Aftertime

by Sophie Littlefield

  She’d been sheltering in the library for a couple of months before she went to get Ruthie, determining that there was finally no one left to try to stop her. The first morning she had her baby back, they woke up together on the makeshift bed in Cass’s corner of the library, away from the others, tucked in a narrow corridor behind the periodicals, beneath a water fountain that hadn’t flowed in a month. Cass kept her space clean, her few possessions stacked and folded and arranged with care.

  That day, she woke to the sweet scent of Ruthie’s hair, her small body tucked perfectly into her embrace, her head under Cass’s chin. She lay still, breathing happiness in and hope out, watching the sun cast strips of yellow light on the wall through the miniblinds. A week earlier, they’d lost Miranda, and Cass’s mood had faltered. But now that she had Ruthie, life seemed like a possibility once more.

  “You going to explain that?” Nora said, not unkindly, pointing at Cass’s arms.

  Cass folded them self-consciously. They hurt, but not as much as they had when she first regained consciousness, lying in an empty field. Then, she had been horrified at the way she looked, her wounds raw, the crusty scabs black in some places, leaking clear reddish fluid. Her back had been an agony of shredded flesh and it was still healing, but the wounds on her arms were almost completely healed, marking crisscross scars across her flesh.

  “On the road,” she mumbled. “Things happen, you know. I fell…I ran into things.”

  “No shit,” Nora said.

  “Go easy,” Smoke murmured, a warning in his voice.

  “Look at her,” Nora hissed, her voice low and angry. “We’ve seen that before. You know we have.”

  Smoke shook his head. “It isn’t the same.”

  “Only because you don’t want to see it!”

  “The same as what?” Cass demanded.

  Smoke looked at the table, wouldn’t meet her eyes. “There’s been a few kids-”

  “Not just kids,” Nora interrupted.

  “Mostly kids, teenagers, they cut themselves, they pull out their hair.”

  “Why would anyone do that?” Cass asked, horrified.

  “To look like Beaters,” Nora said. “To look like you. To mock the world. Or to come into settlements and everyone takes off screaming and then they help themselves to whatever they want-water, food, drugs, anything. That is, if they don’t get themselves shot first.”

  “You think I- You’re fucking insane.” Cass’d been trying to hold on to her patience, but this-Nora’s implication that she had done this to herself on purpose-it was too much. “So where’s all my stuff, then? If I’ve been terrorizing citizens and stealing from them, where is it? I don’t have anything on me, nothing.”

  “I don’t mean to-”

  “Just let her tell her story.” Smoke glared at Nora, and after a long moment, the woman gave a faint shrug.

  Cass took a breath, let it out slowly, considered how much she wanted to give away. These people could help her, or not. They could let her go, or not. Already she felt certain that they would. There was no cruelty in them, only caution, and who could blame them for that?

  “The girl,” she hedged. “Sammi. Why was she out alone?”

  “Why don’t you tell us about you first,” Nora said coldly, and this time she refused to acknowledge Smoke’s warning glance.

  “All right.” Cass gathered her thoughts. “I lived in Silva. In Tenaya Estates. You know-the trailers.”

  Smoke nodded. “I know the place.”

  “I lived…alone. I worked at the QikGo off Lone Pine. Back in the spring, during the Siege, I stayed on for a while. I thought…I didn’t want to give up, I guess. But, you know, when they started coming into town more…”

  She didn’t add that people stopped showing up at the A.A. meetings, until one day she was the only one in the room. That day, she knew she couldn’t live alone anymore.

  “Anyway I went over to the library to shelter.” She dug her fingernails into the callus of her thumb, under the table where they couldn’t see. The next part was hard. “I was there the first time the Beaters came. When they took a friend of mine.”

  And the second time.

  She couldn’t bring herself to tell it. Not yet. “Are there still…is anyone still over there?”

  “Yes, last time anyone was there, they were up to around fifty.” Smoke hesitated and Cass got the impression he wasn’t telling the truth-not all of it, anyway. “They got it reinforced. They haven’t lost anyone…not inside, anyway, in a while. We have eighty here. There’s a few dozen in the firehouse. And you know, you have your folks who are still trying to stay in their own places. More than you’d think, really.”

  “Fewer every day,” Nora muttered.

  “Not our place to judge,” Smoke said in a voice so low Cass was sure it was meant only for Nora.

  “Do you talk to them…the people at the library?” she asked. Now that she was so close, fear bloomed in her heart.

  “We did,” Smoke said. “Until…well, we had some trouble. A couple of weeks ago. Since then we’ve stayed local.”

  “Seventeen days,” Nora said, with surprising bitterness.

  Smoke nodded, acknowledging her point.

  “What happened?”

  “You don’t know?” The suspicion was back.

  Cass looked from one to the other, mystified. “No, I don’t-I told you, I’ve been on my own since I woke up and-”

  “Some people would just say that it’s awfully convenient that you can’t remember anything,” Nora said. “And that you just happen to show up after the Rebuilders set up camp over there.”

  “Who are-”

  “So now you want to accuse her of being a Rebuilder?” Smoke said. “Really, Nora? That’s a little paranoid, even for you.”

