Aftertime

by Littlefield, Sophie

  Smoke lowered his face close to hers and she saw the look in his eyes. He wanted her to see it. He wanted it to be unmistakable as he spread her wetness all over her, found it with his insistent fingers and sluiced it into her folds and crevices, stroking her all the while, making her watch, and when her breathing grew hard and loud and ragged he plunged into her again but this time it was all of his fingers and he took his other hand and slid his thumb into her mouth and she clamped her lips around it and sucked it hard and writhed and bucked against him like she could take his entire being inside her and when she shattered she was sure she was dying because every part of her splintered and went flying into the sky in different directions and she didn’t even care.

  And then time passed and the breeze kept up its gentle journey and the tears—because yes, she’d sobbed when she came, probably she had been crying the entire time—the tears dried to salty tracks on her cheeks. Smoke held her, and when his hands found the wounds on her back he explored them with his fingers, so gently that it only tickled a little, and he murmured that he was sorry, so sorry, and she let him touch the entire expanse of what was ravaged and hurt. When she shivered from the night chill, he pulled the covers up over her body.

  Then he stroked her cheek and she could smell her own scent on his fingers and she turned her face away and the shame was back, just like that.

  “You shouldn’t…you put your fingers in my mouth.”

  “You wanted them there,” Smoke answered, without any trace of regret.

  “But I could be—”

  “We could both be dead tomorrow,” Smoke said sharply. And then, relenting: “Besides, I didn’t kiss you.”

  Cass considered that. Technically, it was true. He hadn’t kissed her on the mouth. But all it would take was the tiniest cut or scratch—oh, God, had she bitten him? She couldn’t remember; it wouldn’t surprise her—

  But she had needed him in her mouth, only it wasn’t his fingers she longed for, and as images flashed across her mind she felt herself blush and then she pushed his hand off her hip and wrapped the bed linens more tightly around herself.

  “What,” Smoke said, allowing himself to be pushed away.

  “You didn’t…you know. I was…that was all about me.”

  Smoke shrugged and settled himself on his back, making do with the short end of the blankets that Cass had left him. “You’re keeping score?”

  Confusion and uncertainty roiled and surged. “You say that like you think there will be a next time.”

  “I have no expectations,” Smoke said wearily. “For what it’s worth…I enjoyed every minute of that. You’re an exceptional woman, Cass.”

  I’m not, Cass screamed, but without words and without sound. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. Long after Smoke’s breathing went steady and even, long after her own body went leaden with fatigue and only her racing mind prevented it from falling into a deep sleep, the voice inside her raged against its walls.

  You aren’t exceptional. You aren’t anything. You were nothing. Now you’re diseased. You are the disease. You are the vessel and you are wrecked and poisoned and evil.

  Calmed by the voice that was vile but at least familiar, Cass finally let go of the sheet she had bunched tight in her hand. She stopped scraping her nails savagely at the skin of her thumb as the voice lulled her to sleep with its familiar lullaby of self-hatred. This was a landscape she knew well. This was home.

  But as she finally drifted off to sleep, the stretch of white sheet between them so inviolable it might as well have been a brick wall, Cass was unsettled to realize that there was a tiny tendril of hope twining up the walls around her heart.

  15

  RUTHIE WAS REACHING UP FOR HER, STAMPING her foot, stamping in frustration, her sweet little rosebud lips wobbling toward a wail. She was dressed, improbably, in the pink terry cloth onesie Cass had brought her home from the hospital in, a gift from Meddlin, who had been beside him self trying to keep the QikGo staffed while she was on her brief maternity leave.

  Ruthie was a big girl now and the pink onesie had morphed into a bell-sleeved dress with a full skirt that swung around her chubby knees as she stamped and pouted. She was trying to tell Cass something but Cass couldn’t hear—it was as though there were a thousand layers of sound in her ears and she could hear none of them. Tears welled in Cass’s eyes and she tried with all her might to bend down and pick up her baby, or at least kiss her frown away, but she couldn’t move. And then the outlines of Ruthie’s dress started to break up and scatter and Ruthie began to fade, her cries turning to frantic screaming.

