58.
I’m falling. I think I’ve always been falling, because I don’t remember what came before this. I don’t remember my name. I sink down through the sand and dust, through layers of forgotten bone and stippled rock, through hidden water and damp earth, until I come to rest in soft darkness. The pain is gone, or maybe it’s my body that’s gone, but I’m grateful for the respite. The darkness isn’t bad, it isn’t empty, it isn’t anything. It’s the absence of what came before. Except—I can hear voices. I frown, and I’m surprised to find I still have lips. I listen, but the voices are muffled, like they’re very far away. They shouldn’t be here. I strain to hear them, twisting what might be my head one way and another.
“Liar,” a voice screams in my ear, and I jolt upright, reeling in the darkness that doesn’t feel soft anymore. It’s sharp, and freezing, and I can’t tell where my body, if this is still my body, ends and the cold air starts.
I don’t belong here, in the cold, in the dark. I am blinding sun and dust, hot metal and chapped skin. This is not my home, so I start to climb. I scramble up what feels like dirt, my nails digging into crumbling earth and chipped stones.
The darkness doesn’t want me to leave. If I stay, it promises, everything will be cold and nothing will hurt. All I have to do is let go. It would be so easy, and I have nothing left. Nothing but the small bits of my body that still count as me. Stay, the darkness says. Stay down. Stay quiet.
But I’ve been pushed down my whole life. And it’s never stopped me before.
I scream and sand pours into my mouth, into my lungs. I choke and sputter, but there, at the corner of my eye, I can see light. I shove my hands into the dirt and dig, grit grinding between my teeth. Something is burning. The acrid smell fills my nose and mouth, and when I breathe I realize the smell is coming from inside me. My skin feels hot and stretched too tight, like diamondback skin pinned in the sun, and the blood is boiling in my veins. I keep climbing, even as my skin bubbles and blisters. I cry out as the blisters pop and wetness oozes over my hands, but I couldn’t stop now even if I wanted to; I don’t know how to back down from a fight.
Tears stream down my cheeks and blood runs down my arms, and still I climb. I dig through sharp, jagged rocks that tear my fingernails and sand that sticks to my blood and stings. And when I think I’ll climb forever, I hear a deafening noise, and light, hot light, pours into my eyes until all I see is white.
“Oh my god,” says a voice that I know. “She’s still alive.”
PART FIVE:
THE
START
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living.
—T. S. Eliot
59.
I’m hungry. It’s the first thought I form, when I can think again. I’m so hungry that it hurts, that it’s all I can think about. My stomach feels hollow and twisted, sucked up against my other organs.
“You’re all right.” A hand presses down on my shoulder and it feels like a knife slicing into muscle.
Light stings my eyes and I shut them, and suddenly I’m in Silver, I think I’m in Silver. I’m standing in the ruin of someone’s home. Half the roof has caved in, and the house sags to one side. Rubble crunches under my feet, rocks mixed with chalk from the whitewash, broken boards and shards of glass. My ruined hands feel along the wood, searching for something, anything to eat, to fill up the vast emptiness that’s yawning inside me. I hear a noise, a faint scrape against the sand, and I spin around. My eyes land on a man standing alone in the wreckage, and then my vision goes red.
“Breathe, Willie.”
I start to run, and my body moves roughly, like it’s new and unused. My feet come down hard and jar my teeth with every step. The man starts to run too, away from me, and it makes me angry. I’m so hungry and he’s making me chase him, and I’ll make him pay for it. I want to tear the flesh from his arms, let the hot blood fill my mouth and taste what he’s like on the inside. It’s easy to run him down, he’s weak and he’s faltering and I’m right behind him. I smell the sweat on his skin and the acid fear beneath it and when I jump on him he screams and the blood is pumping hard in his neck and when I bite it pours out like a faucet.
It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted, warm and soft and pure; it fills me up and makes me whole. I bury my face in his neck and eat, eat until the emptiness goes away. I finally pull back, breathing hard, and I lock eyes on the face of the man. A boy, really, and one whose face I know as well as my own. I swallow my mouthful and I scream in a voice I don’t recognize. Then I lean back in, knowing full well I’m eating my brother, but he tastes so good I can’t stop.
