Horizon (03) (5 page)

Chapter 9

ON NIGHTS WHEN she stayed over, it was Sammi’s habit to slip out before the rest of the Wayward Girls were awake. It wasn’t that she wasn’t welcome there. She came to the House almost every day, since Red and Zihna let all the older kids hang out whenever they wanted. Sammi imagined that she could stay over whenever she wanted, that she could show up anytime, no matter the hour. The front door wasn’t locked. Doors in New Eden weren’t locked. Well, except for the storage sheds and the pharmacy cabinet, a fact confirmed by Colton when he had gone to the hospital—nothing more than a two-room guesthouse behind the community center—to get a cut on his ankle cleaned.

The reason Sammi sneaked in on her late-night visits, and left early in the mornings, had nothing to do with whether she was welcome in this place, but with her dad. She worried about him. She used to, anyway. The way he always held on to her a little too long with his goodbye morning hugs, the way he was always checking in with her—at meals, after dinner at the community center, when she went to North Island with her friends, hell, even when she was with Valerie. It wasn’t
exactly
loneliness, and Sammi got that it was his
job
to worry about her, and the fact that they’d been separated for so long, all the terrible things that had happened, her mom’s death and everyone else’s—so yeah, it was natural that he’d want to keep an eye out for her. But with her dad it was something more. It was like his fear for her made him weak and she had to be the one to constantly remind him that he was strong, and she couldn’t let him worry too much or the weakness would grow.

And that was why she always made sure to be home, in their crappy little trailer, by the time he got up. It wasn’t hard to do, she knew her dad had trouble sleeping and often spent the middle of the night tossing and turning, but even on those nights—
especially
on those nights—the sleep that finally found him at dawn was deep.

But all of that was different now, Sammi reminded herself angrily.

She was sitting on the floor of Sage and Kyra’s bedroom for the second morning in a row. The borrowed blankets were neatly folded with the pillow centered on top, tucked under Kyra’s bed, because there was too much shit under Sage’s. If—when—Sammi asked Red and Zihna if she could move in for good, she would have to ask for her own room. She loved her friends, and the mess didn’t bother her when she was just visiting, but she needed a place where she could have her things the way she liked them, everything in its place, arranged exactly the same every single day.

She had that now, she remembered with an unwelcome hollowness. Her dad let her do anything she wanted to the trailer’s only bedroom, and didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow when she took to dusting every single day. Her things—a stone and a necklace that been gifts from Jed, a plastic barrette that had belonged to her mother and was missing a couple of teeth, her journal, a striped coffee cup holding sharpened pencils, the small pocketknife Colton had given her just last month—each had a specific place and Sammi checked them all the time, making sure they were centered on the shelves. She had begged to use the jerry-rigged hand vac, and Dana had finally relented and agreed to let her borrow it once a week, and she went over the matted beige carpet one small row at a time, walking all the way down to the shore to empty the debris into the swirling water of the river.

All of that was hers, hers alone, and all of it was good. She would give that up by moving here. Even if they let her have her own room, she would be too embarrassed to do the same things here. Besides, she would have to share everything, and even though she had no problem sharing her clothes and her food and her books, even her treasured shampoo and conditioner and lotion and cleanser—she could not bear the thought of her special things disappearing.

The stone, the necklace, the barrette were all she had left of Jed and her mom.

Too bad she wasn’t more like her dad, Sammi thought bitterly. He’d started dating within a month of leaving her mom, as if their twenty years together hadn’t even happened. One woman after another—Pilates instructors and pharmaceutical reps and even, for a few strange weeks, Sammi’s old Spanish teacher.

Her father wasn’t the type to let things get to him. She ought to ask him how he did it. Right after she asked him if it was hotter to mess around with someone who’d been a Beater and recovered. Fucking Cass. They said people like that had higher body temperatures and faster heartbeats than ordinary people, that they could heal from whatever injuries—scratches, bite marks, hickeys?—they got. Fucking Cass.

Sammi kicked at exposed roots as she took the long way back home. The path wound along the edge of the river, disappearing in hummocks of reeds and reemerging only to dip down to the water and back up the banks. Hardly anyone came this way, and Sammi was in no mood to run into other people before she’d had a chance to change clothes and wash her face. She just wanted to spend a few minutes in the welcome order of her room. Touch the stone and the necklace and the barrette, in order, twice. Once to make sure and once for luck.

An exhalation followed by a curse: Sammi looked up the banks and saw an uncertain figure struggling through thick overgrowth, grabbing handfuls of grass and weeds to keep from slipping down the slope on her ass. Sammi resigned herself to having to share this moment that she would have so much preferred to keep to herself.

And then she saw who it was, the thick dark hair grazing the woman’s shoulders, the grosgrain headband. Valerie, with her bag slung over her shoulder, the canvas printed with some art-museum logo—Valerie the do-gooder, supporting the arts even after all the art museums had been ransacked and abandoned.