  “Cass—Cass!” Cass felt a strong hand close on her shoulder and she fought her way awake, the horror of the dream falling away in shards. She blinked hard a few times and sat up, looking frantically around the unfamiliar room until she remembered where she was.

  In daylight, the room was smaller than it had seemed last night, with a beadboard ceiling sloping toward the window, and rose-patterned wallpaper. The curtains that had drifted on last night’s breeze lay limp in the window, barely stirring. There was a white-painted dresser with a porcelain lamp and a basket of pinecones. A faint scent of dried eucalyptus tinged the air.

  Cass rubbed her eyes and forced herself to look at Smoke. The stubble on his face gave him a raffish air, and his eyebrows knit in concern only underscored the effect of a pirate. His t-shirt had twisted during the night, and she caught a glimpse of his stomach, flat and hard with a line of black hair below his navel, trailing down. She felt the stirring inside her, a response that last night had sealed indelibly in her mind, and she fought it hard.

  “You all right?” Smoke asked, voice sleep-rough but gentle.

  Instead of answering Cass rolled away from him and un-tangled herself from the blankets. She stood, hastily pulling up her pants, and slipped out of the room.

  She retreated to the bathroom and pulled the door tight behind her. Inside, on the closed toilet seat, lay a bowl of water and an unopened toothbrush and a fresh tube of toothpaste. On the floor was a second bucket; the waste bucket had been emptied. Lyle had been up before them, and the extent of his hospitality stopped Cass in her tracks and halted the panic that was threatening to careen out of control, dragging her behind it.

  It wasn’t that other people hadn’t offered help. Some of the shelterers at the library made an effort when she first arrived, but she was so accustomed to keeping to herself that accepting an extra serving of food, a much-thumbed magazine from six months earlier, an invitation to walk around the courtyard in the evening…these were foreign notions, and it was so much easier to turn away than to risk letting a stranger get close to her.

  What did it mean that she was allowing Lyle to help her now? Was she changing—had the brief contact with Smoke, with Sammi, with the women at the bath already turned her into someone different, a self that she didn’t recognize? Was she growing softer, weaker in her longing for human contact?

  She picked up the toothbrush and peeled back the packaging, running her tongue over her cracked lips, her teeth. Yesterday the women had loaned her supplies and she’d brushed for what seemed like hours, trying to remove the weeks’ accumulation of matter from them. Among all its other properties, the kaysev stems’ woody fibers did a serviceable job of cleaning teeth, but the taste of toothpaste and the cool clean sensation afterward were a welcome relief.

  She brushed slowly, savoring the taste. Then she used one of the folded cloths that Lyle had left to wash her face, her hands, between her legs, trying to get rid of every trace of the night before. She did not think of Smoke, and she did not think about the dream Ruthie, though not thinking about them took all her concentration.

  She thought of the real Ruthie, the way she’d looked when Cass went to Mim and Byrn’s place to take her back. She’d been worried that the months of separation might have erased her from her daughter’s mind, but the minute Ruthie saw her in the doorway, she jumped up from the sofa where she had been playing with a thin
gray cat and ran to her, blond curls flying, eyes wide with relief and joy.

  Cass took a deep breath and looked into the mirror.

  The first thing she noticed was how green her eyes were and for a moment she was electrified with terror until she figured out that it was only the pure strong light of morning that had shrunk her pupils. She cupped her hands around her face and leaned toward the mirror and her pupils expanded in the tunnel of dark she had created, and she exhaled with relief. Before the turn, her eyes had been a muddy hazel green; now they were the vibrant green of lemon leaves.

  Bright irises were an early symptom of the disease, one of the things that gave the infected such ethereal beauty shortly after the blueleaf appeared, before any of them had turned all the way. But the shrunken irises that followed turned Beaters’ eyes into bright, soulless tunnels, passages that seemed to lead to their poisoned cores. By contrast, Cass’s eyes sparkled with life, making her look alert and intelligent and…pretty.

