Authors: Sophie Littlefield
Sammi said she was sorry like she always did, and Sage said it didn’t matter like she always did, and they smoked for a while and then they lay down, Sage in her bed and Sammi on the floor under borrowed blankets, and after a while Sage fell asleep in the middle of talking about which actor from Before Phillip looked most like, and Sammi lay awake and tried not to think of her dad and Cass and what they were doing and the sounds they were making, and instead imagined sliding across the wooden floor on her knees like the little kids, being seven again with her mom on the sidelines clapping and saying,
Go, go, Sammi-bear.
Chapter 6
“I ALREADY KNEW that,” Luddy said, taking back his guitar after Red had showed him exactly how the chord progression went. They had been among the last people in the community center, the party having wound down to the dregs, all the good food gone and most folks having wandered home with a full belly and a pleasant buzz.
The chord progression was a tricky one, and Red remembered with wistful clarity the day he’d learned it himself. He’d been crashing in a guy’s apartment in San Francisco, not too far from the Haight. Red had a little of Luddy in him back then: insecure and ambitious. He didn’t dare let on how much of a rush he got just being that close to where it all started. Hendrix, Joplin, Garcia—back in those days everyone still remembered the greats.
Red used to get up before the rest of the guys and walk over to the park with his guitar and find a bench. He’d stay a couple of hours, dicking around just for the sheer joy of it, going through the set list first for whatever dive Carmy had managed to book them into—and then he’d play his own stuff. Some of the songs were polished, as perfect as he could make them; others were just a few bars here and there, inspirations that came to him in the early hours of the morning while he lay in bed thinking and smoking after a gig.
Back then, people used to try to give him money all the time, and what the hell, Red didn’t discourage it. A “hey, man” for the guys, a wink for the ladies. He got other offers, too, and now and then he’d take one of the girls home, or if he and Carmy were sharing a room, to her place. It never meant anything. It was just part of the journey, and Red back then was always on a journey. It was in his blood, in his bones. The original ramblin’ man, that was him.
Not anymore, though. Red counted every day that he woke up in the same place, Zihna at his side, as a good day. And the kids—the girls who lived with them, the teenage boys who hung around the house—they were a kick. He taught them all guitar, just for fun. On a good day, it was pure magic. On a bad day, well, then it was still pretty good.
His favorite nights were when the girls got bored and came downstairs looking for something to do. Zihna made tea and snacks, and Red got out board games or cards, and they laughed and played until the girls got sleepy. On nights like that, it sometimes seemed like he had all the time in the world. That was an illusion, of course. Red was fifty-nine this year and well aware that he looked a decade older than that. All that hard living was catching up to him.
There was one more thing he needed to do before he was dead. He’d tried and failed more times than he could count on one hand. Still, he was biding his time. Making a move too soon would be even worse than waiting too long. And he had a feeling he’d have only one more chance.
Chapter 7
IN THE MORNING Cass woke before Ruthie. For a while she lay with her daughter tucked in the curve of her body, wrapped in her arms, watching Ruthie’s hair ruffle in the gentle current of her breath, feeling her good sure slow heartbeat and marveling for the hundredth, the thousandth time at the perfection of her eyelids. They were porcelain fair, with a single faint crease and long curved dark lashes, a tiny miracle, evidence of grace she didn’t deserve.
Her head was thickly cottoned, sharp thorns of ache punctuating the fuzz. Her stomach rolled and burned, and she had a powerful dry-lipped thirst and a faint dizziness. She eased herself out of the covers and crawled onto the carpet, then carefully stood, holding on to the small end table that served as a nightstand for support. A tremor, a shake. A sheen of sweat on her forehead, the backs of her hands.
Self-contempt as real as salt and poison on her tongue.
This morning Cass would not go to the shower house, where a primitive plumbing system had been cobbled together by Earl and his men. The women gathered there, breathing misty clouds in the morning chill, while they scrubbed their faces and brushed their teeth with split kaysev twigs. Cass couldn’t face anyone until she got her daytime mask in place.
