Horizon (03)

by Sophie Littlefield

  “…don’t know who he thinks he is,” Dana was saying angrily.

  Cass glanced back at them a few times while she and the girls strolled; she saw Shannon gesturing, pleading maybe, before finally giving up and going to join the others.

  Cass had volunteered to watch the girls to give Suzanne a break, but the truth was she needed a little time to herself. No. The truth was that she was fighting an urge for a drink. Not that there was one to be had, but the unsettled feeling left over from Mayhew’s little speech had spiraled into a full-on tangle of worries, the sort that usually found her deep in the night.

  Days tended to be easier. Last time she quit drinking, Cass filled them with work, with running, with caring for Ruthie. And she could usually stave off a craving by throwing herself into arduous physical work. Digging stones from a field. Weeding between rows. Anything at all to drown out the anxiety.

  On the road was different. She had no sense of control. She moved when the group moved, stopped when they stopped. Everyone else seemed to be content knowing only that they were headed “north,” but the uncertainty of the future only added to her anxiety.

  She walked, head down, with her hands in her pockets, reciting the litany of phrases she’d picked up in her long-ago meetings, inane little sayings that did nothing to boost her confidence in herself but sometimes, occasionally, could pull her back into that feeling of thin hope, that she really might be able to get through this, that she really could survive without a drink.

  If God brings me to it, He will bring me through it

  I am not failing as long as I am trying

  She heard, in her whispered words, dozens of other voices. Since the end of everything she had seen no one from the meetings. Not one of them. They were all probably dead. What would they have chosen, Cass wondered, if they knew how few days they had left—to keep coming back, or to go on a bender the likes of which no one had ever seen? Would they have drunk themselves to death?

  She had the start of a headache, a faint breathlessness. Nothing too terrible. And food would help. She could get through this, she could—

  Cass looked around. They’d walked to the far edge of the field—strawberries, it looked like, the long-dead plants choked now by kaysev—and there was a worn split-rail fence that might have been pretty if the vines twined around the wood weren’t all brittle and brown. But though Cass turned around, a complete circle, she did not see the girls.

  “Ruthie!” she called, her voice hoarse. “Twyla!”

  Oh God, she hadn’t been watching, hadn’t been listening, she’d been lost inside her own head, her own cravings. For a second Cass was frozen in terror and mortification, eyes darting everywhere, gathering her breath to scream—

  And then she heard their voices, bright peals of laughter spilling from behind a tractor that had been abandoned in the field. A second later Twyla’s head popped up on the bench, followed by Ruthie’s.

  “Mama!” Ruthie called. “Look, we’re farmers!”

  Cass forced a smile, her stomach seized with adrenaline and fear. She felt like she would throw up again, but that couldn’t happen, not here, not in this moment of the girls’ delight.

  “Oh, look at you two!” she called through a smile she dredged up from her paltry heart. “Show me how you grow your crops!”

  And she hastened toward the girls, fixing her gaze on their sweet faces. If she couldn’t beat her cravings, then she’d just have to outrun them, keep running toward the next right thing and the next.

  That night she had thought to speak to Smoke, to confess how bad she’d gotten. He would be disappointed in her, but he would be compassionate, too. Smoke was like that; he wouldn’t let her suffer alone. And she was willing now to trade a little of her dignity for a few moments of his comfort.

  But as they set up camp for the night in a feed and supply store, after first clearing out several long-abandoned Beater nests and searching the much-looted supply shelves for anything useful, Cass could not get a moment alone with Smoke.

  His limp was far more pronounced in the afternoons, after the day of exertion had taken its toll. His face was slightly ashen and she knew he was in pain. And yet he wouldn’t take a break. He helped Davis and Bart—and Valerie, Cass couldn’t help noticing with an uneasy feeling—to feed and water the horses, and then he and Mayhew and Terrence and a couple other guys made a tour of the other buildings in the town while there was still daylight, looking for anything useful. They made a decent raiding party, well armed and cautious; they came back with a few tools and several armloads of firewood. Terrence had found someone’s rainy-day stash in a canister. He shook it out upside down on the fire once they got the kindling going, and dozens of bills fluttered down and caught flame, the kids laughing at the spectacle.

  But throughout the meal and the cleanup, Smoke stayed away. He talked to Mayhew, to Davis and Nadir, even to Dor for a few tense moments. He made his way around to the kids, impressing Colton and the other boys with a brief knife-throwing demonstration. When Cass came back from taking Ruthie outside to wash before bed, he’d set up his bedroll near the front, along with the Easterners and others who were well armed, and was already deeply asleep, his face sheltered in the crook of his arm.

