“Come on,” Smoke yelled again, waiting until she took his hand. Ruthie was heavy and restless in her other arm, wakened from her peaceful afternoon slumber yet again by tragedy and disaster.
Cass could tell that Smoke’s strength was ebbing, his body racked with pain and his muscles weak, but he kept up the pace past a cosmetics store, a kitchenware shop, to a clothing store that still, all these many months after the final shopper overpaid for the last logo-embroidered shirt, still reeked of a signature cologne.
Cass had hated malls, the chemical smells and lack of natural light, the forced cheer of the window displays featuring impossibly thin mannequins and spotless suburban tableaus, all of the tableware and underpinnings and electronic toys and scented candles, the thousand varieties of crap that didn’t even add up to a single decent meal Aftertime. All of this, the entire compendium of suburban marketing fraud, coursed through Cass’s mind as she allowed Smoke to shove her and Ruthie inside the somewhat fortified store.
“I’m going back for your dad and Zihna,” he said, and then, in the dim mote-speckled light of a postconsumer skylight, in what had been a shopping mecca Before, he seemed to be about to kiss her.
He stared into her eyes and ran his fingers through her hair and pulled her closer, but in the last minute, one of them hesitated, one of them flinched, and Cass would always wonder which of them it had been, because all she remembered of the moment was the cornflower-blue of his eyes and the regret that he couldn’t love her enough, couldn’t love her as much as his cherished ideal of justice.
In the next instant he was gone.
Chapter 35
SMOKE HAD SEEN carnage and Smoke had killed men, but the blood-slicked panorama before him caused him to suck in his breath. For a moment he thought he’d vomit, and he leaned over the stuccoed wall, heaving and gulping air, ready to unloose himself onto the vinyl sofa directly below.
The moment passed, in a second, a fraction of a second. Disgust was not an emotion he could afford to indulge. Smoke swallowed down his bile and plunged forward.
At the entrance, half a dozen citizens were throwing themselves against the doors, using their bodies as battering rams. Locking the exits from within—the shelterers had mistakenly believed they were making their small world safer, protecting their number from the temptation of outside, never anticipating the horror they’d accidentally spawned. Smoke could not help them now: at this point his focus needed to be on the threat of the moment.
The Beaters had dragged off their first victim, a slender middle-aged woman with long, graying hair they wrapped through their decrepit fingers for leverage. Smoke recognized her—she’d asked him if she could help him when his bum leg gave him trouble, offered him half of her lunch, but now she was being shoved facedown on the floor in the entrance of a Hallmark card shop. Behind the broken glass windows were canting displays holding Mother’s Day and graduation cards and gifts—because it had been that season, hadn’t it, a year ago when things fell apart? The woman screamed and gargled in terror as the creatures yanked her limbs straight out and knelt on them. He could hear the ripping of her clothes as they were torn away. Her back was smooth and pale, and then it disappeared under the four monstrous heads as they assaulted with their wide greedy mouths, their sharp and tearing teeth.
“Anyone who’s armed, help me,” he bellowed, shooting into the writhing mass. One of the Beaters squawked and fell away, its face slimed with blood and its mouth wide and grimacing, but immediately squirmed back into the feeding frenzy, dragging one bloodied arm uselessly at its side.
No one seemed to have heard him, so Smoke shot at the doors, hitting the reinforced metal above their heads. The sound echoed all around them, and several people screamed or fell and the crowd tried to run in both directions. “If no one helps me we’re all going to die here,” he yelled before turning back to the Beaters.
He edged closer to the mass, trying to find his opportunity. He managed to get a clear shot at the woman when one of the Beaters threw his head back to tear a long strip of flesh from her back down near her buttock. Smoke aimed for the back of her head and tried not to see it burst, focusing instead on the Beaters, now sprayed with her blood and brains and enraged to find their quarry unresponsive.
