Resurrection (Eden Book 3) (2 page)

“I don’t get it, Pop.” Tommy was genuinely perplexed. “Mac and Rodriguez, they’re married, they got kids. Why would they want to…with her, you know?”

“I don’t know what motivates some people, son…” His father stood slowly. He stretched his legs, fighting off cramps. “And I don’t think they do either.”

Tommy was quiet.

“We
do
a lot of things.” The old man tapped the ash off the end of his cigarette. “We
are
a lot of things. One thing we
ain’t
though. We
ain’t
rapists.”

Tommy nodded, thinking of Rodriguez and Mac.

“Well,” said the son, considering the last few days, “that was fun.”

“Wasn’t it, though?”

The radio in their kitchen was on.

“…and if you’re just getting up out of bed, well then good morning, New Harmony. Peace and love, peace and love, and all that jazz, am I right? Hey, here’s…”

Riley looked up from the table at her brother, Anthony, on the other side of the nook. His view of her was blocked, so he didn’t see her hand on her stomach.

“You want juice, sis?”

Dawn filtered in around the window blinds.

“Already had, little brother.”

Anthony was Riley’s younger brother, but he was not little. He was one hundred and seventy eight centimeters tall, as was she. They were both adopted, taken in by their father and raised as brother and sister. They bore no blood relation to their dad or to one another. Riley had been nearly four when Dad brought Anthony home, and she’d watched him grow from a gangly, elfin-faced little boy into a tall, handsome young man.

Calling him little brother was a nod to their childhoods and a term of endearment.

“I hate that hat,” Riley told him and meant it.

Lately, Billy had taken to wearing his dark beanie with the ear flaps over the curly hair he wore to his shoulders. He sported the hat inside and outside. Riley suspected he slept in the thing. She didn’t get it. Her brother was almost twenty-one years old and was attached to that hat like a toddler to his infant blanket.

“I know.”

Anthony sniffled and blew his nose in a tissue from a box on the counter.

“Shouldn’t sleep with that window open,” Riley said.

“I sleep better that way.”

It was shortly after six in the morning. Their dad wouldn’t stir from bed for a few more hours. He wouldn’t be up until noon if he’d been out with their uncle the night before, tying one on.

Riley rubbed at her flat belly under the table where Anthony wouldn’t notice. She’d known she was pregnant but hadn’t said anything. Not a word to Alex, even though it would have been his. Nothing to Anthony or her best friend, Troi. And definitely not a word to their dad. Riley had known—when she’d woken up last week and her legs were wet and the sheets were red—she’d
known
the baby was gone before it had really even had a chance to begin.

She’d known that she would never get to know him-her-it? Riley knew because this was the second time that her body had rejected the life inside of her.

“You’re going to catch pneumonia, Ant.”

“Cold weather doesn’t cause a cold.” Anthony sipped his juice. “Anyway, I can’t get sick. We’ve got plans, sis.”

The brother and sister had made arrangements to travel farther south in New Harmony. Their society stretched for several hundred miles along the interior of what had been the Carolina coastal plains region of the United States on the North American continent. There was no North or South Carolina any longer, and no United States of America to speak of. There were autonomous societies like New Harmony, dotting the landscape here and there, outside the radiated hot zones.

Anthony and Riley had grown up near the northwestern border of New Harmony, close to the Outlands with their thousands of miles of inhospitable, poisoned terrain. Radiation from nuclear weapons was responsible for everything from the huge spike in cancers, to the diminished life expectancy, to the precipitous rise in infant mortality. The nukes were detonated twenty-five years earlier. And then the nuclear power plants had melted down when there were no humans left that knew how to tend to them.

Riley knew this. Anthony knew this. Everybody in New Harmony knew this. But only Riley had known she’d been pregnant this second time. There was no use in dwelling on it, she thought. A majority of pregnancies ended in miscarriages, and many of the babies born were sickly and died shortly after, or were malformed. Her best friend, Troi, was a nurse in the hospital and had all sorts of stories. It was sad.

