Brave New Love, page 17
A second later I sigh, rubbing crust out of my eyelashes left-handed: it’s only Amber and her nightmares. I was dreaming too, but it’s already crumbling like sandcastles. Even familiar screams shouldn’t be ignored, though, so I ease the door open and glance both ways before I slip down the hall.
Amber’s awake when I get there, sobbing and gasping while Kayla pats her back and murmurs soothing nonsense. Kay gives me a nod and I lower the gun. The metal is cool and heavy against my thigh.
“You okay?” I ask, still foggy from sleep.
Amber nods, scrubbing away tears. Her hair stands in tousled cockatiel-spikes, the bright red of salvaged Kool-Aid faded now to dirty pink. “Yeah, sorry. It’s just—” She waves a hand at the barred and shuttered window, at the hissing rain beyond.
“Yeah.”
“Everyone okay?” Dave calls from down the hall. He’s shy about the girls’ rooms.
“All clear,” I yell back.
Kayla lights a candle and I squint at Amber’s creepy Kit Kat clock—nearly eleven in the morning. Early for me, but I doubt I’ll get back to sleep, or find the dream again if I do.
“Get some more rest,” I tell Amber. “I’ll do your detail today.”
Kayla gives me a smile, probably thinking of my good karma. She doesn’t call herself Wiccan anymore—an it harm none, didn’t last long after the end of the world—but old habits linger.
I wash and dress in my room—I miss running water most of all, I think. A pint of cold water and a washcloth don’t measure up to a real shower. Kayla makes us oil scrubs and baking soda shampoo and all kinds of hippie stuff, but it’s not the same.
The rain slackens, sighing against the window. The storm is almost gone. I glance at my door, double-check the flimsy hook. Just a quick look . . .
I ease the shutters open, wincing at every tiny squeak. The others would never let me live this down. It’s stupid and dangerous and puts the whole house at risk. But I have to see.
Crooked bars behind the shutter, glass cracked and streaked behind them. Beyond that, the storm.
The sky is the color of the space behind my eyes, red-black and shot through with distant lightning. The end of the world is alizarin and crimson, ruby and garnet, tangled streaks of scarlet on my windowpane. The end of the world is beautiful.
The smell leaks through the chinks—copper and iron, bitter and salty and cloyingly sweet. Not exactly blood, but close enough. I remember the taste of it and swallow hard.
Distant thunder growls and its voice is the voice of my dream. North, it says. I shudder as images surface: a garden blooming with poison-red flowers, unfurling their creepers in the twilight; a girl with eyes the same poppy red. North.
My hands shake as I close the window tight. We forgive each other all manner of quirks to live as we do, but the others won’t forgive this. My secret, the taste of red rain on my lips. I tasted the rain and I’m still alive—still human, still sane—but I feel the storms coming now, and the monsters that sprout like mushrooms in their wake. Kayla thinks I’m psychic, and I let her. They’d kill me or turn me out if they knew.
I’ve lost two families already to the apocalypse rain. I can’t bring myself to give up this one.
• • •
Amber was on clean-up crew today, so I help Seb sweep and do dishes. There’s extra scrubbing—tomorrow we’re hosting a gang-meet. We check in with each other whenever we can, but every three months one gang hosts the others for a formal get-together. I get a quiet nagging fear before every meet, and I know the others do, too: What if this time someone doesn’t come?
Seb is probably disappointed about the schedule switch, but he doesn’t say anything. Seb doesn’t say anything ever, as far as I can tell. He’s certainly never said he has a crush on Amber, but my intuition still works, even if the water and electricity don’t. He’s the youngest of us, still just a kid when the first storm came—now he’s callused and hard-eyed, the fastest of all us on the draw. You’d never know he’s only fifteen.
Not even two years younger than me, but some days I feel a hundred years old.
Kayla comes down by the time we’re finished. I make coffee and we sit in the gloomy kitchen waiting for the red storm to blow out and the next to blow in. It always rains after, a real rain. We don’t know why—new weather patterns, or maybe the world is trying to clean out the contagion. We don’t know much of anything, except to adapt or die.
