“I’m sorry,” she managed. “I just couldn’t stop coughing.”
The cloth was stained with blood. Sara knew what was happening; she’d seen it before, the effects of years of dust in the lungs. One minute a person was fine, the next they were drowning in it.
“We have to get you out of here.”
She pulled the woman to her feet just as the whistle blew. One hand wrapped around Jackie’s waist, Sara steered her toward the exit. Her goal was to get outside before anyone noticed; what would happen after that, Sara had no idea. Vale was the col in charge. Not the best, but not the worst, either. More than once, Sara had caught him watching her in a way that made it seem like he had something in mind for her, something personal, though he had never acted on it. Perhaps now would be the time. A shuddering nausea passed through her at the thought, yet she knew she was capable of it. She would do what she had to.
They had nearly reached the exit when a figure stepped into their path. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Not Vale: Sod. Backlit by the open door, he loomed before them. Sara’s stomach dropped.
“She just needs some air. The dust—”
“Is that right, old woman? The dust bothering you?” With the butt of his stick he tapped the woman’s chest, igniting a strangled cough. “Get back to work.”
“It’s all right, Sara,” Jackie wheezed, freeing herself from Sara’s arm. “I’ll be fine.”
“Jackie—”
“I mean it.” She looked at Sara, her eyes saying, Don’t. “She’s just a busybody, that’s all. Thinking she knows what’s best for me.”
Sod eyes flicked the length of Sara’s body. “Yeah, I heard that about you. Think you’re some kind of doctor, do you?”
“I never said that.”
“Sure you didn’t.” With his free hand Sod cupped his crotch, rocking his hips forward. “Hey, Doctor, I’ve got a pain right here. What do you say you get a closer look at it?”
The moment caught and held; Sara thought of Eustace, in the truck. The blood on his face, his shattered hands and teeth. His broken smile of triumph. Standing before Sod, she willed herself to say the words, to utter the curse that would unleash him upon her. It was all so simple, so stark. She could see the scene unfolding in her mind. Just two words, and the flare of anger in Sod’s eyes, and then the crash of the stick. These were the terms of her life, a thousand humiliations enacted daily. They had taken everything from her. To accept the worst—no, to embrace it—that was the only resistance.
“Sara, please.” Jackie was staring at her. Not like this. Not for me.
Sara swallowed. Everyone was looking at her.
“Okay,” she said.
She turned and walked away. The space around her had grown strangely quiet. All she could hear was her heart.
“Don’t worry, Fisher,” Sod called after her with a leering laugh. “I’ll know where to find you. It’ll be as good as the last time, I promise.”
It was later, as Sara lay in her cot, that she permitted herself to consider the full measure of these events. Something had changed within her. She was on the verge, a figure standing at the precipice, waiting to jump. Five long years: it could have been a thousand. The past was disappearing inside her, rinsed away by the wash of time, the bitter cold of her heart, the sameness of days. She had plunged down inside herself for too long. Winter was coming. Winter light.
She had somehow gotten Jackie through the day. Now the old woman slept above her, the straps of her bunk sagging with her restive turning. Jackie’s death, when it came, would come badly, in long agonal hours, a strangling from within, before the final stilling. Would her fate be Sara’s own? To stumble blindly through the years, a being without purpose or connection, a hollow shell of nothing?
Sara had not returned the makeshift envelope to its hiding place under the mattress. Seized by a sudden loneliness, she withdrew it from beneath the lump of rags that served as her pillow. It had been given to her by the midwife’s assistant in the birthing ward—the same woman who had told her that the baby, arriving early in a gush of blood, had not survived. It was a girl, the woman had told her. I’m sorry. Then she’d slipped the envelope into Sara’s hand and vanished. Through the haze of grief and pain Sara had ached to hold her daughter, but this hadn’t happened; the child had been taken away. She’d never seen the woman again.
