Horizon (03) (14 page)

Chapter 22

RED SAW THEM coming, the man limping along with his arm around his daughter, who was somehow managing to push one of those funny-looking three-wheeled strollers at the same time. The man walked like he was about to collapse, leaning on Cass for support.

So this is how they were to meet. Red had imagined this day a hundred different ways, but never like this. Red would call for Zihna. She was good at this sort of thing. He knew the only reason Cassie had come to him was that she had no other choice, and he accepted that. But this was a start.

The trailer, a little single-axle flatbed utility model with a handle he’d rigged from an old ski rope, was as comfortable as he could make it. Earlier, Craig Switzer and a few of his friends had come by and tried to talk him out of it, and when he didn’t budge, the talk had turned ugly.

“What are you fixin’ to do, haul your guitars and shit along when there’s people to be fed? We could get a hell of a lot of water and supplies on that thing,” Craig said, eyeing the trailer with a calculating expression. What brave Craig didn’t know was that Zihna was in the next room, cleaning their guns. He didn’t know what a good shot Zihna was. Well, there was a reason Red had taught her in private. A man would have to be a fool not to see that a day like this was coming—and he’d have to be a coward not to take precautions to protect the ones he loved.

Red had been exactly such a coward for most of his life. But no more.

No more.

“And who’s going to decide that, brother?” he asked softly, hand on his belt, where a holster he’d carefully modified over several long winter afternoons hid not one but two blades, each of them specialized, each of them very, very comfortable in his hand. “You? Because last I heard, no one had nominated any of you clowns for council.”

An ugly grin spread across Craig’s face. Behind him, his friends giggled and shuffled. Red knew that Mario had been caught trying to break into the storehouse at least once. No formal punishment had been meted out, since there was no proof to contradict his story that he’d been simply seeking a Band-Aid for a woman who had cut herself on a paring knife. But a lingering pall of suspicion had followed him ever since.

“Council’s in for some changes, I bet,” Craig said. “Give it a week or two, there’ll be all manner of staff changes, resignations…attrition…what have you.”

“I imagine you’re right,” Red said, his mild tone hiding a growing anger. “Why don’t we wait until then and reconvene this discussion again. Meantime, my wife and I have our own plans for our property, and I’ll thank you to respect that, and be on your way.”

The men stayed only for a moment more, looking around the garage, no doubt trying to see if there was anything worth taking. There was not—Zihna had helped the girls pack and sent them on ahead to the docks, where everyone was assembling.

“Wife, huh,” the dullest of the three, Tanner Mobley, said over his shoulder as they sauntered away. “You all have you a proper wedding I didn’t get invited to?”

“Indeed,” Red said, folding his arms over his chest and watching them go.

No, he and Zihna had never had a ceremony. They’d met after Red had nearly given up on life, seven months ago. Red had in mind to hang himself in a neatly tended trilevel house on the outskirts of Bakersfield. Who knew why he chose that house from the dozen on that block—but when he went inside looking for a rope or a belt or even a sheet he could rip into strips, instead he found Zihna sitting calmly at the kitchen table, shelling kaysev beans.

He couldn’t believe his eyes. He had been wandering for days, and he hadn’t bothered to eat or drink much since survival had ceased to be a goal. He wondered if she was an angel, sent to welcome him to the next world, the one where he could start forgetting all the things that he’d done wrong in this one.

But she wasn’t an angel. And she had no plans to allow him to forget or escape anything at all. Instead, she guided him back. He owed her everything, and had pledged her everything. Where before there had been a broken man and a proud woman, now there was a union that meant more to Red than anything on this earth, aside from his daughter.

If that didn’t make Zihna his wife, no vow or ceremony or holy man on this earth would either.

Now, as dawn waited just over the horizon, he waited with an old wool blanket over his lap and watched his daughter slowly approach. When they were within a few yards of his front door, Red cleared his throat.

“Cassie, I’m glad to see you. And your friend.”

Cass saw him then, and the door opened behind him and Zihna came out, carrying a lantern. The porch was lit up and they could see the wounded man clearly. Zihna saw him every day, of course, but it was not Red’s habit to come inside the hospital where she worked. Red couldn’t abide hospitals, not even now. So the face of the man his daughter loved was new to him.

