Aftertime

by Littlefield, Sophie

  “Well, yeah, you sell hooch in paper cups,” Cass said. She’d been surprised and relieved earlier when, smelling the cheap wine on the women waiting to use the bathroom, she found that it hadn’t called out to her with the strength it once had, hadn’t made her insensible with yearning.

  Faye snorted. “That’s nothing. They give that shit away for free, for the big spenders. The pill poppers, meth junkies—guarantee they’re lined up back behind Rockets right now, trading their last can of SpaghettiOs for 20mg of Ritalin or a couple of rocks.”

  Oh.

  Ohhh. Idiot, Cass chastised herself. Earlier the thought had danced through her mind, quickly enough that she hadn’t bothered to examine it carefully, namely that the Box didn’t make much sense. A few months into Aftertime, it was true that all the easy stuff was taken; grocery stores and hardware stores and sporting good stores had long ago been looted of all the valuable items, homes had been broken into and all the weapons and canned goods and medicine cleaned out. But for the brave—and at this point, almost every citizen who had managed to stay alive this long fell backward into that category to some extent—there was still more than enough to be found.

  So it stood to reason that the Box’s allure would be something even more special.

  As the Siege followed its tortuous path, each day bringing some new abomination, some crippling terror, alcohol and drugs were at an astonishing premium. More than a few people locked themselves in their houses and proceeded to get as drunk or stoned as they possibly could. Sometimes they were in search of the courage to shoot or hang themselves. Sometimes they were trying to drink themselves to death or overdose. Some were trying to tap into fantasies they’d held secret for a long time, from a time when society had a tighter grip on the psyche. Before long there was nothing left to get numb with.

  Except clearly, the people running the Box had a hell of a stash.

  Cass gripped the cheap metal frame of her chair, the plastic web cutting into her shoulder blades, overwhelmed by the thought of all these people who had survived so much, only to try to drown their pain with a temporary high. She hadn’t been around active users in a long time; the thought was a little overwhelming.

  “You’re an addict,” Faye added, offhandedly.

  Cass felt her face flush, but she forced herself to keep her expression neutral. “Was,” she corrected Faye. “Was.”

  “Was, like, for how long?”

  “Long enough.”

  “Yeah,” Faye said, clearly skeptical. “So it’s some kind of accident you showed up here? There’s nowhere else in the central valley to score, and yet here you are—”

  “Because I have to get in the Convent. I have to get in there. I have to find…someone.”

  Faye’s expression didn’t change. “You want to find someone in there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sister? Mother? Spinster aunt maybe? Your people Jesus folks?”

  “Why, is that what the Convent is? Like, fundamenta lists?”

  “I don’t know the details. I guess you can ask Gloria. She’s happy to talk, talks everyone’s fuckin’ ears off, when she’s not wasted. But, no, it’s not just a Jesus thing. It’s like, they worship the disease or something.”

  “What?”

  “Or like, it’s the antichrist and they vanquish it through prayer, something fucked up like that. I don’t know.” Faye shrugged. “For all I know they’re in there dancing naked under the moon.”

  How could the woman not be more curious? The Convent was the closest thing to a real community that Cass had seen since the Siege. Other than the little groups in libraries and schools, no one had been able to band together in sufficient numbers to move beyond the demands of subsistence living.

  “You two look cozy.” Smoke’s deep voice rumbled behind Cass. She twisted in her chair to see him holding a plastic bucket in one hand, white towels in the other.

  “Okay, I think that’s my cue to shove off,” Faye said. “I’m sure I’ll see you around. Nice meeting you.”

  Smoke waited until Faye disappeared down the main path through the tents, then offered Cass a hand. “How does a shower sound?”

  “Like heaven.”

  She let Smoke pull her out of her chair, and peeked into the bucket. There were washcloths along with the rest of the toiletries. “What did that cost?”

