Aftertime
Sophie Littlefield
THE WORLD IS GONE. THE DEAD ARE WALKING. HER DAUGHTER IS MISSING.Cass Dollar vaguely recalls surviving something terrible. Around her is barren wasteland where cities once stood. Her body is ravaged. Her daughter has disappeared. Her eyes are unwilling to believe what they see… People turned hungry for human flesh by a government experiment gone wrong.Packs of cannibalistic Beaters prowl the desolate landscape. Everyone is out for their own survival. There are no rules. No morals. No hope. And for Cass, with a body scarred by a zombie attack, the nightmare has only just begun.‘Grab a Littlefield pronto.’ – Kirkus Reviews
Praise for
SOPHIE LITTLEFIELD
‘Grab a Littlefield pronto.’
—Kirkus Reviews
‘Startling and unputdownable from beginning to end … hands down the best zombie book I’ve read all year.’
—All Things Urban Fantasy
‘… page-turning action and evocative, sensual, harrowing descriptions that bring every paragraph of this thriller to life.’
—Publishers Weekly
‘A fascinating protagonist and some of the scariest zombies I have ever encountered—a doublebarrelled salute.’
—Jess d’Arbonne, The Denver Examiner
‘Stephen King’s The stand in a bra and panties.’ —Paul Goat Allen, BarnesandNoble.com
‘Sophie Littlefield shows considerable skills for delving into the depths of her characters and complex plotting as she disarms the reader.’
—South Florida Sun-Sentinel
‘Psychologically fascinating … a gripping read.’
—The Paperback Dolls
‘Sophie Littlefield has stepped into the male-dominated field of apocalyptic fiction and is making them take notice.’
—Fresh Fiction
‘I did not want to put this book down … for anyone who likes to be on the edge of their seat.’
—The Book Den
‘One of the best zombie books I’ve read … truly interesting Zombies. 9/10’
—Sunshine and Bones
‘… alternately creeped me the hell out and broke my heart repeatedly.’
—The Discriminating Fangirl
‘Littlefield excels at keeping the momentum going and she knows how to inject a huge beating heart into any story, even one in which humanity is barely alive.’
—Pop Culture Nerd
About the Author
SOPHIE LITTLEFIELD grew up in rural Missouri. She writes the post-apocalyptic Aftertime series. She also writes paranormal fiction for young adults. Her first novel, A Bad Day for Sorry, won an Anthony Award for Best First Novel and an RT Award for Best First Mystery. It was also shortlisted for Edgar, Barry, Crimespree and Macavity Awards, and it was named on lists of the year’s best mystery debuts. Sophie lives in Northern California.
Aftertime
Sophie Littlefield
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For M, with love and regret
There you are and always will be
In your pretty coat
Skating lazy eights
on the frozen pond of my heart
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The existence of this book is a testament to the tenacity and vision of two people: my agent, Barbara Poelle, who only accepts “no” when it suits her—and my editor Adam Wilson, who gets it and then some. In the moments when the story shines, it’s because of them.
Thanks, too, to the entire Harlequin team, who made me feel welcome from day one.
01
THAT IT WAS SUMMER WAS NOT IN DOUBT. The nights were much too short and the days too long. Something about the color of the sky said August to Cass. Maybe the blue was bluer. Hadn’t autumn signaled itself that way Before, a gradual intensifying of colors as summer trailed into September?
Once, Cass would have been able to tell from the wildflowers growing in the foothills where she ran. In August petals fell from the wild orange poppies, the stonecrop darkened to purplish brown, and butterweed puffs drifted in lazy breezes. Deer grew bold, drinking from the creek that ran along the road. The earth dried and cracked, and lizards and beetles stared out from their hiding places among the weeds.
But that was two lives ago, so far back that it was like a story that had once been told to Cass, a story maybe whispered by a lover as she drifted off to sleep after one too many Jack and Cokes, ephemeral and hazy at the edges. She might not believe it at all, except for Ruthie. Ruthie had loved the way butterweed silk floated in the air when she blew on the puffs.
Ruthie, who she couldn’t see or touch or hold in her arms. Ruthie, who screamed when the social workers dragged her away, her legs kicking desperately at nothing. Mim and Byrn wouldn’t even look at Cass as she collapsed to the dirty floor of the trailer and wished she was dead.
Ruthie had been two.
Cass pushed herself to go faster, her strides long and sure up over a gentle rise in the road. She was barely out of breath. This was nothing, less than nothing. She dug her hard, sharp nails into the calluses of her thumbs. Hard, harder, hardest. The skin there was built up against her abuse and refused to bleed. To break it she would need something sharper than her nail. Teeth might work, but Cass would not use her teeth. It was enough to use her nails until the pain found an opening into her mind. The pain was enough.
She had covered a lot of ground this moon-bright night. Now it was almost dawn, the light from the rising sun creeping up over the black-blue forest skeletons, a crescent aura of orange glow in the sky. When the first slice of sun was visible she’d leave the road and melt into what was left of the trees. There was cover to be found—some of the native shrubs had survived. Greasewood and creosote still grew neck high in some places.
And it was easy to spot them. You saw them before they saw you, and then you hid, and you prayed. If they saw you at all, if they came close enough to smell you, you were worse than dead.
Cass stayed to the edge of the cracked pavement of what had been Highway 161, weaving around the occasional abandoned car, forcing herself not to look inside. You never knew what you would see. Often nothing, but … it was just better not to look. Chunks of the asphalt had been pushed aside by squat kaysev plants that had managed to root in the cracks. Past the shoulder great drifts of it grew, the dark glossy leaves hiding clusters of pods. The plants were smooth-stemmed without burrs or thorns. Walking among them was not difficult. But walking on pavement allowed Cass, now and then—and never when she was trying—to let her mind go back to another time … and when she was really lucky, to pretend all the way back two lifetimes ago.
Taking Ruthie, barely walking, down the sidewalk to the 7-Eleven, buying her a blue raspberry Slurpee, because Ruthie loved to stick out her blue tongue and look at herself in the mirror. Cutting across the school parking lot on the way home, jumping over the yellow lines, lifting Ruthie’s slight body and swinging her, laughing, through the air.
Yes, pavement was nice. Cass had good shoes, though she didn’t remember where she got them. They seemed like they might have been men’s shoes, plain brown lace-up walking shoes, but they fit her feet. A small man, then. How she’d got the shoes from him … it didn’t bear thinking about. The shoes were good, they were comfortable and hadn’t given her blisters or sores despite the many days of walking.
A movement caught her eye, off in the spiky remains of the woods. Cass stopped abruptly and scanned the tree skeletons and shrubs. A flash of white, was it? Or was it only the way the light was rising in the sky, reflected off … what, though? There were only the bare trunks of the dead cypress and pine trees, a stand of dead manzanita, the low thick growth of kaysev, a few of the boulder formations that dotted the Sierra Foothills.
Snap
Cass whipped her head around and saw the flash again, a fast-moving blur of fabric and oh God it was white, a slip of a little dark-haired girl in a dirty white shirt who was sprinting toward her at a speed that Cass could not imagine anyone moving, Cass who had run thousands of desperate blacktop miles one life ago, trying to erase everything, running until her legs ached and her lungs felt like tearing paper and her mind was almost but never quite empty.
But even Cass had never run like this girl.
She was twelve or thirteen. Maybe even fourteen, it was hard to tell now. Before, the fourteen-year-olds looked like twenty-year-olds, with their push-up bras and eyeliner. But hardly anyone dressed like that anymore.
The girl held the blade the way they taught the kids now, firmly in front of her where it would have the best chance of slicing through a Beater’s flesh. Because that’s what she thought Cass was, a Beater, and the thought hit Cass in the gut and nearly knocked her over with revulsion. Her hands went to her hairline where the hair was just growing back in, soft tufts, an inch at most. She knew how her arms looked, covered with scabs, almost worse now that they were healing, the patches of flesh falling away as the healthy skin pushed to the surface. But that was nothing compared to the ruin of her back.
She hadn’t been able to clean herself in days, and she knew she carried the smell. The long hair on the back of her head, the hair she hadn’t pulled out, was knotted and tangled. Her nails were blackened and broken. Real Beaters usually had no nails left, but how could the girl be expected to notice a detail like that?
In the second or two it took the girl to cross the last dozen yards of scrubby land, Cass considered standing firm, wrists out, chin up, giving her an easy target. They were taught well; any child over the age of five could find the jugular, the femoral, the carotid, the ulnar. They practiced on dummies rigged from dolls and clothes stuffed with straw. Sometimes, they practiced on the dead.
At the last minute Cass stepped out of the way.
She didn’t know why. It would have been easier, so much easier, to welcome the blade, to let it find its path to her vital core and feel the blessed release of her blood, still hot and red despite everything, bubbling over the slice in her flesh, falling to the hardened earth. Maybe her blood would help the land heal faster. Maybe on the spot where her blood fell, one of the plants from Before would return. A delicate mountain bluebell; they had been her favorite, the tiny blossoms shading from pale sky blue to deep lilac.
But Cass stepped out of the way.
Damn her soul.
Three times now it had refused to die, when death would have been so much easier.
Cass watched almost impassively as her foot shot forward, nimbly, her stance steady and her balance near perfect. The girl’s eyes went wide. She tripped, and in the last moment, when the blade flew from her hand and she lurched toward Cass, the terror in her eyes was enough to break Cass’s heart, if only she still had one to break.
02
EVERYONE REMEMBERED THE FIRST TIME THEY saw a Beater. Usually, it was more than one, because even in the early days they gathered in packs, three or four or more of them prowling the edges of town.
Cass saw hers in the QikGo.
Cass worked in the QikGo until the end. Where else would she go? She couldn’t leave Silva, not without Ruthie. But as the world fell apart—as famine crippled Africa and South Asia, as one G8 capital after another fell to panic and riots in the wake of random airbursts, as China went dark and Australia mined its shores—Mim and Byrn held on all the tighter to their granddaughter. Cass had no detailed plan, only to wait until there were no more police, no sheriffs, no social workers, no one willing to come when Mim and Byrn called them to block Cass from seeing her daughter or even setting foot on their property.
When that day came, she would go to their house and she would take Ruthie back. By force if she had to. It would hurt, to see the anger and contempt on her mother’s face, but no more than it had hurt her that Mim refused to acknowledge how far Cass had come, how hard she had worked to be worthy of Ruthie. The ninety-days chip she kept on her key chain. The two-year medallion she’d earned before her single relapse. The job she’d held through it all—maybe managing a convenience store wasn’t the most impressive career in the world, but at least she was helping people in small ways every day rather than fleecing them out of their money, the way Byrn did with his questionable investment strategies. But she and her mother saw things through very different lenses.
It would not hurt Cass to see her stepfather, who was finally weaker than she was, his ex-linebacker frame now old and frail compared to her own body, which she had made lean and hard with her relentless running. She anticipated the look of powerlessness on Byrn’s face as she took away the only thing he could hurt her with. She looked forward even more to the moment when he knew he had lost. She would never forgive him, but maybe once she got Ruthie back, she could start forgetting.
That time was almost upon them. Cell phone service had started to go in the last few days and the landlines hadn’t worked for a week. Televisions had been broadcasting static since the government’s last official communication deputizing power and water workers; that had been such a spectacular failure, skirmishes breaking out in the few remaining places there had been peace before, that the rumor was the government had shut down all the media on purpose. Some said it was the Russian hackers. Now they said the power was out over in Angel’s Camp, and every gas station in town had been looted except for Bill’s Shell, where Bill and his two sons-in-law were taking shifts with a brace of hunting rifles.
Who was going to care about the fate of one little girl now?
Two days earlier Cass had stopped taking money from customers unless it was offered. Some people seemed to find comfort in clinging to routines from what was quickly becoming “Before”—and if people reached for their wallets then Cass made change. People took strange things. There were those who had come early on for the toilet paper and aspirin and bottled water—and all the alcohol, to Cass’s relief. Now people wandered the aisles aimlessly and took random items that would do them no good anymore. A prepaid calling card, a map.
Meddlin, her boss, hadn’t made an appearance for a few days. The QikGo, Cass figured, was all hers. No matter. She didn’t care about Meddlin. The others, the fragile web of workers who staffed the other shifts, had been gone since the media went silent.
On a brisk March morning, a day after the lights started to flicker and fail, Cass was talking to Teddy, a pale boy from the community college who lived in the apartments down the block with a handful of roommates who didn’t seem to like him very much. Cass made coffee, wondering if it would be the last time, and wiped down the counter. There hadn’t been a dairy delivery in weeks, so she set out a can of the powdered stuff.
When the door jangled they both turned and looked.
“Feverish,” Teddy said quietly. Cass nodded. The ones who’d been eating the blueleaf—the ones who’d lived—were unmistakable. The fever made their skin glow with a thin sheen of perspiration. Their movements were clumsy. But most remarkable were their eyes: the pupils contracted to tiny black dots. In dark-eyed people the effect was merely unsettling; in pale-eyed people it was both captivating and frightening.
If everything hadn’t fallen apart, there would have undoubtedly been teams of doctors and scientists gathering the sick and studying and caring for and curing them. As it was, all but those closest to the sick were just happy they kept to themselves.
“Glass over over,” one of them said, a man whose plaid shirt was buttoned wrong so that one side hung farther down than the other, speaking to no one in particular. A second, a woman with lank brown hair that lay around her shoulders in uncombed masses, walked to a rack that held only a few bags of chips and pushed it with a stiff outstretched hand, and as it fell to the floor, she smiled and laughed, not bothering to jump out of the way of the bags which popped and sprayed dry crumbs.
“Gehhhh,” she crowed, and Cass noticed something else strange about her, something she hadn’t seen before. The woman’s arms were raw and red, blood dried in patches, the skin chafed and missing in spots. It almost looked like a metal grater had been run up and down her arms, her shoulders, the tops of her hands. Cass checked the others: their flesh was also covered in scabs.
