The Arrivals

When Chloe didn’t respond, the woman reached down, gripped Chloe’s hand, and hauled her to her feet.

Chloe’s legs weren’t quite as reliable as her arms were. She wobbled and had to close her eyes against a wave of dizziness that was followed instantly by the pressing need to vomit. Kitty held her steady as she did just that.

“Hush,” Kitty murmured. “It passes soon enough. What are you called?”

“Chloe.” She kept her eyes closed as she marshaled the strength to stay upright. After a few moments she opened one eye tentatively to see the two strangers watching her.

The man held out a neatly folded square of cloth.

“It’s clean,” Kitty said.

After Chloe took it and wiped her mouth and chin, Jack bowed his head slightly. “I’m Jackson, but everyone calls me Jack.”

The woman holding her upright interjected, “Except when we’re calling you—”

“This is my sister, Katherine,” Jack continued. “She’s not nearly as vulgar as she appears.”

“Kitty, not Katherine,” the woman corrected. She smiled and cajoled, “Come on, Chloe. You’ll get your bearings soon enough, or you’ll succumb to madness. Either way, it’ll be easier after you get past the travel sickness and rest awhile.”

“Travel sickness …” Chloe echoed. “I’m just hungover, and you’re a hallucination … or a coma dream.” She glanced toward the pasture, where she saw what looked like an elephant-size iguana. “This is all a coma dream.”

“Of course it is, sweetie.” Kitty’s arm tightened around Chloe’s waist. “Why don’t we head back to the camp? You can catch some sleep, and then we’ll talk about everything.”

After a moment’s pause, Chloe decided that there weren’t a whole lot of options before her. She could go along with the people in her dream/hallucination, or she could stand around staring at the giant lizard while she waited for reality to right itself.

“I’m not dead, right?” Chloe asked.

Jack flashed her a grin before saying, “Well, no one’s ever accused Katherine of being an angel.”

“And jackass here isn’t as much a devil as he’d like everyone to think,” Kitty added in a soft, consoling voice. “It’ll all be all right, Chloe. We’ll go back to camp and rest a bit, and soon enough you’ll feel right as rain.”

CHAPTER 6

They were only a mile outside camp when Jack noticed the unfamiliar tracks and decided that it was in everyone’s best interest to carry the disoriented woman. She’d been chattier than most, rambling about concussions and brain tumors affecting her perceptions and then explaining that she must be in a hospital filled with drugs that were creating elaborate hallucinations. She finally fell quiet when Jack lifted her into his arms and walked faster.

Katherine picked up her pace without question.

Jack did his best to think about getting them to camp safely—without thinking about the last woman he’d carried into camp. Mary was truly dead. Thinking about her didn’t change anything. The new one—Chloe, he reminded himself—was lighter than Mary. It was harder each time to remind himself that they were all individuals, people, not simply replacements for the Arrivals who’d died.

He knew that this one—Chloe—was from a later year than most of them, possibly around Mary’s time period. Her clothes were different. She wore the tightest pair of denim trousers, of jeans, that he’d ever seen. A blouse of some sort of delicate material was covered by a soft leather jacket that narrowed at the waist like a woman’s dress would. With such revealing clothes, any man would’ve noticed her. Jack was neither a saint nor a preacher; he definitely noticed her charms—and immediately felt guilty for it.

As Jack, Katherine, and Chloe reached the perimeter of the camp, Jack saw Edgar leaning against the barrel that served as a stool at the guard point. He looked at them with his usual methodical assessment.

“Kit,” Edgar said with no obvious inflection. Then the taciturn man glanced at Chloe, who rested half asleep in Jack’s arms. “Jack … and …?”

“Chloe.” The girl lifted her head from Jack’s shoulder and looked at Edgar. “I’m not sure of anything else today, but I’m definitely Chloe.”

Jack lowered Chloe’s feet to the ground, but he kept an arm around her waist. She wavered a little as she stood, but despite the exhaustion, shock, and lingering travel sickness, she was upright. In truth, she was doing remarkably well. “Go with Katherine, Chloe. You’re safe here.”

Without any of her usual sass, Katherine stepped up to Chloe’s other side and wrapped an arm around her middle just under Jack’s arm. “Lean on me,” she offered.

Once Chloe shifted her weight onto Katherine, Jack lowered his arm and released the woman into his sister’s care.

Edgar lit a cigarillo. He was studying Katherine as intently as he always did when she returned to camp after a patrol. Katherine continued pretending not to notice, but neither of them persuaded anyone—including themselves. If anything ever happened to Edgar, Jack would have no idea how to look after his sister. He was tempted to lock the two of them in a room to sort themselves out, but he’d tried that once before with less than grand results.

