Sophie Littlefield - Rebirth

“Boone’s dead?” Ralston sounded shocked. “I didn’t even know he was on that detail.”

“Yeah, him and Calder and Zhao and Lorenzo, Lorenzo just got promoted to Detail Five, this was his first recruiting trip.”

Cass remembered the name Calder-one of the guards who’d taken over the library when she and Smoke got there. He’d been a prematurely gray man who spoke little but had a habit of touching the handle of his blade every few minutes. Had he burned the school? She supposed he must have; Smoke would not have executed him otherwise.

“They say he shot Calder in both knees and elbows with his own gun,” Jimbo went on, as though reading her thoughts. “Told him he was going to keep going until he’d used up every Rebuilder bullet they had. Calder choked to death on his own blood while he was begging for one to the brain to finish him off. Death in a warm bed is too good for this one.”

“No shit,” Ralston said, but he clicked his penlight on and shone it on the bed, no doubt curious about a man who could go up against four men and kill two of them before they got him.

Cass was not prepared for the sight of Smoke-he looked even worse than he had hours earlier, when Mary’s scrutiny prevented her from looking too close. Now she could see that his nose was broken, his eyes blackened and swollen shut. His lips-his beautiful mouth-were split and bloodied, black crusted blood on his chin.

His head rolled back and he tried to raise his one arm, but it lay at a wrong angle and only twitched before falling back. Broken. The other arm, the one with the ruined fingers, was bound in dirty rags; blood had soaked through the knotted fabric and Cass saw that flies were settling and swarming around it. She realized the flies were the source of the buzzing that she’d thought was only in her head.

“Zhao got ’im,” Jimbo muttered. “Pretended he was down and when this asshole was done with Boone he went to drag the body-he’d already got Calder stowed, don’t know what he was fixin’ to do with ’em-anyway he holstered up and Zhao shot him clean through the shoulder. Missed the bone and came out the other side. Lorenzo was trying to get off a shot but he’d been lying on his gun hand, it’d gone numb, is what he said.”

Ralston made a grunt of disbelief. “Lorenzo’s a douche. He just made a shitty shot, is all.”

“Yeah, maybe. But he’s the douche who brought Smoke back here along with Calder and Boone’s bodies.”

“You proud of your boy?” Ralston demanded, crouching down next to Cass and nudging her shoulder. “Proud of him torturing an unarmed man?”

Cass said nothing, focused on Smoke. As gently as she could she pried his eye open, saw that the eyeball was rolled up in his head. Whatever sounds he made were from deep within his semiconscious state, but that didn’t stop her from trying.

“I’m here,” she whispered, and bent to kiss his cracked and torn mouth. She tasted his blood, felt her tears splash on his wounds.

“That’s foul,” Ralston said. “Don’t put your mouth on that, not when you owe me the next hour. I don’t want none a his nasty.”

They didn’t know, and Cass forgave that comment even as her fingers traced lightly on his shirt, looking for the wound, the bullet’s exit. They didn’t know what Smoke had been avenging. They’d heard only one account, riddled with inaccuracies and outright lies. They didn’t know that the Rebuilders Smoke killed had lined up the residents of the library, shot the older men one by one before moving on to every resident who dared to object. She remembered Nora, her nervous quick movements, her badly cut hair, the way it fell around her face, making her gaunt cheekbones look somehow elegant. Her sad black-brown eyes.

And Sammi’s mother, the first and only time Cass ever saw her, when she dragged Sammi in from the fields to the safety of the school shelter. The way Jessica had fallen to her knees when she saw that her daughter was safe, the wildness in her expression that spoke of frantic worry.

The two women had been ordinary. A mother, an aunt, but they had stood up to the Rebuilders and for that they had been executed, their bodies draped in a heap in the center of the school, left to burn and burn and burn.

Cass doubted the story Jimbo told, that Smoke had continued shooting a downed man, but thinking about the fire, she realized that perhaps she would have done the same if she had been there.

She found the torn place in the shirt, slipped a finger through the hole and searched for the wound in Smoke’s shoulder. His skin was impossibly hot; infection must have set in. There. It was a jagged hole, but not too large.

Why couldn’t it be Smoke who had her immunity? Cass supposed that if she was the one shot, her body would immediately start healing. It happened with cuts, even deep ones. There would be no infection, and the severed nerves and vessels would eventually knit back together. But not Smoke. He was nothing special at all. He had never been a soldier, never worn a uniform, had only learned to sharpshoot, to run with a heavy pack and scale obstacles and make strategy on the fly when he started working for Dor.

Had Dor taught him brutality, too? She’d seen Smoke, on the mornings she followed him, her jacket’s hood pulled up all the way for warmth. She’d watched him practice the chopping fist motions that Joe taught him for hand-to-hand fighting; watched him run up and down the steps of an apartment building until he was drenched in sweat, his calves trembling and his lungs fighting for air. Smoke had worked so hard to make himself dangerous. Was it all for this? All so that he could fight against an enemy so powerful that it barely flinched before replacing its fallen?

Would Smoke’s actions mean anything at all? Death was cheap; the world would not miss a few more men in the prime of their lives.

“When did he get here?” Cass asked.

“Two nights ago,” Jimbo said. “The recruiting party spent the night up at Emerson Gap, they were heading up to Silverton. There’s a group up at the old MegaBass Pro Shops, that big one they built back in like ’14 or ’15, something like that…bought a wakeboard there once.” He spat off into the darkness, spittle falling on Cass’s exposed neck. “Don’t know how this asshole knew to look for them there, but he was waiting. He was up in a tree the whole time, waited until they made camp and rushed them after dark.”

Dor . Dor had told Smoke where to look. Three nights ago when Smoke left on the motorcycle Dor gave him, armed with weapons from Dor’s private arsenal, Dor had told him exactly where he could find the Rebuilder party.

Was that why Dor let him go so easy? Why he tried to put Cass’s fears to rest? Was it because he really believed Smoke had a chance? Or because he didn’t want her running after him? Cass’s anger at Dor grew; it was one man against at least four. The element of surprise was good, that was true; without it, Smoke would not have been able to take out even the two he did. But how could Dor have expected him to win? All the target practice in the world, all the jogging and weights couldn’t prepare him for his first actual battle, and he’d gone in alone.

“Why?” she whispered, lowering herself as gently as she could against Smoke’s body. He had slipped back into unconsciousness, and she felt only his weak heartbeat in response. Why had he thought he could do this? But she already knew the answer-he’d never intended to live; he only meant to take out as many of them as he could before he died.

Would he be satisfied now to know that he’d killed two? It didn’t seem like much of a trade for one’s own life.

She forced herself to stand, letting her hand linger on Smoke’s unhurt shoulder for a moment. She faced Jimbo and hugged herself in the cold.