Cold alarm traveled up Cass’s spine. Something was wrong—very wrong. Something even worse than the fever and the unfocused eyes and the incoherent speech. She thought she recognized one of the group, a short muscular man of about forty, whose complicated facial hair was growing out into a sloppy beard. He used to come in for cigarettes every couple of days. He was wearing filthy tan cargo shorts, and the skin above his knees was covered with the same sort of cuts and scrapes as his forearms.
“Hey,” she said to him. He was standing in front of a shelf that held the few personal products left in the store—bottles of shampoo and mouthwash, boxes of Band-Aids. “Would you like …”
Her voice trailed off as he turned and stared at her with wide unblinking blue eyes. “Dome going,” he said softly, then raised his wounded forearm to his face and, eyes still fixed on her, licked his lips and took a delicate nip at his red, glistening skin. His teeth closed on the damaged flesh and pulled, the raw layers of dermis pulling away from his arm, stretching and then splitting, a shred of flesh about the size of a match tearing away, leaving a bright, tiny spot of blood that glistened and pooled into a larger drop.
For a moment he stared at her, the strip quivering between his teeth, and then his tongue poked out and he drew the ruined skin into his mouth and he chewed.
“Holy fuck, dude,” Teddy exclaimed, stepping back so fast that his foot thudded against the front of the counter. Cass’s stomach turned with revulsion—the man had chewed off his own skin and eaten it. Is that what had happened to his entire arm? Were the scabs and open wounds his own doing?
“Fuck dude,” the man mumbled as he burrowed his teeth along the ruined flesh of his arm, his tongue probing and searching. Looking for undamaged skin, Cass realized, horrified. The pattern of the wounds—covering the forearm and upper arm, fading at the elbow—it was exactly consistent with what he could reach with his own mouth, and, as if to confirm her suspicion, the man twisted his forearm in his mouth, seeking out any bit of flesh that was left undisturbed, finally trailing up to his hand and taking a deep bite from his scabby palm so that blood trickled between his lips and ran down his chin.
“Out,” Cass managed to say. “Get out.” She ran to the thin woman, the one who had toppled the chip stand, and pushed. The woman staggered backward, regarding Cass with faint interest.
“Cass,” she mumbled, as she found her footing. “Cass castle hassle.”
Cass stared at her. Then she made the connection: this was the girl who worked at the bank, on days when Cass took the cash down to deposit. Only Cass hadn’t seen her in a few weeks, since the banks closed, their windows shattered by looters who thought cash might somehow help, cash they found they couldn’t get because it was sealed in vaults no one could open.
The young woman used to wear her hair differently. She curled it every morning, and she favored bright eye shadow, green that shaded to black around her carefully rimmed lashes. She’d worn low-cut tops and dresses in colorful patterns, a far cry from what she wore now, a red knit t-shirt several sizes too big that was only partway tucked into her jeans.
“Do you know me?” Cass demanded, but the girl’s eyes flickered and shifted, and she murmured something that sounded like “yam yam” before shuffling over to where the others stood.
“Something’s fucked up with them,” Teddy said. “Do you hear that? They’re all like … delirious.”
Cass nodded. “We have to get them out.”
Teddy slipped past the little group and held the door open wide. “We were just getting ready to close,” he stammered, and despite her unease Cass noticed the “we” and was glad. Maybe Teddy would stay. Maybe he would keep her company. And when there was nothing left in the store to give away, maybe he would be there to help her figure out what to do next. Cass had been on her own for a long time now, and she had told herself she didn’t want anyone else, even on the days when she felt most alone, when the craving for a drink was almost unbearable.
But maybe, now, she did. A friend. How long since she had a friend?
Buoyed by the thought, she went up to the three feverish people. She put her hands to the back of the girl’s shirt, trying not to look at the raw and weeping flesh of her limbs, and pushed. The girl allowed herself to be guided to the door, and the others followed. When Cass got them outside, she ducked back in and shut the door, twisting the heavy bolt into place.
The day had been warm, but a low layer of clouds made a thin shadow over the sun. The three people she had locked outside looked up at the sun without blinking. Cass wondered if they were slowly going blind.
The girl took a step toward the man with the misbuttoned shirt, and for a moment Cass thought she was kissing him, pushing her face into the back of his neck. He didn’t flinch, but he didn’t turn to embrace her either.
“That’s—he’s—” Teddy said in alarm and Cass looked closer.
The woman shook her head and only then did Cass realize she’d sunk her teeth into the man’s flesh and was tugging at it. Tearing at it. Trying to rip off a shred.
Teddy turned away and vomited on the floor, as a bright trail of blood snaked down to the man’s collar, and the woman began to chew.
03
THE GIRL WITH THE BLADE WAS NAMED SAMMI, but Cass didn’t find that out until later. As dawn broke, they left the road and traveled through the woods. By the time they got to the school, maybe a mile down, the sun was high in the sky. It was the clearest sky yet since Cass had returned, flawless blue, and as they rounded a sharp bend topped by a rock outcropping and what must have once been a beautiful stand of cypress, the school stood out in stark relief against the eye-searing blue.
It had been built in the last few years Before. The architect had gone in for broad stretches of stucco, a roof molded to look like cedar, vaguely Prairie-style window placement and overhanging eaves. The sign still announced, in iron letters against hewn stone, Copper Creek Middle School.
Cass knew this school. They’d built it halfway between Silva and Terryville. She had driven past it a hundred times, thinking about Ruthie going there someday.
She was close to home.
The girl hadn’t spoken a single word. Cass tapped the girl’s blade against her own thigh, loosening her grip on the wind-breaker she’d taken off and looped through the girl’s sleeves as a kind of makeshift harness before remembering the dangers and grabbing it even tighter. I’m sorry, she mouthed, but only because the girl couldn’t see. She led them across the parking lot with sure, quick steps, shoulders held high, and Cass couldn’t help but admire her courage.
For all the girl knew, Cass would have followed through with her threat and sliced her ear to ear. The blade was a good one, a two-edged straight stiletto with a small guard, the blade itself perhaps six inches long. Someone loved this girl. Someone had made sure she had a good weapon, had cared if she lived another day.
She pulled the girl tight against her and bit out the words, hating herself for saying them—and knowing they were lies. “When someone comes out, tell them I’ll kill you,” she murmured. “Tell them that first.”
The girl only nodded.
It made sense to choose a school, of course. The threats of Before seemed minor now. Everyone worried that deranged people would come into schools and steal the children away, harm them, kill them. Or that one of the students would bring a gun to school and take out his classmates. Yes, things like that had happened back then, just often enough to keep everyone vigilant, and the schools had been built with more and greater safety measures until, in the end, they were fortresses, reinforced and sealed and locked down.
In some ways it wasn’t so hard to stay safe, even now. A basic wall could keep Beaters away. A fence, even one that was only ten feet tall, like those that surrounded the school’s courtyard. As long as there were no citizens close by, nothing to attract the Beaters and drive them into a frenzy of flesh-lust, nearly any barrier at all would be enough to make them lose their focus and wander back to their fetid nestlike encampments.
They said—at least, near the end of Cass’s second life—that the Beaters were waning. Cass wasn’t so sure. It was true that they had formed larger and larger groups, nomadic little bands that took over neighborhoods and entire towns, so they weren’t appearing in sporadic places as much. They seemed to have flashes of longing for Before, just as everyone else did. You could see them sometimes, doing homely little things. It was like the bits of speech that sometimes bubbled from their lips, phrases that meant nothing, fragments that tumbled from whatever was left of their minds, dislodged from memory that had given way to the fever and the disease. Cass had seen one trying to ride a bicycle, and falling off when its jerky motions caused the wheel to spin and flip. It tried again and again and then suddenly lost interest and wandered away. Another time she had seen one at a clothesline, taking the pins off one by one and holding them in its ruined hand, then reattaching them.
Cass had known a woman who had been a social worker Before. Her name was Miranda. They had not been friends, exactly, but they had sheltered together in the library before a half-dozen Beaters came through a back door that had been left open one day and dragged her off.
Miranda had once worked with violent offenders, counseling them to look deep inside themselves to find the key to who they were before abuse and anger had changed them. She had been extraordinarily successful, the pride of the Anza County Correctional System’s Anger Replacement Therapy program. Miranda had believed that in those moments when the Beaters appeared to be connecting to a memory, miming some homely everyday task, there was a chance to remind them of who they had once been. That if you could reach them in that moment—if you could reconnect the splintered shards of memory—that you could reverse the process of the disease. That the afflicted would comprehend the horror of what they had become, and choose to come back.
Miranda had wanted to try it. It wouldn’t be so hard to capture just one, she had argued at one of the “town hall” meetings Bobby held every few days. Bobby was the de facto leader of the ragtag group of a few dozen people sheltering in the library. Miranda tried to recruit a few of the men: one who used to be a deputy sheriff, several hard-muscle types who’d worked in construction, and, of course, Bobby. They all listened to Miranda’s plan: capture a Beater, bring it back … restrain it, observe it. Wait until the right moment and then she, trained in the ways of the desperate, the outcast, would speak to it.
Bobby listened, but he could not contain his incredulity. “You think you’re, what, some kind of zombie whisperer? Because you got a few crack whores to give up their babies? Is that it, Miranda, you think a Beater’s like some guy beats his wife on payday?”
Miranda had argued back, passionately. But when the Beaters came for her that day, breaking in that forgotten back door while the kitchen detail was cleaning up from a lunch of kaysev shoots and canned apple pie filling, when Miranda had taken some trash to the back hall by herself, it wasn’t reasoned argument that issued from her lips. It was screaming, as raw and desperate as the screams of any of the others who were taken, screams that echoed in Cass’s mind on nights when sleep wouldn’t come.
The school, though … Cass guessed that they had not lost anyone that way here. In addition to the fences, brick walls surrounded the entire courtyard. The doors would be the type that shut automatically. Guards would be posted. They undoubtedly did all their harvesting and raiding at night. Maybe they even had a few flashlights, some batteries.
Why had they let this girl out on her own? It made no sense. Even though it should have still been safe—the Beaters rarely went hunting before the sun rose high in the sky—what adult, what parent, would allow a child to go out alone? Had she somehow gotten separated from others? Had some greater threat come along?
There was a sudden clang and the door to the school burst open and a woman ran out, wailing. Her flip-flops slapped against the pavement, and she stumbled at the kaysev-choked median that once kept the carpooling moms in orderly lines. A pair of men chased after her, trying to restrain her, but the woman shook them off. “Sammi!” she screamed, but Cass pulled the girl tight against her and held the blade to the soft skin under her chin.
“Stop there,” Cass yelled. And then she added the one thing that might convince them to do as she said. “I am not a Beater!”
She watched them look at her, watched the terror in the woman’s expression and the fury and determination in the men’s slowly tinge with doubt. She felt their gazes on her ragged skin, her scalp where the hair was only now growing back. She waited, holding her breath, until she saw that they knew.
Until they saw that her pupils were like anyone else’s, black and pronounced.
“I don’t want to hurt this girl,” she called, trying to keep her voice steady. “I don’t want any trouble. I am not a Beater and I can …” She had been about to say that she could explain her appearance, but that was a lie. She couldn’t explain, and no one else could either. “I can prove it, if you let me. I’m not asking to come in. I don’t want anything from you except to be allowed to continue into town.”
“Let the girl go,” one of the men said.
The woman sank down to her knees and extended her arms beseechingly. “Please,” she keened. “Please please please please please …”
And something shifted inside Cass. A memory of Ruthie being carried away, screaming, sent to live with Cass’s mother and the man she’d married. The man who’d made her life hell. She remembered her own pleas, how she had gone down on her knees just like the woman before her now, how she’d collapsed on the floor after the front door shut behind Mim and Byrn and the court people carrying her Ruthie away, how she’d cried into the sour-smelling carpet until she could barely breathe.
She released the girl then and watched her go to her mother, jogging across the pavement, but not before glancing back over her shoulder. A defiant glance, sparked with victory. The girl felt she’d won. Well, Cass certainly felt like she’d lost, so maybe that was fitting.
The mother gathered the girl up in her arms as though she wanted to meld her to herself, and Cass had to turn away. The men must have thought she was trying to leave, though, because an instant later she was knocked to the ground and she felt the weight of them crushing her into the gravel-pocked asphalt. The rough pavement smelled like tar and scraped against her cheek. The blade had fallen from her hand. No matter; these men were guards. They would have their own. And it would be a quick death, better than she deserved.
She waited, but after a moment the weight lifted and a strong hand grabbed hers, pulling her up roughly.
“Inside,” he said, and that was the first word she ever heard Smoke say.
04
THEY HAD SET UP A KITCHEN OF SORTS IN THE school’s courtyard, and a small crew was cooking over a fire in a makeshift hearth. Ginger: the scent of sautéed kaysev was in the air. A group of children sat at a table taken from one of the classrooms, eating, and Cass saw that they’d made the kaysev into a sort of pancake. She’d seen that before, when people were figuring out different ways to prepare the plant. After so many weeks of eating it raw, the smell of the cakes—made with a flour ground from the dried beans—prompted a powerful hunger she didn’t know she was capable of anymore.
And there was another smell, one that made her doubt her senses. “Is that—”
“Coffee.” Her escort was a man of medium height, hard-muscled, with broad shoulders and powerful forearms. Sun-streaked brown hair fell into his chambray-blue eyes and he kept pushing it impatiently aside. His mouth was on the generous side, almost sensuous, but his expression was hard. “Once a week, on Sunday. It’s strong but you only get one cup.”
“You know what day it is?” Cass asked, surprised. Who kept track, anymore?
The man didn’t answer, but led her over to a door that stood open, propped with a stack of books. U.S. History, Cass read on the spines. Books, left out to the elements—who would abandon a book outside to be ruined?—but thoughts like that led straight to a spiral of despair.
