Because of me.
“Janey-Jane, you knew it in your heart,” Jackson says, his voice near my ear. “Why do you think I’ve been following you here there and everywhere? You just didn’t want to face it, the fact that what Gideon Carr did to you had consequences beyond your control.”
I turn my head to the side. There is no ghost. Perhaps there never was. Only the subconscious knowledge that I truly do bear some responsibility for Jackson’s death, and the cold reality that he is never coming back, that my heartbreak will always be total and complete.
I shake my head. But I wasn’t bit then. I wasn’t immune.
“Jane?” Katherine calls to me, but her voice is far away.
Bite plus vaccine, Callie said. Unless Callie was wrong. Maybe everyone was wrong. What if the behavior of the dead is the key to identifying an effective vaccination, just seeing how the dead reacted to a living body? If the dead are disinterested, then it means the vaccine has taken. But the whole process takes time, both Callie and I had been vaccinated for months before being bitten.
By that estimation I wasn’t immune when Gideon and I walked past the shambler wheel in Summerland, but perhaps by the night of the undead attack I was. It could be too many unvaccinated folks make the dead react like usual, so then, maybe some of the Summerland patrols actually are immune and that’s why the dead acted so strangely back then. A real scientist could work out ratios and ranges and all that, but I ain’t a woman of science, I’m a woman of action.
Either way, the vaccine does work. Just not the way Gideon Carr thinks it does.
Stupid, stupid man. He had the answer in front of him all along, one everyone could have lived with. All he needed was to parade a body in front of the dead and gauge the reaction to check the efficacy of his vaccine. None of his exposing folks to the bite was necessary. Gideon’s focus was just too narrow to see it.
And Jackson is dead because of it.
My anguish quickly explodes into rage. I lean down and pick up my knife, cleaning it off on the dress of a white woman. I want to push everything back, to close the door on the cage of my emotions, letting only my anger run free. But it’s too late for that. Katherine’s presence has compromised my defenses and laid my heart bare, and now there’s nothing to do but deal with it best I can.
I can see what she’s doing, trying to save me from myself. But she doesn’t need someone like me in her life. I am unrepentant and feel no shame for the lives I’ve taken. It’s inevitable that I will disappoint her, just as I have everyone else. And the sooner she figures that out, the better.
“These dead are newly turned,” I say, cold and calm, once I’ve gained control of myself enough to speak. “We should get moving. I reckon the horde must be growing, which means they’re only going to get more numerous.”
Katherine’s hand is over her mouth. “Jane, I did not—”
“All is well, Katherine,” I say. My voice is as flat as the Great Plains themselves. “It’s just one more reason to plant a bullet between the eyes of Gideon Carr.”
By far the greatest indication of the grandeur of California is the ability of the common man to eke out a successful living, whether by farming, trapping, or trying his luck in the mountains where gold is plentiful and the dead are not.
—The Great California Republic, 1868
—KATHERINE—
Chapter 40
Notes on a Disaster
Jane and I quickly break camp and head out. She is quiet in the wake of the revelation about Jackson, and I regret the part I played in it. Sometimes I think it is better when the causes of our miseries are mysteries to us; when the reasoning is clear, it almost becomes too much to bear. And as we make our way upriver Jane tries to come to terms with the idea that she might have played some inadvertent role in Jackson being bitten. Jane has no face for poker, even as she thinks she does; her every thought or feeling is telegraphed across her face. I see the familiar mix of anger and sadness in her expression as she bares her teeth and quickens her pace, but there is a newer darkness there as well, and it causes me to feel breathless as my familiar anxiousness begins to overwhelm me.
I want to tell Jane that none of this is her fault. She was vaccinated by Gideon Carr against her will before she even knew what effect it would have. She certainly had not summoned Jackson to our side as we fled that awful place. But if she continues down the path of killing Gideon regardless of the cost, well, that will be her choice. And whatever heartache she reaps will be exactly what she has sown.
But I am not sure she cares about anything beyond her revenge.
We find a well-used road and, silently, agree to follow it rather than cutting our own path through the woods. The road twists toward the river, then, about a quarter mile from the water, turns to run parallel to it. At first I am wary of the dead doing their damnable jack-in-the-box act as they once did to Jackson, but hours pass, and we do not see anyone else, living or dead. The sun is warm and bright, and the coat I wear is more than I need for such temperate weather. California truly is a marvel. No wonder so many sing its praises. The wheat and alfalfa that grow on either side of the road are green and lush, and the birds sing songs of joy and renewal. That the dead have managed to find their way into a place of such promise is an American tragedy. Nothing remains untouched in this world for long, and it is hard not to fall into despair at the futility of our condition.
“Jane,” I call, a thought occurring to me.
“What?”
“What are your plans for Tomás?”
She scowls and shrugs. “I ain’t got any plans for the boy. I figured that there would be an orphanage in Sacramento where I could drop him.”
I blink. “You figured you would drop the boy at an orphanage.”
“Yes, I can’t be out here caring for a youngster. I only brought him along because I thought I’d need him to translate for me.”
