Horizon (03) (8 page)

But images of the morning’s discovery kept her awake. Bubbles had risen to the surface of the water after the Beater went under. Was it possible that she had imagined the other—the sudden paddling of its hands?

The sound of the front door opening yanked Cass out of her thoughts. She scrambled to her feet and smoothed her clothes. There was already enough trouble between her and the other moms without them thinking she wasn’t doing her part with the children. She picked up the closest book—one of the historical romances Suzanne liked—and put her finger between the pages so it would look like she’d been reading, and sat in the recliner.

Ingrid came into the room, followed by Jay Swarmer, who headed up the security rotation, guarding the bridge and dragging away dead Beaters from the shore. His presence here, in the middle of the day, caused an uneasy cramp in Cass’s stomach. As for Ingrid, her onetime friend’s lips were set in a thin line and twin red spots stood out on her cheeks, and she refused to meet Cass’s gaze.

“What’s going on?” Cass said quietly. Getting no answer other than grim looks, she set the book down on the coffee table. “Let’s talk in the kitchen so we don’t wake the kids.”

“I’ll stay with them,” Ingrid said primly. She settled herself cross-legged on the floor, the long wool skirt she wore draped over her muddy boots.

Cass followed Jay wordlessly into the kitchen, wondering if she should offer him some of the cold tea left over from the morning. They’d all grown accustomed to drinking it cold; though the cooks kept a fire going through most of the day, the hearth was usually in service for one task or another, everything from slow-cooking rabbits on a spit, to baking flat breads, to boiling river water to purify it. There was no time for heating tea or leftovers, barely even for warming one’s hands over the flames.

But Jay spoke before she had a chance. “This is a hell of a thing, Cass.”

She was surprised at the approbation in his voice. He leaned back against the counter, his jeans slung low under a gut that had been slowly disappearing ever since Cass had known him. No matter how much kaysev a person ate, it wasn’t enough to make or keep them fat. Even Fat Mike was lean these days, though the nickname stuck.

“What do you mean?”

Jay winced, closing his eyes for a moment as if the conversation pained him. “Sammi’s been to see me.”

Cass set a hand on the back of a kitchen chair to support herself as she absorbed this fresh bad news. Sammi had told. Despite Cass’s deep anguish over hurting Dor’s daughter, she had never considered that Sammi would want revenge against
her.
But of course, Cass would be much easier to hurt than her father. Their affair didn’t go against any of New Eden’s covenants, and there were those who might even admire him for keeping a couple of women in play…but Cass had trouble fitting into New Eden from the start and this would only make people that much more reluctant to befriend her—

“She told us all about it. How she’d had her suspicions, about how people were talking.”

Somehow the knowledge that Sammi suspected the affair troubled Cass even more. Would that have been enough—would knowing that they were hurting her have been enough to make them stop? Cass hoped the answer was yes, but there would be no way to know now.

“Look, I know we messed up. But I never meant to, to hurt anyone. We just, it was private, it—”

“‘We’?” Jay’s gray eyebrows, thick and untrimmed, knitted together in consternation. “Who’s
we?
”

They stared at each other for several seconds, Cass spinning possible scenarios wildly through her mind.

“I am talking about your
drinking,
Cass. If there’s other folks—I mean, the issue’s judgment, if there’s partying going on, people who need to keep their wits about them to do their job, when it affects all of us—look, we’re not trying to go on a witch hunt here.” Jay wiped a callused hand across his forehead. “The only reason it was agreed we needed to do something was, first of all, the mistake that’s got a boy down in the quarantine house. If your little problem made you careless, then hell yeah, I think it’s community business, and at the very least we need to think about taking you off the harvest detail. But as Ingrid pointed out, and I’ve got to say I agree with her, leaving you in charge of the kids when you’re high as a kite ain’t much better. I mean, I know I won’t have an argument from you when I say they’re our most precious resource, right? These little ones?”

Throughout his speech, Cass was trying to keep up, trying to assimilate what Jay was saying. Why hadn’t Sammi said anything about what she’d seen on the dock? But the answer hit her with blinding clarity: because it wasn’t enough to hurt her, not in a big enough way. By revealing her drinking, the girl could hit her on every level that mattered—calling into question her commitment, her competence, even the wisdom of letting her have a role in the children’s lives.