Carefully she unfolded the pocket of brittle paper with the tips of her fingers. Inside lay a coiled lock of hair—a baby curl. The room was sunk in darkness, and yet its pale golden color was vivid to her eyes. She brought it to her face, inhaling deeply, trying to capture its scent. Sara could never have another, the damage was too great; Kate was the only one. That was what she’d named her, Kate. How she wished she’d told Hollis. She had wanted to save her news, to choose the perfect moment to give him the present of the two of them conjoined. How foolish she’d been. She thought: I know you’re better off, my darling. Wherever you are now, I hope it is a place of light and sky and love. If only I could have held you, just one time, to tell you how much I loved you.
37
This Sergio thing: it had simply gone on too long.
Not that there hadn’t been uprisings before. The year 31, wasn’t it? And again in 68? Not to mention the hundred little brushfires of defiance put down over the years. And wasn’t it true that the problem inevitably boiled down to a single individual, a lone renegade, who simply failed to get the point? That when this man was taken care of (it was always a man), the flames of resistance, deprived of their essential oxygen, would extinguish of their own accord?
And yet this Sergio: he didn’t feel like the others. Standing in the window at the base of the cupola, his gaze directed over the grimy stain of the flatland and the colorless, winter fields beyond, Director Horace Guilder took stock. The man’s methods were different, for starters, not merely in quantity but in kind. People blowing themselves up! Strapping sticks of dynamite to their chests, or pipe bombs crammed with shards of glass and broken screws, and actually mustering the will to blow themselves and everyone around them to a bloody mist! It was beyond madness, a full-blown psychosis that could only mean that this Sergio, whoever he was, held a deeper psychological sway over his followers than any who had come before. The flatlanders had safety, they had food to warm their bellies, they slept in beds at night without fear of the virals. They were allowed to live their lives, in other words, and this was the thanks he got? Couldn’t they see that everything he’d done, he’d done for them? That he had built a home for mankind so that it might, against the prevailing winds of history, continue?
True, there was a certain … unfairness to things. An uneven distribution of resources, one could say, a partitioning of management from labor, of haves from have-nots, us from them. An unpleasant reliance on the human capacity for pulling the ladder up behind oneself, and the time-tested tools—icy showers, endless lines to stand in, the excessive use of proper nouns, loudspeakers blaring a constant stream of inanities, etc.—of broad social compliance. “One People! One Homeland! One Director!” The words made him wince, but a certain amount of stage-managed demagoguery went with the territory. Nothing really new, in other words, all of it warranted under the terms of the present age. But sometimes, such as now, on this icy Iowa morning, the first arctic front of the season bearing down on them like a runaway train of asshammering cold, Guilder had a hard time maintaining his enthusiasm.
His expansive suite of offices, which also functioned as his living quarters, had served, at various times in its two-hundred-year history, as the office of the Iowa territorial governor, the headquarters of the state historical museum, and a storage room. Its last old-world occupant had been the provost of Midwest State University, a man named August Frye (so read the man’s stationery), who, from its generous windows, had no doubt passed many happy hours soaking in the heartwarming sight of cheerful corn-fed undergraduates flirting like maniacs as they strolled their way to class upon its
well-kept Iowa lawns. On the day Guilder had assumed residency, he’d been surprised to discover that Provost August Frye had decorated the place with a nautical theme: ships in bottles, maps with serpents, overwrought oil paintings of lighthouses and oceanscapes, an anchor. A strikingly incongruous choice, given that Midwest State (go Bearcats!) was hard aground in about the most landlocked place on earth. After nearly a hundred years, what Guilder wouldn’t have given for a smidgen of scenery.
Hence the major problem with immortality, apart from the peculiar diet: everything began to bore you.
