Horizon (03)

by Sophie Littlefield

  Zihna narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. She was taking her turn, at her insistence, pulling the trailer. Ruthie and Twyla were playing with a bowl full of pebbles that they had collected from a landscaping bed at the rest stop, protected from the rain by a pop-up play tent that Ingrid had brought, chattering and laughing.

  “I don’t think he’s crazy,” she said. “I think he hasn’t been entirely truthful.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know I’m not a doctor, but these last few weeks I couldn’t figure out why he was gaining his strength back so quickly, and now it makes sense, he was awake. He was pretending during the day. It makes me want to kick myself, ’course, since I could have saved him a lot of trouble by just talking to him. And you know I’ve talked to plenty of patients that didn’t talk back. Only with Smoke, it had been so long, and it was like…well, nobody was coming around to see him anymore.”

  “I know. It’s my fault.”

  “It’s no one’s fault. I’m just saying he started to seem like, I don’t know. We were always so busy, and we had Omar’s burns, Crystal with the staph infection, Charles…we all just started treating him like an object. A…houseplant. And the whole time he was, you know, coming back to life. Well, look at the man, I’ve never seen that kind of determination.”

  Smoke walked a dozen yards ahead. He’d set his cane aside today; it was resting on the trailer, a long tree branch trimmed and sanded for him by Steve the first day of the journey.

  “That’s Smoke—determined,” Cass said softly. She could give a thousand examples of her own: how he’d scavenged lumber in the Box until he could build her a bed frame, how he’d stayed up with Ruthie two nights straight when she had strep throat, how he’d killed a man who’d just saved his life but been bitten in a Beater attack.

  How he’d gone hunting the Rebuilders, alone, outnumbered, outmatched, hungry for justice and willing to sacrifice everything he cared about to get it.

  “How quickly do you think he could get back—I mean, I know he’ll never be exactly like he was before, but, you know, back to himself?”

  “Hard to say. When he really was unconscious, his body was focused entirely on mending. First order of business was to fight off the infection he had when he got here. Rebreaking his arm set him back, but Sun-hi was right, it was the right thing to do. The limp, he’s gonna have that for a while. Maybe forever. Everything else—well, he’s doing exactly what we’d tell him to do. Work on those muscles, rebuild. Kaysev’s probably perfect fuel for him. He’s doing everything right, darlin’.”

  “He just seems so…spent, at the end of the day.”

  “Well, you would be too, with a regimen like that. Bet every muscle in his body is screaming.” She smiled slyly. “Or are you really asking me something else? Like…how soon he can expect to be sexually active?”

  “Zihna!” Cass reddened. In fact, that hadn’t been what she was asking—and then she wondered why not, why she hadn’t been stirred by him the way she used to be, in the Box.

  “Because let me tell you I’ve seen every inch of that man, and I didn’t see any evidence of injuries that would prevent a full recovery. Heck, probably be good for him.”

  “Stop it, I didn’t—”

  “Oh, come on, it’s just us. And it’s perfectly natural. Where do you think me and your dad get our robust good health?”

  “Oh, Zihna, you do not need to be telling me that. I’m barely used to the idea that he’s my dad—I don’t think I want to know anything about his…about his…eww.”

  Zihna turned serious. “Honey, I know what you’re saying, it’s different when someone’s your parent. But you might want to keep that in mind when you’re dealing with Sammi.”

  “Sammi—what does she—”

  “Just, your relationship with her is important—she needs other adult women in her life, not just me. And the quality of that relationship is going to be dependent on how you and her dad are getting along. Or, to be more specific, the state of things between you two…romantically.”

  “Zihna…” Cass said softly. “Do you, um, I would hate it if you thought, I mean, things have been so weird with everything and I’ve done things I shouldn’t, I know—”

  “I don’t think badly of you,” Zihna said cheerfully, squeezing Cass’s hand. “If that’s one of your worries. You make your own choices and as your friend my only hope is that you learn from the wrong ones and enjoy the right ones. And while we’re talking like this, I am very glad you’re going to quit drinking. I hope you don’t mind that your dad and I talked about it.”

