Rebirth (24 page)

Despite the pleasant memories of her garden and her determination to wait until morning to focus on their next steps, Cass had trouble getting through her meal. She was tired from the trip, worn-out from the adrenaline spikes and crashes. Numbed by terror and faintly nauseous from all the blood that had been shed in the past twenty-four hours. She tried to force herself not to think about the car-crash decoy and the bodies picked clean by the birds, the terrible things that had happened in the house, the Beaters in the road—but she couldn’t shake the aftereffects, the anxiety and fear. She helped Ruthie eat instead, and listened to the men’s small talk, and stole glances at the tired woman across the room, who was doing the same thing she was, trying to coax food into her sickly child. Each time Malena caught her eye, Cass looked quickly away; it was too hard to see the desperation on the woman’s face. Her eye sockets were sunken and purple, her hair lay in lank tangles, and her hands shook faintly. Cass could only imagine the prayers she had said for her son’s recovery. Evidently God had not yet come through, and it looked like Malena had stopped eating and sleeping.

Dor made idle conversation and Cass also watched Dor watching Kaufman. She thought she saw something—a flicker, a moment of change when his keen black eyes seemed to focus like the sights on a laser. Cass knew Dor was mapping this man out. She supposed he had a plan—if not yet, he would soon. She was certain Dor was drawing conclusions about Kaufman, about Lester and Malena and even the sick boy in the chair. It was what he did—he observed people so intensely that he picked up on many things they didn’t even know about themselves.

It was only one of many reasons she had avoided encounters with Dor, and he was not hard to avoid. But it would be a lie to pretend that she didn’t watch him. Yes. When he wasn’t looking, she watched him watching others, and it was like this, always. The laser focus. The absorbing of details. The filtering of distractions. The considering and calculating. And then—yes, just like now. The moment when Dor came to some conclusion, and his features relaxed and re-formed, chameleon-like, into a new public character he would play to achieve some unnamed end.

In the Box, these changes were subtle. Sometimes Cass convinced herself that Dor wasn’t even aware he was doing it. Often he retreated to his most frequent mask, the one she thought of as his default but not necessarily true self: friendly but aloof, terse but rarely angry. A myth. He was the benevolent but unattainable man behind the curtain, the merchant, the moneychanger, the keeper of scales and coin. The guarantor.

Now, however, he put on a different face, one Cass hadn’t seen before. She paused in surprise, a spoon lifted halfway to her lips, as Dor eased down in the chair, extended his legs under the table, and crossed his hands on his belly in an attitude of self-satisfaction.

“Man, I could sure use a frosty cold one right now,” he said. “Raiders game on TV, halftime with those girls? You know, those little black skirts? Sorry, hon,” he added automatically, shooting her an easy grin that didn’t reach his eyes.

Kaufman chuckled. “Don’t be saying that around here. I hear you, but in case you haven’t heard, this place is dry. No booze, no smoking, no fun.”

“No shit.” Dor looked crestfallen. “Damn. So I guess I won’t be getting my bottle of Jack back that I’ve been carrying around for emergencies.”

“No, I’d say that’s a negative. Though you can bet someone’s gonna be enjoying it on the sly tonight. There’s a little…creative warehousing going on, know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I hear you. Like any military.”

They sat in companionable silence for a moment. Dor let it ride out, shaking his head sorrowfully. Then he said, “Yeah, so the—what did you call it? Ragbag?”

“Oh, that.” Kaufman glanced surreptitiously at Malena and her son, then at Cass—she made sure she was looking away, as disinterested as she could manage to appear—and lowered his voice a notch or two. “We’re not supposed to talk about that while you’re in here—but, man, you gotta understand about some of this shit before you see it, y’know? I mean, you don’t want to get taken unawares.”

“Uh-huh, sure.”

“Well—it’s one of Mary’s things.”

“Mary—what is it, Mary Vane?”

“Yeah, she’s been in charge since the start. Anyway, she’s okay. I guess. I mean, some of her ideas are a little out there. They say she was some sort of government scientist or something, I don’t know. But this, see, sometimes someone comes in and it’s obvious they’re infected. It’s happening more lately. People eat any shit they can get their hands on, out on the road. Get hungry enough and they’re not careful and they end up eating blueleaf roots, especially now it’s going dormant and it’s hard to tell which is which.”

