Authors: Sophie Littlefield
“We need to be consistent enforcing the rules—” Mayhew started to say, but Dor turned on him.
“The only
we
here is
you,
buddy,” Dor snapped, his hands in tight fists at his sides. “You’ve done all right so far, but I wouldn’t start thinking you’ve got a free ride to go around giving orders.”
That was apparently all the encouragement Owen needed. He walked toward Dana and was only a couple of steps away when a gunshot blasted and he went down, a hole ripped in his thigh.
She whipped around to see who’d fired—Smoke, his gun now aimed at Owen’s heart. “Nobody go near him,” he yelled. “Not until we’re sure.”
“What did you
do?
” a woman screamed.
“Stay where you are!”
“Put that gun away!” Mayhew had drawn too and was aiming at Smoke. It wasn’t an easy shot—too far, too many people in the way.
“Smoke—” Cass started, but he cut her off, his voice calm.
“Fine. I’ll go myself. I am going to walk over and check him. I’ll leave my gun here.” He slowly lowered it to the ground, in reach of Cass and away from the children, then stood with his hands in the air. “Shoot me if you want, but I’m telling you, if you don’t know if he’s infected and he’s close enough to touch a citizen, he’s the one you need to shoot.”
Owen was sitting on the ground whimpering, his hands over his thigh, blood coursing through his fingers. Dana had scuttled back a few steps.
Mayhew said nothing for a moment and then nodded. There was silence as everyone watched Smoke limp painfully toward the downed man. When he got close enough, he knelt down, slowly, using a hand on the ground to brace himself.
For a moment the two men stared at each other. Cass knew what Smoke was looking for—the same constricted pupils citizens checked for at the buddy-ups, and the sheen and flush of the skin. If Smoke was wrong, the man was still as good as dead unless the group was willing to give up a cherished spot in one of the vehicles, as well as precious medication. But if he was right—
Suddenly Owen sprang at Smoke, knocking him over. He pinned Smoke and pounded on his chest with his fist, yelling curses. People screamed as Smoke struggled to hold off the attack. Owen was skinny and now he was also wounded, but Smoke was exhausted from the day on the road, and Cass saw that he was weakening fast.
Cass snatched up the gun from the ground and ran, stumbling over people and abandoned meals. In the seconds it took her to reach them, Smoke had managed to force Owen off him and had rolled to the side. Owen was snarling and desperately trying to grab Smoke’s kicking legs.
Cass shot him. She was running when she took the shot and it went wide, hitting his shoulder rather than his head, but he stopped trying to grab Smoke and lay in the dirt, howling and bleeding from both his wounds.
Mayhew came running, followed by Dor. “Get him still,” Mayhew ordered to no one particular.
“You think I’m getting close to that?” Dor demanded, and then, contradicting himself, he went within a couple feet of Owen’s writhing body.
“Stop flailing around, goddamn it,” he yelled.
Cass’s gun hand shook. If Owen wasn’t infected, then it was the second shot that had doomed him. Hers. There was no way they’d risk transporting a man with two serious wounds, a man who wouldn’t be well enough to work for months, if he recovered at all.
He didn’t appear to hear them. He was sobbing as he tried to stem the flow of blood from his wounds. Dor toed him in the good leg.
“Look at me, you bastard, or I’ll kill you right now.”
That finally got Owen’s attention. “Bitch shot me…” he said, turning his unblinking eyes up at Dor.
They all saw it—Cass knew by the gasps from the crowd. Owen’s irises were tiny black pinpoints, and though he was staring straight into the setting sun, he didn’t squint at all.
Cass knew she only had a second. She crouched down as close to Owen as she dared.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” she demanded. “You blew up the island, didn’t you?”
Owen’s expression turned into a smirk and he looked at Cass defiantly. “We’re all gonna burn, baby, it’s just a matter of when.”
He barely got the words out before someone shot his face off.