  Cass blanched, and for a moment she did mind, she minded a lot. And then the anger subsided and Cass saw it for what it was—the desperation of the addiction trying to maintain its hold on her.

  She’d been here before. And she knew what she had to do. Fake it till you make it. That was the program’s answer, and—annoyingly, frustratingly—it worked. So she would pretend she didn’t mind, and pretend some more, until one day it was a little bit true, and the next day it was a little more true.

  “I’m glad you and he talk,” she said as evenly as she could.

  “I wouldn’t be here without him. I would have given up.”

  They walked in companionable silence for a while.

  “Where did he get the name Red?” Cass asked. She could see him up ahead walking with Earl and Old Mike, talking. She recognized his gestures, now that she knew it was him; perhaps she’d noticed them all along, somewhere deep down. There it was—the way he rubbed the back of his neck when he was considering something, the way he stabbed the air with a finger when he was making a point.

  “I was the one who gave him that name,” Zihna said. “Actually, we named each other. Once we decided to make a go of it, and we were on the road, on the way to New Eden though we didn’t know it at the time, we had plenty of time to talk. And it turns out neither one of us much liked the names we’d been saddled with.”

  “What was yours?”

  Zihna grimaced. “Mary Chastity.”

  “Oh, no.” Cass laughed and then Zihna was laughing too.

  “Your dad said that didn’t fit me at all. And then he told me that Zihna means ‘spinning’ in Hopi. And, well, I thought it was pretty.”

  “And what about Dad? Was he still going by Silver Dollar?”

  “Yeah, he was. Showed me this old band flyer he used to carry around—‘Hammerdown, featuring Silver Dollar Haverford.’”

  “You know…I took his name when I turned eighteen. Cass Dollar, it’s legal and everything. Mostly I think I just did it to piss off my mom.”

  “Well, how about that.” Zihna grinned. “Save that up, maybe tell your dad the story one day when he needs a lift. I think he’d get a kick out of it.”

  “So…how did you come up with Red?”

  “Well, I asked him if I should just call him Tom, but your dad said it brought back memories he’d rather forget, that he wasn’t proud of being that man and he’d just as soon start over with something brand-new. And I said, anything I want? and he said, yes, anything, and I was going to tease him and maybe call him Skeeter or something but he was so…serious.”

  Her voice went soft and dreamy and Cass felt like she was intruding on a private moment.

  “Your dad can be a very serious man, for someone who makes me laugh every damn day,” Zihna said, smiling, but Cass didn’t miss the way she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Anyway, when I was a little girl, my grandfather used to listen to this old comedian named Red Skelton. We kids thought that was such a funny name. It made me think of a red skeleton, you know, the bones…anyway, your dad has this amazing thick hair for a guy his age, and when the sun hits it just right, I swear there’s these glints of red.”

  Cass laughed. “I think you’re just a little dazzled. He’s pretty much gray all over.”

  But secretly she was having a hard time keeping her emotions reined in. It shouldn’t matter to her, what her father d
id, who he was, after all this time.

  But then again, why not let it matter?

  “But that’s just it. Everyone has their own reality, right? I mean, we see the same things, but the thoughts in our head and the experiences we’ve had, all of that changes things, so the pictures we carry around with us are all different. Like, look up there…lot of folks would say that’s a ruin, a junk heap.”

  Cass had been walking and thinking, not focusing on the horizon, but up ahead the torn flags and hulking wings of the mall stood out against the steely, damp clouds.

  “But for a lot of folks, that’s home now. I imagine it’s got a certain kind of beauty when you think about how it couldn’t be much more secure, how it’s probably got a pretty good stockpile of necessaries, plenty of room to spread out.”

  Cass tried to see what Zihna saw, but instead she got a deep foreboding, a tightening in her gut that could not be entirely explained by the bad architecture and gloomy weather.

