Cass held the ditty bag, felt its weight in her hands. Past John and Glynnis, she saw a Beater sink into the water up to its chin and ears, like a beaver or an otter. It churned the water in front of it and then she realized that its feet were not touching the bottom, it was keeping itself afloat—swimming—and it was coming closer.
“Oh, God,” she said softly.
“I see it,” Dor muttered through gritted teeth. “Don’t say anything until you get this shit safely in their boat. I mean it, Cass. Knowing can’t help them.”
If Cass alerted John and Glynnis of the approaching Beater, they might panic—rock the canoe too far, miss when Cass tossed the weapons—and then they wouldn’t stand a chance against it, that’s what Dor was saying. Cass nodded grimly.
“Be ready, be ready,” she whispered, and her eyes locked on Glynnis’s. Five yards, three—it was like softball, twenty years ago when she played on the U-12 team, waiting in the dugout for her team to bat.
And then the canoes pulled even. Cass held the bag aloft with trembling hands, and Glynnis reached; her hands closed on the bag, tugged, and then she had it, and Cass seized the .22 and held it out by the barrel, and Glynnis took that too, and then it was only a matter of the extra magazines, and Cass lifted them from the bottom of the boat and—
“What the hell!” John roared, turning, as the Beater caught up with the canoe and slapped at it with desperate hands. It was close enough that Cass could see that it was recently turned. Only the hair along its hairline had been pulled out of its scalp, and its face was still recognizable, barely bruised or lacerated, the face of a young man. The fresh wounds on its forearms were very much like those she’d found on herself when she woke in the field.
She shivered with the realization that she could be among this throng, or one like it, if she hadn’t recovered from the fever. She could be one of these single-minded things, throwing itself into the water, driven by flesh hunger. Who knew what things she had done—
Her attention jerked back with the thudding sound of John bringing an oar blade down on the Beater’s head, but by the second blow the thing had already slipped below the surface, and the oar slapped harmlessly on the water, splashing him and Glynnis instead.
The canoe was slammed from the bottom, the Beater trying to claw its way back to the surface. It popped up a second later, its wet, greasy head dripping cold water, its hands paddling air.
Then its scrabbling fingers found the lip of the canoe and gave a yank.
Glynnis screamed, and an answering roar came from the far shore, all the people of New Eden helpless to do anything but watch. Cass cried out, too, but no sound came from her; her throat was sealed with terror, her body frozen.
The gun fell from her shaking hands. It hit the water with a little splash and was gone, heavy metal sinking indifferently into the depths.
Oh my god
oh my god
oh my god
“Oh my God,” Cass gasped, watching the gun disappear.
She had failed. She had allowed the old fears to drift up from the place where she had banished them, and the fears had made her clumsy. She had failed John and Glynnis and she had failed Dor and the pain of her failure burst through her body—
“It doesn’t matter!” Dor shouted at her, his hand reaching for hers. His touch was warm, even in the frigid air he was warm, all determination and life, and she responded, snapped back to attention and forced herself to forget about the lost gun.
John slammed the butt of the oar’s handle directly onto the thing’s disfigured hand, over and over, so hard that the canoe shuddered and the air was filled with the sickening sound of bones splintering. And still it hung on. Miraculously, the canoe had not dipped below the water’s surface, though it rocked dangerously back and forth as the Beater hauled and tugged.
The water behind it churned and boiled, rounded shapes rising above the water. Heads. More of them—three or four more had swum nearly to the boat.
An explosion split the air only inches away and Cass snapped her head around. Glynnis was crouched in the boat; she must have pressed the muzzle of her gun directly to the Beater’s head because its blood covered the side of the canoe, her pants, the seat, everything—and its skull as it slipped below the surface for the last time was cratered and broken. Another shot. Another, and another, and Glynnis barely paused, even when brain matter slapped wetly against the hull, even when another of the infected hooked a bony hand over the side like the first one and when John smashed it with the heavy oar, a skinned and crusted finger splitting off into the boat. More and more, and then the shots ceased and there was silence—sudden, shocking silence and the smell of the shooting acrid in Cass’s nostrils. She coughed, almost delicately, touching her mouth as though assuring herself that she had survived the shoot-out, that she still lived.
“You go down, we’ll go upriver,” Dor yelled, already dipping his oar in the water to pull them against the current. John only nodded, exhausted, and laid his oar across his knees and bowed his head, a few seconds’ respite while they drifted downstream. Glynnis didn’t stop; she dug in the ditty bag and lined up her extra shells on the metal bench.
There was no more time to worry about them. “Get me in closer,” Cass urged Dor. “I’m not that good.” She might be able to hit a target from where they were, but she might not, and there were too many of them.
“You’re no good to anyone if they get to us,” Dor said, but he arced the craft around and headed to the shore.
“So don’t get me that close. Get me, you know, medium close.”
Cass was sure she saw his lips curve, only for a second. Dear God, he’d smiled. In the midst of this madness, wearing the blood of Beaters, she’d made a joke, unconsciously, and he’d found a reason to be amused.
