A hollow sound stopped him, footsteps echoing from around a curve in the hall that led to another wing. A man stepped into sight. He was good-looking, exceptionally so, with curly brown hair and wide blue eyes. He wore an expensive-looking red sweater that fit him well. His mouth curved in a hint of a smile, and he moved slowly, confidently, a hint of swagger in his stride. There were weapons on his belt, but he made no move to reach for them.
“Hi,” he said.
From behind him, three more people followed, two women and another man. All of them looked healthy and well fed, if slightly disheveled. “Hi,” one of the women said, touching her hand to her face. None of these others held weapons.
“Good to see you,” Mayhew said, stepping forward with his hand extended. “We’re up from the south, a shelter about fifty miles from here. New Eden, you know it?”
“Eden…” said the man. “Eden.”
The uneasiness in Cass’s gut unraveled into full-scale alarm. Something was wrong, very wrong. “Those people,” she said to Smoke. “They’re not right.”
Mayhew reached the little group and stood awkwardly for a moment with his hand extended. After a pause, the man in front reached for his hand and they shook.
“I’m Damon Mayhew.”
The man stared at him with his mouth suddenly slack. “Havoc.”
“Havoc…I’m sorry?”
“Sorry,” the man repeated, with an odd little grin. Then he lifted Mayhew’s hand to his face, as though he meant to kiss it with a courtly flourish.
And Cass screamed.
And kept on screaming, joined by other voices, other terrified Edenites, because instead of kissing Mayhew the curly-haired man licked his wrist delicately, and Mayhew, who hailed from the East and had never seen a Beater in the early, airy stages of the disease, who had time to run but didn’t, didn’t, didn’t, stood there doing nothing while the man smiled wider and then nipped into his skin with perfect white teeth.
Mayhew yelped and jumped back, grabbing his wrist with his other hand but not before Cass saw the little jagged rip dotted with blood. The man who’d bitten him had been recently turned, still had the initial shine of the fever, and he would not attack. This little group would not tackle Mayhew and drag him away to feast upon, even though Cass now noticed the cuts and scabs on their hands and wrists, a gash on one woman’s face, the rosy sheen and bright eyes that were the hallmarks of the sickness. In this phase, they merely nibbled idly, on themselves and each other, their bites more exploratory than savage, nothing like the ravenous hunger that would soon follow. In their fever, they practically glowed.
Mayhew still didn’t understand what was happening, rubbing at his arm and scowling, but the Edenites did.
They ran. Most ran back toward the doors they’d entered through, though a few raced in the other direction toward a T in the rows of shops. Cass had Ruthie in her arms and Smoke at her side and they were not as fast; others-including the Easterners who finally figured out what was going on-passed them by, hurtling with a speed born of terror.
“Go on!” Smoke yelled at Cass. “Take Ruthie, just go!”
He was fumbling at his belt, he had his gun-they had Red to thank for that, Cass’s father had outfitted Smoke with his second-favorite piece in a gesture that seemed oddly old-fashioned, a courtly tradition of another era. Now she was grateful. Now she understood what Smoke meant to do and prayed for the bullet to find its target.
The curly-haired man went down first, his head canting to the side in a burst of blood, his body thrown against the half wall overlooking the atrium, his hands clutching air.
Smoke shot Mayhew second, taking off the top third of his skull, dropping him to his knees with a surprised expression on his face, and as Smoke fired twice more and Cass’s ears rang with the echoing report, the thought that came to mind was that Mayhew would never know why he’d been killed, he’d never know why the people of New Eden turned on him.
But he should have. On this side of the Rockies, at least, everyone knew. Everyone had seen a new Beater and knew they were every bit as deadly as the oldest ones that shambled, flayed and broken, toward their inevitable end.
The female Beaters lay on the floor, one of them silent and still, the other gut-shot and trying to move, shrieking in pain and rage, crawling over her own entrails toward them. Smoke fired again and she crumpled like a moth hit with a garden hose.
But the screaming continued, and Smoke grabbed Cass’s arm and pulled her toward the walkway bridge that led across the atrium, to a Victoria’s Secret store that still bore a pink-and-red banner decorated with sequins and stuffed felt hearts.
“That’s not the-”
That was all she got out before one of the Easterners, the barrel-chested, lisping one named Davis, ran past her, knocking into her with his shoulder, spinning her against the wall.
Then she saw what he was running from. Three of them, much further along in the disease, old Beaters whose flesh hung in ribbons from their chewed and wasted arms and whose faces were a ravaged tarmac of wounds and self- inflicted assaults, lips chewed away and broken teeth, eyebrows and eyelashes long ago ripped out with the nervous savage fury of infection. These creatures were not handsome, like the ones who’d greeted Mayhew, damned spirits with one foot in this life and one foot in hell, gorgeous with the first flush of the poison, their skin radiant and their eyes bright and depthless. No. These were the befouled foot soldiers of the curse, their humanity drained from them as they mortified themselves, obscene stinking mad lustful organisms of hunger and need.
These were the ones who must’ve breached the mall somehow, compromised a barrier or overwhelmed a guard, forced their way in and found their prey captive and defenseless, trapped in a prison of their own making. Who knows how many they’d devoured until, momentarily sated, they’d let some of their prey live. And those, the newly turned, were the ones who doomed the rest. Just as Owen’s curse would have spread like wildfire throughout the Edenites had he lived, the barely feverish had doomed the other mall-dwellers until the entire place was one giant festering nest of Beaters, all of them longing for uninfected flesh.
It was nothing she hadn’t seen before, nothing any of them hadn’t seen before, except, perhaps, for the Easterners, so perhaps Davis could be forgiven his terror, his desperate attempt at self-preservation that left Cass reeling and struggling to hold on to Ruthie.
“Come on,” Smoke yelled again, waiting until she took his hand. Ruthie was heavy and restless in her other arm, wakened from her peaceful afternoon slumber yet again by tragedy and disaster.
Cass could tell that Smoke’s strength was ebbing, his body racked with pain and his muscles weak, but he kept up the pace past a cosmetics store, a kitchenware shop, to a clothing store that still, all these many months after the final shopper overpaid for the last logo-embroidered shirt, still reeked of a signature cologne.
Cass had hated malls, the chemical smells and lack of natural light, the forced cheer of the window displays featuring impossibly thin mannequins and spotless suburban tableaus, all of the tableware and underpinnings and electronic toys and scented candles, the thousand varieties of
“I’m going back for your dad and Zihna,” he said, and then, in the dim mote-speckled light of a postconsumer skylight, in what had been a shopping mecca Before, he seemed to be about to kiss her.
He stared into her eyes and ran his fingers through her hair and pulled her closer, but in the last minute, one of them hesitated, one of them flinched, and Cass would always wonder which of them it had been, because all she remembered of the moment was the cornflower-blue of his eyes and the regret that he couldn’t love her enough, couldn’t love her as much as his cherished ideal of justice.
In the next instant he was gone.
Chapter 35
