Aftertime

by Littlefield, Sophie

  “That’s just for the ceremony,” Adele murmured, but the energy had gone out of her words. “It’s all symbolic, the way they prepare them. It’s to make them all uniform so they’re like blank slates, ready to accept the doctrine. Monica…I’m sure they let them just be kids, when they’re in their own quarters.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure.” Monica shrugged. “I’m just saying, it’s pretty freaky that they—”

  “You don’t know,” Adele snapped. “And it’s best not to speculate. It’s not your place.”

  Despite her sharp tone, Cass saw tears welling in her eyes. There was a silence, as Monica ducked her chin in regret. “I’m sorry, Adele,” she said softly, covering the older woman’s hand with hers.

  Adele sighed and dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. “It’s all right, sugar. But you don’t need to worry about it. The children are being cared for so the rest of us can focus on our own spiritual growth. I mean, really, it’s better, it’s easier this way. Without the distractions.”

  Cass knew when someone was lying to herself—that was a skill every recovering addict had in spades—and Adele was working hard to believe she didn’t want to be around children. Monica was part of that work, allowing Adele to mother someone while pretending she was indifferent to the youngest members of the Order.

  Cass could do that, too. She could convince herself she didn’t need to see Ruthie, to hold her, if only she knew that she was being cared for. Cass didn’t deserve any more, not after she’d been so careless. She just needed to know her baby was safe.

  “So this isn’t too bad, right?” Adele asked, clearing her throat and forcing a smile. “I mean, for Aftertime.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Cass said, though she’d barely touched her food, a stir-fry of kaysev leaves with a few grains of barley and herbs and bits of jackrabbit meat. “I’m just…I’m not that hungry. I guess all the excitement, and all—”

  Monica rolled her eyes. “I know, more excitement than a person can stand. Deacon Lily gave you the grand tour, right? Only I bet they didn’t show you any of the stuff they don’t want you to see.”

  “Monica,” Adele scolded her. “You’ve got to stop being so disrespectful. You’re going to get us all in trouble again.”

  Monica managed an apologetic smile, showing a tiny gap between her front teeth. “I’m sorry, Adele. I really am. Only I don’t understand why no one ever stands up to them.”

  “It’s not everyone,” Adele said, shaking her head in exasperation. “Honey, you need to understand that every organization has its bad apples. But you still have to show some respect.”

  “Cass, it was so ridiculous. No one has a sense of humor around here.”

  “What happened?”

  “I forgot how this one prayer ended and I kind of made up my own verse in chapel. Mother Cora was not amused, and my ladies here all had to attend extra prayers because of me.” Monica inclined her head toward the women at the other end of the table. “They’re still kind of mad. That’s why we’re all alone at the bad girl end of the table.”

  “Well, honey, we missed tea,” Adele said, patting her arm. “Can’t get between the ladies and an afternoon snack, even if it is dandelion tea and rabbit salad sandwiches.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste.

  “You need to take it more seriously,” a woman two seats down said. Cass hadn’t realized she’d been listening. “Next time it’s gonna be a reckoning. You’ve already had what, like three warnings?”

  “Two,” Monica mumbled.

  “Okay, two,” the woman said. “Third one’s a reckoning.”

  “What’s a reckoning?” Cass asked.

  “Don’t listen to them,” Monica protested. “All I ever do is say what everyone is already thinking. There’s no way they’d call a reckoning without more to pin on me than that.”

  “But what’s—”

  “Hush,” the woman down the table hissed, as a deacon in deep lavender walked slowly past their table. Conversation died down until she was safely out of hearing range.

  “Damn spy,” Monica muttered. “Like to see where that’s in the Bible. Especially when they’re up there preaching faith, it would be nice if they had a little faith in—”

  This time it was a different woman who interrupted. “Come on, Monica, can we please get through one single meal without you getting us in trouble?”

  “Why’re you even here if you’re not a believer?” another added. All the other neophytes were turned toward them now.

  “I am a believer,” Monica protested hotly. “I’d put my faith up against anyone else’s any day. I just don’t believe in this crazy shit that masquerades as, as real faith.”

  But she kept quiet until the meal was finished and servers had cleared the dishes. Cass answered Adele’s questions with a mixture of the truth—her job at the QikGo, her love of plants and landscaping—and lies and omissions. Lily had been right—the food helped, and by the time they filed out of the darkened stadium, their way lit only by the stars and the strings of tiny lights, her head had cleared, and the terrifying memories had receded back into the recesses of her mind.

  37

  BUT IN THE MORNING SHE AWOKE FROM THE dream of Ruthie again. Ruthie pressed beneath her, the snuffling wailing of the Beaters coming closer, her own screams ringing in her ears—she jerked awake in a twist of sheets sour with her own sweat, salt riming her eyelashes so that she knew she’d cried in her sleep.

  For a moment she didn’t remember where she was. The light in the neophyte dorm was ashy, filtered through burlap tacked along the top of the enclosure, which had been constructed from a length of the stadium’s concrete corridor.

