Withered + Sere (Immemorial Year Book 1) (10 page)

Cavalo lowered his hand. “What about him?”

Bad Dog closed his eyes.
He smells different.

The man felt sweat drip down the back of his neck. “How?”

Don’t know. But you feel it too.

Cavalo didn’t feel that. He didn’t know what the imaginary voice he gave his dog meant. It was nothing. It meant nothing. And
if
there was something,
if
he allowed himself to see anything there, it was clinical. A cold appreciation from one hunter to another, nothing more.

The man from the government had announced himself and had taken control. His eyes had widened as soon as he’d seen the boy Dead Rabbit. This man, this
Wilkinson
, had fumbled then with a black radio, the screech of static foreign to Cavalo’s ears. He’d barked into it, saying
Simon
, saying
Bernard
, demanding they come at once. Cavalo hadn’t seen a radio in years. A working one, however? Maybe not ever, at least that he could remember.

It had screeched. Wilkinson had squawked. Two other men had come, big men, overgrown men with shaved heads and veins bulging on comically huge biceps. Their uniforms matched Wilkinson’s, though they didn’t have the same colorful bars across their breasts. One blond, the other with black hair, shaved close to the scalp. They looked mean. Stupid. The dull eyes of cattle. They were muscle, and Wilkinson was the brain.

Psycho had lashed out as Blond and Black approached, quicker than was expected. He caught Blond in the knee with his foot, snake-bite fast. Blond had roared angrily. Black had pulled a black metal stick out of his utility belt. Electricity snapped at the end. Cavalo almost shouted out a warning, but stopped himself. It wasn’t his fight. He didn’t care. The boy was not his concern.

But it came. That cold respect. That admiration of a killer. Psycho almost escaped. He moved like liquid, hands still secured behind his back. It was the grace of an animal. A sleek cat. While the boy moved, his eyes seemed almost black. It was made all the more surreal by the fact that no sound came from him, not even a quickened breath. Blond and Black were bleeding. Psycho was not.

Cavalo had no doubt that if the boy’s arms had been free, he would have killed them both. As it was, he almost did. But then Black had gotten in just a graze with the electric stick. There was a snap in the air, a crackle that smelled like lightning. The boy’s mouth had opened in a grimace, the cords in his neck standing out. His eyes had rolled back in his head. He’d collapsed.

“Take him,” Wilkinson had panted.

They did. Roughly.

Hank hurried after them, his voice angry.

The crowd had watched Cavalo a moment longer before they too dispersed. It was morning, after all. Things had to be done. Soon it was just Cavalo standing on the road to Cottonwood, Bad Dog by his side.

Now he stood on the ramshackle porch of Alma’s farmhouse, thinking about the insanity of robots, the voices of his dog and the bees, the death of a man who didn’t deserve to die, this town, this woman, the tree like
her
, the ghost of his son.

And the boy. Psycho.

The door opened before he could knock.

The steel hadn’t completely left Alma’s eyes. They were hard. She looked older than before. Death did that, Cavalo knew.

“Just going to stand there?” she asked him in a clipped tone.

You bring death wherever you go
, the bees said.

He hesitated.

Alma turned and disappeared back into the house, leaving the door open.

Cavalo looked over his shoulder. The clouds overhead looked even darker than they had the day before.
Early
snow
this year
, he thought. He wouldn’t admit to himself that he was slightly frightened it had reached October without him knowing. Hadn’t he noted frost on the ground at the prison? The leaves changing color? The cold air? Hadn’t SIRS or Bad Dog said anything?

He followed Alma into the house.

HE SAT
before her in a chair in her kitchen. It was cold in the house. It felt like Warren was everywhere. It’d been the two of them for the longest time. Their parents had died when Alma was sixteen and Warren only two. It hadn’t been the Dead Rabbits that time. A drifter—Cavalo couldn’t remember his name—broke into their house late one night. Shot their father. Raped and shot their mother, who’d shoved Warren into Alma’s arms and told her to hide, to run, to get away. She had. She hid in the cellar, behind the potatoes, singing quietly to Warren, who fussed in her arms. Eventually, when the sky began to lighten, she’d crawled through a window with her brother and run for help. A group of men returned later to the house to find the drifter asleep next to the mother, curled around her body. The drifter told them he did it because the voices made him.
Sodom and Gomorrah
, he’d said.
The flight of the crows will always bring the fire and I will
bask
in the blood that rains from the sky.

