Читать книгу Rebirth - Sophie Littlefield - Страница 11

THERE WERE CLOCKS, THE OLD-FASHIONED KIND with triple-A batteries, if she had wanted to know the time. One of the self-appointed holy men passing through had nailed them to posts around the Box, for comfort he said, but Cass had trained herself not to notice them. Knowing the time seemed necessary to some people, but to Cass, such details seemed pointless, almost profane. The reality of their life was inescapable, just like the fine dust kicked up along the well-worn path around the perimeter of the Box, finding its way into the folds of their clothes and the creases at their knees and elbows and neck and, she imagined, coating their lungs with a fine red-brown grit. Pretending that the time mattered was like pretending you could escape the dust, that you could ever really be clean again. It was no good.

Smoke went for a walk and Cass knew by now that when he went for a walk she was not meant to follow, so instead she hitched Ruthie up in her arms and went looking for Dor. The sky was purpling dark near the horizon and the sun had slipped down behind the stadium across the street, and the smells of cooking wafted from the food stands, and people milled along the paths toward the dining area, a fifty-foot square in the dirt where picnic tables were arranged with precision, like everything that was Dor’s.

Dor was not in his trailer, which was unusual for this time of day. He routinely made himself available in the early evening, seeing anyone who came to meet with him. As often as not, he ate his dinner alone afterward. Sometimes you’d see two or three people lined up outside at the park bench that had been planted there for that purpose, like failing students come to beg their professor for a passing grade during office hours. Nine times out of ten it was folks wanting credit, even though Dor had never been known to grant it. One of the cheap cots up front—yeah, sure, if there was one free. And he generally turned a blind eye to the food merchants who set their leftovers out late at night for scavengers. But if you wanted anything else you had to trade something, and that was that.

Cass was curious about the conversations that took place in the trailer, but she and Dor were not close and she didn’t ask. Smoke didn’t tell her anything, either. Dor had become a noman’s-land between them in the two months that Smoke had worked directly for him. Cass had never suggested that Smoke find some other work—what else was there, after all?—and she had no quarrel with Dor over the guards patrolling the Box and keeping the roads into town clear of Beaters. If she’d been surprised that Dor had put Smoke in charge of the entire security team, she had to admit the decision had been inspired: everyone knew about the battle at the rock slide, and while Smoke played down his role, that almost gave the story more power. He’d killed a Rebuilder leader, and the Box was full of stories of the Rebuilders’ methods, their violent occupations of shelters, their killing of those who resisted.

Smoke did nothing to spread the stories, and in fact grew stone-faced and irritable whenever he heard people telling them. He had drawn inward since Cass met him, and while he was most comfortable with her and Ruthie and rarely joined the gatherings around the fire late at night, he seemed to be happy enough with the company of the other guards. He insisted he was only their scheduler, a facilitator, but everyone knew otherwise.

Cass didn’t object to the guns Smoke carried, though she made him lock all but one in their safe at night. She didn’t object to the long hours he spent training with the guards, target shooting and lifting weights and practicing some strange sort of martial arts with a guard named Joe, who had been awaiting trial at the Santa Rita jail until one day late in the Siege when the warden apparently opened the doors and let the lowest-security prisoners go free. She didn’t even mind the awkwardness between Smoke and Ruthie; she knew he was trying and that Ruthie would warm up to him in her own time.

The truth was that Cass didn’t know when the discord had started between them, the uneasiness. Things had been so good and they were still good, most of the time. They had the rhythm of a couple, the way they prepared a meal together, handing each other things without needing to speak. Laughter came easy when they walked in the evenings, swinging Ruthie between them.

But still. They didn’t discuss Dor or what the two men talked about in the long hours they spent together. Smoke stopped telling her what he saw when he went on the raiding parties and hunting down the Beaters, and their conversation usually centered on her gardens and Ruthie and gossip about the people in the Box, the customers who came and went and the other employees they counted as friends. He often seemed preoccupied, and she sometimes woke in the middle of the night to see him sitting outside their tent, tilted back in his camp chair, staring at the stars. They didn’t make love as often, and Cass thought she might miss that most of all, the moments of release when her mind emptied of everything but him, when every horror and loss in her life faded for a moment, a gift she’d never found the words to thank him for.

Now, she forced herself to admit that Dor might know Smoke better than she did. If anyone knew what had happened, what was in Smoke’s mind, it would be him. She tried the front gate next. Faye was there, and Charles, playing cards with one of the older guards who went by Three-High, except by his new girlfriend, who called him Dmitri. Feo sat on Three-High’s lap, chewing on a kaysev stalk that had been soaked in syrup until it was nearly fermented, the closest thing to dessert besides the pricey canned pudding or candy canes.

