Authors: Sophie Littlefield
And yet the swirling need was there, threatening to overtake her if she didn’t satisfy it. How long had it been since— Cass’s mind raced as she realized she hadn’t touched herself, hadn’t had even that pale substitute, since she woke in her matted bed of dead weeds. How was that possible? All these long days on the road, and Cass had never once missed the touch of a man…or even the satisfaction of her own hands…until now, with Smoke next to her, Smoke whose eyes glinted even in the dark.
“I can’t—I need—” she started to say, but she didn’t know what came next.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Smoke said, his voice little more than a low vibration that traveled from his body through the soft clean sheets and blankets and mattress and pillows and into her body, spreading out from the middle, sounds and sensations that broke apart and reformed as more than just words.
“I’m not ashamed,” she whispered back. But it was a lie. Her shame was so great, so powerful, it was a tiger in a cage; it was hungry; it wanted to devour her as it had devoured her on so many nights before. Its teeth were sharp. The only way to keep the tiger in its cage was to fight back with the rage inside her and she only knew one way if she couldn’t drink her shame into submission, she had to let it out through her body, until the sensations overtook her, emptied her, cleansed her.
“I’m not afraid,” Smoke said, and he reached out a hand and closed it over hers, but he didn’t come any closer, he kept the distance between them—a gulf he wouldn’t cross, a moat he would let her stay behind. “I’m not afraid of you and I don’t believe you have anything evil inside of you. I could kiss you now and I wouldn’t be afraid. I want to kiss you—I’m not afraid.”
“No,” Cass protested. She couldn’t stand to look at him. She turned her face to the pillow, trembling. “No, no, no…”
But she held on to his hand, and it was her—it was
all
her—who pulled hard, who took his hand and pressed it to her body, over her shirt, ground his palm against her nipple as she found the corner of the pillowcase and bit down hard.
Smoke waited, his body tense and still next to her and only when she whispered
please,
eyes squeezed tight against everything she couldn’t bear to admit to herself, only then did he trace the softest path across her collarbone with his lips while he pushed her scrabbling fingers away and locked them tight in his own.
“Don’t kiss me,” Cass whispered fiercely.
If she could, she’d seal her mouth, cover it over with skin so the disease, if it was harboring inside her, insidious and undetected, could only boil its toxins within her. She would not risk Smoke—she’d swallow the disease whole if she had to. She would be its host; she would give it her body, but she would not let it claim him, too. “Don’t you
ever
kiss me.”
Cass let him pin her in place because she wanted to be pinned and somehow he knew. She did not want to be able to fight against this. She knew herself too well, knew how savagely her body would fight if it had a chance, so she lay with one arm trapped under her hip, her other pressed to the mattress in Smoke’s fist, as he unbuttoned her shirt one excruciatingly slow button at a time. He slid his fingers along the edge of the bra the women had brought her. It was a serviceable thing, nothing like the black and lacy ones she used to wear, a stretch of beige with businesslike stitching and sturdy straps, but it was a simple matter for him to unhook the front and ease it out of the way while her treacherous body slid closer to him, as close as it could while he held her in place.
She was strong but she was compact, legs and arms whittled down to muscle and sinew and not much else. Smoke was broad and dense and unstoppable, and she shivered with anticipation as he covered her body with his own and held her motionless and watched her. The window was open; Cass had not thought to worry about it, and there was no time to be afraid now—any Beaters wandering around out side could fuck themselves because she had to be here for this moment, had to be
all
here, body and mind and whatever shreds were left of her soul. Sheer curtains fluttered in the window, gossamer panels of white that waved and floated on the breeze.
A woman chose those curtains
. The breeze was cool and delicious and it blew gently across her body, across her nipples, exposed and hard and aching. The breeze was indifferent to the Siege. It was the breeze of Before, and as Smoke lowered his mouth to her, slow and unstoppable, it occurred to her that the breeze had defied the Beaters, the famine, the routed, cracked and poisoned earth. It waited for night and then it came as it ever had and Cass welcomed it and drank it in.
Smoke’s mouth: it was hot. It was soft but then…oh, God, then it wasn’t. He closed his lips around her and stroked with his tongue and even then he was strong, he was insistent, had she known he would be like this the moment she saw him in the little room that was once a school office? As he looked her up and down, Cass with her wrecked flesh and stinking body and misshapen clothes, her hair in knots, no better than a rabid dog…there had been something even then, hadn’t there? But Cass had steeled herself against it, she had thought her body no longer carried that taint.
