Horizon (03)

by Sophie Littlefield

  “No.” Dor practically spat the words. “Mayhew’s right about one thing, we don’t have a lot of time. Here’s how we’ll do it. Anyone who’s armed, who was in the fight, we stay away from the others. Tonight or whenever we find shelter, we’ll check then. The fever takes at least that long to turn. But we can do that on our own, Mayhew. These people don’t answer to you.”

  “They answer to me.” Dana’s voice rose, belligerently. “You’re a laborer, Dor, and a, a philanderer. We’re all grateful for your bit in the canoe yesterday, but you’re not a council member. And this isn’t the time to start pretending you are.”

  The crowd buzzed, but no one contradicted Dana. Cass knew it was a critical moment, that whoever played the crowd’s fears most skillfully would lead, qualified or not.

  “You’re weak, Dana,” Dor said, not bothering to hide his contempt. “You’ll get us all killed. And you—Mayhew—we don’t know you. We don’t know what your agenda is. Why should we trust you?”

  Mayhew was implacable behind his dark lenses. “You want to know my agenda? Fine, I’ll lay it out for you. We come from the East. Like, beyond the Rockies, get it? We’re here to help you, but unless we get moving, we’re all screwed.”

  He reached for his gun, but Dor was faster, his own out and ready before Mayhew had his out of his holster.

  “I’m offering to hand this over to you,” Mayhew said tightly. “Mine and the rest of my men. As a symbol of trust.”

  “Dad. Stop it.”

  Sammi burst from the edge of the crowd, hugging herself, looking miserable.

  “Please, you’re just making it worse,” she pleaded. Her face was flushed with anger and embarrassment, and Cass realized she was ashamed of her father. “Just do what the guy says, okay?”

  Everyone looked from Sammi to Mayhew to Dor. Dana opened his mouth to protest but then shut it after it became clear that no one was going to be following his notions.

  The resolve seemed to drain from Dor as he watched Sammi, flanked by her silent friends, fade back into the crowd. Dor, who’d taken the front line without a second thought, who was wearing the blood of the creatures that he’d killed, bowed his head and turned away.

  The crowd shifted its attention expectantly at Mayhew.

  “I promise that tonight, once we find adequate shelter, we’ll share everything we know,” Mayhew said as though Sammi hadn’t spoken. “We’re not here to take over your people. We’re trying to carve out a future for everyone and we’re all in the same boat now that the fever’s gone east. When you hear what we’ve got to say, you can choose who you want to lead you, but you’ll be doing it from a place of knowledge because right now, my friends, I think you’re acting from fear, understandably.”

  This man said his words gently, his face sympathetic. But behind his sunglasses, Cass was certain his expression burned with thoughts and plans that he wouldn’t be sharing.

  As everyone began to divide into the groups he had asked for, Cass watched Mayhew’s frown curve—ever so slightly—into a smile so brief that Cass wondered if she’d conjured it from her imagination, the spoils of Dor’s defeat.

  Chapter 26

  MAYHEW’S MEN DISMOUNTED their horses; one of them stayed with the animals as the rest moved into the crowd.

  “If you were within eight feet of a Beater, go with Bart here,” Mayhew ordered, indicating a tall, broad-built man with ruddy skin and pale hair cut almost to his scalp. “If the person next to you was, see that he goes.”

  Those who’d stayed with the crowd separated themselves from those who fought, some sheepish, some defiant. Soon eight people had assembled around Bart: Cass and Dor and five other men and Darla Piehl, who had surprised them all by producing a little .22 from her backpack and hitting a target some thirty feet off.

  The examination didn’t take long. They took off their shirts and coats and examined each other’s bare skin, Cass shivering in just her sleeveless undershirt. Fat Mike squinted at an old scratch she’d gotten while pruning, tracing its shape delicately with his finger, then nodded his approval.

  “What’s that?” Terrence Godin asked, peering closely at Owen Mason’s shoulder. Everyone looked to see what he was pointing to—a small gash smudged with drying blood.

