But Cass’s attackers had presumably been interrupted. How, and by whom, she had no idea. Still, she was grateful that the Beaters had time to tear only a half-dozen holes in her back, from the base of her spine to her shoulder blades.
She pulled her shirt over her shoulders and slowly turned until she could see her back in the mirror, dreading her reflection, but the wounds weren’t the festering and oozing things she feared they would be. They were healing, regrowing flesh where it had been taken. In the mirror they seemed to glisten, pale layers of skin filming over the red and raw underlayers.
Cass realized she had been holding her breath and turned back, pulling on her shirt as she exhaled slowly. Her hair, soft from its recent shampoo, stuck out in jagged clumps where Smoke had sheared it off, but at least it didn’t look like she’d pulled it out herself. She looked a little like a punk rocker from thirty years earlier—her mother’s time, when women used to cut their hair short and spike it. She thought of wetting it down to tame it and her hands went automatically to the faucet and turned the handle before she remembered the futility of the gesture. Water had not run in these pipes in months.
As the Siege worsened, it eventually became clear that not only did the government not have the ability to repel the relentless bioterrorist attacks—they were never going to be able to identify with certainty who had unleashed them. The toxins were manufactured in Japan, Russia, even Finland, outsourced across a thousand corporate shells, but terrorist groups in Greece and Sri Lanka and Colombia and Somalia took credit along with the usual suspects. As every major food crop was decimated and livestock lay rotting in stinking shallow graves, people’s fears morphed into a terrible fury. Rioting, roving bands of citizens stormed every municipal and government office and the very people who were trying desperately to hold on to order were either dragged out and beaten, or ran for their lives. One by one, substations on the power grid flickered out; water stopped running through the municipal pipes; cell towers went dark. And still, everyone kept making mistakes, forgetting that the light switches no longer turned on lights, that faucets wouldn’t deliver water, that phones wouldn’t ring or connect anyone, that stoplights would never guide them and toilets would never flush. It took a while, but eventually everyone adapted. The things from Before—the hydrants and lamp poles and public restrooms—gradually, they became just another part of the landscape, unnoticed and untouched.
And yet here she was, hands turning the cold knobs, expecting water to fill the basin. Cass closed her eyes and focused on the sensation; she could almost feel the water rushing over her fingers. She imagined water arcing from a drinking fountain, remembered how it felt pooling in her mouth, cold against her tongue. She remembered a garden hose on a hot day, testing the water dribbling out of it and waiting until the sun-heated water ran cool before putting a thumb over the nozzle and making a rainbow-dappled spray for Ruthie to run through. Droplets sparkled like a thousand tiny crystals in the sun.
Anguish seized Cass—not just a longing for another time, but a sense that she herself was lost, that her exile from the rest of the world had left her without a place to return to. She was missing two months of her life, and during that time, the world had moved on without her. The Beaters had evolved. Citizens had evolved, too. The shelters were full of survivors who made homes inside the schools and libraries and supermarkets and churches. In the time since she was taken, they had shared meals and made friends. They’d buried their dead and given birth and made love. They’d cried and grieved and laughed and created new memories.
And she had not been there.
Cass was alone, like she had always been alone, since the day her father walked out the door and her mother hardened and changed into someone else. The bad decisions she made in high school only grew more desperate as she pushed everyone away. She piled failure onto disappointment until there was no path back. Eventually her friendships atrophied and disintegrated and the only people in her life were the people she drank with or fucked.
For a brief, shining time there was Ruthie. Ruthie brought Cass back to life, Ruthie helped her start to be a person again. Until that dark moment when she stumbled, when her darkness reached up for her and pulled her down again, and maybe Mim and Byrn were right—maybe they had to take Ruthie away from her, maybe they had no choice because Cass didn’t deserve her.
Cass ground her knuckles hard against the porcelain of the sink until her bones ached. She’d finally gotten Ruthie back, only to fail her again. She’d had her daughter less than one day before she carelessly let the danger in. She’d almost let her daughter die a horrible death.
A sound came from her throat, a strangled whimper.
There was a knocking on the door, and then it swung open and Smoke was there. “Are you all right? Cass?”
His hand hovered in the air, as though he was afraid to touch her, and he said her name again.
“Cass?”
Slowly, she raised her face to the mirror and this time when she looked at herself there was a sparkle of tears in the moonlight, and Cass realized that she was crying for the first time since the day the social workers had come for Ruthie.