Of course, there was one secret Sammi still hadn’t shared. If she ever told the others that Cass had been attacked and infected, that would be a sure way to stir up so much trouble that Cass could get thrown out of New Eden. Cass wasn’t the only Beater victim ever to recover, but no one in New Eden had seen such a survivor before. And with tensions running high, there was no guarantee they’d listen when Cass offered up frantic, self-serving explanations that she was no threat to anyone.... Nor was Ruthie....

“But I love the children,” she mumbled, on the verge of tears. “You can’t think that I don’t.”

“Aw, hell,” Jay said, his shoulders slumping forward, and she realized that he had been hoping he was wrong. He was a good man, a family man with no family anymore, an associate dean at Sacramento State with no one to ride herd on. And he had the broken capillaries and red nose that signaled that he too had once known his way around a bottle. “I hate this, Cass. Lord knows I don’t have any beef with you. But there’s too much at stake. I’m here to ask you to resign. From child care and picking both. You can stay on gardening—I don’t think you’ll get any argument for that, everyone knows you’re the best with the growing. And that’s enough for anyone—Hell, there’s lots of folks that don’t get a fraction of that done. We got Ingrid, we got Suzanne, we got Jasmine ready to pop, maybe we can get another of the gals to pitch in with the little ones. Valerie, maybe, she’d be good.”

His words cut deep. She understood why he said it—Valerie would have been a great mother; her patience, her soothing voice, they were perfect.

“Maybe,” she said bleakly, but it was a lie because the day that Valerie was responsible for Ruthie’s care would be the day Cass had failed utterly. Her daughter had been taken from her twice before, when other people decided Cass wasn’t a fit mother. She couldn’t let it happen again. “Or I don’t know…maybe I could take Ruthie in the field with me when I work. Let me think, okay? Just give me a day to think about it.”

Jay sighed and folded his hands over his gut. You could see in the gesture the shadow of what he had once been, a paunchy, proud, cheerful man. “That’s fine. I don’t want to take this up with the council in any official way, you know what I mean? That wouldn’t serve anybody. Just, hey, Ingrid’s a little sore with you right now.” He hooked a thumb in the direction of the living room. “Let’s let her finish out the day with the kids, maybe you go for a walk, talk to a friend, whatever you feel like. An afternoon off. Looks like the weather’s breaking, maybe we’ll get a little more sun, everything’ll look different by tonight.”

“Yeah, okay,” Cass said.

She saw him to the door, and they said an oddly formal goodbye, Jay giving her a little half bow before he walked off toward the guard headquarters. He’d been right about the weather; a thick cloud scudded across the sun and was quickly gone, leaving the air warm and inviting.

She should do as he suggested, take that walk, maybe go to the far southern end of Garden Island where you could sit and stare off at the mountains in the distance, skip stones into the river. But she didn’t think she could bear to look across all those rows and rows of kaysev, the chubby deep green leaves hiding a secret killer somewhere in their midst.

And she couldn’t leave Ruthie here, not with Ingrid. She wouldn’t risk losing her daughter, ever again.

She made her decision. She went into the living room. Ingrid stood with her arms folded, glaring, but Cass did not look away. There was so much she wanted to say, but instead she tamped down her anger as she picked up Ruthie from her pallet of blankets, and carried her into the remains of a day in which, yet again, everything had changed.

Chapter 13

SMOKE OPENED HIS eyes when it was quiet in the room, closed them when the people came in. He worked his hands under the blanket, flexed his limbs, tensed his muscles, always going slack and still at the slightest sound.

He was careful, because he knew the people were waiting for him to wake up. What would happen then, he did not know. There were people who wanted him dead, who wanted him to suffer.

The great irony was that Smoke did deserve to be punished, but only one other man left on this earth knew the true reason, and who knew if he was even still alive. It was Smoke’s burden, to know what he had done and to be alone in that knowing. They could punish him for the lives he had taken, for the Rebuilder leaders he had killed, and Smoke would laugh—fighting the fascist warlords was only a tiny penance for his true crime, for that secret crime. They could send in one Rebuilder after another and he would keep killing them until he was exhausted from the effort, until he could no longer lift his blade or his gun, and he would never regret all the blood that got spilled. In that battle he had right on his side, because the battle against the Rebuilders was a battle for freedom and for hope.

