Renna breathed out, long and slow, sitting with the sensation, listening to the rush of the trees. One of the rafters in the loft gave a low creak when a particularly hard gust pushed against the roof. Isolation settled over her like a second skin. The inky darkness beyond the clearing seemed to deepen and the rooms at her back felt profoundly empty.
It was awful.
She moved deeper into the living room, away from the window. The sound of Curran’s breathing steadied her. How had Arie done it for so long, up in the attic with only her own voice for company? Renna understood that there always had been those rare persons who chose solitude, but weren’t they a terrible exception? Weren’t there a million more who withered away with loneliness they didn’t choose? Surely one needed a companion. Even if no words were spoken, even if only for the certainty that another pair of eyes watched the wind on a dark night. A shoulder against your shoulder, bearing the burden of our smallness on the scrubby surface of the planet. Another soul, tiny and transient.
Imagine being a kid alone, she thought. Kory had been only nine when his parents disappeared from his life. Renna remembered nine—always someone there to turn up the thermostat, fill the refrigerator. Someone to sit on the edge of her bed in the middle of the night with a glass of water and a kind word. Nine years old, when the worst thing she could imagine was a bad guy coming in the house so that her dad would have to jump out of bed and hit him with the miniature baseball bat he kept in the top drawer of his nightstand.
Despite the racket of the blow outside, Handy heard Renna moving downstairs, restless as a cat. She’d come upstairs twice, but hadn’t come behind the curtain into the alcove where he was.
He was on next watch and should have been sleeping, but Tom Wallace’s journals were keeping him awake. He lay in the big bed alone, staring at the walls and ceiling, imagining Tom and Jaimee laboring together with their friends, the loving attention to detail in those beams, and the carved headboard. Every bit of that effort for naught in a single stroke when the sickness fell. Perhaps literally fell from the open bay of a helicopter.
Renna was moving again, in the kitchen now from the sound. She’d been nearly silent after having words with Arie. She did that when she was angry, pulled inside herself and put up a stone wall. Any other time—if she was afraid or worried, excited or content—he knew how to find her. But anger seemed to erect an impenetrable shelter.
Tonight, when Arie had tweaked her at the fire, Renna’s reaction had shocked him. I’m not as stupid as you think I am, old woman. That was a Renna he’d never met. Not in person. The Renna who could cut a man’s throat to free herself. It came as a relief to see her show up.
She’d need that version of herself as they traveled.
Arie hadn’t asked him for the specifics of what he’d seen on the road. The last thing he wanted to do was poison the well with stories of the depraved behavior he’d seen between God’s Land and Arie’s house. There was a madness out there, a thing deeper and darker than Randall and his notion of slaves and masters. One day in particular haunted him.
He’d made good time leaving the home place. For a while he traveled parallel to the highway, staying low in the overgrown pastures and wide marshy areas that bordered it. After a couple of miles, the almost-empty highway began to sport stalled vehicles, first in ones and twos, then in larger numbers. That bit of road was the primary north-south throughway on the coast, and as he moved gradually south, it became clear he was seeing an exodus. Some cars had pulled onto the dirt shoulders. Others were stopped dead in the center of their traffic lanes, neatly spaced, doors closed. Empty cars gave him the creeps. The ones with slumped figures in them were much worse, and he did his best to keep distance from the now wracked and rotting asphalt verge.
Eventually, though, the fields narrowed down to nothing and he was forced onto the highway. It snaked along the steep hillside, which was a sheer, rocky cliff rising on one side, a steep and vertiginous drop to the ocean on the other. Handy walked close to the hillside as much as possible, wary of the many places where the bluff-side dropped away in vast, ragged hunks.
He’d just worked his way around one particularly narrow hairpin turn, skirting a pair of four-wheel-drive pickups that had collided on the blind curve, when he came face to face with the woman.
She was the only living person he’d seen since he left the Land, and it gave him a jolt to nearly run right into her. He stopped short, already raising his bow, heart suddenly walloping.
The woman stopped, too, but she didn’t seem at all surprised, despite the fact that they now stood less than six feet from each other. In fact, when she saw Handy her face lit up in a bright smile.
“Amazing, right?” she said. Her body language was completely relaxed and familiar, as if Handy were a good friend she’d run into at the fair. She breathed deep and looked out at the vast expanse of the Pacific glittering in the perfect angle of late September sunshine.
Handy lowered his bow and looked down. Between the woman and him stood the thing that would cling to his dreams for months afterward. She was pushing a stroller, a large expensive thing with three pneumatic wheels and two roomy seats, one in front of the other. Two small children were strapped inside, a child of about three in the front, and an infant in the seat behind. They were both dead.
When he realized what he was looking at, he took two careful steps backward.
“Fantastic day for it,” said the woman.
The wrecked trucks sat crosswise on the road, one with its hood up against the high bank of rock, and the other with its rear axle hanging partially off the cliff. This left only a narrow passage between them. Handy retreated until there was room for the woman to get by, angling himself so that the bank was to his back but he still had enough space to raise his bow arm if it came to that.
The woman favored him with another smile, but before she continued, she set the brake on the stroller and came around to the front of it. Bending over the purple-black bodies of the children, she hummed a sweet, cheerful tune. The older corpse—a little boy, if the clothing was any indication—wore a bright yellow safety helmet. The woman reached down to adjust the strap, which seemed to have become part of the darkened flesh under the boy’s chin. Handy jerked his head sideways so that he was looking almost over his shoulder, not even wanting to see her moving in his peripheral vision.
“Better!” she said. “Guess we’d better get it in gear.”
Handy stood where he was and let her pass. When she drew by, he noticed one of the stroller’s rear tires was almost flat, and he couldn’t see how the woman was able to keep pushing her burden up the mountainous grade. He smelled her then, too. Not the dead children—they seemed desiccated, and he wondered if they’d been outside in that stroller since the pox hit. No, it was the woman, a wild animal odor of old dens and raw meat. And something else—a feverish, electrified scent. The smell of her lost mind, perhaps.
In the loft bedroom of the Wallace cabin, Handy flipped the pillow over and rolled onto his side. Surely worse things had happened, and continued to happen. He was sure of it. That day on the hill with the woman and her stroller, though—that was the one he saw and kept seeing.
By the time Renna came upstairs again, he was making a mental list of what they should pack for the trip.
Curran had been awake for nearly a half-hour. Over the weeks, he’d developed an internal clock attuned to their watch rotation. He could fall deeply asleep, but he’d wake up even if it wasn’t his turn. Tonight he woke sooner. Every time he heard Renna make her restless way past him, he deepened his breathing, smoothing out the rhythm of it and adding a slight snore now and then. Finally, she finished her constant circling and climbed the stairs.