Aftertime (12 page)

Cass stepped into the kitchen. “Don’t you think I know that? When’s the last time anything was ever easy?”

“Mornin’, princess,” Lyle said, raising his glass of water in a mock toast. Cass saw that a glass had been poured for her as well, and she sat in the chair closest to Lyle, not looking at Smoke. She wasn’t ready to look at him yet. The sensations of the night before still lingered on her skin, but she could not afford to be distracted, not with the hardest part of the trip still ahead.

“Good morning,” she said, taking a drink from the glass. The water was cloudy, with tiny specks floating in it.

“I boiled it,” Lyle said, gesturing at the kitchen counter, on which plastic jugs full of water were lined up. “I get a fire going every few nights, haul up water from the creek and set in a big batch. I strain it, get it as clean as I can.”

“It’s delicious,” Cass lied. Really, it tasted like nothing. It
was
nothing, nothing but sustenance. Even if it was swimming in bacteria her body would take from it what it needed >and leave the rest. She just had to maintain, survive.

The nontaste of the liquid triggered a memory of a meeting one weeknight after she’d done a double shift at the QikGo.

Cass sat in the back of the meetings at first and participated as little as possible—until the day she couldn’t leave the church basement because she knew that if she did she would get so drunk she might never recover, that she would drink until the bottle fell from her fingers and she passed out. She wanted to drink until she was dead. She wanted to drink until
everything
was dead, so instead she sat silent but trembling through the lunchtime meeting, and then stayed in the room crying and sweating until the first person came back for the five o’clock meeting. By then she was lying on the carpet next to the wall, her face pressed against the dirty rubber baseboards, and it took two people to help her into a chair.

But she stayed.

The night Cass was thinking about, she had gone to the meeting after her double shift, too tired to do anything but go through the motions. She passed when it was her turn to speak. She moved her lips when everyone else did, but didn’t listen to anyone’s stories.

Until the end. They stood, they held hands, they said the words. “…take what you need and leave the rest.”

Take what you need and leave the rest
.

Just one sentence from the stupid thing they always repeated at the end of every meeting. She’d heard it dozens of times before; it meant nothing. Only it kept going through her head as the other people in the room talked and smiled and sniffled and hugged.

What do I need?
she had asked herself. It wasn’t the stories. Not the burnt coffee or supermarket cookies or the company of these other people, not the chanting or the hand-holding or the hugs, which she had trained herself not to feel, not the manuals and books and pamphlets and tokens.

There was nothing in the room she needed. But when she left, she had what she needed. It was a puzzle like the ones she’d once liked to do, the riddles in her childhood. “I have no feet but I can run”…“I am as big as an elephant but as light as a feather”…

There is nothing here that I need…

What do I need?

“Thank you,” she told Lyle. Then she forced herself to turn and look at Smoke, who was watching her warily, his expression guarded.

“Thank you,” she forced herself to repeat, though the words were like broken glass in her mouth.

They passed the day helping Lyle move furniture around. Lyle had left thin strips of windows exposed along the top, which let in enough light to see what they were doing. His back was hurting from the effort of hauling them into the window the night before, and he needed their help to set up the downstairs rooms in anticipation of the Beaters’ next escalation in cunning. They created barriers at all the points of entry into the house, putting china cupboards in front of the boarded windows, dismantling a dresser and nailing the pieces over the doors.

That left only the back door, which had no glass panes that could be broken. It had two sets of dead bolts, installed since the start of the Siege.

Twice as they worked, stumbling groups of afflicted came down the street. Their snorting and moaning could be heard even though the downstairs windows were shut tight. The second time, seven Beaters milled across the street at the house where Lyle’s friend Travers was presumably still living. When Cass went to the upstairs bathroom, she could see the Beaters shuffling around the front lawn, bumping into each other. A pair lay down in a bed of kaysev growing in front of an ornamental stone bench, one nibbling gently at the other’s arm. It took a moment for Cass to realize that the one being gnawed was lying still, only a twitch of its leg now and then convincing her it wasn’t dead.

“Do you have binoculars, Lyle?” Cass asked. Lyle looked >up from the coffee table whose legs he was sawing off. He and Smoke were planning to brace it along the bottom of a large window in the dining room.

“That I do, missy, but are you sure there’s anything out there you want a closer look at?” he asked.

“I just—just for a quick look,” Cass said. She couldn’t bring herself to say that their moans had been traveling straight through her skin and making her thrum with anxiety; not knowing what they were up to was worse than the alternative.

Lyle merely nodded and went to the kitchen. He returned, polishing a compact pair on his t-shirt.

“Got these for hunting,” he said. “Damn shame my wife made me keep my guns locked up at the cabin or we could take a few potshots and scare those suckers off.”

Magnified, the Beaters looked even worse than the few Cass had seen on her journey. On those occasions she had watched from hiding spots behind shrubs or rocks. From a distance, they looked merely unkempt and wounded, their skin split and ragged, in various states of injury and flensing.