But for his other crime, his first crime, he had no justification and no defense....

This was a strange prison, where people came and went freely and he was not shackled, and security was lax. A terrible miscalculation on their part. If they knew anything at all about him, surely they would know he’d bide his time and he would wait for the right moment.

Each day, Smoke let the thin gruel dribble down his face, swallowing just enough to survive. So too with the water held to his lips. And he felt his strength returning. Soon he was able to leave his bed at night to stand at the window, looking out on a moonlit yard; not long after that he was marching in place, doing simple calisthenics, returning to bed only when he was exhausted.

His body was not the same. He was missing two fingers, the flesh raggedly healed at the first knuckle, where the little and ring fingers of his left hand used to be. The skin of his face was crossed with scars he could not see; his arms, his torso, his legs, with scars that he could. There was a persistent ache in one arm and in his hip; his abbreviated walks around the room were hampered by a painful limp.

Each night he pushed himself. Each dawn his body screamed in pain at the effort. And each day he grew stronger. Emboldened by his success, he took to working his hands during the day, squeezing them into fists, getting used to the odd absence of the severed fingers. He flexed his limbs, bent and extended them. Worked as though his life depended on it.

One day soon, they would come for him. They would not expect a fight—but a fight was what he meant to give them.

Chapter 14

RUTHIE BARELY STIRRED, so Cass settled her into the stroller they kept under the eaves of the house. It was a nice one, an Italian model that navigated even the stony paths along the water without getting its wheels jammed, but it didn’t get much use now that the younger kids preferred to walk nearly everywhere.

She tucked a sweatshirt around Ruthie, draping it over her head to keep her warm, and set out along the path to her herb garden when she heard gunshots, two in rapid succession, then another a few seconds later. Shouting followed, not just one or two voices, but half a dozen or more. Cass hesitated, wondering what the latest calamity could be. Glynnis and John routinely picked off Beaters on the shore when they patrolled the river, but they lined up their shots carefully, deliberately, taking their time so as not to waste ammo.

In the end her curiosity won out, and she turned the stroller toward the community center, where people would know what was happening. As she drew close, she saw a knot of people on the edge of the lawn looking toward the water, shielding their eyes against the sun.

On the opposite shore were Beaters, dozens of them. How they’d managed to assemble so quickly since Cass was last outside—only a couple of hours ago when she took the little ones for a walk over to the drying house to watch Corryn and Chevelle lay out the metal pans of hardtack—she had no idea. Now they lined the bank for a hundred yards in either direction, and from the distance, if you squinted, they could be spectators at a game, shoppers at a department store, except for their jerking, awkward movements.

Cass nervously ran her fingers over the sun-browned skin of her forearms, a habit left over from when her arms were covered with ragged scars. But her torn skin had scabbed over and fully healed from her time as…one of them. Early on after recovering, the fear of what she might have done—whether she’d joined a pack of the things, whether she’d hunted or even, God help her,
feasted
—continually worked on her mind, and her touch on the wounds brought the pain that she needed to distract herself. These days—mostly—she kept those fears at bay. But looking at the things, separated only by the river, the old terror nagged at her.

And now she had a new concern, a fresh terror: that Sammi, her fury stoked by what she’d seen, would tell the others that Cass and Ruthie had survived infection. It was dangerous information, sure to stir up distrust and anger in the community. But how far would the girl go to punish Cass?

Beyond the ragtag crowd, in the fields studded with drifts of kaysev, more approached in groups of three and four and in some cases more. Cass could only guess where they had come from—there were more than could be accounted for from the usual nesting spots the raiders had mapped in the area. Were the wretched creatures somehow responding to a signal that citizens could not pick up on, an instinctual awakening that drew them inexorably here in this moment?

Since the early days of the fever, when the first Beaters cast off their humanity to follow their terrible hungers, they had been drawn to population centers. They preferred towns to farmland, cities to towns. Of course, at first many people believed that safety could be found in the most densely populated areas, so they set out for urban settings. In the heightened security of the new century, every high-rise featured antiterrorism barricades and could function as their own ecosystems for a short period. Most had backup power sources and filtration systems that could sustain citizens at least a few weeks while they modified the buildings to serve as shelters for the new, grim reality.

