by Ann Aguirre
“A little.” I told them both what I’d been envisioning, and Fade groaned.
“You delight in cruelty.” There was a sweetness in his teasing that I hadn’t seen in so long, like he was before, when it was just him and me against the world.
Stalker turned to Fade with a polite expression. It sat oddly on his scarred features, like a hat tailored to another head. “I’d like to speak with Deuce in private, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“It’s not up to me,” Fade answered.
Stalker nodded. “It’s not personal, if you’re worried about that. I have no intention of causing any trouble between the two of you. I just need a word.”
Part of me felt aggravated that he’d asked Fade, like he was in charge of who got to talk to me. But the rest appreciated the gesture, thereby acknowledging that Stalker understood how things stood between Fade and me. I ignored those conflicting reactions and accompanied him all the way to the door. That seemed like an excessive precaution, if he feared somebody eavesdropping. The men were all seeing to their own needs.
He took a deep breath. “There are a few things I need to say, if you’ll hear me out.”
“Go ahead.”
He folded his arms, but not in a defensive way, more like he needed a hug, and there was nobody to give him one. I didn’t move. Touch was a precious gift, and I didn’t offer it freely. The distance between us came for good reason, as he didn’t seem to be able to separate the quiet warmth of a friend as opposed to the way I reacted to Fade, who had exclusive kissing rights.
“In the gang, if I made up my mind to do something, it happened. And I started believing there was no obstacle I couldn’t overcome, nobody I couldn’t turn to my will.”
“If nobody ever gainsaid you, I understand how that could happen.” I was less sure what that had to do with me, but I trusted that he’d get to it.
“So when I met you … and I wanted you, I figured it was only a matter of time until I changed your mind. I didn’t factor your thoughts or desires into it. At first, you were more a prize to me than a person.” He took a deep breath. “I apologize for that. And when I realized you were never going to return my feelings, I didn’t take it well. I’m not a good loser.”
“Few people enjoy it,” I said dryly.
“My point being, I’d like to accept your offer of friendship, if it’s still open. I’ll talk to Fade, make it plain I don’t intend to get in his way. I get why he doesn’t like me. He has reason.”
“I’d like that.” All of it. I’d never wanted any competition between them.
“The next thing is, I need you to lock up after I leave.”
I tensed. That sounded like good-bye. “Why?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back. I just need to rove for a while. I can’t sleep tonight.”
I nodded, guessing the loss of a man under his command was bothering him. He probably thought if he had been faster or smarter, he could’ve saved the scout. But Longshot’s death had taught me that sometimes you couldn’t, no matter how much you wanted to, because other people made their own choices, however little you liked them. Sometimes they were brave and heroic; other times, it was just stupidity, and those losses were the hardest to bear.
“Be careful,” I said.
“I will.” Stalker unfastened the bolts and chains and strode into the dark.
Recovery
I slept poorly that night.
The conversation with Stalker plagued me. I expected to hear a tap on the door at any moment during the night, so I lay awake listening for it, but it never came. I snatched my rest in fitful bursts, but I roused with everyone else, took my turn washing up, and then I went out to see what Winterville looked like. The men followed me, something that struck me as odd, though it was what I’d wanted. In the daylight, the damage was apparent, but it seemed as if it could be readily repaired. Dr. Wilson joined us, shading his eyes as if he rarely saw sunlight. Since most of his work took place in the lab, that might be true.
“There’s a bell four blocks that way,” he said, “at the church. It’s the building with the point on top. If you ring it, the townsfolk will know it’s safe.”
I was ready to put this grim and broken town behind us, but I’d told the men we’d help with the cleanup, and despite my desire to move on, I’d keep that promise. One day spent in repair and recovery wouldn’t cost us the war.
“This way,” I said, following Wilson’s directions.
As we moved off, he went back inside. Tegan fell into step with me. “Where’s Stalker?”
“He’s taking Hammond’s death hard.”
