Still, nothing stirred in the dusty streets as the group rolled silently by, the horses’ hooves clopping hollowly alongside the cars and trailers and wagons. They’d gone perhaps twenty-five yards past the edge of the town, far enough for a collective sigh of relief, when a frightened yell pierced the air and a figure came sprinting toward them.
As he gained ground, Cass saw that it was Shane, his long hair flopping on his forehead, his baggy pants sagging below his stomach. A second later a pair of Beaters came loping after him. One of them had something wrong with its leg, which dragged along behind it, and Shane quickly outpaced it. But the other one had managed to get a hold of Shane’s flapping jacket before it tripped and let go as it staggered, trying not to fall. A bullet from Smoke’s gun dropped it instantly, but Shane kept running, gibbering with terror, until he was in the midst of the group.
Cass didn’t like the boy, but he was still a child, as much as any sixteen-year-old can still be called a child. She wasn’t the only one to feel that way, it was clear, because several of the women surrounded him, checking for injuries, exclaiming over him, as Smoke walked to the injured Beater and shot it in the neck.
“Let’s keep going, let’s just keep going,” Shane repeated, his voice thin and terrified.
“What the hell happened, son?” Dor demanded. Shane was not a big kid, and he had to look up to meet Dor’s eyes. “What were you doing back there?”
“I was, I was, I just saw, I thought I saw, uh, cans, like food cans.”
“Where, through a window? On a porch?”
Bart and Nadir had their weapons out and had flanked Smoke on either side. Neither of the downed Beaters stirred, and there were no further sounds from the camp.
But there was smoke and, as everyone turned to stare, a small popping sound.
Shane turned away, muttering, as Dor exclaimed softly under his breath.
“Stay here, everyone,” he ordered as he joined the other armed men.
It didn’t take them long to find the fire. The shabbiest of the bungalows was in flames all along the back, where the paint had long ago flaked off the siding and a porch railing made excellent tinder.
They were back in moments.
“I smelled kerosene or something,” Dor said, cuffing Shane on the shoulder. The boy kept his head down, his face burning.
“I said something to you, boy.”
“It was there. It was sitting out. And it wasn’t kerosene, it was deck stain.”
Dor cursed and spun Shane around in the street. Cass was torn—like the others who kept walking, she trusted Dor to handle it. But her father, who had been walking next to her, had backtracked to join the pair, and Cass followed.
“So you found deck stain sitting on the street? I don’t—”
“Didn’t say it was in the street. In the garage.”
Two of the houses had detached garages behind them. Both were missing doors and windows.
“Boy,” Red said softly. “You like watching shit burn?”
Shane flicked a glance at him but didn’t answer.
“Check his pack,” Red said, as he hooked a large hand under Shane’s chin and forced him to look at him.
A quick search turned up a Ziploc bag full of small boxes of matches, a motley collection of knives and a cheap imitation throwing star.
“That’s a lot of matches, son,” Red said softly. “Anything else you might want to be getting off your conscience?”
Shane shook his head as Red squeezed his jaw, finally wrestling free and stumbling off at a jog.
“I think you just found your firebug,” Red said.
Chapter 40
EVERYONE WAS TALKING about Shane, and Sammi wanted to talk to him, ask him if it was true, if he’d really done the things they were saying. They’d taken everything sharp or flammable or conceivably dangerous away from him, and spread the word among the entire group. Bart suggested leaving him behind at the next shelter they passed, but he was quickly voted down. Watching the boy trudge along behind the group, face flaming and an expression of utter dejection on his face, seemed like punishment enough.
Besides, they had another problem to worry about. Jasmine had gone into labor that morning, and it wasn’t going well. She’d been riding in the panel van with Sun-hi all day, and when they came to a long, low-slung cinder-block building set at an angle on a giant gravel lot, broken neon signs spelling out TRIPLE-X GIRLS LIQUOR COORS LIVE NUDE, it was decided that she and Sun-hi would stay in the van while everyone else made camp inside.