“Sammi—oh, Sammi, thank God,” she called down, pushing at a stalk that crossed her path. “I’ve been looking everywhere.”

Sammi looked past Valerie toward the community center, through wisps of mist and stumpy dead trees, to the yard. She had been so deep in thought that she hadn’t noticed the crowd forming there, people gathering in little groups, huddling in the cold.

“How come?” Sammi asked irritably. Whatever the new crisis was, she wasn’t in the mood to be a part of it.

Valerie slid the last few feet, stumbling and almost falling. “There was a crowd of Beaters this morning, on the west shore. Your dad saw them when he headed out this morning with Nathan and he’s been looking everywhere for you.”

“Not everywhere,” Sammi mumbled, even as Valerie’s words—
a crowd of them
—sank in.

“What’s that, honey?” Valerie’s hand—Sammi couldn’t help focusing on her nails, perfectly oval and clean—settled on her shoulder, and Sammi resisted shrugging it off.

“I just said, I’m surprised Dad didn’t find me, I would think Kyra and Sage’s room wouldn’t be all that hard to find.”

“But we did look there, first thing!”

“Well—I was there.” Sammi made a halfhearted effort to keep the defiance out of her voice, but hadn’t she and her dad talked about it—she’d asked him point-blank,
So Valerie’s, like, my new stepmom now?
This was weeks ago, when Valerie had returned a stack of Sammi’s clothes, mended and pressed and smelling, somehow, faintly of lavender.

No one can replace your mom,
he had replied, as if he knew that Sammi was remembering her mom doing laundry back in their house in the mountains, singing while she folded clothes in the sunny laundry room.

Valerie was better at laundry—her mom tended to mix red things in with the whites, turning everything pink—and somehow that just made it all the worse.

“But Zihna said she hadn’t seen you,” Valerie said, twisting her hands together.

“So what’s the big deal anyway? There’s Beaters on the shore every day.”

“Oh, Sammi…you don’t understand. It was more than there’ve ever been before. Steve said he counted more than thirty before Glynnis and John started shooting.”

“Thirty?”
Sammi was taken aback.
A crowd…
by that she thought they meant eight or ten. The most that anyone had ever seen before was, like, nine, and that was two separate groups, one that came from the direction of Oakton and the other from straight across the field, dragging what turned out to be a split and rotting garden hose behind them. But thirty…Sammi had never heard of that many being in one place at one time, though she probably could have
imagined
it in the denser cities’ ruins. “Where did they come from?”

“No one knows. It was so early…no one saw them coming. Glynnis and John managed to kill eight of them, and the rest ran. Nathan took off after them in the car, and he and Steve killed another seven. They’d wanted to see which direction they came from, but the Beaters just—they just panicked, I guess like they would, and ran in every direction.”

“Dad didn’t go with Nathan, did he?”

“Of course not,” Valerie said, eyes widening. “He hasn’t done anything but look for you since they were spotted. He’s down on Garden Island now, going row by row.”

Guilt made Sammi blush. She should have known—but her dad loved going out with Nathan, and she could picture it—Nathan white-knuckle driving, her dad half out the window with that big Glock of his, like it was some kind of jackass safari.

Her dad was such an idiot. Acting like it was all some sort of game, the way he went out driving around, looking for gas, blowing up cars. And he had the nerve to accuse
her
of being irresponsible.

Her irritation was back in a flash. “Well, I guess you can tell him I’m fine,” she said, pushing past Valerie, taking the incline nimbly.
Sucks to be old,
she resisted saying, knowing Valerie would struggle even more getting back up the bank than coming down—and knowing she was a real bitch for not staying and helping, especially since Valerie had devoted her morning to searching for her. “I’m gonna head back to the trailer and take a nap.”

“But, Sammi—”

“Look, I’ll talk to you later, okay? We were up late, I’m wrecked.” Sammi yawned and didn’t bother to cover her mouth.

“No, what I wanted to say…look, they found blueleaf. They don’t think anyone ate it, the plants were young, but there’s an alert.” Her worried face sagged. “There’s a buddy-up, right after breakfast.”

As if on cue, the breakfast bell chimed, two soulful tones carried on the mist. Sammi loved that bell possibly more than anything else about New Eden, the way it sounded like it had once hung in a beautiful old cathedral, the way it made the air still and silent and echo-y for a few seconds after it stopped ringing.

“Fuck…”

“I know they’re a pain,” Valerie said, not even commenting on Sammi’s language, which made Sammi want to say it again, or worse. Sometimes she wondered what it would take to get a reaction out of Valerie. Of course the woman was only nice to her because she was dating her dad—if she wasn’t, she would have snapped a long time ago, given Sammi the lecture she probably deserved. Sammi took advantage of her, but honestly, how could she not? How could anyone stand Valerie’s fakey niceness? “We could go together, though…if you want. I mean, once we get there, I’d—”

“You’re with Mrs. Kristobal,” Sammi interrupted. “Right?”

