Domino Falls (7 page)

“Probation first. The tax for joining the community is half of what you brought, however much or little that might be. Wealth is of no interest to us. Sincerity is.”

Terry felt the others staring holes into the back of his neck.
They had fought hard for every scrap they owned, and now they had to give up
half
?

“Sounds fair,” Terry said. “A trade's a trade.”

“While you're on probation, hope you came to work,” Van Peebles said. “What we need most are people willing to go into the city to scavenge. I won't lie: it's our most dangerous job. We've always got openings.”

Ugh.
Going into San Francisco would be a hard way to make a living, but they would probably fly through probation if some of their party took on the toughest work. Terry expected Ursalina to volunteer, but she didn't say a word.

“Also pays well,” Van Peebles went on. “You keep half of what you find. Top choice in housing. Extra rations. Short rotations. We send you out two days max, and you're back here three days for every day you spend outside.” He leaned toward Piranha, a conspiratorial glimmer in his eyes. “And scavs tend to be very popular with the ladies.”

Piranha nodded. “Sold. I need to get to San Francisco. I'm out of contact lenses, so I'm a scavenger.”

In the sunlight, Terry suddenly noticed how red Piranha's eyes were. Just how blurry was his vision these days? Piranha looked like he needed the backup, and the loot wouldn't be bad. Who knew what they might find?
Besides hordes of freaks?

“I've got your back out there,” Terry said, bumping his fist. “But what's up with your eyes, man?”

“Nothing some fresh contacts and saline solution won't cure,” Piranha said, weary. “Don't suppose you've got an optometrist here?”

“Not yet,” Van Peebles said. “Contacts are scarce, so I doubt you'd find any you can use. But one of our vendors, McPherson, has a huge box of eyeglasses. You might not want to ask him where they came from, though.” He pointed toward a corner.

Piranha nodded. “McPherson. Cool. I'll check him out.”

“But nothing here is free except dinner. Expect to trade for everything.”

“As long as we still have our stuff on the bus, trade is no problem,” Terry said.

“What other jobs are there?” Kendra said.

The mayor explained that the radio station needed staff to keep up their goal to produce twenty-four-hour programming. “For some folks out there, we're the only voice of civilization,” he said. “There's lots of fencing to be done. Good shooters sail through probation. We've also got a growing day care that's short of help. There's lots of kids.”

“I want the day care,” Ursalina said quietly.

They all shared a surprised look.

“You're kidding,” Terry said.

“I like kids,” Ursalina said, avoiding eye contact with them.

“The radio thing sounds good,” Sonia said. “I always wanted to do that.”

When Van Peebles gazed at Sonia, his eyes seemed to melt. “You'd be a lovely addition to the station, my dear.”

“Yeah, I like radio too,” Dean said.

Van Peebles gave Dean a skeptical look. “Maybe, but I rather saw you and your brother as fence crew types. Let's all go take a look at the fence factory, shall we?” he said. “Whether or not you stay, I want you to see how our town has survived.”

As he said it, he rested one hand on Kendra's shoulder and the other on Sonia's. A harmless enough gesture, maybe even paternal, but to an alert part of Terry's hindbrain, the mayor almost seemed to be claiming the girls as his own.

The mayor had said it himself: the town didn't take in the infirm, the sick,
the blind. In this terrible world, who would? If you couldn't take care of yourself, there was no one to take care of you. The freaks had seen to that.

The fence factory was a huge rectangular mass to Piranha, probably a solid block long at the edge of town. When he got close enough, he saw that it was sturdy white brick. An ashy silhouette on the wall suggested some kind of fire, but the rest looked reasonably well kept. All of the windows on the lower floor were barred with iron or wood, and some on the second floor. One corner was leaping distance from the rooftop of a warehouse across the street. That was all Piranha could see. Piranha fought not to blink too much, not to rub his eyes. Rubbing made the pain worse.

This was beyond bad, worse even than the endless wondering about his family, knowing he probably would never see them again, each day feeling more and more certain that even if they were alive, he had no way to find them.

