She wasn’t necessarily on call, as that was an anachronism of a time gone by, but she wasn’t not on call either. And on a night like tonight, with many Promise residents good and lubricated by their moonshine, her services could well be in demand. Fights, overindulgence, accidental injuries sustained by ever more dangerous dares.
Despite the alcohol flowing through her veins, or perhaps because of it, Lucy was growing more agitated. Fall would be coming soon, the final harvest of the season. After that, the supplies would grow thinner than they already were. The summer had been fruitful, and in past years, they would have been canning their surplus for the winter. But the surplus had gone to Joshua’s, so the winter cupboard was already close to bare.
“Do you people have any idea what’s coming?” she finally snapped.
Her voice was thick and harsh and sliced through the banal conversations like hot steel through flesh. The remaining revelers fell silent, glancing at her, embarrassed.
“Y’all are celebrating like we got something to celebrate,” she went on. “We’re digging our own graves.”
Lucy looked around the semi-circle of revelers surrounding the fire, but none held her gaze.
“Winter will be here before you know it,” she said, climbing to her feet. She snatched the bottle out of Teresa’s hands and splashed the liquid onto the fire. It triggered a large flash of flame, large enough to send people scurrying backward. A few people yipped in pain, singed by the bloom of fire.
“And we’re not gonna have enough to eat.”
“But—”
“But nothing!” Lucy shouted. “If we keep giving them such a big cut, we are going to starve. The rations we have left will be barely enough to keep the strongest alive. The older ones? They won’t make it. Half the kids will die.”
“They won’t let us die, will they?” someone asked.
“They don’t care if we live or die,” Lucy said. “They will suck us dry. And if we all die, then they will just move on.”
“We’ll figure something out,” someone said.
“Will we?”
She flung another splash of moonshine on the fire, triggering another bloom.
“Goddammit, we have to do something,” she said. “We can’t keep doing this.”
The group fell silent as Lucy stormed off into the darkness. It was quiet but for the crackle and whoosh of the rippling blaze, embers floating off into the ether of the night. Jack followed her to her cottage.
“Luce?”
She ignored him, muttering under her breath as she looked for something.
“Lucy,” he repeated, this time with heft in his voice.
She stopped pawing through her belongings, sitting back on her haunches.
“What?”
“What were you thinking?”
“Speaking truth.”
He sighed and let it out slowly.
“I’m not sure that was the best way to go about it.”
“And why not?
“You scared them.”
“Good,” she said. “Maybe they need to be a little scared. Hell, I’m scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“That we’ve already lost.”
“We’ll figure something out.”
“You think so?”
There was a fatalism in her voice.
Lucy’s mood was as sour as she could ever remember. It had been since the executions two weeks earlier. Sure, they had gotten back on track, but it didn’t mean much to her. What mattered was the loss of these two people she had lived alongside these last few years. Robert had been a librarian, Esther a church secretary. The murders had cast a pall over the community darker than the deaths accompanying their initial takeover. A harsh reminder that they were at the mercy of the Haven. Promise was no longer in charge of its own destiny.
That was what depressed Lucy the most – the sense that she was no longer in control of her own life. You didn’t jump through their hoops? Too bad, here’s another body for you to bury. They were like trained monkeys. No better than that. You just did what you were told, and maybe if you did it just the right way, you’d get a handful of peanuts.
They’d all been reduced to automatons. Get up, go through the motions of your daily life, the one you thought you once owned. But now those motions were dictated by someone else. All in furtherance of delivering the share that their masters had requested.
“We have to do something,” she said, her words slow and slurred from the alcohol.
“We will,” Jack said as she fell asleep.
17
Lucy started sleeping a lot.
It was strange. She had never been much of a sleeper. Even as a child. It had driven her poor mother crazy. For baby Lucy, sleeping through the night never meant more than a few hours at a stretch. This continued through adolescence, high school, and into college. Last one to bed, first one up. Her body just never demanded it. Of course, she knew about the health benefits of sleep and often wondered if she was driving herself to an early grave by not getting enough shuteye. It wasn’t like she didn’t try. She had knocked off the screens two hours before bed, she didn’t have a television in her bedroom, all the things they told you were conducive to a good night’s sleep.
And she didn’t ever feel shortchanged on rest. Four hours for Lucy were like eight for the average person. She didn’t nap, she didn’t get tired in the afternoon. Even when she had worked the overnight shift early in her nursing career, she had no problem pushing through the graveyard hours. A cup of coffee every now and again, but even that was for the social aspects, something to do with the other nurses yawning, struggling to keep their eyes open at four-thirty in the morning.
When Emma had gotten sick, sleep was nothing but a nuisance, a thief of her time with her daughter. She didn’t sleep when Emma was awake, and she sure didn’t sleep when Emma was asleep. She sat with her for hours and watched her sleep. Even when the prognosis had been optimistic, Lucy took no chances. She didn’t want to look back and think she should have spent more time awake.