The things she’d suffered, in some way she’d thought they had sucked
all
the life from her. Not just hope and faith but
this,
this most elemental longing of the body for recognition. For slaking. For surfeit. This was, somehow, different from the desperate coupling she’d done a thousand times in the back room of her trailer, in backseats in roadhouse parking lots, in cheap motel rooms and alleys and up against cars. This was a bid for life.
Smoke grazed her nipple with his teeth and she cried out and bucked against him. She wrapped her strong thighs around his waist and forced him harder against her. He slid his hand into what was left of her hair. He tugged and she arched her back, and then he released her hair so that he could undo her pants, could jam the zipper down and slide the rough fabric over her hips, taking the plain white cotton panties with them. She made the sounds that meant
no,
that meant
this is not a good idea,
but the sounds somehow didn’t turn into words, were just sounds, just wailing needful sounds.
He kissed her neck, traced a path around her jaw, down across her throat as his hand found its way between her legs, her legs that fell open for him in greedy betrayal. He pressed his palm gently against her and hesitated, as though he might stop there. His touch was not tentative, she knew he meant to be reassuring, and that was not enough, no, that would not be enough, it would never be enough.
Cass lifted her hips off the bed and ground against his hand and he entered her with his fingers. He was not gentle. He did not take his time. He did not coax out her moisture to ease his way. He jammed them hard inside her and she broke her own rule, she had kept her mouth clamped shut but now she cried out, a hungry desperate sound that was nearly mad with need.
Smoke plunged into her as far as he was able, but then his thumb slid against her in the mere suggestion of a caress. He barely touched her—
there
—and Cass threw herself into the rocketing sensation and kicked him, hard, on the backs of his calves. He answered with a growl that was deep and dangerous, and pushed her back against the bed with a hand splayed at her throat. She was pinned again, helpless against him and that may have been the only thing that allowed her to open her eyes and look at him. A lock of her hair had fallen into her mouth and she seized it with her tongue, chewed it.
Their eyes met and it was some trick of the moonlight or of her own fevered need that she could see into him, through what was real into what was before, into his Before self, into his days of rote striving, his complacency, his
success,
and Cass knew in that instant that Smoke had never been a man she could want, Before, and it was only the Siege that had forged and molded him into this.
Smoke lowered his face close to hers and she saw the look in his eyes. He
wanted
her to see it. He wanted it to be unmistakable as he spread her wetness all over her, found it with his insistent fingers and sluiced it into her folds and crevices, stroking her all the while, making her watch, and when her breathing grew hard and loud and ragged he plunged into her again but this time it was all of his fingers and he took his other hand and slid his thumb into her mouth and she clamped her lips around it and sucked it hard and writhed and bucked against him like she could take his entire being inside her and when she shattered she was sure she was dying because every part of her splintered and went flying into the sky in different directions and she didn’t even care.
And then time passed and the breeze kept up its gentle journey and the tears—because yes, she’d sobbed when she came, probably she had been crying the entire time—the tears dried to salty tracks on her cheeks. Smoke held her, and when his hands found the wounds on her back he explored them with his fingers, so gently that it only tickled a little, and he murmured that he was sorry, so sorry, and she let him touch the entire expanse of what was ravaged and hurt. When she shivered from the night chill, he pulled the covers up over her body.
Then he stroked her cheek and she could smell her own scent on his fingers and she turned her face away and the shame was back, just like that.
“You shouldn’t…you put your fingers in my mouth.”
“You wanted them there,” Smoke answered, without any trace of regret.
“But I could be—”
“We could both be dead tomorrow,” Smoke said sharply. And then, relenting: “Besides, I didn’t kiss you.”
Cass considered that. Technically, it was true. He hadn’t kissed her on the mouth. But all it would take was the tiniest cut or scratch—oh, God, had she bitten him? She couldn’t remember; it wouldn’t surprise her—
But she had needed him in her mouth, only it wasn’t his fingers she longed for, and as images flashed across her mind she felt herself blush and then she pushed his hand off her hip and wrapped the bed linens more tightly around herself.
“What,” Smoke said, allowing himself to be pushed away.
“You didn’t…you know. I was…that was all about me.”
Smoke shrugged and settled himself on his back, making do with the short end of the blankets that Cass had left him. “You’re keeping score?”
Confusion and uncertainty roiled and surged. “You say that like you think there will be a next time.”
“I have no expectations,” Smoke said wearily. “For what it’s worth…I enjoyed every minute of that. You’re an exceptional woman, Cass.”
