Horizon (03) (21 page)

And then Tom saw the things. Four of them, bursting around the corner, running like a bunch of drunks on wobbly legs, grabbing at the air and making gobbling sounds—headed straight for Cassie.

Then he ran, too. Down the hall, the stairs, stumbling and slamming into the wall of the stairwell but he didn’t care. He got to the bottom and—unbelievably—the door jammed.

Tom heaved and kicked and when he realized there was no way he was getting through he ran back up to the second floor and down the hall to the front apartment. He yanked up the window roughly and crawled out onto the ledge and dropped, aiming for a hedge, feeling the dead branches scrape his flesh as he landed and rolled, and then he was on his feet and running and just in time to see the things dragging his beautiful girl away, holding on to her legs and arms.

Tom didn’t hesitate for a second but he knew he had to be careful, had to be craftier than they were because he’d heard tales of what they could do, and he would be outnumbered and outmuscled if they turned on him. He didn’t much care if they ripped him to shreds, but he had to get to Cassie first, had to get her away from them before they bit and infected her.

It wasn’t that hard to keep up with them, racing along dusty backyards, catching glimpses of them loping down the street, dragging his poor little girl along the road, swinging her from their crabbed hands. She’d gone limp, and he hoped and prayed she’d gotten knocked out somehow, because he couldn’t imagine anything more terrifying than to be carried by these monsters and know there was no one there to help you and no one around to care about your fate.

But that’s what he’d always done, wasn’t it? Hadn’t Tom left her behind half a dozen times before, heading down the driveway when she ran out after him, clutching his hand with her little ones, holding on to the car door when he started the engine, bursting into tears as he drove away? He’d always promised to be back again—
“Soon, you won’t even notice I’m gone”
—but somewhere on the inside, he’d known that the promises were a lie. There was always a new town, a new gig, a riff he wanted to try or a song he wanted to cover, or a woman with long eyelashes and satiny shoulders. And the road—there was always the road, calling to him, seducing him, making silvery promises that he couldn’t resist.

Tom ran faster, sickened by his many failures. He’d trade his own future, his own life, to give Cassie another chance.

The monstrous things turned onto a small alley and headed for a shed, a nice one someone had built the right way, timber construction over a poured foundation. One of the barn-style doors had come off its hinges and was leaning against the building, letting light into the small building. It was a mess, garden tools and a ride-on mower and cans of paint strewn everywhere. In the center was a thick mound of rags, and Tom understood that this was their home, that they had brought his daughter here to eat her.

Now he didn’t worry about staying hidden. He ran into the open like he was on fire, ignoring the burning in his lungs, the pain in his knees. He got there as they threw her facedown onto the nest and fell upon her. He saw them pin her down with their knees, watched them rip the clothes from her back. They were screaming nonsense syllables now, something that sounded like “mam-mam-mam-mam” and he thought he might vomit when he saw that one of them was actually
drooling,
a long string of saliva falling from its mouth.

That was the one that Tom tried to pull off first, but it only lashed at him with surprising strength before returning to the exposed flesh of his daughter’s back. Red was flung back against the wall of the shed, hitting his head on a bare stud, knocking over a bottle of coolant that hit the floor and burst open, pink liquid seeping everywhere, a sharp note in the nauseating smell of the nest.

Frantically, Red looked for a weapon. He heard his daughter moan and saw the things bite into her, tearing open her skin, rich red blood pouring from the wounds.

Later, he would wonder why it didn’t occur to him then that she was lost—that she was doomed to the disease in those seconds, infected like the rest of them. But he was frenzied in his purpose, determined to stop them at the cost of anything: his life, the world, the universe, anything at all.

His hand fell on the handle of an axe.

Tom swung the axe up and over his head before he was even fully aware of it. Its weight as familiar as the boots on his feet. Tom had been raised high in the Sierras where it took two cords of firewood just to get through a single winter, and as the only son of a working man he’d split more than his share of good dry mountain pine, the scent of the sap and the seasoned wood coming back to him now in a rush as he brought the axe blade crashing down onto the neck of the Beater who’d shoved him, cleaving his head off and burying the blade into the floor inches from his daughter’s hip.

He took a little more care against the second one, because he was for damn sure not going to hurt so much as a hair of his daughter, and he sank the blade through its shoulders, severing the spine and lodging the axe so that it took some effort to pull it back out.

Only two of the things remained now, and they looked at him curiously. They were covered now with the blood of their companions, Cassie unconscious beneath them. One crawled toward him, right over the body of his daughter, and for that affront earned itself a blow from the side, the axe head hitting with such force that the skull cracked and splintered like an Easter egg.