He’d been executed later that day. One precious bullet to the head.

Voices. Cavalo knew about voices.

“That Dead Rabbit do this?” Alma asked, dipping a cloth into a bowl of warm water. She brought the cloth up and started dabbing at his forehead. She was not gentle. He winced but bit back the urge to tell her to be gentle.

“No,” he said, then thought. “Maybe. Yes.” It hurt his pride, but Cavalo couldn’t lie. For all he knew, the boy had set the net. “Got caught in a trap.”

She smiled, but there was no humor in it. “A boy gets the upper hand with the great Cavalo? Must be losing your edge, old man.”

It hit him again. His birthday. He struggled to remember the number. He pulled it from behind the bees and felt every bit of his forty years. So much time had gone by without him knowing, and he felt illusory. Thin. Like he was nothing but a ghost and could be blown away by the slightest wind.

She was right. He had grown careless. He knew better.

Daddy!
the bees said.

Stop it
, he said back.
Please.
He almost opened his mouth to tell her he was chasing a ghost but thought better of it. She didn’t need his ghosts. Not now. Not ever.

“He’s the one in cuffs,” Cavalo said instead, his voice gruff. He winced as he got a particularly hard jab.

“This time,” Alma said, her voice tinged with anger. “What happens next time?”

“It won’t happen again.”

She rinsed the cloth in the bowl. The water was a dirty pink, little flecks of blood and grime floating along the surface. He saw the way her hands shook.

“I’m sorry,” he said, though it was inadequate. He didn’t know what he was apologizing for. Many things, most likely.

“For what?” she asked. She didn’t look back up, instead staring at the ruined cloth, the blood in the bowl. A droplet of water tracked its way down his cheek. It looked like a tear. It felt like one. It wasn’t.

“Warren.” That was partly true, made real by the fact that Cavalo could see a pair of Warren’s boots sitting near the door, flecked with dust.

She laughed. It quaked with fury. “Warren,” she said. “Yes. I am sorry too.”

He reached out for her, but she shook her head. “Don’t.”

“No?”

“Not yet.”

He looked down at his hands. They were covered in dirt and blood. God only knew what else. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

She resumed her cleaning of him. “That’s twice now.”

“What?”

“That you’ve apologized. How long have we known each other?”

“Eight years. Maybe nine.”

“Nine, I should think.”

“Maybe.”

“And in those eight years, maybe nine, I’ve never heard you apologize. Not once.”

He was bemused. “Have I had anything to apologize for?”

Her tongue stuck out between her teeth, an endearing trait she had when she concentrated. “You’re a man, are you not?” she said, bathing his hands.

“Yes.”

“Then no doubt you’ve done something that needs apologizing for.”

“I’m sorry.”

She smiled again, but it was watery. He wouldn’t draw attention to it. It wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t be what Alma Marsh wanted. She was a strong woman. She felt she could do anything a man could do. Cavalo thought this wrong. She could do it better. She was the carpenter of Cottonwood and had the uncanny knack to fix most everything that was broken. If she could get her hands on electronics (far and few between they were), she could usually puzzle it out. Once she’d even repaired Cavalo’s flashlight, though he couldn’t explain how. It died one day, and no battery would fix it. He brought it to her. She took it apart. She cursed at it. Switched some things around. Put it back together. It worked. Like he knew it would. Few things could elude her. Cavalo knew many towns still didn’t have electricity. Cottonwood did. Grangeville did. And it was thanks to Alma.

She had value, more than Cavalo did. And yet here she was, bathing him like she had nothing better to do. He thought she might love him, though she never said it. Cavalo left it mixed in with the bees. It seemed safer.

What could he ask her? To make her forget, at least for a moment? He could tell her something funny Bad Dog had done. Or maybe about the family of squirrels he’d seen gathering nuts. (How had he not known winter approached?) He could say anything he’d seen in five months, because it
had
been five months.

