Digger 1.0 (5 page)

Now Kate felt the warm morning sun fall on
her face. By touch alone she felt for the pile of unwashed sheets,
and when she had one, she kept her face—upturned tiny nose and
alabaster skin with freckles—toward the sun, without looking, and
began to wash the next of her load in the cold river water.

Those things had happened too.

She thought of the things she’d seen during
that day of sight. And she thought of the frightening stretches of
the Pennsylvania woods she’d fled into once her sight was gone
again. How she’d gone on alone after that Grand Dame had “pilled
out” one night and died of an accidental overdose on purpose. The
night after the day in which they’d found the Grand Dame’s promised
safety burnt to the ground. By touch she’d discovered the
matchstick frames and timber all burnt and dead, the ashes cold
like the rain falling all around them in the evening on that lost,
long ago day.

Now as Kate worked at the waxy sheets, her
fingers numb and no doubt red...

...fingers that had once held a bow and
plucked, when needed, most deftly and full of promise, at some
mischievous note in some arcane chamber piece traced out on a
yellowed score she’d never see...

... she remembered those burnt frames and
the ash and the ominous woods of Pennsylvania beyond. Those days
alone were the most beautiful and the most frightening she’d ever
known.

Hauntingly empty to be blind and alone in
them at the world’s end.

Like Prokofiev.

Thinking of that one day when she’d been
able to see what the world really looked like.

“What was the last thing you ever saw?” she
asked herself over the burble of river stones where she did the
wash, tracing all their tiny notes in her mind without trying.

People killing themselves and one another,
eyes blank and staring. Horror etched on their features.
That
was the last thing I ever saw
, she thought.

But she’d learned to see with her other
senses. So there were other sights after that. After the blindness
came back to her.

The tumbling mad dash through the woods.
Alone. In a forest. Running from a bear, no doubt. Or at least, it
had most definitely seemed to be a bear.

And then there was warm blood running down
her face and darkness again. Not seeing with her senses.

And pain.

She remembered it all, though. That last
snap of a dead branch, so clear and sharp above the distant ones
she’d fled, sure they were being broken by an oncoming bear in the
night.

In the silence after, she remembered, and
now at the river washing sheets, in the silence of that forest at
midnight, with the bear that never was, silent, in that forest
she’d whispered though it felt like a scream inside her head, she’d
whispered to herself, “I’m blind again. Forever.”

She finished the wash toward noon only
thinking to herself then that the river birds had been silent that
morning. The little birds who chirped and called by the water’s
edge had said nothing to each other in all that time and only now
she was noticing. She could tell by the sun on her face that it was
noon and that she needed to head back into Summner. She gathered up
her laundry, searching for the basket, and headed back toward the
gate into Summner.

As she walked she thought about her dream of
a better tomorrow. The dream Ford had made a promise to keep. The
dream of a found violin.

It had been five years since she’d touched
one, but she was sure if they found one someday, she could play it.
It didn’t matter if it was a good one, like the one her parents had
paid for. A Strad. That’s what her dad had called it, shortening
its proper name. That’s what people in the know called it. A Strad.
The Strad. Nice Strad.

Stradivarius.

The violin Ford or one of the others might
find in the wastes beyond the gate didn’t need to be a Strad. A
Stradivarius. It could be any kind of violin. Even the one the poor
kids had brought to band class back in high school. Any would do.
She knew she could make it play. And if she could make it
play...

... then that would be something completely
different than the five hard years since she’d touched one. Since
Juilliard.

“Kate,” said the voice of Briggs the Gate
Watch.

Waiting to count the steps from the gate to
home, Kate felt for the shadow of the tower to cool her forehead as
she shuffled forward. When it did, she started counting. Two
hundred and seven steps would take her back, then a right turn and
ten steps and a step up and five steps and then the front door to
the bar.

But she had trouble counting today because
there was so much activity. She could hear people arguing. She
could hear the sound of guns being cleaned along the street. Of
hammers aimed at nails and curses aimed at nothing. She smelled the
sharpish gun oil that always stung her nose. The smell of
troubles.

Ford met her at the door, his presence hot
and gusty.

“Kate!” he exclaimed with a blast. “I...”
and then he didn’t say anything.

She waited.

“Never
mind,
” continued Ford. “Just get inside and start boiling
water. There’s a horde headed this way.”

Kate’s blood went cold. Even though she was
hot from carrying the load of laundry through the heat of the day,
the sweat beneath her patchwork dress began to freeze making her
feel clammy and sick all at once.

“Will we be okay?” she could hear the fear.
The fear in her own voice.

“Never mind, woman!” shouted Ford. “Boil
water and cut the sheets to strips and use the worst ones and not
any o’ mine personal. Got me?” She felt his thick finger in her
chest.

She heard him stomp off.

She went to the kitchen.

She was shaking.

She did as she was told and started the big
kettle to boiling, stacking the cut hardwood, striking a precious
match, failing. Hoping it would strike again because Ford
would...

He loved her. He said he did. Often when
he’d finished with her, she was allowed to stay in his room unlike
the other girls. His whores. They were just business.

He loved her.

That’s why he’d promised her the violin.

If they ever found one.

The match struck and she smelled the
kindling, waiting for the thick, sweet smoke it made. She leaned
close and blew.

Not too much or she’d kill the flame.

Pianissimo
was what she always thought when she blew
on kindling.

She’d learned something from music.
Something she’d never known would be so practical in building fires
on the other side of the end of civilization. Softly. Quietly.
That’s how one made kindling do its work and make fire.

Pianissimo.

Silently. Waiting. Waiting for the soft
crackle
. The
first
pop
that would mean the wood had caught. Waiting.

Then she felt the vibration.

It was like...