Whenever something reminded her of Before, it was a quick trip back and it hit her hard. Like now: textbooks had been sacred, once. But books needed readers. And all the teachers were dead from hunger or disease or riots, or dragged off by the Beaters, or desperate, like Cass, just to survive. There was no one left to teach children like Ruthie.
Cass forced those thoughts from her mind as the man guided her into the hallway, his hand at her waist gentler now. Earlier, he’d been rough as he searched her, patting down the ragged and stinking canvas pants and athletic shirt that stuck to her, the same clothes she’d woken up in a couple of weeks earlier. He’d avoided touching her scabbed flesh, and stopped short of searching the folds and crevices of her body, for which she was grateful. He’d lingered at her hair, combing his fingers through its greasy, filthy length while he held the ends bunched in his fist. The stubble at the front had caused him to frown, but he’d said nothing.
It had hurt like hell when his hands moved along her back, and she’d ground her teeth to avoid crying out in pain. There, whole sections of flesh had been ripped from her body and it was taking much longer to heal than the scabs on her arms. An ordinary citizen would have succumbed to infection, blood loss, exposure. But somehow in the days after the things tore into her back, she had developed a freakishly powerful immune system and was healing. How she had recovered from the disease, she had no idea.
But thin layers of skin were slowly building from the scabbed edges. Smoke had not detected anything amiss in the ruined landscape of her back, and for that Cass was grateful. She didn’t want him to see.
Cass blinked as her eyes adjusted from the bright morning sun to the gloom of the interior. A single transom window lit the space; the other windows were covered by miniblinds. They were in what had been the school’s administrative office. The bulletin boards had been stripped bare except up at the top where a few ragged papers were still attached with pushpins. ARTCARVED—ORDER YOUR CLASS RING NOW one read. Another advertised $$CASH$$ FOR PRINTER CARTRIDGES.
A woman came around the corner and stopped short, staring at Cass with shock, processing her appearance.
“We found her outside,” the man said quickly. “She brought Sammi back.”
The woman merely nodded, but Cass could see the relief written plain on her face. A child had been missing. The people sheltering here had been waiting, knowing it was likely that their beautiful young girl would never return. None of them were new to loss now—by most estimates, three-quarters of the population was dead, victims of starvation and fever and suicide and Beaters. You learned to protect yourself. But the cost of steeling yourself against grief was that you had to steel yourself against joy, as well.
“You might as well have some,” the woman said, and only then did Cass notice that she carried a glass carafe of steaming black coffee. “Get her a cup, Smoke.”
The man called Smoke went into the hall, leaving the woman to stare openly at Cass. She was a lean woman with poorly cut hair, pieces of it jutting unevenly at her cheekbones. But she was clean—remarkably so. Her skin looked healthy and her eyes were clear. Cass found herself wondering if she was the man’s lover, and her gaze went to the woman’s fine small hands, the nails trimmed neatly. Her smooth pale legs under the plain denim shorts.
“I’m Nora,” the woman said.
Cass cleared her throat. Until this morning, she hadn’t spoken in many days, and she was out of practice. “I’m Cassandra. Cass.”
Smoke returned carrying a large blue mug. Nora poured from the carafe and Cass accepted the mug and held it near her lips, not sipping, the glazed porcelain almost too hot to bear. Her eyes fluttered closed as she inhaled as deeply as she could, and when she opened them, she saw that Smoke was staring at her with an expression that was part curiosity and part calculation, and no part fear.
She drank.
The taste brought back a sharp memory of the room in the basement where she attended a thousand A.A. meetings. The first time she accepted a cup of coffee only because everyone else was drinking it. She’d never liked it much, drank it only on the occasional morning when she needed a little extra lift to get going, but at that meeting she drank two cups and on the way home she bought a ten-cup model at Wal-Mart, along with two pounds of ground beans.
At work, she made the first pot at 5:30 a.m. when her shift started and the last—dozens of pots later—when whoever was on afternoons arrived at two o’clock.
This coffee was a little odd. It was like the kind her mother used to make before her father left, in an old tin percolator with green enamel flowers worn nearly away. For a moment Cass felt an intense ache for her mother—for who she’d been before she met Byrn, before she started insisting that Cass call her Mim. For the woman who’d once read to her at bedtime, who’d let Cass bury her face in the crook of her neck and breathe the soap and hair spray and perfume and sweat.
Slowly, not trusting her hand not to tremble, Cass lowered the mug to the table. “May I sit?”
“Yes, of course,” Nora said. She exchanged a look with Smoke as he pulled out a chair for her, and Cass was certain that these two were lovers. Only, troubled ones. You could see it in the way his gaze slid warily away.
Cass leaned over the mug and let the steam warm her face. “What’s today’s date?” she asked.
Nora blew out a little breath before she answered. “August twenty-sixth. It’s Sunday.”
August 26. So it had been almost two months since the end of what she’d come to think of as her second life.
She thought about that last day. Not the last moments, which she wouldn’t remember, but what came before.
She’d been sheltering in the library for a couple of months before she went to get Ruthie, determining that there was finally no one left to try to stop her. The first morning she had her baby back, they woke up together on the makeshift bed in Cass’s corner of the library, away from the others, tucked in a narrow corridor behind the periodicals, beneath a water fountain that hadn’t flowed in a month. Cass kept her space clean, her few possessions stacked and folded and arranged with care.
That day, she woke to the sweet scent of Ruthie’s hair, her small body tucked perfectly into her embrace, her head under Cass’s chin. She lay still, breathing happiness in and hope out, watching the sun cast strips of yellow light on the wall through the miniblinds. A week earlier, they’d lost Miranda, and Cass’s mood had faltered. But now that she had Ruthie, life seemed like a possibility once more.
“You going to explain that?” Nora said, not unkindly, pointing at Cass’s arms.
Cass folded them self-consciously. They hurt, but not as much as they had when she first regained consciousness, lying in an empty field. Then, she had been horrified at the way she looked, her wounds raw, the crusty scabs black in some places, leaking clear reddish fluid. Her back had been an agony of shredded flesh and it was still healing, but the wounds on her arms were almost completely healed, marking crisscross scars across her flesh.
“On the road,” she mumbled. “Things happen, you know. I fell … I ran into things.”
“No shit,” Nora said.
“Go easy,” Smoke murmured, a warning in his voice.
“Look at her,” Nora hissed, her voice low and angry. “We’ve seen that before. You know we have.”
Smoke shook his head. “It isn’t the same.”
“Only because you don’t want to see it!”
“The same as what?” Cass demanded.
Smoke looked at the table, wouldn’t meet her eyes. “There’s been a few kids—”
“Not just kids,” Nora interrupted.
“Mostly kids, teenagers, they cut themselves, they pull out their hair.”
“Why would anyone do that?” Cass asked, horrified.
“To look like Beaters,” Nora said. “To look like you. To mock the world. Or to come into settlements and everyone takes off screaming and then they help themselves to whatever they want—water, food, drugs, anything. That is, if they don’t get themselves shot first.”
“You think I—You’re fucking insane.” Cass’d been trying to hold on to her patience, but this—Nora’s implication that she had done this to herself on purpose—it was too much. “So where’s all my stuff, then? If I’ve been terrorizing citizens and stealing from them, where is it? I don’t have anything on me, nothing.”
“I don’t mean to—”
“Just let her tell her story.” Smoke glared at Nora, and after a long moment, the woman gave a faint shrug.
Cass took a breath, let it out slowly, considered how much she wanted to give away. These people could help her, or not. They could let her go, or not. Already she felt certain that they would. There was no cruelty in them, only caution, and who could blame them for that?
“The girl,” she hedged. “Sammi. Why was she out alone?”
“Why don’t you tell us about you first,” Nora said coldly, and this time she refused to acknowledge Smoke’s warning glance.
“All right.” Cass gathered her thoughts. “I lived in Silva. In Tenaya Estates. You know—the trailers.”
Smoke nodded. “I know the place.”
“I lived … alone. I worked at the QikGo off Lone Pine. Back in the spring, during the Siege, I stayed on for a while. I thought … I didn’t want to give up, I guess. But, you know, when they started coming into town more …”
She didn’t add that people stopped showing up at the A.A. meetings, until one day she was the only one in the room. That day, she knew she couldn’t live alone anymore.
“Anyway I went over to the library to shelter.” She dug her fingernails into the callus of her thumb, under the table where they couldn’t see. The next part was hard. “I was there the first time the Beaters came. When they took a friend of mine.”
And the second time.
She couldn’t bring herself to tell it. Not yet. “Are there still … is anyone still over there?”
“Yes, last time anyone was there, they were up to around fifty.” Smoke hesitated and Cass got the impression he wasn’t telling the truth—not all of it, anyway. “They got it reinforced. They haven’t lost anyone … not inside, anyway, in a while. We have eighty here. There’s a few dozen in the firehouse. And you know, you have your folks who are still trying to stay in their own places. More than you’d think, really.”
“Fewer every day,” Nora muttered.
“Not our place to judge,” Smoke said in a voice so low Cass was sure it was meant only for Nora.
“Do you talk to them … the people at the library?” she asked. Now that she was so close, fear bloomed in her heart.
“We did,” Smoke said. “Until … well, we had some trouble. A couple of weeks ago. Since then we’ve stayed local.”
“Seventeen days,” Nora said, with surprising bitterness.
Smoke nodded, acknowledging her point.
“What happened?”
“You don’t know?” The suspicion was back.
Cass looked from one to the other, mystified. “No, I don’t—I told you, I’ve been on my own since I woke up and—”
“Some people would just say that it’s awfully convenient that you can’t remember anything,” Nora said. “And that you just happen to show up after the Rebuilders set up camp over there.”
“Who are—”
“So now you want to accuse her of being a Rebuilder?” Smoke said. “Really, Nora? That’s a little paranoid, even for you.”
Nora scowled. “Freewalkers don’t threaten to kill children.”
“Everyone would have thought she was a—”
“Don’t say it,” Cass interrupted, resisting the urge to clap her hands over her ears. She couldn’t bear to hear the word, to hear the accusation, again. “Please. Look, why don’t I just leave now.”
“No one said anything about that,” Smoke said tiredly. “You’re safe here. Everyone’s just on edge. It’s been hard. Shit, no one needs to tell you that.”
For a moment no one spoke. Cass could feel Nora’s anger clogging the air still.
“All I want to know is how she’s managed not to be attacked,” she said, addressing Smoke alone. “Walking alone as long as she says she has—how does that happen?”
Cass glared back. “I’ve been lucky, I guess.”
“Lucky,” Nora repeated, spitting out the word as though it was poison.
“Listen to me. My daughter was there,” Cass snapped. “In the library. The second time we were attacked. We were outside. She wanted … to be outside.”
What Ruthie had really wanted was to pick dandelions, one of the few plants to survive the Siege. Cass had taught her to hold the blooms under her chin, so that the yellow reflected off her pale creamy skin. Oh, look, you must be made of butter, she teased Ruthie, peppering her sweet face with kisses. And then Ruthie would laugh and laugh and tickle Cass’s chin with bunches of dandelions wilting in her chubby little hands.
Ruthie wanted to pick dandelions, and they were hard to find at dusk, so it was barely twilight when Cass led her outside to the little patch of dead lawn in front of the library, after she looked carefully in every direction.
But not carefully enough. Because the Beaters were learning. And they had learned to hide. They hid behind a panel truck on two flat tires that had been abandoned half a block away … and they waited. And then they moved faster than Cass thought possible, awkward loping strides accompanied by their gurgling breathless moans, and Cass grabbed for Ruthie, who was tracing the path of a caterpillar with a stick and thought it was a game and danced out of the way and darted into the last glorious rays of sun as it slipped down the horizon—
The challenge drained from Nora’s face. “Don’t,” she begged.
Smoke placed a work-roughened hand over Nora’s and didn’t look at Cass.
“Nora,” he said heavily. “She, uh … her nephew. She was watching him.”
“I was supposed to be watching him,” Nora said hollowly. She pulled her hand away and stood, knocking over her chair. She backed out of the room, brushing against the coffeepot on the counter. It fell to the ground, shattering and splashing hot coffee, but she just turned and bolted down the hall.
“She’s …” Smoke said, watching her go. Then he turned back to Cass. “I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” Cass said, but the truth was that she did need it. Not the apology—but the way his voice softened when he spoke to her and the way his eyes narrowed with concern when he looked at her, taking in what had happened to her poor body and not turning away.
That. Most of all she needed that, the not turning away.
“Something did happen to me,” she found herself saying, the words tumbling out as though a trapdoor had been opened inside her. “Something bad.”
Telling was crazy. Telling could get her thrown out of here. Or worse. But Smoke looked at her as though he saw her, saw the real her, and she wanted to hold on to that, wanted him to know the truth and still see her.
The kindness he’d already shown her should have been enough. Settle for that, she willed herself. Settle for good enough.
But Cass could never leave well enough alone. She didn’t know how. She wanted someone—one other human being—to know what had happened, and not turn away.
“Your daughter,” Smoke said softly. “Was she taken?”
“No,” Cass said. “But I was.”
05
SMOKE HELPED HER CUT HER HAIR.
He handed her the scissors, a pair of office shears that were too bulky and too dull to do a good job, even if she had a mirror, even if she knew what she was doing. He’d said it would give her less to explain to the others. Cass knew he was right. Still, when she made the first cut, the sight of her filthy and matted hair falling to the floor caused her to suck in her breath.
Her hair had been her best feature, once. Long and thick and shiny, dark blond burnished with gold, curving inward where it lay across her collarbones. She refused to cry as the hair fell away, but when she had cut as far as she could reach, and Smoke closed his large hand gently over hers and took the scissors away, she squeezed her eyes shut and mourned the loss of the last faint reminder of her beauty as he carefully trimmed the back.
