Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

The things Tom could do with a guitar on his best days rivaled anything Knopfler had ever done, and the crowds would always notice eventually. If he and Carmy had managed to keep a band together for more than a season, they could have written their own ticket, but the truth was that their lifestyle didn’t suit that many people. Especially as they’d gotten older. Sometimes they’d pick up a young guy to sing or play horn or whatever, but even they got worn down after a while. So be it-Tom and Carmy were content with their lot.

Then in a cheap motel in a little town an hour north of L.A., two things happened.

First, Carmy met a woman, disappeared for a week and somehow ended up in the hospital with a gash in his chest that he claimed was accidental but which had nicked a lung and threatened to keep him laid up for a while. And second, Tom saw his first case of the fever, a woman who’d been staying in the same motel even longer than he had and, if he wasn’t mistaken, with whom he was pretty sure he’d previously spent a drunken night.

Her name was Beverly or Brenda, something with a B, and when he bumped into her on the stairs, she reached out to touch his face and for a moment he thought it was an invitation. His room was on the second floor, hers on the first, and he’d been trying to figure out how to politely decline the come-on and edge past her. He was headed for the bar across the street, where he planned to watch the news on the big-screen TV; everything was so fucked up, with the terrorists and now the rioting in the cities, that Tom was starting to get a little alarmed.

“Hey, darlin’, in a bit of a hurry here,” he’d said smoothly, giving her his best smile. That’s when she pinched the skin of his jowl hard and pulled his face toward her, her mouth opening and her eyes unfocused.

Tom knew now that if he hadn’t been so startled that he tripped over his own feet and fell down the stairs, that would have been the end of him, and he and Bev would have been roaming the streets together before long, looking for snacks. Instead, he made it to the bar with only a little bruising, talked to some folks and figured out that if there was ever a time for making amends it probably ought to be now.

His ex-wife wasn’t hard to find-ten minutes on the library’s computer got him her address, not five miles from the house he’d last called home, and within the hour he was hitching his way back to Silva. The trip was terrifying, as traffic from the cities clogged the inland roads and gas stations started putting up signs that said NO GAS HERE and the cost of a slice of pie quadrupled. He made the last six miles on foot after the driver of the car he’d been riding in crashed into a stalled RV.

All that momentum…and when Tom got back he suddenly lost his nerve. He walked to his ex-wife’s new house and stood across the street for an hour, cursing himself for not using the long journey to figure out what to actually say. Finally, he walked another half hour to a bar and got good and soused, drunk enough to bloody the mouth of the guy on the next stool over, who told him not only did he know Cass Haverford, but he’d been a year ahead of her at Silva High and had screwed her once in the locker room and once six years later in the parking lot of the same bar where they just now happened to be sitting. And so had most of his friends, one of whom happened to be at the same bar and who, after some hard persuasion, was happy to share that she’d gotten knocked up and changed her last name to Dollar. And then he threw in her new address for good measure.

On the way to his daughter’s house, Tom thought about the fact that his little girl had changed her name. The last time they’d been together, he’d taken her to a baseball game and promised her that he’d be big someday, that the name Silver Dollar would be up in lights in places twice as big as the stadium. He’d said she would always be able to find him just by looking for those bright lights-but that had been a lie, hadn’t it?

When he saw the dump his Cassie was living in, Tom suffered an even bigger setback. Because it had never occurred to him that his little girl, despite the benefit of not living under his influence, would grow up to be just like him.

He spent the night in an apartment building across the street from her trailer park. Someone had broken all the windows in the ground-floor apartment, and the occupants had fled, but the bedroom still had some furniture in it and Tom slept on the sagging box spring with a knife under his pillow. The next day, while he waited for courage to find him, he boarded up the windows and took stock of the place. Maybe it would do for a few days while he figured things out. Meanwhile he could keep an eye on his daughter’s comings and goings.

Except she never went anywhere.

Tom grew bold, squeezing between her trailer and the thick oleander hedge that separated it from the next one, and peering through the windows. The oleander was dying, its leaves curling and turning that baked-red shade that signaled death by the biological agent drifting in from its rural targets. The government said the stuff didn’t pose a threat to livestock or humans, but Tom figured once it got in the groundwater, they were all fucked. Still, he had bigger things to worry about.

Cassie sat on her couch a lot. She also cried a lot. Sometimes, she lay on the floor and cried.

Also-even worse-there were children’s things in the trailer. A crib, toys on the floor, one of those things you stick them in to keep them still, with all the bobbly devices attached to it to entertain a baby. But there was no baby.

Tom puzzled over what it all meant. He supposed he could knock on the door and ask her, tell her who he was and why he’d come, but all his instincts told him that she would not receive that news well. And who could blame her?

It tore him up more than he could have ever imagined: his daughter, all grown-up and heartrendingly beautiful even in dirty clothes and no makeup, had clearly arrived at her own rock bottom. As one day turned into two, and then three, Tom began to understand that it was now his life’s purpose to help her back up. Maybe-he sometimes thought, during those yearning days-that had been his purpose all along and every set in every nightclub had just been the sound track leading up to this moment.

He was determined not to screw it up.

He considered and abandoned dozens of ideas. All around him, the town was going to the dogs. Before long the apartment house in which he was squatting emptied out, except for a few of the freaky fever people who moved into the other ground-floor apartment. Red talked to people in the streets who urged him to find a shelter. That’s what everyone was doing, moving into movie theaters and city hall and grocery stores, big open places where they could pool their resources and keep the scary fuckers out-the rumor was that they were starting to attack people and infect them, too. Rabies, they’d called it. If only. And frankly Tom thought everyone was right, that until someone got a handle on this epidemic, holing up like scared little girls was exactly the right thing to do. The fevered were terrifying as shit.

But he wasn’t about to leave until his daughter did. By then he’d evolved a sort of plan-when Cassie moved into a shelter, he’d just follow along and see if he could get into the same one. When they were safe, and maybe fed-Tom was getting damn tired of eating out of cans, and he wasn’t keen on eating the K7-whatever-the-hell the government was calling it, like a damn horse-then he’d test the waters and figure out how to tell her who he was.

He almost missed it. One morning she walked out the door carrying a duffel bag, and Tom only saw it because the plumbing had stopped a few days earlier and he’d gone out to take a morning whiz against the side of his building.