Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

“Please,” Cass whispered. “Just-just let me talk for a minute.”

It took less than a minute. There was very little to say. A death, a birth, another Aftertime tragedy marked with blood and loss. Cass did not embellish. She did not entreat. She did not even say the thing that had made her seek out the woman who probably despised her most, of anyone in New Eden-that only Ingrid could save this child. She opened her jacket and showed Ingrid the baby, who, miraculously, was sleeping.

“Oh my God,” Ingrid whispered. “Oh God, oh.”

She reached for the baby and Cass knew she did it without thinking and was only a little bereft to hand her over.

“You have to feed her,” she pleaded, but Ingrid was already unbuttoning her shirt.

In the morning, Dor and Steve and Earl and Smoke dug the grave. They had brought a shovel in one of the cars, but the barns revealed a vast assortment of tools, enough for all of them. It did not take long.

Jasmine’s body was brought from the shed and lowered, in its wrapping of blankets, into the ground. Everyone scooped a fistful of dirt and tossed it in.

Sh’rae was ready with her Bible. She had a gift for gentleness, and she chose her texts with care. Today she read from Revelation; when she got to the end, many people were crying as her words drifted away on the morning breeze. For a moment nobody spoke. Then Sun-hi crouched down and dug a fistful of dirt and tossed it into the grave. She brushed off her hands and started toward the building, not looking back.

The others followed. Cass held back until the end, and when their turn came, she set Ruthie down. Ruthie had been quiet since the mall, thoughtful almost, staying close to her mother. Now she bent to the earth with her mouth pursed in concentration and dug into the ground with her small hand. She dropped her fistful of dirt into the hole with a reverence far beyond her years.

The news of Jasmine’s baby had spread quickly through the group. During Jasmine’s funeral, Ingrid stood in the back, and when the baby began to fuss, she slipped away, out of earshot. But when the service was over, Cass saw Kyra sitting in an old glider chair, on the building’s back porch, cradling the baby gingerly, Ingrid showing her the proper way to hold her head.

Back on New Eden, there had been lots of teasing-not all of it good-natured-as Dirk approached his second birthday; the public opinion was that he was too old to still be nursing. But no one said anything now.

DAYS PASSED, a lengthening string of them, until it had been nearly three weeks since they left New Eden behind.

In two days’ time, they would arrive in Salt Point. Nadir said they called it that because of potassium deposits in the soil, but considering he’d never actually been there Sammi was skeptical. The people who were trying to get the place set up would be in for quite a surprise. The Edenites were down to thirty-three now, including baby Rosie, who turned out to be healthy and not nearly as bad-looking once she was cleaned up and fed for a few days.

They’d lost five more since the mall. Old Mike and Terrence had died when they stumbled on a Beater nest in the warehouse they were clearing one night a couple of weeks ago. Richy Gomez and Paolo had to be shot the next day after being bitten doing the good deed of trying to save Old Mike. Cheddar had hit his head on a stone outcropping while longboarding, been unconscious for several hours and suffered noisy seizures for a few days after that until someone-no one had come forward-had strangled him during the night.

Sammi was ready to move into the next empty building they saw, as long as it meant they could stay put for a while. Her blisters had blisters from all the walking, and her body ached from the moment she woke up in the morning until the moment she went to bed-if you could call it “bed,” since most nights she was sleeping on the floor in some shed or barn or church.

Worse, she couldn’t get warm unless she was walking. When they stopped for the night, she volunteered for every task she could think of because the alternative, which was to sit still, meant she’d be freezing before she went to bed. Once she was lying down she’d never get warm, even though she and Sage and Kyra had taken to sleeping huddled together.

According to the plan that the new council had drawn up, she was entitled to ride for forty-five minutes twice a day. That was the shortest amount of time since she was in the youngest age bracket with no health issues, and she wasn’t pregnant. But the reason she skipped her allotted time most days was that she was only allowed on the trailers, not in any of the three cars that still worked. And that meant getting colder and colder until she could get off and walk again.

Kyra took her trailer time most days. She said the baby was starting to press down on her bladder and her back hurt. They all felt the baby kick-every time it moved, it was good for a little entertainment, which was way hard to come by-but when Kyra rode, she liked to nap. How she managed it, Sammi couldn’t figure, though Kyra said she got something like hot flashes now, with all the hormones zinging through her body.

Part of the problem was undoubtedly that Sammi was so skinny. She wasn’t the only one-they hadn’t had much besides kaysev since the food ran out. There wasn’t time to hunt, and though they raided every promising building they passed, nearly everything had already been ransacked by others.

It was March now, almost a year into the Siege. A year of desperation, a year of people making do with whatever they could find. Lots of times they’d come to a house and there would be a pot in front of the door. That meant it had already been raided of all the food and medicine, anything worth taking, but that didn’t keep people from wishing, hoping, for a miracle.

Sometimes when she and Kyra and Sage walked with the boys, they played a game to see who could imagine the best meal. The boys always won, probably because they declared themselves the winners. Colton always started out with his mom’s Caesar salad. No one ever gave him a hard time about his lack of originality, because his mom was one of the first to die; she was the manager of a high-end grocery store and was shot when she tried to stop looters from taking all the bottled water.

Kalyan was the most creative. He described elaborate feasts featuring all his favorite take-out menus in the Oakland neighborhood where his parents once developed online content from home.

Sammi would never admit to it but the meal she most longed for was the one her dad used to make her on her birthday-giant rib-eye steaks grilled black on the outside and practically raw in the middle, with an iceberg-lettuce salad with tomatoes and a few slices of red onion on the side. Her mother had declared it inedible back when they were still together, and Sammi had called it disgusting the last time he’d ever fixed it for her and only eaten the narrow band of meat that was cooked medium.

But her dad used to wear an old red apron that Sammi gave him in first grade, her handprints in acrylic paint on the front. He paraded the plate of raw meat around the house acting like it was so heavy it hurt his arm. He’d bring a bone home from the butcher for Chester, too, saying that since he was a mutt and no one knew when his birthday was, he might as well share Sammi’s.

Her dad had kind of sucked as a dad, spending way too much time at work and missing a lot of her soccer games and forgetting her friends’ names, but at least he’d cracked jokes and tried to spoil her on the weekends.

Ever since the mall, he’d somehow gotten himself on the new council along with Nadir, the Easterner who Rachael and the de Ceccos didn’t trust because he was a Muslim, and Shannon and Harris and Smoke. At first Sammi worried her dad would be upset because of Smoke, who was almost back to normal now and so everyone figured he and Cass would just take up right where they left off. Only that hadn’t exactly happened. Cass spent most of her time with Ingrid, helping with the boys since Ingrid had to nurse Rosie, like, fifty times a day. But Sammi thought the real problem might be that Cass was avoiding both of them.