  “We shouldn’t go to the mall,” she breathed.

  “What’s that, honey?”

  “I have a bad feeling about the mall.”

  “Well, let’s just send these East Coast yokels in, then.” Zihna laughed. “I don’t much care for them, they’re kind of uppity.”

  Cass forced herself to brush the feeling off. It was true that they all needed a rest and a chance to dry out, as well as to restock their supplies, if possible. There was the unspoken but very real hope there might be room for at least some of them to live in the mall too, at least for a while. But the idea of all that concrete, so few windows… She wished she’d appreciated the freedom of the island more, the ability to step outside her home without worrying about Beaters, to walk in her garden without looking over her shoulder every second.

  So many days and nights on the island, she worked so hard to forget that she failed to take notice of the good things—the beauty of the moon reflected in the river, the wind riffling the reeds that grew along the bank, the laughter of the children playing in the yard. The only time she let go of the tension lodged inside her was when she was with Dor. It was no wonder they came together with a passion that was almost violent: they both had so much loss to obliterate. And that’s what it had been, wasn’t it—tearing holes in their dreary and painful reality and letting in sensation, longing, even joy, if only until the tears skimmed over and their lives were shut tight again.

  And now even that was lost to her. But she shouldn’t need him anymore—Cass berated herself; she had Smoke now, her heart, her love. Dor was in the past, just a phase she’d gone through, a crutch she’d relied on. As soon as Smoke was well, as soon as they were settled, it would be as before, the two of them together, being everything to each other.

  Only…Smoke had been spending all his time with the new council. Reunited only days, he was already strategizing and planning, eager—maybe too eager—to work with the Easterners. It wasn’t glory he was after, Cass was sure of that. But something else…something familiar, something she had thought, had hoped, he had left behind on the battleground where he killed the Rebuilders.

  He was still avenging. Even after the Rebuilders were no longer a threat, he was seeking…something. Maybe not vengeance, exactly, but atonement.

  And still she didn’t know what he was atoning for. The thing that had always been between them was still there. He cherished his self-punishment more than anything else in the world, and nothing could banish it, nothing could ever be enough. He’d almost given his life as trade, but even that was not enough—as his strength came back he was already seeking ways to matter, ways to give, give of himself. And there would never be enough left over for her.

  Knowing that had chilled Cass’s feelings. No longer did her heart race at the sight of him. No longer did the brush of his hand against hers excite her. He kept his distance and she, if she was truly honest with herself, kept hers.

  Maybe the mall would be a fresh start. Maybe she needed time to be alone, without any man at all. She had a lot more in her life than she had a few weeks ago. There was Red, for starters, a father she’d given up for dead, for lost. There were the moms, the fragile peace between them. There was Zihna and Sammi and the other kids. And always, always, there was Ruthie.

  It would be work, all the complicated messy relationships she’d damaged and scorned, learning to trust and to earn trust, to take risks and take deep breaths, try again and again, until she got it right. But God willing there would be time for that too.

  “You’re right,” she said to Zihna, as cheerfully as she could. Fake it till you make it. “It’s going to be fine.”

  Chapter 34

  SOMEONE HAD BEEN working on the mall parking lot. The cars had been dragged away from the innermost spaces around the central entrance, and an area had been walled off with chain-link that looked like it had been scavenged piecemeal and then welded together. Inside the fencing were mismatched outdoor chairs and tables that looked like they had been taken from several different restaurants. A fire pit in the center made from stacked brick pavers was blackened and piled deep with ash.

  They left the vehicles and horses at the far edge of the parking lot. There had been an undercurrent of excitement buzzing through the crowd all morning, a yearning to be indoors again, to see other citizens, but the council insisted on a break before they went inside, a chance to eat something and drink water. No one argued. Experience had taught them to take dehydration and hunger seriously enough that they broke their progress for a meal of kaysev, chewing methodically and with little satisfaction. The mothers coaxed the little ones to eat.Colton and Kalyan practiced tossing hard little dried kaysev chips into the air and catching them in their mouths, people good-naturedly cheering them when they managed a direct hit.

