Horizon (03)

by Sophie Littlefield

  Part of the problem was undoubtedly that Sammi was so skinny. She wasn’t the only one—they hadn’t had much besides kaysev since the food ran out. There wasn’t time to hunt, and though they raided every promising building they passed, nearly everything had already been ransacked by others.

  It was March now, almost a year into the Siege. A year of desperation, a year of people making do with whatever they could find. Lots of times they’d come to a house and there would be a pot in front of the door. That meant it had already been raided of all the food and medicine, anything worth taking, but that didn’t keep people from wishing, hoping, for a miracle.

  Sometimes when she and Kyra and Sage walked with the boys, they played a game to see who could imagine the best meal. The boys always won, probably because they declared themselves the winners. Colton always started out with his mom’s Caesar salad. No one ever gave him a hard time about his lack of originality, because his mom was one of the first to die; she was the manager of a high-end grocery store and was shot when she tried to stop looters from taking all the bottled water.

  Kalyan was the most creative. He described elaborate feasts featuring all his favorite take-out menus in the Oakland neighborhood where his parents once developed online content from home.

  Sammi would never admit to it but the meal she most longed for was the one her dad used to make her on her birthday—giant rib-eye steaks grilled black on the outside and practically raw in the middle, with an iceberg-lettuce salad with tomatoes and a few slices of red onion on the side. Her mother had declared it inedible back when they were still together, and Sammi had called it disgusting the last time he’d ever fixed it for her and only eaten the narrow band of meat that was cooked medium.

  But her dad used to wear an old red apron that Sammi gave him in first grade, her handprints in acrylic paint on the front. He paraded the plate of raw meat around the house acting like it was so heavy it hurt his arm. He’d bring a bone home from the butcher for Chester, too, saying that since he was a mutt and no one knew when his birthday was, he might as well share Sammi’s.

  Her dad had kind of sucked as a dad, spending way too much time at work and missing a lot of her soccer games and forgetting her friends’ names, but at least he’d cracked jokes and tried to spoil her on the weekends.

  Ever since the mall, he’d somehow gotten himself on the new council along with Nadir, the Easterner who Rachael and the de Ceccos didn’t trust because he was a Muslim, and Shannon and Harris and Smoke. At first Sammi worried her dad would be upset because of Smoke, who was almost back to normal now and so everyone figured he and Cass would just take up right where they left off. Only that hadn’t exactly happened. Cass spent most of her time with Ingrid, helping with the boys since Ingrid had to nurse Rosie, like, fifty times a day. But Sammi thought the real problem might be that Cass was avoiding both of them.

  And to be fair, there was a lot to keep the new council busy. They’d given everybody jobs, made up all these procedures for how to check and clear a shelter when they stopped, who would cook and clean and all of that. Smoke was kind of like how he used to be back when they lived in the school, he let other people make the big decisions, but now he would have his own opinion a lot of the time instead of insisting everyone keep talking until they came up with a decision together.

  They’d been off the main roads for a week now, the terrain getting more and more uneven. Nadir had explained about how Mayhew was planning to crash the shelter, and in a lot of ways it seemed like that was still the plan, but somehow it was okay now since they were just trying to survive.

  Sammi and her friends constantly discussed what would happen if the settlers weren’t happy to see them. What if they told them to turn around, find their own damn camp? Sammi couldn’t imagine that her dad and the rest of the new council would fight people over what was, to be fair, theirs.

  They’d probably have one of their stupid secret meetings where they went walking after dinner, talking it all through. Then they’d come back and tell everyone they would just have to keep going and make the best of it. They’d act like it was no big deal, at least to Sammi and her friends, because they still thought of them as immature, even though Kalyan was going to be eighteen in July and the rest of them were all over fifteen. If her dad could see what Colton had given her, well, then he might change his mind…but she still hadn’t figured out how to give it to her dad without getting Colton into trouble. The adults wouldn’t understand how none of it had been his idea, that he’d thought they were just messing around, that he’d never realized it would go so far.