Afterward, he gathered her hair with his hands and haphazardly piled it in a file box while Cass got control of herself. He carefully avoided looking her in the face and Cass knew that she was hard to look at, an ugly, hard-worn thing. She demanded that he take her to the library that night, and he agreed once Cass made it clear that she was going with or without him.
He tried to talk her into waiting a few days, when the full moon had waned. The Beaters had become bolder, he warned her, coming out on moonlit nights as well as mornings and early evenings. Gone were the days when they only ventured out in the middle of the day.
But Cass didn’t care. She’d been out every night since she woke up; she wasn’t going to stop now, not when she was so close to Ruthie.
Smoke took her to the cafeteria, which they had set up as a community room with toys and activities for the kids, and chairs and sofas arranged for conversation. Makeshift shelves held kitchen implements and plates and cups. Blankets and clothing were folded and stacked. There were rows of paperbacks, vases of the few surviving wildflowers. Board games and puzzles were set out on tables and two separate card games were in full swing.
Eight or nine kids—toddlers up to six- or seven-year-olds—played on carpet scraps arranged on the floor at one end of the cafeteria. Sammi was watching them, along with a boy about her age.
Smoke led Cass into the large open space, and the adults’ conversations died. People set down their playing cards, the baskets of clothes they had been folding, the kaysev they had been separating and cleaning and preparing. They regarded Cass with open curiosity and, in some cases, suspicion and fear and hostility.
Sammi’s mother was in a group of women who had been chatting as they washed and dried dishes. There was a tub of soapy water, another of clear, no doubt creek water that had been boiled. Cass had seen the blackened fire pit in the courtyard, the hearth built of rebar and steel beams and that fireproof plastic weave.
“This is Cass,” Smoke said into the silence. “She’s a citizen, just like us.”
“She’s not like us,” Sammi’s mother said, setting down her washrag. Her voice shook. “She tried to—”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Sammi said. She put down the bucket of toys she’d been holding. A pretend zoo was laid out on the floor, and she and the boy had been helping the younger kids stack wooden blocks to make cages.
“It’s not okay,” her mother hissed, but she stayed where she was. One of the other women laid a hand on her arm and said something that Cass couldn’t hear.
“She only did what she had to,” Sammi added, glaring at her mother defiantly. “Besides, if you didn’t keep me cooped up in here like I was in jail—”
“Don’t, Sammi,” the boy said quietly. “Not now.”
“I’d rather take my chances out there,” Sammi said, pointing out the window at the street that ran alongside the building, beyond the iron fence. Cass saw abandoned cars, some with graffiti painted on the side. Several had crashed into each other, by accident or on purpose, crushed metal and broken glass surrounding doors that no one had bothered to close.
Then she saw something else, something that struck white-hot fear in her heart. In the yard of a squat brick bungalow across the street, a small clump of Beaters shuffled around a kiddie pool they’d managed to drag from somewhere. One was trying to sit in it. Two others were trying to turn it over. Another stood close to the house, staring into a large picture window and absently tugging at its ears.
She wasn’t the only one to spot them. A few sharp gasps, a collective wave of fear that ran through the room.
“They’ve started gathering here in the afternoon. Waiting …” Smoke sighed, running his hands through his hair. For a moment he looked a decade older than the thirty-five Cass had taken him for. “Sometimes a dozen of them. They wander off when the sun starts to get low. For now, anyway.”
The Beaters had everyone’s attention. The argument between Sammi and her mother was forgotten. Cass took the opportunity to slip out of the room, Smoke following her without a word. She could not stay there, watching the Beaters, enduring the scrutiny of all those people.
She would wait in the office, alone, until evening. After all, she’d become accustomed to her own company.
Cass added it up in her head. A hundred seventy-five, maybe two hundred people left, between the library and the school and firehouse … Silva’s population had been over four thousand before the famine and the riots and the suicides and the fever deaths. Before the Beaters began carrying the survivors away.
As the sun sank down in the sky, Cass felt restless. She had been alone in the office for hours, waiting for night to come. No one had disturbed her. No one had even walked by the door. She stood up and stretched, easing her hip and thigh muscles. They were tight all the time now, from the walking.
When she regained consciousness all those days ago, she saw the Sierra foothills in the distance, the flat dry central valley all around her. She had been lying under a stand of creosote a few yards from the edge of a farm road, one she didn’t know. All those years living in Silva, ever since Mim and Byrn had moved there during Cass’s senior year of high school, she had never traveled far from the long, flat, straight stretch of Highway 161 that led up into the hills from the central valley. The few times she’d made the four-hour trip to San Francisco with friends, to see a concert or spend the night on someone’s friend’s couch getting high and drinking cheap wine, she’d barely noticed the chicken and cattle ranches flanking the highway, the clots of houses that passed for towns, the collapsing sheds and silos left over from more prosperous times.
She had been lying in a thicket of dead brown weeds. Kaysev had taken root in patches between the dead plants, and Cass had been curled up with her face in a soft clump, its gingery scent in her nostrils along with the other smells: the metal tang of crusted blood, the rotting spoils of her own breath, her body’s odor foul and acrid. Her mind had been clouded and troubled, both racing and stalled, somehow. She had no idea how she’d come to be lying, bruised and mangled, in the weeds, and she wondered if she was dead, because her last memory was praying for death when the Beaters closed their ruined fingers around her arms.
That was all she remembered, and it came to her through a dense tangle of lost and broken thoughts, so she understood that time had passed since that terrible moment. How much time, she had no idea.
The brown weeds made a stark pattern against the clear sky and Cass had wished she could just close her eyes and finish the job of dying.
But then she saw what had become of her flesh.
Stretching made the wounds on her back throb, and Cass pulled her shirt up and over her shoulders to let the room’s cool air reach them. Just for a moment, just to take away the constant ache for a little while. She leaned into the stretch, and tried not to think. Only to wait, for Smoke to come and get her and take her to what was next.
A sound at the door broke her concentration. Cass pulled her shirt down hastily, but it was too late.
It was the girl. Sammi. She had approached the room so quietly.
And she had seen.
06
FOR A LONG MOMENT THEY STARED AT EACH other, Cass holding her breath, the girl’s eyes wide with surprise and curiosity—but no fear.
“Can I come in?”
“Of course,” Cass said.
The girl slipped gracefully into a chair at the same table where Cass had drunk coffee hours earlier. She had washed and changed her clothes, and her hair had been combed and plaited neatly. The braids made her look even younger, but Cass could see that she was well into adolescence, maybe fourteen. That might explain her rebellion against her mother, but Cass figured it went further than that—there was a reckless spirit to her. A spirit not so different from her own.
“So you really were attacked by Beaters,” the girl said. “What happened?”
Cass winced. Telling Smoke had been hard enough, especially when he asked to see her scars. The look on his face—the horror, the pity—had been almost more than she could bear, but it was worse when he turned away from her. It had taken him a few minutes to get his composure back, and he’d remained cool and distant even when he promised to keep her secret.
“I was …” Cass started to speak, found that her mouth was too dry. She licked her lips and cleared her throat, wished for water. “I was taken, yes. But, I, I woke up and I was … all right.”
Sammi didn’t hide her skepticism. “What about those cuts? Did one of them do that to you or did you do it to yourself?”
Cass had wondered the same thing a thousand times. The wound pattern held clues. The damage was all in places she could reach by herself, and it was safe to say she was the one who’d bitten and chewed herself.
The wounds on her back were another matter. The Beaters always started with a person’s back, where the large uninterrupted stretch of flesh made their ravenous feeding easiest. Only after they chewed it away did they move to the backs of the legs, the buttocks—and eventually, when they had eaten away all they could, they turned their victim over and started on the front.
She touched her stubbled hair. “I did this.”
“So, you were one, for a while at least,” Sammi said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Did you eat the blueleaf?”
Cass shook her head, but who could say with certainty? When the government dropped kaysev from planes all over the nation, its last act before it ceased to exist, the second strain had somehow gotten mixed in. Everyone had a theory about that: most thought the researchers made some sort of mistake, sending the wrong seed, but some people thought blueleaf had evolved on its own, that mutating cells had been heeding nothing more than the call of evolution. And some saw the hand of God in the appearance of the rogue leaves, whose edges were slightly pocked and tinged faintly blue—His punishment for the profligacy and faithlessness of the last decade.
The blueleaf took root, an occasional low-growing and stunted patch among the healthy kaysev. At first no one noticed. By the time anyone made the connection, it was too late for the first wave of the infected.
Detection wasn’t the only problem. The early stage of the disease didn’t hint at what the victim would ultimately become—it hid its curse in a cloak of sensual delirium.
First came the fever, of course—and that felled thirty percent of the infected, mostly the very young and the old. But if you survived that, you felt so fucking good. Word quickly spread that when the fever leveled off, you experienced a high not unlike ecstasy. Your skin pigmentation deepened, an appealing effect when coupled with the feverish sheen. The irises of your eyes intensified—green turned jade, blue shone brilliant sapphire, brown sparked gold—but your pupils stopped dilating, and without bright light you could barely see.
You ceased to care, as your mind started to take elaborate journeys on its own. The hallucinations were elaborate and often sexual. There were no terrors or suicidal impulses. You simply lay about, flushed and beautiful, sighing with pleasure.
For a week or two. Until you started to pick at your skin and pull at your hair. Until your confusion deepened and your speech grew unintelligible, and your blood burned hot and you flayed your own skin and developed a taste for uninfected flesh.
Cass had spotted a few blueleaf plants here and there as she followed the road up into the foothills. Citizens learned to kill the plant on sight, and they’d managed to drive the wretched thing nearly to extinction only a few months after they first appeared. Cass herself pulled the plants from the ground and trampled them whenever she saw them, even though her body had somehow rebuffed the disease.
“My mom says blueleaf’s only here. That it’s not in the rest of the country.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s been freewalkers through—some guy who had this ancient radio, like from the 1960s or something? There was something about it that it could get a signal even with all the power dead. And he said he talked to people in other states and they don’t have blueleaf. They have the kaysev but no one’s getting sick.”
“That’s—that’s not possible. Everyone would leave California if that was true.”
Sammi shrugged. “That’s what he was trying to do. He was going to walk all the way to Nevada. He just stayed one night. A couple people believed him, they went, too.”
“Well.” Cass spoke carefully; she knew how fine the line was between hope and fantasy. “It would be nice. Maybe, once they get the Beaters under control …”
“Yeah. I know it’s a long shot and all. I’m just sayin’.” She looked increasingly embarrassed, twisting her hair around nail-bitten fingers. “But I was just wondering. You know, how you got infected.”
Cass took a deep breath. “I was attacked. I remember that. I don’t remember what came after, but—well, I’m hoping someone at the library will know.”
“You think they might still have your little girl there. Your daughter.”
Cass nodded, unable to speak.
“I hope they do,” Sammi said fiercely. “My mom, she worries about me like all the time? She and my dad separated back in January and he moved up to Sykes and we don’t know if he, well, you know. I mean the last time we talked to him, he and this guy, this guy who had gas, you know, like a full tank or almost a full tank? My dad was going to have this guy bring him down, only the roads …”
She stopped talking and swallowed and Cass spotted the hole in her bravery.
The roads. They’d become nearly impassible in places, as gas ran out and gridlocked intensified, as wrecks piled up and people panicked and abandoned their cars and tried to make it back. A few did. Many others didn’t. And a few just stayed locked inside, terrified, until they starved or someone shot them for their fuel or one of the Beaters happened to remember what it was to open a door, the memory of the mechanical motion released from the recesses of its ruined mind, a small step to feed its larger need.
A few days before she moved to the library, Cass had watched from her kitchen window as a car tried to navigate the debris-strewn street that ran along the front of the trailer park. Woodbine Avenue had once been one of the busiest streets in town, with two lanes in each direction, so it was a logical choice for someone trying to get through—or out of—town. But Cass hadn’t seen a car in days. No one had gas—and no one had anywhere to go. Rumor had it that the biggest cities had fallen first, and anyone who’d set out for Sacramento or San Francisco hadn’t been seen since.
But Cass didn’t recognize this car, a blue Camry with a crumpled front bumper. When it slowed to a stop at the site of an accident that had blocked the road for weeks—a semi truck had overturned trying to make the tight turn, causing a pileup that no one had bothered to clear, the drivers abandoning their vehicles to search for shelter—Cass waited for the car to turn around and go back the way it had come.
For some reason, this driver hesitated.
In seconds a cluster of the diseased loped out from behind the 7-Eleven across the street, lurching and babbling. Most started trying to climb on top of the car, moaning with hunger and frustration, but one held a large rock in his scabby hand. He beat the rock against the driver side window, persisting even when blood dripped from his arm, cawing excitedly, until the glass finally shattered.
The Beaters screamed as they dragged the driver, a middle-aged man dressed in a wrinkled button-down shirt and plaid shorts, from the car.
He screamed louder.
“Maybe,” Cass started. She had to steel herself for the lie she was about to tell. “Maybe he’s there still. In Sykes. There must be shelters there. Groups of people, like this …”
Sammi shrugged, an obvious effort to be brave. “Whatever.”
“I can try to find out, you know. When I get into town.”
“They won’t know. No one’s traveling between much anymore. I mean, besides you.”
“What were you doing outside this morning?” Cass asked gently.
Sammi looked at her hands; the nails were bitten. “I sneak out sometimes,” she said. “When the raiding parties go out at night. I hate it here, it’s like being in jail. And I always come back before it gets light out.”
“What about this morning?”
“I … kind of got turned around.”
“You were lost,” Cass clarified. “Sammi … you have to know how dangerous it is to be out there alone.”
“You were alone. How far have you walked, anyway?” Sammi demanded. “Since you, you know, woke up.”
“Look, Sammi … you can’t tell anyone what I’m telling you. About me being attacked.”
Sammi nodded solemnly. “I promise.”