Twenty yards behind the building was a surprisingly pretty creek. The water was shallow and murky, but grasses grew along its banks, and butterflies and water bugs flitted among them, the first anyone had seen Aftertime.
A fire was built along the bank and dinner served there as the sun set. People waded into the water, the first chance for a bath or laundry in many days. There was laughter as people emerged shivering and stripped behind blankets, hanging their clothes from the branches of a sycamore tree.
Sammi was helping to dry the little boys after a dip in the creek, toweling Dane off and smoothing his damp hair, which had grown long enough to hang into his eyes.
“Sammi, oh my God, Sammi.” Kyra came running up, holding her side, wincing.
“Kyra, what are you doing, you’re not supposed—”
“It’s Jasmine. Sun-hi sent me. It’s bad. The baby won’t come and—”
Sammi exchanged a look with Sage, who was trying to get a struggling Dirk back into his clothes.
“Go ahead, we’ll watch them,” Sage said, her face pale.
“Who does she want?” Sammi asked. “Does she want you to get Zihna?”
Kyra nodded, gulping air.
“Yeah, I just, I can’t catch my breath—”
“I’ll go.”
She ran over to a clump of people sitting on the ground on the stream bank. Zihna was sitting and talking with Cass, slightly apart from the others. Sammi skidded to a stop with her arms wrapped awkwardly around herself.
“Jasmine’s baby won’t come,” she said, out of breath. “Kyra says it’s bad. Sun-hi needs you.”
“Take me there.” Zihna transformed instantly from earth mother to all business, though she held Sammi’s hand as they ran, and Sammi squeezed back. They raced back up the incline to the ugly building, around through the parking lot to the front. One of the side doors of the panel van was open and next to it, on the ground in the shade of the car, was a pallet made of blankets unpacked from someone’s luggage. Jasmine lay on it, naked from the waist down, her legs impossibly pale and still, with blood-soaked towels covering her belly and between her legs.
Sun-hi was holding a baby.
It was the ugliest thing Sammi had ever seen. There had to be something wrong with it—it was purple and wrinkled and dented and covered with slime, a disgusting kinked cord hanging from its belly, its mouth wide with fury and its eyes squinched shut, and it was wailing, the most terrifying hiccupping cries Sammi had ever heard. It didn’t sound like a regular baby, even—it just sucked air and wailed over and over again.
“Dear God,” Zihna said, so it must be bad. When Zihna put a strong hand on Sammi’s shoulder, she stayed put. “Wait here a minute,” she said, and jogged the rest of the way.
She and Sun-hi conferred quietly and Zihna examined the freak baby. They looked down at Jasmine, who was apparently dead, and back at Sammi, who was suddenly cold. Freezing, even, shivering as the wind blew trash up off the asphalt and skittered it along under cars.
“Sammi.” Zihna’s voice was gentler, but still urgent. “This is important. You need to get your dad and Cass. Hurry, okay?”
“Cass? Are you sure?”
“Sammi, it’s obvious she’s an outlier, I’ve known it since I met her. She has all the characteristics.”
“But some people think—”
“They’re just scared. By morning they’ll realize she’s not a threat. But for now, we need her here.”
So Sammi made the trip back, jogging more slowly this time. Her dad and Cass—well, that was just great. Figured that they’d have to work together on whatever came along. In there, in the mall, it had been the two of them that finally got the door unstuck. It was like no matter what happened in their lives, they were thrown together. It had to be the two of them. What did they know about babies? Other than they’d both had one—but then again a lot of the people in New Eden had had kids, once.
Besides, Smoke was here, Smoke was doing fine, he’d made his miraculous recovery, shouldn’t Cass be with him now? He was a hero again after the mall, so why wasn’t she back with him? Why couldn’t she just leave her dad alone?
