Dread Nation

by Justina Ireland

  “I am the master here, you ungrateful bitch. I’ll tell you when enough is enough.”

  He then squeezed, slowly choking me, pressing so hard that I saw spots. I clawed at his hand, but I was little, and nothing I did seemed to make much difference.

  That was when Momma stood up and slammed the complete works of William Shakespeare into the side of the major’s head. His grip immediately went slack, and I crashed to the ground, sobbing as I was finally able to breathe again.

  “Jane, go down to the kitchens and tell Auntie Aggie that you need to stay out of sight for a few days, okay?”

  I’d nodded, hot tears running down my face, and I ran down the stairs as quickly as I could. Auntie Aggie was waiting for me, and she hurried me back to her room, tucking me into bed next to her and whispering kind words as I cried myself to sleep.

  The next night the major turned shambler and that was the end of him.

  Now, I climb out of bed in the dark, grabbing my boots, carrying them so I can put them on once I’m outside. I can’t stay here, suffocated by my thoughts, choking on my dark memories. I need a moment of freedom, no matter how fleeting it may be.

  From below come the sounds of merriment, men shouting and women laughing. Payday has been the loudest night yet, no surprise there. I ain’t sure what time it is, but apparently the party never ends, despite Sheriff Snyder’s alleged curfew.

  “Where you going?” someone whispers at me from the dark. I don’t know anyone’s voice well enough to be certain whose it is, but I’m guessing it’s Ida.

  “Out.”

  “You can’t. There’s curfew. You leave and the sheriff and his boys will make an example of you.”

  I shrug, then realize that whoever it is can’t see me in the dark. “Don’t worry about me, I can deal with the consequences.”

  “Let the chickenhead figure it out herself,” someone else snaps. “And be quiet. The rest of this town may not care about getting a full night’s rest, but I do.”

  The room settles down amid grumbling and I go to the door to slip out. Only, when I go to turn the knob, it doesn’t move.

  At some point in the night they locked us in.

  I don’t even blink, just step carefully through the room trying to get to the open window, making all attempts to keep my feet away from sleeping forms. I’ve almost made it out when a hand grabs my ankle.

  “You should go back to bed,” the deep voice mumbles blearily. The big girl on the team that mends the interior fences and the one that woke us up the first day. Cora. She always seems to be watching me, and I don’t need a spotlight to know a snitch when I see one.

  “I appreciate the concern, but I’ve had enough sleep.”

  The hand ratchets down tighter.

  “We don’t cause trouble here, girlie. As long as we follow the rules things are fine. So that means you go back to bed, or I’ll put you there.”

  I cross my arms and consider my options. I could go back to the pile of blankets that passes for my bed and wait for morning to come, which by my estimation would be another few hours or so. But that means backing down from Cora, and I’ve seen her kind. She’ll do everything the people in charge tell her to, even if that means she ends up broken and bloody. She’s one of those people that never learned to breathe, never understood the true meaning of freedom. She’s a dog, happy even with a cruel master. She eats her three squares and takes her bit of pocket change and happily wears the collar around her throat, because that’s enough for her.

  But it ain’t for me.

  So instead of meekly going along with her commands, I ready myself, and say, “If you don’t let me go, I’m going to break that arm of yours, and I’m afraid that would be a most unfortunate turn of events.”

  The grip on my ankle tightens painfully, and Cora pulls my foot, unbalancing me and sending me crashing to the floor. It’s exactly what I expected her to do. I swing my legs around, a whirlwind of motion, catching her in the face as she goes to stand and using my momentum to climb to my feet.

  I stand over her as she holds her face. “You kicked me in my mouf,” she says, the words garbled.

  “I think you’ll find it’s better to just let me do as I please.”

  She’s smart enough to say nothing in response.

  I make my way to the window again, which has been left open to let in some semblance of a breeze. The night is dark and looming, heavy and warm. For a moment I consider going back to my spot, lying down, and trying to get along with the status quo. But I ain’t never listened to that little voice before, and I ain’t about to start now.

