Horizon (03)

by Sophie Littlefield

  “If you call two months recent,” Dor cut in, his voice rising angrily. “Things change fast. As I guess you might know, Mayhew.”

  “And so I suggest we break into this door here and if nothing else, we’ll have a warm and dry place to let the kids run around a little,” Mayhew continued, as though Dor hadn’t spoken.

  “You won’t have to break in. This group doesn’t lock their doors from the outside,” Dor said, disgusted. “The mechanical ones don’t work at all, but there’s a safety latch on the emergency doors, under the push bar. The Beaters haven’t had the dexterity to work them so they leave them unlocked so citizens can come in quickly. They only lock them on the inside.”

  “So much the better.” Mayhew smiled, his expression chilly. He walked over to the door and ran his hand along the bar. There was a click and the door opened. “Okay, look, MacFall, if it makes you feel any better, I’ll go first. We can keep the women and kids in the back. Let’s just get in there, everyone can take off their packs, rest a little while we look around, talk to the folks.”

  “Only a damn fool would go in alone,” Dor said, and strode to the door.

  “Guess we’re two damn fools, then,” Mayhew said sarcastically. “But I appreciate the company. Anyone else?”

  The Easterners stepped up, as well as a few others. The rest of the crowd murmured approvingly. Clearly the popular vote was for Mayhew. Again.

  They entered single file, Nadir holding the door open. Inside, there was a faint hint of the smell that permeated every mall, Before, industrial cleaners and plastic and perfume. But there was also the shelter smell—notes of burned food, urine and bodies living in close contact with little opportunity to bathe.

  Oddly, Cass found it comforting.

  “I think you should carry Ruthie.” Smoke had appeared quietly at her side. “And stay in the back of the crowd, with me.”

  So he felt the same as Dor and as Cass herself, that there was something off here. But she wasn’t about to stay outside without protection from the Beaters, no matter how long it had been since they’d swarmed in the area. She picked Ruthie up without a word.

  “Hello!” Mayhew called, as the crowd walked along the broad hallway into the mall’s upper floor. The entire ceiling was made of glass and plenty of natural light filled the open areas. Many of the storefront windows had been shattered, the contents looted, but the debris had all been swept away and the mannequins and displays stacked against the walls, leaving most of the stores clear in the center. As they passed, Cass could see that many of the clearings had been made into homes; shelves held personal possessions, stacks of clothes, stores of food. Curtains had been hung to lend some privacy to the living quarters; posters and lamps and other merchandise had been moved into the spaces to personalize them. Other than the fact that everything was new, the atmosphere was not so different from the middle of the Box, where the employees made their permanent homes.

  But where was everyone?

  The group reached the rail overlooking the atrium. Just as Mayhew had described, there were restaurants with tables arranged in the center area, even evidence of a recent meal, dishes and cutlery on the tables—but no one was around.

  “So where are all these citizens you were talking about?” Dor demanded.

  “They were right down there,” one of the Easterners said, puzzled. “We looked in from that window up there, there’s stairs up there from the parking lot. There were at least eight of them before. Mostly women. Maybe they’re cleaning up, they must have a separate area for the kitchen—”

  A hollow sound stopped him, footsteps echoing from around a curve in the hall that led to another wing. A man stepped into sight. He was good-looking, exceptionally so, with curly brown hair and wide blue eyes. He wore an expensive-looking red sweater that fit him well. His mouth curved in a hint of a smile, and he moved slowly, confidently, a hint of swagger in his stride. There were weapons on his belt, but he made no move to reach for them.

  “Hi,” he said.

  From behind him, three more people followed, two women and another man. All of them looked healthy and well fed, if slightly disheveled. “Hi,” one of the women said, touching her hand to her face. None of these others held weapons.

  “Good to see you,” Mayhew said, stepping forward with his hand extended. “We’re up from the south, a shelter about fifty miles from here. New Eden, you know it?”

  “Eden…” said the man. “Eden.”

  The uneasiness in Cass’s gut unraveled into full-scale alarm. Something was wrong, very wrong. “Those people,” she said to Smoke. “They’re not right.”

