Hopefully this letter finds you, although none of my other letters have been answered. I love you, my darling daughter, and the news I share is grim. Rose Hill is gone, Jane. I have been betrayed by a pretty face, my secret writ large for the world. Those of us who are left have fled. We travel west, to California, and the promise of a new life.
Find me, Jane.
Katherine and I stand in front of the entrance to the sheriff’s office and survey the chaos. People yell at us, a hundred questions at once, spittle flying as they work themselves into a fine fit.
“We should probably tell them something,” Katherine says.
A scream pierces the air, so loud and fraught with fear that it gives me a chill despite the heat of the day. And like an angel on high delivering a message from the Lord Almighty, comes the shout, “SHAMBLERS! THERE’S SHAMBLERS IN TOWN!”
I glance at Katherine and grin. “Sometimes a problem solves itself.”
People go running past, men and women, and I grab Katherine by the arm and drag her off the boardwalk in the direction of the church as the men start to scatter. A few have the presence of mind to run into the sheriff’s office to hide, but I ain’t got time to pay them any mind now.
“Jane—”
“We’ve got to get to the other side of town and fetch Lily and the Spencers. Mrs. Spencer and her boy won’t be any good at fighting the dead, and Lily is just a little girl.”
Katherine purses her lips and nods. “Lead the way.”
It is utter chaos. Men and women run here and there, seemingly aimless, while shamblers walk the street leisurely, grasping for whoever gets close. Most of these shamblers are old and barely holding together: men in wool uniforms missing limbs, women in full dresses that are decades out of fashion, Negroes wearing the wretched uniforms of the old plantations, boys and girls who drag themselves along, tiny nightmares in their own right. Here and there is someone unexpected, a man dressed in the heavy garb of a fur trapper, an Indian woman with long dark hair wearing the rough homespun of white settlers, men wearing uniforms I don’t recognize, the red and dark blue very different from the Union and Confederate uniforms that most shamblers wear.
And there are so many of them. A tidal wave of the dead breaking over the town. I’m frozen for a few precious moments, taking in this horrible scene, watching the inexorable march of the shamblers, when a strong grip on my arm jolts me out of my shock.
“Let’s move!” Katherine demands, as bossy as ever.
“Jane, which way?” The Duchess and a couple of her girls run up to me. I’m happy to see one of them is Nessie, the colored girl who braided my hair and brought me water the day I was whipped. I don’t recognize the other girl, a white girl with brown hair and freckles who gives me a shy smile. “Everything is chaos.”
Just like that, the uncertainty disappears and I know what we have to do. “Follow me. We can cut through town using Gideon’s tunnel.”
We hurry through the street toward the lab. But when we get there the door is locked.
“Gideon never locks his door,” the Duchess says, worry making her bruised face look even more tragic.
“These are extraordinary times.” A tendril of worry tries to rise up, but I smash it flat. I glance toward the street. The shamblers are getting more numerous, flooding into town. Pretty soon they’ll be too thick to maneuver and that’s when the real trouble starts. “I think we’re going to have to run to the other side of town.”
And so we do.
All of the Duchess’s ladies are wearing corsets, and our passage is slower than I’d like. I herd them before me like a dog nipping at the heels of livestock. People rush past us, fleeing the dead, and we’re about halfway to the better side of town when I realize there ain’t no way we’re going to make it. The dead are slow, but so are ladies who can’t breathe.
I grab the Duchess and pull her to the side. “What’s the problem, Jane?” she pants.
“We need to cut those lacings. If we don’t, we’re never to going to make it to the other side of town. We’re moving too slow. Eventually people will get bit and turn, and they’re going to move faster than those raggedy old shamblers. The fresh ones always do.”
“I am not cutting this corset,” Katherine announces. Only Katherine would have a tantrum in the midst of fleeing for her life. I give her a hard look and she rolls her eyes and stomps her foot. “Fine.”
I pull a knife from my boot, unfasten the back of her dress, cut the top few lacings, and fasten her back up. I do this with the Duchess and her girls, then tuck my knife away.
“All right, ladies,” I say. “Pick up those skirts and run.”
We make better time, and when we get to the rows of houses there’s no sign of the dead yet. It’s just the better families, packing up to leave. People are running between the houses, grabbing what they can, piling it in wagons. No one is even going to try to save the town. They’re just running for their lives.
Bitterness twists my lips and a hard feeling settles over me. These folks were more than happy to send us out there, day after day, but when it’s their turn to fight they ain’t got the stomach for it.
I lead us to Lily’s house, one of the few without the front door open. I pound on the wood. “Lily, it’s me! Open up.”
