By contrast, the men racing toward them looked as though they had been training for survival, as though they were handpicked to kill: deadly, fit, lean and determined. Their shouts carried across the expanse of bridge, guttural cries, terrifyingly close.
Dor was unshouldering his backpack. He lowered it gently to the ground, then knelt and started unzipping it. “Smoke. Cass. Nadir. Take everyone with you—now. Go.”
“What are you going to do?”
He pulled out the brick of plastic explosive and set it on the ground with great care. He looked up at Cass and for a second he went still, his eyes wide with emotion.
Then he looked away. “Go, damn it, Cass, get the fuck out of here.”
“You heard him,” Smoke said. “It’s the only way, Cass. Go.”
Nadir was already gone, shouting ahead to the others, who were running as fast as they could, some of them already off the bridge, scrambling up onto the grassy bank of the point. He ran behind them, shouting encouragement, urging them to go faster. More bullets flew around them, and ahead, a bright bloom of red appeared on a woman’s back and she went stiff, falling slowly to the ground on her face. The terrified screaming crescendoed.
“Come on,” Smoke yelled. It was only the three of them on the bridge now, Dor working frantically at the mass of wires and the pale doughy bricks. Cass looked beyond him, searched out Red and Zihna, Ruthie in her father’s arms. There were the kids, Sammi and the rest of them, and the young mothers.
The seeds of a new community.
“No,” she said, the decision made before she even considered the alternative. She would not leave him. She would not leave Dor. “You go. Go on ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Go, Cass, I don’t need you,” Dor muttered, but the wires slipped from his fingers and he cursed. Frantically he picked them up again, pressing the ends between his finger and thumb.
“Cass—” Smoke’s voice broke. “Goddamn it. I’ll stay here with him. We’ve got it taken care of. Please, for the love of God, just get the hell off this bridge.”
The men’s eyes met and Cass knew they had come to an unspoken agreement, that they were both willing to sacrifice themselves for her, for the others, for the future.
“Leads came out of the igniter,” Dor said tightly, and Smoke nodded and took hold of the loose piece. Dor twisted something and pulled, the two of them anticipating each other’s moves. “Hold that—here. Steady…”
“No!” she shouted, because without them…without Dor…there was no future for her. “No, look, I can—”
More shots, and Cass looked up to see that the men were terrifyingly close, close enough to make out the red logos on their jackets, the muzzles of their guns. She dropped to the concrete, saw that the wires were back in place, but the minute Smoke took his hand away they slipped out again. Someone had to hold them in place.
Smoke made a sound next to her, a soft exhalation, and when she looked into his face it had gone completely pale. “Cass,” he whispered. “Please.”
Something warm dripped onto her hand, and she looked down and saw the blood, an enormous round splotch on the back of her hand, slowly dripping down through her fingers. No. She looked back up at his face and saw how his eyelids fluttered, how his mouth was twisted in pain.
Smoke, whose face she’d first seen on the broken pavement of a school parking lot in Silva. She’d been broken, stinking, terrified, a thing of need, driven only to find her daughter. But Smoke had loved her. He had helped her save Ruthie, but he had also loved her back to life, his great gift to her, and if in the end it had not been enough, it was not his fault, he had given her more than he gave anyone in this world, more than he could ever give himself, and she would never forget.
Tears filled her eyes even as Dor cursed and wrapped the wires tightly around Smoke’s fingers and then gently pushed the ends back into place. He knew. He knew. “Hang on, buddy,” he said softly, and Smoke nodded, and then his eyes closed and Cass knew he was beyond speech, but still his grip held. He held on.
“Oh God, oh no,” Cass sobbed, and she kissed his face, his eyelids, his lips, and then Dor pushed her and she got to her feet, already running, her legs moving like they’d never moved before, Dor right behind her, pushing her still, his hand at her back, making her faster, getting her there, saving her, and all the while she whispered Smoke’s name and remembered that she had loved him once and would always love him for what he’d given her, for the gift of loving her first.
Cass’s muscles burned and her lungs screamed and then it came, then it came—
The explosion was all sound and blast and then a great shuddering quake below her feet, heat at her back and grit pounded against her neck, her wrists, her face. But the end of the bridge was still too far away. They were not going to make it, Cass saw the truth reflected in the horrified faces of the people waiting, she heard the ripping steel and crumpling asphalt behind her, the screams of their pursuers, the blast of debris hurled against the rock walls of the canyon.
And then the ground shifted beneath her as the bridge split and canted toward earth. The sound was deafening, the sound of hell itself, the air swallowed by the echoing blast, and she fell, her knees cracking against the concrete.
So it was here she would die, broken on the rocks next to the bodies of her enemies, only the very last of the many deadly threats since the Siege, but at least it would be instant and she would be washed clean in the freezing water of the river before her body was deposited, lifeless and pale, on a gravel spit far downstream. It would be consumed by animals, picked to the bones, dried to nothing while far above, the new community took hold, Ruthie and Dor and Sammi and her father and all the others she’d known, the imperfect people she’d loved, sometimes badly but always with all of her heart.
And then she felt herself being dragged again, her arm nearly pulled from its socket. Dor bellowed her name and she scrabbled on the crumbling asphalt as a huge chunk of the bridge split off a few yards away from her and fell toward the water.
She slipped back a foot, another, and then miraculously her boots found purchase and she propelled herself forward, holding tightly to the hands reaching for her, climbing with bloodied fingers up the sloping, tearing edifice. Above them, the bridge’s concrete footings began to separate from the earth into which they’d been poured, like tree roots after a storm, tearing off chunks of dirt and saplings with them.
