Aftertime

by Littlefield, Sophie

  She watched helplessly as Bobby raced for the door and threw himself at the entrance, never letting go of Ruthie, who looked so small in his arms. Cass could not see her face, only her blue shoes and white socks and small fist still holding one wilted dandelion. Bobby’s shoes flashed in the sun and then he was inside and Maynard, that was his name, the guard with the shaved head—Maynard’s arm swung wide and one of the Beaters went down in a spray of arterial blood and the doors shut with a clang and Ruthie was gone and Ruthie was safe and inside the library and outside the doors were one bleeding Beater distracted by its own blood and one who pounded its body against the door as though it could bend the steel if it tried hard enough.

  Ruthie was saved. Ruthie was saved. A prayer, a deal done—it took all the energy Cass had left and she stopped fighting. She lifted her voice to the God she long ago stopped daring to trust. Hold her safe in Your arms. Love her for me.

  So that was done, and she closed her eyes and prayed for death and knew that instead she was headed for something far worse.

  35

  PAIN, AND A VOICE. PAIN ABOVE HER EYE, SHARP as the jagged edge of awake—and a voice she knew.

  “Cassandra, please, don’t fight me, just let me—”

  Cass rolled and her shin struck something hard and sharp. The pain made her squeeze her eyes shut and she pressed at her temples. She was lying on the floor, on carpet. The air smelled like dust. She patted around her, found the legs of furniture, opened her eyes and saw a frightened face, a woman kneeling close, hair hanging in her face. Sister Lily.

  “Cassandra, you hit your head when you went down. I just want to help you get back up to the chair. I’ve got some cool water, I’d like you to take a drink now. The heat—”

  “It wasn’t the heat,” Cass said. The words wobbled in her mouth. She tasted blood and touched her lip with her tongue. She’d bit her lip when she hit the table. “I was…remembering.”

  She let Lily take her hand and help her up, a moment of dizziness passing when she settled back into the chair. The light outside seemed to have faded. Afternoon was passing by.

  “That happens sometimes,” Lily said. She poured from a pitcher and put a glass in Cass’s hand, folded her fingers around it so it wouldn’t slip from her grip.

  Cass drank. Lily talked, Cass listened, she drank more. The water didn’t go down easily; her throat felt tight, her gut uneasy. Ghosts of images skittered around her mind like trash on a windy day—Ruthie’s eyes wide with wonder, the Beaters’ grasping scabby hands, the silver swoosh on Bobby’s Nikes. It was as though, now that it had been loosed, the past had slipped through the crack Lily made with her kind words and her breathing exercises and now the seal was broken for good.

  “…a tight schedule, what with dinner…”

  Their wretched hands closed on her shins, her arms. Sebaceous, oozing flesh touching hers, wiry tendons closed tight as she was lifted, Bobby clutching Ruthie tight and running, running, running away, never knowing she’d already been infected.

  “…tour of our home, just a quick one…”

  Had he watched as she was carried off, had he handed Ruthie to the others and looked down at his own torn skin and bitten flesh? Had his heart broken as he realized what he would become, as he did what must be done, chasing his own death down the path that once wound through agapan-thus and lantana and birches along the river?

  “Cassandra? Come on now, honey, let’s get up.”

  Cass allowed Lily to help her gently from the chair. Lily was nice. And this was better; this would help her stop thinking, stop remembering.

  “Let’s get up,” she echoed softly, her tongue feeling thick in her mouth.

  “That’s right. You’re going to feel better soon. You probably need some food, something to settle your stomach. How long has it been since you had a good meal?”

  She continued talking without waiting for an answer, ushering Cass out of her office and past the stairwell the guards used, down the empty corridor that wound around and around the stadium. Cass watched the concrete walls go by. When they entered the stands, blinking in the late-afternoon sun, she looked down onto the field and half expected to see the Miners there, warming up in the afternoon sun.