Chapter 29
SAMMI SAT ON a little swing that had been hung from a covered arbor that once had plants growing on it, watching the sky go from purple to gray. There were dead spikes on the arbor, probably roses or something. Sammi had seen things like that Before, benches no one sat on, ponds with fountains that no one ever threw pennies in, paths that went nowhere. Just another way for rich people to spend money on nothing.
She’d been sitting here trying to forget what Owen Mason looked like after he’d been shot, how half of his face looked kind of normal and the other half looked like a steak dipped in barbecue sauce and covered with pink cottage cheese. There was no way she was eating anything ever again, and she kind of wished she could just lie down and sleep and not wake up until the world was normal again.
“Wondered where you went.” Sammi jumped, but it was only Colton. He’d sneaked up on her—not really, but he never made a lot of noise. He was quiet, and Sammi liked that. Most of the time she loved hanging out with Kyra and Sage, but sometimes she just wanted to not talk.
That’s what they did for a while. Colton put his arm along the back of the swing, and Sammi leaned into it, and that was nice. There wasn’t anything going on with them, despite what anyone thought. After Jed, Sammi wasn’t…well, it would be a long time before she looked at a boy like that again, if she ever did. And Colton wasn’t like that anyway, he never did anything. Maybe he was gay or something. Which Sammi wouldn’t care if he was, that was cool. But whatever.
Everything was just so fucked up. Again.
Tears leaked down her face and she didn’t try to hide them. Colton said, “Oh,” and dug something out of his pocket, a rag or something, and it wasn’t all that clean but it was nice when he dabbed at her face with it.
“That thing with Owen. Jesus,” he said, shoving the rag back in his pocket.
“Yeah…I know.”
“Sammi, listen, I need to tell you about something.”
She said okay but a little warning went off inside. People didn’t say that unless it was something big, something important. “Well, it can’t be someone else dead, right?” she asked, trying for a joke.
“No.” He sounded even more serious. “Owen…he was into some really bad stuff.”
“No shit. He blew up the
island.
Everybody says so.”
“Yeah, but…” Colton’s voice trailed off for a minute, and then he took a breath and continued, kind of in a rush. “That wasn’t the first time. He, uh. One time? Shane and me were over at his place. He had, like, a whole drawer full of explosives. Electronic stuff, timers and shit, I don’t even know what all. Like, to make bombs? Seriously, Sammi, he scared the crap out of me. I think he was going to…do something. He was talking about taking out the whole island.”
“Well, he just about did!”
“No, I mean, before that. He said he was working on something big enough to destroy the whole place. I didn’t believe him. I got the fuck out of there. But Shane, he stayed. He told me that Owen said there was all this stuff in the storehouse. He was trying to figure out how to get it. And then when the Beaters attacked and we had to leave so fast, he somehow got it all out of there.”
“Owen did? Or Shane?”
“Owen. He didn’t have time to rig it up to the thing he was working on, the remote or whatever, but he and Shane…it was them, Sammi. They went back when everyone was on the bridge and they blew up the community center and they blew up the quarantine house. Shane only went along because he felt bad for Phillip, he wanted to put him out of his misery but—but listen, Sammi, you can’t tell anyone. Okay? You can’t tell
anyone.
Now Owen’s dead it doesn’t matter, and Shane, no one would get it, what he was trying to do.”
Sammi’s skin felt cold all of a sudden. “They blew up Phillip?” she whispered.
“Only because—I mean, Sammi, Shane said he was thinking about him going crazy in there, losing his mind. He said he’d want someone to do it to him, if it was him in there.”
“But…” Sammi thought of the last time she saw Phillip, of his hand reaching out through the narrow slot. She couldn’t do it, no matter how much he was suffering. There was no way she could pull the switch or light the fuse or whatever. “Why are you even telling me this?”
“Because I need a favor.”