I wake up heaving, my stomach in convulsions, and I choke up something wet on my chin. I can’t tell if I’m awake or dreaming, everything is black and harsh and damp.
“Don’t try to move.”
A darker shadow moves across the sky, the outline of a person. I can’t make out the features, but I know Sam’s voice. Why is he here? He shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be near me. I try to speak, but my mouth doesn’t remember how to open properly.
“Just lie back,” Sam says. The shadow comes closer, bending over me. Something touches my face, my wrist, and I flinch, expecting pain. It doesn’t come; all I feel is a slight pressure, coolness against my hot skin.
I’m burning from the inside out. Help me, I plead silently. And maybe Sam can hear me, because his voice comes very close.
“It’s all right, Will. Keep breathing. You had a seizure—a fit—and it’s gonna take some time to recover. But the worst is over, I promise.”
There’s a sharp stinging in my arm then, and the shadow starts to fade.
“Go back to sleep,” he says.
I try to fight it, try to make him understand. Don’t make me go back there, don’t let it take me. The words won’t come, and the clouds are already starting to roll in and he sounds very far away. I can’t stop it and the clouds pull me back into the soft place of dreams.
60.
When I wake up, actually wake up, I know it’s real because of the pain. My joints ache; everywhere my bones connect it feels like they’ve been pried apart and hammered back together. I’m lying on my back, and when I try to roll over my body screams in protest. Even breathing hurts: my throat is tight and raw, and something in my chest pinches when it rises. Opening my eyes takes an effort, my lids flutter and twitch against my cheeks. It’s dim, wherever I am, and my vision is hazy. Soft light comes from somewhere, and I move my head to face the bloom.
“Welcome back.” Sam peels back my eyelids and his face starts to come into focus. He looks exhausted, deep circles beneath his eyes and a gray tinge to his skin.
“Sam?” My voice is a rusty hook, and it scrapes my throat as it comes out.
“I’m here.”
“No,” I say, struggling to push him away. I can still taste blood on my tongue. “You have to get away from me—”
“Willie, stop,” he says, and I’m so weak I can’t move him.
“I’m a shake, I’ll kill you—”
“Look at me,” Sam says, gripping my wrists. “You are not a shake. You won’t hurt me.”
I’m shivering, and I want to believe it so badly.
“Am I dead?” I whisper.
“No,” Sam says, releasing my arms and easing back. “But you tried your damnedest.”
I move my head slowly, trying to take in everything around me. I’m on a cot, and Sam has a stool pulled up next to the bed. There’s a thick, clean bandage wrapped around my hand.
“What . . .” I have to stop and cough, and it sets my jaw aching. Sam stands up and fetches me a glass of water, and to my embarrassment he has to help me drink.
“What happened, Sam?”
He sits back down, his hands gripping the empty glass so tight his knuckles are white. I stare at him, not sure if he’s real.
“We were al
most back to Glory.” He says it like he’s been reciting this speech. “But I kept thinking about you out there, all alone and waiting to die. I knew I couldn’t help you, but Micah would never forgive me if I left your body to the shakes. So I told the Garretts I’d pay if they helped me find you, so I could put you next to Micah.”
His name hits me in the chest, a tight punch that has me curling in on myself. My eyes get hot and blurry, but the tears don’t come.
“It took us a while to find you,” Sam says. “I didn’t know where you’d gone, or if you were still in one piece. We finally thought to check the box, and I saw you lying there, and I thought you were dead.” Sam looks up at me with haunted eyes. “And then you moved. And I thought I’d have to kill you right then.”
My injured hand throbs along to my heartbeat. I don’t understand what he’s telling me.
“Two days you were in that box, Will. Two days past when the sickness should’ve ended you. But when I went to get close”—Sam shakes his head, disbelieving—“you were sweating. Your fever was starting to break.”
“I think . . . I heard your voice,” I say to myself.