That left the last one, and it glared at Tom with its mouth wide open, bellowing in rage and excitement. Tom saw with disgust that it had bitten off its own tongue, leaving a ragged lump of meat bobbing in its mouth. It sprang at Red, knocking him down, the axe falling from his hands. The thing was about his size and weight, but as it threw itself on top of him and knocked the breath from his chest, screaming one last time in triumph before lowering its blood-spattered, scabbed and mangled face to feed on him, Tom realized that he was going to die here, in this shed, covered with the blood of the monsters that the earth had spawned, and his daughter would die and would never even know that he died for her.

That realization twisted him savagely, jerking him back. He put everything he had—every synapse, every nerve ending, every muscle and thought—into one last heave and the monster toppled, its face hitting the floor, and even though it recovered immediately and twisted like an eel to grab him again at the ankle, Red had found the handle of the axe and he was just a little bit faster, a little bit wilier and a hell of a fucking lot more determined than some mindless feeder, and it was an awkward blow, that last one, without the benefit of a good windup or gravity on his side, and when the blade crashed down it didn’t finish the thing off entirely.

So when Tom used the last of his strength to pick up his daughter and carry her from that hell place, the inhuman mass watched from the floor, its neck broken and bleeding, its eyes blinking and fluttering, and though its cries weakened and its body twitched, it was still scrabbling with its broken-nailed fingers to reach her.

That night, Tom didn’t get very far. He found shelter in a house a few blocks away. He dragged a dresser in front of the front door and ran the taps dry, collecting the water in every pot in the kitchen as the sun slipped down and the light bled away into night. He bathed his poor daughter, so gently, laying her out on a rug in the bathroom, letting the water run onto the floor, where it pooled in the tiled corners. He gently squeezed the water from what was left of her hair, and more water seeped into the cracks. Who was going to care if it ruined the walls below? Her wounds were horrible, entire strips of her flesh missing, muscle and sinew and even bone exposed, but somehow the bleeding had slowed and he was able to bandage her roughly with sheet strips torn from one of the beds and supplies he found in the linen closet.

If she died that night, it would not be for lack of effort on his part.

When he’d wrapped her as well as he could, finding some soft knit pants, a sweater, socks in a closet, he placed her tenderly on the bed in the master bedroom and arranged the blankets so that they would not weigh on her wounds. Still she remained unconscious, her eyelids twitching and small mumbled syllables escaping her from time to time. He kissed her forehead, her hair, her fingers, and then he gently closed the door to the bedroom and sat down in the hall outside, a knife from the kitchen in his hands and several more on the carpet at his side, and as he waited for the long night to pass he prayed for God to understand that he had done his best and would do his best again and again, as long as He demanded it.

Chapter 32

CASS BARELY REMEMBERED to keep breathing while her father told his story. He’d been there. He’d been watching—keeping vigil, really—while she and Ruthie played outside in the sunshine.

How many times had she berated herself for her foolish choice? She knew better than to risk venturing outside the walls of the library. And for such a poor trade: she’d exchanged their safety for dandelions, when surely she could have found Ruthie a dandelion growing in the sheltered courtyard; for the same breeze that blew through the screens in the conference room; for a chance for a few moments of alone time with her baby girl, when she was dooming them both to a solitary death.

Cass had replayed those moments outside a thousand times in her mind. She’d opened the library’s heavy metal door, giving the frowning door guard a sunny grin—no one was forbidden from coming and going, at least not back then—and let Ruthie scoot ahead of her out into the bright sunshine of a spring day. She’d promised Ruthie that she would show her the paving brick that had her name on it, the one bought by her mother and stepfather during the library’s fundraising campaign the prior year, before anyone realized that the world was about to end.

Ruthie had skipped and sung, clapped her hands in delight at the tiny yellow buttons of dandelions growing among the kaysev. She’d picked a handful, marveling at the stems’ bitter milky juice, and Cass had been so busy being grateful for the moment that she never saw the Beaters until it was too late.

But her father had been watching over them. He’d set aside his own safety for them, and the novelty of that knowledge was warm and curious, unfurling slowly inside her mind. He’d cared about her, enough to search for her, enough to fight for her. And as for not being able to gather the courage to come straight to her—well. Cass was certainly not one to judge. Shame had prompted a thousand of her own missteps and mistakes, and if things might have been different if her father had knocked on the door of the library before Cass ventured out that day, well, she had learned that you could never rewrite history, that Fate would always prevail.

She had not winced and she had not looked away when her father described the carnage in the shed: she was trying too hard to remember. But, nothing. She had no memory of the things carrying her to the shed, no memory of their teeth tearing at her flesh, no memory of the axe and the blood and the screaming and her father lifting her, cradling her, rescuing her. The bath…there was something there, a faint shadowy flicker, a notion of floating, of water sluicing away her blood, cool and healing, making her weightless. Maybe it was nothing but a sense memory of unconsciousness, but Cass wanted to believe she could remember something good. She’d seen Red’s gentle way with Ruthie and the other kids; surely he’d been just as gentle with her.