“But, he is a child.”
“Yep, and one that can speak Spanish, while I do not. But our time together nears its end, so I suppose he’ll have to figure out the future on his own.”
“Jane, you cannot just abandon the boy! He has no one.”
“I know that,” she snaps. “But he ain’t my problem.”
I bite my tongue, stopping myself from any further conversation on the matter. I had thought to bring it up to distract Jane from the problem of the vaccine and Gideon and Jackson’s end, but only because I had made the mistake of thinking perhaps there was some affection between Jane and the boy.
It was a miscalculation, to be sure.
“What is your favorite bit of Scripture?” I ask.
Jane snorts. “I find the Bible tedious. I prefer Shakespeare. Or that new writer, Twain. I find their writings somewhat more relevant to my experience.”
“You cannot find the Bible tedious! It is a beautiful book with some absolutely wondrous passages. I have always found Galatians to be particularly uplifting, since you did not ask. ‘And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.’”
For some unfathomable reason, Jane smiles. I cross my arms. “I do not see why that passage is amusing.”
“‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all.’ That’s from Hamlet. Do you know what that’s about?”
It is not as though I am ignorant of Shakespeare; Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer’s Night Dream were frequent favorites for the showcases in a few of the entertaining houses back in New Orleans. I never had cause to watch any of them as a child—mostly because they were performed in the nude—but I can tell Jane has something to say, and so I just look at her until she does.
“Hamlet is about a prince trying to kill the man who killed his daddy, which happens to be his uncle.”
“His uncle is his father?” I cannot keep the horror from my voice. Classic or not, this play sounds depraved.
“No, the murderer is Hamlet’s uncle. After he kills Hamlet’s father, he marries the queen, Hamlet’s mother. His
daddy’s ghost is the one who clues him in on the whole plot, but Hamlet’s not sure if he can trust the ghost, so he goes through this elaborate plan to get the new king, his uncle, to confess. In between, he spends most of the play talking about how awful everything is, and how unfair his life is. Finally, Hamlet ends up stabbing his uncle, but not before Hamlet himself is poisoned.” Jane goes quiet for a moment, and I wait. “Anyway, if I can get my hands on a copy, I’ll read it to you. It’s very good. A lot of people die, but they deliver these great soliloquies before they go. Well, at least the men do.”
“I would like that,” I say, and I mean it.
Our travels have brought us to a crossroad and, just beyond it, a bridge. We’re close to Sacramento now, and the dirt wall levees here are finished and intact. They’re also built higher than they were downriver. A levee is a wall of a sort built between a river and the land on either side, dirt and rocks piled up wide and high. The Sacramento River’s levees are covered with tall grass, and from where we stand the water is not quite visible. But there are no dead, and that is a good sign. I am still a bit rattled after this morning, and more reluctant to face the dead than I have been in years.
I am not fond of surprises.
We climb the road to the bridge. Here, the river is muddy and narrow. It’s not half so majestic as the Mississippi, but it is still a power in its own right. The water looks slow, but as the odd corpse or tree branch bobs by the speed of the current is revealed.
“Looks like the bulk of the horde has passed through,” Jane says.
“What’s that?” I ask, pointing to the city in the distance, where there is a line of smoke rising, as if from a factory. Perhaps Sacramento is still safe after all.
Jane fishes the spyglass out of her pack, lifts it to her eye, and lets loose with a string of curses that would cause even the most experienced working girl to blush.
“Look,” she says, thrusting the bronze tube at me.
When I hold the spyglass to my eye, the city is painted in smoke and flame. Figures make their way through the chaos, but the jerky motions are not that of the living. Sacramento may have once been a jewel on a river, but now it is a fiery hellscape.
“My God,” I breathe. If Sacramento is overrun, that means the dead we saw downriver were just the beginning. Soon, tens of thousands of shamblers will be making their way, unabated, toward San Francisco.
The promise of California is no more. Even if the dead could not find their way en masse across the Rocky Mountains, the West will still succumb.
The dead always find a way.
“Well, what now?” I ask.
Jane’s jaw clenches. “We continue on to Sacramento.”
“You . . . even if Gideon had been here, you cannot truly think he would have remained in the city, do you?”
“No,” Jane finally admits, reluctantly.
It is the first real sign of reason I have heard from her since our reunion.
“Halllooooo,” comes a call.
Down in the river, heading right for us, is a grizzled old white man in a small rowboat. He appears to be a prospector; he wears a dusty, battered hat, canvas pants, and an unkempt beard that has mostly gone to gray.
“Hello!” I call back, because it would be rude not to. Jane just glares at the man.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a bit of rope or an oar, would you?” he asks.
“No, sir,” I say, cupping my hands around my mouth so that my voice carries. “You would not happen to know what is happening upriver, would you?”
“Didn’t your homestead get a rider? They sent out a hundred men on horses the first night. The city has fallen! They say some rich folks were having a soiree, as they do, and one of them must have been infected. All turned! No one knows how one of them could have gotten bit. But that’s how it started.”
The little boat picks up speed as it approaches, and goes under the bridge we are standing on. Jane and I switch sides to keep talking to the old man.