The terrible fallacy of this assumption emerged slowly. Last summer, citizens flocked to the cities by whatever means available—by the carload when gas could be found and the streets were clear, on foot when not. Through an unseasonably warm and sun-dappled autumn, those who stayed outside the city limits wondered if they’d made the wrong choice. But as time went on, the other citizens never returned, and the cities remained dark.

And so one conclusion was generally drawn by those outside: the fever thrived in the population centers, infection spreading geometrically among those who lived close together, until the skyline became a treacherous maw teeming with hungry Beaters.

Dor, crafty and careful inside the Box, probably sent his patrols to get a visual confirmation of this, Cass suspected. He’d never said as much, but that would be like him—he would want to know himself, but not wish to inflict debilitating proof of the world’s end on others, if he could avoid it.

Though Dor kept his own counsel, others did not. January had brought a few refugees from what Sacramento had become. Their stories confirmed that the cities were lost, taken over by swarms of maddened Beaters nesting in office buildings, in shops, in public housing and luxury town houses. Restaurants and museums and parking garages were full of them.

The Beaters were not above feeding on each other, though they didn’t seem to like it. Of late, refugees passing by New Eden reported that the creatures had begun to starve inside the cities, imparting to listeners the most horrifying tableau of gaunt, bony Beaters in the later stages of the disease, kneeling over recently fallen others, feeding on their slack and waxy skin, before seeming to lose interest, and lying down next to them to die. There was not enough to feed even these voracious, implacable monsters.

Had the Beaters finally sucked all the sustenance out of the cities, and returned to the countryside to hunt? If so, New Eden would be a ready target with its seventy-some citizens living out in the open, where they could easily be observed and smelled and heard.

All that separated them was the perfect barrier of the river.

No one had ever expected the Beaters to learn to cross it. As a shocked murmur went up from the crowd, Cass knew that she wasn’t the only one thinking that if they somehow took to the water, New Eden would be lost.

There was another gunshot, and another. Cass pressed forward, pushing the stroller through the crowd, muttering apologies. When she got near the front of the throng she wheeled the stroller around so that it was behind her, and elbowed her way through.

Two canoes floated in the current halfway between island and shore. It was too far across the wide, rapidly flowing expanse of water on this side of the island to reliably hit a Beater from the shore, even with a deer rifle, which was why they patrolled from the middle of the river. John steadied one canoe expertly, paddle skimming the surface, while Glynnis sighted down her shotgun. She alone of the security staff preferred to use a shotgun; she’d learned to hunt with her father and, until last year, had gone up to Canada every year when the season opened. Now she hunted Beaters.

In the other canoe Neal struggled to keep the prow pointed at the opposite shore. Parker, one of the younger security guys, knelt clumsily in the front trying to reload, but the craft’s rocking made it difficult.

“Goddamn it,” a low voice said next to Cass.

Dor. She turned to him instinctively, resisting throwing herself into his arms, suddenly flooded with the fear and tension that had reemerged with these things. She couldn’t give in to the urge, not here, not after what had happened with Sammi and Jay.

“What’s happening?”

“What’s happening is, this is what we get for not training more people on the watercraft,” Dor snapped. “Look at that.
Look
at that. They’re likely to drown themselves before they get a shot off. Maybe even lose a rifle or two. I told them—” He bit off his words and fell silent, anger radiating off his tense, rigid body.

“Do
you
know how to handle a canoe?”

“Yeah. Me and Nathan—we’ve taken them out half a dozen times. I mean, I’m nowhere near what John can do, but I could for damn sure keep the fucking boat pointed in the right direction.
Fuck.
”

“Where’s Nathan now?”

“Went out this morning, after I decided to stay back and look for Sammi. I doubt he even knows what’s happening, because he was going to try going down toward Clifton. I told him not to go alone, but…”

But Nathan was another renegade, just like Dor.

He’d mentioned Sammi. Cass looked back at Ruthie for a second. “Did she find you? Or Valerie?”

“Yeah, yeah, I talked to Val. Sammi’s over in the community center with the other kids. Earl’s told them to stay put there until we get this under control.”

So Sammi was safe for the moment, at least. By Dor’s grim expression, Cass had to assume the reunion hadn’t gone well. Which wasn’t surprising.

