She couldn’t bear to return to the Box with Dor and Smoke, both injured, both vulnerable. Either could lead, either could own the place, but not like this. They would live or they would die, but she would not take them back like this, weakened and needful.
And she couldn’t take a chance on leading the Rebuilders back to the Box. Those who survived the explosion would not know where she and Dor had come from, and she would not risk attracting their wrath if they were somehow followed. Not with her friends there. Not with Feo there.
Before the sun was high in the sky, Smoke had stirred next to her several times. She touched his face every few minutes, alternating with checking on Ruthie, who slept on the floor, curled in a ball. Cass drove as carefully as she could, mindful of every bump and crack in the road; in the back of the truck, she knew the girls were huddled over Dor.
She passed a marina, a motel that looked familiar. She cast about in her memories, trying to remember where the turnoff was. When the road wound along next to the canal and she looked down and saw thickets of cattails, a rowboat bobbing next to a dock on which a pair of bright red clogs still sat, it came back to her.
She had switched on her turn signal before she remembered there was no one to see it. She took a soft right and slowed to five miles per hour, remembering that long-ago day when a boy named Trace Pritcher had untied her bikini top and told her he’d loved her as she finished off her own spiked Big Gulp and then started working on his. She’d been pleasantly drunk when he’d clumsily pushed down his board shorts and lowered her to the dock, and she’d closed her eyes and imagined that he was the boy who would love her forever.
Cass knew that she would never see Trace again, that his body was moldering in a ditch or basement or parking lot somewhere, his bones baking in the sun and freezing in the night rains. So many good, beautiful people had died, but she had lived, and she did not know why. But she had her daughter, and the man who she loved and would never stop loving. She pressed her fingertips to his face for the hundredth time, found his pulse and prayed. And in the back of her truck she carried girls who teetered on the brink of womanhood, girls who she was now responsible for, who-God help all of them-needed her.
But that was not all. There was also the man she’d crashed up against, like the tide throws itself onto the shore. He had saved her and she had saved him; she had tasted the salt of his sweat and his blood on her lips, and she had known the shape of his grief and his longing and she had drunk it in and wanted more. She had seen him and she had not turned away, and he had known her and had not turned away.
Cass’s vision darkened with her swirling thoughts, and so she gripped the steering wheel hard and focused on the blacktop ahead, until she was back in herself. There was the chicken stand and the parking lot and the waterslides. There was the bait shop and the liquor store. There was the freezer where she’d bought bags of ice for half-assed margaritas.
A pickup was parked across the road, and from the bed a man rose up, a shotgun loose in his hand and a bandanna tied around his tangled hair. He was late twenties, maybe a little older, deeply tanned with laugh lines bracketing his mouth. A second later a pretty young woman pulled herself up next to him and rested her arms on the side of the truck, staring at the approaching truck with curiosity.
These were not Beaters. And they were not Rebuilders.
Cass took a deep breath and tried to think of what she could say, how she could introduce her ragtag group, the people she carried with her. She tapped the brakes and coasted to a stop. She put her hand on the door handle, but before she opened the door she took a deep breath, and traced a cross over her heart and whispered a cautious prayer.
You got us this far, she whispered. Now take us home.
Sophie Littlefield
***
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Rebirth Page 32