  Nadir’s lists said that Salt Point would get below freezing at night through April. That was almost two more months like this. There was no way that they would be able to build adequate shelter for that, not right away, anyway. And if they went down to lower elevations, they would need Beater walls, just in case, and they were right back to the same problem.

  Sammi wondered if they should have just picked someplace on the way and made the best of it, like so many other people had done. Only…she’d seen what happened on the islands. At the mall. Before that, at the school and the library and almost every other place she could think of since the Siege. If the Easterners thought the only place to make a new life was up north, at least until someone figured out a way to get rid of the Beaters once and for all, then Sammi had to admit they were probably right.

  They crested a ridge and there, on the other side, was a scattering of farms with a few buildings at the center making a tiny town. And in the center of that was a sweet little white church with a spire on top, looking like a postcard against the blue blue sky.

  “It’s so pretty,” Sammi couldn’t resist saying.

  “You think? I’ve been in a hundred of those,” Sage said sourly. “That’s a Methodist church, bet you anything. They go in for the wooden pews. No cushions.”

  “Huh,” Sammi said, as they trudged on.

  Sleeping in a wooden pew didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world. Nadir might say one of his pretty Muslim prayers—that would be kind of nice.

  She knew it was all the same God, just different ways of talking to Him. But in a way, it would be better if there was a whole team of gods they could pray to. Sammi had a feeling they were going to need all the help they could get.

  Chapter 43

  IN THE VESTIBULE of the old church Cass found a bride’s dressing room. It looked like it had once had some other function; perhaps it was a supply closet before a steady stream of city brides discovered this perfect little setting that practically guaranteed enviable photos, with the drifts of wildflowers and the mountain backdrop. All those brides…they’d adjusted their veils in the mirror, checked their makeup, quelled their nerves and stepped out with breathless anticipation in their satin high heels and French manicures and updos constructed with a hundred tiny hairpins. All of this to launch marriages that, more often than not, would end in tears and bitterness and regrets.

  Nevertheless, here she was, alone in the twilight of an early March day in the year 2022, wiping a year’s worth of dust from the mirror, regarding her reflection and thinking about love. When Ruthie was born, Cass had sworn off all love but that which she had for her daughter. Back then it had seemed that her damaged heart would have to struggle the rest of her life to be worthy of her daughter, that it would have to work overtime learning the lessons of devotion and faith and support. But all of that had come instantly, hard, crushingly, the moment she held Ruthie in her arms.

  Then there had been Smoke. They’d come together in the threat of the unknown, first loved each other while on the run and then—when she’d rescued Ruthie and they were safe at last—clung to each other and built something real from the tender shoots. They’d had three months together in the closest thing to bliss that Cass had ever known. She’d been shocked to discover that she had learned to trust him; at the end of each day he came back to her and that was a sweet miracle, that alone was enough.


  But then he’d left her. It had to be: he could never have been at peace knowing he hadn’t tried, that he hadn’t avenged the loss of those he cherished. Smoke could not have continued to love her if he hadn’t made the quest. And now, finally, after this journey, Cass accepted it. She’d forgiven him for leaving, he’d forgiven her for Dor, and she trusted that he was ready to love her again.

  Why, then, was she hesitating?

  Cass leaned closer to the mirror, dust motes swirling prettily in the last beams of fading light, and looked at herself critically. She was different—different than she was a year ago, different than she’d been after the attack, even different from the start of this journey. There were the obvious things: they were all thinner, their bodies pushed to the limit each day, with little to eat other than kaysev. But the changes that eluded her, things she noted as one sees shadows from the corner of one’s eye, were as compelling as they were subtle.

  Her eyes were still the startling clear green of those few who survived the fever, her pigment altered forever. But there were depths to them, a weariness accumulated from all the stories of hurt and loss that she’d not only witnessed but lived through. Phillip, Jasmine, Terrence…all the lives she’d moved through had changed her, both hollowed and intensified her.

