So what she had were her memories of him, like this early one, the one that began in the car, with the sense of abstract, sleepy joy, blinked out into unconsciousness, and ended when she was briefly awakened to her father unbuckling her from the car seat. He lifted her easily in his strong arms, put his handsome face close to hers, kissed the tip of her nose. “Beddy-bye, baby girl,” he said.
What a pleasure, a luxury, to be carried to bed by someone you loved and trusted, someone with the physical power to move you gently and tenderly, to slide you between cool covers at the exact moment you slid back down into sleep. Edie imagined this with longing as she rushed, heart thumping in the cold darkness, to gather her few personal belongings and help Jesse collapse their tent and its vac system into a package small enough to be stowed in its custom microfiber pack. They were muttering at each other: instructions, curses, corrections. It goes this way. No, goddammit, you’ve got to unfold it and refold it the other direction. Did you unlock the brace before bending it?
“Thirty seconds,” Andy shouted. “If you’re not ready to move when I say move, you leave the shit behind. Leave it behind, and you sleep outside.”
With a final surge of panicked adrenaline Edie was able to see what they were doing wrong, the corner they had neglected to tuck in, and she made the necessary adjustment, then shoved the tent into place and zipped the pack closed with a gasp. She shouldered it quickly because she knew Jesse wouldn’t think to in time, slung the strap of her pack of personal items around her neck, and stood ramrod straight. In another situation, another life, she might have offered a sarcastic salute to punctuate her success. Now, she only dropped her hands to her sides, palms open, and kept as still as she could stand to. Mickey Worthington’s body was still slumped in the shadows of the dwindling campfire, generous bottom resting on his socked heels, his head—what remained of it—cheek-down in a pool of blood. It’s not right, she could hear him wailing. You pay as much as I did, you expect some things.
Andy approached her. “Hands in front of you,” he said. His eyes didn’t meet hers.
She complied. They were shaking; she couldn’t do anything about that.
“Cross your wrists.”
She did, the inside of her right wrist resting on the inside of the left, but he roughly turned her left hand over. “Like that,” he said impatiently, as if she were stupid, and then he looped a neon pink zip tie around her wrists, cinching it so tightly into place that her skin was pinched, even under the protective layer of her microsuit. When he moved on to Jesse she relaxed the weight of her arms, experimenting. Let her hands drop, and the zip tie sank even more painfully into the skin on the back of her left hand. But holding her hands up, she could tell, would quickly put a strain on the muscles in her upper arms and shoulders. She wiggled her hands around, testing for give. There was none.
Jesse’s shoulder brushed hers. “This is fucked,” he said. She could hear the panic in his voice. “What the fuck are they doing? What do they want? Money?”
Edie peered as surreptitiously as she could at the disfigured woman who had shot Mickey. She was difficult to look at, and Edie could only imagine that she didn’t like being looked at, and so Edie dropped her eyes—only to feel them dragged back upward to that unfortunate face, so riveting in its painful contortion. “I don’t think so,” Edie whispered. All the credits in the world couldn’t help this woman, though perhaps a top-notch Atlantic Zone doctor could at least give her some grafts to make her face more pliant, or scrap that face and put on a new one, the way they did with people who were mauled by pit bulls or who walked into helicopter blades. And then, instead of this horror show face, the woman would have a slack moon-face, saggy eyes, bottom lip puckered like a newborn’s. But that seemed unlikely, too. Edie guessed that this woman would rather be a horror show.
“Violet,” Andy said, and the disfigured woman jerked her head around in response. Violet? Had Edie heard that right? Maybe he had said “Violent.” Violet would be a name of almost cruel absurdity, applied to this woman with the gun slung across her chest, face singed of any of its femininity.
“Collect the Stamps,” Andy said. “Check their bags.”
She made her way around the circle of hostages, jamming her hand into holster-pockets and tossing the Stamps into an empty knapsack, then turning each traveler’s knapsack inside out and picking through the contents, leaving some items for the traveler to clumsily repack, tossing others into the sack with the Stamps, and—in a couple of cases—keeping her find. From Wes she stole a peanut butter–flavored power bar. From Anastasia—and this could almost stoke your sympathies, if you weren’t being held at gunpoint by the murderous ghoul—she took a fine gold chain with a letter A charm, slipping it over her head with a little smile playing at her tendinous lips. There was such childlike pleasure in her gestures that Edie wondered if she wasn’t perhaps a little touched, as her mother would have put it.
When the woman reached Edie, though, and started going through her bag, Edie revised her assessment. There was too much adult efficiency in her hands—pristine hands, unburned and even lovely, faintly freckled. The hands of a thirty-or forty-year-old. The hands quaked suddenly, and the bag slipped out of them; on instinct, Edie dropped her own bound hands down and managed to catch it.
“Thanks,” the woman muttered, her blue eye touching Edie’s for a fraction of a second. Then she shoved the pack back at Edie and moved down the line.
“Now, wait just a minute,” Ken Tanaka said as Violet collected his Stamp. He was trying awkwardly to support his sister without the use of his bound hands, and Wendy, temple swollen and bleeding, looked only half-conscious. “Wait, now, how are we supposed to protect ourselves?” It was the most Edie had heard him say at once in the entire three weeks of their acquaintance.
Violet grunted in an amused way and tossed Ken’s Stamp in with the rest.
“I advise you to stick close to the group,” Andy said. “Behave yourself, and one of us might Stamp you when the time comes.”
Edie found herself watching with interest when Violet approached Marta, wondering if Marta had been stupid enough to pack those diamond earrings.
“Bag,” Violet said through her mangled mouth. Marta handed it over, shaking so much that she seemed to be playing keep-away with Violet, and finally Violet snatched it and turned it upside down. Edie expected something good, given this display: the earrings, or a contraband phone, maybe. But there was nothing of note, nothing even worth stealing: the usual changes of underwear and socks; bug spray; ibuprofen. Violet paused over what looked like a Smokeless, still shrink-wrapped in its Canteen packaging, and seemed to consider taking it, perhaps only on principle. But in the end she left it in the dirt and went on to the next person, and there was something oddly frantic in the expression of relief that crossed Marta’s face. The woman must really like her NicoClean.