Читать книгу Rebirth - Sophie Littlefield - Страница 15

SAMMI RODE IN THE BACK OF THE TRUCK WITH the others, pretending to sleep, too afraid to speak. The men who rode back there with them—when did they sleep? Because every time Sammi opened her eyes, their eyes were there, too, dark and unreadable as they waited and watched while the rest of them huddled together for warmth.

Her mother was dead. Jed was dead. Everyone who resisted—even a little—dead, dead, dead. The only reason Sammi was alive was because her mother’s last words were Go with them, Sammi—her name was still on her lips when she’d gone down, blood pouring from the slice in her neck.

Jed had earned a bullet. He’d pretended to go along, helping his brothers support their parents as they were herded up into the truck, holding them up by their arms so they wouldn’t stumble. Stumbling got you killed—at least, that was what had happened to Mrs. Levenson, who didn’t have time to get her cane when the Rebuilders burst into the burning school. She tried to keep up but she kept twisting her hip and falling, making little “oof” sounds when she landed on the ground, and the third time one of the Rebuilders had hit her on the head with his black stick and she twitched and lay still, making no sound at all. Sammi had seen the Rebuilder—a woman, how could a woman do such a thing?—wind up for the swing, and Sammi had played softball, so she knew, from the way the woman brought the stick back and around and down with a crack everyone could hear, that the force must have crushed poor Mrs. Levenson’s skull.

And that was before they were even loaded on the truck.

There had been sixteen of them, in the end. Sixteen alive and thirty-four dead or dying in the burning school. Sammi was numb with horror as the truck ground out of the parking lot and onto Highway 161. Two of the Rebuilders, both men, both young, rode in the back with them. The one with his back to the cab and another who sat on a box, flipping a blade and catching it. It was the same blade he had used on Sammi’s mom and on the others, too, the ones who tried to keep the Rebuilders out of the common room.

An older man drove, and then there was the woman—the woman who had killed Mrs. Levenson. The guard who stared at her, the one with a tiny triangle of beard and a cap with a cartoon picture of a dog embroidered on it—he had made her sit near him and Sammi wondered with a sickening feeling if it was so he could look at her. Because he just kept looking at her. Jed and his family had been made to sit on the other side of the truck bed, and Jed mouthed words at her whenever the guy on the box wasn’t looking, he said I love you and other things Sammi could not understand, and after a while her vision blurred with tears and she couldn’t see his mouth forming words. In between were the rest of the survivors. Arthur. Mr. Jayaraman. Terry and her kids. The ones who were too old, too young, or too cowardly to fight or who, like Jed’s brothers, had someone to protect.

Her mother had died trying to protect Sammi. They hadn’t even wasted a bullet on her death; they’d dropped her to the ground like a sack of garbage and stepped around the pooling blood as though it was distasteful. Her mother’s body was left behind in the burning building; Sammi hoped it burned all the way, to the bones—and that the bones burned, too. She didn’t want the birds to get to her mother’s body; she’d seen what the birds could do, the big black ones that had showed up a week ago and feasted on the carcass of a fat raccoon the raiders had caught and left out in the courtyard for skinning. Better that her mother disappear from earth as Sammi wished she herself could disappear.

Through the long night in the truck, Sammi shivered and wished she’d been killed, too. But she kept hearing her mother’s last words. Go with them. Well, she had, and she regretted it. Even in the dark she sensed the man staring at her. She knew what he wanted to do. She wished she’d done it with Jed first, because at least then Jed would have always been her first. They had talked about it, and Sammi had finally decided she wanted to and Jed had got some condoms. They just hadn’t gotten around to it. They were waiting for a night when they could be alone.

Sammi cried and felt the cold seep deeper inside her and stared at the stars. Sometimes she thought the stars were the most beautiful thing left, maybe the only beautiful thing left in the world. There were so many, it was almost like a thick and sparkling sauce had been spilled across the sky, and Sammi wondered if somewhere out there was a planet whose inhabitants hadn’t messed it up, hadn’t created their own monsters and poisons to kill themselves off.

She found her dad’s star, and almost didn’t say the words. She’d gotten used to the idea that he was dead; her mother said that it was better that way, that wishing for him to be alive was just pretending, and they didn’t have the luxury of pretending anymore; but until this night she had kept her promise. Every night she found her dad’s star and touched her nose with her fingers the way he taught her as far back as she could remember. “Who do I love best?” he used to ask and she would touch her nose with her finger because that meant Me! You love me!—but that wasn’t even the real part of it.

The real part was the star and the thing they said together. Before he left, even though Sammi was fourteen and too old for it, he would always take a break from his study and come find her, and it didn’t matter if she was watching TV, he would wait for a commercial; or if she was texting or painting her nails, whatever it was, he would wait and then they would go out on the deck and he would find the star and they would say it together. Just another way of saying I love you; she knew that now, but when she was little she had decided it had to be the same every time and so it was.

The night her dad left, his SUV packed with his stuff in the driveway, he hugged her hard and pointed to the sky and said the thing. “Never forget,” he said and kissed her nose, her forehead, and then he added, “Okay?” in a way that sounded so sad and tentative that Sammi promised after all even though she was so angry she had been planning to refuse.

Tonight she almost broke her promise because he’d left her and died, and now her mom had died and she was alone, and if that wasn’t his fault, well, she didn’t exactly know who else to blame. So she wasn’t going to say it.

But there the star was, as bright and yellow as it had ever been, and the man stared and she couldn’t see Jed and she wished she was dead…but she whispered the words:

“Star bright, you and me always.”

A few minutes later they stopped the truck so everyone could pee and the man with the beard, the one who stared, jumped to the ground and took them to the side of the road one at a time while the knife man watched everyone else, and when it was Jed’s turn, all three brothers jumped up and attacked the guard who’d killed her mother and broke his neck before the old man and the woman shot them. The Rebuilders wrapped the body of the dead guard in a tarp and lashed it to the top of the cab. They left Jed and his brothers lying facedown on the ground. And the rest of the way Jed’s mother screamed and Sammi was silent and knew she’d never keep any promise again.