After a long quiet, Kayla nudges my foot under the table. I look up, realizing I’ve been staring into the dregs of my coffee. “What’s up, kiddo?”
“I had the dream again,” I say, though I didn’t mean to.
“North?”
I nod and swallow cold coffee to keep my mouth busy. I’ve told her about the thunder, but not the garden. And not the red-eyed girl—that part is new.
“It comes with every storm, doesn’t it?”
If Kayla weren’t smart and perceptive, she never would have held the Orphans together this long. Still, sometimes I wish she were a little less smart. “Pretty much, yeah.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know. But it feels important. It wants me to answer.” I give her a crooked grin. “That’s probably a bad idea, though.”
It’s Kayla’s turn to frown at her mug. A familiar clatter and bang drifts in from outside—Nick and Geoff setting up the catchment. The clean rain is here.
“Probably. We’ll talk about it later. After the meeting.”
After the rain stops and the boys give the all-clear on the weather, I suit up and do the rounds. It’s been quiet lately, and it’s starting to bug me. Not the itch in my blood that means something’s really wrong, but a vague distrust. Nothing moves outside, but my hand stays near my gun as I circle the grounds.
Home is a castle. A little castle on a hill in the middle of downtown Austin. A military school back in the 1800s. I don’t know what happened to it after that—it was closed and boarded up when we moved in. It’s not as defensible as Las Calaveras’ headquarters, or as gorgeous as the Spooks’, but it’s got a great view.
The last rain clouds snag and tatter against the skyscrapers. Glass spires and ziggurats fade into the haze, their grimy windows reflecting the light in streaks and flashes, crackle-finished. Below them, a young forest grows. Nature moves fast now that the world’s fallen apart.
Too fast, sometimes. The trees are pressing against the fence again and we had pruned only a week ago. Lately the plants have started to change, too, strange new flowers and fungi sprouting in the shade. Kayla doesn’t like the look of them. She keeps a close eye on the greenhouse since we saw the first one, but so far we haven’t been menaced by bloodthirsty tomatoes or zucchini.
Ivy twines through the fence, leaves and spiraling tendrils softening the harsh lines of the wire. I rip it away with gloved hands, trying not to think about the garden in my dreams. The original fence couldn’t have kept out a lazy dog, let alone zombies, so we put up chain link and razorwire. Geoff and Dave talk about building a real bricks-and-mortar wall, but I like being able to see what’s lurking on the other side.
Halfway through my circuit I get a shiver, the nasty kind, but it fades too quickly to figure out where it came from. I can’t see anything moving in the brush, except a couple of squirrels that don’t seem any more vicious than usual. The gates are all locked, the tripwires unsprung. I’m less scared of shamblers than of other people, really. We have a sturdy truce with the Spooks and Las Calaveras, but you never know. Things were ugliest during the gang wars, when you couldn’t trust anything that moved, living or dead. It calmed down after the Kings and Hammers got slaughtered, but I worry. We’re still human, and even a good apocalypse can’t cure humans of stupidity. And I won’t feel humans coming.
I check in with Dave after my rounds. He’s the last of the Hammers, the only one who didn’t go down to monsters or to other gangs. He’s really not so bad, now that he doesn’t call himself Thor. It took a while, but losing enough fights with Geoff finally knocked the racist bullshit out of his head. We don’t even flinch at his swastika tattoo anymore—it’s just another scar. We’re all orphans here.
• • •
After lunch I take my knitting and sketchpad up to the tower. I’m halfway through a scarf that I think will be Amber’s birthday present, if I finish it in time. My grandmother taught me to knit, another world ago—other than my middle name, it’s all I have left of her. And twelve inches of pointy steel are nice to have around. The sketching is just for me, the last part of me from before the rain, when I was a daughter and a granddaughter, a sister and a girlfriend, a student and an artist. All the things I lost when I became a survivor, an Orphan.
Underneath the chilly gray November sky, I can almost make believe the world is still alive. Except for the silence. No more traffic, no more humming wires, no more distant voices. Not even screams and gunshots lately. Just the wind and the last of the rain dripping from the gutters, the soft scrape of my pencil on scavenged cold-press paper.