From the ground, I could see the bell, but it required me to go inside the church. I left the bulk of my men outside, taking only Fade with me. The damage seemed especially wrong in here; the wood was scarred with countless scratches, more blood and excrement from the feral humans who had squatted here. It smelled rank, like death and rot; I covered my mouth as we moved through the shadowy interior to the stairs on the right. They were steep and skeletal, leading up to a narrow tower where the bell hung. Fade pulled the rope and the peal rang out, echoing to all corners of town.
“It’s worse,” he said. “Knowing that people caused all this destruction.”
The cause and effect haunted me. Long ago, people feared one another, so they invented terrible things, capable of creating monsters. Then the monsters killed so many of the people that we were in danger of dying out. So once again, we devised something awful, trying to drive off the beasts. It was like an unbreakable cycle, and it exhausted me, made me wonder if I was mad for thinking I could make a difference. I preferred to imagine I’d survived the long walk to serve some purpose, but the world might not operate like that. Maybe there were no reasons why, just an endless chain of bad and worse, leavened by occasional brightness.
“Yes. It is.”
Fade laced our fingers together as we left the church. Sometimes it felt as if he could sense when my heart hit its lowest ebb, then the smallest sign from him, and it sailed away again, soaring on the wind like a bird. The lightness couldn’t last, of course, with the dire nature of the task ahead of us, but it was enough to keep me from seeing only the dark.
The citizens of Winterville emerged from their homes slowly, careful as squirrels. An elderly woman asked, “Who do we have to thank for our salvation?”
“Company D!” the men replied as one.
A ragged cheer rose up. In their wan and tired faces, I glimpsed true adulation. I’d seen it a few times down below in the faces of brats who dearly wanted my approval. Several men and women clasped my hands, kissed them, even, and I glanced at Fade in confusion. He lifted a shoulder, fending off the worshipful attention, but not in a way that made me fear he was about to panic and attack them. He only looked puzzled.
“Enough,” I said. “There’s a lot of work to do. Who’s in charge here?”
A couple pushed to the front of the crowd; they looked to be of an age with the Oakses, lined but not incapable. “I’m the mayor, Agnes Meriwether, and this is my husband, Lem.”
“Do you intend to punish Dr. Wilson?” I asked.
She looked as if I’d suggested murdering a child. “Why? He only did as we implored. For years, we had no need to defend ourselves. The Muties were different then. They didn’t band together like they do now … and we could handle the odd scavenger. It was no different from running off a rabid wolf. But in the last year or so, things have gotten much worse. We didn’t have any trained men or many weapons. So we thought science might offer a solution.”
“From what I’ve seen,” Tegan said soberly, “you can’t have both fast and safe. It just isn’t possible.”
“We know that now. I should’ve listened when Dr. Wilson warned me that it wouldn’t end well. But it worked at first. The Mutie bands just veered away, but then people started going mad. Fourteen people died while we were rounding them up—”
“There’s a prison camp in the south,” Morrow said to me,
low. “Barbaric. It would’ve been kinder just to kill them.”
“That’s what I said,” Lem put in.
Agnes seemed genuinely tormented. “I couldn’t bear for so many people to die, if there was any way to prevent it. I asked Dr. Wilson to devise a treatment.”
I nodded. “But he couldn’t. And the temporary prison didn’t hold.”
“I don’t want this responsibility,” she said softly. “I’ve made too many mistakes.”
A woman called from the crowd, “If you think we’re cleaning up your mess, you’re out of your mind, Mrs. Meriwether. You put this town to rights.”
I cut off the argument with an impatient gesture. Once we left, I didn’t care who held office. My objective was to restore Winterville to some semblance of order. So I divided us into teams as I had the day before, only this time we were hauling bodies. It seemed disrespectful to burn them as we had done the Freak corpses, so I set five men to digging a mass grave. That wasn’t a whole lot better, but it would take too long to dig so many separate ones. Down below, we’d have fed them to the Freaks, but I’d come to understand that was wrong, and Topside, it would attract scavengers.