  “Got it when I fell,” Owen said. “I tripped on the first one I put down when I was trying to get close enough to take a shot at the rest.”

  Terrence was silent for a moment, bringing his face closer to the wound.

  “I don’t know, I guess—”

  “Quarantine,” Mayhew said. “It’s the only way.”

  “What do you mean, quarantine?” Dana demanded. Cass wondered if he was beginning to bristle from ceding away his position of leadership and was now looking for a fight. “You see any, like, locked rooms we can stick him in around here?”

  Mayhew stared at him from behind his dark glasses for a moment before answering. Off his horse, he did not seem quite as imposing, but he was still well over six feet tall and at least two hundred twenty or thirty pounds, his hair held in a loose ponytail secured with a bit of leather cord.

  “Way we handle it, the man walks ten paces behind. We post one armed man back there with him. Deal is, if he comes closer than the ten paces he gets a warning. Three warnings and he’s shot. Not shot to kill, but in a situation like this, being on the move, I guess you don’t need me to tell you that’s a death sentence anyway.”

  There were a few protests from the crowd, a crescendo of voices as the issue was debated. Owen started to object, then appeared to think better of it. He touched his wound, his fingertips coming away bloody, and he stared at them for a moment before wiping them on his pants.

  “Come on,” Dana protested. “There’s no need for that. He’ll be glad to stay back, without a guard, won’t you—”

  “Mayhew’s right.”

  Dor, who had been standing silently off to the side, spoke quietly. He’d regained his composure since Sammi’s outburst, but his eyes were deeply troubled.

  “We can’t take any chances,” he continued. “And we’ve got to be a lot more systematic about these things. You have my vote, Mayhew.” His tone implied that his vote did not necessarily carry much respect with it.

  Mayhew stared at him for a moment, then nodded. “Look, you—what’s your name?”

  “Owen Mason.” He mumbled, but that was nothing new; Cass couldn’t recall a time when Owen met anyone’s eyes when he spoke.

  “Owen. You need to understand that there’s nothing personal about this.”

  “What the hell, man, I don’t even know you. How could it be personal?”

  “I’ll watch him,” Dana said. “Since you’ve decided to take over my job, Mayhew, I guess I might as well make myself useful somewhere. Don’t worry, Owen.”

  He walked through the crowd, glaring at his fellow council members. After a moment, Owen followed, taking a wide route around the crowd, already the leper, already the outcast.

  “We need to get moving,” Mayhew said. “We need to find shelter well before nightfall so we can set up sentry, get everyone fed.”

  “I think we could have figured that out, at least,” Cass muttered.

  There was something about Mayhew’s placid confidence that bothered her. Or maybe it was only her age-old issue with authority, her difficulty with following orders. That, if nothing else, had made the QuikGo a perfect job for her; after her boss showed her how to work the cash register, the locks, the lottery machine, she was pretty much on her own. And she liked it that way. The gardening was the same—no one told her how to move from task to task, when to start, when to end her day.

  “I’m sure you could have,” Mayhew said easily. “Cass, is it? I don’t suppose you want to ride with me.”

  “No, and if someone’s going to ride, we’ve got some older folks, some others who might be a better candidate.”

  Mayhew nodded, raising an eyebrow. “Of course, I’m sorry, I should have thought of that. Maybe you could h
elp me figure out who’d be the best to give a breather to.”

  Cass nodded, but as the crowd gathered closer and she helped Mayhew sort out rides, she felt everyone’s eyes on her. But she couldn’t help what any of them thought. Not her dad, or Smoke. Or Sammi. Or Valerie. She was like anyone else, trying to make the best of a bad lot of choices.

  But as two men watched her from opposite ends of the crowd, she had a feeling her most difficult choice still lay ahead.

  Smoke insisted on walking. Cass held his hand, ready to catch him if he stumbled, but he was surprisingly steady.

  “Tell me everything,” he muttered through clenched teeth.

  She didn’t know if he meant Dor, but she wasn’t willing to go there. And so, instead, she started with the night they’d freed him from the Rebuilder headquarters in Colima.