The shiver comes back, a prickling below my skin. I glance up from my drawing and scan the yard, one hand drifting toward my gun. Nothing inside the perimeter, or on the road . . . There. On the slope below the house, amid crumbling cement terraces and rusting rebar, the bones of stillborn condos, something moves.
A girl.
She stands there, watching me through the fence. Her stance hits me first—not the dazed sway or wary crouch of the shamblers. She stands hip-shot, one thumb tucked into a pocket of her tattered jeans. Like a living person. I raise my hand, lips parting to call, when the rest sinks in: her sickly gray pallor, the ugly wound stretching across her right shoulder, blood streaking her face. My hand falls.
She cocks her head and waves back.
I stand there for a minute, gaping. I swear she grins at me. I’ve never seen a zombie move like that, and it’s too bright out for the nastier things. But the rain evolves. All we can do is try to keep up.
Footsteps rattle the stairs and before I can second-guess myself I shake my head at her, make a shooing gesture. I don’t trust Seb or Dave not to shoot first and think later. But it’s only Nick. By the time he climbs up, the girl is gone.
I have a new secret.
Nick isn’t even wearing his gun and I should bitch at him, but I’m too busy trying not to look nervous. It must not work because he says, “Sorry, did I scare you?”
“It’s the quiet. It gets to me after a while.”
He nods. “Do you mind?” he asks, pausing with one foot still on the stairs.
“No, come on up.” I pull my yarn bag out of his way, sneaking a glance at the hill to make sure the girl is still gone.
Nick is a year older than me—he would have started college this year. Tall and skinny and beaky-nosed, with dark hair that’s always flopping in his face. He liked gaming once, and movies and computers and rock climbing. The sort of boy I would have been friends with. The sort of boy I might have dated. It hurts to hang out with him sometimes, a sharp thorny feeling in my chest. We all get that pain; it’s called before.
We stand in silence, leaning against the crenellations and watching the clouds tatter and drift away, and I wait for the awkward moment to come. Nick’s been trying, in his quiet way, to ask me out. Not that there’s any out left. Don’t get me wrong—he’s cute, and I’m tempted. A lot tempted. I can’t even remember my last kiss. But so much could go wrong, besides any of the usual relationship messes.
Michelle was six months pregnant when she got caught in a storm. She died slow and screaming for five days before Kayla finally shot her. Nobody talks about it, but we can’t forget. And even if a baby didn’t kill me from the inside out, who knows what the lingering traces of rain in my blood would do?
I swallow sour spit and turn to collect my sketchpad. My drawing stares up at me—a forest, rough and smudged, thick graphite shadows between the trees and flowering vines dangling from the branches like spiders.
I flip the sketchbook closed and gather my stuff.
“Audra—” Nick looks so sad, and I know we can’t put the conversation off any longer. “Did I do something? You keep avoiding me . . .” His hair falls over his long-lashed dark eyes and I want to tuck it back.
“I’m sorry. You haven’t done anything. It’s not you—” Nick snorts, and I can’t finish the sentence. Some lines don’t get any less lame even after the world ends. “It’s everything.” That’s still horrible, but it’s true.
“Yeah.” He smiles, wry and understanding, and I wonder if maybe I’m being an idiot. “It’s not like either of us could move out if we had a bad breakup.”
“I’m sorry.” I lean in to kiss his cheek, my bag held between us like a shield. The smell of his hair nearly undoes my very limited virtue.
“It’s okay.” He touches my arm awkwardly. “I’ll see you around, anyway.”
We laugh, but it’s strained. My eyes are blurring by the time I get back inside. I blame hormones.
• • •
I’m restless all day, picking up a dozen projects and setting them down again. Finally I put my leathers on and take another walk around the perimeter. What I’d really like is to walk outside, down Castle Hill and through the broken streets, a different view to clear my head. But outside is too dangerous alone.
I feel a shiver at the northeast corner. To the north lies an overgrown driveway and the broken remnants of a house nearly consumed by trees and brambles. East faces downtown, and slabs of broken, weed-choked cement below the fence. I can’t see anything but a few birds moving in the trees and the leaves sighing in the breeze. I glance back, but I’m alone in the yard; the turret is empty.