He knew the stories, of course. Well, maybe the man was a hero. Maybe not. Time would tell. For now, though, Red owed him courtesy. He’d watch him like a hawk, and if Smoke made his daughter happy, then he could stay.

He stood up with his hand extended. Smoke regarded him with unfocused eyes and it took him three tries to lift his hand high enough to shake. He looked like he was about to pass out on the spot.

“Welcome,” Red said gravely.

In his mind, he added,
Watch yourself.

Chapter 23

SAMMI FOLLOWED THE sound of her father’s voice without getting up from the spot they’d claimed, their backs against the bridge supports where they took root fifty feet inland. The road rose above the ground there and was in pretty good shape for Aftertime. Someone must have kept it in good repair, Before.

Sage was sitting next to her, finally asleep, dozing with her head on Sammi’s shoulder, and Kyra was sleeping at their feet wrapped up in a blanket. A little while ago Roan and Leslie and Jasmine had stopped by to see if Kyra wanted to go with them, but she and Sammi had barely managed to get Sage to come with them, practically dragging her away from the quarantine house, and Kyra had absently told them, thanks maybe later.

It was too weird to think of her with Jasmine, who had to be the oldest pregnant woman Sammi’d ever met—she was well over forty, anyway. What would she and Kyra even talk about? She could be Kyra’s mom, easy.

Before Kyra fell asleep she told Sammi to make sure they stuck together, and Sammi was going to do that, though she was secretly worried about whether Kyra ought to be walking so much. But then again, who knew how far they were even going to go? Maybe they’d find the perfect shelter in a day or something. It was unlikely: rumor was that Nathan and some others had driven out to all the known shelters within thirty miles that were still reachable—many of the major roads were impassable, clogged with wrecks—and none had room, or the desire, to add on a group of their size. But it wasn’t impossible, right? They could split up, if they had to, find somewhere like the first shelter Sammi’d lived in, back when her mom and Jed were still alive. The school had been fine. It wasn’t like New Eden, where there were no high walls, nothing to separate them from the rest of the world but the river, but it had been all right. In fact, she missed it in some ways. Missed how small it was, how she knew everything about everyone, how everyone always asked her how she was doing.

She’d been a child there, still. It had been a long while since she felt like that.

Her father was going around talking to people about what they wanted to bring along. He was acting like some kind of expert, like someone had put him in charge. Like he was king of the council all of a sudden, when last week he was digging a new trench for the latrines. Sammi knew—she’d seen the way people talked to her dad, like they thought they were better than him. It was a long way from when her dad was a big financial trader, that was for sure. Somehow, here in New Eden where there were rules for everything, her dad never really fit in. Even when he took up with Valerie—and everyone liked Valerie, she was so perky and perfect—people still didn’t warm up to him. And if Sammi was really, really honest with herself, that had hurt.
He’s not perfect,
she wanted to tell people,
but you have to know him like I know him.

Only, then she’d seen another side of him and decided she didn’t really know him at all. It started with him getting all overprotective, after not giving a shit what she did or where she went for all those years. It was like he wanted to keep her locked up all the time. Her mom had been protective, but at least she had reasons, at least she’d been like that as long as Sammi could remember. With her dad it was just stupid. And then, seeing him and Cass together—as though nothing else mattered, not her, not Valerie, not the job he was supposed to be doing.

But now he was like some kind of hero, going around and talking to people, and everyone wanting to know his opinion. All because of what he’d done today, him and Cass, going out in the boat and shooting all those Beaters. Sammi didn’t know exactly how she felt about that. She’d been watching out the window of the community center with Kalyan when they first set out in the canoe, and she’d been so scared she didn’t have actual thoughts but just a crazy buzzing spin of fear that didn’t go away until they were back onshore.

