Horizon

Phillip’s fingers.

Chapter 12

CASS WOKE FEELING like teeth were working her head from the inside. Her eyes were gritty and her mouth tasted like the fetid rot in the bottom of a trash can. She staggered out of the bed after checking on Ruthie—a trembling hand pressed to her cheek, feeling the warmth and her daughter’s steady pulse, calmed by the sight of her hair tangled and cascading over the pillow—and down the stairs, skipping the third one from the top, the one that squeaked. It was already getting late, the sun rising in the sky, and people would be up in the house. Cass heard voices from the kitchen and slipped out the back way, the damp cold hitting her like a washcloth dipped in ice water.

She went down to the shore and did her morning routine there. She brushed her teeth twice with the kaysev stub, spitting over and over again into the river. This time, she checked the other shore first, and there were a few of them there already, though they looked sleepy, too, bumping and stumbling into each other as they got as close to the water as they could. They kept up a steady stream of muttering, but it wasn’t the desperate hungry keening that signaled a hunt. Cass tested the air with a damp finger—sure enough, she was downwind. And sheltered by the overhanging willow that was coming back into leaf, they couldn’t see her.

On another morning Cass might watch them for a while, taking in the details of the clothes they’d been wearing since before they turned, of what was left of their hair. It could be a fascinating exercise, looking for clues to who they’d been—a gold watch that still hung on a bony wrist, the remains of a tattoo in the ruin of a bicep, a hank of dreadlocks stringing across a filthy scarred scalp; a T-shirt with a now passé slogan or a skirt with last season’s flared hem.

But today she didn’t care. She just didn’t care anymore. After last night…dear God, the boy had looked so terrified, his skin already getting the sheen. He had to be what…two days in? What had they served two days ago?

It was a useless exercise, since everyone was allowed to visit the pantry freely and help themselves to the snacks the cooking staff left out each day, bowls of greens and pans lined with kaysev “cookies,” the hard little nuggets studded with dried berries and sweetened with the syrup made from cooking the juice crushed from kaysev stalks.

It was just impossible to know, especially since the kids liked to spend their free days on North Island, frequently plucking raw kaysev to avoid coming back and eating at the community table. Cass understood that, remembered how much she’d wanted an identity of her own at that age, how she’d cherished the fleeting moments of freedom when she and her friends could pretend that they never had the homes and parents and lives they were all so desperate to outgrow. She knew the kids stole kaysev wine from the pantry, that they’d learned how to roll their own cigarettes. She even knew where they kept their little weed patch, although she hadn’t been sure it was the kids’ and didn’t feel right turning it under or trying to catch the gardeners in the act. It wasn’t her place to judge—that was for damn sure, especially now.

She thought of the little band of New Eden kids, Phillip and Colton and Kalyan and Shane, all the girls—Kyra and Sage and especially Sammi, oh, Sammi, and the thought of her hit Cass with a fresh assault of dread and fear and guilt. She had to talk to Sammi, had to explain again how they must never, ever eat anything that hadn’t been grown on Garden Island, that hadn’t been checked and rechecked and prepared by the kitchen staff. But how could she get Sammi to listen? What if Cass had had a chance to reach them, warn them, and had squandered it?

What if Phillip was her fault

No, no, she couldn’t do that, wouldn’t do that. It didn’t help. And God, it hurt, it hurt so much to wonder about all the ways she’d failed and people she’d hurt, if she indulged that kind of thinking for even a minute she’d never get up off her knees in the mud at the edge of the river, she’d just sink into it until it covered her over and buried her. And that wasn’t happening, not as long as Ruthie lived.

Cass splashed her face with water and dried it with the cloth she kept in her kit. She squatted to relieve herself, the urine splashing into the brackish edge of the river, and as she watched the Beaters it almost looked like they were trying to copy her, crouching and crab walking at the water’s edge.

Only…they weren’t at the edge of the water. They were in it. Water lapped around their ankles, their shins, soaking the bottom of their pants. Stupid beasts, their shoes would be ruined, waterlogged; the skin of their feet would swell and peel and, if they weren’t Beaters, succumb to rot and gangrene. But because of their wretched immunity they’d keep walking even after the skin had sloughed away and they walked on bone-ends and raw pulped flesh, never knowing and never caring.

Something almost sounded like laughter. They were playing like children, patting at the water with their hands and crowing. There was a commotion as they jostled for position, going farther and farther into the water until it was up to their chests, their underarms. They had to be freezing. A citizen could last ten, maybe fifteen minutes in that water before hypothermia sucked the life from them, but a Beater…they were too stupid to stay out of the cold water. It would serve them right if they fell facedown, dead, in the river.