Already she was intoxicated with the notion that he cared for her. That her father, disappeared for so long, loved her. She’d despised him for so long, disguising the pain of his abandonment in stubborn fury, but all of that was slipping away as he talked. She knew it was supposed to take a long time; she expected to take a lifetime to forgive him, as so many of the people at the A.A. meetings made clear, early hurts were often permanent.

But Aftertime, a lifetime was a luxury that could not be counted on. If she ever hoped to forgive, she had to start now. If she hoped to absorb the fact that she had been loved, she had to seize it and hold fast.

She wanted her father to keep talking, to keep spinning this tale whose words felt like silken strands weaving themselves into a shield that would protect her, even—especially—from her own self-contempt. Only…there was more to the story. A lot more. Not least of it the fact that when she woke, she was alone.

“So I never woke up?”

“No, not that night, and not for a long time after.”

Cass was silent, thinking about her father keeping sentry outside the room. She wanted to know if he had the beard, then, or if he was clean-shaven, the way she remembered him. She knew it didn’t matter, and she wondered anyway.

“What did you do in the morning?” she asked instead.

Tom shrugged. “There was a car in the garage, an old Honda Civic, beat to hell. My guess is it was a kid’s car or a second car or something. Keys on a rack by the door, believe it or not. It couldn’t have been much easier. I got you laid out in the backseat, took everything I could from the house, medicine and food and whatnot, clothes. Pulled up the garage door and off we went. Kind of amazing, now that we’ve all heard the stories.”

Cass knew the stories he meant—by that time, there were roving bands of marauders at the edge of town who waited for cars to come by and then shot out the tires. They were after the gas, the things people carried—the sport. Later, you’d find these cars abandoned at the side of the road, often with corpses with holes in their heads draped over the seats, or on the ground, shot in the back when they tried to run away.

“So no one stopped you?”

“No. But it might have helped that I went all back roads. I knew enough to avoid any of the main roads, but mostly I thought I was avoiding the Beaters.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I guess I didn’t understand them very well. I’d a made a shitty anthropologist. I figured they’d stick to the main roads because it was easier or something…I was probably giving them too much credit.”

“Well, at least you were right about one thing. If you’d gone on the highway you probably wouldn’t have made it far.”

“Yeah. As it was, I just took farm roads and dirt roads. A lot of ’em I hadn’t been on since I was a kid, but it’s funny how that stuff stays with you.”

“Why did you go down mountain? As opposed to up?”

Red shrugged. “No good reason, I guess. I mean, if I’d had the balls I would have taken you back to the shelter, I guess. But I thought Ruthie was dead, and I figured you didn’t have long for the world.”

“You mean because I was infected.”

“Well, hell yeah. I thought there was no way you’d survive.”

“So why…” Cass’s breath caught in her throat and she took a minute to steady herself before trying again. “Why didn’t you just kill me?”

Red didn’t answer for a moment, but his eyes shone wetly in the darkness.

“I couldn’t,” he finally whispered.

Cass nodded. The strongest men—Smoke and Dor among them—had become killers in order to be merciful. The ones who couldn’t kill an infected person ended up bringing more misery for everyone.

But she wasn’t in a place to judge. She herself had walked away from a victim nearly senseless with shock and pain after the skin had been chewed from its body, unable to do what needed to be done, leaving the job for someone else.

“It’s just that it was
you,
” Red said. “Someone else…in the days that came after that, I did have to kill, twice. People who were infected. One asked me to. One…well, no sense dwelling on that now.

“Anyway, I got almost as far as the foothills but it took me all day. Kept having to go around wrecks and shit, even on the back roads. Saw a couple Beaters too, scared the crap outta me. So when it started to get late in the day I just picked out a farmhouse, one of those ones on cattle acreage, up on a rise. Drove up and moved us in.”

“That’s right near where I woke up,” Cass said haltingly. “The first thing I remember is lying in this field in clothes I didn’t remember, with all these half-healed cuts.”

But this could be good news. If she had woken close to the place where her father had taken her, then it stood to reason that she hadn’t had time to travel very far. And the less time had passed, the less distance she covered, the lower the chances that she’d encountered any humans.

Any
victims.

If she’d been alert and conscious long enough to escape from the farmhouse, then she had to have been practically recovered. She’d tired, obviously, and lain down to rest, spent a night perhaps, lying under the moon in a field not far from where her father was frantically trying to find her. But the next day she woke for real, and that was when her real memories started.

And there was one other thing, Cass realized with growing excitement. If she’d been recovering, the fever would have been driven from her body. And it only made sense that its effects on the brain had disappeared, as well.

