But she had her own quest to think about. Once she got Ruthie, she might have the luxury of arguing abstract points about the future of the planet. For now, she could only afford to be interested in how these two men could help her.
“I’m going into the Convent,” she said to Dor. “I don’t know if Smoke told you. I need some things. Personal stuff. And something I can trade.”
Dor regarded her with renewed interest. “Why would you want to go in there? You don’t strike me as a believer.”
Cass shrugged, pretending a calm she didn’t feel. She wasn’t about to tell him about Ruthie; he seemed like a man who sought to know everyone else’s trump card while keeping his own hand hidden. “I have my reasons.”
“Fair enough.” He let his gaze linger on her face. “It’s a waste of a damn fine woman, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“Maybe I like other women.”
Dor laughed. “Won’t make any difference if you do—they take vows of celibacy.”
Cass raised an eyebrow—she doubted such a vow held much meaning. In a world where comforts were so desperately rare, it would be impossible to stop people from seeking out the few that remained.
“I don’t plan to be there long enough to get that hard up,” she said. “About those supplies…”
“I’ll cover her, MacFall,” Smoke said. His hand moved slightly lower on her back, his fingers dipping into the waistband of her pants. “Give her what she needs.”
Dor considered, his scar creasing as he furrowed his brow with thought. “I can give her an escort, someone they’ll trust. We can get the job done…provided you’re willing to pay a premium.”
“I think we’ve already established that I will.”
The iciness in Smoke’s voice highlighted the tension between the men and sent an unfamiliar thrill through Cass. There didn’t seem to be a limit to the sacrifices Smoke was willing to make for her. Which was exactly what she needed, right? She’d do whatever it took—cheat, lie, steal from him if need be—to get to Ruthie.
Only, he was giving her everything she needed, without being asked. And that felt like standing at the edge of a cliff and being tempted to jump.
Cass forced the thought from her mind—there was nothing to be gained from questioning Smoke’s generosity. Besides, this was a drama that held no place for her, a negotiation about far more than just her passage into the Convent.
“In that case,” Dor said, pushing back from the desk and standing, “I believe our business here is done.”
Cass and Smoke stood in the shade of a bent pepper tree. Before, it had been one of Cass’s least favorite species, with its scabby bark and spiky, unadorned branches. Aftertime, it had endeared itself to her merely by surviving.
“I’ll be out as soon as I can,” Cass said. “As soon as I find Ruthie.”
Smoke reached out a rough-callused hand and touched her face, drawing a line from her cheek down to her mouth, tracing the line of her lower lip. “I wish I could go with you.”
Cass attempted a smile.
His eyes glinted with worry and frustration. “But I’ll be here waiting. And if you don’t come back soon…”
He didn’t finish the thought. What could he promise, after all? The task ahead was up to Cass alone. Others had helped her prepare, but once she went inside, she was on her own. “I will come back,” she said softly.
Smoke stroked her mouth softly with his thumb and it was all she could do not to part her lips and to taste his work-rough skin.
“I want to kiss you,” Smoke whispered, his face inches from hers, his voice rough and dangerous. “Let me kiss you.”
“No.” She shook her head, pushed his hand away, but he just pressed closer. She could feel his hot breath on her face. “No.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“I can’t. I can’t…I won’t be responsible.”
For poisoning him, for the chance—no matter how small—that the disease lived within her, in her saliva, in her mouth and her throat, roiling and festering while she talked and breathed and swallowed. She would not take that chance. She would not let Smoke die because of her.
Like Bobby had. Like Ruthie almost had.
“I don’t care—”
“I do.” The anger in her voice took them both aback. Cass pulled away, and Smoke let her. They regarded each other in the golden light of late afternoon, a slight breeze carrying the scents of sage and wood smoke, the faint strains of someone’s lazy guitar picking, and they might as well have been staring across a chasm a mile wide and deep.
“I care,” Cass repeated, and then she ran, not looking back, straight for the way out of the Box and into the Convent and the next hard thing she must do.
She cared a great deal about not destroying anyone else.
But even worse, she cared about Smoke.
And that was even more dangerous.
32
THE SUN WAS SLIPPING TOWARD THE HORIZON and the smell of food carried on the breeze when Cass made her way to the front gate. Faye was playing chess with the guard on duty, a young man with a dirty fedora pulled over his eyes. He muttered something that passed for a greeting, but barely looked up from the board.
“Everything you’ll need is in here,” Faye said, picking up a pack from the barter counter and shaking the contents out onto the table. A plastic water bottle—never opened, an incredible rarity—rolled across the surface. There were socks and underwear and kaysev cakes wrapped in cloth napkins. There was a folded t-shirt and a packet of aspirin. “I can’t give you a weapon. If they found it, you’d be out on your ass. Or worse.”
Cass nodded, and Faye returned all the supplies to the pack before handing it over.
“Back soon, Charles,” Faye told the other guard as Cass slid the straps over her shoulders. “Think hard before you make that next move, or I’ll take you in three.”
