“Many of you have come to me with questions,” Mayhew began. He had tied his hair back in its leather string and trimmed his gray beard. Cass had seen him sitting at a window in the kitchen, a small mirror propped on the sill, leaning close with a pair of small scissors, unmindful of the rotted-food stench in the place. “And I promised you answers. I won’t take up too much of your time now, because we want to cover a lot of ground today. But I want you to know that you can come to me and my men anytime. Questions, concerns, what have you. Last night I think we all learned something.”
Red, tying down their belongings on the small trailer, made a sound in his throat, making no attempt to hide his skepticism. Zihna shot him a warning look.
“I’d like to thank Smoke here for his quick thinking, and Cass, and all of you who shared in the unpleasant…duty. Well, it’s always difficult.” He pursed his lips and stared at the ground for a respectful moment. He was good, Cass had to give him that. He’d taken little responsibility for the screwup with Owen, and yet here he was directing a moment of silence for him, and people were going along with it. She caught Smoke’s eye; he sat on the edge of the porch, his back against a column, resting his hip. He gave little away in the tiny flash of a reassuring smile he gave her.
So neither of her men was going to challenge Mayhew, not over this. And none of the others, who were clustered near the group—Shannon, Neal, certainly not Dana, who was tightly rolling a ground cloth and stuffing it into a small nylon sack, his mouth tight and his eyes lowered—would either.
“Until six weeks ago we were doing fine,” Mayhew began. “We—all of us here—were on the border patrol across the Rockies. We’d stop people trying to come east now and then, heard what they had to say about conditions west of the Rockies before we sent ’em back. No one got through. No one.
“Then one day the blueleaf showed up in our lands, too. Had to be avian migration, we’re figuring, but it doesn’t really matter because in one week—one week—there were six cases in town. We locked the whole town down, put everyone in a six-block area until we could get a handle on whether it had spread any further, but then a couple cases popped up in town five miles away, and then suddenly there’s rumors of people going missing from one place and the infected showing up wandering around somewhere else, feverish. It’s terrible over there now.”
“Welcome to our world,” a woman muttered not far from Cass, but she was quickly shushed. This was the first confirmation any of them had of the stories that occasionally reached New Eden.
They’d heard rumors of the arming of the natural border created by the Rockies a few months ago, when people who’d attempted to travel east returned to tell the story. There had been a couple of guys in the Box who claimed to have tried to cross at the Eisenhower Tunnel. They told of seeing rotting corpses on the west side of I-70, would-be émigrés who didn’t take no for an answer and were shot for their efforts and left to serve as a warning. There were only a few other places where a crossing on foot was even possible, and these were all patrolled, or land-mined.
There had been considerable resentment of the East after that. Calls for quarantine—you could hold people for a week, and it would be clear who was feverish from blueleaf kaysev and who was not at that point—were rebuffed by the border patrol, who were rumored to shoot not only those who attempted to force their way across but also those who merely argued too strenuously.
Dana looked up from his task, his face puffy and pale. He evidently hadn’t slept well, and his expression was petulant. “So you’re just getting a taste of what we’ve been dealing with,” he muttered. Cass couldn’t help thinking that what New Eden had been dealing with was, largely, keeping its head in the sand and going soft, that until now they’d been well fed and comfortable.
“Maybe so,” Mayhew said coldly. “But we’ve been sending patrols north, too. That’s where we’re headed. Beaters can’t tolerate the cold and neither can blueleaf. We’ve got a plan. And a destination. Now, look. We never meant to come barging in on you and take over. But if our two groups pool our resources, our intelligence, we stand a lot better chance of finding a place where we can build a real community, somewhere that we can actually thrive, where we’re not looking over our shoulders every second of the day.”
“How far north are we talking?” Phil Booth demanded.
“Word is if we get up into the Cascade range, both threats drop off significantly.”
“Jesus. How far exactly? How many days on the road?”
Mayhew’s expression didn’t so much falter as harden, but when he spoke his voice was calm and even encouraging. “I won’t lie to you. This is going to be a few hard weeks. But think about the alternatives, my friends. We try to shelter anywhere around here, we’re into the same problems you’ve already been up against.”
Silence. People stole glances at each other, shuffled their feet, fidgeted with their things. Cass watched Dor, his arms folded across his chest, his jaw set. His gaze bored into hers and he did not look away.
Then a woman near the front of the crowd raised her hand. It was one of Collette’s do-gooder friends, Cass didn’t remember her name. She was still soft through the middle, fleshy and wan, somehow.
“The Beaters, the way they learned to swim,” she said breathlessly. “Everything was fine until a few days ago when they decided to try to get in the water and then it was like they all decided to jump in the water all at once. If they can learn that, what else are they gonna do next?”
“They’ve got their own language now!” a man called from the back of the crowd.
“That’s ridiculous,” Dor snapped, raising his head and uncrossing his arms, craning his neck to see who’d spoken. “There’s absolutely no indication of that, and spreading rumors isn’t going to help. You people need to calm down.”