“No, really. You can’t tell anyone.”
Sammi nodded again.
“And you have to stop going outside on your own.”
This time Sammi didn’t react, didn’t meet her eyes.
“Say it, Sammi, please. I know you don’t like being cooped up here, but just promise me you won’t go out alone.”
Sammi rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay, I promise.”
Cass sighed. “I don’t know how far I’ve walked, really. At first I didn’t … It was like I was sleeping and awake at the same time. I didn’t go very far for a while. I was stopping a lot … maybe that was a week. Until I felt right again. And even then …” Cass passed a hand over her eyes, rubbed the skin between her eyebrows. “Even then I didn’t cover a lot of distance. Because of trying to hide when it was light out. You know, to keep watch.”
And at night, when the moon went behind a cloud, or the stars failed to light the sky, she couldn’t go very far at all, because she couldn’t see. Back in the library, she’d hoarded matches and two good flashlights and a cache of batteries. But she had none of that when she woke up. No pack, no food, no supplies, and she was wearing clothes she’d never seen before.
How far did she travel every night: maybe a few miles? As close as she could figure it, Cass had started out about thirty-five miles down-mountain, maybe a little more since she had weaved back and forth to avoid going too close to the road. The Beaters didn’t leave the roads when they could help it; they liked to follow an easy path, and their stumbling, awkward gait did not lend itself to obstacles. On uneven terrain they stumbled and fell a lot.
Still, if they’d caught her scent, a glimpse of her in the woods, nothing would stop them from coming after her, no matter how deep she ran, so she had tried to stay out of sight of the road. And roads eventually ran into towns, which she had to avoid more and more once she noticed, like Smoke had said, that the Beaters were clustering around the population centers of Before.
One time, a few days after she woke up, she’d been dozing the afternoon away in the skeleton of a live oak tree. It was a hundred yards or so from the road, and upwind, so Cass figured it would be safe enough. Low in the foothills, the trees were sparse to begin with, and most had died; there was little in the way of cover.
A sound broke nearby and she came awake instantly, her heart racing. She almost fell as she looked around for the source of the sound. Then she spotted the man who had walked directly below the tree, his footfalls cracking on broken branches. He was walking fast, a bulky pack on his shoulders, his gait sure and strong. A loner, Cass guessed, someone who—like Sammi—would rather take his chances outside than live cooped up in a shelter.
Suddenly there was a second sound. Over on the road.
Cass had been so focused on the man that she hadn’t seen them approach. Beaters—four of them, stumbling and crying out—and they’d heard him, too.
Fear turned Cass’s blood cold.
For a second, the man paused, looking around wildly. His eyes went wide and he began to run, faster than Cass had ever seen a man run. After a few dozen paces he shrugged the pack off his back, and it fell to the ground as the Beaters’ cries escalated into enraged screams. Unburdened, he ran even faster.
But he wasn’t fast enough.
It was dumb luck that he ran forward. If he had run perpendicular to the road, the Beaters would have come close enough to Cass’s tree to smell her. As it was, Cass guessed the man stayed ahead of them for a quarter mile before they caught up. She watched the whole time, willing the man forward with her entire being as the beasts knocked into each other and stumbled on the uneven ground and shoved at each other. They were so awkward, so ungainly, but their strength and speed were otherworldly.
In the end, two of them tripped each other and fell to the ground, snorting and snapping with fury as they beat at one another with clumsy fists.
But two surged ahead.
Cass pressed her face into the scratchy trunk of the tree and covered her ears with her hands, but she could hear the man’s terrified screams and the Beaters’ triumphant crowing as they carried their prey back down the road to wherever their nest was.
Sammi was watching her, light brown eyes wide and speculating. “Smoke’s going to take you, isn’t he?”
Cass nodded.
Sammi gave her a fragile shadow of a smile. “He’s good. He’s brave. You know how he got his name?”
“No.”
“He was living up at Calvary Episcopal. I mean, not like because it was a church, they were just using the church for shelter.”
“Yes, I remember, there were people living there when I was at the library.”
“And the Beaters came and they got one of them. Or, I don’t know, maybe more than one, I’m not sure. Only, they got this one guy’s wife, and he went nuts and tried to burn the place down. With everyone in it, you know, like a group suicide? They had this tank, natural gas or something. And he totally blew it up, you could see it all day, the sky was like black. You know, like … totally dark. He died, but Smoke—well, I don’t know what his name used to be, it was right when we all moved in here.”
“How long ago was that?”
“It was around the beginning of May. We saw the fire, we saw the sky go dark and all … Well, Smoke got a lot of the people out.”
“He rescued them?”
“Yeah, he got this whole family, Jed and—Jed’s that guy who was babysitting with me. He’s sixteen. His parents and his brothers and a bunch of other people, too. Smoke helped them get out. And when they came here his hair was burned but that was all. He smelled like smoke, but he wasn’t burned, and people said it was a miracle. I don’t know if it was really a miracle but …”
The girl seemed suddenly embarrassed.
Cass followed a stray impulse and covered the girl’s hand with her own. Sammi’s skin was warm and she could feel her strong pulse at her wrist.
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “Maybe there’s still room for a miracle or two in the world.”
“Maybe,” Sammi said. She sounded like she thought Cass was going to need one.
07
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, SMOKE RETURNED. Sammi was long gone, not wanting to worry her mother any more than she already had. Cass’s heart went out to the girl; she’d once walked the same complicated tightrope of parental loyalty and teenage rebellion, the challenges of school and friends and her father’s absence. Aftertime, everything was turned upside down. Kids, with their more elastic notions of what was real, rebounded and adapted while the adults struggled.
Except for the ones who lost their families. Aftertime orphans did not fare well. They were responsible for much of the looting and destruction that happened now—the ones who managed to escape predators, whose movements were no longer tracked and monitored. They found each other somehow, their senses tuned to the same frequency of grief and anger, and formed gangs who roamed the streets with breathtaking indifference to the danger, destroying everything in their path—just as everything that they had loved had been destroyed. Cass didn’t doubt that the bands of fake Beaters that Nora had mistaken her for were comprised of kids like these.
Sammi had already lost one parent. Cass prayed that the girl’s mother would stay safe.
Smoke brought plates piled with food and two plastic bottles filled with murky boiled water. There was a salad of kaysev greens dressed with oil and vinegar. There were also three blackened strips of jerky.
The aroma caused Cass to salivate, and she could practically taste the salty meat. Still, before accepting the plate, she asked: “Why?”
Smoke didn’t meet her gaze. “They want something in return,” he said. “News … there are a lot of people who won’t make the trip anymore. In the last couple of weeks it’s become a lot more dangerous. There’s been trouble, and not just from the Beaters.”
“What do you mean?”
Smoke made a dismissive gesture. “Long story. I’ll tell you about it on the road. But just folks with their own ideas about who ought to be running things.”
“What, you mean like who’s in charge here?” Cass saw a chance to ask something that she had been wondering. “Who is, anyway? You?”
“Not me,” Smoke said with finality. “We’re a collective here, we make decisions as a group. But look, like I said, it’s a long story. We’ll have time for it later, but now you should eat.”
“But …” Cass gestured at the plate. “What kind of stores do you have?”
Smoke shrugged, but his unconcern wasn’t convincing. “Quite a bit, actually. We still go raiding. Me, some of the others. There are still houses within a mile or two that haven’t been cleared yet. We only do one a night, take five or six of us and go.”
Cass nodded. She had come across some of these houses herself, even sheltered in them.
“What about the Wal-Mart?”
Smoke shook his head. “Beaters got there first. Nested all over it. There’s still a lot of canned food and other stuff in there but we can’t touch it.”
It was an older store, up Highway 161 outside the Silva town limits. It didn’t sell produce or meat, but that would actually be an advantage, since there would be no spoilage. And there would be medicine. Diapers, clothes, toiletries, processed foods. Winter coats and gloves. Boots.
“But we’re doing okay,” Smoke continued. “We got to the Village Market early on.”
Cass knew the place, a mom-and-pop grocery in a strip mall that stocked high-end gourmet stuff for weekenders and skiers. “Wasn’t it mostly cleared out back during the Siege?”
“Yeah, but we went back and finished the job. You know—people were panicking. Grabbing stuff. We’ve found things in houses … People will have a whole room full of bottled water, frozen dinners and shit they just left out when they couldn’t fit it in their freezers. Not that it mattered.”
Not after the power went out. Cass shook her head at the waste.
“We’ve got about five thousand cans. We’re trying to save the bottled water we have, and just rely on the creek. There’s some cereal, pasta, rice. Spices … not much meat, this is pretty much the end of it,” he said, pointing at the jerky. Cass noticed that his own plate held only salad and cold kaysev cakes. “Medicine … We got into the clinic, and there’s a woman here who was a doctor, a couple others, a nurse and a paramedic. So we have antibiotics, painkillers, bandages, like that.”
Cass chewed, trying to savor the salty jerky. She had never liked it Before, but now it tasted better than anything she’d ever eaten. “Do you think it’s true?” she asked after she took a sip from the bottle he’d brought. “Can you just live on kaysev? I mean, after …?”
After everything else is gone, she didn’t say. Because no matter how many stores they had managed to lay in here or anywhere else, the survivors would go through them eventually.
Smoke shrugged. “They certainly wanted us to believe that.”
Cass remembered the president’s prepared remarks, distributed to all the networks after he himself had gone to an undisclosed shelter. It was one of the final broadcasts before everything shut down. Paul Palmer, of KTXT, his hair looking like he’d done it himself, the part slightly askew, his eyes hollow and his voice wavering. It was a few days before the media disappeared forever—and only a matter of hours before the planes left air bases in Brunswick and Pensacola and Fort Worth and China Lake and Everett, loaded with their secret freight, tested and developed and grown in a dozen different locations across the U.S. Paul Palmer hadn’t even bothered to conceal the fact that he was reading from the teleprompter: “Full-spectrum nutritional mass,” he’d intoned. Code name K734IV, later shortened to K7 and then kaysev. Protein, calcium, vitamins, fiber.
“They could have been lying, though,” Cass said. “They obviously never tested it. I mean … if they had, they would have figured out about the blueleaf before they went and dumped seed over thousands of square miles.”
“Cass … you should know. Blueleaf’s only in California. At least, it was, unless it’s drifted.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” Cass said, remembering Sammi’s story. “Only that’s just one more rumor. The only people who know are the pilots who dumped it, and even they don’t know what was in the seed mix.”
“No,” Smoke said quietly. “It’s true. Travis was the only base that went for it. Even China Lake turned it down, but they were doubling back over the same flight patterns as Travis so it didn’t matter.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
Smoke was silent for a moment, not meeting her eyes. “Because I was working in Fairfield at the time. Practically right next door to Travis. I used to drink with some of those guys.”
“But—wouldn’t that be confidential? Why would they open up to some guy in a bar?”
Smoke’s face darkened and his mouth went tight. “It was more than just a bar conversation. We were … friends. And I guess they needed to talk, when they got back from taking the kaysev up. Those guys were career pilots—that’s what they knew. Who they were. They knew it was the last flight they were ever going to take. So yeah, they talked.”
Cass thought about what he was saying. It was tantalizing to think there was part of the world—part of the country, even—that was still free of Beaters. A place where people didn’t live in constant terror.
But there was something off about Smoke’s story, about the way he wouldn’t look at her, at the barely concealed emotion in his voice.
“How would the pilots know what they were flying?” she demanded. “I mean, the military’s never been known for transparency. I would think something like that would be—what do you call it?—need-to-know. Especially if there was disagreement about what exactly they were going to distribute.”
Smoke shrugged. “Look, I only told you because … well, I thought it might give you hope.”
Cass didn’t believe him, but she wasn’t ready to let the conversation drop. “Why are you still here? If you’re so sure blueleaf’s only in California?”
“It’s way too unstable to try to make it out of state now. That’s got to be a hundred miles, most of it over-mountain.”
“Sammi told me other people have done it.”
Smoke laughed bitterly. “Yeah? What she told you was that other people tried. I met that guy. The one she’s talking about. Tried to talk him out of it, but he was determined, was one of those new roaming prophet-preachers. I bet he didn’t make it twenty miles up the road on foot.”
I did, Cass thought darkly. She’d made it farther than that, alone, with nothing but her wits.
Although she’d had Ruthie to live for. Maybe that had bought her survival.
Smoke seemed to have lost any interest in the conversation. He reached for her plate and Cass didn’t stop him; she allowed him to scrape the last of her meal onto his own plate and collect her empty bottle.
“I’ll take care of the dishes,” he said. “I’ve packed for both of us. We’ll leave in an hour or so. There’s wash water in the courtyard, if you want it. Women use it after dinner, then the kids. Men wait until morning. This is your chance—they’re expecting you. They’ll have supplies for you.” He hesitated. “I told them you were shy. That you’d want to keep your undershirt on, your underwear.”
He was gone before Cass could object—or thank him.
08
CASS FOLLOWED THE SOUND OF LAUGHTER, staying to the long shadows under the eaves. She’d already decided that if either Sammi or her mother were in the courtyard, she’d retreat without showing herself. She’d done enough damage to the fragile network of relationships in the school.
But the four women clustered around the makeshift tub were strangers. The tub was really more of a giant trough composed of sections of white plastic pipe that had been capped off and propped up on a pair of sawhorses. It had been filled with water that steamed in the rapidly cooling evening. A small fire crackled in the hearth a few yards away, a neat stack of burning madrone branches giving off a spicy, pleasant smell. Several pots of different sizes simmered on the grate above, and Cass guessed they poured the boiling water into the tub to keep the communal bath warm, and to replace what sloshed and splashed out with their movements.
Two of the four women were naked except for plastic flip-flops, and one of them held a nearly new bar of soap. The naked women washed, passing the soap back and forth. One of the other women was undressing, hopping from foot to foot as she stripped off her clothes and tossed them into a pile. The fourth woman had put her clothes back on and was toweling her hair. She was telling some sort of story that had the others cracking up, but when they noticed Cass approaching they all went silent.