I’m not,
Cass screamed, but without words and without sound.
I’m not, I’m not, I’m not
. Long after Smoke’s breathing went steady and even, long after her own body went leaden with fatigue and only her racing mind prevented it from falling into a deep sleep, the voice inside her raged against its walls.
You aren’t exceptional. You aren’t anything. You were nothing. Now you’re diseased. You are the disease. You are the vessel and you are wrecked and poisoned and evil.
Calmed by the voice that was vile but at least familiar, Cass finally let go of the sheet she had bunched tight in her hand. She stopped scraping her nails savagely at the skin of her thumb as the voice lulled her to sleep with its familiar lullaby of self-hatred. This was a landscape she knew well. This was home.
But as she finally drifted off to sleep, the stretch of white sheet between them so inviolable it might as well have been a brick wall, Cass was unsettled to realize that there was a tiny tendril of hope twining up the walls around her heart.
RUTHIE WAS REACHING UP FOR HER, STAMPING
her foot, stamping in frustration, her sweet little rosebud lips wobbling toward a wail. She was dressed, improbably, in the pink terry cloth onesie Cass had brought her home from the hospital in, a gift from Meddlin, who had been beside him self trying to keep the QikGo staffed while she was on her brief maternity leave.
Ruthie was a big girl now and the pink onesie had morphed into a bell-sleeved dress with a full skirt that swung around her chubby knees as she stamped and pouted. She was trying to tell Cass something but Cass couldn’t hear—it was as though there were a thousand layers of sound in her ears and she could hear none of them. Tears welled in Cass’s eyes and she tried with all her might to bend down and pick up her baby, or at least kiss her frown away, but she couldn’t move. And then the outlines of Ruthie’s dress started to break up and scatter and Ruthie began to fade, her cries turning to frantic screaming.
“Cass—Cass!” Cass felt a strong hand close on her shoulder and she fought her way awake, the horror of the dream falling away in shards. She blinked hard a few times and sat up, looking frantically around the unfamiliar room until she remembered where she was.
In daylight, the room was smaller than it had seemed last night, with a beadboard ceiling sloping toward the window, and rose-patterned wallpaper. The curtains that had drifted on last night’s breeze lay limp in the window, barely stirring. There was a white-painted dresser with a porcelain lamp and a basket of pinecones. A faint scent of dried eucalyptus tinged the air.
Cass rubbed her eyes and forced herself to look at Smoke. The stubble on his face gave him a raffish air, and his eyebrows knit in concern only underscored the effect of a pirate. His t-shirt had twisted during the night, and she caught a glimpse of his stomach, flat and hard with a line of black hair below his navel, trailing down. She felt the stirring inside her, a response that last night had sealed indelibly in her mind, and she fought it hard.
“You all right?” Smoke asked, voice sleep-rough but gentle.
Instead of answering Cass rolled away from him and un-tangled herself from the blankets. She stood, hastily pulling up her pants, and slipped out of the room.
She retreated to the bathroom and pulled the door tight behind her. Inside, on the closed toilet seat, lay a bowl of water and an unopened toothbrush and a fresh tube of toothpaste. On the floor was a second bucket; the waste bucket had been emptied. Lyle had been up before them, and the extent of his hospitality stopped Cass in her tracks and halted the panic that was threatening to careen out of control, dragging her behind it.
It wasn’t that other people hadn’t offered help. Some of the shelterers at the library made an effort when she first arrived, but she was so accustomed to keeping to herself that accepting an extra serving of food, a much-thumbed magazine from six months earlier, an invitation to walk around the courtyard in the evening…these were foreign notions, and it was so much easier to turn away than to risk letting a stranger get close to her.
What did it mean that she was allowing Lyle to help her now? Was she changing—had the brief contact with Smoke, with Sammi, with the women at the bath already turned her into someone different, a self that she didn’t recognize? Was she growing softer, weaker in her longing for human contact?
She picked up the toothbrush and peeled back the packaging, running her tongue over her cracked lips, her teeth. Yesterday the women had loaned her supplies and she’d brushed for what seemed like hours, trying to remove the weeks’ accumulation of matter from them. Among all its other properties, the kaysev stems’ woody fibers did a serviceable job of cleaning teeth, but the taste of toothpaste and the cool clean sensation afterward were a welcome relief.
She brushed slowly, savoring the taste. Then she used one of the folded cloths that Lyle had left to wash her face, her hands, between her legs, trying to get rid of every trace of the night before. She did not think of Smoke, and she did not think about the dream Ruthie, though not thinking about them took all her concentration.