Their angry cries ricocheted and echoed down the mall, and he glanced down the corridor to the farthest end where people poured out of a JCPenney, a dozen, two dozen, more of them. From this distance they looked normal, orderly, a congregation emptying out after church, fans leaving a stadium, patrons leaving a bar at closing time—only they walked with a certain shuffling, unsteady gait and they bumped into each other and occasionally lifted their fingers to their lips and chewed.
The new ones. The ones who, if they’d come a week earlier, would have still been living here as survivors, not so different from the people of New Eden or the people of any shelter, making the best of things, trying to scrape together enough optimism to see them through another day, when somehow—a door forced open? an HVAC duct? a tear in the cheap stucco wall, the things’ hunger driving them to tear and chew through insulation, plaster, whatever it took until they reached the inside of the mall?—the Beaters got in.
And all it would have taken was a few bites. A population like this, trapped, no light at night, all those halls and empty shops and dark corners for hiding like this—it would have spread geometrically, madly, instantly. With nowhere to go, the mall sealed shut tight save the one breach, the uninfected didn’t stand a chance. Hordes of the things outside, inside would still seem more survivable…
All of this flashed through Smoke’s mind while he was shooting, then reloading from the stash in his pocket. There was more ammo on the trailer—but the trailer was out there, in the parking lot. The bullets were slippery in his hands, maybe twenty of them, and he jammed them into the cylinder with shaking hands while the Beaters grew frustrated with their immobile, unresponsive meal and howled their disappointment.
They liked it alive. They’d eat a dead body if they had to, but with far less zeal. They’d wander away from it and circle back, grazing on the corpse for a few days as children might pick at a fruit bowl if denied their Halloween candy. But for now, with the air pungent with the scent of living citizens, they would lose interest in the dead woman and come after the fresh uninfected.
In fact it was already happening. Two of them had turned away from the woman’s blood-soaked, naked body and were crawling, slipping on her blood, toward the crowd of terrified people. One tried to rise, slipped, and fell down again, its elbow cracking on the hard floor. Smoke’s damp and trembling fingers had not managed to load the entire cylinder but there was no time, and he jammed it shut and fired the way he’d practiced so many mornings in the Box, on the fly, his body turning already to the next target.
But before he could aim, the thing lurched sideways, taking a shot in the upper chest. Not a fatal injury, but enough to slow it down. Smoke looked for the shooter and saw three of the others, no—four, all armed, one man with only a blade—coming tentatively closer.
Smoke shot the last two uninjured Beaters in quick succession, and they collapsed on top of the poor dead woman. One of the Edenites, a short wiry woman, ran to the Beater that was crawling along the blood-slicked floor, jammed the muzzle of a gun against its forehead and fired, getting splattered with gore.
Smoke approached her, wary that she might fire again. “Hey,” he said gently, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t get so close if you don’t have to. That’s taking a hell of a chance.”
The woman looked at him, wild-eyed, her mouth trembling. “It’s just I never shot a gun before,” she said. “I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss.”
Damn. The last thing they needed was weapons in the hands of people who had no idea how to use them. “Whose gun is that?”
“It’s some…somebody droppe
d it. Over there.”
“You did good,” Smoke said, taking it carefully from her hand, pushing the barrel down. “You didn’t miss, not one bit.”
“What do we do now?” One of the slacker guys, the ones who had been skateboarding along the edge of the crowd, was tugging on Smoke’s sleeve like he was five years old. Smoke didn’t bother asking him if he was armed. “There’s more of them down there, did you see? Did you? Oh, Jesus, what’re we going to do?”
“I saw. Look, maybe you can help out here, okay?” Smoke pointed to the entrance lobby, where several people had been knocked down in the panic to reach the doors. One woman had a gash on her forehead and was leaning against the locked door, crying. “How about you see what they need, okay?”
The boy turned dubiously toward the fallen. “Yeah, I want to help and all but—”
“Then do it.” Smoke had run out of patience. He scanned the mall in both directions, saw a couple of the Easterners conferring at the junction with the other wing, past half a dozen storefronts. They, at least, were armed. And there. There was Dor, working at the heavy door. Someone had hacked away at the hinge and the thick metal had split, exposing wires from the security system and the mechanical closing mechanism.
