Rebirth (12 page)

But still.

“What…?” she said, not knowing how to ask.

“They’d laid in quite a few supplies,” Dor said quietly. “Look, I didn’t want to bounce Ruthie around if we didn’t have to, but…hang on.”

He started the car and it crept forward slowly, over the edge of the road onto the dirt, bumping and lurching. Ruthie shut her eyes, her small body absorbing the turbulent ride, Cass steadying her with a hand pressing her against the seat. They passed the wreck and Cass saw how still the bodies were, a bug of some sort flitting around the one on the ground with interest.

Then there was a sound, a stirring of the air, and a large black shape flapped past her face, only inches away, clumsy and fast and tumbling in the air, and settled on the body with a fluttering of its enormous, ragged ebony wings. The sound it made was not what you would expect from such a huge creature, it was a throat-rasping high-pitched frantic cry that split the air around Cass and she threw her arms over the seat, reaching for Ruthie whose mouth was open in a silent scream but her eyes were still shut tight
thank God
she still had her eyes shut because the next thing that happened, as Cass pressed her hands to her daughter’s face and told her that
everything was going to be all right it was going to be just fine,
a second bird settled with a thrashing of feathers on the body of the hat-man on the car’s hood and began to tear at his flesh with its large hooked beak. Cass knew she should look away but she did not. She watched the birds’ frenzy, watched the body shudder and shake as it was molested and devoured, and then there were more, two more black flapping shapes flying in from places unknown and landing on the carcasses with joy and fury and hunger.

Soon the grisly scene was out of sight behind them. Cass kept watch out the back of the Jeep until they turned a curve in the road and the wreck disappeared and for a while she stared at the scrubby pine skeletons and red-dirt shoulders and crushed run-over pinecones in the road, all receding into the distance as Dor drove. Finally she realized she was pressing too hard on Ruthie’s face and immediately she turned the touch into a caress, and she said, “It’s all right now, Ruthie, you can open your eyes,” and it was a moment before Ruthie did, blinking in the sun. “It’s all right,” Cass repeated.

“Look in the bag. There’s a juice box,” Dor said, and Cass took the plastic bag from between the seats and there were not only juice boxes, but Fig Newtons. Opening the packages took a while, Cass inhaling the near-forgotten scent while her shaking fingers worked clumsily, and though her mouth watered she did not take anything for herself. Dor also refused. She broke the cookies one by one, giving Ruthie the sticky halves. She held the sharp-pointed straw to Ruthie’s lips and watch her drink and wondered if her daughter remembered drinking from such boxes Before, long ago, the juice dribbling down her inexpert mouth. She’d nearly mastered drinking from the straw right before the Family Services people came, her chubby hands holding the plasticized boxes with such care, her eyes widening with surprise every time the wiggling straw got away from her. Now she did fine, drinking deeply with an expression of wonder on her face. For months she’d had only the tea Cass made from her herb garden, and boiled and filtered water.

After a while, the cookies were gone and Cass cleaned Ruthie up as well as she could from the front seat and put the wrapper and empty box back in the plastic bag. It was heavy and she looked through the contents: half a dozen more packages of cookies, a large pouch of turkey jerky, several more juices. Two cans of beef broth and cans of corn, mushrooms and chili; pears and fruit cocktail and crushed pineapple.

“Wow,” she said quietly.

“Best stuff’s in back. Medicine, all kinds, I didn’t have time to look through it. Over the counter and prescriptions—probably twenty of those. They had it all in one place, made it easy for me.”

He was silent for a moment. “A couple of guns, too. They’re in the back. And ammo. I thought about taking the ones off those guys…”

Cass shivered. She was glad Dor had not touched the bodies again.

“What were those things?” she whispered.

“I’ve seen them before, just one other time. They’re…I guess they’re like vultures. Carrion birds. They feed on the dead.”

“I’ve never seen any bird like that.”

“No, I know. I mean a vulture’s large, bigger than most people think. But those…”

Cass thought about the great flapping wings, the lurching flight. There was nothing lovely about the birds. They looked damaged, malformed, sick—but they were also quick and determined and by the time the grisly scene had disappeared around the bend, the birds had managed to pierce and tear the bodies and their crowing beaks were covered in blood, testament to the strength of their jaws and talons.