She stared at her ghostly reflection in disbelief, and it was only when Smoke took her by the shoulders and turned her toward him, when he reached a gentle hand toward her face to brush away her tears, that she shoved him.
“No.”
Immediately he put his hands in the air and backed up into the door. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“You don’t understand. It’s—it’s what Lyle said. I could be a…” She swallowed, hard. “A carrier. You know, I could have it in me, the disease. It could be in my tears.”
Smoke shook his head. “No, Cass. No. I don’t believe that. And even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be your tears. Just your saliva.”
“You don’t know that. That’s just a rumor.”
“Not for sure, maybe, but there’s a guy at the school, came out from UCSF in the early days of the Siege. One of the last ones to make it before the roads got all fucked up. He was a researcher, in infectious disease. He knew his shit, Cass. And he said it’s like with rabies. You get it from being bitten, from an infected animal’s saliva, and even if there’s traces of the virus in other body systems it’s not enough to cause infection. He said they tested one of them. One of the Beaters. Before they lost power in the lab. They didn’t get very far, but the abnormalities or whatever were in the saliva, and they found traces in the spinal fluid and internal organs but at such a low level that it wasn’t enough to pass on the disease.”
“He could have been making it up, he could have been crazy, he—”
“Yes,” Smoke interrupted. “Yes, he could have been lying. But I choose to believe him. That’s all we can do anymore…is to choose what we’re going to believe and what not to believe.”
This time when he traced his thumb gently along her cheek, Cass stayed still. When he grazed the tender skin below her eyes, her tears spilled over and splashed hot on his skin, but he did not flinch.
“What happened to him?” Cass whispered. “The scientist.”
“He moved on. He felt it was only a matter of time before the Beaters spread east, he figured within a year they’d have reached the Midwest and South. But he went north.… He thought the Beaters might not be able to handle colder climates.”
“You believe that?”
Smoke said nothing, but his fingertips traced her hairline, over her ears, settled under her chin. “Yeah, maybe,” he finally said. “I mean they’re still human. Kind of. They’d die of exposure when the temperatures go below freezing, so I think there’s a good chance they’ll naturally keep moving south with the weather. Look, let’s not talk about all this anymore now. Come with me, Cass. Let’s lie down. I’ll stay awake with you until you fall asleep. Let me help—you don’t need to feel so alone.”
Cass ducked her chin. The moment was broken; she was done crying for now. She followed Smoke out of
the bathroom and into the guest room, and as he closed the door silently behind them she turned the bedcovers down and slid between the sheets. They were marvelously cool and silky against her skin. They smelled like fabric softener, and Cass realized that they hadn’t been slept in since the last time they were washed.
Smoke unbuttoned his shirt, taking his time and watching her watching him in the moonlight. He slid it off and folded it and laid it on a chair. Then he took off his belt and boots and socks and dropped them to the floor. He got in the bed next to her, slowly, carefully, leaving an expanse of white sheet between them. He propped himself up on an elbow and gazed at her and she couldn’t help it, she sucked in her breath and felt her skin grow hot.
Being watched like this…Cass felt the old stirring, the need that had always made itself known to her without subtlety. Whenever she felt her solitude too acutely, the weight of all her terrible decisions, there was only one way to block it out, and that was to smother it with something stronger.
She had started using sex to obliterate the pain when she was a senior in high school. A few years later she’d evolved it into a high art, learning to attract and control and barter, and for a while that was enough. But over time it took greater and greater risks, sheer heights and breathless drops, to satisfy her need for release.
Drinking helped. But drinking only masked the need. It never took it away. And there had been plenty of nights when she didn’t manage to pass out before she had to satisfy the hunger that wouldn’t be quieted. Plenty of nights when she’d done things that skated a very thin line between pleasure and pain, when she didn’t recognize her own cries, couldn’t tell if they were anguish or satisfaction.
Ruthie had been conceived on such a night. Only, Cass had no idea which one. There had been too many.
Now, the old swirl was hot within her, the rushing, dizzying bloom of need and fury that felt like molten iron and burning acid all at once, a killing thirst that demanded to be slaked. But something was wrong. Instead of anger, it had been stoked by fear. Fear…and loneliness. And these emotions could never be powerful enough. They could never force her to do what anger could do—because she was a creature of rage, she burned white-hot when she drank and fucked and ran miles through the foothills, when she pushed her muscles her lungs her legs so hard they screamed out for release. Without her rage she was nothing but emptiness, a shell of a person.
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 ha
rder 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.
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