Rebirth (11 page)

“No, never this far, anyway. He goes straight down 161, but while he’s down there he takes a drive around the area a bit, checks out where they have people stationed. Joe’s good, Cass…he won’t tell me what he was in Santa Rita for, and I don’t want to know, but he’s smart and he’s loyal. In fact, this is his Jeep.”

Cass thought about Joe, a quiet, soft-spoken man with dark eyes and dark skin whose racial makeup was difficult to fathom. Joe had been teaching Smoke obscure Chinese martial art techniques, and though he was not a large or powerful-looking man, Smoke swore Joe could take him down any day of the week. Mostly, the man kept to himself. Cass saw him drinking at Rocket’s sometimes, and once in a while he sat with Smoke for a round or two, rarely with anyone else.

“I didn’t know.”

Dor laughed without humor. “That’s the point, sweetheart. Got to pick someone discreet. I mean, he finds an issue, we get it taken care of. No one’s the wiser. We keep the roads into San Pedro cleared, we keep the Beaters relatively under control in the neighborhood, patrol it tight. And rumor gets around, the Box is the place to go for the good stuff. Joe makes sure it stays that way—get it?”

“So if there’s, I don’t know, a problem, a nest you overlooked…”

“Yeah, but it’s more than that. Joe looks out for anything that tells a story,” Dor said. “For instance. Lance and Nina? Came up here on that three-wheeler a while back?”

“What about them?” Cass tried to remember the few conversations they’d had, came up with nothing memorable. They’d traded the three-wheeler and the contents of Lance’s father’s gun cabinet and moved in.

“Told me about a bridge out a few miles out of San Pedro on the road into Tailorville. So I have Joe go and take a look. The bridge is out, yeah, just like they said. Now, that could be a problem for us. A perception problem, anyway.”

It took Cass a moment and then she got it. “Because that’s the only way into town. Anyone past there—”

“Sure as hell no one’s driving in or out, and haven’t for months. Place is dead. So Tailorville doesn’t exist anymore,” Dor confirmed. “Not in a way anyone wants to think about, anyway. So we have a little talk with Lance and Nina. Make it worth their while to keep quiet. And no one has to go to bed at night worried about a ghost town full of Beaters a couple miles up the road.”

Spin control, Cass thought, amazed that such a concept could reroot so quickly after the cataclysms. She looked back at Ruthie. Maybe spin was the enduring human trait, allowing survival.

“Let me go first, okay? Just give me a minute and then I’ll hook up the chains and we’ll get this hauled. Cheap Chinese tin cans, shouldn’t take long.”

Cass watched him walk away, pistol in one hand, the other on his belt. Cass had seen his blade before, a wicked curve-handled hunting knife with a gut hook that he kept in a worn leather sheath.

Ruthie, stirring in the backseat, made a soft smacking sound with her lips, a holdover from when she was a baby and used to wake hungry for her bottle. It was a habit Cass loved, to watch when Ruthie was deep asleep, her soft lips working at nothing. But then Ruthie moaned softly and Cass’s heart skipped in panic. In the gray morning light Ruthie’s face looked flushed and nearly translucent, her fine hair splayed against the rough fabric of the backseat. She writhed against the seat belt and moaned again and then as Cass reached for her, her eyes flew open and she looked at nothing and said,
“Hat.”

Cass licked her dry lips and settled her hand on Ruthie’s hot cheek, suddenly certain that Ruthie’s word was a warning, a portent of the worst and most terrifying sort. As soon as Ruthie spoke, it was over and she collapsed back against the seat and slipped immediately back into sleep, her face serene, her outburst forgotten. But now it was Cass whose skin was clammy with fear.

She had no idea what “hat” meant. But as she looked from Ruthie to Dor, twenty feet off, making his cautious way to the wreck, unafraid yet suddenly so vulnerable, Cass wanted to stop him. Something was wrong, and Ruthie knew.

She couldn’t leave Ruthie, defenseless and alone in the Jeep, could she?

But whatever threatened Dor, threatened them all.

Barely thinking about what she was doing, she threw open the door and stumbled out onto the pavement, screaming Dor’s name. He turned to her in surprise and seemed to freeze as a figure flashed between the smashed-up cars and careened and rolled. There was a shot, loud on the still morning air, and Dor lurched sideways and Cass was sure he was hit until he rolled on the ground and came up in a crouch and returned fire, his aim steady and sure, and the figure jerked and seemed to rise up into the air before falling down sprawled at the edge of the wreck, his flung forearm spasming and fingers quivering.