  Only the neophytes were kept locked in. Lily, who had escorted her to the dorm after dinner, explained that once they became acolytes they would join the others, groups of women sharing quarters created from what had been restaurants and club rooms and offices and even—for the ordained—the skyboxes. They would be allowed to keep clothes and personal possessions—books, keepsakes, toiletries—in their rooms. But for now everything was common property.

  “It builds a sense of community,” Lily explained, showing her the shelves of towels and kaysev shoots carved into toothbrushes and the rough soap made from the oily center of kaysev beans. No doubt the manufacture of these supplies was part of what kept the convent humming with industry, but it served another purpose, too—preparing for the day when everything from Before ran out.

  As the neophytes lined up for the two crude bathroom enclosures, acolytes brought buckets brimming with water and took away tubs heaped with dirty laundry before locking the doors for the night. To Cass’s surprise they were allowed to wear whatever they wanted to sleep in, everything from Giants T-shirts to lacy nightgowns, but she had nothing but the clothes she was wearing.

  She rubbed sleep from her eyes and looked around the empty room, surprised that she’d slept through the others’ departure. Most of the beds were neatly made. Her bed was separate from the others, tucked into a corner. The newcomer bed, where Lily explained she would sleep for the first few transitional days. Next to it was a hardback chair and a small table on which a stapled set of pages rested. They were well-thumbed, the edges curling, and they looked as though they’d been typed on an old manual typewriter.

  “You’ll have two days to rest before you join the others for daily chores and study,” Lily had said when she showed them to Cass. “Mother Cora likes for newcomers to spend time in reflection. And reading these.”

  There were hundreds of pages, single-spaced. “Who wrote all of this?”

  “The founders. Mother Cora did a lot of it.” Lily looked uncomfortable. “You can, you know, skim some of the parts. You’ll take your meals here until you’re done. Just try to think of it as room service.”

  On the table next to the pages was a plate holding a thin, flat seeded kaysev cake and six almonds, and a tall glass of clear water. Cass put the glass to her lips and drank slowly, feeling the water wash down
her throat, lukewarm but clean, the best she’d tasted Aftertime.

  She ate her breakfast and washed herself as well as she could. After that, there was nothing left to do but pick up the pages.

  WELCOME, SEEKER

  DOCTRINE OF THE ORDER

  Cass read the first page three times before giving up. The words refused to come together in her mind, the paragraphs swimming before her eyes.

  Somewhere, not far away, the children of the Order were being cared for. Fed and clothed and sheltered and kept safe. That was more than Cass had ever accomplished. Much more than she’d managed already, and she’d only had Ruthie back in her care for a single day—a day in which she’d let her be bitten, infected, and nearly taken. A day that had caused her girl untold pain as she turned, then reverted, then healed in that small library room.

  Cass tossed the pages on the table and lay back in her bed, pulling the sheet up over her head. Her breath fouled the air under the sheet, and she pulled her arms and legs in tight and made herself as compact as she could. She squeezed her eyes shut and wondered if, in here, her prayers might actually work.

  The prayer she would say, if she allowed herself, was the old one, and for that reason Cass knew it was a bad idea. It was the prayer from when she drank. On mornings like this, in beds not dissimilar, Cass breathed her own stink and reviled her own body and prayed only for God to let her forget—the things she had done, the things she had lost, the things she would do tonight. It was not a prayer of hope.

  Someone would come, eventually. She had managed to sleep through the other neophytes washing and dressing and preparing for their day, but she would not be so lucky again. She would be expected to study, to eat, to make conversation. Cass had come here with hope and something even better—with thoughts of Ruthie dancing like diamonds in her mind, never far from her thoughts. But that was gone now. Yesterday, as Lily’s kind voice stirred the silt from her memories, she had remembered.

  And remembering stole her resolve. Cass wanted to be Ruthie’s savior, but she was the one who had forsaken her.

  She wanted to be Ruthie’s everything, but she deserved nothing.

  Cass pressed her face to the mattress and felt her tears hot against the cotton. She pressed harder, harder, until she couldn’t breathe, and wished she could stay that way until the last of her life left her.

  But her body was a traitor, and as she willed the air from her lungs and her mind went black at the edges, she knew that eventually it would seize deep drafts of air to sustain life, a gift she no longer wanted.

  38

  IN THE END, OF COURSE, SHE BREATHED. SHE stared at the pages and ate the food an acolyte brought for lunch, and slept and woke, and when the others came back at the end of the day she listened to their talk and answered when they spoke to her.

  Monica offered her a gift, a single sleeping pill wrapped in a page torn from a magazine printed back when there were still celebrities to gossip about. Cass thanked her and turned her down, but she wondered how many times she would say no before she said yes.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” she said instead, fanning out the typed pages.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Monica sat cross-legged on her bed. She was wearing faded pajama pants printed with penguins on skis, and a white tank top, and her hair was pulled back from her face with a wide band. Her thin brown shoulders and the bangs that slipped out of the hair band made her look like a teenager, though she’d told Cass she was twenty-two. “It’s not like they test you on it or anything. It’s just all of Mother Cora’s crazy ideas.”

  “Did you read it all?”

  Monica laughed. “Nobody reads the whole thing. Lily just tells Cora that you read it after a couple of days.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then nothing, really. You get to be a neophyte. Big thrill.”