At such moments, the only thing that cheered him was taking stock of his accomplishments. Which were not inconsiderable; they had constructed a city literally from nothing. What excitement he’d felt in the early days. The ceaseless ring of hammers. The trucks returning from their journeys across an unmanned continent, bursting with the abandoned treasures of the old world. The hundreds of tactical decisions made daily, and the buzzing energy of the staff—men handpicked from among the survivors for their expertise. They had, in short, built a veritable brain trust from the human leavings of catastrophe. Chemists. Engineers. City planners. Ag scientists. Even an astronomer (who had come in surprisingly handy) and an art historian, who had advised Guilder (who, to be perfectly honest, couldn’t tell Monet’s water lilies from dogs playing poker) on the proper preservation and display of a major haul of masterworks from the Art Institute of Chicago, which now decorated the walls of the Dome, including Guilder’s office. What fun they’d had! Granted, there was a certain frat-house mentality to the way they’d conducted themselves, minus the sexual shenanigans, of course. (The virus pretty much gutted that part of your brain like a trout; most of the staff couldn’t even bring themselves to look at a woman without making a face.) But in the main, decorum and professionalism had ruled the day.
Such happy memories. And now: Sergio. Now: Pipe bombs. Now: the bloody mist.
Guilder’s train of thought was broken by a rap on the door. He heaved a weary sigh. Another day of forms to fill out, duties to be parceled, edicts to be issued from on high. Taking a seat behind his desk, an expanse of eighteenth-century polished mahogany the approximate dimensions of a ping-pong table, as rightly befit his station as Beloved Director of the Homeland, Guilder braced himself for another morning’s ceaseless appetite for his opinions—a thought that gave rise almost instantly to the first inklings of an appetite of a more physical and pressing nature, a burble of acid-tasting emptiness that ascended from his gut. So soon? Was it that time of the month already? The only thing worse than the burps were the farts that came after, room-clearing jets of oniony gas that even the farter himself could not enjoy.
“Come.”
As the door swung open, Guilder drew up his necktie and hastened to make himself look occupied, shifting documents around the desktop with manufactured intensity. He selected one arbitrarily—it turned out to be a report on repairs at the sewage treatment plant, a page literally about shit—and pretended to study it for a full thirty seconds before lifting his eyes with directorial fatigue toward the dark-suited figure waiting in the doorway, holding a clipboard chunky with paper.
“Got a second?”
Guilder’s chief of staff, whose name was Fred Wilkes, advanced into the room. Like all residents of the Hilltop, his eyes had the bloodshot look of a chronic pot smoker’s. He also possessed the glossily sleek appearance of a twenty-five-year-old—a far cry from the wiry septuagenarian of Guilder’s first acquaintance. Wilkes had been the first to come aboard; Guilder had discovered the man hiding out in one of the college’s dormitories in the first days after the attack. He was holding—hugging, really—the body of his late wife, whose hefty proportions had not been improved by three days of gaseous decomposition in the Iowa heat. As Wilkes related, the pair had fled the refugee-processing center on foot when the buses had failed to arrive; they’d made it all of three sweltering miles before his wife had clutched her chest, rolled her eyes heavenward, and toppled over, dead of a heart attack. Unable to leave her behind, Wilkes had scavenged a wheelbarrow and carted her mountainous form to the college, where he’d taken refuge with only her corpse, and his memories of a lifetime shared, for company. Despite the horrendous smell (which Wilkes either didn’t notice or much care about), the two of them made for a genuinely heartrending sight that might have moved Guilder to tears if he were a certain kind of man, which he might have once been but was no longer.
“Listen,” Guilder had said, kneeling before the grief-sticken man, “I’d like to make you a proposition.”
And so it had begun. It was that very day, that very hour in fact, even as he’d watched Wilkes take his first disgusted sip, that Guilder had heard the Voice. As far as he could tell, he was still the only one; none of the other staffers gave so much as a hint of experiencing Zero’s mental presence. And as for the woman, who knew what was going on inside her head?
Now, the width of one and a half human lifetimes later, his grand design coming to fruition and the last of humanity having been gathered at his feet (the Kerrville thing, like the Sergio thing, being a small but significant irritant, a pea under the mattress of the Plan), here was Wilkes with his omnipresent clipboard and a facial expression, evidently, of not-good news.
“I just thought you should know the gathering party’s back. What’s, ah, left of it.”
With this disconcerting introduction, Wilkes withdrew the top sheet of paper from his clipboard and placed it on Guilder’s desk and backed away, as if he were happy to be rid of the thing.