  The fake turf was still verdant, and the field markings were still present in places. But in what had once been the outfield, an enclosure as big as a suburban ranch house had been erected, white tent fabric stretched to make a roof over walls built from two-by-fours and plywood and steel braces.

  At the other end of the field, dozens of tables were lined up in neat rows along with a variety of chairs—folding chairs, plastic outdoor chairs, a few aluminum chairs from patio sets. Walls of wire shelving, the kind used for garage storage, had been joined to make a larder. Women in long sleeved shirts and skirts that reached their ankles worked alone and in pairs, setting out dishes and stirring pots over cooking fires.

  An entire long side of the field was lined with planters constructed from wood and filled with soil and, astonishingly, overflowing with a variety of plants. From far away, Cass couldn’t tell what they all were, but brightly colored flowers tumbled from the planters under small trees and hardy-looking shrubs. And—could those be pole beans? And squash, or melons, their tendrilous vines overhanging the planters and trailing on the ground.

  The Order was cultivating plants she hadn’t seen since Before. Like the evergreen seedlings she and Smoke saw along the side of the road, these plants sprang from seeds and spores that had somehow survived the Siege.

  Maybe the earth truly did want to be reborn.

  Cass followed Lily down the stairs between the stands. Her legs still trembled, and she stepped slowly and carefully, afraid of falling again. Lily slowed her own pace to match, giving Cass an encouraging smile and touching her arm to steady her.

  They passed small groups of women huddled together in the seats. “Praying,” Lily explained. “There’s not much else the stands are good for, other than exercise.”

  She pointed to an unenthusiastic queue trudging slowly up the steps a dozen yards away. The women wore drab beige and gray clothes. Their leader was dressed in pale lavender. When they reached the top they turned and started down again.

  Before, Cass occasionally ended her weekend desert runs in the high school stadium, sprinting up and down the stands, enjoying the way her footfalls caused the metal benches to shudder and creak. It felt dangerous, and once when she fell she gashed her shin badly, but there was something irresistible about hurtling up and down the stands until the breath burned in her throat, until her heartbeat was so strong she could feel it in every part of her body, and when she finally collapsed, lying on one of the sun-warmed metal benches and staring up at the sky, she had the rare satisfaction of being utterly spent.

  If it wasn’t joy, it was as close as Cass ever got.

  Once they were on the field, Lily led Cass toward the tables. The turf felt nice under her feet, springy and resilient, and as they drew nearer, she could smell the food being cooked and hear the conversation of the women. They worked at wooden counters propped on metal legs, chopping kaysev and what looked like new potatoes, sliding them into pots of water that others carried to a hearth above a crackling fire. Two women skinned a jackrabbit together, chatting as they peeled the pelt away from the meat, their knives flashing in the sun. Cass looked away, but not before she’d seen them lift the organs from the animal’s body.

  Food, she told herself, it was only food. And besides, this meant that the rabbits had continued to multiply. Which meant that the animals were finding their way back, Aftertime, too.

  The realization brought an emotion that felt suspiciously like hope, and Cass fought it, barely listening as Lily chatted on about the meal being prepared. There was no place for hope, not here, not yet. Not until she found Ruthie. Then—maybe—she would allow herself to start believing in the future again.

  Cass tried to pretend interest in the things that Lily was showing her, to focus on
the water spigot that extended from one of the dugouts. But she remembered how the players looked that day, broad shoulders in the white jerseys piped in silver, ornate red Ms embroidered on the front. Where they had lined up to bat, a pair of women dispensed water to others who brought buckets and plastic bottles and large reservoirs on wheeled carts. Lily explained how they had tapped into the pipeline that ran from the Sierras all the way to San Francisco, and Cass accepted a dipper of water, letting it trail down her chin and into her neckline, cool against her skin.

  There was a laundry area where women stirred clothes in huge vats of cloudy water. There were rows and rows of kaysev pods drying on cotton sheets in the sun. There were twisted electric cables snaking along the walls, connecting strings of lightbulbs to generators.