  A quick jump, and I’m out on the roof. Before I can even look for a way down, a bright light a few hundred yards away catches my eye. At first, I think it’s the sun coming up, but it’s way too early for that. It’s only then that I understand what I’m seeing.

  Electric lights. Dozens of them, lining the streets and dotting the houses on that luxury section on the southern side of Summerland. The lights shine soft but bright in the night fog, and it’s more lovely and peaceful than anything I’ve seen in a long time. Maybe in my whole life. I know now why I’ve been able to read by what I thought was moonlight each night.

  But those lights ain’t for me. I’m two stories up, and there doesn’t appear to be any way down from here. Below me a couple of cowpokes stumble out of the saloon singing some song, the words too slurred to make much sense. An ugly feeling of hopelessness wells up in me, and I have to fight tears.

  I ain’t giving up. No way, no how.

  Pulling on my boots, I walk to the edge of the roof. The next building is only a few feet away. It looks to be abandoned, the second-floor windows covered in a thick layer of dirt. I try to remember what’s on the first floor, but I come up blank. With a running start, I jump to the adjacent roof. The window is open a bit, so I jimmy it wider and climb in.

  I stop just inside of the window. Through the darkness comes the sound of someone breathing. I wait, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom. Lying in a bed, arms hanging over the side, is the tinkerer I met on the first day, Mr. Gideon. His pale skin glows in the little bit of moonlight, and I’m a bit scandalized to see that he’s naked from the waist up. He’s too tall for the bed he’s in, and his feet hang off the side. He looks like a broken baby doll, half-dressed and tossed where he lies.

  There hasn’t been much time for social visits and I ain’t seen him since I got here. I ain’t sure if he’s friendly or not. I remember the way he pointed that revolver at my head, and decide that he’s probably not someone I want to risk waking.

  I take a step backward to climb out the window, and my foot catches a squeaky board. The movement from the bed is explosive. Mr. Gideon sits up, and a pistol gleams in the low light, the business end pointed right at me.

  My heart pounds in my throat, and for the first time in my life I wonder why I always leap before looking. But there ain’t ever much time for regrets, so I swallow down my heart and raise my hands in surrender. “You sure do like to point that thing at my head.”

  “Miss McKeene?”

  “None other.”

  “What are you doing in my sleeping chamber?”

  I take a deep breath and let it out. I feel like I’m about to jump right out of my skin, but I’m in no immediate danger. The penny under my shirt is warm.

  The view, what I can see of it with the moonlight coming in the window, is the nicest thing I’ve seen all week. Gideon is all slim muscles and interesting boy angles, and it’s hard to formulate an answer.

  “I suppose . . . the proper answer is that I don’t rightly know. The honest answer is that life in this place is untenable, and if I don’t get out of here soon something bad is going to happen.”

  I think of my momma’s warning about my temper, the temper I inherited from her. “Do not let things get to you, Jane. Do not give in to your rage,” she’d always say, her voice full of warning and a knowledge I was afraid to plumb. But now, that anger is building up,
making me feel like I’m going to lose my mind. In here with this boy I don’t know, this is the calmest I’ve felt all week.

  The tinkerer puts his revolver away and gives me a wry smile. “Miss McKeene, this is a place where terrible things happen more often than you know. Go back to bed before Sheriff Snyder discovers that you’ve gotten out.”

  I should leave, should turn and go back to my crowded room, but I don’t. Instead, I lean against the wall, bold as can be. “You mind answering a few questions before I go?”

  He crosses his arms, and I feel his regard more than see it. “You barge into a man’s room in the wee hours of the night, where he pulls a gun on you and tells you to leave, and now you wonder if you might ask some questions?”

  “You did put the gun away.”

  His chuckle echoes through the room. “Well then, how could I say no?”

  “Why ain’t we trying to thin out the dead that surround the settlement? Whole plain is full of them, and all we do is keep them off the wall. Sooner or later they’re going to be more than we can hold back. I figured the point of settling in a place like this would be that it was far away from the eastern cities, largely empty of people to turn shambler?”