The two women slowly tottered toward Katherine’s tent. Once they were inside and Katherine closed the tent flap, Jack turned to Edgar. “She’s the new Arrival.”

“I figured, but you don’t usually cart them in like that,” Edgar said, holding out a second neatly wrapped cigarillo.

Jack shook his head. “Can’t. I need to do another patrol, and the stink of that makes it harder to scent what’s around me.”

Mutely, Edgar pocketed the cigarillo.

“You’ll stay at the gate?” Jack prompted.

Edgar took a drag and exhaled a plume of smoke before he answered. “I don’t shirk my duties, Jack. I’ll talk to her after my shift.” His tone was mild enough, but he was undoubtedly already tense after Katherine had insisted on going out with Jack. Typically, Edgar patrolled with Katherine; he stood night watch when she was in camp. Right now Katherine was struggling. She never coped well when one of the Arrivals died, worse when it was someone like Mary, whom she’d called a friend.

Jack nodded. It was the best he could hope for, all things considered.

“What’s she like?” Edgar asked.

“The new Arrival? Hard to say.” Jack pulled his attention away from the tent. “She kept calling us hallucinations.”

Edgar snorted. “Another Francis. Did she tell you her ‘real name’ was Dewdrop or Star?”

Jack grinned. “No. Near as I can tell, she isn’t from the same years as him. She feels … newer than anyone else has been.”

Each new Arrival wasn’t from a later time than his or her predecessors, but they were from a general window of time. Jack and Katherine had lived in the late 1800s; Mary had been from almost a century later. No one had come from a time earlier than Jack’s, and everyone else was from the 1900s. The areas weren’t the same either. Edgar was from Chicago; Melody wouldn’t give the same answer twice on where she was from. Francis thought he’d been in somewhere called Seattle when he’d been brought over to the Wasteland.

Jack and Katherine had been the first, and Jack had spent more than a few nights wondering if they were all here as a result of something he’d done forever ago. He had no idea what that something could’ve been, and he’d thought on it often enough the past twenty-six years. He’d also spent years trying to figure out a pattern to the times and places, but he’d had very little luck. All he knew for sure was that those who arrived in this world needed someone to help guide them, and he’d taken that task as his own. The transition to this world was hard. If he could have spared everyone from having to make it, he would.

For a moment, the only sound was the crackling of the tobacco in Edgar’s lit cigarillo. Neither he nor Jack mentioned the fact that they’d been expecting Chloe—or someone like her. Nor did they mention the worry that she’d attract Ajani’s attention too soon.

Jack had been waiting for that peculiar itch under his skin that always heralded a new Arrival; he’d wondered more than a few times if Ajani felt the same thing, but there was nothing to indicate that Ajani was anything more than a Wastelander who’d found the Arrivals particularly useful as employees. For Jack, though, there was a pull to a particular location, generally near to where the last of their group had died. Even without a sense of it, Jack would know to watch for the Arrival. Mary had only been dead a little over a week, but the replacement almost always arrived within a month. That was how it went: when one of them finally died, someone else arrived in the Wasteland. The only oddity was that Chloe had arrived much sooner than they usually did.

Edgar interrupted Jack’s musing when he asked, “Do you need me to do anything?” His tone said what his words didn’t: he had no special thing in mind, but if Jack did, he’d be obliging. That was one of the joys of dealing with Edgar: there wasn’t a lot of guesswork where he was concerned.

Jack pondered the question. Sometimes he had a better sense than others about what to do about the new ones. With Edgar, Jack had known almost instantly that he needed to keep the man away from any weapons until Edgar had determined that the Arrivals weren’t a threat to him. With some of the others—people long dead now—they’d had to keep weapons out of reach to keep them from harming themselves. Chloe didn’t fit into either of those categories.

“Not right now,” Jack said. “Maybe take Katherine out tomorrow so I can talk to Chloe without her hovering and badgering.”

Edgar nodded.

“I don’t know if she mentioned it, but Daniel was in Covenant.” Jack kept his voice pitched low.

“She hadn’t mentioned it yet.” Edgar’s characteristic calm failed a little; his nostrils flared and his lips pressed together tightly. In a blink, though, the expression vanished, and he asked in a deceptively calm voice, “Anything interesting happen?”

“Katherine shot him,” Jack started, and then he summarized what he knew of the meeting. He paused a moment before adding, “He warned her that Ajani is crazier than usual of late. I trust my sister, but she’s far too forgiving where Daniel is concerned.”