  Cass felt her face flush. She touched her cheeks, her chin. The skin was clear and almost luminous. Her eyelashes stood out against the delicately veined eyelids, long-fringed and black. Her hair looked badly cut, but not terrible; it was glossy and the same rich golden brown it had always been, the new growth at her crown nearly indistinguishable from the rest.

  After taking a thorough survey of her face, she couldn’t put it off any longer—it was time to look at her back. She skimmed off her shirt and turned and oh God it was worse than she’d thought, worse than she’d imagined, worse than she’d seen on anyone who wasn’t already dead or dying. The pocked areas where chunks of flesh had been chewed off were red and angry and raw. Shreds of blackened, dead tissue were stuck to the crusty, shiny layers underneath. In some areas it looked like muscle was still exposed, though concentric layers of healing skin, as thin as tissue paper, skimmed over the wounds from the edges inward.

  Thank God she’d hid herself from the women at the bath. What would they have done, if they knew? They had been so kind, especially the one who had washed her so tenderly, never knowing what lay under her shirt. If they saw, were forced to look at the evidence of the attack on her—especially after what she’d done to Sammi—even the most compassionate among them would be unlikely to show her any mercy.

  Cass tried to force a memory from her mind, a night when she had gone on the raiding party from the library. She’d been at the library for a couple of weeks and was going stir-crazy, her only outdoor time in the courtyard where she stared at the same treetops, the same stretch of sky, day after day. So when the raiding party assembled after dark with their empty packs and bags, she put on her own knapsack and held her blade at the ready and went out with them into the night.

  There was an air of forced joviality, whispered joking and brittle laughter. They went south, down past the high school, to a cul-de-sac of run-down seventies-era trilevels. One of the curious truths of Aftertime was that the most opulent homes didn’t yield the best spoils: it was the solidly middle class who were most likely to have Costco-sized stores of granola bars, Midol, hand sanitizer.

  They found enough to fill their packs in the first few houses. They’d come back another night and make their way around the rest of the block. There was no rush; they were like summer-fat squirrels, hoarding for a winter that still seemed far-off. The others seemed to relax, now that they were headed home—until they passed the old ARCO and heard garbled pleas for help coming through the mini-mart’s shattered double doors.

  It was not the voice of a Beater. “Help…please…help.” Cass couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. It was like a scream that was leaking air, agony enunciated with excruciating care.

  “Walk on, Cass,” Bobby said softly, drawing her away from the others, his hand gentle but insistent at her back. Bobby was always so kind to her. He wanted to be with her. He said he was willing to wait until she was ready, but how could she ever be ready? Half a dozen times she had turned him down, and still he was trying to protect her. Didn’t he understand that she didn’t deserve him?

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” she whispered, backing away from him, from the concern in his eyes. She had to show him that she was not his, and though her heart hammered with fear, she walked straight over to the mini-mart, shining her flashlight in front of her.

  There were none of the things inside, she knew, or they would have come loping and gnashing in pursuit the minute she and the others came close. But what she saw in the flashlight’s illumination was clearly a nest, befouled clothing and blankets mounded into a pile a dozen feet wide, the space made by pushing all the store’s racks and shelves to the side. The Beaters usually only left their nests during the day, when their tiny-pupiled eyes could absorb enough light to see, but for some reason these ones had gone hunting that night. The nest stink was powerful, and Cass knew any number of the things could be nearby, and she would have turned and run—except that on the nest lay one of their victims.

  It was a man. She thought it was, anyway, but only because he still had his hair, which was buzzed short. He was naked, but the rest of his body held no clues to his gender, all of the skin having been eaten away. Under a basting of blood the flesh was flayed and ribboned and chewed, bone showing through in a few places, but mostly red muscles and sinew and nerves and tendons remained. The tough soles of his feet had been left whole, and his toes were undamaged, but even the flesh on top of his feet had been ripped away, the network of delicate bones showing through the gore.

