His mother. Over eighty but still hanging on to the little bungalow he grew up in, last he called, a few months back.
His half brother, Burt. Burt hated him, sure, but Tom figured he’d given him cause, the way he’d tormented him during their childhood.
His ex-wife. Well, there was no chance she gave a shit about him anymore. Still, he added her to the list of beneficiaries; she’d more than earned it.
And Cassie.
Tom thought more and more about the past as the days ticked by. He thought about telling Carmy about it, but Carmy wasn’t that kind of guy, not someone you spilled your guts to, even though Tom knew his old friend would take a bullet for him. Carmy had always had a way with people. He played bass, could pitch in on a set when needed, but mostly he was their manager—finagler of gigs, extractor of payment, riler of crowds and bedder of women. He was good-natured, funny—and fond of anything he could snort, inject or ingest. But they worked around that. It was a scheduling thing more than anything; Carmy could go three, four weekends in a row keeping his shit together and then they’d just hole up somewhere for a while and he’d go nuts and Tom would find a used bookstore or a movie theater or a pretty waitress and while away a week.
The truth was that Tom was content to sit on a beach, or in a park, or on a bench in front of a city hall, or even in a motel room while the rain came down outside, and play his guitar and hum along, throwing in a phrase or two when it struck his fancy. If he’d written down a fraction—a hundredth—of the great lyrics that came to him when he was messing around, he’d have a million dollars, but he was too lazy. He just liked playing.
The things Tom could do with a guitar on his best days rivaled anything Knopfler had ever done, and the crowds would always notice eventually. If he and Carmy had managed to keep a band together for more than a season, they could have written their own ticket, but the truth was that their lifestyle didn’t suit that many people. Especially as they’d gotten older. Sometimes they’d pick up a young guy to sing or play horn or whatever, but even they got worn down after a while. So be it—Tom and Carmy were content with their lot.
Then in a cheap motel in a little town an hour north of L.A., two things happened.
First, Carmy met a woman, disappeared for a week and somehow ended up in the hospital with a gash in his chest that he claimed was accidental but which had nicked a lung and threatened to keep him laid up for a while. And second, Tom saw his first case of the fever, a woman who’d been staying in the same motel even longer than he had and, if he wasn’t mistaken, with whom he was pretty sure he’d previously spent a drunken night.
Her name was Beverly or Brenda, something with a B, and when he bumped into her on the stairs, she reached out to touch his face and for a moment he thought it was an invitation. His room was on the second floor, hers on the first, and he’d been trying to figure out how to politely decline the come-on and edge past her. He was headed for the bar across the street, where he planned to watch the news on the big-screen TV; everything was so fucked up, with the terrorists and now the rioting in the cities, that Tom was starting to get a little alarmed.
“Hey, darlin’, in a bit of a hurry here,” he’d said smoothly, giving her his best smile. That’s when she pinched the skin of his jowl hard and pulled his face toward her, her mouth opening and her eyes unfocused.
Tom knew now that if he hadn’t been so startled that he tripped over his own feet and fell down the stairs, that would have been the end of him, and he and Bev would have been roaming the streets together before long, looking for snacks. Instead, he made it to the bar with only a little bruising, talked to some folks and figured out that if there was ever a time for making amends it probably ought to be now.
His ex-wife wasn’t hard to find—ten minutes on the library’s computer got him her address, not five miles from the house he’d last called home, and within the hour he was hitching his way back to Silva. The trip was terrifying, as traffic from the cities clogged the inland roads and gas stations started putting up signs that said NO GAS HERE and the cost of a slice of pie quadrupled. He made the last six miles on foot after the driver of the car he’d been riding in crashed into a stalled RV.
All that momentum…and when Tom got back he suddenly lost his nerve. He walked to his ex-wife’s new house and stood across the street for an hour, cursing himself for not using the long journey to figure out what to actually say. Finally, he walked another half hour to a bar and got good and soused, drunk enough to bloody the mouth of the guy on the next stool over, who told him not only did he know Cass Haverford, but he’d been a year ahead of her at Silva High and had screwed her once in the locker room and once six years later in the parking lot of the same bar where they just now happened to be sitting. And so had most of his friends, one of whom happened to be at the same bar and who, after some hard persuasion, was happy to share that she’d gotten knocked up and changed her last name to Dollar. And then he threw in her new address for good measure.
On the way to his daughter’s house, Tom thought about the fact that his little girl had changed her name. The last time they’d been together, he’d taken her to a baseball game and promised her that he’d be big someday, that the name Silver Dollar would be up in lights in places twice as big as the stadium. He’d said she would always be able to find him just by looking for those bright lights—but that had been a lie, hadn’t it?
When he saw the dump his Cassie was living in, Tom suffered an even bigger setback. Because it had never occurred to him that his little girl, despite the benefit of not living under his influence, would grow up to be just like him.
He spent the night in an apartment building across the street from her trailer park. Someone had broken all the windows in the ground-floor apartment, and the occupants had fled, but the bedroom still had some furniture in it and Tom slept on the sagging box spring with a knife under his pillow. The next day, while he waited for courage to find him, he boarded up the windows and took stock of the place. Maybe it would do for a few days while he figured things out. Meanwhile he could keep an eye on his daughter’s comings and goings.