“It was a rich person who first turned?” Jane yells.
“So I heard. But who knows? Some folks was claiming the infection came from some food they’d had sent up from the Chinese in ’Frisco; others say it was a Californio day laborer who turned first. There’s more than enough blame to go around once folks get to speculating.”
The man is drifting downriver now, and Jane leans over the railing of the bridge so he can better hear her. “Why is the city on fire?” she calls.
“Who knows?” The old man shoots back with a cackle. “Most likely some fool thinking he could end the threat of a horde before it could get out of the city. But I was at Gettysburg, I know the truth. The dead always get theirs.”
“Thank you for the news,” I say. “And good luck!”
“As long as I’m still breathing my luck is fine! You and your girl be careful.”
Whatever else he says is swallowed up by the distance.
“Well,” I say, looking at Jane. The muscle in her jaw is working again, and I can only imagine what is going through that mind of hers as she sorts through our options.
“This is Gideon’s doing,” she begins. “I know it. He’s behind what happened here. You want me to give up on my revenge, but Katherine . . .” She closes her eyes, and a tear escapes down her cheek. It is the first time I have seen her cry since Jackson. She swipes it away angrily and no others follow. “I ain’t . . . I can’t let Gideon Carr get away with what he did to me and everyone else.”
I hold my breath. If Jane is still bent on finding Gideon, the only place we are going to find a clue as to his whereabouts is in that city of death on the horizon. Even if Jane is beyond fear of anything but failure, I am not. I close my eyes and say a silent prayer.
She gives the smoke in the distance one last look and sighs. “The only lead I had was in that city, and I ain’t about to quit now. I’m going to see this through, and neither fire nor flood is going to stop me.”
I swallow around the lump in my throat. My anxiousness is nearly overwhelming, and I want to give in to the feeling. But I cannot.
I can only keep moving.
The silence weighs heavily between us. I could try to navigate my way back to the wagon train, but traveling by oneself is dangerous. If I follow Jane to Sacramento I will be walking right into the middle of a horde. And while Jane has nothing to fear from the dead, I am very much not vaccinated and vulnerable.
But I meant what I said to Jane back when we left the others. Jane might not see anything in herself worth saving, but I do. And until she sees it, I am not about to leave her alone.
“Well then, let us keep moving. If we wait any longer there is like to be naught but ashes left.”
And then I stride down the road toward the city, my shoulders square and revealing not a single hint of the terror that thrums through my veins.
A prudent bounty hunter knows when to let a quarry go for a better offer. After all, not all men are worth hunting to the ends of the earth. Considering the cost is what smart bounty hunters do. Plunging headlong into any bounty that comes a body’s way is what dead hunters do.
—Life on the Range, 1868
—JANE—
Chapter 41
In Which I Contemplate My Future
Katherine Deveraux is a fool.
She walks beside me as we make our way to the city, the smoke growing in volume as the fire in the city spreads, and I want to send her away, tell her to go back to the wagon train. I’d thought my determination to continue on to the city would make her turn tail. What rabbit runs into a fox’s den? But that is exactly what Katherine is doing, walking with me to a city of the dead without any care for her own fool neck.
And she’s doing it for me.
The further we walk, the angrier I get, so that when we pass through a small shantytown on the outskirts of the city proper, I grab her arm.
“Why are you doing this?” I demand. This close to the burning city the air smells of wood and cooking meat, and th
e smoke makes my eyes water. We can only see a little ways before us; the smoke billows around the tent city we walk through. The ground is muddy, even though I don’t know the last time it rained, and I figure it must be water pushing up from the river in some way. The stink of squalor is barely noticeable, only when the smoke clears enough for me to get a whiff. Breathing is hard, and my lungs labor, the smoky air making me cough.
There is not a soul to be found, and even if Gideon Carr had remained in the city after the dead rose, there is no way to ride out a fire like this. We haven’t even walked into the city proper and it’s already unbearable. I know he ain’t there, just as Katherine does.
But at my snarled question she raises a blond brow at me. “What do you mean? I should think it was obvious. You want to kill Gideon Carr, and you think we will somehow find him in this city. And so, here I am. I do have to admit that I think we should probably wait until the fire has died down,” she says, coughing delicately. “This smoke is abysmal.”
I’m not paying attention to our surroundings, I’m too focused on my frustration with Katherine, so it takes me a fraction of a second too long to realize that there are shapes lurching toward us through the smoke.
“Katherine,” I say, drawing my sword. “Turn back.”
“No,” she says, not yet seeing the dead around us. “You want to march into the mouth of hell to find Gideon Carr, then I will accompany you all the way to Satan’s throne.”
“No.” I push her behind me, using my elbow to steer her around. The way we came is clear, but in front of us the dead are beginning to congregate. I take a step backward, forcing her to do the same.
If they swarm us, Katherine is dead.
Despite the hazy smoke that swirls around us I can finally see clearly. I have a choice: Gideon or Katherine. Stupid, stubborn Katherine, contrary and ridiculously loyal to boot.
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