  Lily led her back and forth along the vast field, showing Cass the inventions and activities and products of the Order, and though they passed the large tent-roofed enclosure several times, it was the one thing she never mentioned, even though a muffled grunting and snuffling came from behind the wooden walls.

  When a bell clanged from the kitchen area, Lily made a tsking sound and put a hand to Cass’s back, giving her a gentle push. “We’d best hurry,” she said. “It won’t do to be late to dinner on your first day, will it? And you’ll feel so much better once you’ve eaten something.”

  Cass had grown accustomed to Lily’s soft, soothing voice, and as they walked back toward the tables, it was lost in the sound of dozens of other conversations as women appeared from the entrances in the stands and swarmed the field. Fifty, a hundred, they kept coming, the old and the young, the tall and the short, the strong and the stooped. Most wore the bland shades of tan and gray and brown that Lily said signified they were acolytes, accepted into the congregation, but here and there was a woman in bright shades of pink and purple. The ordained, like Lily. The leaders, the teachers.

  Lily led her to a long table near the edge of the gathering where twenty or so women were gathered, all of them dressed in white blouses and skirts.

  “These are the neophytes,” Lily said. “Like you. All of you are new. You will live together and study and pray together.”

  She guided Cass to an open seat near one end of the table, next to a young, pretty woman with wavy brown hair that fell in her eyes, and a solidly built blonde woman in her late forties.

  “This is Cassandra,” Lily announced as the women gathered at the table fell silent. Cass lowered herself to a straight-backed chair with a webbed-plastic seat and folded her hands on her lap. “She arrived today, and she’s still a little weary from traveling. Please make her feel welcome.”

  Lily crouched down between Cass and the young woman on her left. “I just know you’re going to do fine,” she said softly in a tone that implied she wasn’t entirely sure.

  Cass wanted to reassure her, to thank her for her kindness, but her collapse in Lily’s office had left her unfocused as well as drained of energy, and her head still throbbed with a spiking pain above her eye where she struck the table, and she managed only a weak smile.

  “This is Monica. She’s been here a week now. And Adele. You’ll help Cass, won’t you? Show her around…? Explain things?”

  “Sure.” The younger woman gave Cass a crooked smile. Especially if it means I don’t have to be the newbie any more.”

  “I need to go to my table,” Lily said, giving Cass a final pat on her shoulder. “It’s almost time for prayer. I know you’re still…finding your way, Cassandra. But just have faith and open your heart. Can you do that?”

  Lily’s smile was so encouraging, her touch so welcome, that Cass found herself nodding along. It wasn’t so different from the third drink, or the fourth—the one that untethered her anxious mind from the dark place that was built of anxiety and worry and fear. When she used to drink, she pursued that moment when the lashings fell free and she drifted, when the numbness swirled in and the memories softened into vague shadows and it seemed possible that she might feel nothing at all, at least for a while.

  She watched Lily go, weaving her way back between the tables filling up with women, and tried to hold on to the stillness. But when she turned back, all of the others at the table were watching her, and the momentary peace evaporated.

  36

  THE NEOPHYTES WERE YOUNG, SUNTANNED, wholesome girls and skinny, hollow-eyed beauties, nails chewed to the quick, their colored and highlighted hair giving way to several inches of natural-colored roots.

  But there were a few older women, some her mother’s age, and at least one who looked like she was pushing seventy. They fussed over the younger women, passing them dishes and refilling their water, chiding them to eat, to relax, to rest. Cass wondered how many of them had been separated from their own children, had lost them to disease or to the Beaters.

  “Welcome, Cassandra,” Adele said with a smile, lifting her glass in a toast. Monica clinked it with her own and winked. Before she could lift her own glass to the others, there was the squeal of feedback from a loudspeaker, and a tall, slender, silver-haired woman dressed in scarlet approached the platform. Silence fell quickly. The servers paused in their tasks, and heads were bowed and hands folded in supplication.