Guilder scanned it quickly. “What the hell, Fred.”
“I guess you could say things didn’t go exactly as planned.”
“Nobody? Not one of them? What is wrong with these people?”
Wilkes gestured toward the paper. “The flow of oil has been at least temporarily disrupted. That’s a plus. It opens a lot of doors.”
But Guilder was beyond consolation. First Kearney, now this. There had been a time when scooping up survivors had proved a relatively clear-cut undertaking. The woman appeared; the gates swung open, the wheel of the vault began to turn, the drawbridge descended over the moat; the woman did her stuff, like a lion tamer at the circus; and the next thing you knew, the trucks were galloping back to Iowa, packed with human cargo. The Kentucky caves. That island in Lake Michigan. The abandoned missile silos in North Dakota. More recently, the California raid had been a bona-fide bonanza, fifty-six survivors taken, most of whom had marched like lambs into the truck once the power was cut and the terms were set. (Get in or you’re meat.) The usual attrition rate—some died en route, others failed to adapt to their new circumstances—but a solid haul nonetheless.
Since then, it had been one out-of-control bloodbath after another, starting with Roswell.
“Apparently there wasn’t much of a negotiation phase. The convoy was pretty heavily armed.”
“I don’t care if they had a nuclear missile. We knew that going in. These are Texans.”
“In a manner of speaking, that’s true.”
“We’re about to go on-line here, and this is what you tell me? We need bodies, Fred. Living, breathing bodies. Can’t she control these things anymore?”
“We could go in the old-fashioned way. I said so from the start. We’d take some casualties, but if we keep hitting their oil supply, sooner or later their defenses will weaken.”
“We collect people, Fred. We don’t lose them. Have I failed to make myself clear? Can you not do basic math? People are the point.”
Wilkes shrugged defensively. “You want to talk to her?”
Guilder rubbed his eyes. He supposed he’d have to make the gesture, but talking to Lila was like playing handball by yourself: the ball came right back no matter how hard you slapped it. One of the most significant aggravations of the job was dealing with the woman’s peculiar fantasies, a wall of delusion that Guilder could penetrate only by the roughest sort of insistence. Of all the experts he’d harvested throug
h the years, why hadn’t he thought to get a shrink? Keeping her in babies made her calm; the woman’s special talent was an indispensable commodity that needed to be managed with care. But in the throes of motherhood she was virtually unreachable, and Guilder worried about further damaging her fragile psyche.
Because that was the thing about Lila. Of everyone who had tasted the blood, only she was endowed with the ability to control the virals.
More than control: in Lila’s presence, they became like pets, docile and even affectionate. The feeling was a two-way street; put the woman within two hundred yards of the feedlot, and she turned into a purring cat with a litter of kittens. The effect was nothing Guilder had been able to replicate on his own, though Lord knows he’d tried. Back in the early days, he’d been downright obsessed. Time after time he’d donned the pads and gone into the feedlot, thinking that if he could only find the right mental trick or ingratiating body language or soothing tone of voice they’d fall at his knees the way they did with her, like dogs waiting for their ears to be scratched. But this never happened. They’d tolerate his presence for a whopping three seconds before one of them tossed him in the air—he didn’t register as food, more like a man-sized toy—and the next thing Guilder knew he’d be flying around the place until somebody hit the lights to get him out.
He’d long since stopped trying, of course. The sight of Horace Guilder, Director of the Homeland, being batted around like a beach ball wasn’t exactly the kind of confidence-inspiring image he wanted to broadcast. Nor could anybody on the medical staff explain to his satisfaction just what it was that made Lila different. Her thymus cycled faster, needing the blood every seven days, and her eyes looked different, displaying none of the retinal stain that marked the senior staffers’. But her sensitivity to light was just as pronounced, and as far as Suresh could tell, the virus in her blood was the same as theirs. In the end, the man had thrown up his hands and attributed her abilities to the less than subtle fact that Lila was a woman—the only woman in the fold, which was how Guilder wanted it.
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