“We couldn’t move you far, not in the condition you were in, so we carried you here to the station. Well, Ben and I did the carrying; Curtis couldn’t, on account of his wrist being broke. It’s set up nicely now. We told the guard you fainted from sunstroke.”
“I’m not . . . I’m not going to become a shake?”
“No, Will, you’re not. Once the fever broke, it was only a matter of keeping you breathing. I stuck you full of morphine and waited. Took four days, but you’re finally awake.” Sam smiles at me, tired but triumphant, and it’s clear that he hasn’t slept in those four days.
“I don’t understand.”
Sam laughs hoarsely. “Neither do I, really. But Curtis told me about the well. I think—I think the infection was weaker, on account of the sickness being in the water. It was thinned-like, easier to fight off. And whatever you did to your hand, it was enough to kill the worst of it.”
I look at the white cloth around my palm.
“You made a real mess of it, by the way. I did what I could, but you’ll have a scar.”
“Sam.” I reach out for his hand, even though it sends a jolt of pain through to my shoulder. “I’m so sorry. Thank you. You saved my life.”
“No, Will.” He shakes his head. “You did that on your own.”
Sam’s eyes start to droop, and in a moment he’s asleep, his head slumped over his chest. He’s wrong, though I don’t wake him up to tell him. He did save my life. They could have killed me; in fact they should have killed me. You don’t bring infected people inside a fence and tuck them into bed. You kill them before the fever cooks their brains past reason, before they turn on you. No one survives once they’ve been infected. No one fights it off, or gets better. No one except me. Maybe I’m still dreaming, because none of this makes sense. Why me? Why not Micah, why not my mother? The unfairness of it stings. I’m not special, I’m not exceptionally strong or clever or lucky. I’m not nice, or deserving, or good. But maybe, just maybe, I’m alive.
61.
“Doc says you’re awake.”
My eyes fly open, and I don’t remember falling back asleep. The light is different, brighter, harsher, and Sam’s stool is now occupied by Benjamin.
“Easy, now,” Ben says, as I try to sit up and fail. “I don’t think you should be moving yet.”
“Where’s Sam?”
“Curtis had to drag him outta here to get some food in him. Kid’s dead on his feet.”
I didn’t expect to find Ben still here. My fever memories may be jumbled and blurry, but I recall parts of what I said, how I lied about the money, about everything.
“You didn’t leave.”
“No. Thought about it.” He shifts back on the stool. “You should have told us.”
“I know.” I lie back, try to find a position that doesn’t ache. “I was afraid you’d kill me. Or make me turn back, and I needed to find Pa. I thought if I could just hold on long enough, I could make it home. Micah—Micah knew.” I feel a stabbing between my ribs, and I close my eyes briefly, willing myself to forget. “But it was too late.”
“You put us all in danger.”
“I did.”
“You could have killed us all.”
“And you could have left me in that box.” Ben’s amber eyes watch me evenly. “You could’ve shot me, thinking to be merciful. You knew I lied to you, and you brung me here anyway.”
Ben sighs and rubs his face. “Yeah, well, Curtis did promise not to kill you. Besides, I reckon we lied to you, too. The deal was to get you to Best and home safe. This ain’t home, and we sure didn’t keep you safe.”
“You did your best. I have a—a knack for trouble.”
“Seems like it. We had a hell of a time trying to figure out how you caught it till Curtis remembered the well.”
I make a sore fist with my injured hand. “It was just a stupid accident.”
“Maybe not so stupid, if you’re still here. I don’t know how, but . . . Doc Junior says people survived the plague, once upon a time.”
“What do you think?” I ask, meeting Ben’s eyes.
“I think you can take a punch.” He stares at me evenly, with none of his mockery.
“How’s Curtis’s wrist?”
Ben huffs out a breath. “Worst thing to ever happen to man, to hear him tell it,” he says. Ben doesn’t look injured, aside from a bruise on his cheek that’s still puffy.
“You don’t have to stay here on my account.”
“Sam hired us fair and square. Can’t go breaking our word, now, bad for business. Speaking of,” and Ben reaches down into a pocket. He pulls out a roll of bills and tucks them into my hand.
“What is this?”