“Where did you see one before?”

Dor looked indecisive, as though he wasn’t sure that telling her was a good idea. “Yesterday. In town…in a nest. Looked like a recent Beater kill.”

“Just one?”

“No, three. They must travel in flocks.”

“But what does it mean that they showed up now? All this time, all these months…”

Dor shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they’ve been here all along but we’re just in the migration path now. Maybe they’ve, I don’t know, evolved—but that takes centuries, yeah, hell, I don’t know. New species? Eat a Beater kill, get that shit in the bloodstream, there’s no telling what’ll happen.”

“Ruthie knew,” Cass said quietly. “Yesterday. When she was napping. She said—I mean she was still asleep, she was talking in her sleep and she said, ‘bird.’”

“I thought she didn’t talk.”

“She doesn’t.” Cass felt exasperation but it was as much for herself as for Dor; she was talking about Ruthie as though she was not sitting a few feet away. She doubted that Ruthie could hear their conversation over the wind rushing through the car, but still, it didn’t feel right. “Not on purpose. But this was while she was sleeping. It was… I don’t think she has any memory of it, like a nightmare.”

“And she said
bird.
And you think that means the ones back there?”

“What else would it mean?”

“I don’t know…anything. A memory, a book, a toy. A plastic fucking bathtub duck—”

“It’s not the only thing she’s said,” Cass interrupted. “When you first got out of the car to see about the wreck? She didn’t wake up, but she said ‘hat.’”

“
Hat?
She said— What does that mean?”

“The second guy. He was wearing that red hat, that red wool hat on his head. He came out from behind the car after you shot the first guy and there it was.”

Dor was silent for a moment, considering. “I would call that a cap. Not a hat.”

“She’s barely three. She doesn’t know a lot of words. That’s not the point.”

“So you’re saying she has…premonitions? That it? Of danger?”

“I don’t know. I think…well, you know how I’m different, since I was attacked? How I heal faster, and my hair grows like crazy, and my fingernails. It’s like everything is, I don’t know. Like it’s magnified somehow. So why couldn’t it be like that for Ruthie? Except not just the physical part, but like…the sixth sense?”

“You believe in that shit?”

Cass colored. “I’m not saying I believe in, you know, psychics and all that. But haven’t you ever just…
known
something? Something that there was no way you would know, or you know before it happens.”

She sensed Dor’s skepticism, but he remained silent.

“Well, I have. I think it’s real. As real as anything else that’s happened. And with Ruthie, it just started happening, yesterday and then again just now. She’s seeing things, knowing things. I don’t know if it’s anything that’s upsetting to her, or just scary images or…what.”

Cass hated the idea of these dark ciphers visiting Ruthie as she slept, robbing her of what little peace she still had. Already she was a different little girl than the one she’d known before the zealots got her, more cautious, less exuberant, so that Cass’s longing to rewind the intervening time was agonizing whenever she let herself think about what had changed. Would the nightmares take more of her joy away? Was it possible she’d misunderstood, that Ruthie’s words had no connection to the things that were happening, and that Cass herself was just searching for a way for her little girl to take her place in the world again?

“Tell you what, don’t get ahead of yourself,” Dor said. “Like you said. She’s just a little girl.”

They rode in silence, the needle hovering well under thirty. Occasionally Dor drove off the road to get around an obstruction. Each wrecked and abandoned car they passed provoked a new sensation of dread, a catch of the breath amid a frantic search for fleeting figures hiding in backseats and crouching behind bumpers…but they were just wrecks, sun-heated and disintegrating, staged tableaus of twisted, rusting metal and smashed glass.

At last they reached the bottom of the long descent from the mountains, the scrub pine thinning to clusters of bent and knobby oaks in the foothills, then shrub-pocked swells and finally flat fields of dormant kaysev with the occasional weedy star thistle or tocalote poking through. Ahead stretched the road, straight and shimmering in the afternoon sun. Dor pulled off in a field so they could share some jerky and dried apricots and a bottle of water, take a bathroom break and stretch. He had planned for a two-day trip; even though he went a little faster on the straightaways, there were occasional wrecks to be cleared and obstacles to drive around, and their progress was slow.