  Her hair was startling, too. It had grown long and thick and fine, silvery-white strands supplanting her old honey blond. At times she thought it looked like a botched dye job, but in this mirror it looked startling and lovely, like an ice queen from a book of European fairy tales, flowing around her shoulders and tumbling over her forehead no matter how many times she pushed it back.

  But even these were not what she was looking for. Cass was convinced there were answers to be found in the set of her lips, the cant of her cheekbones, the fine lines that had appeared on her brow. Somewhere inside her was the knowledge of whether she could truly ever be with a man, and if so, who she was meant to be with, and it was hard to resist the notion that if she just looked long and hard enough, she might find it here, in the glass.

  But the harder she looked, the more it eluded her.

  There was a soft knock at the door, and it creaked open.

  Smoke.

  “Okay if I come in?” he asked. “I’ve got room service.”

  “Oh, are they serving dinner?”

  “Yeah, if you can call it that. Kaysev again. But I have something special…” He rattled something in his pocket, and took out a small can of smoked almonds. “Not even opened.”

  “Oh wow, where on earth—”

  “Nadir gave it to me. He’d been saving a few things for tonight. He and Dor and Bart are drinking twelve-year-old scotch right now, if I’m not mistaken. I asked him if it was okay if I took mine to go.”

  “Oh.” Cass’s mouth watered at the thought of real food, but she hesitated. “I guess someone probably told you by now. That I was drinking again.”

  “And that you stopped.”

  “It’s been hard.” That was an understatement; a dozen times each day she yearned for the sharp taste of the first swallow, the oblivion that followed.

  “Which is why I’m here and the bottle’s not.”

  Cass smiled. “Thank you,” she said softly.

  Smoke sat down on the upholstered bench, and Cass sat next to him. He popped open the can, but for a moment neither of them moved to eat.

  “It’s not going to work out between us, is it?” Smoke finally said quietly.

  Tears sprang instantly to Cass’s eyes. “Oh, Smoke…”

  He closed his hand over hers and squeezed gently. “There’s something I need to tell you. Something I did, Before.”

  Cass blinked and looked at him carefully. His face was lined and scarred, and the past months had left a permanent wistfulness that lifted when he smiled, but always settled back into place afterward.

  As long as Cass had known him, he had been a man of secrets. He’d told her only that he’d done something that he could never make right, but it was clear that guilt and self-recrimination were never far from his mind. She often found him staring into space, or soaked with sweat from a workout that was never hard enough to drive the memories away. She’d asked him to tell her what was wrong a hundred times, a thousand, but he’d always brushed off the question, saying it was nothing, or not saying anything at all.

  And only now, when she’d finally let go of her need to know, was he ready to tell her.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said softly.

  “I’m not telling you for your sake. I’m— I need to. For me.”

  Cass swallowed. Now that they were on the brink of it, she wasn’t sure she was ready to know. But she owed him this, the freedom he might earn from the telling. It was one gift she could still give him. “All right.”

  “I told you what I did Before, right?”

  “You were a corporate coach.” The phrase he’d used, on the day they met, as they walked through the streets of Silva, was “career consultant of last resort.”

  “Yeah. And I was damn good. You want to know my specialty? Weak guys. Guys who lacked resolve. Guys who were…” Smoke’s expression was pained as he made air quotes around his words: “‘Weak on follow-through.’ ‘Soft leadership.’ ‘Unable to build consensus.’ But those are all just euphemisms, Cass—you want to know what for?”

  His self-contempt was as clear as if it was painted on him.

  “No balls. Those are all MBA-bullshit ways of saying a guy’s got no stones. And when that happened, they’d bring in the fix-it guy. Me. I charged heaven and earth for my services, but I gave a guarantee—you give me your hopeless case, I give you back a man who can whip it out when he needs to. Six hundred twenty-five bucks an hour, that was my top rate, and there were half a dozen clients in San Francisco who couldn’t get enough of me. Hell, I had a waiting list—seemed like there was no shortage of guys who tended to freeze in the clutch or hide behind the other guys’ skirts.