Leaves crunch, a single deliberate footstep. I spin, hand dropping to my gun.
The girl. She stands at the bottom of the terraced wall, watching me through the fence. When I flinch, she shows me her empty hands, slowly and carefully as if I were the one who might bite.
She’s my age. Was my age. Dressed in dirty jeans and a tank top, thick black hair pulled back in a braid. Her skin must have been a warm golden-brown once, a shade or two darker than mine. Now it’s cold and gray. The wound I saw this morning is still there, a nasty gash on her shoulder, skin flapping to expose raw flesh. No blood or infection, just dark red meat and pale marbled fat. Her eyes are wide and shadowed under thick, arching brows.
Her eyes are red. Not zombie eyes, bloodshot and clouded, but clear and bright, carmine and carnelian.
My breath catches. “I saw you—”
She raises her eyebrows, living movement on a dead face. “This morning, yeah.” Her voice is soft and raspy, but human. She draws breath to speak; she wasn’t breathing before.
“No. I saw you in a dream.”
She smiles, flashing white teeth. “That’s romantic, but we’re taking things a little fast, don’t you think? I don’t even know your name.”
My face goes hot. Zombies don’t smile like that. They don’t tease. Even the other things, the ones that prowl outside camps at night, crying and wailing like lost children—even they don’t flirt.
“You’re different,” I whisper, mostly to myself.
Her smile widens; her eyeteeth are thick and sharp. “And you haven’t shot me yet, so maybe you’re different too.”
“What are you?” I flush again, hotter this time. I’ve shot dozens of monsters, but that was just rude. “I’m sorry. I mean—”
The dead girl laughs at me. “I’m Natalie.” She presses one palm against the fence.
“Audra.” I squat down so we’re closer, but don’t touch her hand. I may be going crazy, but I’m not stupid. “What are you doing out there?”
“The same thing you’re doing in there: surviving.”
“Are you . . . hungry?”
“All the time.” Her smile twists and falls away. “But I don’t eat what you eat anymore.”
I was afraid she’d say that. “You’re hurt.” Which sounds stupid, considering she’s dead, but that cut makes my skin crawl to look at.
“This?” She pokes at the skin flap and I cringe. “It doesn’t hurt, really. Sort of itches. I have to keep the bugs out, though.” She grimaces, which is terrifying.
“I should go,” I say, my mouth dry. “Don’t—Don’t talk to any of the others. They might not—”
“Care that I’m different?”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugs. “Not your fault. Thanks for not shooting me.”
“I—You’re welcome.” This isn’t the strangest conversation I’ve had since the world ended, but it’s close. “What are you going to do?”
Natalie takes a step back. “I’m going north.” My mouth falls open, and she pauses. “You dreamed of that, too, didn’t you?”
Before I can answer someone calls my name. I turn to see Geoff halfway across the yard. When I look back Natalie is gone.
“What is it?” Geoff asks as I hurry to meet him. Trying not to act like I’m hurrying.
“A cat. He looked healthy but he ran away.”
Geoff frowns sympathetically. His shirt is soaked, and stray soapsuds cling in the black cloud of his hair. “Sorry Aud. You know we can’t have pets.”
“I know. I just miss my old cat.”
He pats my shoulder. “Yeah. Get your laundry, kiddo. We don’t want to stink for our guests.”
I don’t look back as we go inside. I don’t open my window. But when I dream that night, I dream of red eyes.
• • •
The others arrive before noon the next day. I stand on the turret with Nick and Amber to watch them ride in, waving the blue flag that means all clear.
It’s hard to look tough riding bicycles, but Las Calaveras manage in their chains and painted jackets. The Spooks pedal up the hill behind them, dressed all in black, as usual. We laugh about the colors sometimes, but I have to admit they look pretty impressive.
Las Calaveras sent six people this time, the Spooks five, putting the temporary population of the castle at eighteen. Nearly ten percent of the city’s current population. Math didn’t use to depress me this much.