Except she never went anywhere.
Tom grew bold, squeezing between her trailer and the thick oleander hedge that separated it from the next one, and peering through the windows. The oleander was dying, its leaves curling and turning that baked-red shade that signaled death by the biological agent drifting in from its rural targets. The government said the stuff didn’t pose a threat to livestock or humans, but Tom figured once it got in the groundwater, they were all fucked. Still, he had bigger things to worry about.
Cassie sat on her couch a lot. She also cried a lot. Sometimes, she lay on the floor and cried.
Also—even worse—there were children’s things in the trailer. A crib, toys on the floor, one of those things you stick them in to keep them still, with all the bobbly devices attached to it to entertain a baby. But there was no baby.
Tom puzzled over what it all meant. He supposed he could knock on the door and ask her, tell her who he was and why he’d come, but all his instincts told him that she would not receive that news well. And who could blame her?
It tore him up more than he could have ever imagined: his daughter, all grown-up and heartrendingly beautiful even in dirty clothes and no makeup, had clearly arrived at her own rock bottom. As one day turned into two, and then three, Tom began to understand that it was now his life’s purpose to help her back up. Maybe—he sometimes thought, during those yearning days—that had been his purpose all along and every set in every nightclub had just been the sound track leading up to this moment.
He was determined not to screw it up.
He considered and abandoned dozens of ideas. All around him, the town was going to the dogs. Before long the apartment house in which he was squatting emptied out, except for a few of the freaky fever peo
ple who moved into the other ground-floor apartment. Red talked to people in the streets who urged him to find a shelter. That’s what everyone was doing, moving into movie theaters and city hall and grocery stores, big open places where they could pool their resources and keep the scary fuckers out—the rumor was that they were starting to attack people and infect them, too. Rabies, they’d called it. If only. And frankly Tom thought everyone was right, that until someone got a handle on this epidemic, holing up like scared little girls was exactly the right thing to do. The fevered were terrifying as shit.
But he wasn’t about to leave until his daughter did. By then he’d evolved a sort of plan—when Cassie moved into a shelter, he’d just follow along and see if he could get into the same one. When they were safe, and maybe fed—Tom was getting damn tired of eating out of cans, and he wasn’t keen on eating the K7-whatever-the-hell the government was calling it, like a damn horse—then he’d test the waters and figure out how to tell her who he was.
He almost missed it. One morning she walked out the door carrying a duffel bag, and Tom only saw it because the plumbing had stopped a few days earlier and he’d gone out to take a morning whiz against the side of his building.
He followed her, not even bothering to go back for his few toiletries, afraid to lose her.
When she went to her mother’s house, Tom was surprised. He’d sort of thought they were estranged.
When she came out a little later carrying a little girl, he was stunned.
He followed them to the library, but when she went inside, he stayed out.
He wanted to come in. Meant to. Planned to. But this was truly the end of the line. If she said no to him now, if she didn’t want to see him here, where else could he go?
Across the street, that was where. From the upper floor of the municipal center, in a big room still decorated with crepe paper from a bat mitzvah—Mazel Tov, Jessica!—he watched the sun go down on the library and wondered if this was to be his lot until the end of time, stalking his daughter, too afraid to come close, too desperate to make amends to ever truly walk away from her.
She came outside the next day looking like his little girl again. The grown-up version, anyway. The smile was back on her face. Her clothes were clean and she’d pulled back her shiny hair. Her necklace glinted gold in the sun. She walked tall, cradling her own little girl in her arms, pointing out the clouds and the mountains to her. When they got to the curved drive, Cassie set the baby down to play, and she toddled around the dried-out lawn. The little girl had the pale fine hair and big round eyes that Cassie had had at that age, and Tom’s throat closed up with emotion and for a moment he felt like he was looking through a lens that erased time, almost three decades, and he wanted to run and swing her into the air and make her a promise that he’d never leave her, but just when he was thinking that this time he might actually take the first step someone screamed and Tom had the terrible premonition that he had waited too long, that Fate waited to snatch away the daughter he did not deserve.
“You were there?” Cass asked softly.
“I was there. Cassie…I always wanted to be there. With you. I just—well, I fucked it up. I was a fuckup. I admit it. And I know admitting it’s not enough, really, I do. I’d have to live nine lives like a cat to make it all up to you, but all I’ve got is this one.”
Red—her dad—reached for a corner of the blanket that had fallen from Cass’s shoulder and tucked it up around her again, and she saw that he was shivering.
“Here, we can share,” she said, and shook the fleece out and let it drift down over both of them, scooching closer. As the soft fabric settled she leaned against him, lightly. It was probably wrong. It was definitely stupid to trust him like this, when he’d been in her life for what—a couple of months, if he could even be believed—and out of it for decades.
