by T. J. Klune
“I’m sorry,” Cavalo said.
The hand stilled briefly but then continued. The cloth brushed against his cheeks. His chin.
“For saying I should have killed you,” Cavalo said. “That it would have been easier. It wouldn’t have been. I’d have died.”
“You might be dying now,” Lucas said, sounding faintly amused, and Cavalo didn’t even stop to think that Lucas couldn’t speak at all. The thought was there, but it was faint and fuzzy around the edges, so he paid it little attention.
“I won’t die,” Cavalo said. “Not from this.”
“People have died from less.”
“Not now, Jamie,” Cavalo muttered as his son pulled on his hand. “I’m trying to have a conversation. Go talk to your mother,” and Jamie skipped away, laughing.
Bad Dog said, “You smell sick. Bad sick. Lung sick.” He lifted his head and sniffed along Cavalo’s throat, huffing out breaths that were warm and wet.
“You smell lung sick,” Cavalo retorted, feeling oddly petulant.
“I’m not sick,” Bad Dog grumbled. “Bad Dogs don’t get sick.”
“You were just a puppy,” Cavalo said. “A puppy in a sack with the monsters. With the bad guys. I saved you. And then you saved me.”
Lucas said, “Sleep, now. You need your strength.”
Cavalo reached up and grabbed his hand before he could pull it away. “I’m sorry about your father,” he said. “I’m sorry about him. Stay with me, though. Okay? You have to—”
“Daddy!” Jamie cried, pulling on Cavalo’s hand as they moved through the trees. “Look at that tree! It looks like a dragon!”
Cavalo grinned. “And how do you know what a dragon is?”
Jamie shrugged. “I read about it. In a book. It’s where I got my kicks on Route 66.”
Cavalo drifted, and on and on it went.
IT TOOK them two days to reach the prison.
They approached as the sky was darkening, as snow was beginning to fall again.
Lucas showed them where the cameras were. They waved at the lenses frantically.
Eventually the snarl of electricity faded around the gates, and they were met by the people of Cottonwood, hands shaking and tears on their faces.
They cared for the wounded. They set the injuries. Fed Cavalo medicines found in the dead robot’s stores, acetaminophen and ibuprofen. Dripped penicillin into his arm.
And then they waited.
Of course, Cavalo didn’t know this. He didn’t know any of this.
He woke in his bed in the barracks. His mouth felt dry, his tongue thick and useless. His head was stuffy, but he wasn’t fever-hot. He thought this could be another dream, a hallucination, but this felt more real than his walks in the forest with Mr. Fluff.
“Welcome back,” a voice said off to his right.
He turned his head slowly. Alma, sitting next to his bunk.
“Hey,” he croaked out. Then he coughed. His chest burned, but his lungs felt clear.
She leaned over, hand going to the back of his neck, lifting his head slightly. She brought a cup to his lips, and he drank greedily, water dripping down his chin and onto his bare chest. He turned his head slightly when finished, and she pulled away.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. His body ached, but the pain was manageable. He’d felt worse. He’d been through worse. He compartmentalized it, shoving it down until he was above it, until it was nothing but white noise under the bees.
He said, “How long?”
“Since Dworshak?”
“Yeah.”
“A week.”
“Jesus.”
“You were sick,” she said. “Very sick. I think everything finally caught up to you, and your body couldn’t take it anymore. I was worried.”
A faint smile touched his lips. He remembered a time when things were simple. Well. Simpler. “Were you.”
“Slightly,” she said, and he opened his eyes to look at her. There were dark circles under her eyes. Her skin was pale. She was exhausted, he could tell. He wondered how long she’d been at his side.
“The others?” he asked. He’d have thought Bad Dog would be in here. Lucas, maybe. If he hadn’t murdered everyone in the prison. Or run off into the trees because of all the people.
“Gone,” she said, and Cavalo froze. Her eyes widened, and she shook her head. “No. Not like that. Hank took Aubrey, Lucas, and Bad Dog.”
“Where?” he asked, his skin starting to vibrate. If Hank thought he could fucking take them away from him, he’d—
“Cavalo,” Alma said sharply.
He looked at her and wondered if he had enough strength in him to take her out. His arms were useless, but he could knee her in the face. Knock her head against the wall. That’d incapacitate her for now. He’d find them. Take out Hank. Aubrey, too, and wasn’t that a damn shame—
“By choice,” she said, hand curling into a fist on her lap. “We had to make sure.”
“Of what?” he asked as he gathered up his strength. He wondered if Bad Dog and Lucas were already dead. Cottonwood had used them to kill Patrick, and now they were tying up the loose ends.
“That the Dead Rabbits are gone,” she said. “It was Lucas’s idea. He was going to go alone, but Hank wouldn’t hear of it. And Aubrey wouldn’t let Hank go without her, and Bad Dog wouldn’t let Lucas out of his sight.”
“They went to the Deadlands? By choice?”
“Yes.”
That…. Cavalo didn’t understand that. “You didn’t kill them,” he said.
