Horizon

double staffing of armed guards. Seeing the gate open wide, the guard chairs empty, it chilled her. When the last of the pedestrians-Steve, that wasn’t surprising, as well as a few other people who’d volunteered to form the rear guard behind the slowest walkers-had gone a hundred yards down the road toward Hollis, Red said softly, “Okay, now.”

But before they could go more than a few feet Red stopped her.

“Wait,” he whispered urgently, looking back toward the community center.

Cass saw it too, two lean figures racing from the wide-open French doors, across the yard, toward the bridge. One was Owen Mason, a hawk-faced man around thirty who raided occasionally and worked at a few other jobs on the island, none of them with much skill or attention; and wasn’t that-it looked like one of the boys Sammi ran around with. As she watched, they caught up with the stragglers and melted into the back of the crowd. No one seemed to notice.

What had they been up to? If it had only been the boys, Cass might have thought they were saying goodbye to Phillip. Throughout the night people had been leaving things outside the quarantine house, magazines and mugs and T-shirts and dried flowers, a heartbreaking if macabre shrine to the feverish boy inside, who was probably incoherent by now, dementia taking over his brain as he picked at his skin and scalp. Sammi’s friends were good kids, and all of them had been friends with Phillip. But Owen…she’d gotten a bad feeling about him from the start, and avoided him as much as she could. He was just…creepy.

A shout from the front of the crowd interrupted her thoughts. It was repeated, voices joining in, and in seconds it had gone from alarm to panic.

Beaters. It had to be.

They’d waited too long. The council had been wasting time, figuring that it was too dark to travel safely, and undoubtedly that was true-even if they’d used precious battery power they could not have safely covered any ground in such a large group in the darkness. But apparently, on this day, the dimmest glow of dawn was enough for the Beaters.

“What do we do?” Cass asked, hollow with fear. To the rear of the crowd, they were safe, perhaps, for a little longer. But they had Smoke. There was no way that he was ready to stand and fight-even if he could defend himself as well as anyone as long as he had a gun.

“We can’t stay here.” Red spoke quickly, firmly. “Anyone on this island is as good as dead, because there’s no way to keep them from swimming across now.”

“All right. Let’s go.” Zihna didn’t hesitate. She pushed Ruthie’s stroller with surprising speed, and Cass followed. The trailer moved easily and it was not at all difficult to pull across flat ground.

“Let me help,” Smoke protested. In the early morning, after several hours’ rest, he seemed more recovered than last night. He was sitting up in the trailer, surrounded by the cans and water bottles they’d packed, in a pile of mussed blankets.

Cass put her hands on his shoulders. “Hush now. Close your eyes. Rest. Please, Smoke, please just trust me this time. We can talk about it later.”

“Go, go,” Red urged.

They caught up with the group by the time they reached the bridge. But there was a problem: the people running back across in the other direction, back onto the island-June, Karen and then Collette, the ringleader of their little group, her hands raised to cover her ears as though she could protect herself by shutting out the screaming. They raced past, heading for the community center, and others followed.

The crowd had stalled on the other side of the bridge, people shifting around inside it strangely so that it was like a living organism, ebbing and flowing across the road, spilling over onto the land on either side. A cardboard box lay crushed, bright-colored fabric spilled out, the sleeve of a shirt flung out as if an invisible arm was pointing the way. Cass scanned the scene for Dor, for Sammi, but saw neither, and then she heard the cries above the din of the crowd.

There were five of them, standing together on the other side of the road, past the drainage ditch and the cattle fencing. They must have come across ragged land rather than by the pathway-and worse, they must have been making their way entirely by memory, instinct, smell, because in this light they would be essentially blind, only able to detect the most basic shapes. Judging by how the things clutched at each other and stumbled, they might have been seeing almost nothing at all.

Suddenly there was a deafening explosion behind the citizens on the bridge, followed by a second, smaller blast.

Cass spun around to see the community center in flames, the top of it blown clear off, debris swirling in a red- orange cloud. Behind it, the quarantine house was nothing but a pile of burning rubble. Someone staggered out the front of the community center and collapsed on the porch, hair on fire. The screaming grew even louder, the terrified crowd caught between the ruination of the island and the Beaters ahead.

“What the hell was that?” Cass demanded.

“Holy…who would have done such a thing?” Zihna said. “And how-where would they get the…”

“There were explosives in the storehouse,” Red said grimly. “Someone must have gotten into them, after it was unlocked last night.”

“But why? What’s the point of-anyone in there was doomed anyway.”

Maybe this was a more compassionate death, Cass thought, at least for Phillip. But if Owen had been involved, she somehow didn’t think compassion was what drove him.

Yet there wasn’t time to worry about it. The Beaters had paused at the first flash of the explosions, but now they were staggering forward again, testing the air with their outstretched hands.

“They must be able to hear our voices, or the rumble of the cars,” Red said.

“They’ve probably been here all night. After they all took off, what do you want to bet some of them came back? Too chicken to come all the way to the water but…”

“Why doesn’t someone shoot them?” Cass cried, but it looked like none of the people close to the Beaters were armed.

An escalating roar came from the front of the crowd, and then two vehicles-the old dented Accord and a motorcycle-hurtled straight for the things. The motorcycle gained speed incredibly fast, and when it reached the edge of the ditch the driver leaned forward and lifted off the seat a few inches. Cass’s breath caught as she watched the bike shudder and jerk on impact but after a split second the rider miraculously righted the bike-

black hair flashing silver

– and oh my God it was Dor, it was Dor on the bike and he was headed straight for the clump of Beaters-

And Cass was running, running through the edge of the crowd, knocking into people-why was everyone just standing there letting him do this crazy thing?-and then there was an earthshaking crash because the car following seconds behind Dor hit the ditch and couldn’t make the jump, its front bumper smashed into the earth, and she saw it crumple, saw the hood accordion against the berm what the hell had the driver been thinking and who would have even taken such a crazy chance-

Cass ran past the smoking wreck, a burning smell coming off it, engine whining like no engine should and then going silent, a pop, another, a small defeated dying sound. And the windshield was red. It was splintered and red and what was that oh God, against the glass, inside the car, that thing that was someone’s head no matter how many times you saw the many ways a person could die you never got used to it, not ever-

But Cass was not fast enough to catch Dor and he circled once and came back at the Beaters, who were moving at full sprinting speed now, at full speed himself and smashed into them and two went flying and one went down and one, somehow, got latched onto the bike and dragged and the bike tipped and hovered, defying gravity, before it slow-mo wobbled and fell and by then Cass was there.

How had her blade come to be in her hand, it was her nature now, as running had become her nature in the days when she thought everything had been taken from her but she didn’t know the half of it, the days when she first found comfort in the tarry punishing blacktop of a summer afternoon. Sweat and ravaged lungs and legs pushed past their limit. And now she was a machine of a different sort, one who could wield a blade that had become like another arm, slash it down on the Beater who was crawling on top of Dor, watch the man who’d held her only days ago as he was sprayed with the blood of the monster and heave the thing off of him and step on its skull as she leaped to the next one.

Behind her there was screaming but where were they, where was help? The closest ones backed away and