“It’s okay, Dor, I’ve got this,” Mayhew said calmly. “Everyone’s just a little on edge.”
Sure, Cass figured darkly, watching your friends die horribly might put anyone “a little on edge.” And yet people seemed to find Mayhew soothing.
He stopped clear of taking any sort of vote, and Cass wondered if it was because he wasn’t confident he had the majority convinced yet. As they set out into the morning, she saw the subtle shifts in the company people were keeping.
Dana walked alone, kicking stones and occasionally talking to himself. Shannon tried to talk to him when they stopped for lunch near a murky pond, taking the opportunity to boil water to refill all of their reserves. Cass overheard a little of their conversation as she took Ruthie and Twyla looking for pretty rocks in the field next to the pond.
“…don’t know who he thinks he is,” Dana was saying angrily.
Cass glanced back at them a few times while she and the girls strolled; she saw Shannon gesturing, pleading maybe, before finally giving up and going to join the others.
Cass had volunteered to watch the girls to give Suzanne a break, but the truth was she needed a little time to herself. No. The truth was that she was fighting an urge for a drink. Not that there was one to be had, but the unsettled feeling left over from Mayhew’s little speech had spiraled into a full-on tangle of worries, the sort that usually found her deep in the night.
Days tended to be easier. Last time she quit drinking, Cass filled them with work, with running, with caring for Ruthie. And she could usually stave off a craving by throwing herself into arduous physical work. Digging stones from a field. Weeding between rows. Anything at all to drown out the anxiety.
On the road was different. She had no sense of control. She moved when the group moved, stopped when they stopped. Everyone else seemed to be content knowing only that they were headed “north,” but the uncertainty of the future only added to her anxiety.
She walked, head down, with her hands in her pockets, reciting the litany of phrases she’d
picked up in her long-ago meetings, inane little sayings that did nothing to boost her confidence in herself but sometimes, occasionally, could pull her back into that feeling of thin hope, that she really might be able to get through this, that she really could survive without a drink.
If God brings me to it, He will bring me through it
I am not failing as long as I am trying
She heard, in her whispered words, dozens of other voices. Since the end of everything she had seen no one from the meetings. Not one of them. They were all probably dead. What would they have chosen, Cass wondered, if they knew how few days they had left—to keep coming back, or to go on a bender the likes of which no one had ever seen? Would they have drunk themselves to death?
She had the start of a headache, a faint breathlessness. Nothing too terrible. And food would help. She could get through this, she could—
Cass looked around. They’d walked to the far edge of the field—strawberries, it looked like, the long-dead plants choked now by kaysev—and there was a worn split-rail fence that might have been pretty if the vines twined around the wood weren’t all brittle and brown. But though Cass turned around, a complete circle, she did not see the girls.
“Ruthie!” she called, her voice hoarse. “Twyla!”
Oh God, she hadn’t been watching, hadn’t been listening, she’d been lost inside her own head, her own cravings. For a second Cass was frozen in terror and mortification, eyes darting everywhere, gathering her breath to scream—
And then she heard their voices, bright peals of laughter spilling from behind a tractor that had been abandoned in the field. A second later Twyla’s head popped up on the bench, followed by Ruthie’s.
“Mama!” Ruthie called. “Look, we’re farmers!”
Cass forced a smile, her stomach seized with adrenaline and fear. She felt like she would throw up again, but that couldn’t happen, not here, not in this moment of the girls’ delight.
“Oh, look at you two!” she called through a smile she dredged up from her paltry heart. “Show me how you grow your crops!”
And she hastened toward the girls, fixing her gaze on their sweet faces. If she couldn’t beat her cravings, then she’d just have to outrun them, keep running toward the next right thing and the next.
That night she had thought to speak to Smoke, to confess how bad she’d gotten. He would be disappointed in her, but he would be compassionate, too. Smoke was like that; he wouldn’t let her suffer alone. And she was willing now to trade a little of her dignity for a few moments of his comfort.
But as they set up camp for the night in a feed and supply store, after first clearing out several long-abandoned Beater nests and searching the much-looted supply shelves for anything useful, Cass could not get a moment alone with Smoke.
His limp was far more pronounced in the afternoons, after the day of exertion had taken its toll. His face was slightly ashen and she knew he was in pain. And yet he wouldn’t take a break. He helped Davis and Bart—and Valerie, Cass couldn’t help noticing with an uneasy feeling—to feed and water the horses, and then he and Mayhew and Terrence and a couple other guys made a tour of the other buildings in the town while there was still daylight, looking for anything useful. They made a decent raiding party, well armed and cautious; they came back with a few tools and several armloads of firewood. Terrence had found someone’s rainy-day stash in a canister. He shook it out upside down on the fire once they got the kindling going, and dozens of bills fluttered down and caught flame, the kids laughing at the spectacle.