“I’m sorry,” Cass said. “I didn’t mean to … Smoke said I might be able to wash. Except … I, um … “
“We have extra towels,” the woman who was undressing said, offering a tentative smile. “I brought two. I wasn’t sure if you … It’s pretty casual. We keep the water hot for a couple of hours and people just show up whenever.”
“Some people, anyway,” one of the naked women said. She was a well-built girl in her early twenties who didn’t seem the least bit self-conscious about dragging her soapy washcloth up and over her wide thighs, her rounded stomach. “Some folks, I don’t think they’ve had a bath since they got here. They get kind of unfresh, you know what I’m sayin’?”
She gave Cass a friendly wink as her companion flicked her with her own washcloth. “Not everyone’s as comfortable strutting around buck naked as you,” she scolded, grinning. “Forgive Nance here. She’s got no manners.”
“I, um …” Cass said, swallowing. “Is it okay … Do you mind if I don’t … uh, if I keep …” She hugged herself tightly, battling her warring desires to keep the evidence of her attack hidden, and to wash her filthy body.
“It’s okay,” the first woman said gently, handing her a small towel and a folded washcloth. They weren’t terribly clean, but Cass took them gratefully. She set the towel on the ground and stripped out of her overshirt and pants before she could change her mind, keeping her eyes downcast, and then approached the trough wearing only the nylon tank and panties that she’d been wearing beneath her clothes all this time. There were only a few scars on the backs of her thighs, and they had healed to barely distinguishable discolorations, but the gouges on her back were still raw and obvious. She knew this from tracing them with her fingers—the undeniable evidence that she’d been torn at by Beaters.
But there was more to her discomfort. It had also been years since she had undressed in front of another woman, and she felt her skin burn with shame as the others watched her.
It was different with men. She’d been with so many; she’d stopped counting one weekend when, by Sunday, she couldn’t remember the name of the one she brought home Friday. She hadn’t been self-conscious—hadn’t been conscious of anything, really, other than the driving need. Not a hunger for the coupling itself, but a need to beat her pain and confusion into a thing that could be contained again, could be put away far enough in the depths of her heart that she could keep going. Keep living. To get to that place she had to use her body, to show and undress and flaunt it, all of which was done without a second thought.
But now she felt hot shame color her face as her nipples hardened under the tight shirt, exposed to the evening chill. She had no bra—what would these women think of that? Cass didn’t know what to make of it herself—on the day she woke up, when she stumbled to her feet and tried to work the kinks out of her mysteriously abused limbs—she’d gone to tug at her bra, a habit of decades, and found it wasn’t there.
Cass hooked her thumbs in her socks and pulled them off, tossing them on the pile. There was nothing more that she could take off.
“I’ll—why don’t I …?” the woman who had been telling a story said. She made a move toward Cass’s clothes pile and hesitated. She looked Cass in the eye and spoke slowly and clearly. She was old enough to be a grandmother—old enough to be Ruthie’s grandmother, anyway. She had several inches of silver roots, an expensive dye job now losing ground, what must have been a severe bob softening to a wispy cut around her chin. “I’m Sonja,” she said carefully. “If you don’t mind, I’ll take these things, bring you back clothes that are clean, that you can wear on your … That will be good for traveling.”
Cass made a sound in her throat, a rusty and ill-used sound that was meant to convey gratitude. Hot dampness pricked at her eyes and she found that her lips did not move well. But Sonja just nodded and swept up the mess of clothes, hugging them against her body as though they didn’t stink, as though Cass had chosen and treasured them, rather than the truth—that she couldn’t say who she’d taken them from and what she’d done to the person who wore them before.
Cass wanted to watch Sonja walk away, to watch the filthy and hated rags disappear, but she knew that if she did she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the bath, and the bath was a rare treat. She had not had or even allowed herself to dream of having such a thing in such a long time. There had been several moonlight splashes in the streams and creeks that crisscrossed the foothills, but the water never came up any farther than midankle, and no matter how Cass cupped her hands and splashed, she succeeded only in wetting her clothes and her skin, never cleansing them.
She approached the trough, the concrete cold and rough on her bare feet, focusing on the steam that rose into the evening air.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the woman who was undressing pause, her jeans folded in her hands. She had not yet spoken, and unlike the others, she had made no move to welcome Cass. Hostility came off her in waves. The others had somehow made their peace with Cass, with what she had done to Sammi—but this woman did not want her there.
Cass inhaled deeply of the steam. Someone had crumbled something aromatic into the water, bath beads or powder or something else that perfumed the air with lavender and created a thin layer of white bubbles. She longed to dip her fingertips into the water.
She was so filthy. She could barely abide herself, and she wanted desperately to wash even a little of her shame away.
Instead she forced herself to turn away from the water, toward the silent woman. “I’ll go, if you want me to,” she offered quietly.
But the woman—she was a handsome woman with a short, no-nonsense haircut and sharp cheekbones—picked up her shoes and socks and glared at Cass. “No, I’ll go,” she muttered, and stalked away.
“I’m sorry,” Cass said to the others, her voice barely more than a whisper. “I should—”
“Stay,” one of the women said. “I’m Gail. Trust me, you need this way worse than she does.”
Cass was grateful, but she stared down at her hands, crisscrossed with cuts from running into dead shrubs and trees, and from falling in the dark. The nails were black and broken, her wrists creased with dirt. Her own odor was strong enough that she caught sour whiffs when she moved; she could only imagine how she smelled to others. “If you don’t mind,” she said, suddenly near tears and more humbled than she had ever felt in her life. “I’d like to stay.”
“I was about done,” Gail said, flipping thick brown braids over her shoulders and stepping aside to make room. “But don’t worry, I’ll stick around and chat.”
She stepped closer, her smile slipping when her glance fell to the nearly healed wounds on Cass’s arms. When she looked in Cass’s eyes again, her curiosity was edged with sadness.
“Did you do that?” she asked, and for one heart-skipping moment Cass thought Gail knew, that she had guessed, about the attack, the Beaters, everything.
And then the truth hit her, bringing clarity, but no lessening of shame.
Gail thought she’d harmed herself.
And she wasn’t wrong. Not about the story, only about the details.
There were days … dark days, when the end of the evening approached with no relief in sight, no one to slip into the shadows with, no strong man to bend her over double until there was no room for her own regrets, nights when every shot she downed added to her screaming headache without ever bringing the blessed numb of forgetting. And on those nights, once or twice … or three or four times … she’d found that sharp thing, the shard of broken ashtray, the coiled end of the corkscrew, the dull knife a bartender cut limes with…. She found the thing and she traced the shape of her shame until she could finally focus on the pain and forget the rest.
So, yes. Once, she’d borne the road map of shame on her skin. And was this really so different, these marks made by her own hands, in a fever she didn’t remember?
She hung her head and blinked at the hot mist in her eyes. Immediately Gail put her hand, warm and comforting, on Cass’s wrist, in the small band of unmolested flesh between her hand and the first of the chewed places.
“I’m sorry,” Gail murmured. “Please, just … just forget I said anything. Past is past here, if you want it to be. Everyone gets to start again.”
Cass shivered, unable to speak.
“Well, look,” Nance said, interrupting the moment with deliberate cheer. “Look, we’re just glad you’re here. You’re the first new face we’ve had in … well, a while. I’ve been going nuts here with all these yokels.”
“Nance isn’t cut out for small-town living,” Gail said, withdrawing her hand after a final squeeze. The moment had passed, nothing more than milkweed on the breeze. “She’s way too upscale for the rest of us.”
“I’m from Oakland,” Nance said. “I just came up here to help my mother when things went bad. I never dreamed I’d get stuck here.”
“Nance isn’t much of a nature person,” Gail said. “She keeps wishing she’d wake up and there’d be room service.”
“I put in this shower last year,” Nance said. “In my condo? One of those rain shower ones? There were jets along the side, steam … “
“And I bet you never had any trouble finding someone to share it with you, right?” Gail said, winking at Cass. “Nance also doesn’t like the men here.”
Cass dipped her washcloth into the warm water, savoring the sensation of the water closing over her fingers, her hand, her wrist. Slowly, she trailed the cloth in an underwater figure eight. “I’ll ruin this water. It’ll be filthy when I’m done.”
Gail shrugged. “It wasn’t exactly crystal clear to start with. We just drag it up from the creek. We don’t bother to strain it or purify it when it’s just for washing.”
Nance wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, it smells a little like rotting fish. I don’t know what we’ll do when we run out of shower gel to hide the smell.”
“We’ll stink,” Gail said. “Just like we do now, only by then we’ll all be so used to it that it won’t matter.”
It was all the encouragement Cass needed. She submerged her arms up to her elbows, then lowered her face into the water and stayed under as long as her breath held out. She came up with the water dripping down her face and blinked it out of her eyes. “Ohhh,” she breathed.
“Tell you what,” Gail said. “I have a little shampoo left.”
“Oh, I couldn’t—” Cass said.
“Yeah, you can.” Gail reached into a plastic tote. “Put your hand out.”
Cass did as she was told and Gail squeezed out a dollop of creamy shampoo. It smelled like rosemary, and it was familiar; Cass had a bottle of it once, long ago. She held it up to her face and breathed as deeply as she could, trying to imprint the memory of the smell in her brain. Then she rubbed it onto her cropped hair and began to work it into her scalp, taking her time, making small circles.
The hair around her hairline was growing in soft and fine; Cass wondered if pulling it out had damaged the roots in some way. Before, when she was a teenager, she remembered her mother warning her that if she plucked her eyebrows too often the hair wouldn’t grow back. She had believed her mother. Before Byrn. When it was just the two of them, her mother taking such care in her mirror in the morning and before dates, Cass sitting on the edge of the tub to talk to her. She thought that might have been when her mother was happiest, when she was getting ready for a new man. Before there had been time for him to disappoint her or, in the end, to leave her. When it was all possibility, when Jack or David or Hunt was still new to her. “I have a good feeling about this one,” she would always say, winking at Cass as she slipped her blouse over her head, adjusting her breasts in her satiny bra, buttoning just enough buttons to give a hint of cleavage.
She always had a good feeling, before.
Even with Byrn.
Cass forced the thought from her mind. When the shampoo was exhausted, the dirt and grease in her hair overwhelming the lather, she lowered her head and let the water come up over her scalp and the back of her neck, down her shirt. She swept her hair through the water, rinsing out all the shampoo. Then she came up sputtering a second time, her hair plastered wet and warm against her shoulders.
Nance made a show of pretending to look into the trough. “Can’t even tell,” she said. “We’ll be able to wash all the kids and a few stray dogs in here, too.”
Gail made a face. “Our standards aren’t very high.”
“I’m … Thank you,” Cass murmured. She took the soap bottle Nance offered and squeezed a little onto the cloth and started scrubbing her body. She began with her shoulders and worked down her arms. She took the suds that gathered in her hands and rubbed them into the synthetic fabric of her tank top, doing her best to clean the fabric. She wished she could take it off, that she could stand here naked and scrub until she was finally clean. But this would have to do.
“Ain’t no big deal,” Nance said. “What you’re gonna owe us big for is taking the only good-lookin’ man we got with you. Here, give me that.”
She took the cloth from Cass and dabbed at the back of her neck, her shoulder blades, letting the water sluice down to soak the back of her shirt. The water stung when it came in contact with the torn flesh, and Cass worried that the fabric would cling tightly, transparently, to the canyons of her wounds, and she twisted away, pretending to soap her back as far as she could reach. Nance pulled away from her, mild hurt in her expression, and Cass wished she could explain, No, it’s not you, it’s me, that her own body was a horror she couldn’t shed, that Nance’s healing touch was a gift she hadn’t earned and couldn’t accept.
Nance squeezed the water from the cloth and folded it carefully, once, twice; then she pressed it into Cass’s hands, but before she let go, she gathered Cass’s smaller hands in her own large and capable ones and held them for a moment with a tenderness that brought tears to Cass’s eyes. Her sense of exposure deepened; while men had touched every inch of her body, sometimes without even knowing her name, and sometimes with the kind of careless fervor that left her bruised and battered, no woman had touched her since her own mother stopped bathing her since the age at which she was old enough to turn the taps herself. The image that flashed through her mind: her mother watching her impassively, smoking, as Cass struggled to let the water out the drain—she must have been all of nine, smarting from her father’s absence and shriveling from her mother’s indifference.
When she finally let go, Nance picked up her own towel and began drying off. Cass finished her washing, concentrating on the sensation of the warm water as it ran down her stomach, down her thighs and calves to puddle at the ground. When the others turned politely away, she washed between her legs, lathering and scrubbing as though she could wash away a decade’s shame with meager and inadequate supplies, rinsing the panties as well as she could with handfuls of murky bathwater, the synthetic fabric clinging to her skin and revealing the thick, dark patch of hair beneath.
“Smoke will come right back here after he walks with me,” Cass said, wanting to turn the attention away from herself. “I just need … “
But she didn’t need Smoke. She’d come this far on her own; surely she could manage to cross the last four miles of bare road before the outskirts of Silva, the handful of blocks to the library.
“You take him, girl,” Gail said, suddenly serious. “You let that man help you. You’ve been out of the towns, you don’t know what you’re up against.”
“I’ve seen Beaters,” Cass protested. “A few, anyway, on my way here.”
“It’s the people you need to worry about just as much nowadays,” Gail replied.
“You come through cities?” Nance demanded, ignoring Gail. “You seen their nests?”
