“So I never woke up?”
“No, not that night, and not for a long time after.”
Cass was silent, thinking about her father keeping sentry outside the room. She wanted to know if he had the beard, then, or if he was clean-shaven, the way she remembered him. She knew it didn’t matter, and she wondered anyway.
“What did you do in the morning?” she asked instead.
Tom shrugged. “There was a car in the garage, an old Honda Civic, beat to hell. My guess is it was a kid’s car or a second car or something. Keys on a rack by the door, believe it or not. It couldn’t have been much easier. I got you laid out in the backseat, took everything I could from the house, medicine and food and whatnot, clothes. Pulled up the garage door and off we went. Kind of amazing, now that we’ve all heard the stories.”
Cass knew the stories he meant—by that time, there were roving bands of marauders at the edge of town who waited for cars to come by and then shot out the tires. They were after the gas, the things people carried—the sport. Later, you’d find these cars abandoned at the side of the road, often with corpses with holes in their heads draped over the seats, or on the ground, shot in the back when they tried to run away.
“So no one stopped you?”
“No. But it might have helped that I went all back roads. I knew enough to avoid any of the main roads, but mostly I thought I was avoiding the Beaters.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I guess I didn’t understand them very well. I’d a made a shitty anthropologist. I figured they’d stick to the main roads because it was easier or something…I was probably giving them too much credit.”
“Well, at least you were right about one thing. If you’d gone on the highway you probably wouldn’t have made it far.”
“Yeah. As it was, I just took farm roads and dirt roads. A lot of ’em I hadn’t been on since I was a kid, but it’s funny how that stuff stays with you.”
“Why did you go down mountain? As opposed to up?”
Red shrugged. “No good reason, I guess. I mean, if I’d had the balls I would have taken you back to the shelter, I guess. But I thought Ruthie was dead, and I figured you didn’t have long for the world.”
“You mean because I was infected.”
“Well, hell yeah. I thought there was no way you’d survive.”
“So why…” Cass’s breath caught in her throat and she took a minute to steady herself before trying again. “Why didn’t you just kill me?”
Red didn’t answer for a moment, but his eyes shone wetly in the darkness.
“I couldn’t,” he finally whispered.
Cass nodded. The strongest men—Smoke and Dor among them—had become killers in order to be merciful. The ones who couldn’t kill an infected person ended up bringing more misery for everyone.
But she wasn’t in a place to judge. She herself had walked away from a victim nearly senseless with shock and pain after the skin had been chewed from its body, unable to do what needed to be done, leaving the job for someone else.
“It’s just that it was you,” Red said. “Someone else…in the days that came after that, I did have to kill, twice. People who were infected. One asked me to. One…well, no sense dwelling on that now.
“Anyway, I got almost as far as the foothills but it took me all day. Kept having to go around wrecks and shit, even on the back roads. Saw a couple Beaters too, scared the crap outta me. So when it started to get late in the day I just picked out a farmhouse, one of those ones on cattle acreage, up on a rise. Drove up and moved us in.”
“That’s right near where I woke up,” Cass said haltingly. “The first thing I remember is lying in this field in clothes I didn’t remember, with all these half-healed cuts.”
But this could be good news. If she had woken close to the place where her father had taken her, then it stood to reason that she hadn’t had time to travel very far. And the less time had passed, the less distance she covered, the lower the chances that she’d encountered any humans.
Any victims.
If she’d been alert and conscious long enough to escape from the farmhouse, then she had to have been practically recovered. She’d tired, obviously, and lain down to rest, spent a night perhaps, lying under the moon in a field not far from where her father was frantically trying to find her. But the next day she woke for real, and that was when her real memories started.
And there was one other thing, Cass realized with growing excitement. If she’d been recovering, the fever would have been driven from her body. And it only made sense that its effects on the brain had disappeared, as well.
Simply put, she wouldn’t have been hunting. Whatever caused her to leave the safety of the room where her father had kept her—hunger, thirst, boredom, restlessness—it wasn’t flesh lust.
She hadn’t consumed
For the first time since that day, Cass was sure that she hadn’t attacked and feasted, hadn’t doomed another innocent to the fever. The realization was dizzying, and she felt for a moment that she would faint; she clutched her father’s arm and a small exhalation escaped her, sounding almost like a sob.
“Goddamn,” Red said, misinterpreting. He wrapped his arm around her, comforting her in a way Cass had not been comforted in a very, very long time—not since she was his little girl. “It’s my fault. I didn’t have a way to lock the doors to that place from the outside. The day you disappeared, I was only planning to be gone an hour—I just went looking for more food. Hell, we could have survived on kaysev, but I hate that shit. And I wanted to feed you better.”
The tears Cass had been holding back spilled over. How to tell him what she was feeling—that she’d given up on being cherished like that. No man—not even Smoke, who’d loved her well and attentively—had made her feel as safe as she remembered feeling in her father’s arms.
But she felt suddenly shy. This was all too new, and she had to absorb it, process it before she could trust the feeling to last. She brushed the tears from her face, counting on the darkness to hide the gesture. “Kaysev’s the best thing you can eat,” she said lightly. “It’s good for you.”
