by Linda L Zern
“God, I don’t have anything to stop this. Her throat is closing. It’s the fire. I need Albuterol—I need—” The doctor grabbed Sweetling, flipped her over, ran her hand down the girl’s back. The whistling stopped. The kid’s back arched in an obscene jerk: once, twice, and then again.
“No. No. No. Come on, Sweet Baby.” She flipped the girl back over, checked her fingernails. They were tinged blue. She started to puff air into the tiny mouth. The kid’s chest stayed flat; the body thrashed as it fought for oxygen, then went limp. Time went sideways; the minutes stretching out like a rubber band.
“No. No. Do something!! Can’t you do a tracheotomy?” The color of the girl’s skin faded. “Do something.” Tess fell to her knees.
The doctor didn’t look at Tess.
Around the fort, men yelled for help when the fire exploded up into a tower of flames at the wall’s edge. At one point, the sky turned red as if hell had burst open to bleed fire. Waterfalls of trailing sparks drifted over and down across the parking lot.
Men and boys worked to keep the animal pens and tents from burning in the courtyard. Women barked orders at them. Someone screamed from the parking lot for more water.
Horrified, Tess looked at the doctor. She jumped to her feet. “What happened to her?”
The doctor pressed her fingers to the side of the child’s neck, feeling for a pulse.
Doc Midge said, “Childhood happened. She’s probably been struggling since the smoke first got here. Asthma. You did the right thing, bringing her to me. But there was nothing we could do. Surgery would only result in a longer, slower dying: infection, fever, pus. Nothing you could do. Help the ones that are alive. I’ll take care of her. Go.”
Tess went back to handing out water-soaked face rags. No one asked Tess about a little girl named Sweetling or a broken child named Golda.
CHAPTER 30
Time turned to quicksilver as the fire swept around them, leaving a barren waste behind. The wall held. The moat continued to fill with seeping ground water. The men who worked the buckets and watched for blaze-ups inside the perimeter did it behind wet scarves and rags. They reminded Tess of the women who’d kept their wounds hidden behind cloth masks, ironic that the scarves were now helping people to breathe.
Residents of the fortress crawled out from under blankets and quilts into the clearing light of day the way the frogs dug out from under the cinders and ashes of the swamps.
Doc Midge kept Tess moving: down to the herb garden to cut garlic for antiseptic, to the laundry kettles with bedding and sheets and bandages. She had her hold the instrument tray when the burns came in, the cuts and scrapes and sprains. After the fire passed, Tess let the doctor tell her what to do, where to go. After the little girl’s death, Tess had quit marking time.
It was easy to ignore all the people gawking at the destruction from the top of the big wall, and then a runner brought a message from Roy Terry. The girl whispered something to Doc Midge, who waved at Tess to follow the messenger.
Tess followed the kid down the escalator. The smell of burning that filled the building had soaked into cracks and bedding and people’s clothing. It was in their hair and gear and throats when they coughed.
Terry waited for Tess outside, at the edge of the parking lot. The man sported bruises that looked like smudged muck or forgotten paint on his flabby cheeks.
“We buried the girl,” he said. “We had to in this heat. The fire didn’t help.”
“Girl.” The word made no sense to Tess. “Girl?” She shook the cobwebs out of her head. “Which one?” If only she’d been able to help Sweetling or even Golda, not to mention Ally or any of the others.
“That girl you brought here. Golda? It was a good thing you did.”
What did any of it matter?
“It didn’t change anything.”
“It maybe kept you alive. Did you ever think of that?”
Heat blasted up from the cracked chunks of blacktop under her feet; it was as if the fire had burrowed into the ground and festered there. Sweat trickled down her backbone. Indian summer, that’s what Grandfather would have called this weather. Flames and now heat and she didn’t have the courage to crawl up on top of the big wall and see what was left for herself.
“Why did you bring me out here? I have things I can do to help the doctor.”
He jerked his head at her, “Come on.” He waited for her to follow, and led her toward the rope ladder next to the front gate.
