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?<
br />
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 way 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.
A third flare went off and Sammi dropped the tote, spilling tiny tubes and bottles onto the floor. A round eyeshadow rolled across the carpet and bumped into Kyra’s leg. “Shit,” she whispered. “Fucking shitballs with lint.”
But she looked like she was about to cry. Sammi crab walked over to her and pulled her into a hug on the carpet, realizing too late she was sitting on the water spot. Oh, well. That probably wasn’t the worst thing that was going to happen today. Or tonight or tomorrow or whatever it was.
“What time is it, anyway?” she asked Zihna.
Zihna, who wore a watch all the time, an old-fashioned one with tiny delicate hands that pointed to the numerals, squinted at her wrist. “Nearly three. Three hours until dawn. Think you girls can catch a little sleep once you get down to the shore? I promise, we won’t leave without you.”
“Are you sure? I mean, don’t you want one of us to keep you company or take turns or something?”
“Aw, no, honey,” Zihna said. “Red and me, we’ve got it covered. We’re a team, right? I mean…Sammi, you know we want you if you want to join us.”
Sammi realized what she was half asking: if she planned to walk with her dad—or stay with Zihna and Red and her friends.
“A team,” she repeated quickly, before she could change her mind.
Chapter 21
CASS HAD THE foresight to go back for the stroller, hoping she’d get to it before Suzanne or Ingrid and then feeling guilty about the thought. The stroller was exactly where she’d left it earlier in the evening, abandoned in the middle of the yard, and Cass realized how lucky she was that no one had taken it. It would make a great little cart, for someone who wanted to transport food, belongings, anything at all—up to seventy pounds, according to the government label engraved on the side, something she’d never given much thought to before because Ruthie didn’t weigh a fraction of that.
Ruthie had settled down after the encounter with Red, a lot more than Cass anyway, whose nerves were still jangling.
I’m your dad, Cassie
She was in a state of shock and denial, but there would be plenty of time to sort it all out on the journey. More than enough time.
Out of nowhere, Cass thought of a picture book a babysitter had once given Ruthie—a children’s Bible, illustrated with watercolors in pale, weak colors. Moses crossing the Red Sea looked more like Moses wading through a forest of camellia blooms, his placid smile making him and the Israelites all appear stoned. Still, Ruthie had loved the story and liked to point to the people in the pictures and try to repeat the names Cass read to her.
Moses, Pharaoh, Jethro, Zipporah
And now her dad, Red whoever-the-fuck he was calling h
imself these days, wanted to come and lead them to a promised land. Hell, he wanted to be her dad again all of a sudden. But it was too late for that, too late by a long shot. And if Cass had to make some harsh decisions to protect Ruthie the way Mim ought to have protected her, well, so be it—she had fought harder for less. Twenty years was a long time, and her father was a stranger to her, and she would not trust her daughter with him. All she had to do now was keep saying no, and she figured she could more than handle that.
She settled Ruthie into the stroller after wiping the chilly dew from its interior with her bare hands, then wiping her hands on her pants. Her pants were not clean, her laundry day was Tuesday; if the Beaters had waited a few more days to come fuck with them at least Cass would have started the odyssey with clean pants. Oh well.
Cass pushed the stroller toward the hospital, trying to narrow and focus her thoughts. If Smoke had made it out of the hospital building, all the way up the path to the yard, halfway down to the water—then surely she could convince the council that he was healing quickly enough to justify bringing him along. She would be responsible for him. All they needed was one seat in one of the cars, Cass would walk alongside, she would push Ruthie and carry their belongings and it would all work out fine.
But when she got to the hospital it was dark. She parked the stroller, behind a rain barrel, and picked Ruthie up before she went inside, but she knew the minute she set foot in the place that it was deserted. And sure enough—there, in the light coming through the windows, the light of the hundreds of candles and flashlights being squandered tonight—there was Smoke’s empty bed, the covers clumsily folded, the pillow on top.
Cass went into the other room. There—in that narrow bed with the crayon drawings that Ruthie and Twyla and Dane had made, pinned up on the walls behind the headboard—there was where Charles had suffered through his waning and finally unconscious days.
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