“Hey, Cass,” Faye said, giving her a slanted smile, more than she offered most people.

“Hey. You seen Dor?”

They shook their heads, Charles and Three-High not lifting their eyes from their cards. “He was meeting with some guy, came in from the west this morning. Jarhead type.”

“Don’t need no more of that,” Three-High said with conviction.

Cass nodded. The guards were jealously protective of their jobs, which most agreed were the best to be had. A guard job came with room and board, access to the comfort tents, a free ticket to the raiding parties with the understanding they got a split of the spoils. Plenty for trade, whatever you wanted, and Dor didn’t much care what you spent your off-hours doing, as long as you showed up sober for your shift and got the job done. Dor didn’t hire addicts; there wasn’t a single one in the crew that Cass could tell, and she had an eye for it. Hard drinkers, yes. But no pill-poppers, no meth cookers. Every one of them loved something more than a high; for most of them it was danger, adrenaline, shooting and fighting and killing Beaters. For some, it was a fierce devotion to the Box itself, a place Cass suspected was the closest thing to home, to family, that they had ever known.

Smoke hadn’t hired anyone new since Dor turned the operation over to him. He was looking for one more, someone to start on nights, but he’d told her it was important to get this one right, to pick someone who’d fit the crew. He said he was waiting for someone who had never been in the service. He gave a variety of reasons, but Cass was still waiting for the one that sounded like the truth.

Charles laid down a card with some authority. “This guy, he was big. Built, you know? And carrying. We took a Heckler & Koch MP5 and a clean little Walther off him.”

“They’re not there now.” Three-High jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the locker where everyone but the guards were required to check their weapons upon entering the Box. “I was in there half an hour ago, didn’t see ’em.”

Faye to set down her cards, eyebrow raised.

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Shit, Faye, I—”

“Okay, okay,” Faye said. “Don’t cry or nothing. I just meant I didn’t see him come back out.”

“Probably day shift checked him out,” Charles suggested.

“Maybe.” Faye seemed skeptical. “But still, that would have been a short visit.”

So none of them knew the visitor had been a Rebuilder. Of course, if they had, word would have been all over the Box as soon as he’d come through the gates. The stranger must have saved that information for Dor, who’d either killed him or found a way for him to leave without drawing attention.

The former was unlikely, since the Rebuilders always had a plan—plans. If the man didn’t make it safely back to his rendezvous point, they’d return in larger numbers, make a show of force, demand a meeting. Or maybe they’d escalate straight to armed conflict, and either attempt to take prisoners, or simply burn the place down.

The peace between the Rebuilders and the Box was uneasy. No one liked it, except possibly Dor, who, as far as Cass could tell, was without loyalties to anyone but himself and his meticulously tracked empire. But everyone realized that the balance was a delicate one, and any provocation would end up with a lot of dead on both sides. The Box was recognized as neutral, and while the Rebuilders no doubt intended to take it someday, for now they would have a hard time outgunning Dor’s arsenal and security force.

Cass decided to keep the information to herself, at least until she knew what the hell was going on.

“Maybe we didn’t have whatever he was shopping for,” Three-High said, yawning. “Kinda thin stock these days.”

Feo, finished with his snack, wriggled off his lap and darted away without a word. It was his way; he was a restless boy, frequently affectionate, but easily bored. No one tried to get him to sit still, especially not his self-appointed guardians, who saw nothing wrong with his prowling and occasional thieving and who had made him a bed in a staff bunkhouse, where they could hear him if he cried out in his sleep.

“What are you talking about, the shed’s practically full. And we got a shitload of new stuff this morning from those guys from…where was it…Murphy’s?” Faye ticked items off on her fingers: “Tampons and toilet paper. Tea bags, olive oil, a couple dozen of those South Beach bars, liquid soap and detergent, all that shampoo. And an unopened bottle of Kahlúa and a case of Diet Canfield’s and twenty-two bottles of Coors Light.”

“That stuff tastes like piss,” Three-High said.

“You’d drink it, though—tell me you wouldn’t.”

“Hell, yes, I’d drink piss if it got me buzzed.”

The raiders had recently cleared a house where Beaters had been nesting on the far east side of town, and they’d come back with a good haul, but they’d lost a man in the raid. They missed a Beater who’d been sleeping in a powder room. It was weak and injured, bones showing through its flesh in several places and one foot twisted at an odd angle, and the others had probably left it behind when they moved on. It had taken only one bullet to kill, but not until it had clamped its festering jaw on Don Carson’s ankle.

It had cost a second bullet to take Don down.