“Up. You need to see it.”
She wanted to argue, but couldn’t find the energy.
Hand over hand, that’s all it would take, to see it for herself. She’d heard them talking about what it looked like out there, about the nothingness. She tried to raise her hand to the first rung of the ladder and couldn’t. He poked her in the back.
“Up, Girl. Come on, is this the girl that threatened to shoot me and leave my body out in the anonymous woods? That chopped the head off a poisonous serpent of death? Go, climb. You might be surprised.”
Tess climbed. The sun felt closer on top of the wall, blasting straight into her face. She blinked when her eyes watered, and put her hand to her brow, and looked for herself.
Flat. Stripped. Naked. The fire had burned away the ground cover in all directions and made the earth easy to see all the way to the horizon line. Whatever was stone and brick remained, leading the way to where the town of Oviedo had once stood, like smoldering signposts. Black lumps marked the trunks and roots of the biggest trees, some of the palms. Thin streamers of smoke drifted up, another kind of marker—hot spots. From where she stood she could see the burned body of some animal that hadn’t been able to outrun the flames, had gotten caught up against the barrier of the mud wall.
Someone should drag that thing in here before the meat went bad. She tried to figure out if dinner would be bear or boar. Gave up. It was burned beyond recognition.
Next to her, Mister Terry shimmied onto the wall, said something to the guard manning the gate next to Tess.
“Gone. It’s all gone,” she said.
“Tess, you’re not paying attention.” He sounded like an elementary school teacher.
He pointed. “Look at the water, Tess.”
She shaded her eyes against the sun. Water. Still there. Still everywhere because it was Florida. There were retention ponds, pools, and lakes, but the scrub had grown up for seven long years, hiding it all away behind thatches of blackberries and mulberry, and now it was—everywhere again. Water pocked the blackened ground, fouled by ash, full of hyacinths and duckweed.
Roy Terry pointed again.
There, standing in a retention pond next to what was left of Red Bug Road, far enough away to make them look like a trick of white light glittering off the water. Ally and ZeeZee’s horses were standing up to their chests in green water.
“Those your missing horses?”
She gasped, felt the rush of delight. “Yeah.”
He let the moment spin out; she could feel him waiting for her to put it together. The horses pushed out of the water to the edge of the pond. Tess saw Curie’s huge gut. They’d known what to do. Where to go to survive.
“Smart horses. Smarter people. They’re out there,” he said. “They are.”
Tess looked at him as he lifted his hand to block the sun. He’d dragged her up here to make sure she saw them, that she saw the possibilities. Strange little man, he’d wanted her to have hope.
Looking beyond the horses to the horizon, Tess made a wish. If only they weren’t just talking about horses.
“Oh, they’re out there,” Mister Terry sounded sure. “Even the ones that should be dead but aren’t.”
CHAPTER 31
Britt Summerlin spread parts of a handgun over a scrap of muslin next to Tess, measuring gun oil out drop-by-drop, liquid gold. They sat side by side in the cool shade of an overhang to a side entrance of the building. Tess watched as she cleaned the gun.
“I know you think that you’re
going back out there, Tess, but El’s not going to go for it. She’ll be sending a search and retrieval party out soon to scoop up the animals huddled in the lakes and rivers. A scouting party too . . . sure. But not you.”
Britt examined the barrel of the Glock.
Tess found it easy to smile at the older girl, nod, and make reassuring noises. Tess had sisters; she knew how to play the game. Along with the ground cover, the fire had burned away any pretense that Tess was free to come and go.
Britt didn’t bother to look up. “And you’re not fooling me with the happy face. There’s too few of us to defend this place. She won’t let you go.”
Tess snorted, pressed hard against the cement block wall behind her.
“Don’t get your back up. It’s not a good look for you.”
“Kidnap and hold a lot of people against their will, do you?”
It was Britt’s turn to stiffen in anger. She shrugged off Tess’s verbal jab and sighted down the barrel of the gun. “Don’t go there. You have no idea.”