  Mayhew reached the little group and stood awkwardly for a moment with his hand extended. After a pause, the man in front reached for his hand and they shook.

  “I’m Damon Mayhew.”

  The man stared at him with his mouth suddenly slack. “Havoc.”

  “Havoc…I’m sorry?”

  “Sorry,” the man repeated, with an odd little grin. Then he lifted Mayhew’s hand to his face, as though he meant to kiss it with a courtly flourish.

  And Cass screamed.

  And kept on screaming, joined by other voices, other terrified Edenites, because instead of kissing Mayhew the curly-haired man licked his wrist delicately, and Mayhew, who hailed from the East and had never seen a Beater in the early, airy stages of the disease, who had time to run but didn’t, didn’t, didn’t, stood there doing nothing while the man smiled wider and then nipped into his skin with perfect white teeth.

  Mayhew yelped and jumped back, grabbing his wrist with his other hand but not before Cass saw the little jagged rip dotted with blood. The man who’d bitten him had been recently turned, still had the initial shine of the fever, and he would not attack. This little group would not tackle Mayhew and drag him away to feast upon, even though Cass now noticed the cuts and scabs on their hands and wrists, a gash on one woman’s face, the rosy sheen and bright eyes that were the hallmarks of the sickness. In this phase, they merely nibbled idly, on themselves and each other, their bites more exploratory than savage, nothing like the ravenous hunger that would soon follow. In their fever, they practically glowed.

  Mayhew still didn’t understand what was happening, rubbing at his arm and scowling, but the Edenites did.

  They ran. Most ran back toward the doors they’d entered through, though a few raced in the other direction toward a T in the rows of shops. Cass had Ruthie in her arms and Smoke at her side and they were not as fast; others—including the Easterners who finally figured out what was going on—passed them by, hurtling with a speed born of terror.

  “Go on!” Smoke yelled at Cass. “Take Ruthie, just go!”

  He was fumbling at his belt, he had his gun—they had Red to thank for that, Cass’s father had outfitted Smoke with his second-favorite piece in a gesture that seemed oddly old-fashioned, a courtly tradition of another era. Now she was grateful. Now she understood what Smoke meant to do and prayed for the bullet to find its target.

  The curly-haired man went down first, his head canting to the side in a burst of blood, his body thrown against the half wall overlooking the atrium, his hands clutching air.

  Smoke shot Mayhew second, taking off the top third of his skull, dropping him to his knees with a surprised expression on his face, and as Smoke fired twice more and Cass’s ears rang with the echoing report, the thought that came to mind was that Mayhew would never know why he’d been killed, he’d never know why the people of New Eden turned on him.

  But he should have. On this side of the Rockies, at least, everyone knew. Everyone had seen a new Beater and knew they were every bit as deadly as the oldest ones that shambled, flayed and broken, toward their inevitable end.

  The female Beaters lay on the floor, one of them silent and still, the other gut-shot and trying to move, shrieking in pain and rage, crawling over her own entrails toward them. Smoke fired again and she crumpled like a moth hit with a garden hose.

  But the scream
ing continued, and Smoke grabbed Cass’s arm and pulled her toward the walkway bridge that led across the atrium, to a Victoria’s Secret store that still bore a pink-and-red banner decorated with sequins and stuffed felt hearts.

  “That’s not the—”

  That was all she got out before one of the Easterners, the barrel-chested, lisping one named Davis, ran past her, knocking into her with his shoulder, spinning her against the wall.

  Then she saw what he was running from. Three of them, much further along in the disease, old Beaters whose flesh hung in ribbons from their chewed and wasted arms and whose faces were a ravaged tarmac of wounds and self- inflicted assaults, lips chewed away and broken teeth, eyebrows and eyelashes long ago ripped out with the nervous savage fury of infection. These creatures were not handsome, like the ones who’d greeted Mayhew, damned spirits with one foot in this life and one foot in hell, gorgeous with the first flush of the poison, their skin radiant and their eyes bright and depthless. No. These were the befouled foot soldiers of the curse, their humanity drained from them as they mortified themselves, obscene stinking mad lustful organisms of hunger and need.