  His face had been left mostly intact, other than the cheeks, which had been chewed through. Facial skin was thin; maybe the Beaters found it tedious and had gone looking for another victim instead. At any rate the man’s eyes were wide with shock and his lips convulsed as he tried to speak. It took several attempts for him to put the syllables together:

  “Kill…me…”

  “No,” Cass whispered, her hand flying to her mouth. “No no no—”

  A hand yanked at her elbow, and she stumbled as she tried to resist.

  “Outside.” It was Bobby, and his expression, magnified in the tilting flashlight glow, was grim.

  Cass nodded dumbly and backed out of the building, shoes crunching on the broken glass that littered the entrance, into the night where the others waited. One, a man in his fifties who had been a highway patrolman before, had his hands over his ears to shut out the tortured moans. Cass allowed herself to be led down the street, away from the ARCO, away from the Beater nest, away from the pulped matter that had once been human.

  No one said anything. Bobby caught up with them a couple of blocks later. He fell into step next to Cass and stayed by her side until they were back at the library. Cass knew Bobby had killed the hopeless victim, but they never talked about it.

  She had been a coward. Now, given the chance to do it again, she would have sliced the man’s throat without hesitation and held what remained of his hand while he bled out.

  Was it courage, she wondered as she slowly put her shirt back on and buttoned it, or only loss that had numbed her? Or was it the effects of succumbing to and then beating the disease? Whatever the reason, she had changed. Her whole body had seemed warm since she first awoke. A matter of degrees, maybe—perhaps even fractions of a degree—but she would swear there was a difference. Her body was rebuilding itself relentlessly, her immune system hypervigilant against infection. The scabs on her arms had mostly healed. Now that she was clean and groomed she looked human enough that most people would think she was completely normal.

  Cass ran her fingers through her hair, combing it as well as she could. She had been called beautiful by a lot of people, mostly men. Never Mim, who had reminded her often that she had inherited her father’s coloring, which she called coarse. He had Mediterranean blood, and like him, Cass’s skin darkened to olive, her hair in between brown and blond. Mim herself was pale as parchment and jealously guarded her skin, wearing big hats and sunscreen even for trips across town. There had been nothing Mim enjo
yed more than reporting that she had run into some acquaintance whose crow’s feet and sunspots and blemishes had worsened. “Bet they wish they’d done what I did,” she’d smirk.

  Mim was dead, of course. She died with her skin as flawless and unlined as ever at the age of sixty-one—but Cass supposed her storied beauty must have been marred by the red flush and frothing spittle that marked a blueleaf fever death.

  At least she’d been spared the other. Dying from the initial fever meant you never had to worry about becoming a Beater.

  Cass folded the used cloth and laid it on the edge of the tub and returned to the bedroom. Smoke had made the bed, but he was gone. A flicker of panic flashed through Cass before she heard talk coming from downstairs, and she picked up her backpack and followed the voices.

  The men were sitting in a tidy kitchen splashed with sun streaming in the upper third of the windows. The bottom had been boarded up, and there was a flap of fabric-covered plywood on hinges at the top that could be lowered to block the sun completely. Raised, it let in sun but did not give a view to the outside.

  Cass paused in the hall, listening.

  “She has enough to worry about,” Smoke was saying.

  “She needs to know before y’all just show up at the

  library,” Lyle said softly. “Them Rebuilders—they don’t take kindly to bein’ told no, as I guess you know as well as anyone.”

  Smoke muttered something that Cass couldn’t hear.

  “It don’t matter,” Lyle said. “You got to hear what I’m sayin’ here. That story’s made it all the way here, hell, it’s probably got around half the state. Rebuilders gaining ground every day—they aim to take over. Hell, they want the valley, the whole fuckin’ state…who knows. Folks are afraid. They want someone to believe in. And that’s you. Which is all good, but you got the girl with you now, and maybe you’re not the worst thing to happen to her, see? But she needs to know it ain’t gonna be easy.”