The Shore (24 page)

There had been rumors, when the disease was first spreading, that her Great-Aunt Sally had taken a shotgun and her grown-up children and a chest full of medicine and lost herself in the woods and marshes of Assateague Island, but she knew that she couldn't trust rumor. Rumor also had it that the slasher girl, the one who had lived in Tamara's own shack, was still alive, had come back, in fact, with some man from the mainland she put under her power, had sucked the blood from a dozen throats and dug up the daddy that she'd killed to desecrate his body—that part Tamara really didn't believe—and seduced a dozen men before also losing herself on Assateague and the barrier
islands, where the Indians and the healers and the weather mages had once hidden themselves.

Tamara wasn't going to trust rumors; she was going to trust common sense, and her own eyes.

She perched on the shack roof to watch the farmhouse: two weeks, nearly three rolled by and she saw no movement, no lights, no one coming or going. The windows weren't boarded, the blinds hadn't even been pulled, so she'd taken a machete and a fifth of Captain Morgan, and hiked across the cornfield. Even with a pull of the rum, she hadn't wanted to go up the front steps. Around the back was a greenhouse, and she'd shattered a pane with her machete to get in, freezing after the patter of glass to listen for any movement inside the building.

There were benches set up along the walls with pots and sprouting trays, with larger plants and bushes growing out of beds in the ground. Cement paths were laid out between them, and she walked carefully down to the sitting area in the middle. Most of the potted plants were dead, the planted ones dying, but they had been trimmed back before they were left. The cluster of wicker chairs and loungers in the center of the greenhouse had been squared off with each other, the magazines on the little table aligned with the corners. She'd looked through the magazines, but there weren't any worth taking back with her; they were all about medicine and genetics.

The back door was unlocked, and she took another drink before she went in. She didn't like being startled; running into a dead body would be just as bad as running into a live one, and it didn't seem like the last person in the house had left in a hurry.

The first door on the left led to a little bathroom, and she
used the toilet before moving on. That was one thing that sucked about the shack: no real toilet. There had been an outhouse at the end of the yard, but she didn't like to risk leaving the building at night. Willie had never found a good solution for that, so she used an old cooking pot and threw her waste off the upper porch into the bushes.

The door opposite led into what had been a large farm kitchen, stone floored. The metal countertops remained, but had been taken over by a proliferation of beakers and Bunsen burners, lab equipment in organized ranks, now coated in dust.

She passed through the rest of the rooms on the lower floor: no bodies, or people jumping out at her, everything coated in dust but put neatly away, as if crazy Great-Aunt Sally had anticipated her death and prepared for it by tidying, or else left the house months before. Tamara went through the drawers and shelves, but didn't find anything that she really wanted; while in the other houses she snatched anything that took her fancy, here she found herself touching books, money, ornaments, but leaving them where they stood.

Upstairs she expected to find a body, perhaps laid out on the bed with its arms crossed on its chest, or slumped over a desk with blood spatter on the wall and a handgun hanging from the limp fingers, but she found nothing. The bed in the master bedroom was neatly made, the bedrooms of a son and a daughter showing the half-grown state of children just gone to college, expected back any day, everything in its place as though it was a show house and potential buyers were about to come through. The drawers in the bedrooms she let alone. A lot of the furniture was under dustsheets, but instead of pulling them off the way she would have in any other house, she passed those rooms
by. She couldn't say why; maybe she did half-believe the stories people told about the house.

When she'd gone through the whole house once and found no bodies, no notes of any kind, no sign that the inhabitants had died but rather that they had packed carefully, left intentionally, she went through the house again, stuffing canned food from the pantry and the alcohol burners from the kitchen into a pillowcase. It was hers now; the rumors were probably right and even if they weren't, the old bat wasn't coming back.

There were bookshelves all over the house, crammed with kids' books and teen books and fat sci-fi and fantasy novels and romance novels and every single damned classical book she'd not read in high school, and all of those she left alone, but when she saw the high-up shelf behind the desk in the living room, she knew that she'd struck gold. At the best of times Tamara wasn't a reader, she didn't even really enjoy movies unless she had someone to make out with during the talking parts, but the part of her that jumped at the sight of a sexy body jumped at the sight of that shelf. There was
New Gray's Anatomy
,
Fertility and Conception
,
Physicians' Desk Reference
,
Home Remedies for Young Mothers
, books that weren't meant to be read for entertainment but in order to make things happen. She pawed through, picked out the volumes on fertility and genetics,
What to Expect When You're Expecting
, guides to women's health printed on thick stapled paper and neat gilt-edged pages alike. She left behind the pillowcase of food, choosing to carry the books back first: they were her inheritance, would help her get the baby that she wanted.

Now the plundering is over. The last time she went out she was chased by a gang of survivors, shot at, nearly killed, and she has hunkered down in the shack to wait until all the idiots kill each other off. She has food, she has medicine, she has anything she could need.