Then the Pulse had happened, and she had gotten by on even less sleep than ever. Two hours at a stretch, maybe three after a long day, and she had really pushed herself. It was better to have both eyes open as often as possible.
Until now.
After her blowup at the group, she slept deep into the next day, even outsleeping the hangover. Conveniently, no one needed major medical care and no one came looking for her. What was the point of getting up if there was nothing to do? If there was nothing she could do.
And when she was awake, she began looking forward to when she could get back to sleep. Sleep was another world, another life, away from this terrible place. There was always the possibility she would see Emma in this otherworld. There was no seeing Emma here, no sir, Emma was dead and gone, and Lucy would be stuck in this mortal coil for God knew how long, separated from the thing she loved better than anything else that had ever existed in the universe. But in the darkness of her unconscious mind, Emma lived forever, Emma was eternal. And it didn’t matter how weird or strange the dreams were, and it didn’t matter that when she woke up, Emma would be gone because in that sliver of time, in that moment on that other plane of existence, she and Emma were together again.
It wasn’t real, people would say, and that was why she didn’t tell anyone.
Who were they to say what was real and what wasn’t?
In this world, in the world they said was reality, they didn’t have enough to eat, and there was no way to know if on any given Friday, someone would end the day with a Haven bullet in their head. Sure, sometimes, the horrors of the real world spilled over into her dreams, and sometimes she had to watch Emma die again. But that was okay, because there was always the chance that the next dream would find them eating ice cream on a hot summer day, the melting treat drip, drip, dripping on the sidewalk as they rushed to finish it.
She worried people would start to notice how much she was sleeping
, so she began hiding in her clinic. She shut the door to her small office and started taking naps on her cot. The canvas was hell on her back, but she didn’t care. Her excuse for spending so much time in her office was the development of a new records system for the residents of Promise. That was why the door was closed. If you need me, she would say, just knock. I’ll be here.
It became a thing. She got to work at seven in the morning and saw patients. In between visits, she hid away in her office and slept. Around her, life continued unabated. There was so much to do. As long as she fulfilled her obligation to provide medical care, no one seemed to care about the manner in which she provided it.
But there was no new record-keeping system.
There was no point in it.
Promise was winding down. Promise was dying. You could almost hear it. The big seams holding their society together starting to split. She watched the others through the window, scurrying to and fro, and she wanted to yell at them to just stop, just give it up already. Better to cut bait now than to live this pipe dream that it was all going to work out. Close out the bar tab now and move on with their lives. If they waited until fall or winter, operating under the erroneous assumption that they would defeat the Haven, they would be left holding a bill they couldn’t afford to pay.
It was early on a Thursday morning. She was treating Mark Ellis for a bad cut on his hand. She cleaned and debrided as best she could. Then she applied some antibiotic cream (old, expired, what was the point? She was going through the motions). As she finished bandaging his wound, her ears pricked up at the sound of the horses whinnying from the stable.
“Keep it clean,” she said as he made his way out. “Keep an eye out for any sign of infection like we talked about. Redness, warmth, fever.”
“Got it,” he said. “Thanks, Lucy.”
The clinic fell quiet once more.
She went outside, drawn toward the horses.
Drawn to the horses, drawn to the possibility of escape. That’s what she should have been doing. Planning to get out of here. Preparing Norah for the inevitability of what was to come. Promise was dying.
Then she found herself at the stables. No one else was around. The animals had had their morning meal, and in the heat of the day, were left to rest in the shade of the stables. She knew better than going out again on her own, but she couldn’t stop herself. But it was like someone else was controlling her. First her foot was in the stirrup and then she swung her leg over the saddle. There, in the quiet heat of the morning, she sat atop the horse, gently stroking its mane.
She hopped back off and opened the stable doors; then she remounted Pancake and sat before the wide open before her. She needed to stop this. She needed to climb back down and head back to the clinic. But even as she was thinking these things, she had quietly guided Pancake out of the barn and toward the woods on the southern edge of the settlement. She hugged the tree line until she made it to the main road, then turned northeast.
Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
The refrain played over and over in her head. The voice of her English teacher echoing in her head. She had been a good teacher. Instead of constantly focusing on dry and stuffy short stories, she taught them poetry and song lyrics and novels and screenplays, all the media that combined and taught them the power of the written word.
Lucy wanted to believe that she was just out for a ride, that she didn’t have a particular destination in mind. But as she drifted further from the borders of Promise, it was like another Lucy had taken control, a grown-up Lucy, a Lucy who did not lie to herself.
Even in the fog of pain, returning to Promise from Westerberg, she had committed the route to memory. It wasn’t as if Tim didn’t want her to know where he was. He could have blindfolded her after all. No, he wanted her to know. In case she ever found herself in dire straits, if she ever came to such a pass that she needed help that no one else could provide.