  “Monica…why are you here, if you don’t believe any of it?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t believe any of it. I believe the basics. Know what I was doing, Before?”

  “What?”

  Monica glanced around the room. Some of the women were already in bed, others were reading by the light of the industrial fixtures mounted in the corners of the room. No one paid any attention. “I haven’t told this to anyone but Adele, but I was going to go to divinity school. Down at Fuller. I wanted to be a minister. I mean not like right away but…someday. I was saving up.”

  Cass remembered herself at twenty-two. The account she started at the bank, where she was going to put away money for landscape design school. The single deposit she made—and the day not long after, when she took it out to buy a leather skirt.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get to go,” she said softly.

  “Yeah. Well.” Monica smiled and yawned. “Here I am, anyway. I like most of the people here. Even a lot of the ordained aren’t so bad. And three meals a day and a bed sure beats living on the outside. It’s just—I don’t like it when people think they have all the answers, you know? Especially when they make them up and then want to make you believe the same crazy things.”

  Early in the evening of the second day, there was a knock at the dormitory’s single door. A key turned in the lock. Cass expected an acolyte bringing her dinner, but it was a gray-haired deacon in a ruby blouse.

  She gave Cass a smile that didn’t reach all the way to her eyes. “I’m Hannah. Sister Lily tells me that you have finished studying the Doctrine. Tonight you will join us for dinner, and afterward I will give you your new clothes. Congratulations, Cassandra.”

  Following Hannah down onto the field, Cass realized how little she had moved during the two days she’d spent confined to the dorm. Her legs felt tight, her heartbeat sluggish. It had been days since she’d ended her solo journey at the school, months since she ran flat-out through the Sierra foothills.

  She needed to decide whether to make the effort to live, or let her ennui spread through her body until it atrophied and withered, but even the idea of making a decision sounded like too much effort. Already she wanted to return to her bed and just go back to sleep.

  Hannah led her to the neophyte table, where Monica and Adele had saved her a seat near them. “I’ll return for you later,” she said. “There’s something special planned after dinner, but I’ll be back after that.”

  Monica waited until she was out of earshot. “Oh goody, maybe there’s going to be fireworks. Or Jell-O shots.”

  Adele sighed. “You know darn well what it is, Monica. Come on, don’t ruin it for everyone else.”

  Cass got through the meal as she had got through the past two days. She answered when spoken to, and forced herself to lift her fork to her lips until most of her meal was gone, all the while concentrating on keeping her mind as blank as she could. The night settled in as the servers cleared dishes and poured weak kaysev tea, and Mother Cora ascended the platform and took her place at the podium.

  “Tonight we have something special to celebrate,” she said. “There has been further progress with Sister Ivy. She is responding to our prayers!”

  On cue, the doors to the enclosure at the other end of the field groaned open, and a large, wheeled cart rolled slowly onto the field, its top half a cage with a dark figure inside. In the rapidly descending night, Cass couldn’t make out any of its features.

  But the creature made a sound. At first it sounded like an engine turning over without success, an escalating whine that ended in clattering coughs before it started up again. Cass listened, goose bumps rising along her arms, knowing exactly what she was hearing: the call of a Beater, frustrated, hungry and lusting for flesh.

  Sister Ivy.

  39

  “SISTERS—” MOTHER CORA’S VOICE RANG OUT like a pristine bell “—prepare to bless the fallen. We have prayed for Sister Ivy, and she is beginning to recover. Our faith is healing her!”

  The cart rolled slowly toward the tables, stopping in the cleared space between the tables and the podium. The light from the strings of
tiny bulbs did little to illuminate the Beater. It was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of loose pants, even shoes, and it pulled at the bars of the cart and its cries carried clearly through the stadium.

  Cass remembered Faye saying that the Order paid Dor to capture Beaters. But she had never imagined this was their purpose: to pray over them, to…heal them? Unless this thing, too, was an outlier, like her…was that possible?

  “Is it really getting better?” Cass whispered.

  “Of course not,” Monica whispered back. “Get real. They just drag them out here every so often and say they’re getting better so everyone keeps praying. I mean, you think it’s an accident they do this after dark?”

  “Hush,” Adele scolded. “Just leave Cass alone, Monica. You don’t want to get her in trouble on her first night as a neophyte.”

  “Really? You’re not going to tell her?” Monica demanded. “Just like no one told me? Come on, Adele, we talked about this, you said—”

  “That was before you got in trouble twice,” Adele hissed. “You don’t have room for any more mistakes.”

  “Prepare for the blessing,” Mother Cora commanded. Servers emerged from the pantries bearing trays with rows of tiny cups. In the flickering light from the larder, Cass saw that the cups bore ruby-red wine. They were barely bigger than a thimble, like dolls’ cups.

  “Not this,” Monica muttered. “Not again, it’s not right—”

  “Shut up,” the woman next to Adele whispered furiously. “I’m not taking punishment because of you anymore, Monica. Just buck up and get through it like the rest of us.”

  “If you hate it so much here, leave,” another woman added, mouth pulled down in anger. “Mother Cora’s healing them. All you’re doing is getting in the way.”