  Smoke gave her a sly grin. “They’ve got a thriving skin trade going here,” he said, pointing to the end of the Box farthest from the stadium. It was lit only by a sparkling string of Christmas lights that wound from tent to tent. “In case you haven’t figured it out, that’s what the blue tents are for. I just, you know, stopped by and gave the ladies a taste of what they wanted, and they showered me with earthly goods.”

  “Ha. Ha.” Cass smiled at his joke, despite herself. “God, I’m stupid. I thought those were first aid tents.”

  “Not stupid, only naive. Or maybe it’s wishful thinking, that you can start a civilization on free trade and have it grow toward an ideal, only I doubt that ever works. I mean, look at the history of any major civilization…”

  “I don’t think I’m up for a history lesson right now,” Cass said softly, though it occurred to her that history was bound to be lost in a generation or two, with no one to preserve and teach it. If any humans even survived that long. “Besides, it’s not just the, you know, blue tent thing. I didn’t get that the whole currency here is based on drugs. I just feel like an idiot.”

  “Well, not the entire trade, maybe. I got this stuff, and a couple decent single-malts and a bowl of pretzels that weren’t completely stale.”

  Cass whistled. “Not to nag, but how are we affording this? You didn’t trade away our blades, did you?”

  “Nah. I, uh, put the bike up to secure a loan.”

  “The bike?”

  “Yeah. I mean, it’s not like we could make much use of it without fuel. Besides, I can get it back. They’ve got every angle covered. It’s like a pawn shop—they just charge you a holding fee.”

  Cass shook her head. It wasn’t for her to say, really. She knew that the bike, the supplies, the gun—these had all been given to Smoke because of his record with the Rebuilders. She had no claim on them.

  “You coming?” he said softly. “I paid for two. Can’t really use the second one myself.”

  Cass slipped her hand into the crook of his arm and they walked down a path lit by yellow light from a dozen Coleman lanterns hung on poles. They passed people talking softly in the entrances of tents, or bent over bongs and pipes and bottles.

  A man lurched into the path from between two tents with a cut-off grunt. He had almost recovered his footing when a second man tackled him and took him down, yelling. The smell of alcohol and sweat came off the pair as they tumbled and rolled. One was trying to stab the other with a butter knife, but he was too drunk to do any real damage and the knife fell to the ground.

  Cass was about to grab it to prevent further trouble when a third man shoved her out of the way. He was dressed in a black t-shirt and cargo shorts and a small receiver on his belt broadcast static and voices. His belt also held a sap, a gun and handcuffs, but he ended the scuffle instantly without using any of them by pulling the closer man off the other, yanking his arms behind his back and up, then pinning him to the ground with a knee. The other man whimpered and curled up into a ball, but another guard arrived and dragged him roughly to his feet. The would-be fighters were hustled off, the guards mumbling apologies to Cass and Smoke, and the incident was over moments after it started.

  “Wow,” Cass said. “That’s…impressive.”

  “Protecting their investment, more like,” Smoke said. “Part of what people pay for here is a sense of security. They’ve got a drunk tank, over at the back corner. Just a big locked pen with a few guys passed out in it.”

  “This kind of feels like the Wild West. Like you could get away with a lot, as long as you don’t disturb the peace.”

  Smoke shrugged. “M
aybe that’s not such a bad thing, as long as you don’t hurt other people…I mean, who really cares? It’s not like a thousand little rules are really going to turn this into some sort of model society.”

  Cass didn’t answer. At first, as the rule of law gave way to the rules of self-preservation, there had been an unfamiliar sense of freedom, an untethering from the obligations and habits of Before. But that freedom was only an illusion, at least here, where a man who might or might not be Sammi’s father ruled with one hand while he offered temptation with the other. Maybe it was inevitable this sort of order would impose itself, even Aftertime.

  Cass remembered the helpless anger everyone felt at the government as the Siege wore on, as one by one the threads connecting communities were broken and people were catapulted into chaos. At the time, everyone had wished for someone or something new to take charge, to make things right and tell them what to do.

  Now, a few months later, someone had. Several someones. Only the choices didn’t look good. There were the Rebuilders. The Box, with its promises of numbness and pleasure. Hundreds of smaller communities with God-knows-what going on behind closed walls. And then whatever the Convent offered.