“I never was good at knowing what was good for me.”
“So…you fed me? How’d you do that, weren’t you worried about getting infected?”
“Well, you were in and out, kind of. I know you don’t remember it, but you’d kind of wake up now and then, look around a little, say nonsense things. It reminded me of this one time when you were little, and you got a really high fever. I sat with you while your mom was at work. You were just a little jabberer, saying all kinds of crazy things.”
“You sang to me,” Cass said, suddenly remembering.
“Yeah, I guess I probably did.”
She had a thought. “Did you sing to me this time? I mean, in the farmhouse?”
Red laughed. “Honey, when I figured out you were getting better, I sang all the damn day long.”
“How long did that take?”
“Just a few days. At first—don’t get mad, Cassie honey, but I had you tied up. I figured I had to, you know?”
“I don’t blame you. I…” Cass hesitated, and then decided to take a chance, share at least some of her fear with him. “There’ve been a lot of times I wondered, you know, what I did. When I was sick. When I was…one of them.”
Red cursed and grabbed her shoulders, turning Cass toward him, hard. “Cassie…you were never one of them. Never. You didn’t do anything wrong, sweetheart. Not one thing.”
All the fear that Cass had stored up threatened to tumble out. She struggled to get herself under control and nearly succeeded, and then a sob escaped her for real this time, and her father pulled her close and hugged her hard, and let her cry.
“It’s just that I, I saw what I did to myself, I mean, it had to be me, on my arms, even my knees, and I thought, if I could do that then was I out hunting? Did I attack people, did I hurt them? Oh God, I was so scared…”
“But, Cassie, nothing bad happened. After a fe
w days your fever broke and your eyes got normal again. I mean, the irises, anyway. They stayed bright, and that green, like they still are. So I wasn’t positive, at first, but man, I prayed like hell. Sometimes…aw, shit, I’ll go ahead and say it—sometimes maybe I thought I prayed you well. The deals I was putting out there, for God, if you only knew. I must have offered him my soul a dozen times over.” Red squeezed Cass even tighter, crushing her against him, but she didn’t care. “You let me feed you, almost like when you were a baby, and sometimes I’d catch you chewing on your arms, but you never came after me. Mostly you just slept a lot. Real restless, like you were having nightmares, so I sat in there with you.”
“And sang.”
“Yeah.”
“And when you ran out of food…”
“Yeah, so I left, and like I said I was going to come right back, but it took me a while to find a house that hadn’t been raided already, and when I finally got back…you were gone.”
“I don’t, I don’t remember it. The house, or leaving, or anything.”
“I went nuts. I looked for you for hours. I finally went up and down the road, used up the last of my gas, before I figured out you must have left the road, covered some serious ground.”
“I’m so sorry I put you through that…Dad.”
Red went still, hearing her say his name, and then he awkwardly patted her on the back. “It’s nothing, baby angel. Look at us, in this whole damn state of California we found each other again. If that ain’t the answer to my prayers, well, I don’t know what is.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Because I’m a damn coward, is why. I just kept biding my time, and biding my time. Zihna tried to get me to say something a dozen times, but I was so scared I’d run you off, that if you knew who I was you wouldn’t want anything to do with me. And then when you…aw, honey, I don’t know how to say it, but you’ve got your share of troubles, and I didn’t want to make them worse. I’ve tangled with the bottle myself.”
Cass felt her face go hot with mortification. It was on the tip of her tongue to deny it, to say it wasn’t a problem, that she’d quit. Well, she was one-day sober, anyway, and she’d been in that scary place twice before and managed to stay for a while. Maybe this time it would be a longer while. Maybe…no. She wouldn’t tempt the Fates by asking for forever, not yet.
“You won’t make it worse,” she said softly. “But you can help me make it better.”
Chapter 33
IT WAS ANOTHER thirty-four miles to the next big town, where there was a huge shopping mall that was rumored to be sheltering close to a hundred citizens.
At least, that was true a couple of months ago. Jay and Terrence and the other raiders hadn’t traveled this far since before the new year. They didn’t want to waste the gas, since everything raidable this far north was the domain of the mall shelter, by dint of the common law that had evolved as shelters consolidated. Bigger groups tended to be more successful, since they could post round-the-clock sentries and assign specialized tasks, and send only their strongest and fastest out to harvest and raid.
The last anyone knew, the mall shelter—nicknamed Macy’s, after its onetime anchor store—was holding its own. Dor himself had sent a guard there earlier in the fall, to spread the word about the Box and find out what the Macy’s people could tell him about the Rebuilders’ progress.
This was the only reason Cass could figure that the new leadership invited Dor to participate in the early-morning discussion. She wasn’t spying on them, exactly; they were sitting in a loose circle on the front driveway, using the abandoned furniture, and breakfast was being served under the house’s broad front porch. Rain threatened, the air heavy with stinging moisture, thick gray clouds low in the sky. Cass had taken Ruthie around the back for their turn at the “bathroom” and on the way back, she stopped to tie Ruthie’s shoe.