She retraced last night’s path down to the water, keeping an eye on the ground in front of her. Not many people came here; besides the problem of the disintegrating dock, the shore sloped too gently to be good for fishing, especially when a steeper drop-off on the other side of the island meant you could practically hang a line into the water and catch bass or sturgeon. Still, there had been enough foot traffic to wear a path from which roots and jagged rocks protruded, ready to trip the inattentive.
Cass reached the water’s edge, and shuffled slowly out onto the dock. The river was wide here, the water calm and lazy; it seemed to flow more rapidly on the other side of the island where the bridge to the mainland was. She knelt at the point where it sagged, and a thin skim of water slid over the slimy wood, inches from her knees. Cass watched the water’s behavior for a moment as she lined up her things—a toothbrush, a cloth, the plastic box of baking soda that she used under her arms—and thought about how pretty it was, the way it followed a design as endless in its variety as it was inevitable. Lapping, dripping, sluicing into every crevice in the wood, every pock and hollow in the shore.
It would be so easy to slip soundlessly into the water, let it find its way into her nostrils, her eyes, her mouth, the breath bubbling out of her as she drifted slowly down into the reeds and muck.
The February-cold water would scour away the stale film left by last night’s wine, the guilt-pall from Dor’s bruising kiss.
A sound interrupted her treacherous train of thought: a crowing burbled cry carried across the water, sharp on the misty morning, sharp and close. Cass jerked her head up, and there, across the twenty yards of sluggish river that separated the island from the shore, were Beaters.
Cass fell back on her ass, the impact jarring her body, and scuttled backward several feet until she got herself under control. Twelve, fifteen…
eighteen
of them. They saw her and started screaming at her like desperate lovers, reaching and testing the water with their knobbed and scabbed and mostly shoeless feet before retreating back to the shore.
So many of them. Their rage was nothing new, but ever since the first wave appeared, nearly a year back, they had steadily evolved, like the old Time-Life picture books Cass’s mother brought home from garage sales—evolution presented in glorious saturated colors, ancient dogs and apes turned slyly toward the reader with expressions of self-confident conspiracy. In no time the Beaters started searching each other out and building nests. In mere months they had learned to work together to take down a citizen, in groups of four so there would be one to pin each of the victim’s flailing limbs. Not too much later, they discovered that larger groups could divide responsibilities so that some kept would-be rescuers at bay while others spirited the prey away for a group feast.
Gathering clothes and rags for their nests. Dragging their victims’ remains away and stacking them into bone-piles. But some things remained beyond them—putting on warm clothes when the weather turned cold, or scaling walls, or driving machinery or building fires.
And—most significantly—
swimming.
It was the only thing that kept New Eden safe. No one had ever seen a Beater even approach waterways with intent, though surely in the crowd of lurching, bumbling creatures on the other shore there must have been some accomplished swimmers. Perhaps one of them had swum for Cal, another had been a pretty young mother who floated her laughing toddler in water wings in a backyard pool, yet another maybe wakeboarded on New Melones Lake only a few short years ago, splendid and muscular and sun-sparkling in his joyful youth.
No more. Even at this distance Cass could make out the hallmarks of the advanced stages of the disease. Some of them were missing huge chunks of flesh, and their bones flashed white and vulnerable-looking. Others had chewed off their own flesh, the thin skin covering their fingers, their nails, their own lips, tearing scabbed craters in their shoulders. When they could not find fresh uninfected flesh, the Beaters would nibble dispiritedly at each other, drawing blood and painting themselves with it, tearing off strips of flesh, but their hearts were not in it. They could tell the difference and the difference was evidently considerable. They would even eat kaysev when they grew truly hungry, and as far as anyone knew, no Beater had perished from starvation.