Dor’s eyes flickered again, the tiny opening and shutting of the mask. Or maybe the flicker was the fleeting dimming of his true self, ceding to the intense demands of maintaining this other, dampened self. Either way, he didn’t look at Cass.

So the Rebuilders had managed to make great strides ahead, again. Just as with the outlier immunity, they knew things here in Colima that people elsewhere—even in the Box where there was plenty of everything, plenty of smart people—took much longer to figure out. The Rebuilders understood the threat inherent in the dormant kaysev. People on the outside should have understood the danger, should have been wise, allowed fear to lead them. Cass had learned to detect those dormant plants that were dangerous and she had taken pains to teach all of the gatherers how to tell the difference between the edible kind and the blueleaf. She had actually only seen blueleaf twice since moving into the Box, and both times it was raiding parties who brought it to show her, specimens they’d found in drifts far out on the perimeter of their patrols. Anywhere people sheltered, summer vigilance seemed to have ensured that the poison strain had been obliterated.

“That’s bad, man,” Dor muttered, shaking his head.

“Tell me. We got a whole group here don’t do anything but work on that shit. Everything we eat, they grow, even our kaysev. We don’t eat anything from outside. They got them this whole greenhouse they’re building. It’s cool. Just wait until you see it. But anyway, that same test, you know the blood test for outliers?—they can use it to tell if you’re infected, too. But, well…you know how it is. You don’t really need it.”

He looked down at the table, and Cass imagined they were all thinking the same thing. The infected went feverish within hours of ingestion. At first, nearly a year ago when the kaysev first appeared, you might think you had a bad case of flu, that your light-headedness came from the fever’s onset, or something like that—hell, it had been thought a drug like acid at one point—but now everyone knew the set of symptoms that arrived all together: the luminous, jaundice-darkened skin; the fever that could go as high as 106 degrees in an adult, higher in a child; the odd bright luminosity of the eyes as the pigment intensified and the pupils shrank.

“Mary, she won’t take any chances. If they’re infected she won’t put ’em in the infirmary long enough to get the tests back. Too dangerous, you know?”

Dor nodded. The disease was transmitted through saliva, not blood. You could touch the blood, even drink it, as some of the Order had done, and there was no chance of infection. But a bite—even a graze—led to the appearance of symptoms within a few hours. And for everyone but outliers, the disease was irreversible.

“What if they’re immune, though?”

Kaufman shook his head. “It’s too risky. I mean, it’s only one in a couple hundred. The odds of finding one who’s already starting to turn—well, it’s just not worth the risk.”

Cass felt her face go hot. So Kaufman didn’t know about her, didn’t know she was an outlier, or that she’d been one of the ones who turned.

“So what exactly do they do?” Dor asked, interrupting her thoughts. “To the infected?”

Kaufman winced, his mouth tugging down at the corners. “Ah, hell. I guess it’s the most fair thing for everyone, given the circumstances, but…well, they rotate it among the security details. Anyone with firearms training. It’s a firing squad. Out in the PAC courtyard. You know, the old Performing Arts Center…they use it for assemblies and… Things.”

Firing squad
. The words buzzed in her mind, forming an image of a blindfolded prisoner shackled to a post. Cass had seen so much, but it was the horrors that “decent” humans inflicted on each other that never failed to shock.

“Yeah, they just bring a dozen or so rifles from the armory, enough for whoever shows up. Only two are ever loaded. They tie the, you know, the infected person up and get it done.”

“Jesus,” Dor said. “So it’s what, voluntary…?”

“Hell, no, I wouldn’t exactly say that. You don’t show up, you damn well better have a good excuse. I mean, there’s a few things that qualify, like if you’re on security, if you’re in the clinic, something like that. But a situation like what we have here—hell, we don’t really need two on staff here at Ellis. It’s mostly so one of us can be in the john or whatever—yeah, it wouldn’t look good.”

Dor thought for a moment, wiping one big hand across his face. “What would happen? Something like that, you don’t show up for your shift?”

