Sophie Littlefield - Rebirth

“What were those things?” she whispered.

“I’ve seen them before, just one other time. They’re…I guess they’re like vultures. Carrion birds. They feed on the dead.”

“I’ve never seen any bird like that.”

“No, I know. I mean a vulture’s large, bigger than most people think. But those…”

Cass thought about the great flapping wings, the lurching flight. There was nothing lovely about the birds. They looked damaged, malformed, sick-but they were also quick and determined and by the time the grisly scene had disappeared around the bend, the birds had managed to pierce and tear the bodies and their crowing beaks were covered in blood, testament to the strength of their jaws and talons.

“Where did you see one before?”

Dor looked indecisive, as though he wasn’t sure that telling her was a good idea. “Yesterday. In town…in a nest. Looked like a recent Beater kill.”

“Just one?”

“No, three. They must travel in flocks.”

“But what does it mean that they showed up now? All this time, all these months…”

Dor shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they’ve been here all along but we’re just in the migration path now. Maybe they’ve, I don’t know, evolved-but that takes centuries, yeah, hell, I don’t know. New species? Eat a Beater kill, get that shit in the bloodstream, there’s no telling what’ll happen.”

“Ruthie knew,” Cass said quietly. “Yesterday. When she was napping. She said-I mean she was still asleep, she was talking in her sleep and she said, ‘bird.’”

“I thought she didn’t talk.”

“She doesn’t.” Cass felt exasperation but it was as much for herself as for Dor; she was talking about Ruthie as though she was not sitting a few feet away. She doubted that Ruthie could hear their conversation over the wind rushing through the car, but still, it didn’t feel right. “Not on purpose. But this was while she was sleeping. It was… I don’t think she has any memory of it, like a nightmare.”

“And she said bird. And you think that means the ones back there?”

“What else would it mean?”

“I don’t know…anything. A memory, a book, a toy. A plastic fucking bathtub duck-”

“It’s not the only thing she’s said,” Cass interrupted. “When you first got out of the car to see about the wreck? She didn’t wake up, but she said ‘hat.’”

“ Hat? She said- What does that mean?”

“The second guy. He was wearing that red hat, that red wool hat on his head. He came out from behind the car after you shot the first guy and there it was.”

Dor was silent for a moment, considering. “I would call that a cap. Not a hat.”

“She’s barely three. She doesn’t know a lot of words. That’s not the point.”

“So you’re saying she has…premonitions? That it? Of danger?”

“I don’t know. I think…well, you know how I’m different, since I was attacked? How I heal faster, and my hair grows like crazy, and my fingernails. It’s like everything is, I don’t know. Like it’s magnified somehow. So why couldn’t it be like that for Ruthie? Except not just the physical part, but like…the sixth sense?”

“You believe in that shit?”

Cass colored. “I’m not saying I believe in, you know, psychics and all that. But haven’t you ever just… known something? Something that there was no way you would know, or you know before it happens.”

She sensed Dor’s skepticism, but he remained silent.

“Well, I have. I think it’s real. As real as anything else that’s happened. And with Ruthie, it just started happening, yesterday and then again just now. She’s seeing things, knowing things. I don’t know if it’s anything that’s upsetting to her, or just scary images or…what.”

Cass hated the idea of these dark ciphers visiting Ruthie as she slept, robbing her of what little peace she still had. Already she was a different little girl than the one she’d known before the zealots got her, more cautious, less exuberant, so that Cass’s longing to rewind the intervening time was agonizing whenever she let herself think about what had changed. Would the nightmares take more of her joy away? Was it possible she’d misunderstood, that Ruthie’s words had no connection to the things that were happening, and that Cass herself was just searching for a way for her little girl to take her place in the world again?

“Tell you what, don’t get ahead of yourself,” Dor said. “Like you said. She’s just a little girl.”

They rode in silence, the needle hovering well under thirty. Occasionally Dor drove off the road to get around an obstruction. Each wrecked and abandoned car they passed provoked a new sensation of dread, a catch of the breath amid a frantic search for fleeting figures hiding in backseats and crouching behind bumpers…but they were just wrecks, sun-heated and disintegrating, staged tableaus of twisted, rusting metal and smashed glass.

At last they reached the bottom of the long descent from the mountains, the scrub pine thinning to clusters of bent and knobby oaks in the foothills, then shrub-pocked swells and finally flat fields of dormant kaysev with the occasional weedy star thistle or tocalote poking through. Ahead stretched the road, straight and shimmering in the afternoon sun. Dor pulled off in a field so they could share some jerky and dried apricots and a bottle of water, take a bathroom break and stretch. He had planned for a two-day trip; even though he went a little faster on the straightaways, there were occasional wrecks to be cleared and obstacles to drive around, and their progress was slow.

Taking Ruthie a dozen yards from the Jeep so they could pee, Cass realized she felt more exposed from Dor’s proximity than from the danger of being out in the open. During her days of wandering, when her disorientation slowly sloughed off like a snake’s skin as she made her way back to civilization, she had urinated in the open and on logs with practically no self-consciousness at all. She’d been filthy, smelling like an animal, her hair knotted and her nails broken; she ate wads of kaysev leaves and wiped her mouth on her arm. Cass wasn’t sure what she had been then, but it was something both more and less than human. Now she turned her back toward the Jeep, felt her skin burn with embarrassment when she pulled her pants down and finished as quickly as she could.

After that, their drive resumed, as did the silence. There were no Beaters, but near a cattle ranch whose grazing land grew thick with kaysev, they saw a chilling sight: a motorcycle overturned at the side of the road, and next to it two bodies, obviously Beater victims. They’d been there for a while, long enough for scavengers-perhaps the monstrous black birds-to pick the bones nearly clean. The bodies lay face up, their pants around their ankles, their shirts and underclothes ripped and abandoned nearby.

The Beaters had probably nested in the nearby ranch house or outbuildings. How they’d managed to waylay these travelers was anyone’s guess, but that they’d feasted here, rather than carrying the bodies back to their nest, was surprising. Early in their evolution, when the first fever victims passed through the skin-picking phase, after they’d pulled the hair from their own scalps and chewed the flesh of their own arms and moved on to craving the living flesh of other bodies, they were largely inept. They attacked alone, fighting each other for victims, and feasted upon the bodies where they fell, nearly maddened by their hunger for flesh. It had been much easier, then, for bystanders to drag the Beaters off the victims, shooting or beating them, though in nearly every case the victim was already infected by saliva. Citizens eventually learned that once someone was attacked the best course for all involved was a quick and humane shot to the head.