Eventually, they died—even the freakishly supercharged immune system that was left behind by the blueleaf fever was not enough to save them from the endless insults to their systems, the breaking of bones and rending of flesh and unstaunched bleeding. Occasionally the raiding parties came across Beater carcasses bent and splayed in the streets, left by their companions where they fell. The huge black carrion birds that had appeared last fall were not interested in dead Beaters. Only maggots would eat Beater flesh, and Cass had heard the stories of raiders rolling over a corpse to reveal its underside split and leaking a tide of fat white pupae onto the pavement.
Cass’s stomach rolled and heaved and she retched and retched into the water, the remains of a meal so long ago she had forgotten it, bare lean tendrils of bile. Retching until there was nothing left, until it felt like her soul itself was expelled.
At last she wiped her mouth on her sleeve and returned to the path without looking again at the opposite shore.
It was her duty, as a member of New Eden’s community, to take this bad news straight to the council, where it could be absorbed and disseminated and acted upon.
But as Cass remembered what she’d done on the dock only hours ago, she knew she would shirk this mean duty as she had so many others. Someone else would have seen what she saw, surely. Someone else would act. Someone else would have to save them.
Chapter 8
THE DAY WAS a scorched and stretched expanse of time. Cass was grateful—her gratitude lousy with guilt—that it was not her day with the kids. Tomorrow was her day in the babysitting rotation and she would not drink tonight. Or at least she would only drink a little, almost nothing. And she would not see Dor tonight. And, definitely, she would visit Smoke. All of that. She just had to get through the day first.
Earl showed up as promised and they walked the bank together, boots squelching down into the sodden soil near the bank, clumps of reed stems going pale where they met the earth, crushed flat under their feet.
“I don’t know,” he said, finally, when they reached the southern tip of Garden Island. Looking north from here toward the other islands, you could see only the rooftop of the community center and a few of the other buildings. A lazy plume of smoke swirled up into the clouds, the remains of the breakfast fire. Lunch was always a cold meal, a lean repast of kaysev in its humblest forms—greens for salad, hardtack made from the everyday flour.
Cass had been skipping lunch too often, she knew that. She was much too thin, her muscles taut and sinewy across her shoulders, her back, her arms. She would go join the others, just as soon as they were finished here. She would eat extra, she would nibble sustenance like a squirrel.
“Maybe hold back on this one area,” Earl said, indicating a section of Cass’s planned lettuce patch. “I don’t think it’s gonna go, but this winter’s been bad for rain.”
Cass nodded. She’d expected as much. She had the rows sketched in twine tied to sticks sunk into the spongy soil, waiting for a dry day to plant.
Earl hitched up his pants, their business concluded. He was a kind man, Cass knew that, the leathery kind of sixtysomething man who would have been a putterer, a retired gent who refereed Little League games and built sunrooms and gazebos for his wife. He never complained about the arthritis in his joints though it was clear that mornings brought him almost debilitating stiffness. As they walked slowly back along the path, he favored one leg; if a trove of Advil or Tylenol popped up, there would be some relief for him—but that was as good as wishing for helicopters or snow cones, since everything good had been raided from the easy scores long ago.
“So you got your crew coming down after lunch,” Earl said amiably.
Cass was surprised he kept track. Benny, Carol, a few others who pitched in occasionally—they came to Garden Island on the afternoons when Suzanne watched the kids, everything revolving around the child-care schedule. The kaysev field was separated by footpaths into six long and narrow sections, and on picking days the crew worked alongside Cass, bent-backed like the migrant workers who used to dot the strawberry fields along Highway 101 from Salinas down to San Luis Obispo fifty miles to the west. It was hard work, painstaking and slow, making sure they didn’t miss a single blue-tinged leaf. The markings could be subtle—on the youngest leaves in particular, there was nothing but a light tint at the base of the veining, only the slightest crenellation along the edges of the leaves. In a mature plant the signs were unmistakable—the leaves were ruffled prettily and the underside had the blue shade of the veins on a fair-skinned woman’s breast. For that reason Cass discouraged her team from picking any of the young plants at all.
