by Libba Bray
Sam held Evie’s hand and tried to rub warmth back into her cold fingers. She had dainty hands, and it surprised him that he’d never quite noticed this before, and he wished everything were normal so that he could tease her about it, call her some stupid nickname that she would pretend annoyed her when they both knew she liked the attention.
Sam swallowed around the lump in his throat. “You gotta get better, okay, Lamb Chop? I still owe you twenty clams. The Evie O’Neill I know would never let me get away with that.”
Jericho looked on and tried to pretend it didn’t bother him. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t quite erase his feelings for Evie. He came around the other side of her and rubbed her left hand. Sam glared. Jericho ignored him. He caught Ling’s eye. She shook her head, angry with him. That was harder to ignore.
“How far are we from Bountiful?” Jericho asked.
“A full day’s drive, reckon,” Bill said.
“Listen,” Henry said.
“What?” Ling asked.
“That’s just it. It’s quiet.”
Carefully, Jericho opened the storm cellar doors, and they emerged into a ruined world. Gideon’s sidewalks were empty, its windows broken. A bicycle lay overturned in the street beside a doll with its arm missing. The wheat fields had gone to chaff. The pond was dry. So were the oil pumps. Gideon had been leeched of anything that had value. Gritty ash blew through the abandoned streets. The town was dead and gray.
A town fit only for ghosts.
BOUNTIFUL
“Go this way,” Isaiah said, pointing to a dirt road off to the right that carved through seemingly endless fields of old, dead corn without even a Burma-Shave sign to break it up. They’d been driving for hours and seen nothing but sky, wheat, cows, and corn.
“That way? You’re sure, kid?” Sam asked from behind the wheel.
Isaiah wasn’t entirely sure of anything. But it felt right, and Evie was sick. They had to get to Sarah Beth. “Yes.”
“All right. I trust you,” Sam said grimly and banked a sharp right.
In the back of the truck, Evie was pale and sweaty. Theta and Henry watched her nervously. The truck careened across some railroad tracks, and up front, Ling told Sam to be careful. Corn leaves slapped the sides of the roadster. Memphis worried they’d be lost in that leafy maze. And then they reached the end of the field, and there it was, just as Isaiah had seen it in his visions: The weathered farmhouse with its sagging porch and the red barn. The old oak tree and the tire swing hanging on a rope from one of its massive branches. There was a tall silo, and a windmill, and land for as far as a body could see. And when they got closer, a rusty mailbox with the name Olson and a number on the side: 144.
Isaiah looked up at the drawn curtains of the second-story windows. “We’re here.”
Theta stepped out of the truck and rubbed the feeling back into her legs. “Hello? Can anyone help us?” she called.
No one seemed to be home. Out here on the plains, the air was sticky with rain that wouldn’t come, and Henry thought about all that water drowning Mississippi while this part of the country looked to be in a drought. The crops drooped on their stalks, their leaves eaten through by bugs.
Sam rushed up the steps of the porch and knocked at the door. “Hello? Is anybody home? We need a doctor!”
A sandy-haired man in coveralls came out from the barn, mopping his neck and brow with a bandanna. The front of his shirt was sweated through. “You folks lost?”
Memphis looked around at the lot of them: Dirty. Scared. Half-crazed, with a very sick girl lying dead to the world in the back of their truck. He wondered if that farmer would reach for a gun soon. Once he knew who they were, Memphis couldn’t imagine he wouldn’t.
“Our friend is hurt, mister,” Theta said. “She needs help.”
“There’s no doctor here. You’d be better off driving into town. It’s about five miles thataway,” the farmer said and pointed right, toward a seemingly endless road bordered by fields of yellow-brown grass.
“She won’t make it,” Sam said, his voice breaking.
“Well, son, I’m real sorry, but we can’t help you.”
“Are you Sarah Beth’s daddy?” Isaiah asked.
The farmer’s eyebrows shot up. “How do you know my Sarah Beth?”
“She comes to me in visions,” Isaiah said. “That’s why we’re here. To keep her safe. We’re the Diviners.”
The farmer’s surprise slid into suspicion. His mouth turned down at the corners. “I’m gonna have to ask you to leave. You’re trespassing on private property.”