  These were the ones who must’ve breached the mall somehow, compromised a barrier or overwhelmed a guard, forced their way in and found their prey captive and defenseless, trapped in a prison of their own making. Who knows how many they’d devoured until, momentarily sated, they’d let some of their prey live. And those, the newly turned, were the ones who doomed the rest. Just as Owen’s curse would have spread like wildfire throughout the Edenites had he lived, the barely feverish had doomed the other mall-dwellers until the entire place was one giant festering nest of Beaters, all of them longing for uninfected flesh.

  It was nothing she hadn’t seen before, nothing any of them hadn’t seen before, except, perhaps, for the Easterners, so perhaps Davis could be forgiven his terror, his desperate attempt at self-preservation that left Cass reeling and struggling to hold on to Ruthie.

  “Come on,” Smoke yelled again, waiting until she took his hand. Ruthie was heavy and restless in her other arm, wakened from her peaceful afternoon slumber yet again by tragedy and disaster.

  Cass could tell that Smoke’s strength was ebbing, his body racked with pain and his muscles weak, but he kept up the pace past a cosmetics store, a kitchenware shop, to a clothing store that still, all these many months after the final shopper overpaid for the last logo-embroidered shirt, still reeked of a signature cologne.

  Cass had hated malls, the chemical smells and lack of natural light, the forced cheer of the window displays featuring impossibly thin mannequins and spotless suburban tableaus, all of the tableware and underpinnings and electronic toys and scented candles, the thousand varieties of crap that didn’t even add up to a single decent meal Aftertime. All of this, the entire compendium of suburban marketing fraud, coursed through Cass’s mind as she allowed Smoke to shove her and Ruthie inside the somewhat fortified store.

  “I’m going back for your dad and Zihna,” he said, and then, in the dim mote-speckled light of a postconsumer skylight, in what had been a shopping mecca Before, he seemed to be about to kiss her.

  He stared into her eyes and ran his fingers through her hair and pulled her closer, but in the last minute, one of them hesitated, one of them flinched, and Cass would always wonder which of them it had been, because all she remembered of the moment was the cornflower-blue of his eyes and the regret that he couldn’t love her enough, couldn’t love her as much as his cherished ideal of justice.

  In the next instant he was gone.

  Chapter 35

  SMOKE HAD SEEN carnage and Smoke had killed men, but the blood-slicked panorama before him caused him to suck in his breath. For a moment he thought he’d vomit, and he leaned over the stuccoed wall, heaving and gulping air, ready to unloose himself onto the vinyl sofa directly below.

  The moment passed, in a second, a fraction of a second. Disgust was not an emotion he could afford to indulge. Smoke swallowed down his bile and plunged forward.

  At the entrance, half a dozen citizens were throwing themselves against the doors, using their bodies as battering rams. Locking the exits from within—the shelterers had mistakenly believed they were making their small world safer, protecting their number from the temptation of outside, never anticipating the horror they’d accidentally spawned. Smoke could not help them now: at this point his focus needed to be on the threat of the moment.

  The Beaters had dragged off their first victim, a slender middle-aged woman with long, graying hair they wrapped through their decrepit fingers for leverage. Smoke recognized her—she’d asked him if she could help him when his bum leg gave him trouble, offered him half of her lunch, but now she was being shoved facedown on the floor in the entrance of a Hallmark card shop. Behind the broken glass windows were canting displays holding Mother’s Day and graduation cards and gifts—because it had been that season, hadn’t it, a year ago when things fell apart? The woman screamed and gargled in terror as the creatures yanked her limbs straight out and knelt on them. He could hear the ripping of her clothes as they were torn away. Her back was smooth and pale, and then it disappeared under the four monstrous heads as they assaulted with their wide greedy mouths, their sharp and tearing teeth.

  “Anyone who’s armed, help me,” he bellowed, shooting into the writhing mass. One of the Beaters squawked and fell away, its face slimed with blood and its mouth wide and grimacing, but immediately squirmed back into the feeding frenzy, dragging one bloodied arm uselessly at its side.