Cass figured that Faye was the best Dor had to offer. She reminded herself that Smoke was paying dearly for her escort to help negotiate entry. Dor was shrewd, but a part of Cass—the part that had promised a brave and tenderhearted girl that she would find her father—hoped there was more to it than that.
Hoped Dor cared whether she lived or died.
Faye didn’t talk on the short walk to the stadium, and Cass didn’t mind. She concentrated on the view, trying to fix every detail in her memory. The ruins of San Pedro seemed far less dangerous now that she was headed into the Convent. Behind them, the Box was lit up with strings of tiny lightbulbs like a city Christmas tree lot Before. The darkening hills were shrouded with purple nightfall, tree skeletons silhouetted in black. And the street they’d followed into town only yesterday, lined with wrecked and empty shops and apartments—it all seemed harmless now, a stage set of a town, the actors and stagehands due back from their break at any moment.
Cass had become a connoisseur of fear, had learned to sense its moods, its encroachment and retreat. Yesterday the fear had weighed upon her, slunk all around her, crushing and smothering and stealing her breath, a shape-shifter playing the unknown into a thousand different threats.
Today it was different. Today’s fear was sharp and focused and came from within the stadium, beyond the curved windowless walls, and it was crafty and cruel, a foe that meant to outwit and inveigle. Cass made a small, low humming in her throat, gathering her anxiety into a single strand and twisting it out of the way.
She was so focused on her own fear that she didn’t hear the far-off wail for a moment, but it escalated sharply and pierced her consciousness.
“Sounds like they got one,” Faye said, pausing to listen. Cass looked down the street that angled away from the stadium toward the center of town, following Faye’s lead, and thought she saw a bobbing point of light.
“Got what?”
“A Beater. They’ve got this cart thing—it’s like a dog-catcher van.”
“You mean they catch them alive?”
“Yeah.” Faye laughed softly. “C’mon, I
told you they’re fucking lunatics in there.”
“Wait, so you’re saying the Order…”
“They don’t do it themselves. They pay Dor and he sends a team out. They’ve pretty much cleaned out the town but every once in a while you’ll get a few that wander in. Usually they can only catch one and have to kill the rest.”
Cass edged back a step, toward the stadium.
Other people had hunted the Beaters, back at the beginning. But when it became clear how hard it was to kill them, most people gave up. They were just so relentless. An ordinary human would stop if he took a bullet or a face full of acid or, in the case of the more resourceful citizens who didn’t have access to anything else, a thrown hatchet or a rock flung from a sling.
But Beaters, when they came close to a potential victim, were almost unstoppable. They didn’t seem to react to pain or injury unless it was mortal, and even in their death throes they would keep advancing. Everyone had a story of a Beater with a crushed skull or a severed limb spending its dying moment dragging itself toward its prey.
Too often it bit before it died.
“Isn’t that…crazy?”
“They have gear.” Faye shrugged. “Protective masks and all. Shit from the manufacturing plant. And if you know Dor, you know he believes in outgunning the enemy. They’re armed from here to Sunday.”
“But what do they do with them? I mean, the ones they catch?”
“That’s their business,” Faye said. “Some crazy ritual shit, is what I heard. Who cares? They pay out the ass.”
Cass followed Faye across the street and along the broad sidewalk that circled the stadium, glancing back once, but the light had been extinguished and all was silent. When Faye stopped at a boarded-up entrance that looked like every other one and knocked on the nailed-down plywood, there was a click above their heads. Cass looked up to see a small window cut into the wall sliding open.
“Weapons?” a female voice demanded.
Faye slid her revolver from its holster. “Just the usual.”
“Who’s with you?”
“Wannabe. She’s from Mariposa, showed up yesterday.”
The story they’d come up with was that Cass had worked in a church-run child care center Before and missed the structure and leadership of the church, that she hoped to find a faith community from which she could help bring a set of guiding beliefs to Aftertime survivors. Cass had been skeptical that anyone would believe her, but Faye said most of the women being turned away didn’t bother to disguise the fact that they were just looking for shelter.
“They want sheep, not opportunists. Act all pious and hungry for the light and whatever, convince them they can mold you, and you’ll be fine.”
“I can’t believe anyone would sign up for something like that on purpose.”
“Well, people are desperate to believe in something,” Faye said matter-of-factly. “You got a cult situation, it don’t matter what they’re selling. What people are buying is a chance to belong to something, for someone to tell them what to do so they don’t have to think for themselves. Just like the fuckers who started this whole mess, trying to force their ideologies down other people’s throats and getting everyone killed instead.”
The plywood barrier slid open, its soundless, smooth glide hinting at well-oiled hardware and expert craftsmanship. It closed as soon as they stepped inside, and they found themselves in a small antechamber that still held the detritus of ball games played long ago, red-and-silver posters and pennants and a desk inscribed with the Miners’ logo.
Two women waited, tensed and ready, in the small room. A short brunette with a strawberry birthmark on her cheek trained a gun on Cass, and a wiry young woman with crooked teeth regarded them from the raised platform that had allowed her to look out of the peephole. Both were dressed simply, in long-sleeved pink shirts and skirts that hung past their knees, their hair pulled back from their faces.