But up close, Cass could see the large patches of skin that had been chewed down to tendon and muscle and bone. One of the Beaters no longer seemed to have the use of one of its arms, which appeared to be missing several fingers and was gnawed nearly through at the elbow. It had also apparently chewed away most of its lips and its ears were crusted black knobs where it or something else had torn the flesh away.

“Oh, God…” Cass breathed. She moved the binoculars, her hands shaking, until she found the two of them on the ground and focused. The one who was being chewed on was, she saw now, twitching spasmodically, the remains of its chewed fingers jerking almost rhythmically. She moved the binoculars up its thin, t-shirt clad body until its head came into view. It, too, had suffered mutilation—its own work or that of others, impossible to know. Gouges in its neck and cheek were crusted with blood and its mouth was a gaping black hole. It was nearly bald and its head was covered with scabs.

But it wasn’t until Cass moved the binoculars to take in the one crouched next to it that she understood what was happening. The other Beater had chewed through a vein, or an artery—something big, anyway. It was bleeding out, nearly dead, so far gone as to be indifferent to its fate. Both their faces and shirtfronts were covered in blood.

The others had noticed what was going on in the flower bed and were lurching over and crouching down next to their dying companion, shoving each other out of the way.

“What’s going on?” Lyle demanded, and held out a hand for the binoculars. He looked only for a few seconds before lowering them.

“Oh,” he said heavily. “They’ll do that sometimes, nowadays, when they haven’t had any fresh…you know. When they haven’t caught anyone for a while.”

“The blood,” Cass said weakly.

“Yeah, well, they don’t prefer it, but in a pinch I guess they get desperate.”

Cass remembered the times, during the Siege, when she’d seen one of the Beaters who’d been cut with a blade when someone managed to get close enough during an attack.

Their own blood fascinated them. It stopped them in their tracks even if they were seconds away from snagging a victim, and they would let go of a person’s arm or t-shirt to stare at the blood as it ran from their bodies. They would pat at it like a child with finger paints, seemingly oblivious to pain, spreading it around on their clothing and skin. They would taste it and suck it off their fingers, but tentatively, not thirstily.

It was that fascination that sometimes saved people. It was the reason the children had been taught to use the blades. Cut a Beater deeply enough and it would bleed out like a citizen. But even if the wound didn’t kill it, spilling its blood would distract it enough so you could get away.

It worked for a while. It probably wouldn’t work anymore.

But Cass closed her fingers on the handle of the blade in her pocket anyway.

IN THE EVENING LYLE LIT CANDLES. THERE WAS
canned soup and snack packs of Oreo cookies, the kind kids used to have in their school lunches. The soup was cold, but it tasted delicious. Afterward, Cass helped Lyle with the dishes. They were chipped stoneware with an ugly design of brown owls winking against an orange sun. These dishes had no doubt been purchased by one of the wives who’d come and gone.

Strange, to think about what people held on to. What brought them comfort.

That thought was still in Cass’s mind when she and Smoke set out again after nightfall. Lyle shook Smoke’s hand and gave her a hug, a crushing, lengthy one, and told them they were always welcome, and stood in his doorway watching them make their way down the street.

In Cass’s pocket was a crystal suncatcher that she’d stolen from Lyle’s house. It had been hanging in the window in what had once been the dining room. She was sure that if she’d asked, he would have given it to her with his blessing.

But Cass couldn’t ask. She had to steal. She didn’t know why, and wondering wouldn’t help.

It wasn’t all that hard to keep the image of the Beaters—swarming across the street, feasting on their dying comrade’s blood—out of her mind, Cass discovered.

Because now all she could think about was Ruthie.

Cass held her blade in her hand as Smoke held his. They walked side by side, down the center of the street. It was a cool night and a few leaves had fallen from the sycamores lining the asphalt. The sycamores had survived the bioattacks that had decimated so many of the trees of Before. Cass had never cared for them because despite their vigorous spring leafing, by late summer they grew dispirited and started to shed yellowed and drying leaves. They seemed, to Cass, to lack resolve.

Now, though, she felt a kinship for them. They, too, were survivors, and that meant something.

Cass traced their route in her mind. Three blocks down Arroyo and then a right and a straight shot down Second for a quarter mile or so before it dead-ended in the wide lawn in front of the library. A few years ago there had been a fund-raising campaign to remodel the place, for new carpet and shelves and furniture, new computers and an updated catalog and checkout system. To pay for it all, personalized bricks were sold and laid in a meandering walkway to the front door. Mim and Byrn had bought bricks. Two of them: one said “Gina and Byrn Orr,” the other “Ruthie Haverford.” It hurt Cass that her own name didn’t appear on the bricks, even though she wanted nothing from Byrn and she herself was responsible for the chasm between her and her mother. And it also hurt that they insisted on using Haverford for Ruthie’s last name, because Cass had changed her own last name to Dollar legally the day she turned eighteen, and so Ruthie’s real name was Ruthie Dollar.

