“But some people think—”
“They’re just scared. By morning they’ll realize she’s not a threat. But for now, we need her here.”
So Sammi made the trip back, jogging more slowly this time. Her dad and Cass—well, that was just great. Figured that they’d have to work together on whatever came along. In there, in the mall, it had been the two of them that finally got the door unstuck. It was like no matter what happened in their lives, they were thrown together. It had to be the two of them. What did they know about babies? Other than they’d both had one—but then again a lot of the people in New Eden had had kids, once.
Besides, Smoke was here, Smoke was doing fine, he’d made his miraculous recovery, shouldn’t Cass be with him now? He was a hero again after the mall, so why wasn’t she back with him? Why couldn’t she just leave her dad alone?
For a minute Sammi considered disobeying Sun-hi and Zihna and bringing back Smoke instead of her dad. She was pretty sure he could do whatever her dad could. Only, Smoke looked like he was going to pass out, and besides…
Jasmine
Sammi squeezed her eyes shut hard for a moment, nearly tripping on a clod of dirt. She’d seen about a million dead people, some of them way more disgusting than Jasmine, people who were eaten or rotted or burned. Compared to that, Jasmine just looked like she was sleeping, and it wasn’t like Sammi was a little girl or anything, she didn’t need her dad to tell her it was going to be all right, because she’d figured out a long time ago it wouldn’t, so it wasn’t that, but only yesterday she’d seen Jasmine in the morning with her hands on her huge belly, stretching with her eyes closed and this little smile on her face and Sammi had wondered what there was to be so happy about. Jasmine wanted that baby so bad, she’d told Kyra that after she turned forty she figured she’d never get to be a mom, and she had about thirty names picked out, for boys and girls, and she said she’d just know, she’d take one look at her baby and she’d know what its name was meant to be.
So maybe it was a good thing she’d died, maybe it was a good thing she hadn’t seen the disgusting thing she’d given birth to. Sammi reached the others and practically collided with her dad, and to her surprise she was crying so hard she could barely get the words out.
Chapter 41
SUN-HI SHOOK HER head when they ran up, and Cass knew that Jasmine had died. But then Zihna lifted the soft blanket and showed them the baby in her arms, and she was beautiful, face bunched and lips puckered, suckling air, her tiny hands in fists and faint pink lines at the bridge of her nose. Angel kisses, they called them, harmless little birthmarks; Ruthie had them too, but they’d faded away over time.
The baby’s head was a little misshapen from the labor. “Unproductive” labor, they called it, when the baby wouldn’t come—just one of many horrible euphemisms for the pain of becoming a mother. Cass had delivered Ruthie in a stark hospital room in the wee hours of the morning, and it had been an unremarkable labor, according to the doctors, but to Cass it had been one miracle after another. She’d suffered plenty—they wouldn’t give her painkillers because she was an addict—but thinking about what Jasmine had suffered before she died, before Sun-hi had taken the baby from her lifeless body, made Cass want to weep.
But this was not the time for weeping.
“We can bury her by the creek,” Dor said. “The soil will be soft there.”
“All right,” Sun-hi said. She sounded exhausted. Cass could only imagine that the disastrous labor had crushed Sun-hi, mentally and physically, as she tried to hold on to Jasmine’s life while the others battled for their own lives inside.
Dor was already wrapping the body. Cass saw his tenderness, his reverence; such a sharp contrast to the man most people thought they knew.
“I think there’s a little bit of evaporated milk in one of the cars,” Zihna said, her brow furrowed with worry. “But not enough. Oh, Cass, what are we going to do, this poor little thing—”
“I have an, an idea,” Cass said, the audacity of it making her stammer.
She told the others. They were all silent for a moment. It was far from ideal.
But nothing was ideal anymore, and after a moment they nodded and she took the baby in her arms—so tiny and precious, memories of holding Ruthie coming back like it had been yesterday—and she and Zihna set out to try.
It was too dark to dig another grave tonight. So while the others carried Jasmine’s body carefully to the shed attached to the building, Cass found an unlocked extended-cab Ford a few rows over and waited there with the baby.
Zihna was back soon with Ingrid, whose flustered, bewildered expression told Cass that she didn’t know. When she saw Cass, her face went stony.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” she asked sarcastically.
For a moment Cass feared she’d made a terrible mistake. Ingrid with her judgments, Ingrid with her certainty that only she knew what was right, with her righteous condemnation—how could she be the one?
“Please,” Cass whispered. “Just—just let me talk for a minute.”
It took less than a minute. There was very little to say. A death, a birth, another Aftertime tragedy marked with blood and loss. Cass did not embellish. She did not entreat. She did not even say the thing that had made her seek out the woman who probably despised her most, of anyone in New Eden—that only Ingrid could save this child. She opened her jacket and showed Ingrid the baby, who, miraculously, was sleeping.
