage, and made tiny, delicate, curved designs on her thighs, her sides. So pretty, the way the blood bloomed in the tiniest droplets, the stinging making her bite her lips.
Why couldn’t she remember?
The scars on her arms had disappeared completely, the ones on her back, where the Beaters had torn into her, had faded to burnished whorls. One of the hallmarks of the very tiny percentage of the population to recover from the fever—along with the startling bright irises and the elevated body temperature and the speed at which her hair and nails grew—was the hyperefficient healing, and even scars from childhood had virtually disappeared.
Cass knew with absolute certainty that she’d been attacked, and then recovered. It was everything that happened in between that haunted her. Several weeks were unaccounted for. She’d come to in a field in the foothills, thirty miles down mountain from Silva, in clothes she didn’t remember, her wounds still weeping and excruciatingly painful, her hair pulled from her scalp. In a stranger’s clothes.
Owen set down the plastic bottle of water from which he’d been drinking, and his gaze landed on her. For a moment he just stared, and then his mouth curved in a slow, calculating, cruel smile. As if he knew what she was thinking, as if he knew what had happened to her.
As if he knew.
Cass looked away, face burning. She had been one of them. A Beater. The thought never failed to bring a wave of nausea; usually she was able to force it back with sheer will, but this time her gut rolled and lurched and she knew she was not going to be able to contain herself.
“Excuse me,” she muttered hoarsely to Zihna and Sammi, who’d been talking across her. She got shakily to her feet and hastened around the corner of the house where the remains of a pergola was twined with dead vines. It wasn’t a very effective screen, but it would have to do.
Cass knelt on the ground, the thoughts swirling relentlessly along with the pounding of her head and the roiling of her stomach. She’d been a Beater, a devourer of flesh. After she pulled out her own hair and savaged her own skin, she’d hunted. They all did. She would have. She had hunted and if any human quarry had crossed her path she had done what Beaters do, because they were driven by one need. Cass had wished and prayed and offered her soul in the bargain, those nights when she could not avoid facing the thing that had happened to her, if only she had never hurt a person, a man or woman or child, while she was changed.
But that was stupid and she knew it. Her stomach heaved one last time and Cass brought up bitter bile, gasping and coughing and retching onto the cracked earth. Beaters did one thing. It would have taken some miracle to keep
this other her
from following its need, and Cass was not a believer in miracles. She had to face the fact that she had committed abominations, that she’d done unnatural things, evil things.
Cass emptied herself onto the ground while not far away children played and people shared a meal and survivors dared to hope. She was only allowed to be a part of this community because they didn’t know. If they knew what she was, they would most likely banish her. They might even kill her.
And she wasn’t sure she blamed them.
When she returned, having wiped her face on her sleeve and chewed a few kaysev leaves plucked from a plant that had rooted along the house’s foundation to cleanse her mouth, Cass returned to the gathering as nonchalantly as she could. Zihna gave her a concerned look but Red was in the middle of a story so Cass just forced a smile and pantomimed that she was fine, then settled back into the group and watched people finish their meal.
Dor was sitting with a group that included Jasmine and Sun-hi. Jasmine had ridden in the panel van all day, but she looked drained and exhausted, her enormous belly clearly making it difficult to get comfortable on the ground. When Dor dragged over a dusty ottoman for her to lean against, she smiled at him gratefully.
Dor was incapable of sitting still; he was always on the lookout for things that needed doing. She was watching him rig a footrest from a sofa pillow when voices raised in argument caught her attention.
“Aw, man, let him,” Luddy said. He was talking to Dana, the sack that had held his dinner dangling from his hand. Luddy and Dana had never gotten along—punk and do-gooder, Cass figured there were probably some sort of father issues going on there—and it looked like Luddy was trying to provoke him, as usual. “Come on, if he had it you’d know by now.”
Owen looked on, chewing on hardtack. Luddy was right, he looked fine from a distance, and it did seem cruel, leaving him alone at the edge of the group after their long day. Dana said something quietly and shrugged, but now they had the attention of the rest of the group.
“Come on, are we really gonna sink to this on our first day out?” Luddy demanded.
Owen got uncertainly to his feet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, stuffing the plastic bag that had held his dinner into his pocket.