18. Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Eighteen
Beckett
I didn't sleep the night I kissed her, and I didn't sleep the night after, and by the third morning I quit pretending the not-sleeping had anything to do with the infected.
I did a cruel thing in that workshop, and knowing it was cruel didn’t make it undoable.
I kissed her like I had nothing left to lose, and then I remembered I did, and ran.
She put the flat nobody-face back on, the one I watched her set down inch by inch over a month, the one I let myself believe she might not need anymore.
She said okay, calm and unbothered and walked away.
The okay was worse than anything she could have thrown at me.
For two days we moved around each other. Her in the grow room and the kitchen, me everywhere else, both of us so careful, so courteous, so wrecked about it. Mara watched the pair of us with her mouth pressed flat and said nothing, which out of Mara was a shout.
I told myself it was for the best. There was a something coming I couldn't stop, and better she hate me a little and live at arm's length than…
I never finished that thought the same way twice. It always ended somewhere I couldn't stand to look.
Then Maddox and Evan came down off the mountain on the third morning, and after that I had no room left to think about the workshop at all.
They came in wrong. That was the first thing, the way they came in.
Evan ahead, the kid's face had gone to something I never once seen.
Not fear, exactly. Past fear. The white blank of a young man who's looked at a thing his mind can't file and put away.
He didn't say a word. He found a stretch of wall, slid down it, and sat.
Maddox looked twenty years older than the man I sent out.
"Map room," he said. "Now. Just you."
I got him behind the door and he set both hands flat on the map table like he needed it to keep him upright.
"We traced it back," he said. "Down past the tarn, down the north drainage, the way you told us.
Followed the channel. And it kept getting wider, Beckett.
The sign. Three abreast, then ten, and then I stopped being able to think of it as tracks at all and started thinking of it as a road.
A road they beat flat in the snow, days of them, and it ran down and down and we followed it to the shoulder above the Kestrel valley and we looked over and—"
He stopped. His hands weren't steady on the paper.
"Say it."
"The valley's moving." He looked up. "The whole floor of it.
Bank to bank, far as the light reached and then past where it reached, on into the next valley over, and I'd put my life the one past that too.
Not hundreds. I don't have a number. Nobody's got a number for it.
Thousands—and that's only what I could see—and every last one of them coming up.
Up the drainage. Up toward the pass." A breath that shook going in. "Up toward us."
I stood and looked at the map for a long time.
The Kestrel valley. The north drainage. The old pass road that switchbacked up out of it.
The one the resort was built to straddle, back when the resort was a resort, because a pass is exactly where you put a thing meant to catch people moving through.
A pass is a funnel. Everything that climbs up out of the low country has to come through the throat of it, and the throat of it was us.
Had always been us. I built my whole life in the one place on this mountain a flood would be forced to pour through, and for five years it hadn't cost me a thing, because the dead didn't flood uphill in the dead of winter.
They were flooding uphill now.
I set the charcoal to the map and traced it—valley, drainage, channel, pass—and my hand knew where the line was headed before my mouth would say it. The line ran straight through the middle of everything I made.
"How long," Maddox asked. "Till the front of it hits the pass."
I did the math I didn't want to do. Distance, terrain, the pace of a thing that walks and doesn't rest and doesn't feel the cold. "Days. A week, if the deep snow drags on them. Not more."
"Then we seal up. That's the plan. That's always been the plan; we go under, shut the door, let them wash over the top and move on."
And I had to tell him. First time I said it out loud, though I'd known it since I first drew the contingency years back and ran the figures on the far end of it. The figures I filed under never happens and prayed I was right about.
"A herd that size doesn't wash over and move on in a day, Maddox.
Or a week. Something that big, funneling through one pass…
that's a river, and a river takes as long to pass as it takes.
I can't tell you how long, and neither can anybody, because there has never once been one.
Could be weeks. Could be a month. Two." I said the rest flat, because there was no soft way to lay it down.
"And we can seal the door. What we can't do is seal it for two months on the supplies we've got and open it again with eighty people still breathing behind it.
If we go under and wait, we don't get overrun.
We starve. Slower. That's the whole of the difference. Slower."
The room went very quiet.
"So the plan doesn't work," Maddox said.
"The plan doesn't work."
For five years I kept us alive on the arithmetic, and now I stood in front of the problem and there was no answer anywhere in it.
Every road ran to the same place. Fight it—you don't fight a flood.
Run—where, into what, eighty people and eleven children strung out across open winter country with a horde at their heels.
Seal up and wait—starve in the dark with the door shut.
I turned it every way a thing could be turned and every way was a grave with a different date on it.
And under all of it, low and shameful and mine, ran the other thing.
Because three nights back I pushed a woman out of my arms to spare myself from watching the world come for her—and here was the world, coming for the whole of us at once.
My great act of self-preservation bought me exactly nothing.
She was still in my count. Still the heaviest weight in it.
If this mountain took her I would feel it torn out of me just the same whether I kissed her or not, because the wanting already happened, months ago, over a row of cans in the snow, and there had never been an arm's length long enough to undo it.
I hurt her for nothing. That was the plain shape of it. Hurt her, and put that nobody-face back on her that I would have traded a year of my life to keep off, and done it to guard myself against a loss I was going to feel to the bone regardless.
Some prepper. Stocked and braced and ready for every last thing but the one that was always going to be the end of me.
"Get Dimitri," I said. "And Mara. Anybody with a level head who won't run it through the halls before we've said it right.
Common room, once the children are down for the night.
" I pushed up off the table, and the pushing-up cost me something.
"It's time they heard it. All of it. I've kept it off them long enough. "
"You got a plan to give them?"
"No." I wouldn't lie to him, not about this.
"I've got a problem I can't solve on my own, and eighty people who earned the right to know they're standing in it, and maybe one of them sees the thing I can't. That's not a plan.
But it beats me alone in this room pretending I'm going to out-think a hundred thousand dead things between now and morning. "
He went to gather them.
I stayed a moment with the map, and the line I drew straight through the heart of the place.
Then I went to find her. Before the others, before the meeting, before any of it.
Because whatever I've done to her in that workshop, she'd been the one to say it to me on the fence line, weeks back, I don't think you ought to be the only one carrying it.
She was right then. She was right now. And if the world was going to fall a second time, I found I couldn't take the next step into it without the one person who already looked clear down to the floor of me and didn’t turn away from what was there.
The arm's length was finished. The mountain had gone and made the decision for me, the way the mountain made every decision in the end.
I only hoped I hadn't broken the thing between us badly enough that she stopped being willing to help me carry the weight.