Horizon (03)

by Sophie Littlefield

  Tom puzzled over what it all meant. He supposed he could knock on the door and ask her, tell her who he was and why he’d come, but all his instincts told him that she would not receive that news well. And who could blame her?

  It tore him up more than he could have ever imagined: his daughter, all grown-up and heartrendingly beautiful even in dirty clothes and no makeup, had clearly arrived at her own rock bottom. As one day turned into two, and then three, Tom began to understand that it was now his life’s purpose to help her back up. Maybe—he sometimes thought, during those yearning days—that had been his purpose all along and every set in every nightclub had just been the sound track leading up to this moment.

  He was determined not to screw it up.

  He considered and abandoned dozens of ideas. All around him, the town was going to the dogs. Before long the apartment house in which he was squatting emptied out, except for a few of the freaky fever people who moved into the other ground-floor apartment. Red talked to people in the streets who urged him to find a shelter. That’s what everyone was doing, moving into movie theaters and city hall and grocery stores, big open places where they could pool their resources and keep the scary fuckers out—the rumor was that they were starting to attack people and infect them, too. Rabies, they’d called it. If only. And frankly Tom thought everyone was right, that until someone got a handle on this epidemic, holing up like scared little girls was exactly the right thing to do. The fevered were terrifying as shit.

  But he wasn’t about to leave until his daughter did. By then he’d evolved a sort of plan—when Cassie moved into a shelter, he’d just follow along and see if he could get into the same one. When they were safe, and maybe fed—Tom was getting damn tired of eating out of cans, and he wasn’t keen on eating the K7-whatever-the-hell the government was calling it, like a damn horse—then he’d test the waters and figure out how to tell her who he was.

  He almost missed it. One morning she walked out the door carrying a duffel bag, and Tom only saw it because the plumbing had stopped a few days earlier and he’d gone out to take a morning whiz against the side of his building.

  He followed her, not even bothering to go back for his few toiletries, afraid to lose her.

  When she went to her mother’s house, Tom was surprised. He’d sort of thought they were estranged.

  When she came out a little later carrying a little girl, he was stunned.

  He followed them to the library, but when she went inside, he stayed out.

  He wanted to come in. Meant to. Planned to. But this was truly the end of the line. If she said no to him now, if she didn’t want to see him here, where else could he go?

  Across the street, that was where. From the upper floor of the municipal center, in a big room still decorated with crepe paper from a bat mitzvah—Mazel Tov, Jessica!—he watched the sun go down on the library and wondered if this was to be his lot until the end of time, stalking his daughter, too afraid to come close, too desperate to make amends to ever truly walk away from her.

  She came outside the next day looking like his little girl again. The grown-up version, anyway. The smile was back on her face. Her clothes were clean and she’d pulled back her shiny hair. Her necklace glinted gold in the sun. She walked tall, cradling her own little girl in her arms, pointing out the clouds and the mountains to her. When they got to the curved drive, Cassie set the baby down to play, and she toddled around the dried-out lawn. The little girl had the pale fine hair and big round eyes that Cassie had had at that age, and Tom’s throat closed up with emotion and for a moment he felt like he was looking through a lens that erased time, almost three decades, and he wanted to run and swing her into the air and make her a promise that he’d never leave her, but just when he was thinking that this time he might actually take the first step someone screamed and Tom had the terrible premonition that he had waited too long, that Fate waited to snatch away the daughter he did not deserve.

  “You were there?” Cass asked softly.

  “I was there. Cassie…I always wanted to be there. With you. I just—well, I fucked it up. I was a fuckup. I admit it. And I know admitting it’s not enough, really, I do. I’d have to live nine lives like a cat to make it all up to you, but all I’ve got is this one.”

  Red—her dad—reached for a corner of the blanket that had fallen from Cass’s shoulder and tucked it up around her again, and she saw that he was shivering.

