Horizon

SMOKE HAD SEEN carnage and Smoke had killed men, but the blood-slicked panorama before him caused him to suck in his breath. For a moment he thought he’d vomit, and he leaned over the stuccoed wall, heaving and gulping air, ready to unloose himself onto the vinyl sofa directly below.

The moment passed, in a second, a fraction of a second. Disgust was not an emotion he could afford to indulge. Smoke swallowed down his bile and plunged forward.

At the entrance, half a dozen citizens were throwing themselves against the doors, using their bodies as battering rams. Locking the exits from within-the shelterers had mistakenly believed they were making their small world safer, protecting their number from the temptation of outside, never anticipating the horror they’d accidentally spawned. Smoke could not help them now: at this point his focus needed to be on the threat of the moment.

The Beaters had dragged off their first victim, a slender middle-aged woman with long, graying hair they wrapped through their decrepit fingers for leverage. Smoke recognized her-she’d asked him if she could help him when his bum leg gave him trouble, offered him half of her lunch, but now she was being shoved facedown on the floor in the entrance of a Hallmark card shop. Behind the broken glass windows were canting displays holding Mother’s Day and graduation cards and gifts-because it had been that season, hadn’t it, a year ago when things fell apart? The woman screamed and gargled in terror as the creatures yanked her limbs straight out and knelt on them. He could hear the ripping of her clothes as they were torn away. Her back was smooth and pale, and then it disappeared under the four monstrous heads as they assaulted with their wide greedy mouths, their sharp and tearing teeth.

“Anyone who’s armed, help me,” he bellowed, shooting into the writhing mass. One of the Beaters squawked and fell away, its face slimed with blood and its mouth wide and grimacing, but immediately squirmed back into the feeding frenzy, dragging one bloodied arm uselessly at its side.

No one seemed to have heard him, so Smoke shot at the doors, hitting the reinforced metal above their heads. The sound echoed all around them, and several people screamed or fell and the crowd tried to run in both directions. “If no one helps me we’re all going to die here,” he yelled before turning back to the Beaters.

He edged closer to the mass, trying to find his opportunity. He managed to get a clear shot at the woman when one of the Beaters threw his head back to tear a long strip of flesh from her back down near her buttock. Smoke aimed for the back of her head and tried not to see it burst, focusing instead on the Beaters, now sprayed with her blood and brains and enraged to find their quarry unresponsive.

Their angry cries ricocheted and echoed down the mall, and he glanced down the corridor to the farthest end where people poured out of a JCPenney, a dozen, two dozen, more of them. From this distance they looked normal, orderly, a congregation emptying out after church, fans leaving a stadium, patrons leaving a bar at closing time-only they walked with a certain shuffling, unsteady gait and they bumped into each other and occasionally lifted their fingers to their lips and chewed.

The new ones. The ones who, if they’d come a week earlier, would have still been living here as survivors, not so different from the people of New Eden or the people of any shelter, making the best of things, trying to scrape together enough optimism to see them through another day, when somehow-a door forced open? an HVAC duct? a tear in the cheap stucco wall, the things’ hunger driving them to tear and chew through insulation, plaster, whatever it took until they reached the inside of the mall?-the Beaters got in.

And all it would have taken was a few bites. A population like this, trapped, no light at night, all those halls and empty shops and dark corners for hiding like this-it would have spread geometrically, madly, instantly. With nowhere to go, the mall sealed shut tight save the one breach, the uninfected didn’t stand a chance. Hordes of the things outside, inside would still seem more survivable…

All of this flashed through Smoke’s mind while he was shooting, then reloading from the stash in his pocket. There was more ammo on the trailer-but the trailer was out there, in the parking lot. The bullets were slippery in his hands, maybe twenty of them, and he jammed them into the cylinder with shaking hands while the Beaters grew frustrated with their immobile, unresponsive meal and howled their disappointment.

