“And this?” I ask, nudging the bucket with my foot.
Miss Duncan says nothing, just presses her lips together. If she thinks I’m going to perform my bodily functions with Redfern for an audience, she has another think coming.
It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. I’m not long for this cell. There’s only two ways this ends: with a noose around my neck, or with me hightailing it across the plains.
And hemp ain’t my color.
Miss Duncan leaves while Sheriff Redfern settles into the chair behind the desk. I can’t help but remember the greeting Katherine and I got from Sheriff Snyder when we arrived to Summerland, and for a moment the dead man swims in my vision. But then I blink and it’s just the bland expression of Sheriff Redfern.
“Miss McKeene.”
“Sheriff Redfern.”
“Mind telling me what happened between you and Sheriff Snyder at the end there?” he says.
I shake my head. “I’m sorry, Sheriff, but I’m invoking my Fifth Amendment, as is my right as an American citizen.”
“What makes you think there’s an America anymore?” he says.
I am, for the second time in a day, left speechless. It’s an unnerving pattern.
Miss Duncan returns with a bowl of stew, a crusty roll, and a full canteen. She hands it all to me through the bars, and my stomach rumbles. I settle on the cot then drink from the canteen, washing the road dust from my mouth before I turn my attention to the food.
I clear my throat dramatically, since Redfern is still waiting for me to start spilling my guts, a confession that ain’t never going to happen. He might be the law in this town, but a tin star doesn’t change anything about the man wearing it. And what I remember of Redfern is that he was only too happy to play by the rules of a broken world as long as they protected him. “Perhaps, Sheriff, you should tell me what has transpired since you left me in the none-too-gentle hands of Sheriff Snyder.”
Redfern gives me an inscrutable gaze while I enjoy the stew, which probably ain’t that great but tastes like manna to me, half-starved as I am. We sit like that long enough for Miss Duncan to let loose with an impatient sigh, and it’s her irritation that finally provokes Sheriff Redfern to speech.
“After I saved your friend Jackson and sent him off onto the prairie, I hitched the train back to Baltimore. Mayor Carr had asked me to ensure the delivery of the lot of you as well as some provisions and the first load of his property to Summerland, and then to return. The mayor was planning on leaving Baltimore within the month and wanted me to escort him as well. After the episode with the shambler you put down at his dinner party, it was only a matter of time before his ruse collapsed, and someone discovered that Baltimore County wasn’t as safe from the dead as the Survivalists were claiming. And the mayor had no interest in being around for that revelation.”
I think of Jackson, the pain sudden and swift, and I have to blink rapidly to stave off the tears. Not yet. I can’t break just yet. I have to get through this, whatever this is, and then I can mourn his loss.
Just a little bit more.
Nothing of Sheriff Redfern’s story surprises me. Mayor Carr had been a clever bastard, but now he was most likely dead just like all the rest of them. Well, not dead. Undead. I want to imagine Mayor Carr as a large, roaming shambler, but that just brings back the images of Jackson’s last moments, so I force myself into a scowl and stare at my stew instead. I do feel better knowing that Mayor Carr will no longer be able to ruin the lives of Negroes by offering them up as shambler chow, but it’s a cold comfort indeed when weighed against my own personal tragedies.
Sheriff Redfern reaches into his desk and produces a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He pours one for himself and another for Miss Duncan, and she takes it up without question, even as it’s the middle of the day. I’m supposing those stories we heard about Nicodemus and its temperance laws ain’t accurate after all. No one offers me any, and I’m a mite bit put out, truth be told. Ain’t I been through a trial?
After taking a small sip of his drink Redfern returns to his tale, expression pinched as though relating his story is one of Hercules’s labors. “I had just returned to the city when he asked me to take one more trip south before we were to head west. He wanted me to go down to a compound in the Lost States in order to unload some bitten Negroes he had for a tidy sum. So I saw to loading up the train and set off.
“That’s when the city fell.”
I shovel stew into my mouth and nod along to Sheriff Redfern’s story. Back in Summerland, my friend Ida told me how criminals and “bitten” Negroes have no rights under the Thirteenth Amendment and could be sold into a version of servitude that persisted down in the South. The reasoning went that, once bitten, a body is no longer “human,” and thus had no rights; combined with the accepted wisdom that Negroes have some sort of natural resistance to the bite of a shambler, it created a situation where Negroes could legally remain in a state of “bitten-but-unchanged” in perpetuity, and thus be sold like any property. It made no matter that there was no evidence a colored person was any more likely to survive the bite of the dead than a white one, it was a convenient lie that no one much bothered to debunk, especially when it meant that a person could lie about colored folks getting bitten and make a quick buck on the open market down in the Lost States. Most white folks are eager to believe the worst about us, anything to make us seem less like people.
Plus, there were more than a few folks who were looking for some way to reinstitute slavery, that peculiar institution. Claiming Negroes had been bitten and survived was just the answer they’d been searching for.
Redfern’s words are also a good reminder that no matter his title now, he used to work for Mayor Carr. Sheriff Redfern might not be spouting the “divine supremacy of the white race” nonsense that Pastor Snyder lived by, but I still can’t trust him.
Redfern continues his tale. “We were only perhaps a half mile outside of Baltimore when the engineer stopped the train. The tracks were swarming with dead, and we couldn’t ram them without the risk of derailing. There were too many for me and the small train crew to fight on our own. We were about to be overrun—until Amelia and her girls came to our aid.”
Sheriff Redfern gives Miss Duncan a soft look, and she blushes prettily, sipping at her whiskey before speaking. “The horde came upon the school quite unexpectedly. It was everything we could do to get out with what weapons we could salvage. The place was utter chaos. We lost most of the instructors, including poor Miss Preston.” Miss Duncan shakes her head at the memory.
I don’t blink at this. Getting eaten by shamblers is the least that woman deserved. “What about Miss Anderson?” I ask. She and Miss Preston were both responsible for sending Katherine and me west to Summerland. I’d like to be able to close the book on them both.
Miss Duncan sighed. “Miss Anderson took her leave of the school a couple of days before the attack. No one is sure where she is now.”
I grip the canteen so hard it bends a little as Sheriff Redfern picks up the story. “The Miss Preston’s girls had fled toward the train tracks, knowing that their best route out of the city was to stay off the main road and follow the tracks until they were well clear of the city walls. When they saw us stalled with the dead they cleared them out, and the engineer and I figured it might be good to have some assistance as we left out of Baltimore County.”