Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

But throughout the meal and the cleanup, Smoke stayed away. He talked to Mayhew, to Davis and Nadir, even to Dor for a few tense moments. He made his way around to the kids, impressing Colton and the other boys with a brief knife-throwing demonstration. When Cass came back from taking Ruthie outside to wash before bed, he’d set up his bedroll near the front, along with the Easterners and others who were well armed, and was already deeply asleep, his face sheltered in the crook of his arm.

Sleep was slow to come, despite Cass’s exhaustion. She knew what Smoke was up to because she had seen it before. He was doing what he did best, building the collective courage of the group, just as he’d once encouraged and developed the security team in the Box. And there was no doubt that it needed to be done; without the cohesiveness he provided, they could easily splinter into factions, start blaming each other for the things that had happened.

So why did she feel so empty every time she spotted him in the crowd?

Yet again, Smoke was not choosing her. He was a good man, a great man, even; these were the qualities that had made him a hero long before his last battle with the Rebuilders. But in his heroism he acted alone. Even when he’d been working with Dor, he was solitary. When he sought vengeance he sought it for himself. He wanted Cass with him, she knew that, but only in the moments left over after he’d vanquished his greater thirst, to fix a world that he could never forgive himself for allowing to go to hell in the first place.

Cass knew there was something at the core of his drive that he’d never shared with her, the key to this crushing sense of responsibility, the blood thirst he carried with him everywhere he went. Smoke had told his secret to only one man, and that was Dor, and that was as good as any vault. She knew she might never know. Whatever Smoke had done, it plagued him, consumed him; the truth was a lover from whose arms Cass could not entice or drag or trick Smoke.

She tossed and turned long after the room was silent, dozens of her fellow survivors deep in their own private dream landscapes, where the luckiest visited memories of Before and others battled horrors real and imagined.

As people began moving from their homes to shelters during the Siege, it was hard to get used to the nights at first. Some people compared it to prison-overcrowding in California meant that many prisoners shared small spaces lined with back-to-back bunk beds, images of which frequently made the evening news-but Joe, one of the guards in the Box who had actually been in prison, said it was worse. Worse because at least in prison there were clear hierarchies of power, of who got the best bunk, who could tell who else to shut the fuck up or quit snoring or crying or beating off. Joe said it was the politeness that got to him on the outside-when the Siege made everything part of the outside-everyone forced to lie next to people they might not even like, to quietly endure their sounds and smells and proximity, then get up and pretend to have had a good night’s sleep.

Cass forced herself to lie still, trying to will the thoughts from her mind, counting backward from a thousand, anything to quiet her restless thoughts. When someone whispered her name, her eyes flew open to find Red crouching next to her, a ghostly presence in the glow of a lantern turned low and hung from a nail.

“You’re not asleep, are you, Cassie? Wanna talk?”

She hesitated only for a moment before getting up carefully so as not to disturb the others, and following him into the house. They felt along the wall in the darkness, to the front door where one of the Easterners was sitting on the ottoman that Dor had brought for Jasmine earlier.

“She had nightmares,” Red murmured to the guard. “We’re just going to sit out here for a bit, okay?”

“Suit yourself,” the man said.

There was enough starlight to find the benches that faced each other across a flower bed. They sat close together and Red unfolded a blanket he’d brought, spreading it carefully over the two of them.

“Aw, Cassie darlin’, who would have thought it.” He sighed.

Cass couldn’t help a cynical laugh. “Who would have thought which part? That the world would be taken over by zombies? That we’d be grazing like cattle on a plant invented in a lab, just to stay alive? Or that by some miracle you’d show up in my life again after abandoning me for twenty-three years?”

After the words were out, Cass wished she hadn’t said the last part. She knew exactly how many years it was since her dad left. All those years, she’d kept track. But why give him that satisfaction? After all, she’d long ago quit caring that he was gone.

“It wasn’t a miracle,” Red said softly.

“Okay, a curse. Is that better? You were cursed with having to run into me again. In all the bars, in all the-”

“No, that’s not what I meant. I found you, Cassie. It wasn’t an accident.”

A tickle started along her spine. “Um, well, if you remember, you were already living in New Eden when we got there, so technically, I found you. And since there aren’t all that many places to live left out here, it’s not exactly a miracle that we both ended up in the same one, know what I mean?”

“I don’t mean in New Eden. I mean before that.”

“Before that, when? Before I came here I lived in the Box and I know for a fact you weren’t there. Before that I lived in a library and I never saw-”

“The day you were taken, Cass. The day you were attacked. By the Beaters. I was there. ”

HE’D STILL BEEN going by Silver Dollar then. Or Tom Haverford, his real name, to his oldest and closest friend in the world, Carmy Gomez, with whom he’d been traveling the highways and byways of the West Coast, playing in clubs and bars and music festivals, opening for other acts and generally making enough money to cover their costs and salt a little away. Tom had even been paying for rock-bottom health insurance, really a lottery Madoff scheme run by a local charity, but even that was a bit of a trick given his lack of a permanent address, but lately he’d begun thinking about the past, about things he wished he’d done differently. And the last thing he wanted, assuming there was anyone who still cared about him, was to be a burden to them now when he’d managed to be a burden way too many times already in his sorry life.

His mother. Over eighty but still hanging on to the little bungalow he grew up in, last he called, a few months back.

His half brother, Burt. Burt hated him, sure, but Tom figured he’d given him cause, the way he’d tormented him during their childhood.

His ex-wife. Well, there was no chance she gave a shit about him anymore. Still, he added her to the list of beneficiaries; she’d more than earned it.

And Cassie.

Tom thought more and more about the past as the days ticked by. He thought about telling Carmy about it, but Carmy wasn’t that kind of guy, not someone you spilled your guts to, even though Tom knew his old friend would take a bullet for him. Carmy had always had a way with people. He played bass, could pitch in on a set when needed, but mostly he was their manager-finagler of gigs, extractor of payment, riler of crowds and bedder of women. He was good-natured, funny-and fond of anything he could snort, inject or ingest. But they worked around that. It was a scheduling thing more than anything; Carmy could go three, four weekends in a row keeping his shit together and then they’d just hole up somewhere for a while and he’d go nuts and Tom would find a used bookstore or a movie theater or a pretty waitress and while away a week.

The truth was that Tom was content to sit on a beach, or in a park, or on a bench in front of a city hall, or even in a motel room while the rain came down outside, and play his guitar and hum along, throwing in a phrase or two when it struck his fancy. If he’d written down a fraction-a hundredth-of the great lyrics that came to him when he was messing around, he’d have a million dollars, but he was too lazy. He just liked playing.