For a while there, when her dad and Cass were helping Glynnis and John, giving them the ammo or whatever, it looked like they were all screwed for sure. There were just so many of them. It got to the point where Sammi couldn’t bear to look. She turned away from the window and Kalyan put a hand on her shoulder and she went very still until he got the message and went away and then Sage came up and wrapped her arms around Sammi and told her everything that was happening in a soft voice: “They’re paddling upriver…Cass has this one gun where you have to hold it with two hands…damn, she nailed that one…oh shit, there’s—no, she got that one too....”

Sage kept that up until the Beaters retreated and her dad turned the canoe around and only then did Sammi stop shaking and find the courage to look again.

Now she listened to her dad talking and tried to find in his voice the man she most missed. But this was more like the dad he used to be before he moved out. He used to order her mom around, not in an asshole way but in a way like he was just used to being in charge. It wasn’t like her mom put up with it anyway; she always did whatever she wanted. Maybe that was what finally broke them up, they both had “boss” personalities. He used to tell Sammi what to do all the time too, but, back then, she mostly didn’t mind because he liked to spend time with her and they had their own things they did, just the two of them, like watching reality shows together and yelling at the TV, or going out for Gizmos Garlic Fries whenever they got a craving.

“Sure, sure,” he was telling the Patels, one of those rare intact fairy-tale couples from Before who clung all the more firmly to each other in the face of all the dangers around them. “I know you want to take all your family stuff. But you’re really going to have to pare it down. See if you can get it into just this one suitcase here, the one with the wheels, and I’ll be back in a while to see how you’re doing.”

And then he was on to the next group.

Sammi hadn’t seen Cass at all tonight, since she came to get Ruthie. She hadn’t come down to the shore with piles of bags, like almost everyone else on the island. For a second Sammi wondered: the decision she’d made, to tell Mr. Swarmer about her drinking—

All she’d wanted…what
had
she wanted, anyway? At the time it had seemed pretty clear. Cass was drinking, everyone knew it—well, maybe not everybody, but the other women in the Mothers’ House for sure knew about it because Jasmine had told Roan, and Roan told Kyra, and Kyra told them. In the Mothers’ House they weren’t happy about it, not by a long stretch, and supposedly they’d had a come-to-Jesus meeting where they told Cass if she ever drank while she was watching the kids she was not only out of the babysitting rotation but out of the house too. Somehow they all seemed to believe Cass only drank late at night. But that wasn’t very likely, was it? Addicts were…well, the only ones Sammi knew, maybe they weren’t addicts, technically, meaning by whatever rules or whatever these things were determined, but the girls at school who were stoners and pill poppers and the ones who brought vodka to school in water bottles?—they were for sure doing it during the day, despite Grosbeck Academy’s zero-tolerance policy, and despite those letters they sent home assuring all the parents they had the best record on drug use of any private girls’ school in Central California, which was a blatant lie, but then again that was part of what her parents used to pay Grosbeck twenty-five thousand bucks a year for, was to be lied to and feel good about it. They all wanted to believe it so they wouldn’t have to acknowledge that they were too busy or didn’t care enough to pay attention to their kids themselves.

And that’s what was going on here too, right? The other mothers didn’t want to lose Cass because they needed her to babysit. Jasmine would join in eventually, she was going to have the kid any day now, but she’d been on bed rest for weeks because she was so old and Sun-hi thought she shouldn’t move around much. And after the baby came she’d be too busy to watch all the other kids for a while.

So they didn’t want to lose Cass, so that meant someone else had to be responsible and step up and say something because it was just plain dangerous for her to be left with the kids. Which was why Sammi had gone to Mr. Swarmer.

Only.

If she’d really wanted to punish her, Sammi would have told Dana, not Mr. Swarmer. Underneath his whole “nobody’s in charge here” thing, Dana totally thought he was in charge. He was always ordering people around and pretending he had the council behind him. Or maybe he did, but Sammi would bet he did a lot of behind-the-scenes ass-kissing and favor-trading and threatening to get his way.

And Dana was such a Goody Two-shoes. If he knew about Cass, he’d probably make an example of her, publicly humiliate her, like he did when they found Mitchell Keller stealing the box of cocoa mix off the raider cart. Dana had suggested public stocks. And while the council had voted that down, they had given the thumbs-up to the reparations chair. Mitchell had to sit there for two days, with a sign he’d written saying what he’d done and how he was sorry, and he wasn’t allowed to say anything until the two days were done and then Dana made a big deal about forgiving him in a big speech up on the steps of the community center.