Riley ran a brush through her curly hair, which she wore above her shoulders, shorter than her brother’s. She pulled at it when she encountered a knot. Riley’s hair was dirty brown and her eyes blue. She had a pretty, honest face, and was athletically built from her years at taekwondo. Her t-shirt rode up her arm to the slight curve of her prominent bicep.

“Now here’s one from the 1970s,” the voice on the radio said, “quite a decade, I’m told…”

There was no way Riley would have said anything to Alex. He was too nice a guy. It would have broken his heart. Neither he nor Riley had “been careful,” as it was put in her father’s day. They hadn’t taken any precautions. With the birth rate as low as it was, every pregnancy was welcomed in New Harmony. Every live birth was a cause for celebration. Riley was twenty-four years old, and she knew, for the times she lived in, she was middle-aged. Several friends from her school days had already succumbed to cancers.

A man on the radio was singing about me and you and a dog named Boo.

“What’s going on with you and Nicki?”

“Nothing’s going on with me and Nicki,” Anthony answered. “Nothings been going on with me and Nicki for awhile.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“You’re a chick, sis. You tell me.”

“
I’m a chick
. You sound like dad.”

They both knew how successful their father
hadn’t
been at keeping a woman in his life. Marriage was a relic of the not too distant past. These days, people hooked up and cohabitated, they made babies if they were able to, and then thought nothing of going their separate ways. The government subsidized childcare from the cradle on, even before. Fertility treatments were as common as flu shots. When a couple paired then split, even when there were children involved, there was little animosity involved. Especially among Riley and Anthony’s generation. People, like their dad—people old enough to remember different—some of them still chose to stay with one partner.

Their dad brought women home, which had never been a cause for embarrassment to him or either of his two children. But none of those women ever stayed in the picture too long. Riley and Anthony often wondered if their father was a lonely man. Sometimes they spoke of it when he was not around. They knew his bachelor status was of his own doing. Though he was the best father he could be, their dad was not the easiest man for a woman to get along with.

Their uncle was their dad’s only real friend, and even he would stop coming around for weeks at a time when their dad said something out of line and obnoxious to put him off.

“Well, you never know,” Riley tried to offer hopefully. She’d thought Nicki might have been around awhile. The girl had really seemed to like Anthony. And, as far as Riley could tell, her brother was a pretty steady guy, unlike their dad.

“It’s all good.” Anthony dismissed her optimism and finished the juice in his glass. He washed it out in the sink before placing it in the strainer to dry.

Riley pushed the remains of her eggs around on her plate. She wondered if she’d ever have a child. The first time she’d miscarried, it had hurt—physically yes, but mostly emotionally—but she’d expected it. She’d waited until she was twenty to get pregnant. Her friends had been miscarrying and having babies since they were fifteen.

Last week had taken an emotional toll. She’d thought this time,
okay
. This time it’d be okay. Riley had lost the one, so now she felt she was somehow guaranteed the second. Wasn’t that how it worked? And he or she would be a healthy baby. The sonograms would come back normal and there would be no reason to end the pregnancy. But who had Riley been kidding, and who had she been bargaining with? She’d taken a few days off from the Do Jang afterwards and gone off for a night alone, camping.

New Harmony was home to about thirty thousand human beings, give or take. That was it in their society. A portion of all that was left of humanity. That number had edged steadily upwards since Riley and Anthony were little kids, but it never rose fast enough to reassure anyone. Although there were thirty thousand men, women and children who called New Harmony home, their society was several thousand kilometers in area, which meant the population density was relatively low. People were spread out. Riley wouldn’t have to go far in New Harmony to be alone. Fortunately they had excellent mass transportation.

She’d gone to the wall and sat there and stared out into the Outlands. She’d wondered about who and what was out there and why. The zombies in North America were all but extinct. The only undead Riley had ever lain eyes on up close were those like the one kept on display outside the hospital, kept as a reminder to humans just how close they’d come to extinction.