Someone was yelling her name and Cass was running to Dor but he was doing an awkward crab-walk backward and he grabbed her hand and pulled her down with him and she thought
what if he’s hit what if he’s going to die
and
oh God he’s going to leave me and Ruthie alone
and the panic in her heart was enough to move her to action.

She stood and seized his arm and tried to drag him to his feet, but he was stronger and he pulled her down on top of him and she felt her knee connect with his gut and she heard the sound he made. And still he clutched her and rolled on top of her and pushed her to the ground while he stood and she thought in despair
oh god don’t let him die now let me go I have to help Ruthie
but he was screaming in her ear and she tried to understand but he was screaming, screaming—

“Stay here! I’ll get her!”

When she finally understood, she stopped resisting and he was up and sprinting back toward the wreck in seconds.
No, no,
she thought,
that one might not be the only one, that one lying still with its skull split on the pavement.
And then she realized that’s why he’d run, and she ran after him, because if he failed then there was no hope for any of them.

Cass yanked at her gun and it was stuck in its holster, why hadn’t she practiced this, she’d gone with Smoke to shoot a dozen times but she never thought it would be like this, her hands slick and shaking. But she had to do better she had to do this for Ruthie and then the gun was out, it was in her hand. There were only yards between her and the broken glass the twisted metal of the wreck, and her heart pumped with adrenaline and her legs flew and even so, somehow she had time to consider the cabin, not much of a cabin but someone’s shelter nonetheless because—

Look there, from the chimney, a thin wisp of smoke drifted out

—
they lived here, these squatters who lay in wait and watched for travelers coming down the road, they burrowed rodentlike into the wreck and came out only to kill and take their spoils. All of this flashed through Cass’s mind as she ran, but Dor was already ducking behind the smashed sedan as there rose up the second, the one Ruthie foresaw, the one with a watch cap pulled low over a knobby head, ears protruding sharp smirk smirking he was wearing a red cap a red
hat
on his hateful greedy head and he sighted down the barrel and lined up the shot he thought he had time for, the anticipation brought him pleasure that vibrated through his trigger finger you could see the way he loved the gun loved the bullet but in the end he didn’t get to shoot because Cass squeezed first and the bullet glanced off his arm and his shot went wild and then Dor stepped up and finished him off.

13

CASS HUDDLED IN THE BACKSEAT TREMBLING and shaking, Ruthie unbuckled and gathered in her arms. She wished the Jeep had locks and a roof and shatterproof glass. She wished it was made of steel, of concrete. She wished they had never come. She wished they were back in the Box, in their bed, watching the sky slowly turn blue up above them through the window flaps and who fucking cared about the rest.

Ruthie rubbed her face against Cass’s shirt. Her skin was hot from sleep despite the chill of the morning air, and then she looked up with a question in her eyes. And Cass realized that once again it was not her place to wish but instead to make everything as right as she could.

“We just had to stop here for a minute, sweet pea,” she said, shifting Ruthie in her arms so that she could not see the wreck in the road ahead. Or the corpse with the outflung broken bloody arm, or the other body, with a hat, slumped over the hood of a car as though trying to embrace it. “Dor went inside to get something and he’ll be back in a minute and then we’ll get going again.”

She looked carefully at the roadside, the soft rocky shoulder, the kaysev drifts and the fallen limbs and branches. The Jeep was made for off-roading; a few stones or branches shouldn’t jeopardize its axles or undercarriage or gas tank. They could survive being shaken up. Now she was grateful they’d taken this worn and uncomfortable vehicle and vowed not to mind the scratchy seat, the blowing wind and noise.

Ruthie sat up in her lap and stretched to see past Cass’s shoulder, searching for Dor. Cass looked, too. The cabin was silent and foreboding, its porch railing listing and shattered, one window boarded with scrap wood. A pair of kitchen chairs sat on the uneven porch floor and it was all too easy to imagine the dead men sitting there waiting, watching, perhaps with binoculars to see down the relatively unobstructed stretch of road on which they’d approached. They’d been traveling down mountain, and the pines at this elevation were thin and sparse, and even before they died they would have provided little shade.