“Man, I would
not
want to be that guy,” Kaufman said. “In theory, there’s this whole review system in place, a whole escalating scale of consequences, but way things are right now—how you have to, like,
shortcut
the
theoretical
—let’s just say they don’t hardly ever get to the finer points of justice, know what I’m saying? Most times you fuck up, you’re gonna end up in the detention camp. I mean, something like this, you’d get work detail. I don’t know, maybe you’d get a couple shifts with the diggers or something. But if you screw up too often and end up being tagged a problem—and they start forgetting to check on you? Leave you in there for too long, maybe with the general population? Let’s just say it’s not a place I’d want to be.”

After that, Kaufman turned the conversation to other, easier topics: TV shows they missed, a memorable Giants game from the last season anyone played. Cass tuned out the words and just let the conversation flow around her, savoring the tone, normal in a way nothing was normal anymore. She got Ruthie settled in one of the beds, the sheets stiff but clean, smelling vaguely of lye or some other harsh chemical.

Before, when the power started to flicker differently from the way rolling brownouts normally did, sputtering for a moment or two before going out entirely, Cass sensed a terrifying loss coming, a return of the fear she’d been keeping at bay. It wasn’t unfamiliar, and Cass knew that the way to handle it was to keep breathing, in, out, in…out…until it passed.

Humans had a visceral fear of the dark—all of them, from the smallest toddler to the frailest senior citizen. If Cass had ever doubted that the fear was inherent, those first hours without electricity—literally among the darkest of her life, as the power failed for the last time in the predawn hours back in March—made the point. Electricity and power had been weakening for days, and there had been an uptick in the riots, a surge in the senseless destruction wreaked by the roving bands of angry and restless citizens.

But when the lights went out forever, there was a brief and reverent silence when Cass felt as though the soul of the city had been sucked out. It had literally felt as though everyone who was still alive stopped breathing for a moment—and then the first cry carried out on the wind, grief-struck meaningless keening that was more intense than anything she’d heard. It was joined by another and another and another, until the street outside her trailer echoed with a terrible symphony of devastation.

Moment for moment, there was nothing more horrific than the Beaters, of course. And perhaps nothing more poignant than fever death, watching someone you loved slip into a luminous delirium, clutching and babbling, hot-skinned and gorgeous in their last hours, before death saved them from the ignominy of turning. But of all the abominations, the loss of power felt most like the loss of civilization.

There had been little pockets of power since then. Those who owned generators—if they were able to protect them from marauders and looters who would kill for as little as a case of bottled water or a tank of propane—consumed their foul-smelling noisy power in furtive bursts. And of course there were batteries, for a while. Some people jealously hoarded their batteries for emergencies, for flashlights and radios they were convinced would start broadcasting safety instructions again someday, somehow—and others used them up quickly, bingelike, playing music and games and movies on their big or tiny screens. Devices that turned human energy into power—shake flashlights and bicycle generators and the like—were suddenly coveted above nearly everything else.

But here in Colima it was almost as though the power had never gone all the way out. A grid was up and running. Its source was still the temporal and noisy generators, but the idea that Evangeline had planted—turbine and solar power, unlimited! Freely available even in the punished and thwarted new atmosphere!—was intoxicating. Cass wondered how long the novelty would last; people here seemed to have quickly readjusted to the idea of power, to an expectation of its availability. Society absorbed what was available with something approaching indifference. The same people who thought they would never again hear a song on the radio likely now barely registered the loudspeaker system, the space heater in the corner of the room.

It was a little like sobriety. That was the notion that had come to Cass as she’d pretended not to watch and listen to the men talking, fussing with Ruthie and trying to get her to finish eating. The first days of sobriety were a novelty. Hard, but oddly thrilling. You flirted with the idea, telling yourself that it didn’t matter, that you didn’t really need to be there, lumped in with the others, the
real
addicts. And yet you heard the voices,
one day at a time one day at a time onedayatatime,
whispering in your mind. You got through the day outside yourself, surprised. Is that me, seriously? Not going to the fridge? Not getting out the bottle? Is that me putting on my pajamas as though I were anyone else, as though I am really not going to have anything before bed? Is this me lying here in this room in the dark, my heart beating so fast I can’t keep up listening to it, as though I could fall asleep and dream like anybody else?