The water was the only barrier between them and the island, and seeing them breaching it spurred a deep, almost insensible terror. Of course they couldn’t swim, and the wide brown river surged and churned with whirling currents and floating debris and hidden hazards. Cass was perfectly safe on this side, but the dread that accompanied this odd sight was undeniable and complete.

Cass gathered her things. She would tell the others, would find Dana or Shannon or Neal and let them know, as they were supposed to report any Beater sighting and especially any behaviors that were out of the ordinary. They’d know what to do. And Cass was more than happy to let the others handle it.

She was stuffing the cloth back into the little zipped ditty bag that held her collection of toiletries when a startled squawk reached her ears. She looked back over the water and saw that two Beaters had given a third a shove, pushing it into deeper water, and were watching it flail. Water flew and frothed as it gasped for air and flung its arms out wildly, cheered by its babbling, grinning comrades.

The current began to carry it, slowly spinning, on a lazy ride downstream, and for a terrifying moment it almost seemed as though it was floating toward the island, but of course the river carried its bounty in the center, and only when a log or branch jutted into the water would it get snagged and dragged and deposited on a silty bank. By then it would be drowned, as dead as dead could be, sodden and already starting to decompose, just another bit of Aftertime detritus to be broken down and absorbed back into the earth, no longer a danger to anything.

Cass watched it struggle, beginning to tire, swallowing great gulps of river water. But right before she turned to go, she saw something that made her pause.

The Beater stopped flailing and paddled. For a moment she doubted what she was seeing, but the longer she watched, the more she became sure of it. Its hands stroked the water in front of itself, a sloppy dog paddle, fingers splayed and weak against the current. A moment later it sank beneath the surface, the water quivering and swirling above where it disappeared for a moment before the current smoothed it over.

The Beater was as good as dead.

But before it died, it had started to teach itself to swim.

The kids were all fussy, as though they had sensed Cass’s mood despite her efforts to cover it up. Twyla whimpered and sucked her thumb, a habit Suzanne had been trying to break her of for some time, and which she had given Cass strict instructions to monitor. But today wasn’t the day for it, and Cass let the little girl comfort herself, wiping her tear-streaked face gently.

Dane and Dirk squabbled, and as the morning wore on, it got worse, Dane making a game of snatching away any plaything that caught Dirk’s attention. The little boy was enraged, screaming and bunching his hands into fists, so Cass picked him up and walked him around the living room, making loops through the kitchen. On one of her rotations she came back to find Dane holding his hands squeezed tightly together, yelling at Ruthie.

“She bit me! Cass, Ruthie bit me!”

Cass sighed and set Dirk down next to Twyla, who was giving play shots to a stuffed dog with a fake plastic syringe. Then she bent to examine Dane’s hand. Sure enough, there was a perfect angry red imprint of Ruthie’s teeth on the soft flesh of his palm.

“Oh, Ruthie,” Cass said, and Ruthie shyly picked up the skirt of her play dress and pulled it up over her head, a new habit that Cass usually found charming. “Were you two fighting?”

Dane shrugged, and Cass saw that he was trying to hide the pile of play money behind him. Dane was a hoarder, and she frequently had to intervene when he took things from the others, only to find little stashes here and there around the house, piles of doll shoes and board books and spoons. She was always at a loss as to how to discipline for this habit; the parenting books of Before never gave advice about what effect seeing your dad beaten to death trying to defend a water supply, or watching your happy-go-lucky neighbor get dragged away by a horde of screaming monsters, might have on children and what you could do to help.

She’d tried to talk to Ingrid about Dane, but she didn’t believe Cass. Ingrid’s answer to every parenting problem involved more of her relentless structured activities; she suggested Cass read a book called Red Monsters Share and discuss it with the children.

“Dane. There’s enough play money for everyone to share,” she said now, digging deep to come up with enough patience to see her through at least until lunch. By the time she served the children their tea and jam sandwiches—jam made from the nectarines she’d grown herself—she would probably be able to force down a few crackers. She always felt better after she got something in her stomach to absorb the churning bile left behind by one of her infrequent all-out benders.

Which she never would have had, if it hadn’t been for—

No, don’t

Dane was looking at her doubtfully, groping around behind him, trying to push the coins out of her sight.

“There’s enough for everyone,” Cass repeated. “You don’t have to keep them all yourself.”

“She bit me,” Dane repeated stubbornly. “Biting is not okay.”