“Oh my God,” Ingrid whispered. “Oh God, oh.”
She reached for the baby and Cass knew she did it without thinking and was only a little bereft to hand her over.
“You have to feed her,” she pleaded, but Ingrid was already unbuttoning her shirt.
In the morning, Dor and Steve and Earl and Smoke dug the grave. They had brought a shovel in one of the cars, but the barns revealed a vast assortment of tools, enough for all of them. It did not take long.
Jasmine’s body was brought from the shed and lowered, in its wrapping of blankets, into the ground. Everyone scooped a fistful of dirt and tossed it in.
Sh’rae was ready with her Bible. She had a gift for gentleness, and she chose her texts with care. Today she read from Revelation; when she got to the end, many people were crying as her words drifted away on the morning breeze. For a moment nobody spoke. Then Sun-hi crouched down and dug a fistful of dirt and tossed it into the grave. She brushed off her hands and started toward the building, not looking back.
The others followed. Cass held back until the end, and when their turn came, she set Ruthie down. Ruthie had been quiet since the mall, thoughtful almost, staying close to her mother. Now she bent to the earth with her mouth pursed in concentration and dug into the ground with her small hand. She dropped her fistful of dirt into the hole with a reverence far beyond her years.
The news of Jasmine’s baby had spread quickly through the group. During Jasmine’s funeral, Ingrid stood in the back, and when the baby began to fuss, she slipped away, out of earshot. But when the service was over, Cass saw Kyra sitting in an old glider chair, on the building’s back porch, cradling the baby gingerly, Ingrid showing her the proper way to hold her head.
Back on New Eden, there had been lots of teasing—not all of it good-natured—as Dirk approached his second birthday; the public opinion was that he was too old to still be nursing. But no one said anything now.
Chapter 42
DAYS PASSED, a lengthening string of them, until it had been nearly three weeks since they left New Eden behind.
In two days’ time, they would arrive in Salt Point. Nadir said they called it that because of potassium deposits in the soil, but considering he’d never actually been there Sammi was skeptical. The people who were trying to get the place set up would be in for quite a surprise.
The Edenites were down to thirty-three now, including baby Rosie, who turned out to be healthy and not nearly as bad-looking once she was cleaned up and fed for a few days.
They’d lost five more since the mall. Old Mike and Terrence had died when they stumbled on a Beater nest in the warehouse they were clearing one night a couple of weeks ago. Richy Gomez and Paolo had to be shot the next day after being bitten doing the good deed of trying to save Old Mike. Cheddar had hit his head on a stone outcropping while longboarding, been unconscious for several hours and suffered noisy seizures for a few days after that until someone—no one had come forward—had strangled him during the night.
Sammi was ready to move into the next empty building they saw, as long as it meant they could stay put for a while. Her blisters had blisters from all the walking, and her body ached from the moment she woke up in the morning until the moment she went to bed—if you could call it “bed,” since most nights she was sleeping on the floor in some shed or barn or church.
Worse, she couldn’t get warm unless she was walking. When they stopped for the night, she volunteered for every task she could think of because the alternative, which was to sit still, meant she’d be freezing before she went to bed. Once she was lying down she’d never get warm, even though she and Sage and Kyra had taken to sleeping huddled together.
According to the plan that the new council had drawn up, she was entitled to ride for forty-five minutes twice a day. That was the shortest amount of time since she was in the youngest age bracket with no health issues, and she wasn’t pregnant. But the reason she skipped her allotted time most days was that she was only allowed on the trailers, not in any of the three cars that still worked. And that meant getting colder and colder until she could get off and walk again.
Kyra took her trailer time most days. She said the baby was starting to press down on her bladder and her back hurt. They all felt the baby kick—every time it moved, it was good for a little entertainment, which was way hard to come by—but when Kyra rode, she liked to nap. How she managed it, Sammi couldn’t figure, though Kyra said she got something like hot flashes now, with all the hormones zinging through her body.
Part of the problem was undoubtedly that Sammi was so skinny. She wasn’t the only one—they hadn’t had much besides kaysev since the food ran out. There wasn’t time to hunt, and though they raided every promising building they passed, nearly everything had already been ransacked by others.
It was March now, almost a year into the Siege. A year of desperation, a year of people making do with whatever they could find. Lots of times they’d come to a house and there would be a pot in front of the door. That meant it had already been raided of all the food and medicine, anything worth taking, but that didn’t keep people from wishing, hoping, for a miracle.
Sometimes when she and Kyra and Sage walked with the boys, they played a game to see who could imagine the best meal. The boys always won, probably because they declared themselves the winners. Colton always started out with his mom’s Caesar salad. No one ever gave him a hard time about his lack of originality, because his mom was one of the first to die; she was the manager of a high-end grocery store and was shot when she tried to stop looters from taking all the bottled water.
Kalyan was the most creative. He described elaborate feasts featuring all his favorite take-out menus in the Oakland neighborhood where his parents once developed online content from home.