“But why are Neal and Parker even out there? I mean, the Beaters are bound to wander off eventually. They always do.” Even as she said it, Cass realized that what she meant was that they always
had
—there was a difference.

“Cass. They’re only shooting the ones that get in the water. Trying to conserve ammo.”

Dor pointed down the river, and only then did Cass notice the gray lumps being carried downstream, drifting lazily in gentle spins in the current. They looked like logs, or bags of trash, but they were dead Beaters.

The ones that get in the water…

“You mean they’re trying to swim.” Not a question—Cass suddenly knew it beyond a doubt. She’d seen one try for the first time only this morning, but that didn’t mean that they hadn’t been working up to it for a while. They were gifted mimics, for beasts that seemed insensate much of the time; they often echoed each other’s movements and sounds. At times it seemed like they made a game of it, a primitive Simon Says, but when one considered that this was how they learned, it was both awesome and terrifying.

“Yeah. And some of them are coming too damn close. And they’re
watching
each other. See? They’re trying to figure out how to stay afloat. The ones Glynnis and Parker took out, they were paddling like dogs—nothing pretty and with a lot of wasted motion, lots of splashing, but you can bet the rest of them noticed that they managed to stay above water for a few seconds before they went down.”

Just then a barking wail went up. At the far right edge of the crowd of Beaters, past Neal’s canoe, a knot of them pushed forward, the momentum of their bodies propelling a stocky one into the water. It was recently turned, with a nearly full head of dark hair and most of its face intact. A woman’s face, Cass could guess, through the leering and the pus and excited babbling.

A final shove sent it stumbling into the water, where it wobbled and abruptly sat down. It screamed high and shrill when the water rose up to its armpits, and splashed with its hands, making wide arcs. In the canoe, Parker was trying to aim over Neal’s shoulder as he dug deep into the current, forcing the canoe around. He fired, and one of the Beaters on the shore squawked and pitched forward, facedown into the muddy bank, the others tripping over it and stepping on its limbs.

For a moment, Cass had a vision of the torn bodies clogging the river, a peninsula of broken flesh permitting them to cross to her and Ruthie.

The one in the water had rolled onto its front and began splashing its way toward the canoe. The water went farther up its body until it went under, only the top of its head visible, black curls floating, and after a moment it came up sputtering and coughing. It flailed and slapped at the water and went under a few times, but then it seemed to establish a rhythm—an inefficient and clumsy one for sure, but enough to keep it from drowning.

Yelling, from the people in the boats and the people onshore, competed with the Beaters’ cries. Parker fired again, but the shot went wide, cutting the water harmlessly, and the Beater bobbed and splashed closer. Neal twisted his body in the canoe, trying to get out of the way. Parker shouted something that Cass couldn’t make out over the din of the crowd, but as he turned back around and aimed at the paddling Beater—it was a can’t-miss-shot, only ten feet—Neal plunged the paddle deep into the water and spun the canoe.

He’d exerted too much force, and the canoe dipped far to the left. Parker’s shot missed, unbelievably, landing somewhere in the inky water, and as Neal tried to correct, the canoe lurched the other way and the two men scrambled for balance and Cass sucked in her breath and swore she could feel it too when the canoe went over and both of them were dumped into the icy water.

Screaming rent the air as John turned his own canoe toward the upended one. Glynnis took a knee and fired without seeming to aim at all and there was a burst of blood from the swimming Beater, the side of its head shredded and running with crimson. The crowd called to the men in the water to hurry, hurry, hurry—

—and then there was a splashing commotion in the water that took Cass away to long ago with her dad, when he took her fishing on Lake Don Pedro. He’d borrowed a friend’s gear, and they didn’t catch a thing all day, but as the sun climbed in the sky and Cass got sleepy and leaned against her dad, her tummy full of peanut-butter sandwiches, her dad’s flannel shirt smelling pleasantly of coffee and tobacco, a bird had swooped down to the water and hooked its talons into a sizable fish. But the prey was too large to be carried off so easily. The bird screamed and fought the mute, desperate fish. They flailed for their lives, the water frothed by the fish’s body slapping the surface of the lake and the bird’s wings beating at it, and they spun and fought until their bodies blurred together, and Cass hid her face in her father’s shirt and cried until it was all over, until the bird finally gave up and flew limp-winged away and the fish sank to the depths, torn up but free to die—