For a minute Sammi considered disobeying Sun-hi and Zihna and bringing back Smoke instead of her dad. She was pretty sure he could do whatever her dad could. Only, Smoke looked like he was going to pass out, and besides…
Jasmine
Sammi squeezed her eyes shut hard for a moment, nearly tripping on a clod of dirt. She’d seen about a million dead people, some of them way more disgusting than Jasmine, people who were eaten or rotted or burned. Compared to that, Jasmine just looked like she was sleeping, and it wasn’t like Sammi was a little girl or anything, she didn’t need her dad to tell her it was going to be all right, because she’d figured out a long time ago it wouldn’t, so it wasn’t that, but only yesterday she’d seen Jasmine in the morning with her hands on her huge belly, stretching with her eyes closed and this little smile on her face and Sammi had wondered what there was to be so happy about. Jasmine wanted that baby so bad, she’d told Kyra that after she turned forty she figured she’d never get to be a mom, and she had about thirty names picked out, for boys and girls, and she said she’d just know, she’d take one look at her baby and she’d know what its name was meant to be.
So maybe it was a good thing she’d died, maybe it was a good thing she hadn’t seen the disgusting thing she’d given birth to. Sammi reached the others and practically collided with her dad, and to her surprise she was crying so hard she could barely get the words out.
Chapter 41
SUN-HI SHOOK HER head when they ran up, and Cass knew that Jasmine had died. But then Zihna lifted the soft blanket and showed them the baby in her arms, and she was beautiful, face bunched and lips puckered, suckling air, her tiny hands in fists and faint pink lines at the bridge of her nose. Angel kisses, they called them, harmless little birthmarks; Ruthie had them too, but they’d faded away over time.
The baby’s head was a little misshapen from the labor. “Unproductive” labor, they called it, when the baby wouldn’t come—just one of many horrible euphemisms for the pain of becoming a mother. Cass had delivered Ruthie in a stark hospital room in the wee hours of the morning, and it had been an unremarkable labor, according to the doctors, but to Cass it had been one miracle after another. She’d suffered plenty—they wouldn’t give her painkillers because she was an addict—but thinking about what Jasmine had suffered before she died, before Sun-hi had taken the baby from her lifeless body, made Cass want to weep.
But this was not the time for weeping.
“We can bury her by the creek,” Dor said. “The soil will be soft there.”
“All right,” Sun-hi said. She sounded exhausted. Cass could only imagine that the disastrous labor had crushed Sun-hi, mentally and physically, as she tried to hold on to Jasmine’s life while the others battled for their own lives inside.
Dor was already wrapping the body. Cass saw his tenderness, his reverence; such a sharp contrast to the man most people thought they knew.
“I think there’s a little bit of evaporated milk in one of the cars,” Zihna said, her brow furrowed with worry. “But not enough. Oh, Cass, what are we going to do, this poor little thing—”
“I have an, an idea,” Cass said, the audacity of it making her stammer.
She told the others. They were all silent for a moment. It was far from ideal.
But nothing was ideal anymore, and after a moment they nodded and she took the baby in her arms—so tiny and precious, memories of holding Ruthie coming back like it had been yesterday—and she and Zihna set out to try.
It was too dark to dig another grave tonight. So while the others carried Jasmine’s body carefully to the shed attached to the building, Cass found an unlocked extended-cab Ford a few rows over and waited there with the baby.
Zihna was back soon with Ingrid, whose flustered, bewildered expression told Cass that she didn’t know. When she saw Cass, her face went stony.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” she asked sarcastically.
For a moment Cass feared she’d made a terrible mistake. Ingrid with her judgments, Ingrid with her certainty that only she knew what was right, with her righteous condemnation—how could she be the one?
“Please,” Cass whispered. “Just—just let me talk for a minute.”
It took less than a minute. There was very little to say. A death, a birth, another Aftertime tragedy marked with blood and loss. Cass did not embellish. She did not entreat. She did not even say the thing that had made her seek out the woman who probably despised her most, of anyone in New Eden—that only Ingrid could save this child. She opened her jacket and showed Ingrid the baby, who, miraculously, was sleeping.