  The tinkerer sighs, running his hand through his hair, and I see the telltale glint of a bracelet on his wrist. I wonder if it was a gift from someone important. I ain’t known many men to wear jewelry that wasn’t a gift. That makes me wonder if he has a wife, and if he does, why ain’t she here?

  “You’re right,” he says, not really answering my question. “You met the drovers? Mean as a shambler and about as bright?”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen them.”

  “There aren’t any cattle here in Summerland. The only thing they’re driving are the undead. At the pastor’s and sheriff’s orders.”

  The revelation leaves my mouth dry, and my hands itch for my sickles. “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you that. I’ve told you too much already.” I just stare at him, and a soft sigh comes from the bed, a creak as his weight shifts. “The last person I told ended up turned. And I’m not about to endanger another Miss Preston’s girl.”

  I think of Maisie Carpenter, mouth gaping, hands grasping. “You talking about Maisie?” He starts, and that’s all the answer I need. “How’d she end up out there on the plain?”

  “She asked questions, too,” he says, his voice heavy with unsaid things.

  I cross my arms, chilled despite the warm night. “What’s up with the other side of Summerland? Those nice houses?”

  “Where the well-to-do folks live? They have their own stores, paved roads . . . You’ve probably seen the path that leads to the side of town, lined with electric street lamps?”

  I remember the sounds of children playing my first day here, and the sight of those lights, and nod. The professor has just confirmed what Ida told me; now I need to hie myself over to that side of town and find Katherine and Lily.

  I scratch at my braids and ask, “Why are people coming out here in the first place?”

  “Money. Land. Empty promises. A lot of the folks out here were facing prison sentences if they didn’t go west, people like the Duchess and most of the roughnecks. The Survivalists think if they can make a go of it out here in the middle of nowhere then they’ll win more people to their cause.”

  “I’d say they were pretty popular already.”

  “Looks can be deceiving. The Survivalists have had trouble getting a foothold in the Northern states. People up there are more solitary, and still believe in the legacy of Lincoln.”

  I snort. “And what exactly was that?”

  “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’”

  I shake my head, because it’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. Colored folks working with white folks, not just for them? Not in this lifetime.

  “Anyway,” Mr. Gideon continues, yawning widely, “the idea is to make Summerland the city of the future. Electric lights. Running water. A wall that will keep the undead out. They provide safety, real safety, then people will make their way here, and we can start to rebuild something solid.”

  “You don’t seem to believe that.”

  “The Survivalists are going about it all wrong. You can’t force the Negro to bend to your whims. You have to convince him that you can offer him a better life. Slavery is finished. Trying to live in the past will get us nowhere but undead. That wall we built may seem fine, but it won’t last forever. The dead are adaptable. It’s just a matter of time before that barrier comes down.”

  I watch him for a long time, trying to decide what to think about him. I decide I mostly like him, despite him pointing a gun at me. Twice. And I swear that ain’t just the fluttering feelings I’m getting from seeing him lying in a bed half naked, either.

  “You don’t seem like you belong out here, Mr. Gideon.”

  “I doubt that I do.”

  I grin. “I know why I’m here, but who’d you tick off to get sent out here?”

  “My father.”

  It’s not a response I’m expecting, and any type of rejoinder dies on my tongue. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s been a learning experience, one I never could’ve gotten at Harvard.”

  I tap out a rhythm on the wood behind me as I think. I nod, and swallow before I ask my final question. I haven’t seen Jackson all week, and his disappearance has been preying on my mind in a way I don’t like. It’s not that I have feelings for him, because I don’t, it’s that I’m worried about what it means that I haven’t seen him in so long. I remember the girl and her wide staring eyes, how easily Bill shot her, and I have the feeling that something equally bad happened to Jackson.

  “There was a boy . . . He was thrown in a cell in the sheriff’s headquarters after we arrived together last week. I don’t suppose you know where he got to?”