Chapter 30
IN THE MORNING Cass woke to the clang of shovels hitting dirt. She went out into the mist-thickened dawn, wrapped in a blanket, and watched from the porch as a small band of people dug a shallow grave. Owen’s body lay nearby. They had not wasted so much as a tarp on him, and his corpse, awkwardly arranged and gray-pale in the morning light, stared sightlessly into the sky. Smoke was among their number, and Cass could see the perspiration on his face as he took his turn with the shovel. He should not be exerting himself like that. But who could stop him?
Dor had been as good as his word, watching over Sammi and some of the other kids upstairs. When they came down the stairs he scowled at Cass. She shrugged, but her indifference didn’t reach inside. It was easy to believe, as he stepped heavily past her and the other mothers, washing their children from a shared tub of water in the house’s mudroom, that he might have stood sentry all night, and she wondered if she were foolish not to take that extra measure of security. His eyes were shrouded and tired, but his body was tense with stored energy. He walked like he was looking for a fight.
But when he assembled with some of the other new council on the porch as the group loaded up for the journey, he stayed near the back and let Mayhew do the talking. He stared straight ahead, detached and almost indifferent as the Easterners addressed the Edenites.
“Many of you have come to me with questions,” Mayhew began. He had tied his hair back in its leather string and trimmed his gray beard. Cass had seen him sitting at a window in the kitchen, a small mirror propped on the sill, leaning close with a pair of small scissors, unmindful of the rotted-food stench in the place. “And I promised you answers. I won’t take up too much of your time now, because we want to cover a lot of ground today. But I want you to know that you can come to me and my men anytime. Questions, concerns, what have you. Last night I think we all learned something.”
Red, tying down their belongings on the small trailer, made a sound in his throat, making no attempt to hide his skepticism. Zihna shot him a warning look.
“I’d like to thank Smoke here for his quick thinking, and Cass, and all of you who shared in the unpleasant…duty. Well, it’s always difficult.” He pursed his lips and stared at the ground for a respectful moment. He was good, Cass had to give him that. He’d taken little responsibility for the screwup with Owen, and yet here he was directing a moment of silence for him, and people were going along with it. She caught Smoke’s eye; he sat on the edge of the porch, his back against a column, resting his hip. He gave little away in the tiny flash of a reassuring smile he gave her.
So neither of her men was going to challenge Mayhew, not over this. And none of the others, who were clustered near the group—Shannon, Neal, certainly not Dana, who was tightly rolling a ground cloth and stuffing it into a small nylon sack, his mouth tight and his eyes lowered—would either.
“Until six weeks ago we were doing fine,” Mayhew began. “We—all of us here—were on the border patrol across the Rockies. We’d stop people trying to come east now and then, heard what they had to say about conditions
west
of the Rockies before we sent ’em back. No one got through. No one.
“Then one day the blueleaf showed up in our lands, too. Had to be avian migration, we’re figuring, but it doesn’t really matter because in one week—
one week
—there were six cases in town. We locked the whole town down, put everyone in a six-block area until we could get a handle on whether it had spread any further, but then a couple cases popped up in town five miles away, and then suddenly there’s rumors of people going missing from one place and the infected showing up wandering around somewhere else, feverish. It’s terrible over there now.”
“Welcome to our world,” a woman muttered not far from Cass, but she was quickly shushed. This was the first confirmation any of them had of the stories that occasionally reached New Eden.
They’d heard rumors of the arming of the natural border created by the Rockies a few months ago, when people who’d attempted to travel east returned to tell the story. There had been a couple of guys in the Box who claimed to have tried to cross at the Eisenhower Tunnel. They told of seeing rotting corpses on the west side of I-70, would-be émigrés who didn’t take no for an answer and were shot for their efforts and left to serve as a warning. There were only a few other places where a crossing on foot was even possible, and these were all patrolled, or land-mined.
There had been considerable resentment of the East after that. Calls for quarantine—you could hold people for a week, and it would be clear who was feverish from blueleaf kaysev and who was not at that point—were rebuffed by the border patrol, who were rumored to shoot not only those who attempted to force their way across but also those who merely argued too strenuously.
