Horizon

“You’re not asleep, are you, Cassie? Wanna talk?”

She hesitated only for a moment before getting up carefully so as not to disturb the others, and following him into the house. They felt along the wall in the darkness, to the front door where one of the Easterners was sitting on the ottoman that Dor had brought for Jasmine earlier.

“She had nightmares,” Red murmured to the guard. “We’re just going to sit out here for a bit, okay?”

“Suit yourself,” the man said.

There was enough starlight to find the benches that faced each other across a flower bed. They sat close together and Red unfolded a blanket he’d brought, spreading it carefully over the two of them.

“Aw, Cassie darlin’, who would have thought it.” He sighed.

Cass couldn’t help a cynical laugh. “Who would have thought which part? That the world would be taken over by zombies? That we’d be grazing like cattle on a plant invented in a lab, just to stay alive? Or that by some miracle you’d show up in my life again after abandoning me for twenty-three years?”

After the words were out, Cass wished she hadn’t said the last part. She knew exactly how many years it was since her dad left. All those years, she’d kept track. But why give him that satisfaction? After all, she’d long ago quit caring that he was gone.

“It wasn’t a miracle,” Red said softly.

“Okay, a curse. Is that better? You were cursed with having to run into me again. In all the bars, in all the-”

“No, that’s not what I meant. I found you, Cassie. It wasn’t an accident.”

A tickle started along her spine. “Um, well, if you remember, you were already living in New Eden when we got there, so technically, I found you. And since there aren’t all that many places to live left out here, it’s not exactly a miracle that we both ended up in the same one, know what I mean?”

“I don’t mean in New Eden. I mean before that.”

“Before that, when? Before I came here I lived in the Box and I know for a fact you weren’t there. Before that I lived in a library and I never saw-”

“The day you were taken, Cass. The day you were attacked. By the Beaters. I was there.”

Chapter 31

HE’D STILL BEEN going by Silver Dollar then. Or Tom Haverford, his real name, to his oldest and closest friend in the world, Carmy Gomez, with whom he’d been traveling the highways and byways of the West Coast, playing in clubs and bars and music festivals, opening for other acts and generally making enough money to cover their costs and salt a little away. Tom had even been paying for rock-bottom health insurance, really a lottery Madoff scheme run by a local charity, but even that was a bit of a trick given his lack of a permanent address, but lately he’d begun thinking about the past, about things he wished he’d done differently. And the last thing he wanted, assuming there was anyone who still cared about him, was to be a burden to them now when he’d managed to be a burden way too many times already in his sorry life.

His mother. Over eighty but still hanging on to the little bungalow he grew up in, last he called, a few months back.

His half brother, Burt. Burt hated him, sure, but Tom figured he’d given him cause, the way he’d tormented him during their childhood.

His ex-wife. Well, there was no chance she gave a shit about him anymore. Still, he added her to the list of beneficiaries; she’d more than earned it.

And Cassie.

Tom thought more and more about the past as the days ticked by. He thought about telling Carmy about it, but Carmy wasn’t that kind of guy, not someone you spilled your guts to, even though Tom knew his old friend would take a bullet for him. Carmy had always had a way with people. He played bass, could pitch in on a set when needed, but mostly he was their manager-finagler of gigs, extractor of payment, riler of crowds and bedder of women. He was good-natured, funny-and fond of anything he could snort, inject or ingest. But they worked around that. It was a scheduling thing more than anything; Carmy could go three, four weekends in a row keeping his shit together and then they’d just hole up somewhere for a while and he’d go nuts and Tom would find a used bookstore or a movie theater or a pretty waitress and while away a week.

The truth was that Tom was content to sit on a beach, or in a park, or on a bench in front of a city hall, or even in a motel room while the rain came down outside, and play his guitar and hum along, throwing in a phrase or two when it struck his fancy. If he’d written down a fraction-a hundredth-of the great lyrics that came to him when he was messing around, he’d have a million dollars, but he was too lazy. He just liked playing.

The things Tom could do with a guitar on his best days rivaled anything Knopfler had ever done, and the crowds would always notice eventually. If he and Carmy had managed to keep a band together for more than a season, they could have written their own ticket, but the truth was that their lifestyle didn’t suit that many people. Especially as they’d gotten older. Sometimes they’d pick up a young guy to sing or play horn or whatever, but even they got worn down after a while. So be it-Tom and Carmy were content with their lot.

Then in a cheap motel in a little town an hour north of L.A., two things happened.

First, Carmy met a woman, disappeared for a week and somehow ended up in the hospital with a gash in his chest that he claimed was accidental but which had nicked a lung and threatened to keep him laid up for a while. And second, Tom saw his first case of the fever, a woman who’d been staying in the same motel even longer than he had and, if he wasn’t mistaken, with whom he was pretty sure he’d previously spent a drunken night.

Her name was Beverly or Brenda, something with a B, and when he bumped into her on the stairs, she reached out to touch his face and for a moment he thought it was an invitation. His room was on the second floor, hers on the first, and he’d been trying to figure out how to politely decline the come-on and edge past her. He was headed for the bar across the street, where he planned to watch the news on the big-screen TV; everything was so fucked up, with the terrorists and now the rioting in the cities, that Tom was starting to get a little alarmed.

“Hey, darlin’, in a bit of a hurry here,” he’d said smoothly, giving her his best smile. That’s when she pinched the skin of his jowl hard and pulled his face toward her, her mouth opening and her eyes unfocused.

Tom knew now that if he hadn’t been so startled that he tripped over his own feet and fell down the stairs, that would have been the end of him, and he and Bev would have been roaming the streets together before long, looking for snacks. Instead, he made it to the bar with only a little bruising, talked to some folks and figured out that if there was ever a time for making amends it probably ought to be now.

His ex-wife wasn’t hard to find-ten minutes on the library’s computer got him her address, not five miles from the house he’d last called home, and within the hour he was hitching his way back to Silva. The trip was terrifying, as traffic from the cities clogged the inland roads and gas stations started putting up signs that said NO GAS HERE and the cost of a slice of pie quadrupled. He made the last six miles on foot after the driver of the car he’d been riding in crashed into a stalled RV.

All that momentum…and when Tom got back he suddenly lost his nerve. He walked to his ex-wife’s new house and stood across the street for an hour, cursing himself for not using the long journey to figure out what to actually say. Finally, he walked another half hour to a bar and got good and soused, drunk enough to bloody the mouth of the guy on the next stool over, who told him not only did he know Cass Haverford, but he’d been a year ahead of her at Silva High and had screwed her once in the locker room and once six years later in the parking lot of the same bar where they just now happened to be sitting. And so had most of his friends, one of whom happened to be at the same bar and who, after some hard persuasion, was happy to share that she’d gotten knocked up and changed her last name to Dollar. And then he threw in her new address for good measure.

On the way to his daughter’s house, Tom thought about the fact that his little girl had changed her name. The last time they’d been together, he’d taken her to a baseball game and promised her that he’d be big someday, that the name Silver Dollar would be up in lights in places twice as big as the stadium. He’d said she would always be able to find him just by looking for those bright lights-but that had been a lie, hadn’t it?