Riley had heard there were other continents that still teemed with Zed, and she knew that the hot zones must have their concentrations of the undead. Those areas were baking with radiation that would leave them uninhabitable to human life for thousands upon thousands of years. There were people out there, in the Outlands. People who chose not to live in New Harmony or the other societies that dotted the landscape. They lived in groups and alone, and sometimes they wandered in from the Outlands to New Harmony, where they were treated as objects of curiosity and watched carefully.

There was a Committee of Public Security, but there were few problems. Most people had dropped the bullshit long ago. Human beings were just happy to be alive. Governments like those in New Harmony allocated resources so everyone lived well. No one grew filthy rich. It was legislated against. Even the owners of private businesses were not allowed to earn more than five times their lowest paid employee. No one seemed too bothered by this arrangement, except for a few greedy individuals who resented their avarice being thwarted.

Anthony taught his classes that the lack of “economic privation” in New Harmony was part of the reason the crime rate so low. And maybe that was true, Riley thought. But that was here, inside New Harmony. There were still those who wandered in from the wire, from the Outlands, the ones who were out there for a reason. Those were the ones you had to watch.

Riley had only been outside the wall once, during her two years of compulsory military training. They’d taken her troop out about five clicks, well shy of any hot zones, and spent two weeks learning survival skills in the wilderness and mountains. In those two weeks, Zed had been absent, but there’d always been the wariness among Riley and her fellow trainees that he could be out there
somewhere
, roaming around, looking for food.

She’d met Alex on that trip, during her training. The Dire Straits were on the radio.

When Riley had lost the second baby—the beginning of what
would have been
her second baby—she and Alex were already kind of not talking. They were on the outs. So Riley had gone to the wall and looked into the Outlands. She’d looked out into the place where she’d first met Alex, a place where a chain of events had been set in motion that resulted in her returning to the very spot to contemplate once again.
It was
funny
, Riley had thought on the wall,
how life worked like that
. Cyclical almost.

“How many classes you have today?” Anthony asked his sister. Riley was a
Sa Bum Nim
-a taekwondo instructor.

“Three.” At her Do Jang, Riley would have her own work out before her first class showed up. For the last two years she’d contracted out to the Defense Forces, teaching their grunts the intricacies of hand to hand combat. Her specialty: the way of the hand and foot.

Riley had trained with Lim since she was five. Her father thought it was important for her to be able to defend herself. Lim was an Asian man who spoke little English. He had taught Riley taekwondo using hand motions, chalked stick figures and what limited English he possessed. Lim had possessed several books in English about taekwondo, and when Riley was old enough to read them she had.

Lim succumbed to the cancer when Riley was fourteen—a year after she’d earned her second degree black belt. She had watched Lim bear the disease stoically, withering away to almost nothing. If he’d complained, he hadn’t done so to his student.

Riley didn’t think Lim the type to complain. The Hwarang Code that governed their art called for indomitable spirit, and Lim had been the embodiment of that principal. The taekwondo-ist knew the determination to attempt the impossible and bear the unbearable brought its own rewards.

When Lim died, Riley continued to practice taekwondo every single day. Her dad had seen how important the martial art was to her, and he’d been smart enough and cared enough about her to find someone else she could train with. That was no easy task in a society where the population had been severely reduced. Riley had continued her training with Master Park, who’d taken her from her second degree black belt to her fifth dan. The fifth dan granted her the right to teach the ancient art, and she was content to do so.

“Because your last days should be pleasant ones….” There was a commercial on the radio for a local hospice.

“Are you going to have a bunch of papers to grade while we’re away?” Riley asked Anthony. He was a teacher like her, though a different kind. Anthony was a post-secondary instructor. Because the crops would have to be harvested, this would be Anthony’s last day of class for six weeks. She and her brother had made plans with Evan and Troi to go camping for two of those. They were supposed to leave tomorrow, but Riley hadn’t even packed anything yet.