  Cass wasn’t optimistic about finding anything more than a different brand of crazy inside the stadium, but if Ruthie was there, that’s where she was going.

  Later, in the tent, Cass busied herself with unrolling the flaps that served as a door and snapping them shut. Only a slim band of lantern light entered at the bottom, though not enough to cast any light on the interior of the tent, so Cass undressed in the dark. Her skin was soft and warm from the showers—an outdoor affair that ran from a heated reservoir and felt better than almost anything she’d experienced in recent memory.

  Anything, that is, except for the night in Lyle’s guest room. Only Cass wasn’t sure if that was even in the same realm. The sensations of that night were enmeshed so completely with emotion that it was impossible to know how much of what she felt came from Smoke’s touch and how much was the momentum of her own needs and fears, tumbled together in a firestorm of ecstasy.

  And now she was about to lie down with him for the second time. Cass knelt on the air mattress, felt it shift beneath her weight. She ran her hands along the blankets and sheets, which were not nearly as finely made or as clean as Lyle’s, and when her hands found Smoke’s he took them and wrapped them firmly in his own and pulled her toward him without hesitation.

  “Get under,” he commanded and she wriggled into the warmth under the covers and pressed against him. For a moment it felt sweet and right, a relief, a balm, an exhalation of a breath caught in anxiety. Smoke’s chest was bare. He was wearing only boxers. And even through the cotton she could feel his heat and, undeniably, his desire.

  “You traded away everything we had today,” Cass chided, trying to keep her tone light. “Now we’ve got no aces up our sleeves. Nothing to get us out of the next jam we get into.”

  “Didn’t give away anything we can’t get more of,” Smoke murmured as he put his arms around her, his hands careful and tender on her back as they sought to touch only the unhurt places. For a moment Cass let herself luxuriate in his arms, in the promise of safety there. But there was whiskey on his breath, and the smell worked away at the thin wall she’d put up over her promises to herself.

  Cass had once loved to kiss a man who’d been drinking whiskey, the way it tasted like a clue to something hard to find, like earth after a rain and like a fire still burning. She never drank it herself, but there had been a dozen nights that had started with its promise.

  Not a promise actually, but a trick.

  It was Cass’s best trick and also her only trick. The way it worked:

  She would have two shots, back to back, when she got to the bar. Vodka was easiest. Sometimes tequila. It helped hone her instincts, her senses, and when she found the right one—bent over a pool table, laughing with his friends, alone at the bar, it didn’t matter, she always knew—the trick was that for a moment right before one of them spoke, everything was possible. Because he could be the one who turned out to be different. He could be the one to see her for who she was, to understand that all her toughness wasn’t anything but pain, to know that she threw herself on the fire over and over again not to satisfy herself but to punish herself—who would see and know all that and still want her and be strong enough to keep her from hurting herself long enough that she wouldn’t have to hurt him just to make herself forget, to make herself believe that it meant nothing.

  Because that was her dirtiest little secret of all—it never really meant nothing. She could walk away and walk away and walk away and walk away, fuck a thousand men and forget all their names and pretend she didn’t remember what they looked like or how their hands felt on her, and get up the next day and do it again and again, and yet it meant something every single time, it meant another failure and another time she wasn’t good enough and she wasn’t wanted enough.

  But that moment. That moment when he first spoke, when she caught the whiskey on his breath, when he looked her up and down and really took his time, when he touched her hand or brushed against her thigh, when he told her that her eyes reminded him of someone or that she was the prettiest thing to ever walk into that particular bar, she played her one trick and played it well. She never lost her taste for the con, she worked it every time, because this might be the man who would truly know her—and want her anyway.

  And she felt it now, felt it as she never had before, when Smoke settled his hand into the curve of her waist and drew her closer against him, so she could feel him pressing against her, making her hot and liquid and confused. He was here with her again, just like he was two nights ago. He had taken great risks with her, brought her gifts, lain down with her…and she longed to wonder if maybe, just maybe, this might be the time things would be different.