But throughout the meal and the cleanup, Smoke stayed away. He talked to Mayhew, to Davis and Nadir, even to Dor for a few tense moments. He made his way around to the kids, impressing Colton and the other boys with a brief knife-throwing demonstration. When Cass came back from taking Ruthie outside to wash before bed, he’d set up his bedroll near the front, along with the Easterners and others who were well armed, and was already deeply asleep, his face sheltered in the crook of his arm.
Sleep was slow to come, despite Cass’s exhaustion. She knew what Smoke was up to because she had seen it before. He was doing what he did best, building the collective courage of the group, just as he’d once encouraged and developed the security team in the Box. And there was no doubt that it needed to be done; without the cohesiveness he provided, they could easily splinter into factions, start blaming each other for the things that had happened.
So why did she feel so empty every time she spotted him in the crowd?
Yet again, Smoke was not choosing her. He was a good man, a great man, even; these were the qualities that had made him a hero long before his last battle with the Rebuilders. But in his heroism he acted alone. Even when he’d been working with Dor, he was solitary. When he sought vengeance he sought it for himself. He wanted Cass with him, she knew that, but only in the moments left over after he’d vanquished his greater thirst, to fix a world that he could never forgive himself for allowing to go to hell in the first place.
Cass knew there was something at the core of his drive that he’d never shared with her, the key to this crushing sense of responsibility, the blood thirst he carried with him everywhere he went. Smoke had told his secret to only one man, and that was Dor, and that was as good as any vault. She knew she might never know. Whatever Smoke had done, it plagued him, consumed him; the truth was a lover from whose arms Cass could not entice or drag or trick Smoke.
She tossed and turned long after the room was silent, dozens of her fellow survivors deep in their own private dream landscapes, where the luckiest visited memories of Before and others battled horrors real and imagined.
As people began moving from their homes to shelters during the Siege, it was hard to get used to the nights at first. Some people compared it to prison—overcrowding in California meant that many prisoners shared small spaces lined with back-to-back bunk beds, images of which frequently made the evening news—but Joe, one of the guards in the Box who had actually been in prison, said it was worse. Worse because at least in prison there were clear hierarchies of power, of who got the best bunk, who could tell who else to shut the fuck up or quit snoring or crying or beating off. Joe said it was the politeness that got to him on the outside—when the Siege made everything part of the outside—everyone forced to lie next to people they might not even like, to quietly endure their sounds and smells and proximity, then get up and pretend to have had a good night’s sleep.
Cass forced herself to lie still, trying to will the thoughts from her mind, counting backward from a thousand, anything to quiet her restless thoughts. When someone whispered her name, her eyes flew open to find Red crouching next to her, a ghostly presence in the glow of a lantern turned low and hung from a nail.
“You’re not asleep, are you, Cassie? Wanna talk?”
She hesitated only for a moment before getting up carefully so as not to disturb the others, and following him into the house. They felt along the wall in the darkness, to the front door where one of the Easterners was sitting on the ottoman that Dor had brought for Jasmine earlier.
“She had nightmares,” Red murmured to the guard. “We’re just going to sit out here for a bit, okay?”
“Suit yourself,” the man said.
There was enough starlight to find the benches that faced each other across a flower bed. They sat close together and Red unfolded a blanket he’d brought, spreading it carefully over the two of them.
“Aw, Cassie darlin’, who would have thought it.” He sighed.
Cass couldn’t help a cynical laugh. “Who would have thought which part? That the world would be taken over by zombies? That we’d be grazing like cattle on a plant invented in a lab, just to stay alive? Or that by some miracle you’d show up in my life again after abandoning me for twenty-three years?”
After the words were out, Cass wished she hadn�
�t said the last part. She knew exactly how many years it was since her dad left. All those years, she’d kept track. But why give him that satisfaction? After all, she’d long ago quit caring that he was gone.
“It wasn’t a miracle,” Red said softly.
“Okay, a curse. Is that better? You were cursed with having to run into me again. In all the bars, in all the—”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I found you, Cassie. It wasn’t an accident.”
A tickle started along her spine. “Um, well, if you remember, you were already living in New Eden when we got there, so technically, I found you. And since there aren’t all that many places to live left out here, it’s not exactly a miracle that we both ended up in the same one, know what I mean?”
“I don’t mean in New Eden. I mean before that.”
“Before that, when? Before I came here I lived in the Box and I know for a fact you weren’t there. Before that I lived in a library and I never saw—”
“The day you were taken, Cass. The day you were attacked. By the Beaters. I was there.”
Chapter 31
HE’D STILL BEEN going by Silver Dollar then. Or Tom Haverford, his real name, to his oldest and closest friend in the world, Carmy Gomez, with whom he’d been traveling the highways and byways of the West Coast, playing in clubs and bars and music festivals, opening for other acts and generally making enough money to cover their costs and salt a little away. Tom had even been paying for rock-bottom health insurance, really a lottery Madoff scheme run by a local charity, but even that was a bit of a trick given his lack of a permanent address, but lately he’d begun thinking about the past, about things he wished he’d done differently. And the last thing he wanted, assuming there was anyone who still cared about him, was to be a burden to them now when he’d managed to be a burden way too many times already in his sorry life.
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