  “Here, we can share,” she said, and shook the fleece out and let it drift down over both of them, scooching closer. As the soft fabric settled she leaned against him, lightly. It was probably wrong. It was definitely stupid to trust him like this, when he’d been in her life for what—a couple of months, if he could even be believed—and out of it for decades.

  But Aftertime had a funny way of jiggering the math, of coming up with conclusions that weren’t supported by the facts. Because the facts—death and infection rates, life expectancies, chemical hazards, the evil hearts of humans—were devastating on their own, unleavened with little miracles like hope and forgiveness and redemption.

  “Tell me the rest.”

  Tom was paralyzed, leaning on the second-story window frame and looking down at the scene across the street, hearing the screams coming from the library’s little entrance area where a few people had been smoking and getting some air.

  The entrance area would have been a good place to play, because you could get back inside and slam the door shut in mere seconds. But Cassie hadn’t stayed there. She had wandered out to the circle drive with her daughter, and they were bent down looking for bugs or something, oblivious to what was going on around them. When the screaming started Cassie lifted her head and looked for the source of the trouble, already scrambling for her daughter, but the little girl pranced out of the way, focused on whatever caught her eye on the ground.

  And then Tom saw the things. Four of them, bursting around the corner, running like a bunch of drunks on wobbly legs, grabbing at the air and making gobbling sounds—headed straight for Cassie.

  Then he ran, too. Down the hall, the stairs, stumbling and slamming into the wall of the stairwell but he didn’t care. He got to the bottom and—unbelievably—the door jammed.

  Tom heaved and kicked and when he realized there was no way he was getting through he ran back up to the second floor and down the hall to the front apartment. He yanked up the window roughly and crawled out onto the ledge and dropped, aiming for a hedge, feeling the dead branches scrape his flesh as he landed and rolled, and then he was on his feet and running and just in time to see the things dragging his beautiful girl away, holding on to her legs and arms.

  Tom didn’t hesitate for a second but he knew he had to be careful, had to be craftier than they were because he’d heard tales of what they could do, and he would be outnumbered and outmuscled if they turned on him. He didn’t much care if they ripped him to shreds, but he had to get to Cassie first, had to get her away from them before they bit and infected her.

  It wasn’t that hard to keep up with them, racing along dusty backyards, catching glimpses of them loping down the street, dragging his poor little girl along the road, swinging her from their crabbed hands. She’d gone limp, and he hoped and prayed she’d gotten knocked out somehow, because he couldn’t imagine anything more terrifying than to be carried by these monsters and know there was no one there to help you and no one around to care about your fate.

  But that’s what he’d always done, wasn’t it? Hadn’t Tom left her behind half a dozen times before, heading down the driveway when she ran out after him, clutching his hand with her little ones, holding on to the car door when he started the engine, bursting into tears as he drove away? He’d always promised to be back again—“Soon, you won’t even notice I’m gone”—but somewhere on the inside, he’d known that the promises were a lie. There was always a new town, a new gig, a riff he wanted to try or a song he wanted to cover, or a woman with long eyelashes and satiny shoulders. And the roa
d—there was always the road, calling to him, seducing him, making silvery promises that he couldn’t resist.

  Tom ran faster, sickened by his many failures. He’d trade his own future, his own life, to give Cassie another chance.

  The monstrous things turned onto a small alley and headed for a shed, a nice one someone had built the right way, timber construction over a poured foundation. One of the barn-style doors had come off its hinges and was leaning against the building, letting light into the small building. It was a mess, garden tools and a ride-on mower and cans of paint strewn everywhere. In the center was a thick mound of rags, and Tom understood that this was their home, that they had brought his daughter here to eat her.

  Now he didn’t worry about staying hidden. He ran into the open like he was on fire, ignoring the burning in his lungs, the pain in his knees. He got there as they threw her facedown onto the nest and fell upon her. He saw them pin her down with their knees, watched them rip the clothes from her back. They were screaming nonsense syllables now, something that sounded like “mam-mam-mam-mam” and he thought he might vomit when he saw that one of them was actually drooling, a long string of saliva falling from its mouth.