It was funny. Of all the thousands of hours of her life, she’d only spent about twenty-four of them with Tim Whitaker. Less than that, now that she thought about it. A few hours at the high school where they had first met. Another sixteen or so during the rescue of Norah from that psychopath, Simon. And yet she still felt close to him after all of these years. He had not become a memory, after all. He wasn’t something tucked away in a dusty, old box that you looked at from time to time. He was bolted onto her soul.
There was something special about their connection. Every now and again, you would meet someone like that. Someone who made you feel like they should have been part of your life all along, that there had been a hole in your life in the shape of that person all this time. Fortunately for her, and fortunately for Norah, she had met Tim Whitaker when she needed him the most. Even if she hadn’t realized the time.
She had traveled at least a dozen miles in her fugue state, somehow cleaving to the route to the warehouse. It was a warm day, and she was very thirsty. She hadn’t even thought to bring a bottle of water with her. What was she thinking? Just giving a middle finger to the way the world was? This world didn’t care; it would chew her up and spit her out.
Jack would go ballistic when he found out she had left again. She even had the perfect comeback for him.
At least I’m out of bed…
The joke wouldn’t have gone over well. That alone brought a smile to her face.
A cloud drifted in front of the sun and brought her some much-needed shade. Her skin felt tight with sunburn.
All these years, she and Tim had been separated by no more than thirty miles. It made her sad to think about it. She’d been here, and he’d been there, and they might as well have been on two different planets for all the good their proximity had done. It was emblematic of their world now. You felt all alone because you were all alone.
They were embroiled in this terrible struggle with the Haven now, a struggle that meant nothing to no one outside their little bubble. Even if the Haven controlled all of central Virginia, that didn’t mean a hell of a lot in the grand scheme of things.
After all, that was why she was going to see Tim.
Wasn’t it?
For Promise?
Or was it for her?
She had been so ready to declare Promise dead. Was this little trip in furtherance of that, or was she looking for a way to save the patient? What could Tim offer? Her community had twice as many people as Tim’s. She couldn’t ask for supplies. He couldn’t spare a single can. Hell, even treating her to a meal had been an act of extraordinary generosity you really couldn’t afford these days. But maybe he would want to join their fight. Maybe he wanted to join her fight.
She turned onto Route 245, the last turn before the access road to the distribution warehouse came into view. The trees thinned out behind her. Ahead was clear grassland, gently rolling hills in the Virginia countryside. It looked like a grand, green quilt of farmland. Corn growing tall and green, the silks and stalks rippling in the afternoon breeze. Whose corn, she did not know. Perhaps it was Tim’s. He would be resourceful like that.
The outer gate of the warehouse was a hundred yards up the road.
Her heart was pounding in her chest. She was as nervous as she’d been on her first date so many years ago. Firing through her was a machine gun of emotions. Fear, anticipation, regret, anxiety, excitement.
She didn’t even know what she would say when she saw him. Even though that was so unlike her. Lucy Goodwin was not one to improvise. She liked thinking ahead, having a plan. It gave her a sense of control, especially in situations where control was an ethereal thing, as easy to grab hold of as a puff of smoke.
But the more she tried to come up with a plan, the more confused she became.
She drew back the reins of the horse, bringing him to a halt right in the middle of the roadway under the shade of a single great oak tree, its canopy curling oddly over the asphalt. The leaves rippled in the warm afternoon breeze.
Just turn around and go home.
You have no business here.
She froze.
She’d lost her nerve to continue, but she could not bring herself to turn around either. She would just wait here in the shade until she died of thirst. Yeah, that was the ticket. Lucy Goodwin, dead at age forty-four from paralysis and indecision.
Then the decision was made for her.
Out here in the open.
Someone was calling out to her.
It was Tim.
18
Tim began jogging toward her, a look of concern on his face.
Why was he running? she wondered.
Not that she minded watching him run toward her. He was still in good shape. Probably made it a requirement for anyone who lived here to stay in top physical condition. Not a bad idea, maybe one they should implement back home. Steel themselves. Become stronger and faster. It was a dog-eat-dog world after all. Survival of the fittest. The muscles in his legs, the way his chest filled out the dry-fit shirt he wore. Wow, Lucy Goodwin, just wow, you’ve really made contact with the horny teenager you were thirty years ago.
“Lucy, are you okay?” he asked upon reaching her. He placed his hand against her leg, not in a titillating way, more to stabilize her. Still it felt good, the touch of his hand.
“I think so,” she said, feeling faint even as she replied.
“Let’s get you out of this heat.”
Was it hot?
She hadn’t even noticed.
She really should have brought a bottle of water with her.
She glanced down at her arms, which seemed redder than she recalled. The skin was tight and stiff. Sunburn, came a voice inside her head. Your dumb ass is sunburned. Suddenly, a wave of shame washed over her, and everything became clear. Again, she was here, brought to Tim’s doorstep by her own misfortune.
He climbed up on the horse and took the reins as she sagged against his back. He guided the animal inside the gates of his community and led it to a shady corner of the property. He sent a young man for water.
American Midnight | Book 2 | Nightfall Page 14