Aftertime

by Littlefield, Sophie

  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 hollo
w 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.