Day by day, he was going blind.

He had been in seventh grade when an eye doctor first used the term
extremely myopic,
like it was athlete's foot, explaining that he needed to protect his eyes and would wear corrective lenses his whole life. His mother had told him not to worry, that in modern society people with bad eyes lived just like everyone else, but Piranha had stayed awake that night imagining utter darkness. Years later, his stepfather had taken him to a Lasik clinic, but he'd been told his eyes were too far gone for laser surgery.

With the comfort of contact lenses—one of them in each eye at all times—Piranha had avoided really knowing how little he could see. He'd lived in a bubble of denial.

No more. Piranha's eyes were an agony of constant stinging,
and his vision was so foggy that he'd given up on seeing faces since right after the Siskiyous. It was as if his eyes had said,
We got you past the pirates, bro; you're on your own from here.

Piranha recognized large objects and knew his friends from their height and voices, enough to get by on the bus, but he'd been terrified he would have to take an eye test at quarantine. He'd rifled through the box of eyeglasses the Irish vendor had on his table in town. None were close to his prescription.

He was down to his last pair of lenses now. He'd made the mistake of trying to rinse one with precious drops from a bottle of purified water a few days ago, and he'd been lucky to get the lens back in. It hurt so much, constant slow grit in his eye, he'd nearly screamed. Had he torn it minutely? He still didn't know, but he kept it in.

Light hurt. Blinking hurt. Closing his eyes hurt. Opening his eyes hurt. He was probably giving himself an eye infection, but what could he do? He couldn't be blind now. He remembered the cloudy eyes of Sharon Lampher, the woman they'd met on the beach, and wondered how long she would last if her husband got killed or bitten, or if he died of a heart attack. How long would any of them last out there?

The factory smelled of cleanser and rust. The wiry blur at the factory door had introduced himself as Tom. Piranha also knew that the woman named Jackie was there hanging close to the Twins. All Piranha could see of Jackie was her chest. The Twins were trying to sidle up to her, nudging each other out of the way. Not playing it cool at all.

Piranha stuck close to Sonia, but she seemed irritated by it. She inched away from him again as soon as Tom came into the room. She would deny it, but today she moved away from him whenever a new man came into sight. Keeping her options open.

Piranha was pissed off, but his eyes were a bigger problem.
Sonia had asked why his eyes were so red, but he hadn't told her everything. He hadn't wanted to scare her . . . and he didn't know how it might change things for them.

After all, he and Sonia were just alike. They were survivors.

“You guys seeing lots of freaks?” Piranha said to Tom's blur.

“Always, and right behind you,” Tom said. “Past three months, we've killed about a thousand, maybe more. They keep coming. They're attracted to clusters of humans. But only a dozen or so had ever made it into town, and we handled 'em quick. Lost a couple of dogs, though.”

Piranha, Dean, and Darius whistled at the numbers.

“But this here's our secret weapon,” Tom said.

Piranha could barely make out the huge rolls and rolls of fencing piled inside, but the gray mass Tom gestured toward was tall enough to stir his heart. Hell, yeah!

“My family's been running this factory since World War II,” Tom said. “We had four orders ready to go out when the freaks hit. We just kept the fence for ourselves. Scavenged from the surrounding land. Got a hold of all the raw stock we could. We can always put it to good use.” He lowered his voice. “Town's biggest industry was my daddy's fence plant. That's what really saved Domino Falls—not Wales.”

No mistaking he wanted to make that point good and clear.

If Piranha's eyes had been working right, filled with distraction, he might have missed the tremor in the man's voice, something that sounded more like anger than pride.

T
he
woman who met Kendra and Ursalina at the main intersection in town was slightly plump and ruddy-faced, with pinned white hair. She called herself Granny Daisy. Kendra felt better about her first separation from Terry since quarantine.

“I thought that was the schoolhouse at the edge of town, out by the fence factory,” Kendra said. The quaint building had reminded her of
Little House on the Prairie.