I labored alongside everyone else, dragging bloody burdens out of buildings to where they could receive a decent burial. By noon, my back and arms were aching; it was the grimmest work I’d ever done. Only Tegan tackled other tasks; she checked the townsfolk over and helped those she could. I saw her frustration when she encountered illness or injuries she didn’t know how to treat. Guilt blazed like a signal fire in her eyes; she thought if Doc Tuttle had lived instead, he’d be of more use.
Once we finished moving the bodies, they fetched us shovels, and everyone pitched in to plant the dead. When I first heard of this custom, it gave me nightmares because it seemed so similar to putting seeds in the ground; and my sleeping mind conjured all kinds of horrific plants that might sprout from a corpse. It was silent work, raking dark soil over the faces of the dead. I heard only the rasp of the shovels and rakes and the breath of those who labored beside me. Black and still, the freshly dug mound rose up from the grass surrounding it. There should be some marker to commemorate the tragedy, but maybe the memory of the people who had loved and lost would do the job instead. Then the men of Winterville came with wood and stone, nails and hammers, and they built a monument. I rested in the shade nearby, weary in body and soul. Once the noise quieted, Mrs. Meriwether fetched the minister, who had a holy book similar, but not identical, to the one Caroline Bigwater read from when she disapproved of someone.
I gathered along with everyone else. These words were soft, and they slid like silk from the holy man’s mouth. “‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted. Weep no more, my children. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’”
After the service ended, the people of Winterville swallowed their tears, pretending their loved ones had gone to a better place. I didn’t know the truth, so maybe they were right. Company D stood silent and respectful through the completion of their rites, then the men gathered around me. It was late in the day by then, and while I didn’t especially want to spend another night here, I didn’t think it was wise to leave the protective perimeter with dark coming on. The pheromones—though they drove part of the town crazy—still seemed to be functioning as a deterrent to the Freaks. So we could rest safely here, I imagined. Before I could announce the decision, however, Mrs. Meriwether stepped toward me.
I met her halfway, brow arched in inquiry. “Something else, ma’am?”
“We’d like to thank you. At the moment, we don’t have much, but it’s customary to share a meal in honor of the deceased. We cook their favorite foods, talk about good times, and remember them kindly.” She lifted a plump shoulder. “It might be a silly tradition, but it comforts people, and supposedly it allows the spirit to move on, like a rite of passage.”
After so much death, it seemed wise to pacify the spirits. I wasn’t convinced such things existed, but if they did, it would be bad for feral souls to stick around. They’d soon drive the survivors mad.
So I nodded. “We’d be honored to share a meal with you tonight.”
The houses were too small to host so many people; there was no mess hall like they had in Soldier’s Pond, so they made do in the town square. People carried out what they had left in their cupboards, and men and women shared the cooking; a good idea, I thought. Soon, there was meat roasting in multiple fires, vegetables bubbling, and sweets being stirred in pots. Other townsfolk went about the business of removing all signs of the bloodbath from the day before. Stern-faced, weary men worked with rags and buckets. For a time, those labors made people forget the high cost of survival.
What will they do with the makeshift prison they built to house the afflicted? And why didn’t they just confine them in their houses? It was possible they tried that and that measure failed. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, breathing in the savory smells. Belatedly, I realized I was starving. Dry meat and bread had been the norm on the way, and I’d pushed the men hard. I’d feared we would arrive too late, but now I could relax a little. The crisis was past.
Someone sat down beside me, then I recognized Tegan’s voice. “Do you think things will ever be the same here?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
“Where are we headed in the morning?”
I had been thinking about that a lot. “We’ll try our luck nearby, see if our success in the fall was enough to change people’s minds.”
“Good idea.”
