Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

Already she was intoxicated with the notion that he cared for her. That her father, disappeared for so long, loved her. She’d despised him for so long, disguising the pain of his abandonment in stubborn fury, but all of that was slipping away as he talked. She knew it was supposed to take a long time; she expected to take a lifetime to forgive him, as so many of the people at the A.A. meetings made clear, early hurts were often permanent.

But Aftertime, a lifetime was a luxury that could not be counted on. If she ever hoped to forgive, she had to start now. If she hoped to absorb the fact that she had been loved, she had to seize it and hold fast.

She wanted her father to keep talking, to keep spinning this tale whose words felt like silken strands weaving themselves into a shield that would protect her, even-especially-from her own self-contempt. Only…there was more to the story. A lot more. Not least of it the fact that when she woke, she was alone.

“So I never woke up?”

“No, not that night, and not for a long time after.”

Cass was silent, thinking about her father keeping sentry outside the room. She wanted to know if he had the beard, then, or if he was clean-shaven, the way she remembered him. She knew it didn’t matter, and she wondered anyway.

“What did you do in the morning?” she asked instead.

Tom shrugged. “There was a car in the garage, an old Honda Civic, beat to hell. My guess is it was a kid’s car or a second car or something. Keys on a rack by the door, believe it or not. It couldn’t have been much easier. I got you laid out in the backseat, took everything I could from the house, medicine and food and whatnot, clothes. Pulled up the garage door and off we went. Kind of amazing, now that we’ve all heard the stories.”

Cass knew the stories he meant-by that time, there were roving bands of marauders at the edge of town who waited for cars to come by and then shot out the tires. They were after the gas, the things people carried-the sport. Later, you’d find these cars abandoned at the side of the road, often with corpses with holes in their heads draped over the seats, or on the ground, shot in the back when they tried to run away.

“So no one stopped you?”

“No. But it might have helped that I went all back roads. I knew enough to avoid any of the main roads, but mostly I thought I was avoiding the Beaters.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I guess I didn’t understand them very well. I’d a made a shitty anthropologist. I figured they’d stick to the main roads because it was easier or something…I was probably giving them too much credit.”

“Well, at least you were right about one thing. If you’d gone on the highway you probably wouldn’t have made it far.”

“Yeah. As it was, I just took farm roads and dirt roads. A lot of ’em I hadn’t been on since I was a kid, but it’s funny how that stuff stays with you.”

“Why did you go down mountain? As opposed to up?”

Red shrugged. “No good reason, I guess. I mean, if I’d had the balls I would have taken you back to the shelter, I guess. But I thought Ruthie was dead, and I figured you didn’t have long for the world.”

“You mean because I was infected.”

“Well, hell yeah. I thought there was no way you’d survive.”

“So why…” Cass’s breath caught in her throat and she took a minute to steady herself before trying again. “Why didn’t you just kill me?”

Red didn’t answer for a moment, but his eyes shone wetly in the darkness.

“I couldn’t,” he finally whispered.

Cass nodded. The strongest men-Smoke and Dor among them-had become killers in order to be merciful. The ones who couldn’t kill an infected person ended up bringing more misery for everyone.

But she wasn’t in a place to judge. She herself had walked away from a victim nearly senseless with shock and pain after the skin had been chewed from its body, unable to do what needed to be done, leaving the job for someone else.

“It’s just that it was you, ” Red said. “Someone else…in the days that came after that, I did have to kill, twice. People who were infected. One asked me to. One…well, no sense dwelling on that now.

“Anyway, I got almost as far as the foothills but it took me all day. Kept having to go around wrecks and shit, even on the back roads. Saw a couple Beaters too, scared the crap outta me. So when it started to get late in the day I just picked out a farmhouse, one of those ones on cattle acreage, up on a rise. Drove up and moved us in.”

“That’s right near where I woke up,” Cass said haltingly. “The first thing I remember is lying in this field in clothes I didn’t remember, with all these half-healed cuts.”

But this could be good news. If she had woken close to the place where her father had taken her, then it stood to reason that she hadn’t had time to travel very far. And the less time had passed, the less distance she covered, the lower the chances that she’d encountered any humans.

Any victims.

If she’d been alert and conscious long enough to escape from the farmhouse, then she had to have been practically recovered. She’d tired, obviously, and lain down to rest, spent a night perhaps, lying under the moon in a field not far from where her father was frantically trying to find her. But the next day she woke for real, and that was when her real memories started.

And there was one other thing, Cass realized with growing excitement. If she’d been recovering, the fever would have been driven from her body. And it only made sense that its effects on the brain had disappeared, as well.

Simply put, she wouldn’t have been hunting. Whatever caused her to leave the safety of the room where her father had kept her-hunger, thirst, boredom, restlessness-it wasn’t flesh lust.

She hadn’t consumed

For the first time since that day, Cass was sure that she hadn’t attacked and feasted, hadn’t doomed another innocent to the fever. The realization was dizzying, and she felt for a moment that she would faint; she clutched her father’s arm and a small exhalation escaped her, sounding almost like a sob.

“Goddamn,” Red said, misinterpreting. He wrapped his arm around her, comforting her in a way Cass had not been comforted in a very, very long time-not since she was his little girl. “It’s my fault. I didn’t have a way to lock the doors to that place from the outside. The day you disappeared, I was only planning to be gone an hour-I just went looking for more food. Hell, we could have survived on kaysev, but I hate that shit. And I wanted to feed you better.”

The tears Cass had been holding back spilled over. How to tell him what she was feeling-that she’d given up on being cherished like that. No man-not even Smoke, who’d loved her well and attentively-had made her feel as safe as she remembered feeling in her father’s arms.

But she felt suddenly shy. This was all too new, and she had to absorb it, process it before she could trust the feeling to last. She brushed the tears from her face, counting on the darkness to hide the gesture. “Kaysev’s the best thing you can eat,” she said lightly. “It’s good for you.”

“I never was good at knowing what was good for me.”

“So…you fed me? How’d you do that, weren’t you worried about getting infected?”

“Well, you were in and out, kind of. I know you don’t remember it, but you’d kind of wake up now and then, look around a little, say nonsense things. It reminded me of this one time when you were little, and you got a really high fever. I sat with you while your mom was at work. You were just a little jabberer, saying all kinds of crazy things.”

“You sang to me,” Cass said, suddenly remembering.