Next to him was Sammi, holding something, a narrow tool of some sort. Her face was pale but as her father worked she remained steady, handing him what he needed from a small leather bag. Smoke recognized that bag—back when he’d been second-in-command in the Box, he remembered Dor carrying his tools with him on his belt. Back then they’d been useful for repairing sections of the chain-link fence that surrounded the Box—or for opening the occasional bottle of beer after a good raid.
How many mornings had the two men trained together? How many overcast days and chilly dawns had they raided together, watching each other’s backs at each unfamiliar house, each closed door? They’d been as close as two men so stubborn could be Aftertime, sharing confidences and, eventually, trust as the weeks turned into months and they soldiered on together.
And all that time, Smoke thought Dor didn’t like Cass. She’d told him so herself, described the way he avoided her, never looked her in the eye, found an excuse to leave whenever she arrived at the fire or one of the food-merchant stalls where he’d been passing the time.
But Smoke had never bothered to wonder why Dor avoided her so studiously. If he had, if he’d paid even a little more attention, it would have been so clear. Dor had loved her. Even then. And though he’d respected Smoke’s claim enough never to allow himself to be tempted, once Smoke left, all bets were off. No: after Smoke had nearly gotten himself killed, after he’d chosen a battle he could not win over a future with Cass. It was what she had been trying to tell him, that last day, when he left without saying goodbye because saying goodbye would have hurt too much, would have stolen his focus—he had chosen.
And she’d come for him anyway, saved him anyway. But what was left, after that battle, was a broken man, an un-whole man—and who could blame Cass and his old friend for letting down their guard, for giving up resisting, for seeking a little comfort?
He could. He could blame them, or at least Dor, and if it was wrong he didn’t care, and if it was pointless he didn’t care. He looked on his old friend and felt the burn of betrayal and the stirrings of hatred, and he knew he had to master these emotions or they would all certainly die. Dor, with his dexterity and determination and focus, was their best and possibly only hope for finding a way back out. Smoke would have to fight the Beaters without him. He turned away, forcing the bile of his hatred down, down and thinking only of the challenge of the next moments.
He had learned the Easterners’ names during the past few days of eavesdropping on their conversations. Mayhew—now dead. Davis was with the group that had pressed to the front—and Smoke saw him now, crouched next to Mayhew’s body, rifling through his blood-soaked shirt. What was he looking for, his weapon? Blade? But all the Easterners were well armed—in fact, he’d admired Nadir’s ebony-handled tactical knife.
The other two were working at the entrance—Nadir, the most outgoing of the four, the one who chatted with the older folks and made wisecracks with the kids, and the Mack-truck-built Bart. They were kicking at the emergency exit door a few yards from Dor, grim-faced and silent, Bart putting his shoulder into it and making the frame shiver with each assault. It was possible that he’d dent the thing, but nearly inconceivable that he’d break through. And definitely not in time. The mall architects and then its dwellers had made sure of that, locking everyone in with great care.
The issue came up every time someone wandered out of the Box, drunk or bored or simply looking for a little solitude, and managed to get themselves killed instead. Then there would be calls for securing the exits, for preventing people from leaving. These demands had been put down firmly by Dor: personal liberties were not taken for granted in the Box. But here—in this temple of suburban consumerism, it was not hard to imagine a different outcome.
Smoke made his choice. He didn’t know any of the group, other than Dor, well enough to be certain who would be best in a fight, but the Easterners were disciplined, at least, and armed. “Nadir. Bart. Come on, we need to deal with these fuckers.”
The men joined him, the crowd closing in around the doors behind them, and considered the shambling crowd of newly turned, still at the far end of the mall. They moved slowly at this phase of the disease, their languorous quality one of the things that made the early stages deceptively appealing, the thing that caused people to call it “the beautiful death,” like tuberculosis a hundred years earlier.