It was an old ruse. Cass didn’t care. The feeling she got from Mayhew—that he was hiding something, that he had an unspoken agenda—had only grown stronger. She’d slept well after her talk with her father the night before, but when she woke up the Easterners were conferring quietly inside the house. So this was their second meeting of the day, and Cass couldn’t help wondering if there were things that had been said earlier that were being left out now that Edenites were listening.
But no one else seemed to care.
Once they got moving, everyone stayed in more or less the same configurations as before, though Smoke joined those at the front, keeping up despite his limp. Cass walked with her father and Zihna, though the other moms had invited her to join them in the car. It seemed like their relationship was warming, and Suzanne thanked her for letting Twyla stay with Ruthie, alternating between walking and the trailer as they had the day before.
Throughout the morning, the group had a bit of a festival air. There was food for at least a week, including all the cans they’d been hoarding in the pantry, and they’d had a good breakfast. The rain held off, the clouds rolling and gusting. No one spoke of those who’d been lost, though the bitter count lay just below the surface of everyone’s minds. A week ago New Eden had been home to seventy citizens; after the battles on the water and on land, the people dragged away and shot and blown up in the community center, they were down to fifty-one, plus the four Easterners.
Cass was walking by herself along the abandoned two-lane highway, pushing Ruthie in the stroller, taking a break from the company of the others to think about her father. She had replayed the conversation from the night before a dozen times, and every time she felt the thrill of relief when she realized she’d never harmed anyone while she was feverish. Relief was not a big enough word to contain the feeling—it was joy mixed with disbelief, a sense of good fortune so unexpected that she was afraid it was illusory, that it could disappear the same way it came to her.
But it had come to her via her father. Her dad. Cass smiled, saying the word in her mind, a word she’d never expected to use again. She knew she needed to be cautious, to prepare herself for the inevitable disappointments that would surely follow. To remind herself that her father had hurt her grievously and that leopards don’t change their spots, to use an old saying of Mim’s; that the more she trusted him the more she risked.
But she was just so damn tired of protecting herself all the time. Didn’t she deserve—just a little, just for now—to see where this went? To maybe enjoy it a little?
A glimpse of orange caught her eye, off on the side of the road where the asphalt was broken and kaysev had taken root. There—growing practically sideways under the gray chunks and clods—was a California poppy. Its wiry stalk and fringy leaves strained to poke through to the air, and it held one tightly rolled bud and one fragile bloom, a tiny spot of brilliant tangerine that wavered and trembled in the breeze.
No one else seemed to take note. Cass pushed the stroller, fast, murmuring, “Oh, Ruthie, Babygirl, you’re not going to believe—do you remember—”
But Ruthie was dozing, lulled by the afternoon sun and the rhythm of the big rubber wheels on the pavement, and it was Cass alone who stroked the tender petals, caught a breath to see that there were others, small and stunted seedlings close to this first one. She thought about calling to someone— Zihna, Sammi, her dad—but they were hidden in the depths of the ragtag group making its slow and stolid way along the road, and her moment of ebullience would not withstand their indifference. Better this way, keeping the bloom to herself, remarking on the poppy’s return with the joy of one who’d loved them, Before.
The poppy was a challenge to cultivate. Seeds often failed, even under the best of conditions. Transplanted seedlings nearly always died. But wherever the native plant rooted on its own, it was tough and wily. It could grow in the smallest crack, the meanest soil; it was not daunted by weeds or sought by predators. Up close, it was indelicate, even coarsely figured, its leaves stubby and its stem workmanlike. But from a distance there was nothing like that glorious shot of pu
re color.
Cass smiled, wondering what it was about this particular spot, this homely stretch of road in the midst of dead fields, that inspired the poppy to grow here. It was not for her to know—but perhaps it was no mistake that she was the one who noticed it.
She didn’t pick the flower. Let it go to seed; let the seed scatter and find its way across the healing land. For now it would remain her secret.
By late afternoon, the rain began. People were tired from walking, tempers were thin and fears had resurfaced, and they spent a cold and uncomfortable night at a stable, sleeping on the malodorous straw in the stalls. The next day dawned clear and brilliant, water sparkling on the kaysev leaves, and spirits were restored. Near evening they disturbed a clump of Beaters sunbathing on the turf of a mini golf course in front of an RV campground. The things rushed out, hollering, but John and Glynnis, riding sentry with Nathan in the hybrid at the front of the crowd, picked them off easily.
The campground would have made decent shelter, with its large bathhouse, but everyone was too skittish from the Beaters—and who knew if there weren’t more Beaters that belonged to this particular nest—so they went a couple more miles and sheltered in a trucker rest stop.
Smoke continued to keep his distance. He was polite to Cass, solicitous of Ruthie, but he was dividing his energy between pushing his body to catch up from its forced inactivity, and conferring with the new council.
Each night he slept elsewhere, bunking down with those closest to the doors, the guards and the raiders.
“Zihna, is he crazy?” Cass asked, as they walked along in a steady drizzle on the fourth day. Everyone was miserable, their clothes soaked. People were beginning to sniffle and cough, and it seemed like a spring cold was starting to spread through the group. Sun-hi was riding with Jasmine, who had started her labor that morning. It looked like her baby was going to be born in a moving car.
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