  But tomorrow she would be going to find Gloria, and Gloria would tell her what she needed to get inside the Convent, to get to Ruthie. And whatever she had to do, Cass would do, and she would find Ruthie and she would take Ruthie back. And she needed to save all her energy, all her determination, for that. She could not afford to give up even one bit of her concentration for a man, for the game she always played, for the way she always punished herself. She could not afford to hurt herself or revile herself. Not now. She had to be strong.

  So Cass put her hand on Smoke’s chest and with tears stinging her eyes, she pushed him away, and if she thought his hesitation and his longing might be for who she really was this time, she also knew it was only a trick of her damned and fevered mind.

  28

  CASS WAS IN THE FAR CORNER OF THE DIRT lot behind the High Timer.

  This was familiar ground, and if she wasn’t proud, exactly, to be there, backed up against the side of a pickup parked under a sycamore next to the dried-up creek, she wasn’t sorry, either. No one could make her sorry, because she owned this corner of the lot, had driven dozens of men to begging and pleading and even crying hot salty tears here, the first when she was barely seventeen years old.

  Only this one was different.

  She wasn’t sure how she got here. Couldn’t conjure up a memory of the drinks he bought her or the songs he picked on the jukebox. Had he challenged her to pool? So many of them did that, thinking she’d be impressed with their hard-crack breaks or their wily double-bank shots, when Cass had learned pool from the master himself, Silver Dollar Haverford, her own daddy who could beat any man from Portland down to Tijuana. Or maybe he had danced with her, the sly dip and glide of a farm boy with town manners.

  Why couldn’t she remember?

  She was pressed up against the cold hard door of the pickup and maybe they’d be better off inside, the truck’s bench seat would be good enough on a night turning cold fast like this one was, when chilly air found its way up her skirt and inside her denim jacket. She ran her fingers through his hair as he nuzzled her neck, found it greasy and lank, wondered what she’d seen
in him.

  But his mouth on the sensitive dip between her collarbones: insistent and hungry, his beard scraping against her soft flesh. Only tonight the man’s touch wasn’t doing what it usually did. It wasn’t lighting tinder up and down her body, setting the scene for a brush fire that would burn out of control until it pushed her into forgetting territory.

  It felt wrong, all wrong.

  Cass slid her hands between her body and his and shoved, and he left off his sucking and biting with a growl of irritation, and then she was staring into his face in the sickly light of the streetlamps mounted on galvanized steel poles.

  And what stared back wasn’t human. Its flesh was pocked and torn. Its lips were chewed to crusts. Its eyes were unfocused and confused and when it saw the look of fear on her face it crowed with excitement, a sound that paralyzed her with unspeakable terror, and as it lowered its face to her neck again she knew that this time it meant to tear her skin from the bone, to rip it and chew it and swallow it even while she screamed.

  And screamed.

  And screamed, except that it clapped a hand over her mouth and she was left gasping for breath and flailing and struggling to get away but the next second the thing became Smoke and she realized she was in a tent, in a tent in the Box on a leaking air mattress with crazy thoughts crowding the dreams from her mind and replacing them with a nightmare made of every fear born in Aftertime.

  She stopped screaming and whimpered instead and Smoke lifted his hand from her mouth slowly, tentatively, ready to clamp it back down if she didn’t stay quiet.

  She stayed quiet.

  “You had another nightmare,” he murmured.

  She nodded, testing the inside of her mouth with her tongue, finding it metallic.

  “Was it a bad one?” he asked, and Cass opened her eyes and found that she could see nothing at all in the dark tent and she suddenly wished she could. Wished she could see Smoke’s face, his eyes, his mouth. A mouth that was a bit too generous, but without it his face might have been hard, unapproachable. Instead she realized she had memorized the shape of that mouth, and in the dark she reached for him and found his chin, rough with stubble; his eyelashes against her fingertips; and finally, his lips. She brushed against them gently, and he was very still, so still she couldn’t even feel him breathe.