Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

Everything was just so fucked up. Again.

Tears leaked down her face and she didn’t try to hide them. Colton said, “Oh,” and dug something out of his pocket, a rag or something, and it wasn’t all that clean but it was nice when he dabbed at her face with it.

“That thing with Owen. Jesus,” he said, shoving the rag back in his pocket.

“Yeah…I know.”

“Sammi, listen, I need to tell you about something.”

She said okay but a little warning went off inside. People didn’t say that unless it was something big, something important. “Well, it can’t be someone else dead, right?” she asked, trying for a joke.

“No.” He sounded even more serious. “Owen…he was into some really bad stuff.”

“No shit. He blew up the island. Everybody says so.”

“Yeah, but…” Colton’s voice trailed off for a minute, and then he took a breath and continued, kind of in a rush. “That wasn’t the first time. He, uh. One time? Shane and me were over at his place. He had, like, a whole drawer full of explosives. Electronic stuff, timers and shit, I don’t even know what all. Like, to make bombs? Seriously, Sammi, he scared the crap out of me. I think he was going to…do something. He was talking about taking out the whole island.”

“Well, he just about did!”

“No, I mean, before that. He said he was working on something big enough to destroy the whole place. I didn’t believe him. I got the fuck out of there. But Shane, he stayed. He told me that Owen said there was all this stuff in the storehouse. He was trying to figure out how to get it. And then when the Beaters attacked and we had to leave so fast, he somehow got it all out of there.”

“Owen did? Or Shane?”

“Owen. He didn’t have time to rig it up to the thing he was working on, the remote or whatever, but he and Shane…it was them, Sammi. They went back when everyone was on the bridge and they blew up the community center and they blew up the quarantine house. Shane only went along because he felt bad for Phillip, he wanted to put him out of his misery but-but listen, Sammi, you can’t tell anyone. Okay? You can’t tell anyone. Now Owen’s dead it doesn’t matter, and Shane, no one would get it, what he was trying to do.”

Sammi’s skin felt cold all of a sudden. “They blew up Phillip?” she whispered.

“Only because-I mean, Sammi, Shane said he was thinking about him going crazy in there, losing his mind. He said he’d want someone to do it to him, if it was him in there.”

“But…” Sammi thought of the last time she saw Phillip, of his hand reaching out through the narrow slot. She couldn’t do it, no matter how much he was suffering. There was no way she could pull the switch or light the fuse or whatever. “Why are you even telling me this?”

“Because I need a favor.”

IN THE MORNING Cass woke to the clang of shovels hitting dirt. She went out into the mist-thickened dawn, wrapped in a blanket, and watched from the porch as a small band of people dug a shallow grave. Owen’s body lay nearby. They had not wasted so much as a tarp on him, and his corpse, awkwardly arranged and gray-pale in the morning light, stared sightlessly into the sky. Smoke was among their number, and Cass could see the perspiration on his face as he took his turn with the shovel. He should not be exerting himself like that. But who could stop him?

Dor had been as good as his word, watching over Sammi and some of the other kids upstairs. When they came down the stairs he scowled at Cass. She shrugged, but her indifference didn’t reach inside. It was easy to believe, as he stepped heavily past her and the other mothers, washing their children from a shared tub of water in the house’s mudroom, that he might have stood sentry all night, and she wondered if she were foolish not to take that extra measure of security. His eyes were shrouded and tired, but his body was tense with stored energy. He walked like he was looking for a fight.

But when he assembled with some of the other new council on the porch as the group loaded up for the journey, he stayed near the back and let Mayhew do the talking. He stared straight ahead, detached and almost indifferent as the Easterners addressed the Edenites.

“Many of you have come to me with questions,” Mayhew began. He had tied his hair back in its leather string and trimmed his gray beard. Cass had seen him sitting at a window in the kitchen, a small mirror propped on the sill, leaning close with a pair of small scissors, unmindful of the rotted-food stench in the place. “And I promised you answers. I won’t take up too much of your time now, because we want to cover a lot of ground today. But I want you to know that you can come to me and my men anytime. Questions, concerns, what have you. Last night I think we all learned something.”

Red, tying down their belongings on the small trailer, made a sound in his throat, making no attempt to hide his skepticism. Zihna shot him a warning look.

“I’d like to thank Smoke here for his quick thinking, and Cass, and all of you who shared in the unpleasant…duty. Well, it’s always difficult.” He pursed his lips and stared at the ground for a respectful moment. He was good, Cass had to give him that. He’d taken little responsibility for the screwup with Owen, and yet here he was directing a moment of silence for him, and people were going along with it. She caught Smoke’s eye; he sat on the edge of the porch, his back against a column, resting his hip. He gave little away in the tiny flash of a reassuring smile he gave her.

So neither of her men was going to challenge Mayhew, not over this. And none of the others, who were clustered near the group-Shannon, Neal, certainly not Dana, who was tightly rolling a ground cloth and stuffing it into a small nylon sack, his mouth tight and his eyes lowered-would either.

“Until six weeks ago we were doing fine,” Mayhew began. “We-all of us here-were on the border patrol across the Rockies. We’d stop people trying to come east now and then, heard what they had to say about conditions west of the Rockies before we sent ’em back. No one got through. No one.

“Then one day the blueleaf showed up in our lands, too. Had to be avian migration, we’re figuring, but it doesn’t really matter because in one week- one week -there were six cases in town. We locked the whole town down, put everyone in a six-block area until we could get a handle on whether it had spread any further, but then a couple cases popped up in town five miles away, and then suddenly there’s rumors of people going missing from one place and the infected showing up wandering around somewhere else, feverish. It’s terrible over there now.”

“Welcome to our world,” a woman muttered not far from Cass, but she was quickly shushed. This was the first confirmation any of them had of the stories that occasionally reached New Eden.

They’d heard rumors of the arming of the natural border created by the Rockies a few months ago, when people who’d attempted to travel east returned to tell the story. There had been a couple of guys in the Box who claimed to have tried to cross at the Eisenhower Tunnel. They told of seeing rotting corpses on the west side of I-70, would-be émigrés who didn’t take no for an answer and were shot for their efforts and left to serve as a warning. There were only a few other places where a crossing on foot was even possible, and these were all patrolled, or land-mined.

There had been considerable resentment of the East after that. Calls for quarantine-you could hold people for a week, and it would be clear who was feverish from blueleaf kaysev and who was not at that point-were rebuffed by the border patrol, who were rumored to shoot not only those who attempted to force their way across but also those who merely argued too strenuously.