  That was the one that Tom tried to pull off first, but it only lashed at him with surprising strength before returning to the exposed flesh of his daughter’s back. Red was flung back against the wall of the shed, hitting his head on a bare stud, knocking over a bottle of coolant that hit the floor and burst open, pink liquid seeping everywhere, a sharp note in the nauseating smell of the nest.

  Frantically, Red looked for a weapon. He heard his daughter moan and saw the things bite into her, tearing open her skin, rich red blood pouring from the wounds.

  Later, he would wonder why it didn’t occur to him then that she was lost—that she was doomed to the disease in those seconds, infected like the rest of them. But he was frenzied in his purpose, determined to stop them at the cost of anything: his life, the world, the universe, anything at all.

  His hand fell on the handle of an axe.

  Tom swung the axe up and over his head before he was even fully aware of it. Its weight as familiar as the boots on his feet. Tom had been raised high in the Sierras where it took two cords of firewood just to get through a single winter, and as the only son of a working man he’d split more than his share of good dry mountain pine, the scent of the sap and the seasoned wood coming back to him now in a rush as he brought the axe blade crashing down onto the neck of the Beater who’d shoved him, cleaving his head off and burying the blade into the floor inches from his daughter’s hip.

  He took a little more care against the second one, because he was for damn sure not going to hurt so much as a hair of his daughter, and he sank the blade through its shoulders, severing the spine and lodging the axe so that it took some effort to pull it back out.

  Only two of the things remained now, and they looked at him curiously. They were covered now with the blood of their companions, Cassie unconscious beneath them. One crawled toward him, right over the body of his daughter, and for that affront earned itself a blow from the side, the axe head hitting with such force that the skull cracked and splintered like an Easter egg.

  That left the last one, and it glared at Tom with its mouth wide open, bellowing in rage and excitement. Tom saw with disgust that it had bitten off its own tongue, leaving a ragged lump of meat bobbing in its mouth. It sprang at Red, knocking him down, the axe falling from his hands. The thing was about his size and weight, but as it threw itself on top of him and knocked the breath from his chest, screaming one last time in triumph before lowering its blood-spattered, scabbed and mangled face to feed on him, Tom realized that he was going to die here, in this shed, covered with the blood of the monsters that the earth had spawned, and his daughter would die and would never even know that he died for her.

  That realization twisted him savagely, jerking him back. He put everything he had—every synapse, every nerve ending, every muscle and thought—into one last heave and the monster toppled, its face hitting the floor, and even though it recovered immediately and twisted like an eel to grab him again at the ankle, Red had found the handle of the axe and he was just a little bit faster, a little bit wilier and a hell of a fucking lot more determined than some mindless feeder, and it was an awkward blow, that last one, without the benefit of a good windup or gravity on his side, and when the blade crashed down it didn’t finish the thing off entirely.

  So when Tom used the last of his strength to pick up his daughter and carry her from that hell place, the inhuman mass watched from the floor, its neck broken and bleeding, its eyes blinking and fluttering, and though its cries weakened and its body twitched, it was still scrabbling with its broken-nailed fingers to reach her.

  That night, Tom didn’t get very far. He found shelter in a house a few blocks away. He dragged a dresser in front of the front door and ran the taps dry, collecting the water in every pot in the kitchen as the sun slipped down and the light bled away into night. He bathed his poor daughter, so gently, laying her out on a rug in the bathroom, letting the water run onto the floor, where it pooled in the tiled corners. He gently squeezed the water from what was left of her hair, and more water seeped into the cracks. Who was going to care if it ruined the walls below? Her wounds were horrible, entire strips of her flesh missing, muscle and sinew and even bone exposed, but somehow the bleeding had slowed and he was able to bandage her roughly with sheet strips torn from one of the beds and supplies he found in the linen closet.

