“Do you understand what I’m telling you, Cass?”
She stared out at the scene unfolding in front of her. The bonfire was growing, wood stacked high and sparks flying. Collette and her friends, waving their hands at the pile of burning belongings. Luddy had his longboard under his arm; for once it didn’t seem like a ridiculous thing for a grown man to own. Two of the guys worked on upended bicycles. What did they think they were going to do with those—outrun the rest of them? Then they would be traveling alone come daylight, with no defense against the Beaters’ speed.
Not odds that Cass would take. But still, at least they had plans of some sort.
“But.” She swallowed, raking her hair with her hands. “Why? Why do you want to help us?”
Red hesitated, and then searched her face with his intense gaze, the one she’d noticed so many times before. It seemed like he was about to confide or confess something; then the moment passed, and he shrugged. “Zihna and I…we like kids. We like helping people. And Ruthie…well, we’ve always thought she was special.”
His voice broke oddly on the last word, and Cass saw that he rocked Ruthie in his arms. It was true that he and Zihna had always been kind to Ruthie—in the days following the chill that formed between Cass and the other women, hadn’t they been extra solicitous, always talking to her at mealtimes, taking the time to chat when Cass and she walked around the island?
Still, Cass was uncomfortable with Red’s suggestion. Hell, she wouldn’t be the first to raise an eyebrow at the two older people taking such an interest in the kids, especially the teens, even though no one had ever picked up on anything inappropriate going on with the couple.
Cass had taken risks with Ruthie’s safety that she never should have. She’d left her daughter with strangers so she could work, or drink, or date. She wanted to trust her instincts. Sometimes it seemed like they were all she had left to navigate with. But right now, as the island descended into chaos all around her, was not the time.
“Thank you,” she said formally. “But as generous as your offer of help is, I’ll take my chances—mine and Ruthie’s—alone.”
Red’s face sagged, the sadness in his eyes reflected in the eerie glow of the flashlight, and he went still.
“I can’t let you do that, Cassie,” he said softly.
A strange premonition snaked up Cass’s spine, something so familiar and yet just out of reach. “Why?”
“Because this is too important. Because she’s my granddaughter. Cass…listen to me. It’s me…your dad.”
Chapter 19
THIS TIME WHEN Cass felt the breath leave her, the ground rushing up to meet her and cave her in, she did not yield to it.
No no no he’s not
The man—her dad—because of course it was him. It was wily old Silver Dollar Haverford, shape-shifted anew, more worn but no less crafty and elusive. How could she not have recognized that voice—the one that had once sung her lullabies? The one that called from the road with ever-diminishing frequency, always a new number, a borrowed phone when times were tough, as they nearly always were. Sometimes she heard a woman in the background; other times the din of Greyhound stations or taverns.
And always, always, she asked him the same question: “When are you coming home, Daddy?”
How long did it take until she figured out that he never would? Oh, but that was the genius of old Silver Dollar—he could make you believe. He waited until you’d just about given up hope and then he’d show up, all smiles and hugs and trinkets in his pockets, embroidered blouses and clay whistles from Tijuana, bags of apples from Washington. A dress for her mother. Promises to stay, this time and the next. The two of them would go out for dinner, come home laughing and loud, then whispering in the living room, him singing and her dancing, and Cass in her bed would be happy because surely this time it would last, surely this time he’d see that they all belonged together?
The last time he ever came home was her eighth birthday. Well, a week later, anyway—the delay broke his heart but was unavoidable, of course, and stupid, stupid Cass, she believed him. He took her to a baseball game, called her his little lady, said maybe they could go skiing that winter once it got cold enough.
And then he was gone forever.
She’d tried to find him, just once. It was after her mother took up with Byrn, after her stepfather started coming into the hall late at night when Cass was in her nightgown, pretending to be on the way to the bathroom at the same time, “accidentally” touching her down there when they passed.
Cass had searched every town she could think of that her dad had ever mentioned. She stole her mother’s credit card out of her purse and used it for an internet service that promised to track down missing loved ones; the fifty-dollar report included six known addresses, but the most she ever found were a few irate landlords who remembered her father well.
By the time she finally gave up, her mother had gotten the bill and was furious. And her anger only grew when Cass tried to tell her what had been going on late at night, that Byrn lurked in the halls, touched her through the thin nightgown, followed her back to her room and whispered warnings while he fumbled with his zipper. She told Cass to consider long and hard if telling lies was worth getting thrown out of the house over and Cass—who was fourteen and had no idea how to even get a work permit—gave up and sealed her heart forever against the man who’d abandoned her to this fate.
And now this man, this old craggy man her father had somehow become, was actually crying, his cheeks shiny in the flashlight glow. Suddenly that enraged Cass more than anything else.
“You don’t, you don’t,” she gasped. “You don’t get to cry.”
She seized Ruthie and wrested her from his arms, her body floppy and hot and damp in sleep. Ruthie began to wail and went stiff in her arms, but Cass fought her, holding her tightly, and backed down the steps, away from Red, away from her father.
