Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

“Yeah, I guess I probably did.”

She had a thought. “Did you sing to me this time? I mean, in the farmhouse?”

Red laughed. “Honey, when I figured out you were getting better, I sang all the damn day long.”

“How long did that take?”

“Just a few days. At first-don’t get mad, Cassie honey, but I had you tied up. I figured I had to, you know?”

“I don’t blame you. I…” Cass hesitated, and then decided to take a chance, share at least some of her fear with him. “There’ve been a lot of times I wondered, you know, what I did. When I was sick. When I was…one of them.”

Red cursed and grabbed her shoulders, turning Cass toward him, hard. “Cassie…you were never one of them. Never. You didn’t do anything wrong, sweetheart. Not one thing.”

All the fear that Cass had stored up threatened to tumble out. She struggled to get herself under control and nearly succeeded, and then a sob escaped her for real this time, and her father pulled her close and hugged her hard, and let her cry.

“It’s just that I, I saw what I did to myself, I mean, it had to be me, on my arms, even my knees, and I thought, if I could do that then was I out hunting? Did I attack people, did I hurt them? Oh God, I was so scared…”

“But, Cassie, nothing bad happened. After a few days your fever broke and your eyes got normal again. I mean, the irises, anyway. They stayed bright, and that green, like they still are. So I wasn’t positive, at first, but man, I prayed like hell. Sometimes…aw, shit, I’ll go ahead and say it-sometimes maybe I thought I prayed you well. The deals I was putting out there, for God, if you only knew. I must have offered him my soul a dozen times over.” Red squeezed Cass even tighter, crushing her against him, but she didn’t care. “You let me feed you, almost like when you were a baby, and sometimes I’d catch you chewing on your arms, but you never came after me. Mostly you just slept a lot. Real restless, like you were having nightmares, so I sat in there with you.”

“And sang.”

“Yeah.”

“And when you ran out of food…”

“Yeah, so I left, and like I said I was going to come right back, but it took me a while to find a house that hadn’t been raided already, and when I finally got back…you were gone.”

“I don’t, I don’t remember it. The house, or leaving, or anything.”

“I went nuts. I looked for you for hours. I finally went up and down the road, used up the last of my gas, before I figured out you must have left the road, covered some serious ground.”

“I’m so sorry I put you through that…Dad.”

Red went still, hearing her say his name, and then he awkwardly patted her on the back. “It’s nothing, baby angel. Look at us, in this whole damn state of California we found each other again. If that ain’t the answer to my prayers, well, I don’t know what is.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“Because I’m a damn coward, is why. I just kept biding my time, and biding my time. Zihna tried to get me to say something a dozen times, but I was so scared I’d run you off, that if you knew who I was you wouldn’t want anything to do with me. And then when you…aw, honey, I don’t know how to say it, but you’ve got your share of troubles, and I didn’t want to make them worse. I’ve tangled with the bottle myself.”

Cass felt her face go hot with mortification. It was on the tip of her tongue to deny it, to say it wasn’t a problem, that she’d quit. Well, she was one-day sober, anyway, and she’d been in that scary place twice before and managed to stay for a while. Maybe this time it would be a longer while. Maybe…no. She wouldn’t tempt the Fates by asking for forever, not yet.

“You won’t make it worse,” she said softly. “But you can help me make it better.”

IT WAS ANOTHER thirty-four miles to the next big town, where there was a huge shopping mall that was rumored to be sheltering close to a hundred citizens.

At least, that was true a couple of months ago. Jay and Terrence and the other raiders hadn’t traveled this far since before the new year. They didn’t want to waste the gas, since everything raidable this far north was the domain of the mall shelter, by dint of the common law that had evolved as shelters consolidated. Bigger groups tended to be more successful, since they could post round-the-clock sentries and assign specialized tasks, and send only their strongest and fastest out to harvest and raid.

The last anyone knew, the mall shelter-nicknamed Macy’s, after its onetime anchor store-was holding its own. Dor himself had sent a guard there earlier in the fall, to spread the word about the Box and find out what the Macy’s people could tell him about the Rebuilders’ progress.

This was the only reason Cass could figure that the new leadership invited Dor to participate in the early-morning discussion. She wasn’t spying on them, exactly; they were sitting in a loose circle on the front driveway, using the abandoned furniture, and breakfast was being served under the house’s broad front porch. Rain threatened, the air heavy with stinging moisture, thick gray clouds low in the sky. Cass had taken Ruthie around the back for their turn at the “bathroom” and on the way back, she stopped to tie Ruthie’s shoe.

It was an old ruse. Cass didn’t care. The feeling she got from Mayhew-that he was hiding something, that he had an unspoken agenda-had only grown stronger. She’d slept well after her talk with her father the night before, but when she woke up the Easterners were conferring quietly inside the house. So this was their second meeting of the day, and Cass couldn’t help wondering if there were things that had been said earlier that were being left out now that Edenites were listening.

But no one else seemed to care.

Once they got moving, everyone stayed in more or less the same configurations as before, though Smoke joined those at the front, keeping up despite his limp. Cass walked with her father and Zihna, though the other moms had invited her to join them in the car. It seemed like their relationship was warming, and Suzanne thanked her for letting Twyla stay with Ruthie, alternating between walking and the trailer as they had the day before.

Throughout the morning, the group had a bit of a festival air. There was food for at least a week, including all the cans they’d been hoarding in the pantry, and they’d had a good breakfast. The rain held off, the clouds rolling and gusting. No one spoke of those who’d been lost, though the bitter count lay just below the surface of everyone’s minds. A week ago New Eden had been home to seventy citizens; after the battles on the water and on land, the people dragged away and shot and blown up in the community center, they were down to fifty-one, plus the four Easterners.

Cass was walking by herself along the abandoned two-lane highway, pushing Ruthie in the stroller, taking a break from the company of the others to think about her father. She had replayed the conversation from the night before a dozen times, and every time she felt the thrill of relief when she realized she’d never harmed anyone while she was feverish. Relief was not a big enough word to contain the feeling-it was joy mixed with disbelief, a sense of good fortune so unexpected that she was afraid it was illusory, that it could disappear the same way it came to her.

But it had come to her via her father. Her dad . Cass smiled, saying the word in her mind, a word she’d never expected to use again. She knew she needed to be cautious, to prepare herself for the inevitable disappointments that would surely follow. To remind herself that her father had hurt her grievously and that leopards don’t change their spots, to use an old saying of Mim’s; that the more she trusted him the more she risked.