And it wasn’t, of course; biting was one of the things that could get a kid thrown out of child care, Before. That and not being current on vaccinations. Or a failure to potty train. All offenses that seemed ridiculously irrelevant now.

“Biting is not okay, but neither is not sharing,” Cass said through gritted teeth. What she really wanted to do was seize all the plastic coins and put them in a box and put the box up on the counter where none of the kids could reach it, and keep taking things away from them every time they fussed, until they had nothing, nothing, and maybe that would keep them quiet, just long enough for her to get her strength back, just long enough to think.

“Maybe Ruthie’s got the fever,” Dane said, watching her closely, a mean little smile at the corner of his mouth.

Cass froze. She ground her fingernails into the palms of her hands, forcing herself not to react. “Don’t you ever say that,” she finally whispered, her own voice sounding strange to herself, stripped bare and dragged over coals.

There must have been something in her tone or expression that finally got through to Dane, because the smirk left his face and his lower lip wobbled and he looked down at the carpet.

“Don’t you ever say anything like that, Dane,” she repeated. Because if an adult could accuse, who was to say that a child couldn’t, as well? She was nearly positive that Phillip had the fever, but if more cases popped up, there was sure to be hysteria, finger-pointing, blame. There were people in New Eden—the weak ones, the easily swayed and those with a tenuous grip on reality—who might latch onto an accusation, even a groundless one, even one that came from a child. “None of us have the fever. We are careful. We are healthy.”

Before long she managed to distract the boy with a stub of crayon and pages torn from a microwave manual. The densely printed instructions were in English, Spanish, Japanese, but there was plenty of white space, which Dane and the other kids set to filling in with colorful scribbles at the kitchen table while Cass made preparations for lunch.

Long ago, Cass had practiced affirmations, little phrases from a book someone had given her at A.A. Live life on life’s terms. Faith chases away fear. Some days they seemed utterly worthless, sentimental drivel, mindless pleasantries. And some days they worked, a little.

I can do this I can do this I can do this, Cass repeated soundlessly to herself, turning away from the children and forming the words on trembling lips. It wasn’t much of a mantra. It lacked imagination and substance.

Worst of all, Cass seriously doubted whether it was true.

But she did. She got through lunch, settling only one disagreement over who got the last of the cookies. She managed to eat a few herbed kaysev crackers and the crusts of Ruthie’s sandwich, and after cleaning up the kitchen she got all the children to lie down for a nap, even Dane, who was not much of a sleeper these days. When she was sure they were all out, she lay down between Ruthie and Dirk, thinking she would just close her eyes for a moment, perhaps catch fifteen minutes’ rest before one of the children woke her up.

But images of the morning’s discovery kept her awake. Bubbles had risen to the surface of the water after the Beater went under. Was it possible that she had imagined the other—the sudden paddling of its hands?

The sound of the front door opening yanked Cass out of her thoughts. She scrambled to her feet and smoothed her clothes. There was already enough trouble between her and the other moms without them thinking she wasn’t doing her part with the children. She picked up the closest book—one of the historical romances Suzanne liked—and put her finger between the pages so it would look like she’d been reading, and sat in the recliner.

Ingrid came into the room, followed by Jay Swarmer, who headed up the security rotation, guarding the bridge and dragging away dead Beaters from the shore. His presence here, in the middle of the day, caused an uneasy cramp in Cass’s stomach. As for Ingrid, her onetime friend’s lips were set in a thin line and twin red spots stood out on her cheeks, and she refused to meet Cass’s gaze.

“What’s going on?” Cass said quietly. Getting no answer other than grim looks, she set the book down on the coffee table. “Let’s talk in the kitchen so we don’t wake the kids.”

“I’ll stay with them,” Ingrid said primly. She settled herself cross-legged on the floor, the long wool skirt she wore draped over her muddy boots.

Cass followed Jay wordlessly into the kitchen, wondering if she should offer him some of the cold tea left over from the morning. They’d all grown accustomed to drinking it cold; though the cooks kept a fire going through most of the day, the hearth was usually in service for one task or another, everything from slow-cooking rabbits on a spit, to baking flat breads, to boiling river water to purify it. There was no time for heating tea or leftovers, barely even for warming one’s hands over the flames.

But Jay spoke before she had a chance. “This is a hell of a thing, Cass.”

She was surprised at the approbation in his voice. He leaned back against the counter, his jeans slung low under a gut that had been slowly disappearing ever since Cass had known him. No matter how much kaysev a person ate, it wasn’t enough to make or keep them fat. Even Fat Mike was lean these days, though the nickname stuck.

“What do you mean?”

Jay winced, closing his eyes for a moment as if the conversation pained him. “Sammi’s been to see me.”