  Sleep was slow to come, despite Cass’s exhaustion. She knew what Smoke was up to because she had seen it before. He was doing what he did best, building the collective courage of the group, just as he’d once encouraged and developed the security team in the Box. And there was no doubt that it needed to be done; without the cohesiveness he provided, they could easily splinter into factions, start blaming each other for the things that had happened.

  So why did she feel so empty every time she spotted him in the crowd?

  Yet again, Smoke was not choosing her. He was a good man, a great man, even; these were the qualities that had made him a hero long before his last battle with the Rebuilders. But in his heroism he acted alone. Even when he’d been working with Dor, he was solitary. When he sought vengeance he sought it for himself. He wanted Cass with him, she knew that, but only in the moments left over after he’d vanquished his greater thirst, to fix a world that he could never forgive himself for allowing to go to hell in the first place.

  Cass knew there was something at the core of his drive that he’d never shared with her, the key to this crushing sense of responsibility, the blood thirst he carried with him everywhere he went. Smoke had told his secret to only one man, and that was Dor, and that was as good as any vault. She knew she might never know. Whatever Smoke had done, it plagued him, consumed him; the truth was a lover from whose arms Cass could not entice or drag or trick Smoke.

  She tossed and turned long after the room was silent, dozens of her fellow survivors deep in their own private dream landscapes, where the luckiest visited memories of Before and others battled horrors real and imagined.

  As people began moving from their homes to shelters during the Siege, it was hard to get used to the nights at first. Some people compared it to prison—overcrowding in California meant that many prisoners shared small spaces lined with back-to-back bunk beds, images of which frequently made the evening news—but Joe, one of the guards in the Box who had actually been in prison, said it was worse. Worse because at least in prison there were clear hierarchies of power, of who got the best bunk, who could tell who else to shut the fuck up or quit snoring or crying or beating off. Joe said it was the politeness that got to him on the outside—when the Siege made everything part of the outside—everyone forced to lie next to people they might not even like, to quietly endure their sounds and smells and proximity, then get up and pretend to have had a good night’s sleep.

  Cass forced herself to lie still, trying to will the thoughts from her mind, counting backward from a thousand, anything to quiet her restless thoughts. When someone whispered her name, her eyes flew open to find Red crouching next to her, a ghostly presence in the glow of a lantern turned low and hung from a nail.

  “You�
�re not asleep, are you, Cassie? Wanna talk?”

  She hesitated only for a moment before getting up carefully so as not to disturb the others, and following him into the house. They felt along the wall in the darkness, to the front door where one of the Easterners was sitting on the ottoman that Dor had brought for Jasmine earlier.

  “She had nightmares,” Red murmured to the guard. “We’re just going to sit out here for a bit, okay?”

  “Suit yourself,” the man said.

  There was enough starlight to find the benches that faced each other across a flower bed. They sat close together and Red unfolded a blanket he’d brought, spreading it carefully over the two of them.

  “Aw, Cassie darlin’, who would have thought it.” He sighed.

  Cass couldn’t help a cynical laugh. “Who would have thought which part? That the world would be taken over by zombies? That we’d be grazing like cattle on a plant invented in a lab, just to stay alive? Or that by some miracle you’d show up in my life again after abandoning me for twenty-three years?”

  After the words were out, Cass wished she hadn’t said the last part. She knew exactly how many years it was since her dad left. All those years, she’d kept track. But why give him that satisfaction? After all, she’d long ago quit caring that he was gone.

  “It wasn’t a miracle,” Red said softly.

  “Okay, a curse. Is that better? You were cursed with having to run into me again. In all the bars, in all the—”

  “No, that’s not what I meant. I found you, Cassie. It wasn’t an accident.”

  A tickle started along her spine. “Um, well, if you remember, you were already living in New Eden when we got there, so technically, I found you. And since there aren’t all that many places to live left out here, it’s not exactly a miracle that we both ended up in the same one, know what I mean?”

  “I don’t mean in New Eden. I mean before that.”

  “Before that, when? Before I came here I lived in the Box and I know for a fact you weren’t there. Before that I lived in a library and I never saw—”

  “The day you were taken, Cass. The day you were attacked. By the Beaters. I was there.”

  Chapter 31

  HE’D STILL BEEN going by Silver Dollar then. Or Tom Haverford, his real name, to his oldest and closest friend in the world, Carmy Gomez, with whom he’d been traveling the highways and byways of the West Coast, playing in clubs and bars and music festivals, opening for other acts and generally making enough money to cover their costs and salt a little away. Tom had even been paying for rock-bottom health insurance, really a lottery Madoff scheme run by a local charity, but even that was a bit of a trick given his lack of a permanent address, but lately he’d begun thinking about the past, about things he wished he’d done differently. And the last thing he wanted, assuming there was anyone who still cared about him, was to be a burden to them now when he’d managed to be a burden way too many times already in his sorry life.

  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.