The raiding was growing more dangerous. When Cass had first arrived in San Pedro in the summer, Dor’s people had cleared the town of nearly all the Beaters. The Order in the Convent paid well enough for live Beaters to use in their rituals that it was more worth Dor’s while to scour the streets for them. But trade with the Order had dried up, and as the weather turned cold, Beaters had begun stumbling their way south, apparently traveling by some instinct unknown to their human brethren. With their preference for more densely populated areas, Beaters were quick to nest once they reached San Pedro, and quick to hunt. Dor still kept the main roads clear, and the guards picked off any who came too close to the Box—but come in on any of the less-traveled paths and you were taking chances. The Beaters had learned to stay away from the stronghold, though they roamed just out of sight. You could sometimes hear their moans and nonsense jabber carried on the winds.

When they caught someone, you could hear the screaming, human and once-human.

Recently it seemed like they were getting bolder. Last week Cass had been trudging back from the bathroom shed at the first light of dawn, the Box still silent and asleep, when she heard a shout at the fence. For a second she hesitated, shivering at the chill snaking up under her nightgown, and then she’d loped silently along the fence toward the sound, the tongues of her undone boots flapping.

She reached the source of the commotion, across from the rental cots near the front of the Box, in time to see the worst of it. George, the guard on third shift, had been backed up against the wall of a two-story brick building that once housed a jewelry shop on the first floor and accountants’ offices on the second. Cass put it together immediately—she knew the guards sometimes smoked in the space where the stone steps met the wall of the building, where an overhang provided protection from rain and the curving staircase blocked the wind. They’d even dragged a chair there, and everyone used it to take breaks between laps around the Box.

Which was fine, unless you fell asleep.

George usually didn’t take the third shift. He was covering for Charles, who was laid up with food poisoning puking his guts out, and as the long uneventful night stretched toward dawn he’d taken a break. Maybe he’d just closed his eyes for a moment.

Long enough for the four Beaters to prowl down the streets and alleys from wherever they’d carved their nest and find their victim practically gift-wrapped, to seize upon their prize with shrieks of delight and hunger before George had time to reach for his gun or even the blade at his belt.

When Cass arrived, heart pounding in her throat, Faye and Three-High had left their posts at the front gate and run down the block, but it was too late. The first bite was enough to doom George, but the Beaters would not finish him here. After a few slobbering crowing nips they hoisted him between them, each holding an arm or a leg in their scabby festering fingers, to drag him back to their nest where they would feast undisturbed. First they would chew the skin off his back, his buttocks, his calves, kneeling on his arms and legs so he couldn’t move. Then they’d turn him and eat the other side, and as he weakened and his screams grew hoarse, they’d nibble at the harder-to-reach skin of his face, fingers and feet.

George knew what his fate could be. You could hear it in his screams. As Cass watched—others running toward the commotion, those who were already awake, those who heard the screams through their sleep and bolted out of bed—Faye and Three-High shot at the Beaters. And when George’s screaming abruptly stopped she knew they’d been aiming at him, too.

There were still entire neighborhoods waiting to be raided, but people were getting nervous. Beaters, disease, toxic waste, depression and anxiety—all these things stopped even the heartiest at times. Some of the raiders had begun refusing to go out at all, just one of the many things Cass knew Dor and Smoke discussed.

“Hey, any kid stuff in the haul?” Cass asked, thinking of Ruthie, her tight shoes.

“Yeah, but older,” Faye said. “You know, like that tween stuff. All the sparkly shit on the jeans. Hold on to it for Ruthie. She’ll love it in a few years.”

There was a sudden, awkward silence; it was an unwritten rule that you never talked about the future. Especially because it wasn’t clear how much longer Ruthie would be welcome in the Box. Dor had made an exception to his no-kids policy for her, and another for Feo, but his continued beneficence was a gamble. “Or, you know, get Gary to take in the seams for now,” Faye added.

“It’s the shoes, mostly,” Cass clarified. “I’d just like to get her some sneakers. Boots, too. I don’t care if they’re boys’, either. Keep your eye out?”

“You know we do, Cassie,” Three-High said kindly. Some of them, mostly the men, had taken to calling her Cassie. Cass didn’t like it, but she also didn’t want to tell them to stop. They meant well. “We’ll find her something in plenty of time. Gonna find her a sled, too, little snowsuit.”

“Thanks,” Cass said softly. “But Dor…so the last you saw him was…”

“Not since morning,” Faye said. “We see him, though, we’ll let him know you’re lookin’ for him, okay?”

It was the best she could do. Cass thanked them and wandered back toward her tent. Maybe Smoke would return before dinner; maybe he’d changed his mind. Maybe he was looking for her even now.