Dana looked up from his task, his face puffy and pale. He evidently hadn’t slept well, and his expression was petulant. “So you’re just getting a taste of what we’ve been dealing with,” he muttered. Cass couldn’t help thinking that what New Eden had been dealing with was, largely, keeping its head in the sand and going soft, that until now they’d been well fed and comfortable.
“Maybe so,” Mayhew said coldly. “But we’ve been sending patrols north, too. That’s where we’re headed. Beaters can’t tolerate the cold and neither can blueleaf. We’ve got a plan. And a destination. Now, look. We never meant to come barging in on you and take over. But if our two groups pool our resources, our intelligence, we stand a lot better chance of finding a place where we can build a
real
community, somewhere that we can actually thrive, where we’re not looking over our shoulders every second of the day.”
“How far north are we talking?” Phil Booth demanded.
“Word is if we get up into the Cascade range, both threats drop off significantly.”
“Jesus. How far exactly? How many days on the road?”
Mayhew’s expression didn’t so much falter as harden, but when he spoke his voice was calm and even encouraging. “I won’t lie to you. This is going to be a few hard weeks. But think about the alternatives, my friends. We try to shelter anywhere around here, we’re into the same problems you’ve already been up against.”
Silence. People stole glances at each other, shuffled their feet, fidgeted with their things. Cass watched Dor, his arms folded across his chest, his jaw set. His gaze bored into hers and he did not look away.
Then a woman near the front of the crowd raised her hand. It was one of Collette’s do-gooder friends, Cass didn’t remember her name. She was still soft through the middle, fleshy and wan, somehow.
“The Beaters, the way they learned to swim,” she said breathlessly. “Everything was fine until a few days ago when they decided to try to get in the water and then it was like they all decided to jump in the water all at once. If they can learn that, what else are they gonna do next?”
“They’ve got their own language now!” a man called from the back of the crowd.
“That’s ridiculous,” Dor snapped, raising his head and uncrossing his arms, craning his neck to see who’d spoken. “There’s absolutely no indication of that, and spreading rumors isn’t going to help. You people need to calm down.”
“It’s okay, Dor, I’ve got this,” Mayhew said calmly. “Everyone’s just a little on edge.”
Sure, Cass figured darkly, watching your friends die horribly might put anyone “a little on edge.” And yet people seemed to find Mayhew soothing.
He stopped clear of taking any sort of vote, and Cass wondered if it was because he wasn’t confident he had the majority convinced yet. As they set out into the morning, she saw the subtle shifts in the company people were keeping.
Dana walked alone, kicking stones and occasionally talking to himself. Shannon tried to talk to him when they stopped for lunch near a murky pond, taking the opportunity to boil water to refill all of their reserves. Cass overheard a little of their conversation as she took Ruthie and Twyla looking for pretty rocks in the field next to the pond.
“…don’t know who he thinks he is,” Dana was saying angrily.
Cass glanced back at them a few times while she and the girls strolled; she saw Shannon gesturing, pleading maybe, before finally giving up and going to join the others.
Cass had volunteered to watch the girls to give Suzanne a break, but the truth was she needed a little time to herself. No. The truth was that she was fighting an urge for a drink. Not that there was one to be had, but the unsettled feeling left over from Mayhew’s little speech had spiraled into a full-on tangle of worries, the sort that usually found her deep in the night.
Days tended to be easier. Last time she quit drinking, Cass filled them with work, with running, with caring for Ruthie. And she could usually stave off a craving by throwing herself into arduous physical work. Digging stones from a field. Weeding between rows. Anything at all to drown out the anxiety.
On the road was different. She had no sense of control. She moved when the group moved, stopped when they stopped. Everyone else seemed to be content knowing only that they were headed “north,” but the uncertainty of the future only added to her anxiety.
