Cass went straight on, and in the seconds that it took to close the gap and slice the neck and oh God don’t look don’t look don’t
The truck rocked on its wheels, slammed into by the bodies of the Beaters. How long until they figured out how to get inside? The floor was only waist-high, no challenge for a citizen, but the Beaters were clumsy, they flopped and thrashed.
Leslie ducked under a Beater’s reaching arm and disappeared around back, and before Cass could protest Sammi went flying past too.
This time she didn’t hesitate. Last time it had nearly cost Leslie’s life. Now that life was almost certainly spent, and Sammi’s too, but if Cass didn’t get in the cab and go, it would all be for nothing. Her heart pounded with exertion and agony but she grabbed for the driver’s-side door, and when it wouldn’t budge she remembered she had locked it and fished the keys from her pocket and jammed them at the lock with shaking fingers. It was impossible to see inside, her eyes were stinging with sweat and it was dark but inside that cab were her daughter and her lover and she had to live for them, she had to survive for them, and after several scrambled tries the key went in and she turned the lock and was about to yank open the door when she heard Sammi scream-
And she was halfway around the truck when she realized what a terrible mistake she had made but she couldn’t let the girl be dragged off and eaten, one last terrible indignity in a life that had been much too short with far too much suffering and loss, and if she had to kill Sammi herself to save her those final moments of terror she would do it.
Around the back of the truck it was worse than she ever could have imagined, the piled crush of Beaters a hideous squirming mound of hands scrabbling for the metal truck floor and mouths making cutting bites at the air, only to be pushed away by others as they fought for purchase.
But one had made it almost all the way up onto the floor. Sammi’s scream had been an attempt to deter it. She and Leslie fought the mob, Sammi with her nail-studded board and Leslie with a branch. Leslie was losing, a Beater grabbing and snatching at the weak weapon, and as Cass reached her it grasped the end and yanked and Leslie stumbled, but Cass was ready with her blade and the force of her fury slashed through the thing’s neck along with the razor-sharp metal.
Cass seized Leslie’s hand and pressed the keys into it. “Go!” she screamed, and Leslie didn’t need to be told twice, she was gone in a flash and Cass saw the truck dip slightly a second later and knew that the girl had made it.
There was only one chance now, one single chance for her and Sammi. She grabbed the girl’s hand and Sammi met her gaze and in her shining eyes Cass saw mirrored back a spark of the hope she’d barely kept alive, and all of the molten rage that had been forged in the past days.
Cass squeezed her hand, once, and then screamed, “Now!” even as the truck rumbled to life, and they ran for it.
This time she could not squeeze her eyes shut against the horror as they ran headlong into the writhing mass of bodies. Sammi, rounding the edge of the horde, propelled herself across the far edge of the opening, kicking at a skull and stepping on the Beater’s shoulder, and then she was in. Cass caught a flash of the terrified girls backed up against the wall of the cargo area, the single Beater who had made it inside crawling toward them with its mouth wide and howling. For a moment she didn’t see Dor and she thought he’d been dragged out, but then she saw that the girls had pushed him behind them, that he was lying against the wall, the girls’ bodies forming the last barrier in front of him.
Only one of them still held a gun and she didn’t have her finger anywhere near the trigger. As Cass watched in horror the girl used it to club at the Beater’s face, and its head snapped back from the impact but then it grabbed her, grabbed the gun and her hand with it and that was when Cass threw herself onto the pile of squirming bodies, hands pulling on decayed shoulders to get her higher and she sprinted up the pile, feet landing on shoulders, heads, a shifting mass below her but then she was in, her knees slamming hard on the metal floor and she grabbed the Beater’s feet with all her might and pulled, feeling the shifting bones and rotting flesh beneath its filthy trousers, and the Beater screamed louder but did not let go of the girl-
– and Cass braced herself with her feet jammed against the wall and pulled with everything she had, every ounce of energy and shred of life left in her and the Beater slid a little further, but it wasn’t until the truck shot forward that the force of momentum knocked the girl to her knees, and still the Beater would not let go, so that as it slid from the truck it dragged her with it and they fell as one to the road, and as Cass and the others watched the terrible scene fade from view, the truck picking up speed as it careened away from the doomed neighborhood, they could only pray that the girl had been knocked senseless by the impact before the Beaters fell upon her.
38
THEY DID NOT RETURN TO THE BOX.
As Colima faded from view and the sky lightened with the dawn, Cass huddled with Sammi and the others in the back of the truck, all of them holding each other as they were jostled by every crack and rock and pothole in the road. Cass put her arms around Sammi and held on and let the girl cry, remembering the moment of their first meeting, all the things that had happened since then. She wished she could erase it all, give Sammi back everything she had lost. Instead she had only one gift for the girl-her wounded father, and as they held each other she whispered a version of the story of their journey to Colima, a gentler version, one in which truth was bent and shaded to take away its power and to let her know how much Dor had wanted his daughter back.
After a while Sammi pulled away from Cass and lay down on the cold metal floor next to her father, her lips moving with words that none of them could hear. Cass put a hand to Dor’s face, checking the wound at his scalp. It was not deep. He would live.
The other girls were named Sage and Kyra. Sage sobbed and couldn’t catch her breath, and Kyra crouched in the corner with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, her eyes wide and staring. Cass had made little headway in comforting them when Leslie pulled off the road in a barren stretch of highway surrounded by kaysev-studded fields.
Everyone but Smoke and Ruthie and Dor got out of the truck and there was a reckoning in the golden dawn. The girl who’d been dragged out of the truck by the Beaters had been named Amber. None of them had known her well. They said a few nice things about her, from what they did know. Miraculously, neither Leslie nor Sammi had been bitten-Leslie insisted they strip and every inch of their skin be examined.
The guns were gone, except for one that had ended up lodged in the corner of the cargo bay. By unspoken agreement, Leslie took it before handing Cass the keys and getting in the cargo area with the others. “I’ll talk to them,” she said softly, indicating Kyra and Sage and Roan, who leaned together with their backs to the wall, their eyes puffy and swollen from crying.
Inside the cab, Smoke and Ruthie slept on, and Cass kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead. An hour out of Colima, Cass saw a sign for the Delta, and remembered a sand bar where she’d once spent a high school weekend at a friend’s vacation trailer, jumping off a party barge into the cool waters of the farm canals, lying about their age and getting high with burnished construction workers from Sacramento. The network of waterways and redneck cul-de-sacs would provide ample cover from the Rebuilders, at least until they worked out a plan. Cass felt sure they could find shelter there; the sun was barely up, the tank was nearly full, they were decently armed.
In the back of the truck were five girls they had stolen from the Rebuilders, but they had traded fire and destruction for their plunder.
She hoped Evangeline and Mary had died in the explosion, but she hoped once again that they’d lived long enough to know what was coming, that as the beams fell on them and the flames licked their skin, they knew it was Cass Dollar who’d brought her gift of terrible rage.
She couldn’t bear to return to the Box with Dor and Smoke, both injured, both vulnerable. Either could lead, either could own the place, but not like this. They would live or they would die, but she would not take them back like this, weakened and needful.
And she couldn’t take a chance on leading the Rebuilders back to the Box. Those who survived the explosion