Benny and Carol had become as efficient as she was and so she no longer double-checked their baskets. They were a good team, close-knit. The dynamics had shifted, Cass knew that—at first she and Benny and Carol stood together at the end of the rows, hands pressing at their aching backs, resting and talking for a few moments before heading back down the field. Now she mostly worked at her own rhythm and it was the others who took their breaks together, their laughter occasionally ringing out over the hush of the island. At the end of the day, when everyone carried their baskets back to the kitchen, the others were subdued, overly polite, asking after Ruthie and Smoke, asking if she needed anything else, help with some chore. Cass always said she was fine, she had everything under control, and it seemed to her they were happy to have her answers and be able to leave her company.
Earl wasn’t like that—or maybe it was only that he moved so slowly he could not outrun the pall she cast. For a moment Cass was so grateful for his kindness that she had an urge to hug him, to put her hand in his big work-rough one. He could be like…a father to her, maybe. Her own father left her for good early on, and her stepfather was rotting in the hell he richly deserved by now, and it would be nice—so nice—to have someone who cared about her. Cass blinked at the shock of painful longing, made a small sound, an exhalation of breath.
Earl stopped, put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. “Cass, are you all right?”
She tried to evade his kind eyes. They were sharp and shining in their nest of wrinkles in his weathered face, but he had seen.
“I’m fine.”
His hand stayed heavy on her shoulder for a moment. “You need to take care, girl,” he said gruffly, and Cass knew it was reproach as well as concern, that he recognized the signs of her hangover. Well, she deserved it, didn’t she, and as they walked the rest of the way she redoubled her fierce silent promise that tonight would be different, that tonight she would abstain from everything that was wrong.
The hardtack, spread with a bit of jam to sweeten it, did not go down easily and did not do well in her stomach afterward. Still, Cass got through the afternoon, keeping to her own row and painfully thinking up responses to the others’ cheerful greetings. The sky cleared by late afternoon, turning a brilliant sapphire suffused with unseasonable warmth, and Cass’s skin sheened with perspiration as they walked back together.
They turned their baskets over to the kitchen staff, who would wash the leaves and pods and roots and turn them into a dozen different dishes. Today’s harvest was mostly tender leaves, succulent and pale from all the rains, so it would be salads, stir-fries and maybe even an exotic soufflé made with the precious eggs from the three chickens found in a creek wash a quarter mile from a farmhouse near Oakton. People joked that the chickens were New Eden’s VIPs and everyone was anxious for the day a rooster would be found and ensure future generations of poultry.
The few pods they’d found were still young and tender enough to be eaten as is; though mature pods were edible they were tough and fibrous and usually reserved for the work studio, where they were dried and turned into a coirlike material that could be used for mats and scrubbers. But the shelled beans could be tasty if they weren’t allowed to get too large—at that point, the beans would be dried, oil pressed from them and the rest ground for flour.
The meals would be prepared with care and presented with ceremony by the women and a few men who tended the kitchen. People needed to take pride in their work—Cass understood that. She even wished she could feel the same, and she envied the beaming servers who set out dishes garnished with lemon slices, the juice squeezed so that everyone could have a little in their boiled water.
Cass lingered in the yard, pretending that she was caught up in a boccie game, in reality putting off the moment when she would have to face Suzanne. That was how she came to be among the first to hear the cry go up.
“Blueleaf!”
For a beat after the syllables hung in the clear warm air, there was silence. Cass whipped around and stared at the long table where the rinsed kaysev was laid out to dry, two of the kitchen staff—Rachael and Chevelle—frozen over a sorted pile, looks of horror on their faces.
Cass leaped to her feet and ran to the table. Chevelle mutely handed over a bunch of leaves. Cass examined it with shaking fingers and yes—
oh, yes, there it is
—the cloudy blue tint at the base of the leaf, trailing up into the veining, which was almost azure before it shaded to green. The leaves were too young yet to have clearly ruffled edges and they lay cool and smooth in Cass’s hand.