She walked, head down, with her hands in her pockets, reciting the litany of phrases she’d picked up in her long-ago meetings, inane little sayings that did nothing to boost her confidence in herself but sometimes, occasionally, could pull her back into that feeling of thin hope, that she really might be able to get through this, that she really could survive without a drink.
If God brings me to it, He will bring me through it
I am not failing as long as I am trying
She heard, in her whispered words, dozens of other voices. Since the end of everything she had seen no one from the meetings. Not one of them. They were all probably dead. What would they have chosen, Cass wondered, if they knew how few days they had left—to keep coming back, or to go on a bender the likes of which no one had ever seen? Would they have drunk themselves to death?
She had the start of a headache, a faint breathlessness. Nothing too terrible. And food would help. She could get through this, she could—
Cass looked around. They’d walked to the far edge of the field—strawberries, it looked like, the long-dead plants choked now by kaysev—and there was a worn split-rail fence that might have been pretty if the vines twined around the wood weren’t all brittle and brown. But though Cass turned around, a complete circle, she did not see the girls.
“Ruthie!” she called, her voice hoarse. “Twyla!”
Oh God, she hadn’t been watching, hadn’t been listening, she’d been lost inside her own head, her own cravings. For a second Cass was frozen in terror and mortification, eyes darting everywhere, gathering her breath to scream—
And then she heard their voices, bright peals of laughter spilling from behind a tractor that had been abandoned in the field. A second later Twyla’s head popped up on the bench, followed by Ruthie’s.
“Mama!” Ruthie called. “Look, we’re farmers!”
Cass forced a smile, her stomach seized with adrenaline and fear. She felt like she would throw up again, but that couldn’t happen, not here, not in this moment of the girls’ delight.
“Oh,
look
at you two!” she called through a smile she dredged up from her paltry heart. “Show me how you grow your crops!”
And she hastened toward the girls, fixing her gaze on their sweet faces. If she couldn’t beat her cravings, then she’d just have to outrun them, keep running toward the next right thing and the next.
That night she had thought to speak to Smoke, to confess how bad she’d gotten. He would be disappointed in her, but he would be compassionate, too. Smoke was like that; he wouldn’t let her suffer alone. And she was willing now to trade a little of her dignity for a few moments of his comfort.
But as they set up camp for the night in a feed and supply store, after first clearing out several long-abandoned Beater nests and searching the much-looted supply shelves for anything useful, Cass could not get a moment alone with Smoke.
His limp was far more pronounced in the afternoons, after the day of exertion had taken its toll. His face was slightly ashen and she knew he was in pain. And yet he wouldn’t take a break. He helped Davis and Bart—and Valerie, Cass couldn’t help noticing with an uneasy feeling—to feed and water the horses, and then he and Mayhew and Terrence and a couple other guys made a tour of the other buildings in the town while there was still daylight, looking for anything useful. They made a decent raiding party, well armed and cautious; they came back with a few tools and several armloads of firewood. Terrence had found someone’s rainy-day stash in a canister. He shook it out upside down on the fire once they got the kindling going, and dozens of bills fluttered down and caught flame, the kids laughing at the spectacle.
But throughout the meal and the cleanup, Smoke stayed away. He talked to Mayhew, to Davis and Nadir, even to Dor for a few tense moments. He made his way around to the kids, impressing Colton and the other boys with a brief knife-throwing demonstration. When Cass came back from taking Ruthie outside to wash before bed, he’d set up his bedroll near the front, along with the Easterners and others who were well armed, and was already deeply asleep, his face sheltered in the crook of his arm.
Sleep was slow to come, despite Cass’s exhaustion. She knew what Smoke was up to because she had seen it before. He was doing what he did best, building the collective courage of the group, just as he’d once encouraged and developed the security team in the Box. And there was no doubt that it needed to be done; without the cohesiveness he provided, they could easily splinter into factions, start blaming each other for the things that had happened.