Taking Ruthie a dozen yards from the Jeep so they could pee, Cass realized she felt more exposed from Dor’s proximity than from the danger of being out in the open. During her days of wandering, when her disorientation slowly sloughed off like a snake’s skin as she made her way back to civilization, she had urinated in the open and on logs with practically no self-consciousness at all. She’d been filthy, smelling like an animal, her hair knotted and her nails broken; she ate wads of kaysev leaves and wiped her mouth on her arm. Cass wasn’t sure what she had been then, but it was something both more and less than human. Now she turned her back toward the Jeep, felt her skin burn with embarrassment when she pulled her pants down and finished as quickly as she could.

After that, their drive resumed, as did the silence. There were no Beaters, but near a cattle ranch whose grazing land grew thick with kaysev, they saw a chilling sight: a motorcycle overturned at the side of the road, and next to it two bodies, obviously Beater victims. They’d been there for a while, long enough for scavengers—perhaps the monstrous black birds—to pick the bones nearly clean. The bodies lay face up, their pants around their ankles, their shirts and underclothes ripped and abandoned nearby.

The Beaters had probably nested in the nearby ranch house or outbuildings. How they’d managed to waylay these travelers was anyone’s guess, but that they’d feasted here, rather than carrying the bodies back to their nest, was surprising. Early in their evolution, when the first fever victims passed through the skin-picking phase, after they’d pulled the hair from their own scalps and chewed the flesh of their own arms and moved on to craving the living flesh of other bodies, they were largely inept. They attacked alone, fighting each other for victims, and feasted upon the bodies where they fell, nearly maddened by their hunger for flesh. It had been much easier, then, for bystanders to drag the Beaters off the victims, shooting or beating them, though in nearly every case the victim was already infected by saliva. Citizens eventually learned that once someone was attacked the best course for all involved was a quick and humane shot to the head.

The Beaters also learned. By early summer they were banding together in small groups and dragging their prey away so they could feast in peace. Soon after that, they started sheltering together, and it wasn’t long before they learned to seek out locations where they were hidden from passersby but could get out quickly to attack; they favored storefronts and other buildings where the glass had shattered, where there was a single way in and out.

Get enough armed people together and you could overwhelm and destroy a nest of even several dozen Beaters. But few were willing to risk up-close contact since the disease was saliva-borne, meaning that not only bites but spit in an eye or wound could also infect. A simple gunshot or blow to the head was not a reliable means of debilitating them in the short term: though they might eventually collapse and die, their attenuated strength and surging adrenaline meant that rage would propel them forward for some brutal minutes yet. And everyone feared inciting a swarm of the cracked, bloody things.

It was these memories—this new common knowledge—that flitted through Cass’s mind, even as she tried to doze, her arm slung over the back of the seat so that she could hold Ruthie’s warm hand. She tried concentrating on the passing scenery, but her mind kept going back to the terrible days after everything fell apart and the survivors began to realize that no one was going to come and make things right. It had been worse, then, when it was still possible to forget occasionally—when you’d wake up and, for a moment, imagine you smelled coffee or that you heard the rumble of the recycling truck and the shouts of children on the way to school.

It had been a long time since the waking nightmare gave her even a day of peace. Traveling with a man who despised her, headed away from the trouble she knew and toward the trouble she didn’t—that was not likely to change.

When the sun slipped down to touch the mountains behind them, Dor finally spoke. “We’re more than halfway. Somewhere short of Glover, I think, but I don’t want to get too close to town. Hopefully all the local critters are already on the move.”

“You mean you think they’ve all gone toward the towns?”

“That, or heading south…if that’s really happening.” He sounded doubtful. The day had been warm, and Cass herself wondered if the cold nights alone would be enough to stir the Beaters’ instincts, if indeed self-preservation spurred them to find a better climate. Even the coldest days in California’s central valley rarely got below freezing, hardly a threat if they managed to take even a few simple measures to stay warm. What was to prevent the Beaters from burrowing into their nests together to share body heat and deciding that was enough?