Despite these hurts she knew exactly where the bricks were. Ruthie was only a baby when the walkway was put down, but Cass had brought her there in a stroller and showed her where hers was, near an oleander hedge. Later, Cass held her little fingers and traced the shapes of the letters in her name. She had been glad Ruthie had a brick, so that someday she could bring her friends and show them that she was someone.

Cass thought about telling Smoke about the brick. But she wasn’t sure what words would make him understand, and she just wanted to get to Ruthie. Her hands were hungry to touch her, her arms longed to hold her. Her entire body felt infused with the frantic energy of longing for her baby.

She was alert to the sounds of the night, listening for the wailing and snuffling that would signal that they had not been lucky enough. She stayed close by Smoke’s side, her fingers in her pocket brushing against Lyle’s crystal teardrop, and her thoughts chased each other in circles as she tried to focus on her breathing, the way that flight attendant in her meetings had constantly been harping about. The woman carried with her an air of wounded resentment that made it hard to pay attention as she described how you were supposed to inhale hope and possibility and exhale expectations and disappointment and fear.

But now Cass breathed with everything she had, and after they had walked in silence for what felt like a hundred miles, the library finally appeared ahead in the gloom.

“We need to go around to the side,” Cass said, trying to cover up the dizzy combination of relief and anticipation that flooded through her. “At least that’s where—”

“Okay,” Smoke said.

He matched her pace as she sped up, barely able to keep herself from breaking into a run. But then she stopped short, several yards from the door, apprehensive.

“You have to knock,” she whispered. “When they see me, they might think I’m…you know.”

Smoke put a gentle hand to her back. “Cass, you’re cleaned up. You look fine. And in the dark, your skin…”

Cass knew what he meant. The wounds along her arm were faded even in the daylight, but in the dark they would go unnoticed.

Smoke ran his hand gently down the side of her face, tilting her chin up so that she would have to look at him. “Are you all right?”

Cass nodded, but she didn’t trust her voice to speak. She led the way to the door, but as she was about to knock it opened.

The woman standing inside held a flashlight.

“Hurry,” she whispered. She stepped out of the way, holding the door open just wide enough for them to pass.

Cass and Smoke slipped inside and the door shut with a heavy thud.

Someone slid a heavy bolt into place. As her eyes adjusted to the flashlight’s glow, Cass saw that four people were gathered in the small vestibule.

One of the men held a gun loosely at his side.

But as she scanned the others she realized that she knew one of them, and her alarm lessened slightly.

“Elaine—it’s me, Cass.”

There was a moment of shocked silence and then a flash of recognition, Elaine’s eyes widening and her lips parting as though she was about to say Cass’s name.

And then she didn’t. Instead, her expression shuttered, but not before Cass thought she saw her shake her head, very slightly, as she raised her arms to cross them in front of her chest.

“Do I know you?” she said.

“Elaine? Don’t you…” Cass’s bewilderment grew into something more, confusion edged with cold fear. She took another look at the other people in the room, their tense posture, their hard expressions. “My name
is
Elaine,” she said. “Elaine White. Maybe you took one of my yoga classes?”

Her gaze was hard and intent, and Cass hesitated. “Uh…maybe.”

“I used to teach at the Third Street Gym. And I had one over in Terryville on Thursdays and Saturdays. Saturday was such a big class, I never knew everyone’s name. But you look kind of familiar.”

“Yeah,” Cass said, trying to gauge where Elaine was trying to lead her…and why. Elaine
had
been a yoga teacher, a fact that Cass learned during one of a dozen after-dinner conversations when the two of them had worked together washing and drying dishes and ordering the stores, tasks reserved for those without children. Parents told bedtime stories and tucked their little ones in, even Aftertime, leaving the others to fill the hours before sleep with stories of their past, never talk of the future. She knew that Elaine had recently broken up with her boyfriend, a man who’d left his wife for her, that she’d had to take out a restraining order against him, though he’d disappeared early on in the troubles. That she had to leave a room-sized loom behind when she came to the library, that she missed weaving her blankets and shawls and table runners more than anything from Before. “Saturdays. I took the…uh…”

“Sacred Thread. At ten-thirty.”

“Yes. That one.”

For a moment they regarded each other, Elaine’s mouth compressed in a thin line, Smoke standing close behind Cass—and then the man with the gun stepped forward, gesturing with his free hand at the two of them.

“All of this is very heartwarming,” he said, in the flat voice of a transplanted Midwesterner. “But your little reunion can wait. Arms out, legs apart.”

Cass realized they were going to be searched, and drew in a sharp breath. She’d made it this far, and she couldn’t risk being turned back now, not before she got Ruthie.

“Elaine, I just need—”

“Do what he says,” Elaine snapped, any trace of warmth drained from her voice. “Maybe you were in my class, maybe not. We weren’t
friends
. So don’t expect me to treat you like we were.”

“But I only wanted—”

“Shut up,”
Elaine growled, and in the flickering glow of the bulb in the fixture tacked to the ceiling with builder’s staples, Cass saw her reach for her belt and knew what was coming even before the woman who had once been her friend produced a gun of her own and pointed it at her heart.