“Stay away from us.” Her voice rose to a wail, rusty and choked with sobs. “Just—just stay away.”
She picked up Ruthie’s Tinkerbell pack, the glittery wings shimmering in the dark.
Then she turned and ran.
Chapter 20
SAMMI WAS DOING her best to keep her shit together, but it felt like she was becoming unglued from the inside. Sage was over talking to Phillip through the slits in the windows and refused to come back to the house. Colton was nowhere to be found. And there was something wrong with Kyra. She wouldn’t get off the bed, wouldn’t help pack, wouldn’t even tell Sammi what was wrong. She just sat on the bed with her knees pulled up as far as she could, her arms wrapped around her legs, rocking and sniffling.
Sammi had a duffel on wheels, the sort of thing she would never have been caught dead with Before. It looked like something her dad took back when he traveled for business, back before he went through the mother of all midlife crises. Back then, her dad had the start of a beer gut, a stupid haircut that he put gel on, and he wore golf shirts with logos from all these different country clubs even though he never had time to play golf.
Hell, Valerie wouldn’t even recognize him. Which was weird. Sammi would have figured someone like Valerie would have liked the old version of her dad a lot more than what he was like now. Sure, he was a lot more buff these days, but then again everyone was at least kind of cut, everyone who survived, anyway.
Valerie and her dad…Sammi could just see them the way they would have been a year or two ago. Valerie probably would look about the same, with her stupid skirts that hit her at the least flattering possible place on her leg, her sensible shoes and her headbands. She had good hair, it was true, and a great figure, but she did her best to hide it all. Her dad never would have asked her out. Although…the truth was that Sammi had never seen any of the women her dad dated, other than her Spanish teacher.
All she had to go on was her mom’s commentary on the subject, and her mom was pretty bitter.
And Cass—Cass would never have looked at her dad before. Cass was so…what was the word, anyway? Sammi used to think she could be really nice, when you were alone with her. She could make you think she was listening, really listening, and not condescending. But maybe all that was was her lame attempt to make Sammi like her because she had a thing for her dad all along.
Except…back when they first met, Cass was with Smoke. She was still with Smoke, wasn’t she? Supposed to be, anyway.
Sammi clenched the stack of underwear in her hand. She had given up trying to talk to Kyra, and was packing for her. Her own bag was ready, and she’d jammed lightweight stuff as far down as she could, leaving room for whatever she could scavenge from the storehouse. Those idiots had better have it open—Sammi wasn’t about to count on the whole commie sharing system to make sure she got what she needed. You could see how fast that was breaking down—she’d heard them all arguing earlier. But what could you expect?
Back in honors English, they’d read this book by a guy whose motto was “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” Sammi figured you might as well make it twenty. Luddy and Cheddar and those guys, they were what, twenty-five, twenty-seven, and they were all fuckups. Before, they would probably have been homeless or living in communes or something. Hell, they’d probably be the first ones to get picked off by Beaters when the shit hit the fan. They’d be throwing their stupid Frisbee around at the back of the pack and bam! that would be it.
Well, Sammi wasn’t going to let anything like that happen to her. She’d already survived one full-on attack—right before Cass and her dad showed up in Colima, she’d escaped on her own, and she’d nearly made it, too, only a nest of the things had woken up and sniffed her out. But she’d nailed a few of them with this piece of wood she’d yanked off a porch—it had nails sticking out of the end. It was the perfect weapon—she still remembered how it felt making contact with their stupid zombie heads. Somehow both hard and soft, like a melon split open. She was sure she had killed at least one, and maybe more.
Sammi realized she was holding Kyra’s clothes so tightly that her hands had gone white. And she was starting to shake, too. Right now, thinking about the zombies, remembering the sounds they made and Cass screaming her name as she came running—yeah, so she’d come to help her, driven that truck of hers straight into a Beater nightmare when she could have just hit the road and never come back, okay, Cass had done at least that for her—right now she was about ten times more afraid than she’d been that night. Which didn’t make any sense at all.
And she wanted her dad.
And…she really, really wanted her mom. But her mom was dead.
“Kyra!” Sammi snapped, a lot meaner than she meant to.
Kyra turned her slightly unfocused dark eyes her way. “What…” she mumbled, but at least she stopped rocking.
“I’ve got your underwear, your leggings, your thermal shirt. What else do you want?” She held up a couple of T-shirts, emblazoned with band logos.
Kyra bit her lip, twisting it around, and Sammi felt a little reassured because it was an expression that went back as far as she had known Kyra. “Hothouse Shears,” she said.
“Okay,” Sammi said, hiding her relief. “I could have guessed. That and Stacy Faith, that’s all you ever wear.”
“That’s all that fits,” Kyra said, and lumbered off the bed. “I’m getting fucking huge.”
She peered into her pack, a black one with silver-and-gray trim.
“I can trade if you want,” Sammi said. “Mine’s probably easier, with the wheels and all.”
Kyra shrugged. “I think they’re gonna let me ride. At least part of the time, me and the other knocked-up girls.”