As the cooks finished up the evening meal, a trading party arrived from Lorraine—and that seemed like a sign. They were grizzled men with permanently sun-browned skin and silver beards. Their easy manners reminded me of Longshot, and a hole opened up inside me. I’d lost people before, but never like that. Nobody ever thought so much of me that he’d die so I could live, and I was finding it hard to carry that gift, as there was no way of repaying him.
“What happened here?” the lead driver asked, for it was obvious the town was recovering from an attack.
“Private dispute,” Mrs. Meriwether told him.
“Not Muties?” the man demanded. “There’s a huge mess of them over in Appleton. The whole town’s overrun.”
The woman blanched but she shook her head. “So far, we’ve seen nothing of them.”
“I wouldn’t fret. I hear there’s an army on the march. I had word on the trail from John Kelley. These soldiers killed about a thousand mutants out past Soldier’s Pond.”
The trader’s comment put a smile on my face. As promised, the trapper was spreading word about—and exaggerating—our great deeds. I didn’t know how much his stories would help, but they were entertaining, anyway.
Agnes Meriwether opened her eyes wide. “Is that so? Well, there will be a party tonight, so you’ve arrived in time for some good eating.”
“Thanks kindly. We’re all hungry enough to eat a raw bear.”
A nascent strategy solidified in my mind as I listened to their polite talk; the wagons were heavy with goods that Winterville desperately needed. With luck, the citizens could find things of value to offer in return, despite the circumstances. The townsfolk hurried off to gather scattered items to offer in exchange for fresh supplies. Longshot had told me that men traveled the trade runs during spring and fall, so we could expect to see more caravans, more targets for the Freaks too.
I sought Fade out to ask his opinion. He was sprawled beneath a flowering tree, its white blossoms sweet in the cool air. Even dirty and tired, he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
“You look like there’s something on your mind.”
I nodded, dropping down beside him. “I was thinking that we should guard the trade routes. The faste
st way to endear ourselves to the people in the remaining towns is to keep their economies thriving.”
“You reckon that’ll make them feel indebted, more likely to send men to bolster our numbers?”
“I hope so. It’s the only idea I have left.” Beyond securing more ground for Soldier’s Pond, I couldn’t imagine how our squad could make a difference against the horde.
“It’s solid,” he agreed.
“We have to add to Company D … or the minute the Freaks abandon Appleton, they’ll roll right over the next town.”
By proximity, Lorraine had the most to worry about, as the settlement was only four days away. A big group might take longer to arrive, but not long enough for the citizens to evacuate, and besides, where would they go? Urgency clutched at me with hot, sharp fingers, but there was nothing I could do at the moment. That didn’t sit well at all.
Fade braced and reached for me then. It seemed to me that it got easier each time he did it, more natural. I hoped the day would come when he could do it without needing that mental pause, where touching me was the easiest and best thing in the world. “Try not to worry. For the moment, we’re safe and we’re together. Let that be enough.”
That was more than enough; it was everything.
Defense
Stalker returned late that night, well after they set out the food. He caught my eye and nodded, letting me know he’d dealt with his grief. I was glad to have him back. After that silent exchange, he fixed a plate and joined the rest of his scouts. The town square was a cheerful place, lit by the electric lights that Wilson had explained in such tedious detail, plus the merry crackle of multiple fires.
By that time, everyone else had eaten. There were jugs of strong-smelling drink that made the townsfolk laugh and fall down a lot; I quietly instructed my men to stay away from it. Around that time, a Lorraine trader produced a fiddle, and I wondered if the Winterville citizens found the music improper for a night that was supposed to be about showing respect for the dead, but nobody protested. The notes sang out like silver light, until people’s feet were tapping. Soon, dancing began, a whirl of feet and legs. The impromptu performance seemed to enliven Stalker further and he coaxed a local girl into dancing with him. Later, he stole a kiss from Tully, which made Spence try to plant a boot in his arse. Laughing, Stalker went back to his Winterville conquest. It was good to see him in high spirits, after the knock he’d taken earlier.