  She told him that she and Dor had killed four people that night, and that other innocent people had died in the fighting. When she described the baby farm, he winced and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “God, Cass,” he whispered. “Did Sammi…”

  “She’s fine. We got her out before they—before anything happened. But we brought some of the other girls with us. Pregnant ones. One of them miscarried when she got to New Eden, but the others…one’s due in a couple of months. The others not long after.”

  For a moment neither spoke, considering the damage done to those girls, just another new variety of horror.

  Cass told him about coming to the island, about the welcome they received in the waning days of the year. About the Mothers’ House, and the House for Wayward Girls; the social committee and the friends Sammi had made. She described Garden Island and the many plants she’d cultivated. She said nothing about Dor, and Smoke didn’t ask.

  That was not the only subject Cass stayed away from. She didn’t tell Smoke she was drinking. Besides, she had quit; even if she wanted to, she couldn’t drink now. There was no liquor among the vehicles’ paltry supplies, and she’d abandoned her half-empty bottle at the last minute. So far it wasn’t too bad, but then again the first few days of sobriety were never the worst.

  The other two times she’d quit, she’d had to deal with headaches, clammy skin, heart palpitations, even a faint tremor in her hands. But she’d been drinking much more then. On New Eden, she almost always limited herself to just enough to dull her edges, which was sometimes harder than being sober. She could do this. She would do this, and not just because she didn’t have a choice.

  The last two times, she’d quit for Ruthie. In the lonely nights on the back step of the Mothers’ House, she thought about quitting so she could gain the approval of the others, for Ingrid and Suzanne and Jasmine. Even last night, she had thought she was quitting for Smoke. But now, as she caught him up to the world he had missed, recounting the details of the night when she and Dor had rescued him from the Rebuilders, she realized something unexpected. She’d done a few things right.

  She was far from perfect; she’d faltered once they arrived in New Eden. But she had come a very long way with little help. She’d been strong when the chips were down, and brave when courage was called for. Today she’d spilled Beater blood and lived to tell about it, and tomorrow she would get up and do whatever it took to protect her loved ones.

  She would do everything for them except this one thing: this time, she was getting sober for herself.

  When she had told Smoke everything she could think of, he was silent. The crowd’s energy was beginning to flag, the scenery changing very little as they traveled north on county roads, but at least they had seen no more Beaters.

  “The men I killed,” Smoke finally said. “Have they been missed?”

  Cass shrugged. “We’ve already lost more than a dozen people. People seem to have assumed those two were among the ones who ran back with the first wave. I…didn’t correct them.”

  Smoke thought about that for a moment, before speaking softly. “Were they good men?”

  “No. Getting rid of Charles…and then you…they took that task on themselves because it excited them, I think. No one on the council ordered it.”

  “But…”

  But they didn’t deserve to die. Smoke didn’t say it, but the truth hung between them like a palpable thing. His actions were self-defense, she wanted to say, and that was true, but she also knew Smoke, knew how he thought and felt. Honor was everything to him, and valor and retribution. He’d nearly died exacting vengeance, and now she wondered if he would punish himself since there was no one else to do the job for him.

  But weren’t his weeks of pain, his scars, his severed fingers and broken bones enough?

  They resumed walking, holding hands now. The children stopped playing, lulled by the motion of the trailer, and fell asleep like a litter of puppies, sprawled together in a heap. Red took over the trailer duties for Ingrid, and Zihna moved through the crowd talking to the most distraught.

  When they came to a prefab ranch house whose windows were all smashed, the leaders in front pulled in and word traveled through the crowd that they were taking a break. Water and crackers were distributed. After Cass checked on Ruthie, still sleeping next to Twyla and Dirk, she took her ration and found Smoke sitting with his back against an old live oak whose gnarled branches had once shaded an above-ground pool, now crushed and seeping brackish water. He made room for her and patted the ground next to him.

  “Look,” he said. “I just wanted to say…whatever went on, while I was in the hospital…”

  “I’m sorry. Oh, Smoke, I’m so sorry, I—”

  “No. I want to put it behind us, starting now. I don’t—none of it’s your fault. We’re together now, and that’s what matters.”