She thought of the real Ruthie, the way she’d looked when Cass went to Mim and Byrn’s place to take her back. She’d been worried that the months of separation might have erased her from her daughter’s mind, but the minute Ruthie saw her in the doorway, she jumped up from the sofa where she had been playing with a thin gray cat and ran to her, blond curls flying, eyes wide with relief and joy.
Cass took a deep breath and looked into the mirror.
The first thing she noticed was how green her eyes were and for a moment she was electrified with terror until she figured out that it was only the pure strong light of morning that had shrunk her pupils. She cupped her hands around her face and leaned toward the mirror and her pupils expanded in the tunnel of dark she had created, and she exhaled with relief. Before the turn, her eyes had been a muddy hazel green; now they were the vibrant green of lemon leaves.
Bright irises were an early symptom of the disease, one of the things that gave the infected such ethereal beauty shortly after the blueleaf appeared, before any of them had turned all the way. But the shrunken irises that followed turned Beaters’ eyes into bright, soulless tunnels, passages that seemed to lead to their poisoned cores. By contrast, Cass’s eyes sparkled with life, making her look alert and intelligent and…pretty.
Cass felt her face flush. She touched her cheeks, her chin. The skin was clear and almost luminous. Her eyelashes stood out against the delicately veined eyelids, long-fringed and black. Her hair looked badly cut, but not terrible; it was glossy and the same rich golden brown it had always been, the new growth at her crown nearly indistinguishable from the rest.
After taking a thorough survey of her face, she couldn’t put it off any longer—it was time to look at her back. She skimmed off her shirt and turned and oh God it was worse than she’d thought, worse than she’d imagined, worse than she’d seen on anyone who wasn’t already dead or dying. The pocked areas where chunks of flesh had been chewed off were red and angry and raw. Shreds of blackened, dead tissue were stuck to the crusty, shiny layers underneath. In some areas it looked like muscle was still exposed, though concentric layers of healing skin, as thin as tissue paper, skimmed over the wounds from the edges inward.
Thank God she’d hid herself from the women at the bath. What would they have done, if they knew? They had been so kind, especially the one who had washed her so tenderly, never knowing what lay under her shirt. If they saw, were forced to look at the evidence of the attack on her—especially after what she’d done to Sammi—even the most compassionate among them would be unlikely to show her any mercy.
Cass tried to force a memory from her mind, a night when she had gone on the raiding party from the library. She’d been at the library for a couple of weeks and was going stir-crazy, her only outdoor time in the courtyard where she stared at the same treetops, the same stretch of sky, day after day. So when the raiding party assembled after dark with their empty packs and bags, she put on her own knapsack and held her blade at the ready and went out with them into the night.
There was an air of forced joviality, whispered joking and brittle laughter. They went south, down past the high school, to a cul-de-sac of run-down seventies-era trilevels. One of the curious truths of Aftertime was that the most opulent homes didn’t yield the best spoils: it was the solidly middle class who were most likely to have Costco-sized stores of granola bars, Midol, hand sanitizer.
They found enough to fill their packs in the first few houses. They’d come back another night and make their way around the rest of the block. There was no rush; they were like summer-fat squirrels, hoarding for a winter that still seemed far-off. The others seemed to relax, now that they were headed home—until they passed the old ARCO and heard garbled pleas for help coming through the mini-mart’s shattered double doors.
It was not the voice of a Beater. “Help…please…help.” Cass couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. It was like a scream that was leaking air, agony enunciated with excruciating care.
“Walk on, Cass,” Bobby said softly, drawing her away from the others, his hand gentle but insistent at her back. Bobby was always so kind to her. He wanted to be with her. He said he was willing to wait until she was ready, but how could she ever be ready? Half a dozen times she had turned him down, and still he was trying to protect her. Didn’t he understand that she didn’t deserve him?
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she whispered, backing away from him, from the concern in his eyes. She had to show him that she was not his, and though her heart hammered with fear, she walked straight over to the mini-mart, shining her flashlight in front of her.
There were none of the things inside, she knew, or they would have come loping and gnashing in pursuit the minute she and the others came close. But what she saw in the flashlight’s illumination was clearly a nest, befouled clothing and blankets mounded into a pile a dozen feet wide, the space made by pushing all the store’s racks and shelves to the side. The Beaters usually only left their nests during the day, when their tiny-pupiled eyes could absorb enough light to see, but for some reason these ones had gone hunting that night. The nest stink was powerful, and Cass knew any number of the things could be nearby, and she would have turned and run—except that on the nest lay one of their victims.