Cass hesitated. The biggest town she’d passed was a half a dozen houses and a gas station clustered around a crossroads, Highway 161 intersecting a farm road that disappeared into dusty fields. But she hadn’t seen Beaters there, no evidence of a nest—no alcoves or storefronts littered with filthy clothing mounded in shallow rings, no piles of household castoffs hoarded for the haphazard, long-ago memories they held. No fetid stink of unwashed, ravaged bodies mingled in restless sleep, of torn flesh and leaking, damaged bodies seized upon and devoured and, finally, abandoned.
The few Beaters she’d seen had been small and restless roving teams, and if she’d wondered where they sheltered, she cast her doubts aside, plunged them into the unknowable so that she could take another step and another, so that she could salvage sufficient hope to continue on.
The others exchanged glances. “How many at a time?”
“Two … three.”
“And tell me, didn’t that strike you as strange?”
It had, of course, once the cloudiness had shaken itself loose from Cass’s mind and she was thinking more clearly. Since the Beaters had evolved, they had formed larger and larger packs, like a snowball rolled around a snowy field, picking up mass. They seemed to take comfort in their own kind. Occasionally, you’d even see them in a clumsy imitation of an embrace, patting each other or grooming the hard-to-reach tufts of hair at the back of their heads, even hugging. They didn’t ordinarily feed on each other after the initial flush of the disease—they hungered for uninfected flesh—but occasionally you’d see them nipping and tugging gently at each other with their teeth, almost the way puppies played, biting with their tiny milk teeth.
“I don’t know,” Cass said. All of it was strange. All of it was horrifying.
“Well, this is new, just the last few weeks. They’ve started going out a couple at a time, kind of poking around together like they have a plan. We—some of us—we think they’re scouting.”
A thrill of fear snaked along Cass’s spine, a sensation she had thought was lost to her. After the things she’d seen and suffered, she didn’t think she could be terrified again. “What do you mean?” she demanded.
“They’re on the lookout for opportunities. For us. They’ve started working on strategy.”
Whispered: “No.”
It was impossible. The Beaters were disorganized, stripped of their humanity, reduced to little more than animals motivated by an overwhelming need to feed. The spells of humanlike behavior were nothing but the debris left behind when the soul made a clumsy exit from the shell of a body that remained. To suggest they were evolving the ability to reason, to plan—that was as senseless as suggesting that a flock of ducks could orchestrate a diving attack.
“We’re not saying they’ve succeeded yet,” Nance said quickly. “I mean it’s not like they get very far before they get distracted or wander off or whatever. But the fact they’re coming out in small groups like that—and they hang out around the edges, across the streets all around the school—it’s got to mean something.”
“It might just be the evolution of the disease,” Cass ventured, grasping at possibilities. “You know … like, in the whole first population, as it progresses … “
There had been a lot of discussion of the evolution of the disease, when people first realized that the sick were turning into something else, something far worse. Before anyone called them Beaters, people repeated rumors that their brains were infected with a madness similar to syphilis. But back then, much as nineteenth-century syphilitics suffered from lesions and tumors and dementia before they died, Aftertime, people had initially thought that those who ate the blueleaf would eventually die once the fever escalated.
“Maybe,” Gail assented, an act of generosity. “Just, I want you to know what you’re up against. Smoke knows…. He’s been watching them.”
“He takes notes,” Nance added. “He keeps a journal. He used to be a teacher or something.”
“Well, we don’t know that,” Gail corrected her. “He doesn’t talk about himself much.”
“He said something about it once,” Nance insisted. “Teaching.”
Cass toweled off her damp body and thought about the man who had offered to freewalk with her to the library. Four miles of unnecessary risk. The overwhelming impression she got from Smoke was of … depth. Layers. He would not be an easy man to know.
There was the story he told about the air force pilots. She still didn’t think he was telling the whole truth. So … maybe he was a liar, or maybe he was just keeping parts of the truth to himself.
But he was brave. Or more precisely, he had a lack of concern for himself, and an abundance of concern for others. He had been the first to come at her when she and Sammi approached the school, and it had been his body crushing hers when he took her down. His arms had been hard-muscled. Despite her strength and fitness, she was smaller by several inches and thirty or forty pounds. He could have hurt her easily.
But he hadn’t even bruised her.
“What about Nora?” Cass found herself asking. “His … girlfriend?”
Gail made an exhalation of air through her teeth. “Is that the impression you got? Well, they’re … I don’t know what you’d call it.”
“They met here,” Nance said. “Nora, when she showed up she was a mess. Kept to herself. Wouldn’t let anyone close at first, after her nephew … once he was taken. Smoke got her talking again.”
“I mean I’m pretty sure they’re doing the nasty,” Gail said, flashing a grin that didn’t make it to her eyes. “Smoke’s hot, and there’s lots of women wouldn’t mind a little of that.”
Cass felt heat rising in her face. That wasn’t what she’d meant—not sex. Just the way they had been around each other, it suggested a relationship beyond the bond of people sheltering together in close quarters, and she’d been—
What, exactly? Curious? Envious, the voice inside her suggested. She didn’t like that answer, but it had the ring of truth. To have someone else to go through this with—what would that be like? To have someone to tell your fears to—your wishes—your regrets?
“People are funny,” Nance mused. “Some people, Aftertime, it’s like they’re dead inside, like they were already taken even though their bodies are still here. And other people just … I don’t know, it’s like they light up. Not in a good way, necessarily, mind you. But more like some sort of crazy energy that they rely on just to keep them going.”
“Yeah,” Gail agreed. “Some people get all manic. There’s been all kinds of hookups, you go looking for a flashlight or something and open a door and there’s people on the floor like, well, you know. And then next time you turn around they’re doing it with someone else.”
“Remember Scott and Meena …?” Nance said, and then the two of them were doubled over with laughter. Cass couldn’t help smiling along, their mirth was so infectious.
“What’s so funny?” Sonja had returned, carrying a stack of folded clothes, which she held out to Cass. “I had to guess at sizes, but I was trying for practical. Here, I’ll take your towels, I’m on wash tomorrow anyway.”
Cass accepted the clothes. She hesitated, embarrassed, before handing over the sodden towel and the washcloth, dingy from scrubbing the dirt from her skin. “I don’t want you to have to—”
“Don’t worry about her,” Nance said affectionately, tossing Sonja her own towels. “She’s a shitty laundress. She needs the practice.”
“Well, if I had something to work with besides creek water—”
“Yeah, yeah, cry me a river,” Gail laughed. “Sonja here was a designer at Nike, Before. She had like a million-dollar budget. A staff and a fancy office, and this chore stuff has been really hard for her.”
“Oh, right,” Sonja said, giving her a good-natured shove. “I had my own latte machine and a Jacuzzi in my bathroom. And a dozen male interns to go down on me under my desk during lunch, too.”
“Good times,” Nance said as they made their way back toward the building, relaxed and laughing, the sun sinking toward the tree line in a pool of molten orange.
Cass hung back, watching. She’d never had women friends. Never known what to say, how to breach the boundaries. But now, as she prepared to go into the unknown again, she suddenly wished she’d tried harder.
09
CASS DRESSED IN THE CLOTHES SONJA BROUGHT. The fabric was stiff from line drying and rasped against her scabs, even through the damp tank top, but Cass was so accustomed to the dull ache that she barely noticed.
Her wounds hurt almost unbearably when she first woke, but before long she was left with a dull, constant sensation that was as much numbness as pain. The disease, which had boosted her immunity before retreating, had clearly changed her sensitivity to pain, as well. Something to be grateful for.
The clothes smelled faintly of lavender. A soft jersey shirt that had belonged to another woman. Hiking pants that were new or nearly new, maybe nabbed from one of Silva’s several outdoorsman shops when the looting turned to general panic and then mass stockpiling.
The greatest luxury was a new pair of socks. Sammi had brought these to her in the small office where Cass had retreated to wait, after the bath. It was part of a warren of tiny rooms behind the old reception area, and Cass guessed it had once belonged to an administrator, a vice-principal or part-time nurse. There was no window, only a desk that had been pushed against the wall, a couple of chairs, an expanse of industrial carpeting still littered with staples and eraser dust and tiny paper circles from a hole punch. The detritus of human activity Before. The sight brought back a memory of the sound of a vacuum cleaner, and Cass realized she was moving her arm back and forth in the obsolete appliance’s once-familiar arc with a sense of longing. Even when she sat in the chair with her hands pressed tightly between her knees and her eyes closed, her mind was filled with a memory of the task, and it was almost like a forbidden thrill to envision making long, slow paths on the carpet, feeling the handle vibrate in her hand, the debris disappearing into the vacuum.
After a while, Sammi came, unannounced and furtive. The socks were rolled up and hidden in her pocket, the tags still attached. Men’s hiking socks, pale gray with an orange stripe knit into the band at the top. Sammi handed them over and shook her head impatiently when Cass protested that she couldn’t accept them.
“They’re for you. Besides, you can do something for me. If you ever get to Sykes, and if you meet my dad, tell him I’m okay,” she said. “His name is Dor. Doran MacFall.”
“Sammi … as soon as I get my daughter, I’m going to go to the safest place I can find. I’m sorry, but I can’t promise—”
“I’m not asking for a promise,” Sammi interrupted, impatiently. “Only, no one knows what’s going to happen anymore. No one knows the future. And maybe you’ll see him. I mean … you got this far, didn’t you? You were attacked, you got infected, you’re the only person I’ve ever seen who got better.”
Fear sluiced through Cass’s veins. “Sammi, I never really said—” she began, her mouth dry.
Sammi shrugged, but she held on to Cass’s gaze. “Don’t worry, I didn’t tell anyone. But your skin … I mean, that’s the way it starts. That and your eyes. They’re way too bright. Most people just don’t want to remember that anymore. I mean, now that they just kill anyone they suspect might be infected.”
“Wait—what?”
“Yeah, if someone’s even suspected, they’re shot. There’s like a special store of bullets for it and everything. They have these elections for who has to do it. Winner loses and has to kill the dude. Kids aren’t supposed to know,” Sammi added, shrugging, as if the absurdity of such a rule eluded her.
Back at the library, before Cass was attacked, those who were suspected of infection were rare enough—there was so little blueleaf left, and no one ate it on purpose—that Bobby ordered that they be kept in the old operations room, among the silent heating and air-conditioning equipment, until their future was clear. Other diseases brought on fever, after all, so you didn’t want to kill everyone. In the end, only one actual infected—a silent and red-faced old man who wore canvas coveralls—had stayed there during Cass’s time at the library. Even when he began pulling his hair out, tearing the skin of his scalp—even when his pupils had shrunk down so far that he couldn’t see Bobby and another man coming the day they hit him on the head and dragged him to the edge of town and left him there—even then he refused to admit he was infected. The old man’s speech had become a bit slurred, and that was the last of it for him.
“But …” Cass swallowed hard. “My arms … like you said.” It came out in a hoarse whisper as she covered the shiny, thin scars with her hands, unable to look.
“Yeah, but you act normal. You’re not feverish and you don’t talk crazy. Once they figured out that you weren’t going to kill me, you know, when you started talking and all—you know how sometimes people only see what they want to see?”
Cass nodded, thinking—but you still see. Maybe it was because Sammi was young. And maybe it was more than that.
Sammi gave her a little grin. “Look, you’re really not so bad. You did fix your hair, kinda—and your scars are almost gone. What you really need?”
Cass smiled, moved despite herself that the girl was trying to cheer her up. “Yeah?”
“Eyeliner. Really thick, you know?” She tugged her lower lid down to show Cass where she’d apply it. Then she hesitated. “They say there’s others,” she finally said. “That got better. I mean it’s just a rumor, this one time a raiding party went down toward Everett. But, yeah, maybe you’re not the only one.”
Cass felt her heart speed up, a prickling of hope radiating along her nerves. Others.
“Survivors?” she asked. “Who were … attacked, who started to turn? And came back?”
Sammi shrugged, didn’t meet her eyes. “It was just a rumor. My mom says it’s just people being confused by those fake Beaters. I mean no one here’s seen it or anything, and most people think it’s like, what do you call that? When people make up stories and they get passed around—”
“Urban myth,” Cass said, trying to cover her disappointment.
“Yeah, that. As far as anyone here knows, no one’s ever come back before. So they don’t believe in it. But I do. I can tell you’re different. And it’s not just that … you’ve been on your own and they haven’t gotten to you. Most people would be dead already, so that means you’re lucky, too.”
“But I don’t—”
“I’d go with you,” the girl pushed on, and Cass had the sense she’d practiced this speech in advance. “I’m not scared. Only Mom doesn’t have anyone else now. I need to be here for her. But you’re going to make it—I know you are. And you don’t even have to go looking for my dad, just only if you happen to meet him somewhere. He’s, like, six feet three and … “
And then, suddenly, just like that, she faltered. Her courage evaporated in a mist of sniffles and her smooth-skinned face collapsed in on itself. She looked like she was about to bolt, and without thinking, Cass reached for her.
Sammi didn’t so much lean as fall into the hug and Cass wrapped her arms around the girl, all elbows and slender limbs, and held tight.
“I’m sorry,” Sammi snuffled against the crook of Cass’s neck, but she didn’t let go.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Cass said softly, and then she said something else, a dangerous thing that she didn’t plan and immediately wondered if she would regret. “I’ll find your dad. I’ll find him and I’ll tell him you’re all right.”
“Oh, thank you … thank you,” Sammi said. “Um … Cass? Could you … you know, if you do find my dad? I was wondering if you could tell him something for me.”
“You want me to give him a message?”
“Yeah. I mean, he’ll know what it means.” She bit her lip and looked away. “Just tell him that I never forget, I never miss a night. And I never will.”
10
THEY SET OUT IN THE CHARCOAL GRAY OF nightfall, the approaching darkness taking the color from the earth, leaving it a land of black forms and navy sky. Someone had given Cass a backpack, a sturdy model made for day hikers. Inside were a good blade, bottles of water, energy bars, a can of orange segments. She wished she could thank her benefactor, but no one would own up to the gift.