But instead he said, “The government man.”

The smile slid off her face on its way to a scowl. “If you can call him that.”

“Is it true?”

She sighed. “That depends on if you take his word for it.”

“Do you?”

“Take his word?”

“Yeah.”

She set the cloth down on the table and sat back in her chair. She watched him with shrewd eyes. She missed nothing. She never did. “The boy.”

“If you can call him that,” he said. He knew what she was doing. Give and take.

“Is it true?”

He shrugged. “Can’t take his word for it. Don’t think he can speak.”

“His neck? Saw the scar.”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“To him? I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.”

“You tell jokes now?” she asked. She sounded amused.

“Can’t say for sure,” he said honestly. Cavalo didn’t think he had a sense of humor, but maybe that had changed during the summer. He tried to remember the last time he laughed.

He couldn’t.

She watched him.

He waited.

“Maybe,” she said finally. “Maybe I believe him. The government man. It had to be a matter of time, didn’t it?”

“Why?”

“Because the minds of men can only be scattered for so long. Soon, they’ll combine. They’ll plan. They’ll create. They’ll build.”

“All of this has happened before,” he said.

“And all of this will happen again,” she replied. He’d found the book on one of his excursions, deep in what had been an office building, desks scattered, shells of computer screens, glass busted out. It had been tattered but complete, buried in a drawer of an upturned desk.
Peter Pan
. A boy in Neverland who never wanted to grow old. The Lost Boys. Hook. Wendy. The crocodile. He’d read it, then given it to Alma as a gift. She told him it was a children’s story. He thought it horror, and Peter a monster.

“United Federated States of America,” he said.

“Has quite the ring to it, doesn’t it?” Alma said. “The UFSA apparently is reaching out. To what they call the outposts.”

“Is that what we are?”

“We?” she asked, calling him out.

Cavalo said nothing.

She let it go. “Apparently. They’re trying to put the country back together again. He has official documents. Or, rather, what he
called
official documents. He said they were his orders.”

“Orders? Like military?”

Alma shrugged. “Maybe. Said that the world is starting again, and the UFSA will be at the forefront. As it always has been.”

“What did the papers say?”

“That America would rise like a phoenix from the ashes. Theatrics never seem to fade far from politics.”

“Were they signed?”

“Not individually. But there was a signature.”

“What did it say?”

She looked him in the eyes, and he wondered when was the last time she had slept. “The Forefathers,” she replied.

“That’s not ominous at all.”

The small smile flashed again. “Funny man.”

“Heard of them before?”

“No. We always thought this was years away. And maybe it still is. Maybe they’re just spreading their feelers out.”

“But maybe not.” His throat felt dry. He’d spoken more in the past day than he’d done in the past year. He had questions, and the bees had questions. He couldn’t stop.

“Maybe not,” she agreed. “Who knows how long it’s been going on. It’s rare to meet people from back east this far out near the Deadlands. The last I heard, it was still like it is here. Divided. Little pockets of humanity. Imagine what’s going on in other parts of the world.”

He didn’t want to. Cavalo wouldn’t admit it, but the size of the world and how much was unknown scared him. “Wilkinson. Blond. Black.”

She nodded.

“Just the three of them?”

“That we know of,” she said, a curl of disgust on her lips. “But cockroaches have a way of multiplying.”

Cavalo frowned. “What’s he said?”

Alma looked out the window. She was beautiful, even if she had started to fade. He had always thought so. But it wasn’t enough. Not for either of them. It wasn’t her fault. Even if the lines around her blue eyes were more pronounced. Her hair more dull.

“It’s what he isn’t saying,” she said quietly. “For every assurance he gives of structure and food and medicine, the fewer answers he gives as to how and when and why. He is especially interested in the Deadlands.” She glanced back at him. Much was said there, but Cavalo knew none of it. “And the Dead Rabbits.”

Cavalo felt a chill. “Why?”

“Says he wants to know who they are. What they do. ‘Solve the problem,’ he says.” Her words were bitter.

Here was his chance. An opening. He didn’t know if he should take it. He’d forgotten what it meant to be sympathetic. He knew
what
it was; he just didn’t remember how to do it. “Alma.”