“Please,” Ling said. “We’ve come all the way from New York City. Your daughter called us here.”
“My daughter can’t call nobody. Don’t make me go for my gun,” the farmer said.
The screen door creaked open and snapped shut behind a small, barefoot girl with startling gray eyes. Her pale blond hair hung down her back in two slim braids already coming loose from their peach ribbons. One half of her face drooped as if from palsy.
“Sarah Beth. Go on back inside,” her father commanded.
Sarah Beth ignored him. She leaned against the peeling porch railing and stared out at the Diviners until her eyes found Isaiah.
She smiled with one side of her face and waved. “Hey, Isaiah. You made it.”
Isaiah gave a small wave back. “Hey, Sarah Beth. We came. Just like you asked.”
Jericho carried a shivering Evie upstairs and placed her on a bed in a shaded room. She was pale as new milk. Sam covered her with a wedding-ring quilt, tucking it carefully around her. The farmer’s wife, Mrs. Olson, touched the back of her hand to Evie’s forehead and frowned. “Lands’ sakes, she’s burning up.” Mrs. Olson hurried away and returned with an enamelware bowl half filled with water. She soaked a cotton rag, wrung it out, and pressed it against Evie’s flushed cheeks. In the doorway, Sarah Beth watched, sucking on the end of her braid.
“What happened to her?” Mrs. Olson asked.
“The dead got to her, didn’t they?” Sarah Beth said from the doorway.
“Sarah Beth!” Mrs. Olson scolded.
“That’s right,” Jericho confirmed.
Sarah Beth stared at her dumbfounded mother. “I tried to tell you, but you never listen to me.”
“We’ll explain everything later,” Theta said to Mrs. Olson.
Finished with her ministrations, Mrs. Olson stood, cradling the bowl under her arm. “We were about to sit for supper. Pump’s out in the yard if you care to wash up first.”
Sam didn’t want to leave Evie’s side. “Somebody should stay with her.”
“You gotta eat, Sam,” Theta said, but Sam didn’t move.
“We can take turns,” Jericho said, squeezing Sam’s shoulder.
In the little yard next to the house, Jericho pumped the red handle. Ice-cold water trickled over Ling’s dusty hands.
“Reminds me of home.” Jericho surveyed the vast expanse of half-tended farmland. It was planting time. If things weren’t set right, the Olsons would lose their farm pretty quickly, he knew.
Theta and Ling helped Mrs. Olson set the dining room table. Sarah Beth sat in a chair, staring out the window. She didn’t offer to help, and Mrs. Olson didn’t fuss at her for it, Ling noticed. Ling’s own mother would never tolerate that. Everybody had to pitch in at the restaurant. Ling wondered what damage the Diviners serum might’ve caused to the girl. She seemed a bit frail and childlike.
They gathered around the table, and Mrs. Olson, a raw-boned woman with freckled cheeks and eyes the blue of sun-faded cornflowers, had them bow their heads and say grace before serving up a supper of corn fritters along with heaping bowls of sauerkraut and apple butter. The Diviners ate hungrily. Isaiah felt Memphis’s knee pressing against his own under the table, and he knew it meant to be careful, to watch and not talk too much. It got Isaiah’s back up some. He was not a baby. Across the table, Sarah Beth dug into her applesauce. She gave Isaiah a furtive smile, which put him a little more at e
ase, like their friendship was a room, already prepared, and he could step right into it. The other Diviners told the Olsons about Isaiah’s visions of Sarah Beth and about the town of Gideon and what had happened there with the dead and the King of Crows and Evie.
“I tried to warn you not to go. Didn’t I try, Isaiah?” Sarah Beth said.
Isaiah wanted to answer, but he was mindful of Memphis’s knee warning, so he just nodded.
“All this time Sarah Beth’s been telling us these stories, well, we just assumed that’s all they were—stories. Her imagination run wild. She has such a wonderful imagination,” Mrs. Olson said, stroking her daughter’s hair. “But you’re telling us they’re true?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jericho said.
“Sarah Beth and me, we can see the future some. That’s how I knew you were here. She told me to come,” Isaiah said.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Isaiah,” Memphis said.