They stopped using that term when the suffering advanced to the cannibalistic stages of the disease.
“They’re all infected, aren’t they?” Bart said, and Smoke saw that he was afraid. Which shouldn’t have been a surprise—who wouldn’t be terrified?—but the Easterners had accumulated, in very short order, a mystique around themselves, one that all the Edenites had bought into. It was so easy to grasp onto anything when you had nothing. Smoke should have known—would have known, if he had been paying attention—that they’d given away their allegiance too fast, that they’d bought into the flimsy illusion the strangers held up, giving too little thought to the dark side they were hiding.
Because every man had a dark side. Smoke knew this more than anyone, didn’t he?
“Nadir, you take the front line with me,” Smoke said, motioning them to hurry. “Bart, you next.” He scanned the people nearby for anyone who could help. “Terrence, Shel—you too. Do you have extra ammo?”
Shel held up her handgun and nodded; her face was pale but her hands were steady. Terrence stepped up without a word. The street-sweeper auto he carried had seemed like a ridiculous affectation to Smoke earlier, but now its bulk and power seemed like a good idea. So what if Terrence was a boy with a man’s weapon? If there was ever a day to become a man, today was it.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
Smoke was conscious of his limp, of the trembling that started in his chest and radiated out his arms. He gripped his gun harder and made a fist with his other hand. He knew it was more important to appear strong than to be strong right now. The others would follow his example, a lesson he’d learned over and over in the Box when he trained with the other guards. He’d never been the strongest, the fastest, the most accurate—but he’d been the most determined.
He had the most to atone for.
And that was the thing he held in his mind as he led them down the mall walkway. It was another day of atonement and that was all right, and if his body screamed with pain and his thoughts fell away until all that was left was this blood-rimed shadow of the man he’d been, that was all right too. The coward’s way, the easy way, would have been to die back in the stinking concrete basement room where the Rebuilders had taken their vengeance upon him, where they left him to lie on
a floor streaked with the blood of others, but Smoke did not die.
Because he wasn’t done atoning.
And because of Cass.
He sought her out in the huddled crowd of Edenites. There—there, she had retreated to the center, with Ruthie in her arms and her father close by. Red would keep her safe, for now—another man who’d give his life for Cass, and that was all right with Smoke.
Nadir knew what he was doing. He kept pace with Smoke, though Smoke knew he itched to go faster, and focused on the group ahead.
“Get ’em in the chute, boss, what do you say?” Nadir said quietly.
Smoke saw what he meant—if they could get the infected to come across one of the narrow pedestrian bridges that crisscrossed the atrium, they’d be tightly clustered, a better target than they were now. Not yet close enough to catch the Edenites’ scent, they stumbled and wandered in a loose formation along the side of the mall, momentarily distracted by the brilliant flashes of light being spun by some sort of crystal hanging in the display window of a Hot Topic.
“Good idea.” He turned to the others. “Everyone…we need to get them to come across. I’ll stay on this side with…how about you, Shel? You and me. Then when they’re in the middle, Terrence, Nadir, Bart, you guys get to the other side and we’ll box them in. But you’ll have to be fast because you’re going to have to take the long way, see?”
He sketched the plan with his finger, pointing out the circuit made by the two pedestrian bridges and the walkways on either side of the mall.
“Got it,” Shel said. The others nodded their assent.
“Okay, we’re ready?”
He was more aware than ever that he was the one slowing them down, and Smoke threw himself into the short journey, holding on to the brass rail overlooking the atrium, and favoring his good leg, letting the other drag a little. The Edenites had stopped screaming, at least, though he could hear the moaning and whimpering from those who’d been trampled and injured. In the relative quiet, the voices of the infected echoed, a trick of the acoustics of the place. The mumbled syllables and nonsense words blended together when there were so many of them, almost losing their oddness; they could have been a polite crowd at an art gallery, a group of suburban parents at a middle-school open house.
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