She sighed. “No, Cavalo. We didn’t kill them. We don’t know how many Dead Rabbits were at Dworshak. Lucas thought most were, and those who weren’t probably wouldn’t look for revenge, but he wanted to make sure. He told us that he thought with Patrick gone, they would fall by way of the wind and scatter. But we have to be sure.”
Cavalo narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean he told you?”
You’re still trapped in the fever, the bees said. None of this is real.
And oh, wasn’t that a doozy of a thought?
“Wrote it down,” she said. “Though he seemed really put out to do so.”
“He doesn’t like writing,” Cavalo said. “I don’t know why. Tried it once. He almost stabbed me with the pen.”
Alma chuckled. “And so you kept him.”
Cavalo felt slightly less murderous. He thought that was probably a good thing. “So I kept him,” he echoed. This was real. This was real. He told himself over and over.
This was real.
Right?
“Why?”
“Why.”
“Why’d you keep him?”
“I don’t know,” Cavalo said honestly. “He’s fucked up. SIRS, Bad Dog, and I are—” Were, the bees whispered gleefully, were because the robot is gone. “—fucked up. He fit. I almost killed him multiple times.”
“But you didn’t,” she said.
“No.”
“That must count for something.”
Cavalo didn’t answer. He was tired. His body was tired.
“We sent another group to Cottonwood,” she continued. “To see what we could see. Make sure it still stood. We don’t know what the Dead Rabbits did to it after we left. If they burned it down. Took our purifier. I don’t know.”
“They didn’t burn Grangeville,” Cavalo said carelessly.
“No,” Alma said. “Just all the people.”
“Which means there’s an entire empty fucking town,” Cavalo snapped at her. “If Cottonwood is gone. Go to fucking Grangeville. I don’t care. Just get the fuck out of my prison.”
Her face hardened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “About SIRS. I really am. I know how much you cared about him. And he saved us. Maybe all of us if the Dead Rabbits are gone. But we have all lost someone in this. We have all lost. Don’t you dare think you’re the only one.”
Oh how he hated her at that moment. Hated her for even mentioning SIRS. Hated her for being right.
>
He said, “I wish I’d never met any of you.” He meant it too. As much as a man like him could mean anything anymore.
She laughed. It edged toward bitter. “I know. All you ever wanted to be is left alone to wallow.”
He said nothing.
“What happens now?” she asked.
Cavalo laughed. It wasn’t the sanest of sounds.
Alma cringed slightly but tried to hide it.
Cavalo said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
He closed his eyes.
THE COTTONWOOD group returned first.
Cavalo was up and moving by then, albeit slowly. His muscles felt weak, his head filled with cotton fluff. He had barricaded himself in SIRS’s office. Someone had shoddily repaired the door when they’d been gone, and Cavalo had taken a blanket and pillow inside and shut the door behind him.
He ventured out only for food and to piss.
He never spoke to anyone. The people all stayed out of his way.
Except for Bill. He stopped Cavalo once and said, “I don’t blame you.”
Cavalo had glared at him until Bill backed away.
Cavalo went back into the office and didn’t leave again for a long time.
He watched the monitors on the wall.
Waiting.
Three days after he woke under Alma’s watchful eye, he saw three people approaching the gates.
He recognized one in the front. Larry. Or maybe Barry. Something like that. He’d stood with them on the wall when the Dead Rabbits came for Cottonwood. Cavalo hadn’t remembered seeing him after.
He pushed open the door.
The people in the large room stopped talking immediately, and they looked at him.
To him.
Cavalo’s hand tightened on the door. He thought to shut it, to block them all out.
It’d be easier.
Instead he said, “They’re here. From Cottonwood.”
The people breathed as one and waited for him to make a decision.
He hated every single one of them.
They must have been able to tell, because some of them flinched away from him as he moved toward the outer doors. He’d already made sure the electricity was shut off before he’d left the office. It was his job now. SIRS couldn’t do it anymore. He knew there was a large manual hidden somewhere in the office, one SIRS had shown him years ago. In it were all the command codes and overrides for the panels around the prison. He’d have to read it. Sooner, rather than later.
But he could do the little things.
He opened the outer doors as Larry or Barry and the others made their way through the gates, shutting it behind them. The air was brisk and cold, the snow blindingly white.
He let them in and shut the doors behind them.
Of course (of fucking course) they looked to him.
“Cottonwood,” Larry or Barry said. “It’s still there. They didn’t… nothing happened to it. Aside from what we did.”
What we did, Cavalo thought, was take on an army of cannibals, and somehow, most of us are still here.
There it was again. That feeling of unreality. Dizzying and sharp.
He said, “The purifier.”
“Still there,” another man said. “Intact.”
“Does that mean we can leave?” someone asked in the crowd.
Yes, Cavalo thought. Get the fuck out, and leave me to grieve.
“No,” Cavalo said, and maybe he hated himself a little then too. “We have to wait for the others. To make sure.”
No one argued against him.
THE NEXT day he sent a group of ten men back to Cottonwood with instructions to burn the bodies of the Dead Rabbits.
“What about our dead?” someone asked angrily. “What about them? Why the fuck would we care about Dead Rabbits when our people are still lying in the open?”