Isaiah chewed the bite in his mouth and glowered at his brother. Here he’d been gone for weeks, surviving without him, and now Memphis was treating him like a little kid again.
“We wanna stop him. But we have to get our friend well first,” Theta said.
“You can stay here till she’s better. Can’t they, Papa?” Sarah Beth said.
Mrs. Olson cast a worried glance at her husband, who took his time considering. “The papers say you’re wanted for treason. We’re a law-abiding family. Never courted any trouble. Tell me why I shouldn’t turn you in and collect the reward money?”
“Jim…” Mrs. Olson said with a note of soft pleading.
“I want to hear it from them,” the farmer said.
“You can do that, sir,” Jericho said. “But I suspect you believe what we’re telling you, or else you would’ve already placed that call.”
“Your daughter told you about the man in the hat, didn’t she? She’s been telling you her whole life,” Henry said. He thought of his own mother, ignored and institutionalized.
Mrs. Olson glanced furtively at her husband. Mr. Olson gave a terse nod.
“If we don’t put a stop to this, the world as we know it will end,” Henry said.
“How will you do that?” Mrs. Olson asked.
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Henry said.
Mr. Olson grunted.
“Jim. We can’t let that poor girl go in her condition. It wouldn’t be Christian,” Mrs. Olson said quietly.
Mr. Olson sopped up his applesauce with the broken edge of a fritter and said nothing.
“I grew up on a farm. Looks like you could use some help,” Jericho said at last. “If you’d allow us time for our friend to heal, and to speak with your daughter about how to stop the King of Crows, we’d be happy to work around the farm.”
“You know how to work a thresher? A plow? Can you milk a cow?” Mr. Olson challenged.
“Yes to all three,” Jericho answered. “Do you have any hired hands?”
“Used to,” Mr. Olson said and didn’t comment further.
“They left ’cause they were scared of me,” Sarah Beth blurted.
Mrs. Olson put down her fork. “Now, Sarah Beth, that isn’t true, dear.”
“Yes, it is,” Sarah Beth answered. If it was true, she didn’t seem bothered by it.
Mr. Olson chewed thoughtfully. “All right, then,” he said at last. “Anybody comes around asking, you’re just hired help. Anything happens to my Sarah Beth, though, and you’ll answer to the law. Or to me.”
“Much obliged, sir,” Bill said evenly, but Henry could feel the big man’s discomfort.
Mrs. Olson smiled with relief. “I’ll make up some beds after supper.”
“I’ll help,” Theta said.
Sarah Beth put her napkin on the table. “May Isaiah and I be excused, Mother? I want to show him the kittens.”
Mrs. Olson sighed. “You be careful under the porch. And don’t get too close to the mama. She’ll scratch.”
“We won’t. Come on, Isaiah!”
“Isaiah,” Memphis prompted.
Before Isaiah followed Sarah Beth outside, he dutifully carried his plate to the kitchen sink. “Thank you for supper, ma’am.”
“Why, you’re very welcome, Isaiah.”
The screen door creaked open and Sarah Beth’s voice drifted after her: “…the little calico is mine. She’s the prettiest one.…”
Ling tried not to stare at Sarah Beth’s plate, still on the table. “Is your daughter very ill?”
Mrs. Olson scooted food around on her plate with her fork. “She has these fits. The doctors can’t do anything for her. They say a bad one could… well, I ask the Lord to watch over her.”
“It’s because of Project Buffalo,” Ling said.
Mrs. Olson’s brow furrowed. “Project Buffalo?”
“A government experiment. We were all part of it,” Ling continued. “Did you have trouble having a baby?”
Henry spat up his milk. “You’ll have to pardon Ling, ma’am,” he said when he recovered. “She had her manners removed with her tonsils as a child.”
Ling blushed. “I’m sorry if that was rude.”
“That’s all right, dear. Just a surprise is all,” Mrs. Olson said. “I kept losing them. After the third time, Dr. McCormick came around and said he’d heard about a cure for troubles like mine. I went to Omaha, and they had me take a test.”
“Guessing at cards to see how many you got right?” Sam said, taking his place at the table. “She’s finally sleeping a little easier,” he said to the others.