  If she died that night, it would not be for lack of effort on his part.

  When he’d wrapped her as well as he could, finding some soft knit pants, a sweater, socks in a closet, he placed her tenderly on the bed in the master bedroom and arranged the blankets so that they would not weigh on her wounds. Still she remained unconscious, her eyelids twitching and small mumbled syllables escaping her from time to time. He kissed her forehead, her hair, her fingers, and then he gently closed the door to the bedroom and sat down in the hall outside, a knife from the kitchen in his hands and several more on the carpet at his side, and as he waited for the long night to pass he prayed for God to understand that he had done his best and would do his best again and again, as long as He demanded it.

  Chapter 32

  CASS BARELY REMEMBERED to keep breathing while her father told his story. He’d been there. He’d been watching—keeping vigil, really—while she and Ruthie played outside in the sunshine.

  How many times had she berated herself for her foolish choice? She knew better than to risk venturing outside the walls of the library. And for such a poor trade: she’d exchanged their safety for dandelions, when surely she could have found Ruthie a dandelion growing in the sheltered courtyard; for the same breeze that blew through the screens in the conference room; for a chance for a few moments of alone time with her baby girl, when she was dooming them both to a solitary death.

  Cass had replayed those moments outside a thousand times in her mind. She’d opened the library’s heavy metal door, giving the frowning door guard a sunny grin—no one was forbidden from coming and going, at least not back then—and let Ruthie scoot ahead of her out into the bright sunshine of a spring day. She’d promised Ruthie that she would show her the paving brick that had her name on it, the one bought by her mother and stepfather during the library’s fundraising campaign the prior year, before anyone realized that the world was about to end.

  Ruthie had skipped and sung, clapped her hands in delight at the tiny yellow buttons of dandelions growing among the kaysev. She’d picked a handful, marveling at the stems’ bitter milky juice, and Cass had been so busy being grateful for the moment that she never saw the Beaters until it was too late.

  But her father had been watching over them. He’d set aside his own safety for them, and the novelty of that knowledge was warm and curious, unfurling slowly inside her mind. He’d cared about her, enough to search for her, enough to fight for her. And as for not bein
g able to gather the courage to come straight to her—well. Cass was certainly not one to judge. Shame had prompted a thousand of her own missteps and mistakes, and if things might have been different if her father had knocked on the door of the library before Cass ventured out that day, well, she had learned that you could never rewrite history, that Fate would always prevail.

  She had not winced and she had not looked away when her father described the carnage in the shed: she was trying too hard to remember. But, nothing. She had no memory of the things carrying her to the shed, no memory of their teeth tearing at her flesh, no memory of the axe and the blood and the screaming and her father lifting her, cradling her, rescuing her. The bath…there was something there, a faint shadowy flicker, a notion of floating, of water sluicing away her blood, cool and healing, making her weightless. Maybe it was nothing but a sense memory of unconsciousness, but Cass wanted to believe she could remember something good. She’d seen Red’s gentle way with Ruthie and the other kids; surely he’d been just as gentle with her.

  Already she was intoxicated with the notion that he cared for her. That her father, disappeared for so long, loved her. She’d despised him for so long, disguising the pain of his abandonment in stubborn fury, but all of that was slipping away as he talked. She knew it was supposed to take a long time; she expected to take a lifetime to forgive him, as so many of the people at the A.A. meetings made clear, early hurts were often permanent.

  But Aftertime, a lifetime was a luxury that could not be counted on. If she ever hoped to forgive, she had to start now. If she hoped to absorb the fact that she had been loved, she had to seize it and hold fast.

  She wanted her father to keep talking, to keep spinning this tale whose words felt like silken strands weaving themselves into a shield that would protect her, even—especially—from her own self-contempt. Only…there was more to the story. A lot more. Not least of it the fact that when she woke, she was alone.