There’s a scraping on the other side of the door, and then “How do I know you ain’t a shambler?”
“Shamblers don’t talk. Stop being a muttonhead and let me in.”
The door opens and Lily flies into my arms. I hug her tightly more out of surprise than anything else. “Someone came through, yelling about the town been overrun. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Get Mrs. Spencer and the little ones, we need to get out of here,” I say, pushing past Lily into the house.
“Mrs. Spencer is gone. She left yesterday afternoon and never came back. It’s just me and Thomas.” A toddler plays on the floor with a wooden horse, and he beams at me.
I think about Mr. Spencer’s body, missing its head. Was Mrs. Spencer out there as well? I didn’t see her, but I also didn’t peep at every decapitated shambler.
Katherine, the Duchess, and her girls come into the house. The Duchess’s expression goes soft when she sees Thomas. “Well, hello there, precious,” she says, picking him up. He offers her his horse before snuggling against the Duchess’s unfettered bosom.
I turn to Lily. “The Spencers got a pony? There’s a town a couple days’ ride north of here called Nicodemus. That’s our best bet.”
“No one has a pony out here. We’ve got an old horse and a wagon. But I don’t know how to hook him up.”
“I do, and Sallie here can help me,” Nessie says with an uncertain smile, gesturing to the white girl with the freckles.
We follow them out to the small stable behind the house. The door hangs open and there’s a group of three drovers there, fighting with the horse, trying to hook it up to the wagon.
“Hey, that’s our wagon!” Lily exclaims.
One of the men turns around, drawing down on us. The revolver catches the sunlight as he points it at Lily. “Sorry, little girl. That horde is picking up speed. And we ain’t about to be turned.”
“At least take the children with you,” the Duchess says. There’s resignation in her voice.
The man looks behind him to where the two drovers have almost hooked the horse up. “No deadweight.”
I reach for my sidearm, but before I can clear the holster there’s a gunshot. The drover is on the ground with a bullet right between his eyes.
“Chivalry is apparently dead.” Behind us stands Jackson, and the scream of joy that Lily lets loose as she throws herself into her brother’s arms damn near shatters my eardrums.
I point my drawn gun at the remaining drovers, who have gone still.
“Nessie, Sallie, make sure those fools have the horse hooked up right and then take those straps.”
“They’re called reins,” Jackson says, an amused drawl in his voice.
“I don’t care if they’re called shoestrings,” I snap. “That dead fellow was right. The horde is picking up speed.”
“What’s gotten into you?” Red Jack asks, and I sigh.
“Leave it to you to pick the last possible moment to show up and save the day,” I grumble.
The women move quickly, fastening things and saying soft words to calm the horse. After a few seconds Nessie nods at me.
“It’s good. Want me to drive?”
“Yes,” I say. I point my pistol at the remaining men, waving them away from the wagon. “Clear on out now before you end up like your friend here.” I move to the body and pick up the man’s pistol, handing it up to Sallie who sits next to Nessie. “You know how to use that?”
“Yep,” Sallie says, taking the gun with a gap-toothed smile.
“Take us with you,” one of the men says as Lily climbs into the wagon, the Duchess handing up Thomas before doing the same. I realize the man pleading for his life is Alan, the boy who gave us a ride in the wagon only a few hours earlier.
I give him a sneer of disgust. “I don’t take kindly to child killers or their friends.”
“But, you’re leaving us here without any weapons! We’ll be overrun.”
The click of a hammer being pulled back echoes loudly in the barn. The men turn to look at Jackson, who wears a half smile. “As long as your feet work you can run. I suggest you go before that option is lost.”
I tilt my head, feeling a calm that cannot be ascribed to the situation. Later, I will look back and wonder at myself, my lack of compassion. I know this from experience. But for right now there is only survival. “I believe the phrase is deadweight? Sorry, no deadweight.”
Nessie slaps the reins along the horse’s back and the beast takes off, carrying the working girls and the children. She steers the wagon out of the yard and down a road along the back of the houses. Once they’re clear I tip my hat to the worthless drovers. Red Jack and Katherine take off after the wagon in a jog, and I follow not far behind.
We leave town quickly, passing other people running for their lives as well. I stop briefly by the entrance to the shambler wheel chamber, but the door is locked. The armory next to it hangs open, the room beyond, empty. Dread rises up in my middle, but I put it to the side. I’m hoping that Gideon got out alive; perhaps there was another chamber down in that rabbit warren of his.
Nessie sets a good pace out of town, and we pass other families in their wagons as well as a few folks running. The dead are behind us, too far to see, too close to get comfortable. I get a side stitch and walk for a while, but not too long because I don’t want to lose sight of the wagon.