“Hey,” Faye said by way of greeting. “Lorrie, Jennie, this is Cass.”
“Take off your belts and packs,” the guard with the gun ordered, ignoring the greeting. “Stand against the wall.”
Cass followed Faye’s lead, resisting the temptation to watch as the woman went through her things. While the dark-haired guard finished the pack check, the blonde frisked Cass quickly, mostly patting around her pockets and checking her shoes and bra, and Cass gritted her teeth to keep from reacting when she patted down her scarred back.
“Okay. You can relax. You’ll get your things back later, after your interview.”
“This what we asked for?” the first guard demanded as she hefted a small, paper-wrapped package that she’d taken from Faye’s pack.
“Yes. Plus a little extra insurance.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Faye nodded. “Check it out after I leave, make sure it gets where it’s going. The rest is for you, but I couldn’t get the menthols. Just the Light 120’s. Maybe next week.”
The guard nodded and slipped the package into her skirt pocket. “I appreciate it.”
“Likewise.”
Cigarettes. In contrast to the drugs Dor moved inside the Box, the idea seemed almost quaint to Cass. It was ironic, how fiercely California had fought smokers Before, banning them from every square foot of public space. Now, something that could kill you over decades seemed like a good bet. Hell, maybe she ought to take up smoking herself now—odds were she’d be dead long before her lungs could fail her.
But no—there would be no cigarettes for Cass, nothing that would build a taste for her addictions. Nothing that would remind her of those feelings, of wanting more and more until wanting became needing. In the past, she’d let her addiction become the thing that mattered most, and she’d lost Ruthie as a result. No more. Even if she had only hours left to live, she didn’t intend to spend any of them enslaved to anyone or anything.
She had made it this far. This much closer to finding Ruthie. And she wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize their future together.
“Thank you for bringing me,” she said to Faye, as sweetly as she could manage. “And God bless you.”
The look the Order guards exchanged was laced with cynicism, but they said nothing.
Cass was pretending to look for answers. And they were pretending they had answers to give her.
Good. So far, everyone was playing their part.
33
BEYOND THE ANTEROOM WAS A BANK OF elevators that no longer worked—and a stairwell that led up five flights to a hallway that opened onto the skyboxes on one side, and offices on the other. Cass was taken to an office with a view out over the parking lot scattered with wrecked and abandoned cars. The door clicked shut behind her and the room was silent as a stone—soundproofed, she guessed, so some pencil pusher could attend to the details of running the place without distractions. There were bookshelves, a couple of chairs, a corkboard that took up most of one wall—a drab little room like in any anonymous office building. The room where business was consolidated from the sport spectacle of the rest of the stadium.
When Cass had come here as a girl, she’d been high on the thrill of a stolen day with her dad. An adventure, just the two of them—the first of many, he promised. She wasn’t about to believe that; her mom said Tom Haverford was about as reliable as a busted clock, and he’d missed her birthday and Easter, off touring with the latest sure-thing band he’d hooked up with.
But at least there was this one perfect day: the snap of the tickets tearing, the shouts of the vendors cooking up sweetsmelling sausages. The heart-pounding first glimpse of the players in their tight white pants and red-and-silver shirts as they ran onto the field. Sitting close to your dad, his arm heavy around your shoulders, his high-five slap stinging your palm when Hugo Hawkins stole second. Wishing the game would never end.
Two lives later, Cass knew that baseball was a business just like everything else. Behind the handsome players and the green-green field and the cheering crowds were managers, bosses, arr
angers of deliveries and collectors of profits, people who hired and fired and balanced budgets and greased palms and traded influence. Someone like that had worked in this office, and, because of that, the magic of that long-ago day never seemed more distant than it did now.
Finally the door opened and a woman in a pink skirt and blouse entered. She looked like she was somewhere in her thirties, with straight dark hair tucked primly behind her ears, but her wide smile was welcoming and generous. She extended both her hands and Cass let her enfold her own in a tight grasp.
“I’m Deacon Lily,” she said softly. She had the kind of voice you leaned in to hear. “Welcome to the Order. You and I are going to have a nice chat and get to know each other, and then together we will decide if you are suited for life here among the Order. If the answer is yes, you will join the other neophytes. You will stay among them until we determine that you are ready to progress to acolyte status. That may take weeks, or perhaps months. It depends on how quickly you learn and adjust to our ways.”
“What if I’m…not suited?” Cass asked.
“Oh, let’s not worry about that right now. Besides, you’ve already gotten Sister Lorrie’s recommendation. She can be quite discerning, and generally when she sees potential in a seeker, there is a good reason.”
Cass searched Lily’s face for sarcasm but found none. “She was very…all-business,” she said carefully.
Lily waved her hand, brushing the thought away. “The ones who interface with the outside, they have a hard job. Mother Cora says they have to steel themselves against the lure of the godless while keeping their hearts open to the possibility of grace, which is a very difficult calling. That is why only a few are called to be guards. Don’t let her attitude put you off, because she is only protecting our sanctum from those who would seek to weaken us. Now you are inside, with us, and very soon you will start to see the beautiful truths that guide us.”
Aftertime Page 25
