“Ain’t you afraid you’re going to turn into a pillar of salt?” Jackson says from next to me. Katherine has stopped as well.
“Naw. My soul is too sullied for the Lord to bother much with me.” I remember pulling the trigger and watching Bob go down, the sheriff’s face as the buckshot hit him in the throat, the look of surprise and then nothing. How easy it was, little more than a muscle spasm, yet world-ending for those men.
But more than that, I remember the rage on the major’s face back at Rose Hill the night before I shot him. And I remember the soft repose of his face as he slept, as I pulled the trigger, knowing that Rose Hill would never be safe as long as his will was law.
After everyone came running it was easier to say that he’d turned shambler than to tell the truth, how I was trying to protect Momma from him and his rage, how I’d gotten the pearl-handled revolver from her desk one night while everyone was asleep just because I was afraid of what a man like that could do.
Like I’ve said, the truth and I are uneasy companions at best. The fib was an easy one to tell.
No one much asked, anyway. No one much wanted to know, I suppose. Who wants to think a child can murder a man? Especially a man everyone knows to secretly be her father. Either way, I am many things, a murderess just happens to be one of them. It’s not something I think about all that much, and now I have two more dead men on my soul. I’ll be fine.
I’m an excellent liar. Even to myself.
An arm wraps around my shoulders, and I look up in surprise as Jackson smiles down at me. “I have something for you, Janey-Jane. You remember that girl you used to run with, Sue?”
“Big Sue?” I say. “She’s alive?”
He nods. “She and some of the other girls made it to Nicodemus. She found something as they were evacuating Miss Preston’s and I thought I should bring it to you.”
Jackson digs into the space between his vest and his shirt, pulls forth a letter, and pushes it into my hand. Then, he kisses me lightly on the lips. “I’m glad you made it, Jane,” he says, before turning and striding toward the wagon.
I look down and sure enough it’s from my momma, my name scrawled across the front. I grip it too tightly, the fine vellum crumpling.
“Jane, do you want some space?” Katherine asks, and I shake my head.
“Can you wait with me while I read it?”
She nods, and I tear the letter open.
The letter is dated nearly two months ago, only a few days before Katherine and I were sent here to Summerland. My hands shake, and as I read, the world narrows to a pinprick of light, all sound fading away until only the roar of my heartbeat fills my ears.
Rose Hill is no more.
Overrun by the dead.
Betrayed by my new husband.
We have gone on the run.
A safe place, run by Survivalists.
And then a name that I read over and over again.
Haven, California.
Haven.
California.
I stare at the letter for a long time, breathing in and out, my world coming apart one piece at a time.
Rose Hill, my dream and my future, is no more. Betrayed by her new husband after he discovered she was a Negro pretending to be white, my mother has gone to California to start a new life.
To a town settled and run by Survivalists.
I turn behind me to look at the wagon heading to Nicodemus, another frontier town just like Summerland. It strikes me that all of us everywhere are running. From the dead, from the uncertainty of the future, from ourselves. We are just always on the move. Is there really such a thing as home when it’s so easily destroyed?
No matter what we do, each town is just the same as the last. Another chance to be overrun, to watch as everything and everyone we love is put in danger time and time again. Doesn’t matter the name of the place, it’s only a matter of time until it’s swept away in a wave of the dead.
That doesn’t seem like any kind of future to me.
I look back at the letter I hold, California scrawled in my mother’s hand, hastily, desperately.
Find me, Jane.
“Jane McKeene, what is it?” Katherine asks, her eyes wide with worry. I get the feeling it isn’t the first time she’s asked me.
I laugh, loud and long. “Oh, I am Fortune’s fool,” I say, knowing Katherine won’t get the reference. But the quote is too apropos.
I hold the letter up, feeling calmer and more focused than I have in weeks. I told the preacher that there would always be men like him, and people like me to stop them. And I meant it. After the trials and tribulations of Summerland, I know my life’s path: Stop the Survivalists and all those like them. I’m done running away from trouble. Why not meet it head-on?
Stopping the Survivalists. It’s a lofty goal, but I ain’t ever been one for half measures.
“Kate, we’re going to California.”
She gives me an incredulous look, but before she can ask any questions I’m striding toward Nicodemus, quickly enough that she has to scurry to keep up with me. My sickles are heavy at my side and my penny is a warm, comforting weight around my neck. For once I’m happy and I can’t help but smile.
It’s a good day to be alive.
Author’s Note
I felt I would be remiss to end this story without telling readers that the events in this book are based on actual historical occurrences. While zombies did not stalk the battlefields of Gettysburg, the United States did have a system
