Aftertime (3 page)

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. A
RT
C
ARVED
—O
RDER
Y
OUR
C
LASS
R
ING
N
OW
one read. Another advertised $$CASH$$
FOR
P
RINTER
C
ARTRIDGES.

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.”