But Aftertime had a funny way of jiggering the math, of coming up with conclusions that weren’t supported by the facts. Because the facts—death and infection rates, life expectancies, chemical hazards, the evil hearts of humans—were devastating on their own, unleavened with little miracles like hope and forgiveness and redemption.
“Tell me the rest.”
Tom was paralyzed, leaning on the second-story window frame and looking down at the scene across the street, hearing the screams coming from the library’s little entrance area where a few people had been smoking and getting some air.
The entrance area would have been a good place to play, because you could get back inside and slam the door shut in mere seconds. But Cassie hadn’t stayed there. She had wandered out to the circle drive with her daughter, and they were bent down looking for bugs or something, oblivious to what was going on around them. When the screaming started Cassie lifted her head and looked for the source of the trouble, already scrambling for her daughter, but the little girl pranced out of the way, focused on whatever caught her eye on the ground.
And then Tom saw the things. Four of them, bursting around the corner, running like a bunch of drunks on wobbly legs, grabbing at the air and making gobbling sounds—headed straight for Cassie.
Then he ran, too. Down the hall, the stairs, stumbling and slamming into the wall of the stairwell but he didn’t care. He got to the bottom and—unbelievably—the door jammed.
Tom heaved and kicked and when he realized there was no way he was getting through he ran back up to the second floor and down the hall to the front apartment. He yanked up the window roughly and crawled out onto the ledge and dropped, aiming for a hedge, feeling the dead branches scrape his flesh as he landed and rolled, and then he was on his feet and running and just in time to see the things dragging his beautiful girl away, holding on to her legs and arms.
Tom didn’t hesitate for a second but he knew he had to be careful, had to be craftier than they were because he’d heard tales of what they could do, and he would be outnumbered and outmuscled if they turned on him. He didn’t much care if they ripped him to shreds, but he had to get to Cassie first, had to get her away from them before they bit and infected her.
It wasn’t that hard to keep up with them, racing along dusty backyards, catching glimpses of them loping down the street, dragging his poor little girl along the road, swinging her from their crabbed hands. She’d gone limp, and he hoped and prayed she’d gotten knocked out somehow, because he couldn’t imagine anything more terrifying than to be carried by these monsters and know there was no one there to help you and no one around to care about your fate.
But that’s what he’d always done, wasn’t it? Hadn’t Tom left her behind half a dozen times before, heading down the driveway when she ran out after him, clutching his hand with her little ones, holding on to the car door when he started the engine, bursting into tears as he drove away? He’d always promised to be back again—“Soon, you won’t even notice I’m gone”—but somewhere on the inside, he’d known that the promises were a lie. There was always a new town, a new gig, a riff he wanted to try or a song he wanted to cover, or a woman with long eyelashes and satiny shoulders. And the road—there was always the road, calling to him, seducing him, making silvery promises that he couldn’t resist.
Tom ran faster, sickened by his many failures. He’d trade his own future, his own life, to give Cassie another chance.
The monstrous things turned onto a small alley and headed for a shed, a nice one someone had built the right way, timber construction over a poured foundation. One of the barn-style doors had come off its hinges and was leaning against the building, letting light into the small building. It was a mess, garden tools and a ride-on mower and cans of paint strewn everywhere. In the center was a thick mound of rags, and Tom understood that this was their home, that they had brought his daughter here to eat her.
Now he didn’t worry about staying hidden. He ran into the open like he was on fire, ignoring the burning in his lungs, the pa
in in his knees. He got there as they threw her facedown onto the nest and fell upon her. He saw them pin her down with their knees, watched them rip the clothes from her back. They were screaming nonsense syllables now, something that sounded like “mam-mam-mam-mam” and he thought he might vomit when he saw that one of them was actually drooling, a long string of saliva falling from its mouth.
That was the one that Tom tried to pull off first, but it only lashed at him with surprising strength before returning to the exposed flesh of his daughter’s back. Red was flung back against the wall of the shed, hitting his head on a bare stud, knocking over a bottle of coolant that hit the floor and burst open, pink liquid seeping everywhere, a sharp note in the nauseating smell of the nest.
Frantically, Red looked for a weapon. He heard his daughter moan and saw the things bite into her, tearing open her skin, rich red blood pouring from the wounds.
Later, he would wonder why it didn’t occur to him then that she was lost—that she was doomed to the disease in those seconds, infected like the rest of them. But he was frenzied in his purpose, determined to stop them at the cost of anything: his life, the world, the universe, anything at all.
His hand fell on the handle of an axe.
Tom swung the axe up and over his head before he was even fully aware of it. Its weight as familiar as the boots on his feet. Tom had been raised high in the Sierras where it took two cords of firewood just to get through a single winter, and as the only son of a working man he’d split more than his share of good dry mountain pine, the scent of the sap and the seasoned wood coming back to him now in a rush as he brought the axe blade crashing down onto the neck of the Beater who’d shoved him, cleaving his head off and burying the blade into the floor inches from his daughter’s hip.
He took a little more care against the second one, because he was for damn sure not going to hurt so much as a hair of his daughter, and he sank the blade through its shoulders, severing the spine and lodging the axe so that it took some effort to pull it back out.
Horizon Page 22
