Authors: Sophie Littlefield
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?
THE ROAD INTO SILVA WOUND THROUGH MOSTLY
unbuilt land, its cracked edges sloping into a rocky outcrop ping 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
time—when citizens entered a house and found the dead, the piles of stones were a respectful gesture as well as giving notice to others who might come along. If the unlikely day ever came when it was possible to clear the buildings, to give the deceased a proper burial, then the stones could be returned to the fields and creeks and flower beds they came from.
Next to the pile of stones was a second form, difficult to make out in the moonlight. “What is that…?” Cass said, pointing.
“Oh, that—a pot, I think.”
“What, like a cooking pot?”
“Yes…I guess you didn’t— It’s a new thing, a way to tell people that there’s nothing left inside worth taking. No food, no provisions. The raiders started doing that as a way to show people when a house had been emptied of anything useful. It caught on fast.”
“But why a pot?”
Smoke shrugged. “Why anything? Why not a shoe or a lamp or…you know how it is. Nobody knows how these things start. Maybe a pot because it symbolizes a kitchen and food, and it’s mostly food that you want in a raid. Well, food and medicine I guess. Maybe just because they’re sturdy and will hold up to the elements. Does it matter?”
“So that means…someone’s been in there, looking for stuff. You guys?”
“I don’t know. Us, or the fire station people, or even some of the squatters.”
“Squatters?”
“It’s what they’re—what everyone’s calling people who stayed in houses.”
“Even if it was their own houses?”
“Yeah, I know, but that’s what they call them. Not in a shelter, you’re squatting.”
They passed the little clump of buildings and reached another bend in the road. Around the corner the road sloped down again and widened, sidewalks lining the street where the ranchers and foursquare houses were lined up neatly.
“Are there squatters here?” Cass asked, her stomach turning with unease. “In these houses?”
“Last time I came this way, yes, there were,” Smoke said. “We’ve mostly been going over toward Terryville when we go raiding. There’s a group sheltering there in the mall, but they’ve had a hard time with security. Our location’s good, I think—not so many Beaters since they like to stay in towns. The school’s just rural enough that we don’t see as many of them. At least, not until very recently.”
“Do you know which houses have people in them?” Cass asked.
Smoke looked along the row. They were walking in the middle of the street, their steps echoing slightly. “I wish I could tell you. Obviously, not the ones with the stone piles. And not like
that
.” He pointed at a house whose garage door had been crumpled inward by a pickup truck that was still parked there at an odd angle, back tires digging into the front lawn. A big picture window had been shattered and furniture and lamps were strewn across the front porch.
“Maybe…there,” he said, pointing at a square brick house that looked relatively unscathed, drapes drawn tight in all the windows.
Cass wondered if there were people inside, sleeping with blades next to the bed, guarding against attack, waiting for the sound of scratching at the door and windows, the moaning and frantic whining when a Beater caught the scent. She wondered what kind of person would prefer living with all that fear and uncertainty rather than sharing it with others in a shelter.
But Cass knew the answer. She knew exactly what kind of person would make such a choice—
she
would. Before Ruthie, before she had something she loved enough to keep on living, she would have dealt with evil by standing firm and alone against it. Even if—
especially
if—she knew it was a losing proposition, one that was sure to get her killed.
Cass wondered where the Beaters were nesting these days. Before she was taken, they had favored places that were open to the air but sheltered, like carports and stores with the front windows broken out. They slept a lot; it had seemed that they slept as much as half the day away, not that they ever seemed to achieve a very deep sleep.
There was a group from the library who spied on them at night. Miranda, before she was taken, had gone along a few times, taking enormous risks to watch a group that took over a service bay at a Big O Tires center. Cass never went along, but she listened to their reports, fascinated, along with everyone else.
Like newborn rats, they reported. A wriggling pile, night->blinded and restless. They slept touching, their scabbed and weeping limbs draped and entwined, almost like lovers. Some people thought they felt affection for each other, but Cass doubted it. She figured it was just familiarity—or, more likely, something even more base, an attraction based on the pathology of the disease. The Beaters’ senses had been sharpened drastically—they were able to sniff the scent of citizens from dozens of feet away—perhaps their sensitivity had been sharpened as well and there was some sort of comfort to be had among their own kind.
They shared their victims, too—there was that.
“Where do they nest, now?” Cass asked.
Smoke answered reluctantly. “Peace Lutheran, still, last time we were here. The Ace garden center. Those are the big ones, and there are smaller nests in other places, too. And they seem to be roving. One night here, one night there. On the move.”
Cass considered the implications. “That’s not good.”
“No, it’s pretty much fucked. No one knows why it’s happening, but everyone seems to agree that the disease is changing and developing. Or maybe it’s just that the first wave of infected is reaching a new stage of the disease. I mean, it makes sense. Every stage has been well-defined. Maybe this is just the outcome of whatever’s going on, you know, in their bodies.”
“You mean, like maybe they’ll stop eating flesh and develop a compulsion to follow each other into the sea, like lemmings?”
“Yeah. Right,” Smoke said, the beginnings of a wry smile emerging. “It doesn’t hurt to dream, I guess.”
They walked for a while without saying anything. The pack Cass had been given was surprisingly comfortable, the weight of the water bottles and provisions well distributed. Her borrowed clothes were clean and she liked the sensation of the washed fabrics against her skin—it had been so long since she had been comfortable.
Twice they heard the eerie crowing cries of Beaters far off in the distance, a roving gang of them out on a night wander. They seemed to be heading away, rather than drawing closer, but when Smoke took her hand she held on tightly until the night was silent again. Cass knew how lucky she’d been that her journey back had been through largely unpopulated country; Beaters generally preferred towns. Now that she was back in Silva, the things were all around. Most slept, waiting for dawn, but as Smoke had explained, some were restless enough to venture out even when they couldn’t see. Cass didn’t know what was worse: the thought of them night-blind and stumbling a few blocks away, or knowing that tucked away in the buildings they passed were their fetid, teeming nests.
Still, she felt like she could walk for hours, just as she had every night since she woke up, as she made her steady way back up through the foothills. On those nights, she had tried hard to empty her mind of anything but her goal— Ruthie—but occasionally she couldn’t help wondering how she’d gotten so far from home. Beaters took their victims straight to their nests. The idea that they had taken her thirty miles or more out of town was unimaginable. How would they have carried her all that way? When they took a victim, one of them would sling the victim over their shoulders and others would restrain the kicking feet, the grasping hands of the terrified victim. Occasionally they would knock the victim unconscious, but that was rare. The supposition was that they were afraid they’d kill the person or stun them so badly that they weren’t alert for what came later.
It seemed to be important to the Beaters that people were awake for that.
“Hey,” Smoke said quietly, closing a hand on her arm, interrupting her thoughts. They were on another block like the last, lined with mature trees, small houses in various states of disrepair.
“What,” Cass whispered back. Immediately her senses were on high alert. She scanned the buildings quickly, trying desperately to see into the dark shadows.
“I heard something…I think. Over there, behind that house.”
“
Behind?
Or in? Because—”
And then Cass heard it, too.