Dor was strong when no one else was. Dor burned bright with life, with vitality, even when people and hopes—when the world itself—disintegrated around him.
Cass reached for him, touched her fingers to his wrist. He looked at her questioningly.
“God be with us,” she said.
For a moment he just looked back at her, his eyes shining the blue of Ceylon sapphires. “I don’t believe in God,” he said, barely more than a whisper.
“Then believe in me.”
They weren’t the words she meant to say. Weren’t words she was aware of thinking. But suddenly they were the plea that powered what she could do next, that gave her the strength and the courage to brace herself with a knee jammed against the cold metal canoe wall, to hold the gun in two hands the way her daddy taught her, to line up the Beater’s throat in the sights and to pull the trigger—
A starburst of blood and the beast shuddered for a second and then crumpled to the muddy bank, but Cass was already lining up her next shot and her next. Some she missed. Most she hit. Her arm went numb from the recoil and she had to stop and reload, and Dor said things to her and she held on to the sound of his voice even though somehow she’d lost the ability to comprehend what words came out and her teeth rattled and clacked against each other and still she kept shooting.
Dor kept them to the shore, going down the line of Beaters assembled there, and when they reached the huddled end it seemed that the crowd had thinned. Cass rested her gun against her knee, feeling her muscles stretched taut and painfully cramped, and twisted in her seat.
Beyond the scattered bodies, she could see the rest retreating, limping away in twos and threes, a whole line of them at the downstream end, where John and Glynnis’s canoe turned lazily in the water.
This, too, was terrifying, however. A retreat was evidence of forethought amid their insatiable drive, of consensual thinking, of responding to events. No doubt the Beaters had learned things tonight that would change their strategy tomorrow when they returned—a fact Cass was certain of
. They’d be back as soon as daylight allowed.
“We’re heading to shore.”
John’s voice, weakened and hollow, reached them as though over a divide far greater than the water. Cass watched him dip his oar into the water, painfully, slowly; and then their own canoe turned and headed for home, Dor’s strokes sure and strong, undiminished by the effort he had made.
The effort they had made, together. A team.
Cass had only worked like this with one other man in her life, and that was Smoke. Only once before had she been completely united in purpose as she had been with Dor tonight, each protecting the other, each reading the other’s thoughts, the sum of them stronger than they could ever be on their own. With Dor, there was a hyperawareness of each other’s bodies, almost an anticipation of their movements, creating a total economy of motion. Nothing wasted, working to each other’s strengths.
The shore loomed solid and welcoming, lined with the people of New Eden, all of them shouting and crying and hugging each other. And then the crowd thinned slightly and Cass saw a figure limping slowly across the yard, all alone, hobbled over a stick, pain evident in every step.
She was vaguely aware of the people calling her name as the canoe was dragged up onto the bank, the warmth of Dor’s hand on hers as he helped her up, the solid ground beneath her numb feet.
She was aware of all these things, but they were not real and they were not true, not the way the man walking toward her as though he might die on the journey—the way he was real and true.
Smoke saw her, and his eyes found hers and held on and all the other sounds disappeared and all the other people disappeared and all there was was her and him and he lifted his hand, he held it out to her and then he fell, crashing down on the hard-packed earth of the island that he had never walked in all the time since he arrived in New Eden, all the time between sleeping and waking and every lost moment that lay between.
Smoke fell.
Cass ran.
Chapter 16
HOW COULD SHE have given up on him?
The minute she looked into Smoke’s eyes, saw him trying to say her name as Steve’s strong hands helped him sit up, she knew what a terrible mistake she’d made, leaving him alone in that place, untended, all because of fear.
She hadn’t been strong enough for him.
“Are you…” He was struggling to speak, his vocal cords rusty from a lack of use. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Are you all right, Cass?”
“Me? I’m fine, oh, sweetheart, I’m perfectly fine. But you—I’m so sorry I haven’t been coming—”
“Have they…hurt you?” He pushed weakly against Steve, trying to break free of his grasp.
“No, no, no, no,” she said, realization dawning on her. No one had told him where he was, no one had explained. “Smoke, these are good people. Free people. This isn’t Colima. These aren’t the Rebuilders. This place is called New Eden, and you’ve been recovering here, healing here.”
Smoke’s eyelids fluttered and he started to say something else, but the words were garbled and almost unintelligible as he slumped against Steve.
“Smoke, no—” Cass pressed her hands to his face, his neck, feeling for his pulse.
A sharp exclamation above her—Sun-hi, out of breath, clutching her jacket front closed. She cursed in Korean before crouching down and switching to English.
“Smoke is awake?”
He mumbled something, his chin slumped to his chest. Sun-hi reached for his wrist, Cass getting out of the way for her. She used her thumb to pull up one of his eyelids and shone her flashlight at his face. That got her a groan of protest.
“This is amazing,” Sun-hi said. “He walked here by himself?”
“I think so.”
“I don’t know how he could—well, it does not matter now. He picked a bad moment for waking up. I have to get all patients ready for evacuation. Steve, you bring him now.”