Tess jumped up. The bottle of gun oil tipped, spilled, and soaked into the ground. The oily mark spread out like a bloodstain. Britt shoved to her feet.
“Everyone keeps telling me that. That I have no idea—”
“You, ass.” The girl’s green eyes snapped a familiar glitter, her brother’s eyes, as she snatched at the bottle to set it upright. Tess’s heart turned over, and suddenly she was drowning in agony.
“This stuff is impossible to get anymore.” Britt glared at Tess. “You don’t have a clue what’s out there. You and your chirpy band of happy homesteaders have no idea what we’ve had to do, to fight through. El doesn’t want you leaving, so you’re not going to look for them. Not yet. The ground hasn’t even cooled.”
But where were they? Parrish? And Blane? Were they gone from her forever? Alive or dead—it was the same. It was an old and familiar agony. She hated the Marketplace. She hated them all.
Tess backed away from Britt’s petty anger, afraid she would punch her. Britt stood slowly.
Tess jabbed a finger at her. “And who knows better than you that I have to go? Not knowing, it’s driving me mad. How many have you lost and never known what happened to them? He is your brother.”
“Stop it!” Britt picked up the Glock. “Don’t think you can put me off the scent by bringing him up. You’re not going over the wall or through it. We’re going to need you up on top with a rifle in your hands when Myra shows up, so just shut up. And if or when El wants you in one of the scouting squads—You’ll join, and you’ll listen, and you’ll do what I tell you.” She slapped a magazine into the pistol, punctuating her sentences with quick, efficient movements.
Britt slammed the gun away into the shoulder holster she wore. Picking up the gun oil, she capped it off and then shook the bottle next to her ear. She sneered at Tess. “You have no idea, Happy Homesteader.”
Tess kicked at the dirt, ignoring the avid curiosity of a boy with big brown eyes and a face caked in gray. The ashes on their faces made the children look like tiny Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, covered in ghostly war paint, warriors from another time.
Tess turned to walk the perimeter of the fortress, if only to think of a way out one more time, conscious of eyes on her.
CHAPTER 32
By the time Parrish hit the Little-Big Econ River, his stolen boots sloshed with blood, but it wasn’t the first time he’d marched in his own blood.
Too bad that last guy had such dainty feet. Those others, the dead men, he should have paid better attention to the size of their feet; but he’d killed them quick under the bridge, lost them in the drag of the river’s current. They’d float eventually. Bodies full of gas floated, but it took a while.
When had he learned that? How old had he been?
His captors should have given up on him and backtracked the fire, but they’d hunted him to the edge of the grass prairie, right up to the bridge. And he’d killed them—one by one—to survive. Kill or be killed. It hadn’t been for their boots or a scrap of clothing, because that would be wrong. Trivial death. He’d seen that too.
Forget it. Forget the feel of death under his hands. Parrish clenched his fists against the fresh reminder and the other nightmare ghosts the act of killing called up; he forced himself to focus on Tess, on getting home.
The fire had eaten its way to the river’s edge, wiping out everything. Somewhere upriver it had jumped the tired slog of water, sparks flying before the wind, blazing up in the dry grasses on the S-Line side. There’d been a lot of brush on the ranch, a lot of fuel. He could see smoke from the fire line filling the sky far to the west, way beyond the longhouse, maybe all the way to the town.
Along the banks of the river, cypress trees smoldered. In the swamps and bogs and below the ground, fires still burned. Down in the muck of hundreds of years of layered slime the fires raged, vomiting sick streamers of oily smoke up out of the ground as if hell had found its way to the surface of the world and nothing could stop it. The muck fires became endless underground furnaces.
As he ran he saw that the fire had jumped the river more than once and burned its way through the heaviest parts of the forest, butted up to patches of sugar sand, and had been stopped by lakes and ponds. It was a patched quilt of blackened land and ash-layered sand.