Valerie nodded. “But it won’t take long. You and Cindy can finish up quick and we can eat together. Your dad’ll come back, I’m sure of it—we agreed he’d come back every half hour to check in. Oh, Sammi, he’ll be so glad to see you. He’ll be so incredibly relieved. Maybe, just to make him feel better, you and I could try to stay away from the banks until we get this all sorted out. Keep to the middle of the island, with everyone else. What do you think—shall we make a pact?”

Valerie was trying so hard to give her a brave smile that Sammi gave up and held out her hand to help her scramble up the muddy bank. Valerie took it gratefully, blinking against the sun, which had risen high enough in the sky to warm their faces.

“Good idea,” Sammi muttered, wondering what Valerie would have to say if she knew that not even twelve hours ago her dad had been out on the dock, practically in the water as he buried his face in Cass Dollar’s tits.

Chapter 10

CASS KNEW IT was no accident that breakfast consisted solely of day-old pone, a thick bread made in skillets over the fire from a kaysev-flour batter sizzled in rabbit fat. No fresh kaysev would be served until it had all been checked—in the daylight—a couple more times. This was mere paranoia—the odds of finding more blueleaf were incredibly low. Only the passage of time would get everyone comfortable again, would lull them back into a state of calm.

After most had eaten and before anyone could leave, Dana got up on the porch of the community center and clapped his hands for quiet. Buddy-ups always began this way, with Dana listing the early signs of the disease in his droning voice: the fever, often accompanied by a darkening of the skin and a sheen of perspiration; the dizziness that was traced with euphoria; the sensitivity to light; and the disorientation. He would go on to remind everyone that the old and young were especially vulnerable, things everyone already knew, and then he would lead them in the buddying.

Today, Cass felt people stealing glances at her—with apprehension, judgment, doubt?—and quickly looking away as they found their partners and lined up. Cass stayed rooted to the spot. She knew that Karen would come to her. She was efficient that way, one of Collette’s best volunteers, a spry sixty-plus woman who liked to say she was a “doer.”

There was good-natured grumbling that the vigilance committee, headed by Dana and Neal, had made a special effort to create as many odd couples as they could, putting people together who didn’t ordinarily seek each other out, who didn’t especially like each other. No one said it, but Cass guessed that everyone believed the same thing—that the vigilance committee figured you’d be more likely to turn in a suspicious case if you didn’t like them that much in the first place. Much lip service was given to the promise that “potentials,” as they called the symptomatic, would be treated very well, escorted to the comfortable house that had been set aside for just that purpose. The house was outfitted with magazines and books and canned food and even soda. The windows had been altered to raise only a few inches—enough to slide in a plate of food or a cup of water, but not enough for anyone to crawl out of.

The house, of course, was locked from the outside. Only Dana and two other council members had keys.

The quarantine house had apparently been used twice before, both false alarms. It wasn’t that New Eden hadn’t lost citizens to the Beaters—it had, more than a dozen—but in every case it had been from attacks on the mainland, and those unfortunates had either been dragged away to their fates or mercifully shot by the citizens.

One of the false positives was Gordon Franche, who now kept to himself. People said that the experience of being locked in the house, waiting to see if he was infected, had caused him to lose his mind. His illness had just been a virus, evidently, because after six days he was let out and welcomed back, but he withdrew from all social events and mostly spent his days reading quietly now.

The other one, a woman, had died soon after, drowning in the shallow waters off the mud beach up at the north end of the island. Supposedly, she had been an excellent swimmer. No one talked about her anymore.

“
There
you are,” Karen said behind her, and Cass fixed a smile in place before she turned around to greet her. They lined up with the others, in two rows before the porch, and stood facing each other, shivering a little in the shadow cast by the building.

“Temperature,” Dana called, and everyone put the back of their hand to their partner’s forehead, like thirty-five concerned mothers checking on sneezing toddlers.

“Eyes,” he said after a while, though by then most people had already checked. It was disconcerting; Cass realized the first time she did this exercise that in reality she rarely actually looked directly into people’s eyes, focusing instead somewhere around their mouths, watching their lips move as they spoke. Dor, of course, was the exception, like Smoke and Ruthie, all of whose eyes she knew like the familiar rooms of a house in which she’d lived forever. Perhaps, she thought, the feeling was a self-protective fear that eye contact might alert people to the bright green of her own irises. It was something she preferred not to think about.

Karen’s eyes were an unremarkable brown, and they were nested in wrinkles, the upper lids drooping and reddened, the lashes thin and pale. But her pupils were a healthy normal size.

Cass was about to make some pleasant, harmless comment, beating Karen to the punch for once—the importance of covering her ass socially was not lost on her—and other pairs of partners were breaking up and returning to the tables or walking off to start their workdays, when Milt Secco surprised everyone by walking up onto the porch and joining Dana. His face was pinched, and he leaned in close to speak. But Cass was close enough to hear him say, “A word, if I might, Dana—”

And she was far from the only one who turned to look at Dana’s partner, who stood frightened and lost-looking, alone at the edge of the yard.

It was Phillip.