ABRAM IS BARELY LISTENING to the exchange between the soldiers and himself. Something about his prisoners escaping, how did that happen, which way did they go—he can’t find an excuse to go alone, so he suffers their presence. He drives to the bookstore, taking side streets to avoid the mess in the center of town, and he knows he should offer some explanation for this stop—There! They got in that RV!—but he’s too weighted with real emotion to play his role right now. He ignores their inquiries as he parks and gets out. He ignores the squawk of his walkie demanding backup for corpse control. He ignores everything as he approaches the RV.
He tries the door. It’s locked, but he hears movement inside. A scattering of tiny feet.
“Murasaki?” he says.
The movement stops.
“Sprout, is that you? Open the door.”
The soldiers’ voices become forceful enough to penetrate his awareness. “Roberts! Who the hell is Sprout? There’s no way your prisoners got this far on foot.”
“She’s not my prisoner,” Abram mumbles.
“Well whoever it is, shoot the lock and let’s get on with it. You heard the call for backup.”
A small, scared voice from inside: “Daddy? Who are those men?”
Abram grits his teeth. “They’re my friends, Sprout. We’re going to take you somewhere safe.”
“Where’s Julie? Where’s R?”
“It doesn’t matter where they are!” he snaps. “I’m your father and I’m here.”
“It’s your daughter?” one of the men groans. “What the fuck is this, man? Do I need to call Abbot?”
Abram’s hands clench around his rifle. Could he kill them? Was the blond bitch right? Now that he has what he came for, could he shoot his way through the whole convoy and run for the woods? But even if he could, would he do it in front of Sprout? He imagines her face smeared with their blood, her good eye wide and round with permanent shock, and he relaxes his grip on the gun. He thrusts an index finger back at the soldiers, one minute.
“It’s okay, little weed. Just open the door and we’ll go home together.”
Sprout pulls a gap in the window shade and peeks out at him. Her soft, round face, hardened barely at all since the day she emerged from her mother. She’s safe. He has not yet failed her completely.
But he has failed her. He can feel it. She watches him through the window, and though the hesitation is barely three seconds, it’s a tiny knife sliding into his ribs. Finally she opens the door and stands there, waiting. He wraps his arms around her and lifts her out, clutching her head against his neck. “My baby,” he murmurs, inhaling the clean scent of her sweat, remembering all those unwell nights, her flus and fevers and night terrors. “You’re safe now.”
He realizes she is stiff in his embrace. Her head is resting on his shoulder because he’s forcing it there. When he releases the pressure, she pulls back.
He sets her down with a ripple of shame and fear.
“Daddy,” Sprout says, staring at the two silently fuming soldiers. “They’re wearing those jackets. Are they going to hurt us? Are they—” Then she sees it. Abram squirms as she studies its contours, its logo, then looks up at him, confused and searching. His jacket is full of wasps and he wants to tear it off and throw it away—but not now. Later, when the right moment comes. When it’s safe.
“Let’s go, Mura,” he mumbles, leading her back to the Hummer with a hand on her back. He tries not to acknowledge that he’s avoiding her gaze.
“Are these yours too?” one of the men grumbles.
Abram looks up from fastening Sprout’s seatbelt and sees the men dragging a blond boy and a brown girl out of the RV. His heart twists.
“No,” he says. “Never seen them before.”
He feels far away, like the world is the surface of a lake fading from view as he sinks.
“Good. They look like prime material for Orientation.”
Abram clenches his jaw as they truss the kids’ wrists and ankles and toss them in the back of the truck like sheared sheep. He hears a voice in his head, and it’s not ours—in this moment, we have nothing to tell him that he’s not already telling himself. The voice is his own, though he barely recognizes its fragility.
I’m sorry, R.
Audrey’s daughter is crying. Sobbing. She is screaming a single syllable over and over as she drags Audrey away from the noise of the massacre and into the surrounding trees.
“R! R!”
Was that the man’s name? The tall, quiet man who was never far from Julie’s side, always there to calm her rage or comfort her grief? The way he looked at her. The soft stare at the side of her face or the back of her head, a yearning to see inside. Audrey knows that look and she knows what it means. She remembers it from another man, another life, so many centuries ago.
“R!” her daughter shrieks a final time, then drops to her hands and knees in the mud. Her breathing sounds tight; there’s a whistle in it. Audrey remembers this too. An image of Julie as a little girl clutching her throat in a wild panic, her airways closing tighter with every terrified gasp. On some old instinct Audrey glances around for the cure, the thing that makes it stop, but she has nothing. She is naked.
She stumbles back out of the trees and digs through the pockets of a few dead Ardents, but she doesn’t find it. She feels the rain on her back. She feels it on her exposed organs, like a ghost’s cold fingers wrapping around her heart. She pulls the white overcoat off one of the corpses and returns to her daughter.
The whistling has stopped. Julie’s shoulders still heave with the strain, but her breaths are no longer gasps. Did Julie make it stop by herself? Without any outside cure? Audrey didn’t know that was possible. There is a lot Audrey doesn’t know. She wonders how much she will get to learn before the ice of the plague thaws and she floats further down the river.
“I can’t let him go, Mom.”
Julie’s voice is a throaty rasp. Her wet hair hangs into her face, her tears merging with the rivulets of rain.
“I don’t know what I’m doing. Everything’s fucked. But I can’t let him go.”
“Love,” Audrey mumbles.
Julie pushes herself upright and kneels there in the mud, staring up at her mother. “What did you say?”
Audrey looks away. She can’t find the thoughts to expound any further. All she has is the word.
“Love.”
Julie rubs her face in her hands, smearing mud across her cheeks. “I let you die, Mom.” Her eyes are red pools. Her shoulders are heaving again, but not from the asthma. “I let Dad die. And Perry, and Rosy. And now R is—” Her voice breaks. It drops to a whimper. “Don’t say ‘love’ to me.”
She is shivering. Audrey moves to drape the lab coat over her but Julie sweeps it off violently and springs to her feet. “No. No, Mom.” Her hands tremble as she wraps it around Audrey and jerks her arms through the sleeves. “You wear it.”
She zips it up with a hard yank, catching a little skin—Audrey feels the muted pinch—then looks back the way they came, toward the rain-drenched carnage unfolding in the town. Gunshots. Shouts. The roar of trucks patrolling the perimeter, rounding up the Living and the Dead. Audrey closes her eyes. The noise of war muffles and fades, giving way to a new sound deep in her head. The rustling of leaves. Pages. The whisper of many voices.
Julie grabs her hand and pulls her into the forest.
I
THE CROWS are watching me.
Rats peer at me from tangles of roots.