She realized Dor was trying to help her, even though he was about to lose his own grip, somehow he’d managed to climb ahead and had one arm wrapped around an exposed root, his feet kicking against the gaping earth, and still he was reaching for her. Above him people screamed and reached for him, but he did not take his eyes off her. She slid another few inches, nails scraping and breaking on the crumbling surface, before she found her footing again and pushed herself upward toward the rough poured concrete. It provided a handhold but too late, too late, as the footings separated from the earth and seemed to hang in the air for a moment before the entire bridge half slammed down into the gorge.
Cass screamed and flailed wildly, her hand brushing the feathery leaves of a wild honeysuckle vine. She seized it and held on with all her strength, getting her other hand around the branch as the bridge fell away beneath her feet and she was suspended in the air.
She looked down, and knew it was a mistake when she saw the bridge span split into pieces on the rocks, the water frothing and geysering around the detritus. She thought a body bobbed on the surface of the water for a second before disappearing beneath. Smoke—oh God, Smoke was down there Smoke was dead he had died saving them. Her hands slipped on the vine and she realized the shrill screaming was coming from her. Desperately she tried to pull herself up, her arms quivering with the effort, but the vine tore away from the earth, flinging clots of dirt into her face.
A thin network of roots was all that held, the woody vine beginning to splinter at the base. And then strong hands closed over hers and she let herse
lf be lifted, dragged across the muddy outcropping to safety. She lay facedown, heaving for air, exhausted and aching, using the last of her strength to lift her chin and search for Dor and there he was, on his knees in the dirt, he’d made it, they’d lifted him to safety too, and she was weak with gratitude as he crawled to her and took her in his arms and she lay there, cradled in his safety while he kissed her hair and whispered her name.
When she got her breath she twisted to look behind her where the bridge used to be. The earth was torn and jagged on either side of the gorge. Down below, the rushing water had swept most of the bridge away, a few broken edges jutting from the surface where pieces lodged among the rocks. There was no sign of the attackers’ bodies. The river had swallowed them whole, and at its leisure would spit them out again, indifferent as the rest of the earth to human struggles, to right and wrong, intent only on coming back to life itself.
Chapter 48
IT WAS NEARLY nightfall in the camp. They’d put out the smoldering fires around the settlement and built a new one in the center, feeding it with the lumber from a ruined structure that Nadir identified as the ornamental gate with the symbol of the new community designed by the people of his old town, a clover with four leaves to represent the four settlements.
The attackers had actually left most of the place intact, burning largely superficial structures. Or maybe they had intended to pile the bodies on a pyre to burn, and run out of time. For now, the Edenites carried the bodies outside the edge of the settlement to a grassy clearing. Tomorrow, they would dig graves.
Smoke would have no grave, but Cass did not need one to visit. For her, the river itself would be his memorial. She would visit it in every season, she would look down at the rushing waters, crusted with ice in winter, running with fish in summer, and she would remember and honor him.
One building in the clearing was nearly complete, a long wide dormitory with windows set high in the walls and a roof framed out and nearly finished. The first-wave settlers had outfitted the building with bedding and a few personal items: photos tacked to walls, rolled-up socks and clothing stacked on the floor. They gathered these and stored them at one end, before getting the children settled for the night. Pink insulation lined the walls and roof of the structure; already, the heat of their bodies was warming the interior.
Everyone was silent. The latest losses had stunned them, the terrible memories of the attackers falling into the gorge, the bodies of the four who’d been shot while trying to cross. The daunting tasks that lay ahead of them. All of this was too much to bear at the end of this long and cursed day. Tomorrow they would take up the yoke of their futures yet again, but for now they were spent, and before long everyone went to bed.
Cass waited until Dor’s breathing became deep and even beside her, and then she got up as carefully as she could. Her body ached from her scrapes and bruises, and she limped painfully out into the night.
The moon lit her path back to the gorge, glinting off bits of mica in the earth, souvenirs from a volcanic eruption aeons ago. She shivered in the cold, but she would not be out here long.
At the edge she looked out over the river and the land beyond, the sloping trail that led back down to the camp and finally the road back to civilization. Here on this side, they were safe—for a night, a month, a season—no one could say. The future was unknowable, but she knew some other things.
She knew the sound of her daughter’s voice.
The touch of a strong man.
The friendship of people who were no longer strangers.
The love of her father.
She did not yet know the limits of her strength, but she was ready to be tested, and tested again. She would be tempted and discouraged and broken, but she would come back each time, into this world that had been bequeathed to them, into the dangers that threatened them and the joys that waited, buried but not impossible, for them to unearth and cherish.
“Thank You,” she whispered into the wind, praying to a God she was not sure existed, whose purpose she did not yet know.
Her words were plucked from her lips and carried into the night, no one to hear them but the spirits of the dead. After a moment she turned and started back to the settlement. Tomorrow she would work alongside the other survivors. Her family. Her lover. Her friends. She would do the next right thing and the next. In small and humble ways, she would begin to live again.
* * * * *
Acknowledgments
The Aftertime series marks a turning point in my life as a writer. Because of the efforts of my agent and editor—Barbara Poelle and Adam Wilson—I was able to take on a challenge that was far more rewarding than it ever was daunting—and it was plenty daunting.
Thank you, thank you, Harlequin team! I keep wanting to pinch myself. Every writer should be so lucky.
ISBN: 9781459220416
Copyright © 2012 by Sophie Littlefield
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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