...someone brushing up against the beautiful
copper kettle drums in the orchestras she’d played in and
remembered hearing. Even in that moment, that brief accidental
moment of contact with that singular musical instrument, you got a
hint of what they could do once someone got rolling on those
immense drums. Then, it was like a storm coming.

And this vibration was that.

Except it wasn’t a result of accidental
contact. It didn’t just happen and then it was gone and only the
memory of tympani remained. This stayed and seemed to be something
more.

And... it was growing.

A horde was coming out of the desert.

In the five years since the collapse, she’d
been sold three times. She’d been...

...she didn’t want to think about that.
Those times. She imagined instead the violin. The violin Ford would
give her. Because he loved her. Her violin.

She touched her hand lightly to the big
kettle. Warm.

Being sold and all the things that had come
with it...

The long walk down to Texas.

The hard work.

Other things.

The horde was still worse. The worst of all
bad things.

She remembered the
grizzled
loner with the big rifle who’d
paid Old Tom, the first man to own her, for a night with her.
Before he’d lain with her, as they’d all sat around the campfire
inside the old mall, the
grizzled
loner had talked of seeing a horde wipe out
Atlanta. His voice had sounded rough and scratchy, like the beard
she’d felt on her skin later. He talked like she and Old Tom hadn’t
even been there listening to him and his stories. Like he just
needed to get the poison of what he’d seen on the road out of
him.

He hadn’t had her. He’d just lain next to
her. He’d held her all through the night. In the morning he’d left
without saying a word.

But before, he’d told them of many things.
Rumors of here and there.

The cannibals out in Connect-i-cut as he
called it. Come in from the sea on raids to carry people back to
the coast, out onto ships and boats and off to islands everyone
assumed.

Zombies out in Californy, different from the
hordes. Actual undead walkers. Where the army had lost and pulled
out completely.

The mutated freaks, cancers erupting on
their skin, along with all kinds of other stuff and noses falling
off. They lived in Dee Cee, as he’d called it. Some super
antibiotic refusing to let them die.

And the horde.

A mindless mass of people. Not human
anymore. They just moved in waves, following each other one moment,
ripping each other to shreds for protein in the next, all of it to
just keep moving. Then they’d find some place. Some place that the
last of Government had managed to defend for a little while. Or
that humanity had put up as a start to try again at the game of
civilization.

Rumors.

“Cee Dee
Cee
‘round ‘Lanta kept that city runnin’. That and my old
buddies in the 82
^nd
,” he’d said. “That horde come up
outta North Carolina or something. Crazy. Plain and simple crazy.
Like Sherman they said, but worse. A thousand times worse. Musta
been... a hundred thousand, easy. No way I can say now, really. I
was s’posed to shoot down on ‘em from a water tower. We could hear
‘em twenty miles outside the city. I seen how many of them there
were and just let ‘em go on by. Didn’t have enough bullets on me to
stop ‘
em. Weren
’t enough
in all of At-lanta. Three days later, I went in and seen what was
left.”

Silence around that long ago campfire back
when Old Tom had been the one to own her.

“And whatcha’
find, stranger?
” asked toothless and smelly Old
Tom.

Silence in the dark mall. Kate could hear
their voices echoing off the abandoned stores and long halls of the
silent place. Long since looted to emptiness. Long since.

“Nothin’,” whispered the loner.

And then he told how the horde had ruined
everything beyond the meaning of the word ”
ruin
’t” as he’d pronounced it. How they’d
eaten everything and everyone. “And then they just left and you
could see where they waz a’going by the destruction and the
wreckage they left behind ‘em.”

After a time Old Tom, who’d loved tales of
bad so much they were the death of him when they shared supper one
night with the gang that owned her next. After a time, Old Tom said
to the
grizzled
loner,
“It was a medical
miracle that makes ‘em do what they done.” He chuckled to himself.
He loved knowing things others didn’t. “Medicine caused it before
the collapse. It was a supplement they was all takin’ to lose
weight and get buff like porn stars and movie folk. Made ‘em crazy
for proteins. The television told ‘em they could eat whatever they
wanted and still lose weight. That’s why they do what they do. They
have to eat or they’ll die. Need it so bad they do, ‘cuz o’ their
vanity!” He finished as though delivering an indictment to a grand
jury, which was Old Tom’s way of putting paid to civilization in
the silence of the abandoned mall.

That too had also happened to her.

She had been there on that night, listening
to tales of the end of everything she once knew and had taken for
granted.

A horde, thought Kate now as she chanced a
quick touch of the kettle which had become merely hot.

She could hear the chipped and cracked
plates they used to serve customers and salvagers come in from the
wastes, beginning to
rattle
and
clink
against one another.

An hour later, the big pot was in boil and
she could feel the floor trembling beneath her bare feet. Ford had
not returned. She felt her way to the front bar, the glassware
rattling. Some of it had fallen, she’d heard the crashes and
shattering. She inched cautiously forward, dragging her feet, her
tiny toes feeling for broken shards of glass.

She thought about getting down on her hands
and knees but she couldn’t chance her hands. Hands that had played
the violin, and would again one day.

Because Ford had promised.

She made the front door. She could hear the
shooting beginning. The shooting along the walls of Summner. She
opened the door and heard the distant scream of white noise she’d
been hearing for some time jump from muffled to clear, echoing all
around the walls of Summner.

Like voices trying to become the ocean.

How many?

A hundred thousand, the loner had said.
Maybe more.

Someone ran past her and knocked her down to
the street. The smell of gun smoke hung heavy in the air. The
shooting was cacophonic and suddenly the wave of white noise which
had seemed distant before was now startlingly present, and she knew
it was coming from the top of the walls as a hundred thousand of
them climbed like a massive wave in the ocean and crested the walls
of tiny Summner.