  No one seemed to have heard him, so Smoke shot at the doors, hitting the reinforced metal above their heads. The sound echoed all around them, and several people screamed or fell and the crowd tried to run in both directions. “If no one helps me we’re all going to die here,” he yelled before turning back to the Beaters.

  He edged closer to the mass, trying to find his opportunity. He managed to get a clear shot at the woman when one of the Beaters threw his head back to tear a long strip of flesh from her back down near her buttock. Smoke aimed for the back of her head and tried not to see it burst, focusing instead on the Beaters, now sprayed with her blood and brains and enraged to find their quarry unresponsive.

  Their angry cries ricocheted and echoed down the mall, and he glanced down the corridor to the farthest end where people poured out of a JCPenney, a dozen, two dozen, more of them. From this distance they looked normal, orderly, a congregation emptying out after church, fans leaving a stadium, patrons leaving a bar at closing time—only they walked with a certain shuffling, unsteady gait and they bumped into each other and occasionally lifted their fingers to their lips and chewed.

  The new ones. The ones who, if they’d come a week earlier, would have still been living here as survivors, not so different from the people of New Eden or the people of any shelter, making the best of things, trying to scrape together enough optimism to see them through another day, when somehow—a door forced open? an HVAC duct? a tear in the cheap stucco wall, the things’ hunger driving them to tear and chew through insulation, plaster, whatever it took until they reached the inside of the mall?—the Beaters got in.

  And all it would have taken was a few bites. A population like this, trapped, no light at night, all those halls and empty shops and dark corners for hiding like this—it would have spread geometrically, madly, instantly. With nowhere to go, the mall sealed shut tight save the one breach, the uninfected didn’t stand a chance. Hordes of the things outside, inside would still seem more survivable…

  All of this flashed through Smoke’s mind while he was shooting, then reloading from the stash in his pocket. There was more ammo on the trailer—but the trailer was out there, in the parking lot. The bullets were slippery in his hands, maybe twenty of them, and he jammed them into the cylinder with shaking hands while the Beaters grew frustrated with their immobile, unresponsive meal and howled their disappointment.

  They liked it alive. They’d eat a dead body if they had
to, but with far less zeal. They’d wander away from it and circle back, grazing on the corpse for a few days as children might pick at a fruit bowl if denied their Halloween candy. But for now, with the air pungent with the scent of living citizens, they would lose interest in the dead woman and come after the fresh uninfected.

  In fact it was already happening. Two of them had turned away from the woman’s blood-soaked, naked body and were crawling, slipping on her blood, toward the crowd of terrified people. One tried to rise, slipped, and fell down again, its elbow cracking on the hard floor. Smoke’s damp and trembling fingers had not managed to load the entire cylinder but there was no time, and he jammed it shut and fired the way he’d practiced so many mornings in the Box, on the fly, his body turning already to the next target.

  But before he could aim, the thing lurched sideways, taking a shot in the upper chest. Not a fatal injury, but enough to slow it down. Smoke looked for the shooter and saw three of the others, no—four, all armed, one man with only a blade—coming tentatively closer.

  Smoke shot the last two uninjured Beaters in quick succession, and they collapsed on top of the poor dead woman. One of the Edenites, a short wiry woman, ran to the Beater that was crawling along the blood-slicked floor, jammed the muzzle of a gun against its forehead and fired, getting splattered with gore.

  Smoke approached her, wary that she might fire again. “Hey,” he said gently, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t get so close if you don’t have to. That’s taking a hell of a chance.”

  The woman looked at him, wild-eyed, her mouth trembling. “It’s just I never shot a gun before,” she said. “I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss.”

  Damn. The last thing they needed was weapons in the hands of people who had no idea how to use them. “Whose gun is that?”

  “It’s some…somebody dropped it. Over there.”

  “You did good,” Smoke said, taking it carefully from her hand, pushing the barrel down. “You didn’t miss, not one bit.”