Steve and a raider named Brandt crouched down to pick the prone form up in a fireman’s hold, linking arms to support him. Smoke’s head lolled the other way.
“Is he going to be okay?” Cass asked. “Is he going to wake up again?”
“I don’t know how this is happening,” Sun-hi said. “I am very amazed. But right now I must figure out cars, pack supplies. You come with me, Steve. We will get ready together.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Steve said.
“We will take him back to the hospital, Cass,” Sun-hi promised. “Take very good care of him. Now you go get ready too.”
Cass put her hand gently on Smoke’s face, his beard soft under her hand. Someone had kept it neatly trimmed. It should have been her.
Smoke was silent as they carried him away, Sun-hi striding purposefully ahead of them toward the hospital. Smoke owed Sun-hi his life, Cass had no doubt. And Cass owed Sun-hi too. And Zihna. And all the volunteers who’d fed and bathed him, held his hand and read to him, talked to him despite the fact that he’d been trapped in his mind as his body mended.
This should be her happiest day, the one she’d longed for, dreamed of and finally despaired of. And instead of holding him, whispering the thousand things she’d saved up to tell him, she and everyone else had to try to survive a horror that lay waiting to overrun them come the morning.
Aftertime had taken so much from her, and now it threatened to take this miracle, as well.
As Sun-hi’s little group disappeared around the back of the building, Cass headed for the doors of the community center, now thrown wide open with dozens of people milling about inside. She would get Ruthie, pack their things, get back to the hospital, make sure Smoke had a place in one of the cars, and then—once everything was in order—she would finally return to keeping the vigil she had forsaken.
She wouldn’t let the world take this one from her.
Sammi had organized the little kids to play a version of Duck, Duck, Goose. Twyla and Ruthie and Dane ran in a circle around Sammi and Dirk, who sat scowling at the floor, old enough to know that something was terribly wrong, but not old enough to understand what.
When Sammi looked up and saw Cass, there was a moment when her resentment and anger didn’t have time to catch up, a second where she looked like a little girl again herself, frightened and vulnerable. Then the mask came down; she narrowed her eyes and got to her feet.
“Sammi!” Ruthie giggled and smacked her. “Goose! Goose!”
Ruthie hadn’t noticed Cass yet. Her skin was rosy from the exertion of the game, and she threw herself at Sammi and grabbed her hands, wanting to play some more. She looked so happy. In recent weeks she had come out of her shell—laughed louder, chattered more excitedly, played more creatively. She was doing so well here—and now she would be uprooted again.
It couldn’t be helped; it was the only way to save them all. Of course, not all of them would make it on the road to…wherever better. How many would die tomorrow? How many the day after that? How many of them would be alive in a week, a month…a year?
Cass forced herself to stay focused. It never helped to think about the future like that—she knew better; everyone knew better.
“Babygirl,” she said, and Ruthie spun around and ran to her, laughing, arms lifted to be picked up. Cass swept her up in her arms and spun with the momentum, her little girl’s legs sailing through the air.
“So, can I go now?” Sammi’s voice dripped with sarcasm, her face curled into a sneer.
“Sammi…”
“What? Don’t you have to, like, figure out which guy you’re gonna hook up with later?”
“Sammi, this is serious. All I want for you—all anyone wants for you—is to keep you safe. Your dad—”
“Dad’s already been here. I told him to fuck off.”
Only the
faintest quiver of Sammi’s lower lip gave her away. It broke Cass’s heart to see how hard she was working to preserve her anger.
“At least let’s figure out what you should bring—”
“I’ve got that covered. I’m with Kyra and Sage, we’re gonna share.”
Cass sighed. If she pressed any further, she risked alienating Sammi entirely, or drawing her focus away from the important tasks at hand. “Okay. I know you girls are smart. You’ve got packs? How about that jogger stroller, can you pack some things in that?”
Sammi rolled her eyes and picked up Dane, who’d fallen at her feet in a fit of giggles. “Tell you what, Cass, why don’t you let me focus on my life and you can go back to screwing up your own, okay?”
Chapter 17
IT HAD ALL started so well and gone so wrong.
The other women in the Mothers’ House were welcoming at first. They gave Cass jars of wildflowers, cakes decorated with thin kaysev-syrup icing, books and toys and blankets and stuffed animals and good cheer. They made her tea and sat with her, clucking over the scrapes and bruises she’d sustained in the Rebuilder battle just before she got there. All of them had jobs. Ingrid and Suzanne both worked in the laundry, Jasmine—at that time already six months pregnant—was in the storehouse, assisting Dana with disbursement. They were happy to have another person to work into the child care rotation. In the evenings, coming back from meals, there was laughter and sometimes singing and when the little ones were asleep they gathered in the living room and talked by the light of a single candle.
And then, one day, one bad day that Cass wished she could do over, she rose in the morning and began down the stairs only to overhear a conversation between Ingrid and Jasmine.
“All I’m saying is, a child doesn’t get that way by herself,” Jasmine said, in her faint East Coast accent.
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