“Yes, that was it,” Mrs. Olson said, passing down a plate to Sam. “I must’ve done all right, I suppose. They took me on. Gave me—”
“Vitamins,” Sam and Ling interjected.
“That’s right!”
“What in the Sam Hill is Project Buffalo?” Mr. Olson asked.
The Diviners explained Project Buffalo to Mr. and Mrs. Olson, how the Department of the Paranormal had instigated a eugenics project aimed at raising a generation of enhanced humans, a so-called super race of powerful Americans they might use to defend the nation someday.
“Mostly they experimented on immigrants, Jews, Negroes, Catholics, Chinese,” Sam said. “People they thought of as expendable.”
“We’re just Americans,” Mrs. Olson said.
Ling bristled. We’re all Americans, she wanted to say. She cleared her throat. “After everything that went wrong during the war, they decided that letting us have those powers was too great a risk. They started experimenting on us. Or killing us. Those who hadn’t died from the effects of the serum already.”
“Killing?” Mrs. Olson repeated.
“Yes,” Theta said.
“Oh my word. They told us it was just about having healthy babies.” Mrs. Olson teared up. “Do you suppose that’s what happened to our Sarah Beth? That she was… hurt… somehow by what they did?”
“We don’t know that,” Theta said. “But it sounds like they abandoned you.”
“They sure did,” Mr. Olson said bitterly. “We wrote to ’em, told ’em about Sarah Beth’s fits and visions and whatnot. They were no help at all. Finally, we got a letter saying the whole department had been shut down. And that was that.”
“For a while, she didn’t seem troubled all that often. A fit here or there. But they started up again last year,” Mrs. Olson said.
“We took her to see Dr. McCormick. He told us there wasn’t anything that could be done except put her in an institution. So we just brought her home. We do the best we can.”
Project Buffalo seemed to have saved its cruelties for Sarah Beth Olson, who, it seemed, might not make it to her next birthday.
Mrs. Olson’s eyes filled with tears. “I’ll get the cake,” she said, hurrying to the kitchen and leaving the others to eat in silence.
“They’re down here.” Sarah Beth took off her shoes and scooted under the broken latticework of the aging porch. Isaiah could hear the kittens mewling, and it excited him
. He’d always wanted a pet of his own, but Aunt Octavia had forbidden it. “The last thing I need around here is one more thing to look after,” she’d say, not mean, just sounding tired. Isaiah hoped he might get to keep one of these kittens, if he showed he could take good care of them.
There, in the soft dirt beneath the porch, Isaiah fell in love for the first time. A gray-and-orange mama cat, fluffy as could be, nursed seven babies. They were so tiny, Isaiah thought they looked more like big mice than cats. They were working hard to open their eyes, which were blue.
“Can I hold one?” he asked.
Sarah Beth nodded.
Carefully, Isaiah scooped up one of the kittens and nestled it close to his chest. It was mostly gray with some orange spots. The kitten mewled weakly, the softest little cry, and nuzzled close to Isaiah. “It likes me!” Isaiah said, and it seemed to him he’d never felt so much joy over something so small. “See?”
But Sarah Beth didn’t seem impressed. “Come on,” she said, getting on her hands and knees to scoot back under the break in the porch. “I want to show you my favorite place on the farm.”
Isaiah was sad to leave the kittens so soon. “I’ll come back and see you every day,” he promised as he placed his new friend near its mother. He crawled back out from under the porch and brushed himself off.
Sarah Beth was marching over to the old oak with its tire swing. Isaiah marveled at the gigantic tree. It was even more majestic than it had appeared in his visions. Sarah Beth lifted her skirt and stuck her legs in through the tire. “Push me? Then I’ll push you.”
Isaiah gave Sarah Beth a push. “Higher,” she called, and Isaiah obliged.
“What do you call your power?” Sarah Beth asked Isaiah as she swung gently back and forth, kicking her legs.
“Call it?” Isaiah made a face. “It doesn’t have a name.”
“I call mine moon glow, ’cause it’s like sharing a secret with the dark.”
Isaiah liked the way she said this. It sounded pretty, like the way Memphis talked.
“Push,” Sarah Beth instructed. Isaiah shoved with both hands. “We can share moon glow, you know. It’ll make our powers stronger. I’ll show you.”