  “What I’d do, I’d get a guy on his own turf. His office, sometimes his house. His club, for the ones who’d made it a little ways up the corporate ladder. See, Cass, they weren’t stupid. They were never stupid. They knew I was there because they were failing, and they wanted to impress me. It was fear, that was what drove most of them, fear that they didn’t measure up, as if my opinion of them mattered at all. But a lot of these guys, their daddies told ’em they weren’t worth shit and they got into the office and all of a sudden the guy in charge can seem damn intimidating. Bring in Ed Schaffer, the guy who listens, and they’d tell me their golf handicap, the women they’d bedded, hell, the car they drove. Take me out and buy me drinks even though their companies were paying me a goddamn fortune. I ate a hell of a lot of rare filet and drank my share of single malt in those days.”

  Smoke laughed, a hollow sound that chilled Cass to the core. “I’d listen and drink their booze, and all the time I’m reading them, figuring out where their fear came from. Once I knew that, I had all I needed. I broke them down and built them back up, tore down the fear, taught them to go in for the kill, to man up on the job. ‘There’s a leader inside us all’—that’s what I had printed up on my business cards, Cass, but you know what it really should have said was ‘There’s a scared-shitless fuck inside us all’ and all you get for your six-fifty an hour is learning how to turn that guy into the bully. Go from the stepped-on to the guy who kicks sand into everyone else’s face.

  “And the amazing thing was that no one ever figured it out. They loved me. ‘Ed, you’ve changed my life.’ ‘Ed, I feel like I can do anything now.’ I just smiled and bought them a final round and cashed my checks and never told them what they were really feeling was power. I didn’t teach anyone to lead, Cass, I taught ’em to take. To look at the world as their candy store and start turning over the shelves. Hell, I got Christmas cards from guys saying they’d dumped their mousy little girlfriends and finally told their families to fuck off and wasn’t it great, and deep down I knew what I was doing w
as not something I could be proud of—but I didn’t care. Because I think my biggest client was me. I was never a hopeless case, I wasn’t the class loser or the guy who couldn’t get a date or the one who got stuck in an entry-level job. I was just…unexceptional. But when I hung out my coach sign, it was like telling the world I knew things they didn’t. I liked the mystique. Hell, I used the mystique.”

  Cass remembered how Smoke had described his old life: the sports cars, the mountain getaways, the skiing and boating and women. It was hard to imagine the man she knew—so carefully unassuming, so determined to maintain his low profile—in the picture he was painting. But she let him talk.

  Chapter 44

  “SO AROUND THE holidays a couple years back, I get this call from Travis Air Force Base. You might remember, I told you I used to work in that area, in Fairfield, and drink with some of the guys from the base after work. That wasn’t exactly true. They hired me, on a consulting basis, to come in and work with one of their guys who was losing his shit. Big project, top secret, very hush, I had to sign all these papers and I wasn’t allowed to talk about the project

  itself when I met with him, only about his job in general terms. The brass was in a tough situation because their leadership on the base had been stretched thin—I mean, it’s not hard to figure out why, now.”

  In the summer of that year, bioterrorists attacked livestock in the U.S. and Asia; by fall there were reports of dead livestock on every continent. Overseas travel was halted and remote nations began to go dark, and skirmishes escalated and nuclear tensions were on the rise. Banks began to fail and currency was devalued worldwide.

  “My guy Charlie—Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Benson, right out of central casting, looked like he’d been painted in his uniform by Norman Rockwell—he had somehow risen to be the number-two guy on the base. Only, the top guy, he got called to Wright-Patterson after the Christmas strike. Charlie was losing his shit because he had personnel problems, discipline problems, protesters every day right outside the gates. They send me in and for a while things are going okay. At first he’s just repeating everything I tell him to say. We take a tough stance, zero tolerance, a civilian guy misses a shift because his wife’s injured in a protest at a bank, we can him. We go out into the protesters one day with tear gas—next day it’s rubber bullets. The shit was hard-core, Cass, and it didn’t even matter because the media had bigger stories than a few tree huggers getting their feelings hurt.