Other than Jasmine, that club included Leslie and Roan, both of whom had been impregnated at the Rebuilders’ baby farm and escaped with Sammi when her dad and Cass came for her. They were cool and all, but since they were almost ten years older than Sammi and Kyra and Sage, it wasn’t like they all hung out or whatever. Leslie and Roan shared a place at the north end of the island and they’d told Kyra she could live with them after her baby came, which pissed Sammi off because there were extra rooms at the House for Wayward Girls and if they all helped out, how hard would it be to raise the kid right here themselves?
But now that they were leaving New Eden, who knew what was going to happen. Poor Kyra—being pregnant for this trip was going to seriously suck. For one thing, Kyra still threw up sometimes, not near as bad as a while ago, but bad enough that she had days where she’d just lie around and moan. And she got these weird cramps that were supposedly kind of like labor, but not really real labor, which was a good thing because Sammi was not interested in being any kind of emergency midwife.
Although, if push came to shove, she’d do it. She’d do anything for her best friends. They were her family now.
“Girls!”
Zihna hurried into the room, her face flushed and her T-shirt damp with sweat under the arms. Sammi felt a twinge of guilt—she’d been so busy trying to get Kyra moving that she hadn’t even offered to help Zihna and Red. Speaking of which, where had they been? After the Beaters finally went home, everyone kind of split up and went off to prepare for the evacuation. Dana made some sort of pronouncement, but no one was really listening—it was pretty clear what had to happen. How hard was it to understand what the priorities were? Anyone who stuck around the island tomorrow was going to be treated to the world’s most terrifying swimming lesson, and then end up served for dinner.
Zihna stood with her hands on her hips and scanned the room quickly. “Okay, I’m going to go get Sage and then I want you two to come wait with me. You can sleep down there, by the water, but I want us all to be ready to move when the time comes.”
“Where’s Red?” Kyra asked.
“He had a little personal errand,” Zihna said.
Suddenly the room lit up with a flash of searing white light.
“What the hell!” Kyra knocked over the glass of water on her bedside table, and the wet stain spread out into an amorphous shape on the carpet.
“Flares,” said Zihna. “Sorry. I was just about to tell you about that. They’re trying to alert any nearby shelters.”
“Why the hell are they using flares?” Sammi demanded. “Isn’t that like a giant neon sign that says, ‘Hey, zombies, over here, come eat us’?”
Zihna shook her head. “Not according to Booth and them. He says they only respond to sustained light. It’s the pupil thing—a flash like that supposedly just makes them dilate more.”
“I think he’s a fake,” Kyra muttered. Booth—Phil Booth, formerly a high-school teacher from Sonora—had supposedly made a study of the Beaters before finding his way to New Eden. He told stories of experiments he’d conducted with a couple of other academics, one of them on the epidemiology staff at a hospital there. The only problem was that depending on the night and who was listening, his stories tended to shift. Often, he was featured as the guy who heroically stepped in when things went horribly wrong.
Which was a little hard to swallow given the fact that Booth was a hundred-ten soaking wet, pale and practically hairless, more of a geek than a hero. Also, there was the problem of Booth’s missing colleagues; depending on the story they’d either died in a huge battle—from which Booth alone emerged unscathed—or gone to the west and north, the three of them having made a pact to spread their findings to whatever civilization they stumbled across.
“But why are they trying to get the other shelters involved?”
Zihna spoke carefully, which was her habit when any of them was upset. She wasn’t the huggy sort. Though old enough to be a grandmother, she was hardly a grandmotherly kind of woman. She showed her concern mostly in the wa
y she took the time to think first and avoided saying anything that could be misconstrued. “I believe there was some hope that other communities…where they might have avoided the attention of Beaters in these large numbers…might see the signal and come help.”
“Help with what? Help us fold our underwear?” Fear was making Sammi sarcastic, and she wished she could stop yelling, but there was only one person who could calm her down fast anymore, now that Jed was gone, and that was her dad. She was still furious with him, but he’d always had a way of talking to her that made things seem like they would work out.
Zihna paled. The girls had lit half a dozen candles from their stockpile, enough to illuminate the entire room, and in the light of the candles you could see every wrinkle, every valley on the woman’s face. At other times, Sammi thought Zihna pretty for an older lady; she wore her hair long and loose and smiled a lot, not in a fakey way like Collette Portescue and the rest of those uptight bitches.
But tonight Zihna just looked old.
“Help us with the, uh, departure. We can’t leave until there’s enough light for us to see where we’re going, but hopefully still before the Beaters are up and out. But we’re bound to run into them soon after that. All it’s going to take is stumbling on a nest of them, and they’ll start up their hollering and get the others all riled up. I think that—the thought of some of the council was that if some folks came from Hollis or Oakton, they could give us a sort of escort until we got out to the truly uninhabited land. Once we get there, we can handle the occasional pack ourselves. It’s only the first few miles that have everyone worried.”
“Wow, was there, like, a whole meeting or something we missed?” Sammi asked, gathering a handful of cosmetics and jamming them into an old plastic zip-around tote that had once been a Clinique gift with purchase.
Horizon Page 13