“Oh fuck,” Chevelle murmured, as Corryn hastened over, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Is it?” she demanded in the booming voice that more than anything had sealed her position as head cook. She held out her hand for the leaves but Cass made no move to share them, only nodding.
The worst of the discovery—the first in a month—was not that a rogue plant had grown on Garden Island, but that one of them had failed to identify it when they picked it. If it had been passed over by the kitchen staff—whose job was to cook, not inspect, the harvest—it likely would have been eaten.
And one or more of the people of New Eden would have begun to turn.
“Which basket?” Cass demanded, scanning the row on the wooden counter behind them. Rachael pointed, her face drained of color. “Whose basket?”
Cass seized the basket and spun it in her hands, looking for the metal scrap that Earl had wired to each basket, initials inscribed with a nail, to identify its owner. CD.
CD, she read, and her throat closed.
Cass Dollar
It could have happened to anyone.
The kind words, spoken in an unexpectedly kind and tender voice by Corryn, were a branch offered to one drowning in a current, and Cass tried to hold on.
It worked, in the moment. Corryn had ushered Cass into the storage pantry while the others checked and rechecked the harvest. Harris and Shannon joined them in the pantry for a quick consultation; it would be discussed at the nightly council meeting, and Cass knew that Harris could be counted on to quell any hysteria. Corryn, if she were called upon to recount what happened, would be fair. She was a woman who would always continue to be kind.
These are good people,
Cass reminded herself, holding her arms tight across her chest, back in the room an hour later with Ruthie. It was almost dinnertime and Cass would not let her daughter go hungry, but she did want to wait until most of the people had eaten, until darkness was settling over the dining area and they could sit alone.
But these were good people. How could she have taken them so resolutely for granted? Why had she rebuffed all their efforts at friendship, at inclusion? But Cass knew the reason why—the reason was sitting in the wooden box. In the dimming light of evening, the bear’s gilded collar seemed to shine. The umbrella balanced on his nose as it always did; his placid canine expression remained unperturbed.
“Can we go see Smoke?” Ruthie asked. She was playing with Cass’s bowl of earrings, taking them out and sorting them, dozens of sparkly and polished studs and dangles, some with mates, some without. Cass mostly kept the collection for her girl, since she rarely wore such things anymore, but tonight she had to tamp down her irritation and resist snapping at her daughter for the baubles spilled and snagged on the dirty carpeting.
“I don’t know, honey.” Cass smoothed Ruthie’s hair down gently as her little girl snuggled into her lap, her skin soft and warm despite the chill of the room.
“’Cause he misses us. He told me.”
Cass’s fingers stilled in Ruthie’s downy hair. It needed a cut. “Did you have a dream about Smoke, honey?”
After Cass had recovered her daughter, it had taken a while for Ruthie to begin dreaming again. At first her dreams took the form of daytime trances; they were often frightening and sometimes providential. Dreams of birds preceded the appearance of the giant black buzzards; dreams of other disasters followed.
But recently Ruthie had only mentioned nice things. Cakes, mostly—she loved cookbooks and pored over them at night with Cass—and adventures with Twyla and sometimes Dane.
She frowned, a tiny line appearing on her brow. “I don’t think so, Mama,” she said, her voice going even softer, almost a whisper. “He said he misses us.”
“But—”
When,
it was on the tip of Cass’s tongue to ask. In which of their visits had Smoke done more than thrash or mumble in a coma-sleep? It had been weeks since they’d been to the hospital, and Cass had not discussed Smoke with anyone, least of all Ruthie.
“It was…” More frowning. “Before. Before today. Yesterday?”
Cass sighed. There would be no making sense of this rogue impulse, and she didn’t want to disconcert Ruthie by pressing her further. “It’s all right. We’ll go see him soon, and we’ll see what he says, okay?”
Ruthie brightened. “And can I ask Corryn for a cookie to take to him?”
“You may ask—but it might not be a cookie day.” Also, Smoke was still being fed his meals ground and moistened, in a spoon, his dormant body responding only enough to swallow the mush—but Cass didn’t mention that either.