It was a man. She thought it was, anyway, but only because he still had his hair, which was buzzed short. He was naked, but the rest of his body held no clues to his gender, all of the skin having been eaten away. Under a basting of blood the flesh was flayed and ribboned and chewed, bone showing through in a few places, but mostly red muscles and sinew and nerves and tendons remained. The tough soles of his feet had been left whole, and his toes were undamaged, but even the flesh on top of his feet had been ripped away, the network of delicate bones showing through the gore.
His face had been left mostly intact, other than the cheeks, which had been chewed through. Facial skin was thin; maybe the Beaters found it tedious and had gone looking for another victim instead. At any rate the man’s eyes were wide with shock and his lips convulsed as he tried to speak. It took several attempts for him to put the syllables together:
“Kill…me…”
“No,” Cass whispered, her hand flying to her mouth. “No no no—”
A hand yanked at her elbow, and she stumbled as she tried to resist.
“Outside.” It was Bobby, and his expression, magnified in the tilting flashlight glow, was grim.
Cass nodded dumbly and backed out of the building, shoes crunching on the broken glass that littered the entrance, into the night where the others waited. One, a man in his fifties who had been a highway patrolman before, had his hands over his ears to shut out the tortured moans. Cass allowed herself to be led down the street, away from the ARCO, away from the Beater nest, away from the pulped matter that had once been human.
No one said anything. Bobby caught up with them a couple of blocks later. He fell into step next to Cass and stayed by her side until they were back at the library. Cass knew Bobby had killed the hopeless victim, but they never talked about it.
She had been a coward. Now, given the chance to do it again, she would have sliced the man’s throat without hesitation and held what remained of his hand while he bled out.
Was it courage, she wondered as she slowly put her shirt back on and buttoned it, or only loss that had numbed her? Or was it the effects of succumbing to and then beating the disease? Whatever the reason, she had changed. Her whole body had seemed warm since she first awoke. A matter of degrees, maybe—perhaps even fractions of a degree—but she would swear there was a difference. Her body was rebuilding itself relentlessly, her immune system hypervigilant against infection. The scabs on her arms had mostly healed. Now that she was clean and groomed she looked human enough that most people would think she was completely normal.
Cass ran her fingers through her hair, combing it as well as she could. She had been called beautiful by a lot of people, mostly men. Never Mim, who had reminded her often that she had inherited her father’s coloring, which she called coarse. He had Mediterranean blood, and like him, Cass’s skin darkened to olive, her hair in between brown and blond. Mim herself was pale as parchment and jealously guarded her skin, wearing big hats and sunscreen even for trips across town. There had been nothing Mim enjoyed more than reporting that she had run into some acquaintance whose crow’s feet and sunspots and blemishes had worsened. “Bet they wish they’d done what I did,” she’d smirk.
Mim was dead, of course. She died with her skin as flawless and unlined as ever at the age of sixty-one—but Cass supposed her storied beauty must have been marred by the red flush and frothing spittle that marked a blueleaf fever death.
At least she’d been spared the other. Dying from the initial fever meant you never had to worry about becoming a Beater.
Cass folded the used cloth and laid it on the edge of the tub and returned to the bedroom. Smoke had made the bed, but he was gone. A flicker of panic flashed through Cass before she heard talk coming from downstairs, and she picked up her backpack and followed the voices.
The men were sitting in a tidy kitchen splashed with sun streaming in the upper third of the windows. The bottom had been boarded up, and there was a flap of fabric-covered plywood on hinges at the top that could be lowered to block the sun completely. Raised, it let in sun but did not give a view to the outside.
Cass paused in the hall, listening.
“She has enough to worry about,” Smoke was saying.
“She needs to know before y’all just show up at the
library,” Lyle said softly. “Them Rebuilders—they don’t take kindly to bein’ told no, as I guess you know as well as anyone.”
Smoke muttered something that Cass couldn’t hear.
“It don’t matter,” Lyle said. “You got to hear what I’m sayin’ here. That story’s made it all the way here, hell, it’s probably got around half the state. Rebuilders gaining ground every day—they aim to take over. Hell, they want the valley, the whole fuckin’ state…who knows. Folks are afraid. They want someone to believe in. And that’s you. Which is all good, but you got the girl with you now, and maybe you’re not the worst thing to happen to her, see? But she needs to know it ain’t gonna be easy.”