  Still, the excitement and anticipation were palpable. When the meal was finished, the group hurriedly assembled and made its way through the parking lot, threading through the maze of cars. A few were parked neatly, as though their owners had come for a final trip to buy a sweater or a tube of lipstick, but many more were abandoned haphazardly, crashed into others or blocking lanes.

  Nobody looked inside the cars. The smells had abated, but you never got used to seeing the decomposed corpses, the hair that was still styled the way it was on the morning they died, the leer of exposed jaws and teeth always making cadavers look cheerful and jaunty, in stark contrast to the horror of the eyes, which were often eaten away by parasites or dried to thin, flaking tissue.

  But there were always remains outside of cars in places like this, people who waited until hunger or thirst drove them out of their cars, who made it a few yards or even a few hundred yards until they were set upon and devoured. These bodies—little more than skeletons, their clothing ripped from them and abandoned nearby—were the worst, and Cass and the other mothers held their children close and shielded their eyes from the sight of them.

  Dor had somehow managed to get Sammi talking to him in the past couple of days, and though she didn’t look happy about it, she and the other kids stayed close to him. The girls who’d escaped the Rebuilders had remained silently loyal to him after they reached New Eden—Cass wouldn’t be surprised if Dor planned to protect them all. Other little cliques—Valerie and her friends, Luddy and his, Corryn and Rachael and the other kitchen staff—merged into one tight group as they neared the doors.

  A hand on her shoulder, and there was Smoke, his cautious smile. “I’d like you to remain near me.”

  Before she could respond, Mayhew leaped nimbly to the hood of a blue sedan at the edge of the cleared area. The rain had abated and weak sunlight forced its way through the clouds, and Cass had to squint to look at him.

  “Everybody.” His voice carried easily through the stillness of the parking lot, rebounding faintly, a trick of echoes. “Davis and Nadir went ahead to check things out. They found a couple of old kills around the corner, so we need to be careful. I think we’re better off all sticking together and going in. Once we get t
he lay of the place we can send some folks back out to deal with the cars and the horses.”

  All of this was already in place, of course, so he wasn’t so much asking permission as building consensus. Not so different, it occurred to Cass, from the way New Eden had been run. And Mayhew was good at it, too, playing on people’s fears; at the mention of the Beater kills the crowd seemed to press in on itself.

  “Did they see the Beaters?” a woman called…maybe Cindy, Cass thought. “The ones who did it? Or the nest—did they see the nest?”

  “I think they may be using a mechanicals shed for a nest,” Mayhew answered easily, keeping his voice in a reassuring, even timbre. “Makes sense they’re around, trying to get into the mall, since there’s folks sheltering there.”

  “Did you talk to anyone inside?” Dor, stepping out from the crowd.

  “Not exactly. We got a visual. There’s a, what do you want to call it, like a sunken lobby in the middle, bunch of coffee shops and restaurants, seating. There were about eight or ten people there, but Davis couldn’t get their attention from up here through the windows. That’s good glass, by the way. Solid as all heck, just needs some Windex.” He smiled at this joke, a gesture reminiscent of television.

  “So maybe we should send in one or two people first,” Dor said, ignoring the few titters Mayhew’s joke earned, his tone making it clear he thought Mayhew was an idiot. “Before we risk our entire population. What do you think?”

  Mayhew stared at Dor without blinking, and the people in the crowd looked back and forth from one to the other. Cass knew the popular opinion had swayed to Mayhew, but there was enough uncertainty that she knew the outcome hung in the balance between them.

  “The way to risk lives is to keep standing out here, where there’s a known Beater threat,” he said impatiently. “Davis saw citizens, they were sitting together talking, eating, whatever. Just like you guys were doing a few days ago, just like I was, with my own loved ones, a few weeks back. Look, at least two of you have been here recently and confirmed that it’s a friendly group—”