“Oh my God,” Ingrid whispered. “Oh God, oh.”
She reached for the baby and Cass knew she did it without thinking and was only a little bereft to hand her over.
“You have to feed her,” she pleaded, but Ingrid was already unbuttoning her shirt.
In the morning, Dor and Steve and Earl and Smoke dug the grave. They had brought a shovel in one of the cars, but the barns revealed a vast assortment of tools, enough for all of them. It did not take long.
Jasmine’s body was brought from the shed and lowered, in its wrapping of blankets, into the ground. Everyone scooped a fistful of dirt and tossed it in.
Sh’rae was ready with her Bible. She had a gift for gentleness, and she chose her texts with care. Today she read from Revelation; when she got to the end, many people were crying as her words drifted away on the morning breeze. For a moment nobody spoke. Then Sun-hi crouched down and dug a fistful of dirt and tossed it into the grave. She brushed off her hands and started toward the building, not looking back.
The others followed. Cass held back until the end, and when their turn came, she set Ruthie down. Ruthie had been quiet since the mall, thoughtful almost, staying close to her mother. Now she bent to the earth with her mouth pursed in concentration and dug into the ground with her small hand. She dropped her fistful of dirt into the hole with a reverence far beyond her years.
The news of Jasmine’s baby had spread quickly through the group. During Jasmine’s funeral, Ingrid stood in the back, and when the baby began to fuss, she slipped away, out of earshot. But when the service was over, Cass saw Kyra sitting in an old glider chair, on the building’s back porch, cradling the baby gingerly, Ingrid showing her the proper way to hold her head.
Back on New Eden, there had been lots of teasing—not all of it good-natured—as Dirk approached his second birthday; the public opinion was that he was too old to still be nursing. But no one said anything now.
Chapter 42
DAYS PASSED, a lengthening string of them, until it had been nearly three weeks since they left New Eden behind.
In two days’ time, they would arrive in Salt Point. Nadir said they called it that because of potassium deposits in the soil, but considering he’d never actually been there Sammi was skeptical. The people who were trying to get the place set up would be in for quite a surprise. The Edenites were down to thirty-three now, including baby Rosie, who turned out to be healthy and not nearly as bad-looking once she was cleaned up and fed for a few days.
They’d lost five more since the mall. Old Mike and Terrence had died when they stumbled on a Beater nest in the warehouse they were clearing one night a couple of weeks ago. Richy Gomez and Paolo had to be shot the next day
after being bitten doing the good deed of trying to save Old Mike. Cheddar had hit his head on a stone outcropping while longboarding, been unconscious for several hours and suffered noisy seizures for a few days after that until someone—no one had come forward—had strangled him during the night.
Sammi was ready to move into the next empty building they saw, as long as it meant they could stay put for a while. Her blisters had blisters from all the walking, and her body ached from the moment she woke up in the morning until the moment she went to bed—if you could call it “bed,” since most nights she was sleeping on the floor in some shed or barn or church.
Worse, she couldn’t get warm unless she was walking. When they stopped for the night, she volunteered for every task she could think of because the alternative, which was to sit still, meant she’d be freezing before she went to bed. Once she was lying down she’d never get warm, even though she and Sage and Kyra had taken to sleeping huddled together.
According to the plan that the new council had drawn up, she was entitled to ride for forty-five minutes twice a day. That was the shortest amount of time since she was in the youngest age bracket with no health issues, and she wasn’t pregnant. But the reason she skipped her allotted time most days was that she was only allowed on the trailers, not in any of the three cars that still worked. And that meant getting colder and colder until she could get off and walk again.
Kyra took her trailer time most days. She said the baby was starting to press down on her bladder and her back hurt. They all felt the baby kick—every time it moved, it was good for a little entertainment, which was way hard to come by—but when Kyra rode, she liked to nap. How she managed it, Sammi couldn’t figure, though Kyra said she got something like hot flashes now, with all the hormones zinging through her body.
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