All over a box of cocoa mix. What would they do for something as serious as what Sammi told Mr. Swarmer?

Because she hadn’t exactly said that Cass never drank on the job. She said she didn’t know. Which was true, sort of, but really, Sammi knew Cass would never do anything to endanger a child. Especially Ruthie. No one could say that Cass didn’t love her daughter, and even though Sammi was angrier than ever, if that was possible, about Cass and her dad, she was starting to feel a little guilty—okay, a lot guilty—about telling Mr. Swarmer that she “didn’t know” what time of day Cass drank or who she got it from.

At least she hadn’t told them the other thing. About how Cass and Ruthie had been infected. Sammi couldn’t bring herself to spread that, knowing what she knew—the immunity was super-rare but if you were immune, you weren’t a danger to anyone. There were people in New Eden who’d completely freak if they knew, idiots who’d probably want Cass gone, just because she’d been sick in the past. And even angry, Sammi knew that going that far would be wrong.

Besides, if her dad found out she’d talked to Mr. Swarmer, he’d probably be furious. He could be such a bastard but he was kind of rigid about right and wrong, at least his version of right and wrong. He’d be all over her about lying, even though he’d been lying to Valerie all along—one look at her tearstained, puffy face when she came by earlier with her friends made it clear she’d had no idea about Cass. But what went on between adults,
that
way, was a private matter. The council would probably all disapprove—and given what a bunch of tight-ass losers they were, she guessed they’d disapprove a
lot
—but there was nothing they could actually do about it.

Besides…if Sammi told people about that, then her dad would be implicated too. And Sammi wasn’t ready to take that step. She hated him, true, but he was all the family she had left, and he’d do anything for her, to keep her safe. She couldn’t let go of that right now. Maybe if Jed was still around…but no. Jed was dead.

So she couldn’t bring herself to hurt her dad, and she had a ready-made way to hurt Cass, and that was what she had done, and at first it had felt really good, to imagine Cass getting her wrists slapped, having everyone spying on her all the time to make sure she wasn’t drinking, and if they were watching Cass like a hawk then she’d sure have a hard time sneaking out to meet her dad, right, which was a win for everyone....

Except Sammi was starting to think she’d made a mistake. A big one.

Half an hour ago Ingrid and Suzanne had come by with Jasmine between them and Twyla holding Dane’s and Dirk’s hands, and Elsa had been with them and they were talking about a car. A car for the moms with little kids, and Jasmine, who was ready to pop. So that was what, three adults and three kids, which was a full car right there.

And no one said anything about Cass and Ruthie. Which meant they weren’t getting a ride, even though they had every bit as much of a right as the others—or they would have, anyway, if Sammi hadn’t started a rumor that might not even be all the way true.

And that still wasn’t any big deal because Sammi knew, deep down inside, that come morning it was going to be basically everyone for themselves. Sure, there’d be a lot of talk about sticking together, and the smartest people
would
figure out ways to stay in groups, while it suited them, but in the end they’d all have to fend for themselves. Everyone would be so focused on saving their own asses there wouldn’t be much left over for taking care of anyone else. People would get left, abandoned. Discarded. But at least in that regard, Cass was in better shape than most. Despite her drinking thing she was strong and fit and brave and healthy.

But then there was Ruthie…

Ruthie wasn’t like other little kids. She spooked kind of easy, and then she went quiet, really quiet, like she thought if she played invisible the problem would go away. In the community center earlier tonight, when Cass left to help her dad, Ruthie wrapped her arms so tight around Sammi’s neck that she was almost strangling her. She put her little face against Sammi’s and made a tiny little whimpering sound. Ruthie was not strong, not the way you had to be to get through what lay ahead. And she was only three.
Three.

What if the thing that Sammi had done had condemned both of them? What if it was her fault that they wouldn’t get to ride tomorrow, safe inside a car, protected by all that steel and—as long as the gas held out—able to outrun the Beaters?