“Too hard to patrol out on the fringes,” Granny Daisy said. “Besides, that old elementary wasn't near big enough. That's why we keep the kids at the theater. Dead center of town. I have any problems, I ring a bell and the whole town is here. A town's not worth a snot if it can't protect its children.”

The Olde Domino Theatre was a redbrick building in the middle of Main Street. The red lettering in the marquee read All Children We come, missing a letter in
welcome,
although the message still got across. The theater was fenced off from its
neighbors. Except for the barred windows and razor wire above the fence, it looked like a regular theater. If the outer town defenses failed, the freaks would have to start over again if they wanted to get to the kids.

Traditional classroom desks crammed the lobby, and twelve students between the ages fourteen and nineteen were getting a wicked geometry lesson on a rolling chalkboard from a pockmarked woman with bright red hair. Life had taken everything but math out of the teacher. Her voice was strong as she tapped the board.

The students were rapt on the teacher, barely noticing Ursalina and Kendra. People must come and go often.

“The high schoolers have to hit the classroom at four-thirty,” Granny Daisy said.

“In the morning?” Kendra said.

“Yeah, class is by lamplight so they can finish their schooling and get to work. Everybody works. Kids grow up fast. Most of these kids have been through something that could turn your hair white,” Granny Daisy said, patting self-consciously at the snowy ponytail that made her face youthful. She leveled a look at Kendra. “We don't force 'em, so these here really want it. Like we tell the kids, the world's going to sort all this out sooner or later, so might as well go out there knowing something. You're the new leaders of the world.”

“Hear that, Madame President?” Ursalina teased Kendra. “Hit those books.”

Kendra had expected to be working at a day care, not going to school. She hadn't survived this long just to bisect triangles again.

Ursalina snickered. “I'll be your alarm clock,” she said.

“As if,” Kendra whispered.

Double doors from the lobby led to the theater space. Kendra
hadn't walked two steps into the room before her eyes filled with tears.

Children filled every space in the room. The theater had seating for at least a hundred people, and there were children in almost every seat. There were kids working in circles on the stage ahead of her. On the floor. If not for the bruises and bandages, their laughter would have lifted her spirits.

One boy about six sat in an aisle seat, busily drawing on a pad in his lap. He had only one arm. His other elbow was a stump in a grimy bandage. The boy's face was knit with concentration as he drew. Kendra had heard stories that it might be possible to stop the infection if a limb was chopped off within seconds after a bite. Was that what had happened?

Kendra heard Ursalina suck in her breath. For a moment, they both just stared.

“Why so many?” Kendra asked.

“Some came with their parents. Some were rescued from their parents, or strangers dropped 'em off. There's a do-gooder a few miles up who drives an old ice-cream truck and rescues kids, brings 'em here. Parents died outside, or on one of the crews. We do all we can, but it's barely enough.” Granny Daisy's words died into a sigh. “I've heard some towns won't even take children. Too much of a burden. Not useful enough, or some such doodley. How can anyone turn a child away?” She smiled a sad, wise smile. “When we stop making room for children, we're lost.”

Kendra remembered the sad look on Reverend Meeks's face as he had stared at her. He'd probably been thinking the same thing.

“What you got there, huh?” a woman's gentle voice said nearby. The voice flowed like a waterfall of loving patience, but that was impossible. It was Ursalina!

Ursalina had wandered to the one-armed boy to see what he was drawing.

The boy glanced toward Granny Daisy, uncertain. He didn't trust strangers.

“It's all right, Skylar,” she said. “This is Kendra and Ursalina. You'll be seeing them here for a while.”

Skylar seemed to relax, but he didn't smile. He went on drawing. “Hey, Skylar, this is some picture you drew!” Ursalina said, voice bursting with amazement.

Skylar bit his lip, trying hard not to let out a smile.

“Look at all that red!” Ursalina said. “That house looks so real.”

“It
is
real,” Skylar said, almost angry.

“Yeah, Skylar, I know,” Ursalina said. “It's as real as it gets, buddy.”