The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) (26 page)

“We
scare because we care,”
Ezzie
said. “Unless the
berries are ripe.” He muttered something else, turned on his pallet, and grew
quiet.

I looked at Sir Tom.

“We treated his wounds
immediately,” he said. “This will soon pass.”

The scratches from the wild
man’s claws oozed a foul-smelling pus that Shawna kept drawing out and wiping
away with a cloth soaked in warm water and some sort of reddish orange
cleanser. The bucket sat beside the fire, on the stone hearth, staying warm.

Shawna’s ankle was swollen, but
she didn’t seem to notice. She kept talking soothingly to
Ezzie
as she tended his wounds, wiping away pus, rinsing the cloth in the bucket,
wiping away more pus. She was wearing long green surgeon’s gloves from Sir
Tom’s medical supplies, and disgusting though
Ezzie’s
injuries were, she’d stayed perfectly calm the whole time, even when
Ezzie
had screamed wildly and accused her of being a secret
warden. Seeing her now, I couldn’t believe she had panicked in the tree.

“Do not
ever
touch the wall,”
Ezzie
said. “It
will eat your fingernails.”

“He’s completely off his head,”
I whispered to Sir Tom.

Sir Tom shrugged. “Delirium
isn’t dangerous,” he said. “As long as he doesn’t do himself any harm, and we
won’t let him do that.”

The others—warm, fed,
doctored, and wrapped in Sir Tom’s blankets—all seemed to be asleep
despite
Ezzie’s
ravings. All save Cline, who was
taking the first guard shift. He sat just outside the threshold alone, facing
the slope, a gun in his hands.

Though the cabin was too small
for this many people, it really was a remarkable thing for one man to have
built alone. Or maybe this had been built long ago, before all the other
Guardians had fallen asleep or become less than human.

The cabin had two small windows
covered at the moment with waxed cloth. It contained a table and chairs, and
plenty of supplies stacked along the walls—metal cans that, I now knew,
held food, boxes of medicines and ammunition, and folded piles of blankets and
clothes. There was even plenty of water. Sir Tom had rain barrels, but he’d
also rigged a bucket on a pulley system to catch the fresh water from a spring
he’d discovered trickling out of the cliff below.

Most importantly, situated as it
was, no one could get to the cabin easily, and certainly not without making
noise when leaping onto that rocky ledge. That was the only possible way up,
and a pile of large rocks at the top of the slope showed how Sir Tom intended
to deal with trespassers.

It was perfect. It was the
refuge we needed. I should have been thrilled.

Actually, I should have been
asleep, like the others. But I was too worried.

“Ten little Indians,” Sir Tom
said now, taking another puff on his pipe. His chin was speckled with gray
stubble, just like his head, and his eyes had a faraway look. He and I were
sitting at the table, sleeping bodies lining the wooden floor between us and the
fire. Judd was lying right at my feet.

 
“Red
Chief has
brought me ten little Indians to fight Custer,” Sir Tom said, “and we can hope
she shall never need ransoming.”

I shut my eyes. I
was so tired. If my mind would stop spinning, I was sure I could fall asleep
sitting bolt upright, even with Sir Tom talking to himself and dropping
unsettling little remarks into the conversation every little bit.

“But among all the little
Indians, I have none named
Meritt
.”

My eyes flew open.

Sir Tom was looking at me intently,
puffing away at his pipe. The smoke curling blue
around his face, the smell of tobacco, recalled to my mind the scarred warden
smoking in the prison house the night
Meritt
ran down
the electric blue streets, that night when we last were as we had always been.

“Red Girl is worried
about him,” the old man said.

I nodded, blinking
hard to keep the tears from forming in my eyes.

The old man studied me, his face
inscrutable in the firelight. After a long moment of silence he tapped his pipe
on the hearth and shook his head.

“There are more things in heaven
and earth than you have dreamt of in your philosophies,” he said.

Impatiently I lifted my hands.
“What does that mean?”

He grinned, showing his gapped
teeth. “It means you never know, Red Girl. Young
Meritt
could be alive, or he could be sleeping. It is not up to us. It may not even be
up to the ones who think they hold his life in their hands, though there we run
into deep water—destiny, freedom, fallen
man
and fallen angels, sleeping and waking, the quick and the dead and the
quickening dead . . .” I stared at him blankly, and he laughed.

Judd threw out an arm and cried
out in his sleep. I leaned over, pulled the blanket more snugly around him, and
kept my hand on his chest until he sank into calmer sleep. When I sat back up
in my chair the old man spoke as if there had been no interruption.

“Until we know for
certain what has happened, it’s best to think and act as if
young
Meritt
is living still.”

I had just begun to
feel a little heartened by that comment when he added, “Otherwise you may
grieve when there’s no time for grieving.”

“He is still alive,”
I said flatly.

When he saw my
expression he smiled again, this time a bit wryly. “That’s the spirit,” he
said. “There will always be time to grieve later on.”

This was very
frustrating. I wanted to argue that he wasn’t making sense, that I couldn’t act
as if
Meritt
was fine unless I really believed he was
fine. But Sir Tom was still rambling on. “By grieving too soon when there is no
need,” he said, “you may create the need to grieve later. Self-fulfilling
prophecies have a way of fulfilling themselves.”

While I tried to untangle that,
wondering whether he was very wise or very crazy, he got to his feet and handed
me a blanket. “Try to sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow is a busy day.”

* * *
*

Judd spoke in my ear. “You must
choose,” he said.

Farrell Dean spoke the same
words. “You must choose.”

Then
Meritt
.
“You must choose.”