One of the pluses of having the marsh right up on her doorstep was how easy it had made bringing things around by boat. If she could get it into the boat, she could usually get it out of the boat, and she'd smuggled loads of pressure-treated wood, nails and hardware, food and clothing and pretty, useless junk from the expensive waterfront houses and rowed them practically to her front door with barely a sweat broken. Willie had taken over from there, when he'd still been alive. It's a good thing she doesn't mind bats, cats, and the occasional really stupid bird, as they are the only animals that can still get in, but sometimes she sits and watches through the cracks in the boards as deer graze by the foundation of the shack.

Even the pretty, useless junk has its purpose now. She is waiting for something, she doesn't know what. An army of scientists, with needles to shoot everyone up with a cure or something to prevent the disease, so they can all come out of hiding and go back to living life. Or an army of do-gooders, come to get the survivors off the island and to someplace that still functions, that still has cities with corner stores that you can go to anytime to buy a pack of cigarettes and a chocolate bar, not because you need it but because you feel like it. Or maybe just an army, to gun down the bands of survivors who have gone feral and violent. But they won't shoot her, she's unarmed, she's not like the gun-waving crazies who chased her. They will take her to the mainland, to hot showers and fresh food. When she starts
wondering if the only thing she is waiting for is her own death, that's when all the stuff comes in handy.

Willie made her keep it neat, stacked the chests he'd made for her against the north wall of the shack, two deep, so that she had the whole of the slick, green floor to spread out across. Now that she's bored of watching the oak leaves flicker above the hole in the roof she gets up and begins rifling about in the chests. Willie is gone, but she still keeps things neat, not so much in memory of him but more because the floor gets damp sometimes.

There are silk dresses in some of the chests, and even though she prefers jeans Tamara slides them on, one at a time, twirling in front of the cracked full-length mirror taken from an abandoned clothing store, like she is five and dressing up as a princess again. She could go outside, but the chances of getting bitten by a copperhead or a cottonmouth are pretty high, or stepping on something or getting cut on a piece of rusting farm equipment half-buried where the field hand left it, and since she isn't sure which type of antivenin goes with which snake, or what exactly to do for tetanus, she stays inside unless she's going scrounging, refilling her water barrels or adding to the stack of canned and dried food against the wall opposite her collection of trunks.

Her bones have surfaced beneath her skin, and a lot of the dresses are far too big. She smooths her hands over her belly muscles and wonders if this could help her get the baby she wants: she looks like she belongs on the cover of one of the supermarket magazines from before, at least with clothes on—it makes her sick to look at herself naked, it reminds her too much of a girl she knew in high school that died of anorexia. Probably she should eat more, but it's hard to get excited over the same
food day in and day out, and a lot of times she doesn't eat just because the taste is boring.

But back to the baby—men like skinny, don't they? Maybe it depended on the man, but who would care if she is hipbones-like-elbows skinny when there is no one else around? One of the things that Willie told her, in the long afternoons spread out on their triple-high stack of mattresses, was that his daddy had had a plan for years, for what to do if everything went tits-up. That's how he'd known where to dig the well, because his daddy had figured it out, had started stocking up on ammo and batteries when his girlfriend got pregnant with Scott. Willie had laughed at his dad, even as he lay there with his head on her arm in their own little bunker, surrounded by their canned food and drums of well water, but now it makes Tamara wonder if his daddy—Mr. Todd to her—isn't still out there, hunkered down in a camouflage hole in the ground with a generator and chocolate bars and all the things she and Willie hadn't quite gotten around to finishing before he left her.

Willie's dad was a big man, she remembers, and she's always had a thing for big men. Tall men with broad, deep chests, and perhaps more fuzz on those chests than strictly necessary, and hands like spades. Sure, when she was younger she'd go with any boy, even if they did look more like girls and do nothing but whine because no one understood them, and girls too because most girls were damn cute and really grateful if you actually knew what you were doing, but really if she had her druthers, she'd always preferred her fellows on the manly side.

And more importantly, Scott had been a carbon copy of his daddy.

As she slips the cold silk over her head she thinks about this.
It has to get awful lonely, sitting in a hole in the ground, even if you have a generator and lights and everything. Real lonely, seeing as how Scott's mama and her on-the-side boyfriend had been among the first to go. Among his other familial revelations, Willie had mentioned that his daddy and mama hadn't touched each other since before his baby brother was born, so Tamara had no worry that Mr. Todd had gotten the disease from his wife and died. There was still someone out there who could give her Scott's baby, or close enough to Scott's baby that it didn't matter.

Her thoughts speed up as she shuffles through the chests. Just being alive is more or less proof that she doesn't have the disease, but even so a man that plans that far ahead would want to be careful. She can get around that, though. Seduction isn't hard. It's the getting-pregnant part that she's more concerned about.

The impulsive part of her wants to pop open a bottle of fertility pills, down it, and head out, but the part that really wants the baby makes her sort through the chests, find the one crammed with books on women's health and the female body, that she'd taken from her great-aunt's house. She sits cross-legged on the double bed that she once shared with Willie. She begins to slowly read, stumbling a bit over the Latin names for common weeds, but mostly comprehending.