“We didn’t hold up our end of the bargain, so Curtis and I don’t feel right taking your money.”
The bills spread out in my hand like a fan. “This is more than what I paid you.”
Ben averts his eyes. “It’s your brother’s share. I reckon it’s yours now.”
The pain hits me again, right between my lungs. I close my eyes and take deep shuddering breaths until it passes. “I don’t need your charity, Garrett.”
“That’s funny, coming from someone who can’t sit up.”
“Sam paid for Micah, this money is his.”
“He won’t take it. I tried, and he near bit my head off. Kid’s got a stubborn streak,” Ben says, admiringly.
“Just because you feel sorry for me—”
“Will you just shut up and take the money? This ain’t about charity, it’s about doing what’s right.”
I look down at the bills in my hand. It’s more money than I’ve ever held in my life, and it will still only last me a matter of months. But those are months where I can feed the twins and pay our dues and survive enough to figure out the rest.
“How much would you charge to get me back to Glory?” I ask Ben. He raises his eyebrows at me.
“You know we’ll do it—”
“How much?”
Ben sighs. “Twenty dollars.”
“Fine, then.” I peel off some bills and hold them out. “I’d like you to take me home, please.”
Ben rolls his eyes, but it’s a compromise we can both live with.
“Yes, ma’am,” he says.
62.
The weakness of recovery frustrates me most. I can’t walk. At least not well, and not far. The first time I try to stand, I’m embarrassed to realize that someone took my pants off to put me in bed. I hope it was Sam, who only sees me as a patient or a sister. After the miles in the desert, I thought I’d never want to walk again, but days spent lying flat have me itching for the freedom of movement.
Sam lets me hobble around the tent, but my legs are stiff and creaky and I get short of breath quickly. It’s just as well I can’t go far, since no one here knows I’m recovering from the sickness; t
he story, thought up by Sam, is that my sunstroke was brought on by a nasty case of pneumonia. I get a tent to myself and the other hunters steer well clear of me, but I’m desperate for distraction. Sam says I need to rest, that I need to get my strength back before I can move, but I’m sick of being in bed. At least I can feed myself now, which saves embarrassment on both sides.
I try not to think about Micah. When I’m awake I school my thoughts away from him, but I can’t stop him from invading my dreams. They’re sticky and suffocating, fueled by the drugs Sam gives me for the aches in my bones. Sometimes I see Micah the way he always looked, disheveled and thoughtful, and then sometimes his face is pale and blood-covered and I’m the cause. Those times are the worst, because the medicine keeps me sleeping, trapped in foggy nightmares.
My own face is hardly recognizable now. I look at my reflection in a spoon and a stranger stares back: rawboned and pale, with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes and brittle clumps of dark hair. My lips are chapped and peeling, and if I smile they crack and bleed. Not that I feel like smiling much. I was never a great beauty, but the fever burned off the last bits of flesh I had, leaving nothing but dry skin on bone. Sam says I have to get some meat back on me, and he brings me bowl after bowl of clear salty soup that tastes of fat. I still look half dead, though. I still look like a shake. I go through the motions, lift the spoon to my lips, say please and thank you, but inside I can feel the anger building, a raw wound of resentment and rage.
“You have to give it time, Will,” Sam tells me. I ask how much time but he can’t or won’t answer. I’ve missed my week deadline with McAllister, missed it by days. He’s not one to forgive, or forget.
I worry for the twins; they must know by now something went very wrong. I didn’t even tell them about the peppermint drops I hid. It seems terribly important that they know about the candy.
After four days Sam weans me off the drugs, and only then do I realize how much I need them. I take to the cot again, unable to stand without shaking. My neck and back throb when I move them, and my infected arm burns with heat as it heals. That night when my dreams turn dark and stained I wake up screaming, pouring sweat and chattering. Between my dreams and the noise of gunshots from the fence, I wake up more tired than I went to sleep. I beg Sam to give me something, threaten and cajole him, but he remains unmoved. I plead for Ben and Curtis to force him to listen to me, but those two defer to Sam in all things medical. When I call Ben a coward, he says I must be feeling better.
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