On the porch at the foot of the chairs were empty bottles, five or six of them, and Cass wondered if they were among the spoils of the last party to be trapped here. The men must have been thrilled to see the Jeep; there were so few vehicles on the road anymore. From time to time there was a motorcycle, a bicycle—or something more rugged, like Lance and Nina’s ATV. But full-on cars must have been rare indeed.

There—beyond the cabin, partially covered with a screen of tree limbs—she saw the junkyard of cars driven off the road and abandoned. Too many would have raised suspicion, would make a driver wonder what could have happened for so many to give up hope right here. The pile extended back several hundred feet, vehicles parked haphazardly. Lazily. It wouldn’t have been that hard to drive them farther into the woods, a half a mile past the cabin, even a quarter mile, find a swale or a dip in the earth and leave them to rust and molder there for mice to nest in and birds to perch on and snakes to slither under.

Wait. A sound. A crack—oh God, another—were they loud enough to be gunshots? But what else could they be? But they didn’t exactly sound right, not like the shooting practice that took place a couple mornings a week down near the Box, didn’t sound—
sharp
enough, somehow, they were muffled, there was no echo. But what if Dor was hit? What if someone had been waiting for him and shot him—but if they were going to kill him wouldn’t they have done it right away, the minute he came in the house? They could have been watching from the window, watching him walk toward the house, waiting for him on the other side of the door…

Cass peered anxiously at Ruthie’s face, but her daughter’s expression showed only puzzlement, maybe boredom, or sleepiness perhaps. She yawned and rested her face against Cass’s chest and Cass thought,
That’s it then, I can’t leave her here alone to check it out,
and she wondered if she should just get in the front seat and turn the key in the ignition and
go.
Cass’s heart was pounding so hard with fear that she was amazed Ruthie didn’t mind. Would Ruthie fuss if Cass buckled her in the backseat and got out, even for a second? But what if Dor wasn’t hit, what if he had done the shooting, or if he’d shot someone who shot him back—maybe he was hurt, right now, lying on the floor in agony—or maybe he wasn’t even hurt that badly but he needed her help to get back out. She listened, as hard as she could, but there was nothing, just the skittering of a dead leaf now and then across the pavement.

Cass waited in an agony of indecision. She should settle Ruthie in and just make a run for it, thirty seconds tops, long enough to just see what had happened, nothing more. She didn’t owe Dor anything beyond that, she reminded herself—he’d said as much, and he wouldn’t want her to risk their safety if he was down. If he was
dead
—she made herself think the word.

But when she finally convinced herself to go, and tried to lift Ruthie off her lap, Ruthie wrapped her arms tight around Cass’s neck and held on.

“Don’t go,” she whispered against Cass’s skin, so softly Cass almost didn’t hear it.

She froze. She settled Ruthie back onto her lap—slowly, carefully. She waited, but her daughter did not speak again. They held each other, and the leaves skittered and the wispy smoke curled out of the chimney and the dead men lay in their sticky puddles of blood. And Cass wondered if she had imagined her little girl’s voice.

After what seemed like a long time, a figure came out onto the porch, and terror seized Cass as she realized she could not make it to the driver’s seat in time now and she wondered if her indecision would be their death. But it was only Dor. He had a duffel bag in one hand, a plastic sack in the other, and as he approached the Jeep he gave Cass the skeleton of a smile.

He set the duffel in the back with the other things and got in the driver’s side and set the plastic sack on the console between the seats and then he sat for a moment without speaking, staring forward and breathing deep. Ruthie relaxed, releasing Cass from the viselike embrace. Cass readjusted Ruthie’s seat belt and kissed her soft cheek, her fingers shaking as they traced the curve of her daughter’s cheek.

Cass got out of the backseat, shut the door gently and opened the passenger door, feeling almost unbearably vulnerable outside the car. She could never be fearless when Ruthie was only a few feet away—but once she was inside again, she saw how shaken Dor looked. Cass knew then that the sounds were indeed gunshots, and that he had probably killed someone, maybe two people, and she didn’t know how it felt to kill and wondered if she should offer comfort, if that was her role now, as well…but surely Dor had killed many more before and took his comfort from his own, unknowable sources. Her efforts would be awkward and unwelcome. Cass was a mother and she knew everything there was to know about her daughter, but she was not easy with other people. She observed from a distance, she read their emotions and divined their stories, but it was a strange truth that the ones she wanted most to know sometimes remained mysterious and remote.