Then Angel. “You must choose.”

And
Rafe
shook his head. “There is no map,” he said. “You’ve lost my map.”

Someone stroked my hair away
from my forehead and the sea came in, the tide rising, the tide falling, and I
sank into its waves and drifted away.

* * *
*

It was black, black as the
darkest night I’d ever seen. Then a thin slice of
pale
light split the darkness. A form went out; another came in, felt cautiously
around, lay down. The changing of the guard.

* * *
*

Warden Karl shook his head.
“Promises are promises,” he said.

* * *
*

“They’re too young to remember,
these children.”

I lay still, trying to orient
myself, sorting out dream from reality.

Sir Tom laughed softly. “
They’re
too young? You’re only a
youngster yourself, Alice, and a most lovely one at that.”

This must be reality. I’d never
have dreamed the head Guardian
flirting
with Farrell Dean’s mother. He must be forty years older than she was, at the
very least. I opened my eyes just a slit and peered up at the table where they
sat.

Alice smiled gently at Sir Tom’s
comment, but didn’t otherwise acknowledge it. “Those were terrible times,” she
said. “The ash was so thick, some days, we could barely breathe. And dirty!
Everything was filthy all the time. We gave up trying to wash sheets; wetting
them down just made matters worse, made mud. The crops hardly grew—our
stores dwindled away to nothing—and so many fell ill. Some who lived
still aren’t the same; you can hear them rattle when they breathe.
Pregnant women miscarried. I lost my second baby then, and
never conceived after. That was a terrible,
terrible time.”

Sir Tom nodded.

“What was it like out here in
the
wilderland
?” Alice asked, and I looked at her
more sharply. Her expression was just as always, serene and matter-of-fact. She
sounded like she was chatting with an old friend, not with a Guardian, that
creature of legend and mystery.

“Oh, it was bad for us, too,”
Sir Tom said. His voice was level but his eyes seemed to be looking far away.
“And because I couldn’t leave it alone, because I couldn’t stand not knowing
what had happened, I made matters worse. Curiosity didn’t kill th
e old cat, just his men. Or worse.”

Alice said nothing,
just sat there patiently with her hands
in her lap, and eventually Sir
Tom went on.

“I sent troops to reconnoiter,”
he said. “Should have known better, but didn’t. Didn’t know what it was, the black
cloud, the dust. And the ones I sent, the ones who went to explore, they came
back sick. Sicker by far than those of us who stayed.”

Alice murmured sympathetically.
“Sick in their lungs?” she asked.

“In their minds,” Sir Tom said.
“
Heart and spirit.” He began to fidget, tapping his
fingers on the table, on his knees, and I hoped Alice’s questions wouldn’t
provoke him into one of his fits of insanity—or into playacting insanity.
I was beginning
to suspect that sometimes he exaggerated his confusion.

“It doesn’t sound like the same
thing that affected us in the city,” Alice said thoughtfully. “The ashes and
dust affected us physically, but not in any other way. Did your men tell you
what they’d seen? What they’d found?”

He shrugged. “Devastation.
Death. Not that they explored exhaustively. They felt themselves sickening, and
they came back.”

“So they picked up some sort of
illness, in the place the ash came from.”

“An illness, a contamination,
something,” Sir Tom said. “But something not that simple, either. I’ve come to
think of it like this: You know when you’re sick with something minor, a cold
or a little virus, and the muscle you sprained weeks before begins to ache
again?”

Alice nodded.

“The virus didn’t cause your
muscle sprain,” Sir Tom said. “But when the virus came, it sought out
weaknesses in your body. That’s what I speculate happened. Whatever it was,
this contamination, it found their weaknesses. It nurtured seeds that had been
planted long before.”

“Seeds of wildness? Of
violence?”

Sir Tom would say no more. “I
can only speculate,” he said. “It’s not for me to judge. All I know is, my
lieutenant was the best of my men. Even with the illness, he still is. He’s
confused, but he’s never taken to preying on people, like the others who got
sick did. Some bit of him remembers that he’s human even now.”

He looked back up at Alice.
“That was when the Watchers sealed the wall,” he said. “Just in the one place,
right behind their compound. They laid traps for my poor men, too, though they
never caught a one of us. Bureaucrats versus trained soldiers? They were always
more likely to blow themselves up than to do us any harm.
”

“The place the ashes
came from,” Alice said. “Where was that?”

He looked at her
uneasily, jiggling one foot up and down. “The mainland,” he said. “A big place.
Could be someone still there, somewhere, though I doubt it. Since the time of
the ashes we’ve never heard a single word. It’s just been my men and me, going
here and there in our little worlds, listening to the clock tick slower and
slower each day.”

The main land? I
mouthed the strange phrase. What was it to be a main land? As opposed to what?
A minor land?

I wanted Alice to
ask about the mainland—who else and what else was out there?—but
instead she changed the subject.

“This afternoon—is there
no other way?” she said.

Sir Tom sat silent for a moment.
“You don’t like it,” he said. “I don’t like it myself, but I do believe it is
the best way to ensure her safety. Perhaps the only way. And the time of year
is right—gentle winds, no sudden storms.”

Beside me on the floor Farrell Dean
muttered something, and I shut my eyes and made my breathing steady and deep,
lest his mother look at him and see I was awake.

“Still, it’s very dangerous,”
Alice said.

“But she is very brave. And she’s
in danger regardless. She’s what he wants, Alice my dear. What he thinks he
deserves, what he thinks he
requires. And that is not
an envious position to be in. Do you remember Rosella?”

My heart began to pound. Why did
he always have to bring up Rosella?