Sammi would never admit to it but the meal she most longed for was the one her dad used to make her on her birthday—giant rib-eye steaks grilled black on the outside and practically raw in the middle, with an iceberg-lettuce salad with tomatoes and a few slices of red onion on the side. Her mother had declared it inedible back when they were still together, and Sammi had called it disgusting the last time he’d ever fixed it for her and only eaten the narrow band of meat that was cooked medium.
But her dad used to wear an old red apron that Sammi gave him in first grade, her handprints in acrylic paint on the front. He paraded the plate of raw meat around the house acting like it was so heavy it hurt his arm. He’d bring a bone home from the butcher for Chester, too, saying that since he was a mutt and no one knew when his birthday was, he might as well share Sammi’s.
Her dad had kind of sucked as a dad, spending way too much time at work and missing a lot of her soccer games and forgetting her friends’ names, but at least he’d cracked jokes and tried to spoil her on the weekends.
Ever since the mall, he’d somehow gotten himself on the new council along with Nadir, the Easterner who Rachael and the de Ceccos didn’t trust because he was a Muslim, and Shannon and Harris and Smoke. At first Sammi worried her dad would be upset because of Smoke, who was almost back to normal now and so everyone figured he and Cass would just take up right where they left off. Only that hadn’t exactly happened. Cass spent most of her time with Ingrid, helping with the boys since Ingrid had to nurse Rosie, like, fifty times a day. But Sammi thought the real problem might be that Cass was avoiding both of them.
And to be fair, there was a lot to keep the new council busy. They’d given everybody jobs, made up all these procedures for how to check and clear a shelter when they stopped, who would cook and clean and all of that. Smoke was kind of like how he used to be back when they lived in the school, he let other people make the big decisions, but now he would have his own opinion a lot of the time instead of insisting everyone keep talking until they came up with a decision together.
They’d been off the main roads for a week now, the terrain getting more and more uneven. Nadir had explained about how Mayhew was planning to crash the shelter, and in a lot of ways it seemed like that was still the plan, but somehow it was okay now since they were just trying to survive.
Sammi and her friends constantly discussed what would happen if the settlers weren’t happy to see them. What if they told them to turn around, find their own damn camp? Sammi couldn’t imagine that her dad and the rest of the new council would fight people over what was, to be fair, theirs.
They’d probably have one of their stupid secret meetings where they went walking after dinner, talking it all through. Then they’d come back and tell everyone they would just have to keep going and make the best of it. They’d act like it was no big deal, at least to Sammi and her friends, because they still thought of them as immature, even though Kalyan was going to be eighteen in July and the rest of them were all over fifteen. If her dad could see what Colton had given her, well, then he might change his mind…but she still hadn’t figured out how to give it to her dad without getting Colton into trouble. The adults wouldn’t understand how none of it had been his idea, that he’d thought they were just messing around, that he’d never realized it would go so far.
Nadir’s lists said that Salt Point would get below freezing at night through April. That was almost two more months like this. There was no way that they would be able to build adequate shelter for that, not right away, anyway. And if they went down to lower elevations, they would need Beater walls, just in case, and they were right back to the same problem.
Sammi wondered if they should have just picked someplace on the way and made the best of it, like so many other people had done. Only…she’d seen what happened on the islands. At the mall. Before that, at the school and the library and almost
every other place she could think of since the Siege. If the Easterners thought the only place to make a new life was up north, at least until someone figured out a way to get rid of the Beaters once and for all, then Sammi had to admit they were probably right.
They crested a ridge and there, on the other side, was a scattering of farms with a few buildings at the center making a tiny town. And in the center of that was a sweet little white church with a spire on top, looking like a postcard against the blue blue sky.
“It’s so pretty,” Sammi couldn’t resist saying.
“You think? I’ve been in a hundred of those,” Sage said sourly. “That’s a Methodist church, bet you anything. They go in for the wooden pews. No cushions.”
“Huh,” Sammi said, as they trudged on.
Sleeping in a wooden pew didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world. Nadir might say one of his pretty Muslim prayers—that would be kind of nice.
She knew it was all the same God, just different ways of talking to Him. But in a way, it would be better if there was a whole team of gods they could pray to. Sammi had a feeling they were going to need all the help they could get.
Chapter 43
IN THE VESTIBULE of the old church Cass found a bride’s dressing room. It looked like it had once had some other function; perhaps it was a supply closet before a steady stream of city brides discovered this perfect little setting that practically guaranteed enviable photos, with the drifts of wildflowers and the mountain backdrop. All those brides…they’d adjusted their veils in the mirror, checked their makeup, quelled their nerves and stepped out with breathless anticipation in their satin high heels and French manicures and updos constructed with a hundred tiny hairpins. All of this to launch marriages that, more often than not, would end in tears and bitterness and regrets.
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