Once we clear the breach in the northern wall, I pause and look back. The wagon trundles down the road that Jackson tells me leads to Nicodemus but I’m in no hurry to follow it.
“Ain’t you afraid you’re going to turn into a pillar of salt?” Jackson says from next to me. Katherine has stopped as well.
“Naw. My soul is too sullied for the Lord to bother much with me.” I remember pulling the trigger and watching Bob go down, the sheriff’s face as the buckshot hit him in the throat, the look of surprise and then nothing. How easy it was, little more than a muscle spasm, yet world-ending for those men.
But more than that, I remember the rage on the major’s face back at Rose Hill the night before I shot him. And I remember the soft repose of his face as he slept, as I pulled the trigger, knowing that Rose Hill would never be safe as long as his will was law.
After everyone came running it was easier to say that he’d turned shambler than to tell the truth, how I was trying to protect Momma from him and his rage, how I’d gotten the pearl-handled revolver from her desk one night while everyone was asleep just because I was afraid of what a man like that could do.
Like I’ve said, the truth and I are uneasy companions at best. The fib was an easy one to tell.
No one much asked, anyway. No one much wanted to know, I suppose. Who wants to think a child can murder a man? Especially a man everyone knows to secretly be her father. Either way, I am many things, a murderess just happens to be one of them. It’s not something I think about all that much, and now I have two more dead men on my soul. I’ll be fine.
I’m an excellent liar. Even to myself.
An arm wraps around my shoulders, and I look up in surprise as Jackson smiles down at me. “I have something for you, Janey-Jane. You remember that girl you used to run with, Sue?”
“Big Sue?” I say. “She’s alive?”
He nods. “She and some of the other girls made it to Nicodemus. She found something as they were evacuating Miss Preston’s and I thought I should bring it to you.”
Jackson digs into the space between his vest and his shirt, pulls forth a letter, and pushes it into my hand. Then, he kisses me lightly on the lips. “I’m glad you made it, Jane,” he says, before turning and striding toward the wagon.
I look down and sure enough it’s from my momma, my name scrawled across the front. I grip it too tightly, the fine vellum crumpling.
“Jane, do you want some space?” Katherine asks, and I shake my head.
“Can you wait with me while I read it?”
She nods, and I tear the letter open.
The letter is dated nearly two months ago, only a few days before Katherine and I were sent here to Summerland. My hands shake, and as I read, the world narrows to a pinprick of light, all sound fading away until only the roar of my heartbeat fills my ears.
Rose Hill is no more.
Overrun by the dead.
Betrayed by my new husband.
We have gone on the run.
A safe place, run by Survivalists.
And then a name that I read over and over again.
Haven, California.
Haven.
California.
I stare at the letter for a long time, breathing in and out, my world coming apart one piece at a time.
Rose Hill, my dream and my future, is no more. Betrayed by her new husband after he discovered she was a Negro pretending to be white, my mother has gone to California to start a new life.
To a town settled and run by Survivalists.
I turn behind me to look at the wagon heading to Nicodemus, another frontier town just like Summerland. It strikes me that all of us everywhere are running. From the dead, from the uncertainty of the future, from ourselves. We are just always on the move. Is there really such a thing as home when it’s so easily destroyed?
No matter what we do, each town is just the same as the last. Another chance to be overrun, to watch as everything and everyone we love is put in danger time and time again. Doesn’t matter the name of the place, it’s only a matter of time until it’s swept away in a wave of the dead.
That doesn’t seem like any kind of future to me.
I look back at the letter I hold, California scrawled in my mother’s hand, hastily, desperately.
Find me, Jane.
“Jane McKeene, what is it?” Katherine asks, her eyes wide with worry. I get the feeling it isn’t the first time she’s asked me.
I laugh, loud and long. “Oh, I am Fortune’s fool,” I say, knowing Katherine won’t get the reference. But the quote is too apropos.
I hold the letter up, feeling calmer and more focused than I have in weeks. I told the preacher that there would always be men like him, and people like me to stop them. And I meant it. After the trials and tribulations of Summerland, I know my life’s path: Stop the Survivalists and all those like them. I’m done running away from trouble. Why not meet it head-on?
Stopping the Survivalists. It’s a lofty goal, but I ain’t ever been one for half measures.
“Kate, we’re going to California.”
She gives me an incredulous look, but before she can ask any questions I’m striding toward Nicodemus, quickly enough that she has to scurry to keep up with me. My sickles are heavy at my side and my penny is a warm, comforting weight around my neck. For once I’m happy and I can’t help but smile.
It’s a good day to be alive.