  “That’s Mother Cora,” Monica whispered.

  Mother Cora closed her eyes and tilted up her chin, smiling faintly. “Let us pray,” she said, and the sound system picked up her well-modulated voice and carried it with surprising clarity through the stadium. All around her the women joined hands; Monica and Adele held hers and reached across the empty seats to the others. Mother Cora raised her hands slowly above her head in an elegant arc, inhaled deeply and began to speak, women’s soft voices falling in with hers in a low susurration that filled the stadium and echoed back upon itself.

  “Lord our Savior,” her prayer began, “we, your Chosen, commend this and every day to Thee.”

  What followed was not so different from the prayers Cass remembered from her occasional forays into church, and she stopped paying attention to the words and instead sneaked glances at all the other women who were praying over clasped hands. She thought she would see at least a few others who, like her, were not able to lose themselves in prayer, who were not moved. Those who lacked faith, or who had been lost, or had turned away from God. Those whose suffering had changed them at the core, stealing pieces of the soul and leaving carved-out shadows in their place.

  But as she searched the neat rows of women, they became indistinguishable from one another, their variations in shape and size and hair and skin color insignificant, forming a whole that was more than the sum of the individuals, pulsing with a life of its own. All the voices made one voice; all the clasped hands formed a chain that stretched from the old to the young, the weak to the strong. In that moment Cass felt the tug of the Order, the desire to lose herself, to become nothing more than another voice sharing in the prayer, if only she knew the words.

  You have sent Your forsaken, that we may forgive

  You have sent Your tainted, that we may heal

  In Your glory we celebrate the body and the blood

  In Your name we consecrate ourselves to Your holy task

  Amen

  The echoes of Amen rebounded around the vast space, now nearly dark except for candles on the tables and a few strings of electric lights. Mother Cora descended the stairs and the spotlight shut off, and conversation picked up again.

  “Hope you’re not expecting much,” Monica said, as servers placed steaming plates in front of each of them and poured water from pitchers.

  “I’m not really hungry.”

  “Well that’s good, since everything around here’s pretty much inedible.”

  “Don’t complain so much,” Adele chided. “You didn’t have to cook it.”

  “I’d rather be cooking than suffering through Purity lectures,” Monica said. “Seriously, Cassandra, if you haven’t sworn off sex already, listening to Sister Linda talk about your vessel of virtue will knock the urge right
out of you.”

  “I’m—um, you can call me Cass.” It was happening again, as it had at the communal bath at the school—the kindness of other women, the offer of friendship. But Cass didn’t have the energy to engage.

  “Don’t mind Monica,” Adele said. “She’s got a good heart, she’s just not used to following directions.”

  “I’m spoiled,” Monica shrugged. “Only child, what can I say?”

  “Monica’s going to do great things here, if she doesn’t get herself thrown out first,” Adele said firmly.

  “Adele’s the only one who hasn’t given up on me yet,” Monica said. “I guess I’m the problem child around here.”

  “You just need to apply yourself a little,” Adele said, and Cass saw a woman who needed a child to mother—a woman who once had children of her own to dote on, and was lost without them.

  “Are there children here? Babies, little kids?”

  She had to know. Just had to know if Ruthie had made it safely. She had failed her little girl, but Bobby had saved her, Elaine had nursed her, and someone else had brought her here. Cass had failed, but Ruthie had survived so much already. If she was being raised here, in the Order, that would be all right. As long as they were keeping her safe.

  There was a pause, Adele’s face draining of life and looking, suddenly, much older. When she spoke, her voice was soft and shredded as a tissue that had gone through the wash.

  “The innocents have their own quarters. We don’t see them much, after the baptisms.”

  “I’ve never seen any since I got here,” Monica said, licking the back of a spoon. “And that’s fine with me because I think it would freak me out. They don’t let them talk. Can you imagine? My nieces and nephews never stopped talking.”