I snort. “And what exactly was that?”
“‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’”
I shake my head, because it’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. Colored folks working with white folks, not just for them? Not in this lifetime.
“Anyway,” Mr. Gideon continues, yawning widely, “the idea is to make Summerland the city of the future. Electric lights. Running water. A wall that will keep the undead out. They provide safety, real safety, then people will make their way here, and we can start to rebuild something solid.”
“You don’t seem to believe that.”
“The Survivalists are going about it all wrong. You can’t force the Negro to bend to your whims. You have to convince him that you can offer him a better life. Slavery is finished. Trying to live in the past will get us nowhere but undead. That wall we built may seem fine, but it won’t last forever. The dead are adaptable. It’s just a matter of time before that barrier comes down.”
I watch him for a long time, trying to decide what to think about him. I decide I mostly like him, despite him pointing a gun at me. Twice. And I swear that ain’t just the fluttering feelings I’m getting from seeing him lying in a bed half naked, either.
“You don’t seem like you belong out here, Mr. Gideon.”
“I doubt that I do.”
I grin. “I know why I’m here, but who’d you tick off to get sent out here?”
“My father.”
It’s not a response I’m expecting, and any type of rejoinder dies on my tongue. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s been a learning experience, one I never could’ve gotten at Harvard.”
I tap out a rhythm on the wood behind me as I think. I nod, and swallow before I ask my final question. I haven’t seen Jackson all week, and his disappearance has been preying on my mind in a way I don’t like. It’s not that I have feelings for him, because I don’t, it’s that I’m worried about what it means that I haven’t seen him in so long. I remember the girl and her wide staring eyes, how easily Bill shot her, and I have the feeling that something equally bad happened to Jackson.
“There was a boy . . . He was thrown in a cell in the sheriff’s headquarters after we arrived together last week. I don’t suppose you know where he got to?”
Mr. Gideon shakes his head. “No. I didn’t see him when I was last there, and I can tell you that the jail only has a couple of cells for a reason. No need for them, when we have a sheriff with a short temper and a penchant for watching folks turn.”
The implications of his words hit me like a punch. I’ve heard of such folks, deviants who believe that some kind of enlightenment exists in watching the moment a man becomes a monster. It doesn’t surprise me that the sheriff would have such predilections, and I wonder if there ain’t some more sinister truth to the story about the loss of the sheriff’s sweet-tempered wife.
But Jackson . . .
Mr. Gideon seems to realize that the boy in question was more to me than just someone on the same train I’d taken here. “I’m . . . sorry,” he says.
Tears spring to my eyes, and a great big wave of ugly feelings wells up. “Okay, then. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Miss McKeene. I’m afraid that we’re all prisoners here of one kind or another, for better or worse.”
“Oh, it’s for worse, all right. Most definitely for worse.”
I slip back out of his window without saying good night, making my way back to the room by the light of Summerland, and with a heavy heart. It’s much easier to get back into bed than it was to get out, and when I find my blankets I roll onto my side and cry silent, angry tears, clutching my lucky penny.
They killed Jackson. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s dead. Just like Maisie Carpenter. He’s probably somewhere out there on the plain, hungry and yellow-eyed, a shell of the boy I once knew.
I curl up into a ball, biting my fist to hide the sound of my sobs. I barely feel my teeth sink into my hand. I’m too focused on the agony of being torn in half, like something inside of me is being savagely ripped out. The one boy I was stupid enough to love is dead. I’d thought my heart broke when he’d told me he didn’t love me, that we were better off alone than together. In a world where people are always being ripped away by the undead plague, I’d thought his words had destroyed my heart.
I was wrong. This is what a broken heart feels like.
Jane, I caution you to prudence. I hope you are reading your Bible and using the Scripture to temper your emotions, to always keep a cool head about you. But if you do not find solace there, perhaps you should take up embroidery.
I suppose it is obvious that I worry about you, a little girl all alone in the world. I worry too much.
Chapter 25In Which I Embrace My Recklessness
After Mr. Gideon tells me of Jackson’s demise something in me breaks. Jackson might not have been mine, and it might be his fault that I’m stuck in Summerland in the first place, but I still loved him. I didn’t want him dead, and knowing the sheriff and his boys could murder someone without so much as a how-do-you-do makes me despair at the chance I have to outsmart a bloodthirsty man like that. I should be coming up with a way out of Summerland, plotting and scheming. But I ain’t. Instead, I’m just surviving.
And barely at that. I’m weak. Moments after eating, my belly growls for more, demanding sustenance that ain’t coming. It ain’t that I’m working any more than I did when I was at Miss Preston’s; it’s