Simply put, she wouldn’t have been hunting. Whatever caused her to leave the safety of the room where her father had kept her—hunger, thirst, boredom, restlessness—it wasn’t flesh lust.

She hadn’t consumed

For the first time since that day, Cass was sure that she hadn’t attacked and feasted, hadn’t doomed another innocent to the fever. The realization was dizzying, and she felt for a moment that she would faint; she clutched her father’s arm and a small exhalation escaped her, sounding almost like a sob.

“Goddamn,” Red said, misinterpreting. He wrapped his arm around her, comforting her in a way Cass had not been comforted in a very, very long time—not since she was his little girl. “It’s my fault. I didn’t have a way to lock the doors to that place from the outside. The day you disappeared, I was only planning to be gone an hour—I just went looking for more food. Hell, we could have survived on kaysev, but I hate that shit. And I wanted to feed you better.”

The tears Cass had been holding back spilled over. How to tell him what she was feeling—that she’d given up on being cherished like that. No man—not even Smoke, who’d loved her well and attentively—had made her feel as safe as she remembered feeling in her father’s arms.

But she felt suddenly shy. This was all too new, and she had to absorb it, process it before she could trust the feeling to last. She brushed the tears from her face, counting on the darkness to hide the gesture. “Kaysev’s the best thing you can eat,” she said lightly. “It’s good for you.”

“I never was good at knowing what was good for me.”

“So…you fed me? How’d you do that, weren’t you worried about getting infected?”

“Well, you were in and out, kind of. I know you don’t remember it, but you’d kind of wake up now and then, look around a little, say nonsense things. It reminded me of this one time when you were little, and you got a really high fever. I sat with you while your mom was at work. You were just a little jabberer, saying all kinds of crazy things.”

“You sang to me,” Cass said, suddenly remembering.

“Yeah, I guess I probably did.”

She had a thought. “Did you sing to me this time? I mean, in the farmhouse?”

Red laughed. “Honey, when I figured out you were getting better, I sang all the damn day long.”

“How long did that take?”

“Just a few days. At first—don’t get mad, Cassie honey, but I had you tied up. I figured I had to, you know?”

“I don’t blame you. I…” Cass hesitated, and then decided to take a chance, share at least some of her fear with him. “There’ve been a lot of times I wondered, you know, what I did. When I was sick. When I was…one of them.”

Red cursed and grabbed her shoulders, turning Cass toward him, hard. “Cassie…you were never one of them.
Never.
You didn’t do anything wrong, sweetheart. Not one thing.”

All the fear that Cass had stored up threatened to tumble out. She struggled to get herself under control and nearly succeeded, and then a sob escaped her for real this time, and her father pulled her close and hugged her hard, and let her cry.

“It’s just that I, I saw what I did to myself, I mean, it had to be me, on my arms, even my knees, and I thought, if I could do that then was I out hunting? Did I attack people, did I hurt them? Oh God, I was so scared…”

“But, Cassie, nothing bad happened. After a few days your fever broke and your eyes got normal again. I mean, the irises, anyway. They stayed bright, and that green, like they still are. So I wasn’t positive, at first, but man, I prayed like hell. Sometimes…aw, shit, I’ll go ahead and say it—sometimes maybe I thought I prayed you well. The deals I was putting out there, for God, if you only knew. I must have offered him my soul a dozen times over.” Red squeezed Cass even tighter, crushing her against him, but she didn’t care. “You let me feed you, almost like when you were a baby, and sometimes I’d catch you chewing on your arms, but you never came after me. Mostly you just slept a lot. Real restless, like you were having nightmares, so I sat in there with you.”

“And sang.”

“Yeah.”

“And when you ran out of food…”

“Yeah, so I left, and like I said I was going to come right back, but it took me a while to find a house that hadn’t been raided already, and when I finally got back…you were gone.”

“I don’t, I don’t remember it. The house, or leaving, or anything.”

“I went nuts. I looked for you for hours. I finally went up and down the road, used up the last of my gas, before I figured out you must have left the road, covered some serious ground.”

“I’m so sorry I put you through that…Dad.”

Red went still, hearing her say his name, and then he awkwardly patted her on the back. “It’s nothing, baby angel. Look at us, in this whole damn state of California we found each other again. If that ain’t the answer to my prayers, well, I don’t know what is.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“Because I’m a damn coward, is why. I just kept biding my time, and biding my time. Zihna tried to get me to say something a dozen times, but I was so scared I’d run you off, that if you knew who I was you wouldn’t want anything to do with me. And then when you…aw, honey, I don’t know how to say it, but you’ve got your share of troubles, and I didn’t want to make them worse. I’ve tangled with the bottle myself.”