No one came to see them off, either. Cass understood. Despite the lighthearted moments at the bath, and the provisions, in the end they’d chosen to stand with Sammi’s mother, at least publicly. No one but Smoke and Sammi knew she was attacked, and she hoped no one really blamed her for the way she’d brought Sammi back to camp, with a blade at her throat. They must have known by now that she wouldn’t have killed the girl, or maybe they just trusted Smoke’s judgment—and, too, she might well have saved the child, getting her back to shelter before the sun was strong in the sky and the Beaters were out in force.
But Sammi was well loved here. And everyone knew the dangers Cass and Smoke faced. Knew Smoke might not be back. Aftertime, goodbyes had become too hard when each one might be the last.
Behind them the doors closed with a solid thunk and Cass felt a shiver travel up from the base of her spine. Smoke took the lead, walking a few steps ahead. He had changed into hiking boots and a long-sleeved shirt over a t-shirt and set an easy pace.
Just a day earlier, Cass was setting out alone at this hour after spending the daylight hours hiding and trying to get some sleep. Her destination was the same: Silva, or as close as they could get before next sunup. Her urgency was stronger, if anything, for how close she was. But things had changed in her brief stay at the school.
After being around people again for even such a short time, she was reminded of their unpredictability, their vulnerability … their humanity. Human beings were driven by emotions and hungers and drives and there was no telling what they would do in times of stress. Her fellow shelterers had rescued Ruthie that day and Cass prayed that they had cared for her ever since. But now she allowed herself to consider what instead they might have done with her little girl. What they might have told her. Would they have cherished her, held her, read her stories and combed her fine hair? Would they wipe her tears when she cried, or would they have been too busy, too distracted, too indifferent?
Even when Cass woke up to the horror of her ruined flesh, the hair ripped from her scalp, sticky and sore in unfamiliar clothes, she hadn’t been afraid for herself, only for her little girl. She had put her faith in the people who rescued Ruthie to care for her, because she had no other choice. She would gladly have relinquished any chance to see Ruthie again, if only she knew her daughter would always be safe and loved. After all, hadn’t she done so once, already? Every time she raised the bottle to her lips, she had chosen: her addiction over her baby. That was the most painful truth of her recovery, and it was hard not to believe this was her punishment, to be separated from Ruthie without even the knowledge that she was all right. If only there was something to trade, someone to trade with; Cass would rip her soul from her body and hand it to the devil himself, would walk into the gates of hell with her head held high if someone could just take care of Ruthie.
And now that the library lay ahead in the gloom, Cass could no longer prevent herself from wondering if Ruthie might have been ignored, neglected, discarded.
No, no, no—if she didn’t get the thoughts under control she would lose her mind; her breath would come out in a scream that would split the air and alert any night-wandering creatures of their presence.
Cass took two jogging half steps to catch up with Smoke and wrapped her hands around his arms. He turned and held her by the shoulders, searching her face in the moonlight. “What’s wrong?”
Cass could feel her heart pounding in her throat, fast and staccato. She worked her lips but no sound came out.
“Did you see something? Hear something? Cass?”
Cass shook her head and licked her dry lips and managed two syllables. “Ruthie …” And then Smoke’s arms were around her in an embrace that was at once strong and cautious. It wasn’t a bear hug, not as committed as that, but more like he was making of himself a support for her to lean on. She rested her face against his broad chest and squeezed her eyes shut and listened to his slow, strong heartbeat.
“I don’t know if she’s all right,” she said after a while, keeping her eyes closed.
She could feel Smoke nod as he held her a little tighter, his arms drawing her closer against him. “I know,” he whispered. “But we try anyway. Right? We try anyway.”
After a while longer Cass pulled away, embarrassed, blinking away the threat of tears. She did not cry easily, not anymore, so what was happening to her? Was it the women at the bath, the illusion of friendship, was she so hungry for human contact that she had let her guard down so easily?
She didn’t look at Smoke, but when they started walking again he stayed by her side. She knew that earlier he’d walked ahead to shield her from whatever they might come up against in the dark. Now she had lost that advantage. But it had been an illusory advantage at best; anything that threatened Smoke threatened her, as well.
The moon was three-quarters full and its watery light was sufficient to mark their way along the road. The smell of tar, cooling now after a day softening in the late-summer sun, mixed with the gingery kaysev and the dry dirt smell of deadwood. Far off in the distance she heard a cricket, and then another, a lonely duet. There were crackling sounds in the brush now and then. Jackrabbits and quail and snakes.
For a while, after the country’s livestock had fallen to the waves of bioterror attacks, there was panic that wild animals would be hunted to extinction. At first, people worried that the pathogens killing the cattle and sheep and chickens and pigs and trout and salmon would spread to the wild—and themselves, of course—but advances made early in the second decade of the century tailored chemicals to species with astonishing specificity, allowed them to be precisely targeted, too. The agriculture industry refined their acute toxins to target specific and narrow bandwidths of pests and rodents; in the wrong hands, it was a simple enough exercise to use the same techniques on other species. Only the attacks on fowl went wide, taking out many bird species until it was a rarity to see even a common blue jay or sparrow. Terrorists killed off other food-source species with laserlike precision, and those who ate the infected meat, of course. It didn’t take long until no one ate any farmed meat at all.
That’s when everyone became a hunter. Traps and slingshots were cobbled together; the many who refused to surrender their guns in the early days of the riots put them into service. Cats and dogs disappeared first, and then rabbits and pigeons and rodents. In one surreal episode, a grassroots environmental group pasted up posters of the common brown rat all over Silva, predicting its extinction and urging people to search out vegetarian proteins.
But things had worked themselves out, hadn’t they? Now there weren’t enough humans left to prevent the poisoned and overhunted species from coming back. Why not? Surviving creatures seemed more than content to graze on the kaysev. And on each other, in the case of the carnivores. Their populations burgeoned, even thrived Aftertime.
Cass herself had come upon a nest of baby rabbits a couple of nights ago. The mother stared at her with eyes wide and yellow in the moonlight, and its heartbeat had felt impossibly fast when Cass put her hands around its soft throat.
But after a moment Cass stopped squeezing and backed away, the rabbit quivering with fear, but alive. Without tools, without fire, it would have been difficult to eat the rabbit anyway.
And it wasn’t necessary. A diet of kaysev truly was adequate. Cass never felt full; in the language of Before she might have said that she never felt satisfied—but satisfaction was an elusive and outdated concept. Serenity—contentment—they seemed as unlikely for citizens as the ability to fly or read minds.
But what of the women, laughing together at the baths? What of the easy banter, the sly teasing, the gentle humor? Weren’t these a sign of—if not happiness—then at least ease of mind? Had the time that passed while Cass was gone been enough to heal the survivors, the denizens of this land? To make them forget, or at least accept, the worst of the horrors, and search out things worth living for?
At the library the mood had been bleak. Loss and devastation and grief pervaded every room, every corner, every conversation. There had been talk—endless talk—but it was the talk of fear and relief and guilt and desperation, a constant discussion of odds and measures and likelihoods, as though such talk could keep them safer, could keep the churning threats at bay.
Time had passed—two months—since Cass was taken. In two months the people sheltering together at the school had become a real community, built on cooperation and friendship. And love, or at least lovemaking. Cass thought about the look that had passed between Smoke and Nora.
“Did she mind?” she asked abruptly. “You coming with me. Did Nora mind?”
Smoke said nothing for a moment, and Cass wondered if it was something she had no right to ask. Smoke had offered to accompany her, nothing more.
“Yes,” he finally said. “She minded very much.”
“But you came anyway.” A question more than a statement.
“Yes, I came anyway. And I understand that you want to know why. But I’m not sure I can tell you. I mean, I know what answers I ought to give—that it gives my life some meaning to be able to help you. Or that in Aftertime we have to think of the greater good, not the needs of individuals. Or even that we have so little of our humanity left that we need to take every opportunity we can to remind ourselves that we aren’t savages.”
“Those all work for me,” Cass said after a moment, trying to let him know that he was off the hook, that he didn’t owe her an answer.
“Well, thanks. But the truth is … I don’t love her. Nora. And maybe this was a convenient way to leave. I don’t know … I just don’t know.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pried.”
“Yeah, well … some people say I think too much. They used to say it, anyway. Now …” Smoke trailed off, and they walked in silence.
He was the sort of man who went to places other people couldn’t follow, and it made her want to know more. “What did you do before? If it’s okay for me to ask.”
“Sure. Look, Cass—” he glanced at her, eyes flashing in the moonlight “—let’s get this straight, okay, seeing as neither of us knows what’s coming tonight or tomorrow or next week or next month. You can ask me anything you want. If I don’t want to tell you, I won’t. But I don’t see where some sort of notion of, of, I don’t know, propriety or whatever is going to help any of us now. And talking might help.”
Might help what? Cass wondered—help to pass the time, or keep her mind off the dangers and worries, or make her forget who and what she was and how she’d got that way? But she didn’t ask for clarity. “Deal,” she said.
“Okay, so … I was an executive coach.”
“A what?”
“I helped people figure out what was holding them back in the professional workplace.” Smoke’s voice carried some dark emotion. Regret, maybe. “And then I showed them how to change.”
“So you basically told other people how to do their jobs? And got paid for it?”
Smoke laughed bitterly. “I guess that’s one way to sum it up. On paper, my job was to guide people to be more effective in their work through an exploration of their skills and goals and challenges.” He looked away, into the night-black forest. “I was good at it. Too good.”
“How could you be too good?”
“I got a lot of my clients because they were struggling at work. They’d been put on performance review and were in danger of losing their jobs. I was like the career consultant of last resort. And looking back on it, a lot of them were probably in trouble for a reason. I should have let things play out the way they were meant to.”
“You mean, and let them get fired?”
“Not everyone’s suited for every job,” Smoke said through gritted teeth. “Sometimes people need to fail so they don’t fuck things up for others. Sometimes systems are designed so that people who should fail do fail.”
Cass was taken aback by his barely controlled anger. She knew she should stop, should leave the subject alone—but for some reason she longed to keep him talking.
“You went around rescuing their jobs for them. Just like you did at the church, the fire. You’re the rescuer. That can be your new job description.”
“Don’t make me better than I am, Cass,” Smoke snapped, and Cass knew that she had gone too far.
She felt herself flame with embarrassment as Smoke stalked ahead of her, his body tense. But after a few moments he waited for her to catch up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—It’s just that I didn’t do anything much, no matter what they told you.”
“You got people out of the fire.”
“Nothing that anyone else wouldn’t have done. I was already there, it wasn’t any big deal to bring the others with me.”
Cass knew he was downplaying the event. She understood the impulse; being talked about got you noticed, and being noticed made you public, and then people expected you to reveal more and more of yourself.
She could respect Smoke’s desire for privacy. She knew well the need to keep to the shadows. So why did she want so much to know more?
11
THE ROAD INTO SILVA WOUND THROUGH MOSTLY unbuilt land, its cracked edges sloping into a rocky outcropping at the edge of the forest. The dead trees could not maintain their grip on the earth where the road carved its path, and their black roots bore clots of earth like hungry tumors. Pinecones from forgotten seasons lay crushed by cars that had long since stopped running.
They walked in silence.
Before, this land was shaded no matter what the season, the evergreens thick against the sky. Then the toxins had blanketed the land, and the trees shed their needles and withered in defeat, their xylem choked and strangled, their bark black and peeling. The sun bore down on the ravaged earth during the day; at night, as now, even the moonlight reached all the way to the earth, covering everything with a frisson of silver.
Here and there a cabin was set back among the few remaining trees, mostly hunting cabins built decades ago, before the Sierras were discovered by city types looking for vacation homes with easier drives than Tahoe. In some, curtains hung neatly in the windows, cheery ruffles and valences hinting at brisk, no-nonsense women with feather dusters and oil soap. In others, the panes were broken, and window boxes hung askew, spilling dirt and dead flowers to the indifferent ground.
When they rounded a bend and Cass saw the familiar glass shop that shared a parking lot with a fireplace and hot tub store, her pulse quickened. Now she knew exactly where she was. Around the next bend, small frame houses would give way to larger ones. And then the strip mall with the KFC and the Orchard Supply Hardware. Another half mile took you to the city offices, including the old town hall with the basement where Cass had attended hundreds of A.A. meetings.
A few blocks from that was the library.
Suddenly Cass wasn’t sure she was ready.
“You know where you are now,” Smoke said. “You all right?”
She swallowed hard, staring across the parking lot at the ruined businesses. There were cars in the lot, but their tires had been slashed, their windshields bashed in. It was shocking, the way nearly everything had ended up in ruins during the final weeks of the Siege. Some said America had been lucky: while the country struggled with outages and dwindling resources, Canberra reported they’d run out of potable water and Seoul’s citizens lay sightless and bleeding from their ears in the streets, victims of a last plague attack that no one bothered to claim. And still, across the U.S., citizens raged and rampaged. Brooklyn saw twelve thousand die in the East Water Riots. The senselessness of it amazed Cass—how a car that was of no use to anyone now that fuel was impossible to find was attacked and ravaged until it was a heap of steel and fiberglass, every part of it assaulted and broken.
But equally surprising was the care people took in other ways, the attention they gave the smallest or most unimportant details, gestures made all the more poignant because of the unlikelihood that anyone would ever appreciate them.
The glass shop’s windows were gone, the interior open to the elements, and even in the near darkness Cass could see desks overturned, computers lying on the floor. But next door, Groat Fireplace and Spa was shuttered up tight, the blinds drawn in the front door, the patio table and chairs stacked and covered.
And there was the neat pyramid of smooth stones piled in front of the door.
No one knew how the stone piles started, but before long everyone knew what they meant: there were dead inside. Bodies that had been left because of panic about contamination, or because they had reached a stage of decomposition that made it hard to move them easily, or simply because there wasn’t time—and now, with the threat of attack weighing heavy on every raiding party, there was never
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