Cass set a hand on the back of a kitchen chair to support herself as she absorbed this fresh bad news. Sammi had told. Despite Cass’s deep anguish over hurting Dor’s daughter, she had never considered that Sammi would want revenge against her. But of course, Cass would be much easier to hurt than her father. Their affair didn’t go against any of New Eden’s covenants, and there were those who might even admire him for keeping a couple of women in play…but Cass had trouble fitting into New Eden from the start and this would only make people that much more reluctant to befriend her—

“She told us all about it. How she’d had her suspicions, about how people were talking.”

Somehow the knowledge that Sammi suspected the affair troubled Cass even more. Would that have been enough—would knowing that they were hurting her have been enough to make them stop? Cass hoped the answer was yes, but there would be no way to know now.

“Look, I know we messed up. But I never meant to, to hurt anyone. We just, it was private, it—”

“‘We’?” Jay’s gray eyebrows, thick and untrimmed, knitted together in consternation. “Who’s we?”

They stared at each other for several seconds, Cass spinning possible scenarios wildly through her mind.

“I am talking about your drinking, Cass. If there’s other folks—I mean, the issue’s judgment, if there’s partying going on, people who need to keep their wits about them to do their job, when it affects all of us—look, we’re not trying to go on a witch hunt here.” Jay wiped a callused hand across his forehead. “The only reason it was agreed we needed to do something was, first of all, the mistake that’s got a boy down in the quarantine house. If your little problem made you careless, then hell yeah, I think it’s community business, and at the very least we need to think about taking you off the harvest detail. But as Ingrid pointed out, and I’ve got to say I agree with her, leaving you in charge of the kids when you’re high as a kite ain’t much better. I mean, I know I won’t have an argument from you when I say they’re our most precious resource, right? These little ones?”

Throughout his speech, Cass was trying to keep up, trying to assimilate what Jay was saying. Why hadn’t Sammi said anything about what she’d seen on the dock? But the answer hit her with blinding clarity: because it wasn’t enough to hurt her, not in a big enough way. By revealing her drinking, the girl could hit her on every level that mattered—calling into question her commitment, her competence, even the wisdom of letting her have a role in the children’s lives.

Of course, there was one secret Sammi still hadn’t shared. If she ever told the others that Cass had been attacked and infected, that would be a sure way to stir up so much trouble that Cass could get thrown out of New Eden. Cass wasn’t the only Beater victim ever to recover, but no one in New Eden had seen such a survivor before. And with tensions running high, there was no guarantee they’d listen when Cass offered up frantic, self-serving explanations that she was no threat to anyone.... Nor was Ruthie....

“But I love the children,” she mumbled, on the verge of tears. “You can’t think that I don’t.”

“Aw, hell,” Jay said, his shoulders slumping forward, and she realized that he had been hoping he was wrong. He was a good man, a family man with no family anymore, an associate dean at Sacramento State with no one to ride herd on. And he had the broken capillaries and red nose that signaled that he too had once known his way around a bottle. “I hate this, Cass. Lord knows I don’t have any beef with you. But there’s too much at stake. I’m here to ask you to resign. From child care and picking both. You can stay on gardening—I don’t think you’ll get any argument for that, everyone knows you’re the best with the growing. And that’s enough for anyone—Hell, there’s lots of folks that don’t get a fraction of that done. We got Ingrid, we got Suzanne, we got Jasmine ready to pop, maybe we can get another of the gals to pitch in with the little ones. Valerie, maybe, she’d be good.”

His words cut deep. She understood why he said it—Valerie would have been a great mother; her patience, her soothing voice, they were perfect.

“Maybe,” she said bleakly, but it was a lie because the day that Valerie was responsible for Ruthie’s care would be the day Cass had failed utterly. Her daughter had been taken from her twice before, when other people decided Cass wasn’t a fit mother. She couldn’t let it happen again. “Or I don’t know…maybe I could take Ruthie in the field with me when I work. Let me think, okay? Just give me a day to think about it.”

Jay sighed and folded his hands over his gut. You could see in the gesture the shadow of what he had once been, a paunchy, proud, cheerful man. “That’s fine. I don’t want to take this up with the council in any official way, you know what I mean? That wouldn’t serve anybody. Just, hey, Ingrid’s a little sore with you right now.” He hooked a thumb in the direction of the living room. “Let’s let her finish out the day with the kids, maybe you go for a walk, talk to a friend, whatever you feel like. An afternoon off. Looks like the weather’s breaking, maybe we’ll get a little more sun, everything’ll look different by tonight.”

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