  Mr. Gideon shakes his head. “No. I didn’t see him when I was last there, and I can tell you that the jail only has a couple of cells for a reason. No need for them, when we have a sheriff with a short temper and a penchant for watching folks turn.”

  The implications of his words hit me like a punch. I’ve heard of such folks, deviants who believe that some kind of enlightenment exists in watching the moment a man becomes a monster. It doesn’t surprise me that the sheriff would have such predilections, and I wonder if there ain’t some more sinister truth to the story about the loss of the sheriff’s sweet-tempered wife.

  But Jackson . . .

  Mr. Gideon seems to realize that the boy in question was more to me than just someone on the same train I’d taken here. “I’m . . . sorry,” he says.

  Tears spring to my eyes, and a great big wave of ugly feelings wells up. “Okay, then. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Miss McKeene. I’m afraid that we’re all prisoners here of one kind or another, for better or worse.”

  “Oh, it’s for worse, all right. Most definitely for worse.”

  I slip back out of his window without saying good night, making my way back to the room by the light of Summerland, and with a heavy heart. It’s much easier to get back into bed than it was to get out, and when I find my blankets I roll onto my side and cry silent, angry tears, clutching my lucky penny.

  They killed Jackson. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s dead. Just like Maisie Carpenter. He’s probably somewhere out there on the plain, hungry and yellow-eyed, a shell of the boy I once knew.

  I curl up into a ball, biting my fist to hide the sound of my sobs. I barely feel my teeth sink into my hand. I’m too focused on the agony of being torn in half, like something inside of me is being savagely ripped out. The one boy I was stupid enough to love is dead. I’d thought my heart broke when he’d told me he didn’t love me, that we were better off alone than together. In a world where people are always being ripped away by the undead plague, I’d thought his words had destroyed my heart.

  I was wrong. This is what a broken heart feels like.

 
Jane, I caution you to prudence. I hope you are reading your Bible and using the Scripture to temper your emotions, to always keep a cool head about you. But if you do not find solace there, perhaps you should take up embroidery.

  I suppose it is obvious that I worry about you, a little girl all alone in the world. I worry too much.

  Chapter 25

  In Which I Embrace My Recklessness

  After Mr. Gideon tells me of Jackson’s demise something in me breaks. Jackson might not have been mine, and it might be his fault that I’m stuck in Summerland in the first place, but I still loved him. I didn’t want him dead, and knowing the sheriff and his boys could murder someone without so much as a how-do-you-do makes me despair at the chance I have to outsmart a bloodthirsty man like that. I should be coming up with a way out of Summerland, plotting and scheming. But I ain’t. Instead, I’m just surviving.

  And barely at that. I’m weak. Moments after eating, my belly growls for more, demanding sustenance that ain’t coming. It ain’t that I’m working any more than I did when I was at Miss Preston’s; it’s that the sheriff don’t feed us enough. The portions at breakfast keep getting smaller and smaller, and even dinner—the only normal-size meal we get—is getting leaner by the day.

  “It’s all the new families in town. The more white folks arrive, the less food we get. They’re quality, and they can’t miss a meal,” Ida says, running her finger across the surface of her empty plate before licking it.

  “What do you mean?” I ask. I’ve just finished my own stew and am barely restraining myself from licking the plate. Even the roughnecks are looking hungry and perturbed. Their rations have been cut as well, meaning that there really is a problem with the food. This ain’t just another of the preacher’s initiatives to reform the Negro.

  “Ain’t you been paying attention? There’s been two trains of families in the past week. Fancy folks, all bedecked in finery. Before that we used to get maybe one train a month, and never anyone wearing silk. Something’s happening back east, but who knows what,” Ida says. “You’d better just hope they don’t think about expanding the brothel, otherwise you’re going to be out of a place to sleep.” She casts a dark look across the room where the Duchess’s girls are calling out to the table of roustabouts. I don’t know why they bother. It’s Thursday. Those fellas are already broke. They spend their money as fast as we do.