  “I came to see you at first,” Cass said, unable to cast off her guilt that easily. “I came every day. But you were so…broken.”

  “Cass.” He tipped her chin up with his fingers so that she would have to look at him. “Please, listen to me. I mean, really listen. I don’t blame you for not coming. I don’t…if it had been you, if I thought I’d lost you, if I thought you’d never wake up—”

  His voice cracked and he swallowed hard before he could continue. “I wouldn’t have been able to come either. I don’t think I could bear it.”

  Cass wanted to let his words heal her, wanted to take hold of the branch he offered her. But instead, her guilt grew. It hadn’t been fear of losing him that kept her away, not entirely. Smoke hadn’t even been gone from the Box forty-eight hours the first time she fucked Dor, and since then it had been practically every opportunity they got. Yes, their coupling was a comfort, a desperate response to fear, to despair, but it was a comfort she couldn’t seem to get enough of.

  If Smoke knew how often she’d been lying in Dor’s arms while he was struggling for his life, could he still forgive her? If he knew that sometimes, when Dor touched her, she was glad of the forgetting, glad to have Smoke out of her mind, glad to have everything out of her mind, would he still want her back? What if he knew that the only time she didn’t want a drink was when Dor was inside her?

  How could Smoke ever look upon her with anything but disgust when he understood what she had really become?

  He would turn away from her and it would be what she deserved; he would reject her and she would know it was her due. And in one small way it would make everything easier. Because if Smoke didn’t want her she would never have to choose between two men. And if he didn’t expect her to be good then she could continue to be bad, to fail everyone and everything. As long as she took care of Ruthie, Cass could simply cease to try in any other way.

  Chapter 27

  THEY PASSED AN uneasy night on a dirt track that had once been used for stock-car racing. By the looks of it, several years had passed since the stands had been filled with crowds, but the travelers were exhausted and on edge. Despite their promises to explain what they were doing on this side of the Rockies, Mayhew and his men kept to themselves, taking posts around the perimeter of the track along with a few
of the others, and no one had the energy—or temerity—to complain. Dana and Owen slept under the overhang of the sagging snack stand; everyone else clustered close on the center of the track, where grass once grew and kaysev now provided a soft surface.

  In the morning, a hasty meal quickly gave over to repacking the vehicles and other preparations for travel. Yesterday’s fears seemed both distant and magnified; few had slept well, and there was a general sense of wanting to put distance between them and the bloody battlefield they’d left behind. Surely Cass was not the only one to realize that the Beater threat was undiminished, no matter how much ground they covered today—as numerous as grains of sand on the beach, they would always be out there—but by the time the pink dawn gave way to day, they were on the road again.

  The progress of the crowd was frustratingly slow. They stuck to the road, leaving the meandering waterways of the Delta behind for the flat farmland south of Sacramento, passing skeletal orchards only now beginning to come back to life, acres of table grapevines that were nothing but dead, woody spirals clinging to supports. At the end of the rows of vines, the rosebushes planted to give farmers early warning of fungal diseases were beginning to send up new shoots from the hardy rootstock that had waited, dormant, for more hospitable times, and Cass tried to interpret the appearance of the reddish canes as a hopeful omen.

  They skirted small towns, taking farm roads to avoid the possibility of Beater nests. They passed shacks, ranches, commercial buildings; fairgrounds and schools and stadiums, and at a distance it all seemed almost normal from time to time, a walk in the country on a long-ago day when one’s only concerns were sunburn and getting home in time to catch the game on TV.

  At least the day was warm and clear, and the roads were mostly passable. Twice they had to go around obstructions, using the Bronco to drag the little hybrid up a steep grade next to a wreck at one point while the walkers edged past on the narrow shoulder and tried not to look inside the smashed cars at the long-decayed bodies inside. They had spotted no Beaters by the time they paused for lunch in the shade of a billboard advertising the Silver Bear casino, a fact that buoyed flagging spirits and seemed to support the idea that the creatures were avoiding the sparsely populated countryside.