By the time he hit the sand dunes the boots had started to dissolve. He didn’t dare kick them free—something was always better than nothing.
There were animals in the Little-Big Econ River: sambar and axis deer, feral pigs, wild cattle and a few smaller animals.
They gave him hope. Hadn’t he waited wildfire out at the water’s edge and sweated through the darkness, protected by the tumbled cement and wet swirls of deep water?
If Jamie had gotten the family out and followed the animals to the river, maybe headed to the Green Spring, gone to the deepest water and followed the big sambar bucks . . .
He ignored the scream of blisters on his feet against the still smoking ground. Back, he had to get back to her.
Near the sand dunes and the Last Fence, a black bear splashed at the edge of the river, hunting frogs, not yet scavenging the dead caught in the flames. The corpses hadn’t started to smell yet; maybe that’s why the bear hadn’t left the river, or maybe it had burned, sore paws.
Hungry animals, upset and pushed out of their regular routines, were going to be a problem. He skirted the distracted bear, put his head down, and pushed harder for home and Tess.
The ground hadn’t stopped belching heat when Britt lined up two groups, organizing them to scavenge the area, to help hunt the wounded animals now that there was no cover to use for concealment. And Tess was going to be on one of the teams if it was the last thing she did.
Britt had been right about the hunting party. El must be pretty worried about stocking up for the future, for the coming siege. They never said Myra’s name or talked about invasion, but the threat floated through the fort like mist.
The Amazons were even allowing men to leave the fort to help fetch and carry; Tess, tall and thin and covered head to toe, found it easy to slip into the mix. She watched the women wrap their faces, hide their wounds behind the uniform of bandanas and head wraps. It made them fierce and anonymous and sexless. Finding a stray scrap to wrap her face in was easy after the fire. Everyone had worn something over their faces, their hair. There were disguises everywhere.
The Amazons moved into formation like a squad of marines: smooth and practiced. Their movements were as natural as birds flying in formation. The civilians slowed them down some, and there was enough confusion as the two groups headed in separate directions for Tess to fade from one group to another. It had been a while since they’d sent anyone out—too much work throwing up the fortifications. A couple of younger women were going out for the first time while a handful of the older more seasoned women had stayed behind to keep order. It had been easy.
She joined the squad going east, toward the S-Line.
Easy
.
Near the big church, Tess slipped away from them. Oviedo had almost disappeared after the firestorm: a few foundations, the lonely pillars of a handful of brick chimneys, a concrete loading dock of a forgotten warehouse, smoldering piles of . . .
But Tess knew this place; even changed, she knew it. It was home.
She dodged around tumbled half walls.
Tess headed out of town toward a place on the map that some funny guy had once called ‘Taintsville—‘taint here and it ‘taint there. She and her mom used to laugh about that name.
The fire had left a giant checkerboard of destruction on this side of town. In places it had advanced unchecked. In other spots grass still blazed green. If she cut over at the old glider port and then through the backwoods to the river, she’d find the edges of the ranch, or what was left of it.
The sun cut across empty fields, turning the burn marks to amber slashes of light. Like a mirage, the damage became a jeweled painting.
Tess headed into the sun and prayed.
CHAPTER 33
Parrish found them.
The longhouse, gutted like a fish, stood alone in a circle of ash and sand. The countryside seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for the noises to start up again; waiting for the birds and lizards to start arguing and fighting over mates, over space, over living. Something inside the longhouse bumped against the charred-out metal side. There was a dull, thudding ring. The smell of death rolled across the clearing in a gust, coming from inside the blackened metal, something too long dead in the heat and humidity.
“Tess.” Parrish staggered back, the smell of horror ripe in his nose. They were in there—dead—all of them. He could smell them, had smelled too many just like them. “Oh, God, please.”
A flashing picture slammed into his head of a time when he’d seen Tess. Her hair had still been long, down to her waist, loose; she’d been crossing a field. She hadn’t known he was watching. He’d only just come to live at the ranch. When he was still broken inside.