They liked it alive. They’d eat a dead body if they had to, but with far less zeal. They’d wander away from it and circle back, grazing on the corpse for a few days as children might pick at a fruit bowl if denied their Halloween candy. But for now, with the air pungent with the scent of living citizens, they would lose interest in the dead woman and come after the fresh uninfected.

In fact it was already happening. Two of them had turned away from the woman’s blood-soaked, naked body and were crawling, slipping on her blood, toward the crowd of terrified people. One tried to rise, slipped, and fell down again, its elbow cracking on the hard floor. Smoke’s damp and trembling fingers had not managed to load the entire cylinder but there was no time, and he jammed it shut and fired the way he’d practiced so many mornings in the Box, on the fly, his body turning already to the next target.

But before he could aim, the thing lurched sideways, taking a shot in the upper chest. Not a fatal injury, but enough to slow it down. Smoke looked for the shooter and saw three of the others, no-four, all armed, one man with only a blade-coming tentatively closer.

Smoke shot the last two uninjured Beaters in quick succession, and they collapsed on top of the poor dead woman. One of the Edenites, a short wiry woman, ran to the Beater that was crawling along the blood-slicked floor, jammed the muzzle of a gun against its forehead and fired, getting splattered with gore.

Smoke approached her, wary that she might fire again. “Hey,” he said gently, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t get so close if you don’t have to. That’s taking a hell of a chance.”

The woman looked at him, wild-eyed, her mouth trembling. “It’s just I never shot a gun before,” she said. “I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss.”

Damn. The last thing they needed was weapons in the hands of people who had no idea how to use them. “Whose gun is that?”

“It’s some…somebody dropped it. Over there.”

“You did good,” Smoke said, taking it carefully from her hand, pushing the barrel down. “You didn’t miss, not one bit.”

“What do we do now?” One of the slacker guys, the ones who had been skateboarding along the edge of the crowd, was tugging on Smoke’s sleeve like he was five years old. Smoke didn’t bother asking him if he was armed. “There’s more of them down there, did you see? Did you? Oh, Jesus, what’re we going to do?”

“I saw. Look, maybe you can help out here, okay?” Smoke pointed to the entrance lobby, where several people had been knocked down in the panic to reach the doors. One woman had a gash on her forehead and was leaning against the locked door, crying. “How about you see what they need, okay?”

The boy turned dubiously toward the fallen. “Yeah, I want to help and all but-”

“Then do it.” Smoke had run out of patience. He scanned the mall in both directions, saw a couple of the Easterners conferring at the junction with the other wing, past half a dozen storefronts. They, at least, were armed. And there. There was Dor, working at the heavy door. Someone had hacked away at the hinge and the thick metal had split, exposing wires from the security system and the mechanical closing mechanism.

Next to him was Sammi, holding something, a narrow tool of some sort. Her face was pale but as her father worked she remained steady, handing him what he needed from a small leather bag. Smoke recognized that bag- back when he’d been second-in-command in the Box, he remembered Dor carrying his tools with him on his belt. Back then they’d been useful for repairing sections of the chain-link fence that surrounded the Box-or for opening the occasional bottle of beer after a good raid.

How many mornings had the two men trained together? How many overcast days and chilly dawns had they raided together, watching each other’s backs at each unfamiliar house, each closed door? They’d been as close as two men so stubborn could be Aftertime, sharing confidences and, eventually, trust as the weeks turned into months and they soldiered on together.

And all that time, Smoke thought Dor didn’t like Cass. She’d told him so herself, described the way he avoided her, never looked her in the eye, found an excuse to leave whenever she arrived at the fire or one of the food- merchant stalls where he’d been passing the time.

But Smoke had never bothered to wonder why Dor avoided her so studiously. If he had, if he’d paid even a little more attention, it would have been so clear. Dor had loved her. Even then. And though he’d respected Smoke’s claim enough never to allow himself to be tempted, once Smoke left, all bets were off. No: after Smoke had nearly gotten himself killed, after he’d chosen a battle he could not win over a future with Cass. It was what she had been