“Do you want them burned,” Cavalo asked, teeth bared, “with the Dead Rabbits? No? We can’t bury them. Not yet. The ground is frozen. We burn the Rabbits. Once they are ash, the ground beneath will be soft. Bury them then. Make your markers for your loved ones, but the Dead Rabbits go first. If that’s okay with you.”
No one else said a word.
They came back two days later, smelling of ash and smoke.
“Deke?” Cavalo asked Larry or Barry.
“Buried,” he said. “I put the marker up that you made for him. I’m sure Hank will appreciate it.”
Cavalo turned and went back to the office, closing the door behind him.
THEY WAITED.
They waited until Cavalo vibrated with it.
He watched the monitors, eyes flicking from one screen to another until they burned.
He slept in the office, hour stretches filled with teeth and blood and a large metal man saying how real of a boy he truly was.
He didn’t say much to anyone.
A FULL week had passed.
The food stores were fine.
The water was fine.
But the prison smelled of unwashed skin and sweat and piss.
He remembered one night when he couldn’t sleep years before. He’d gotten up and moved, the air warm as spring turned toward summer.
SIRS had been here. In the office. Awake, of course.
“Can’t sleep?” SIRS had asked.
“No,” Cavalo said roughly.
“Ah. I often wonder what it’s like.”
“What,” Cavalo asked, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes.
“Sleeping,” SIRS had said. “Being able to dream. I’m told it’s a wondrous thing.”
“Except when they’re nightmares. Not so wondrous when death is all you see.”
SIRS’s eyes had flashed. “I would think that would be even better,” he’d said. “Because you wake up, your heart pounding in your chest, and there would be a moment of terror before clarity sets in. The relief one must feel at realizing it was just a dream seems like it would be the greatest sensation in the world. How I wish I could wake from a nightmare.”
ANOTHER WEEK passed.
Cavalo became restless.
He thought they must be dead.
That the Dead Rabbits had taken them and eaten them, and everyone he knew, everyone he cared about was gone again.
He didn’t know if he had it in him to go back to his wandering days, aimless weeks and months of putting one foot in front of the other, moving from place to place without rhyme or reason.
“They’ll be here,” Alma told him toward the end of the second week. “They will.”
He wanted to ask her if she’d waited for Warren the same way but was somehow able to choke down the words.
It didn’t seem like a polite thing to ask.
NINETEEN DAYS after Cavalo woke, they came back.
It was almost dark. It hadn’t snowed in three days.
There was a knock on the door. Cavalo thought about ignoring it, but it came again.
It was Alma.
“What?” he asked.
“Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“When was the last time you ate?”
Yesterday, but she didn’t need to know that. “This morning,” he said.
“You know,” she said, “for all that you are, you’ve always been a shit liar.”
And yeah, maybe she had a point, but he didn’t have time for her right now. It had been almost four weeks since Dworshak, and he needed the people to leave, needed Lucas and Bad Dog to come back. He’d started planning, in his head, going after them. He had a vague notion of where the Dead Rabbit encampment lay in the Deadlands. He could be there in a week, maybe nine days. He couldn’t take sitting here anymore, waiting and wondering. The bees wouldn’t leave him alone.
“Is that all?” he asked.
“They’ll come back,” she said, and he was pretty sure he was going to slam the door in her face.
“I know,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Do you?”
So many games, the bees muttered, and for once, he agreed with them.
He didn’t answer her—just glared at her, really—but instead of backing down, instead of looking away or cowering in fear, she cocked her head at him, a small smile playing on her lips. She said, “You really care about him, don’t you?”
“No,” Cavalo said coldly, not bothering to ask who she meant. “I don’t.”
“Shit liar,” she said, smiling fully now, a hint of teeth that Cavalo wanted to knock from her head. “Always been. But if you posture a little bit more, maybe I’ll believe you. It’s—”
A sensor went off from behind him. A click, then a low beep. He set it every time he looked away from the monitor, every time he walked out of the room, so he would know. The panels would light up, and he would know.
He thought maybe it was Dead Rabbits. Possibly Patrick, having survived getting plowed into by a falling helicopter, stabbed in the chest, knocked off a seven-hundred-foot dam. He thought it could be them setting off the proximity alarms, coming to finish them off finally, and Cavalo knew he would never find out what happened to Bad Dog and Lucas. He would never know because this was the end.
His heart jackrabbited in his chest as he turned, thinking something he hadn’t quite thought to himself in years:
I wish I had more time.
He looked at the monitors.
And on the one in the upper right, fuzzy and dark as the picture was, stood Bad Dog, tail wagging side to side, ears cocked at the ready near the gate.
Cavalo let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. It came out sounding suspiciously wet and broken. Relief like he hadn’t felt in years rolled through him, overwhelming and warm.
He heard Alma already moving away from him toward the outer doors. He reached down and shut off the alarm and the electricity in the gates before following her out.
The people of Cottonwood knew something had happened, and they began to buzz like the bees in his head, whispering in each other’s ears, calling out, wanting to know what had happened, what was going on.
Cavalo ignored them. He didn’t have time for them.
He barely felt the cold as he stepped out into the snow.
Hank was pushing open the gate.