  Nora scowled. “Freewalkers don’t threaten to kill children.”

  “Everyone would have thought she was a-”

  “Don’t say it,” Cass interrupted, resisting the urge to clap her hands over her ears. She couldn’t bear to hear the word, to hear the accusation, again. “Please. Look, why don’t I just leave now.”

  “No one said anything about that,” Smoke said tiredly. “You’re safe here. Everyone’s just on edge. It’s been hard. Shit, no one needs to tell you that.”

  For a moment no one spoke. Cass could feel Nora’s anger clogging the air still.

  “All I want to know is how she’s managed not to be attacked,” she said, addressing Smoke alone. “Walking alone as long as she says she has-how does that happen?”

  Cass glared back. “I’ve been lucky, I guess.”

  “Lucky,” Nora repeated, spitting out the word as though it was poison.

  “Listen to me. My daughter was there,” Cass snapped. “In the library. The second time we were attacked. We were outside. She wanted…to be outside.”

  What Ruthie had really wanted was to pick dandelions, one of the few plants to survive the Siege. Cass had taught her to hold the blooms under her chin, so that the yellow reflected off her pale creamy skin. Oh, look, you must be made of butter, she teased Ruthie, peppering her sweet face with kisses. And then Ruthie would laugh and laugh and tickle Cass’s chin with bunches of dandelions wilting in her chubby little hands.

  Ruthie wanted to pick dandelions, and they were hard to find at dusk, so it was barely twilight when Cass led her outside to the little patch of dead lawn in front of the library, after she looked carefully in every direction.

  But not carefully enough. Because the Beaters were learning. And they had learned to hide. They hid behind a panel truck on two flat tires that had been abandoned half a block away…and they waited. And then they moved faster than Cass thought possible, awkward loping strides accompanied by their gurgling breathless moans, and Cass grabbed for Ruthie, who was tracing the path of a caterpillar with a stick and thought it was a game and danced out of the way and darted into the last glorious rays of sun as it slipped down the horizon-

  The challe
nge drained from Nora’s face. “Don’t,” she begged.

  Smoke placed a work-roughened hand over Nora’s and didn’t look at Cass.

  “Nora,” he said heavily. “She, uh…her nephew. She was watching him.”

  “I was supposed to be watching him,” Nora said hollowly. She pulled her hand away and stood, knocking over her chair. She backed out of the room, brushing against the coffeepot on the counter. It fell to the ground, shattering and splashing hot coffee, but she just turned and bolted down the hall.

  “She’s…” Smoke said, watching her go. Then he turned back to Cass. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to apologize,” Cass said, but the truth was that she did need it. Not the apology-but the way his voice softened when he spoke to her and the way his eyes narrowed with concern when he looked at her, taking in what had happened to her poor body and not turning away.

  That. Most of all she needed that, the not turning away.

  “Something did happen to me,” she found herself saying, the words tumbling out as though a trapdoor had been opened inside her. “Something bad.”

  Telling was crazy. Telling could get her thrown out of here. Or worse. But Smoke looked at her as though he saw her, saw the real her, and she wanted to hold on to that, wanted him to know the truth and still see her.

  The kindness he’d already shown her should have been enough. Settle for that, she willed herself. Settle for good enough.

  But Cass could never leave well enough alone. She didn’t know how. She wanted someone-one other human being-to know what had happened, and not turn away.

  “Your daughter,” Smoke said softly. “Was she taken?”

  “No,” Cass said. “But I was.”

  05

  SMOKE HELPED HER CUT HER HAIR.

  He handed her the scissors, a pair of office shears that were too bulky and too dull to do a good job, even if she had a mirror, even if she knew what she was doing. He’d said it would give her less to explain to the others. Cass knew he was right. Still, when she made the first cut, the sight of her filthy and matted hair falling to the floor caused her to suck in her breath.

  Her hair had been her best feature, once. Long and thick and shiny, dark blond burnished with gold, curving inward where it lay across her collarbones. She refused to cry as the hair fell away, but when she had cut as far as she could reach, and Smoke closed his large hand gently over hers and took the scissors away, she squeezed her eyes shut and mourned the loss of the last faint reminder of her beauty as he carefully trimmed the back.

  Afterward, he gathered her hair with his hands and hap-hazardly piled it in a file box while Cass got control of herself. He carefully avoided looking her in the face and Cass knew that she was hard to look at, an ugly, hard-worn thing. She demanded that he take her to the library that night, and he agreed once Cass made it clear that she was going with or without him.

  He tried to talk her into waiting a few days, when the full moon had waned. The Beaters had become bolder, he warned her, coming out on moonlit nights as well as mornings and early evenings. Gone were the days when they only ventured out in the middle of the day.

  But Cass didn’t care. She’d been out every night since she woke up; she wasn’t going to stop now, not when she was so close to Ruthie.

  Smoke took her to the cafeteria, which they had set up as a community room with toys and activities for the kids, and chairs and sofas arranged for conversation. Makeshift shelves held kitchen implements and plates and cups. Blankets and clothing were folded and stacked. There were rows of paperbacks, vases of the few surviving wildflowers. Board games and puzzles were set out on tables and two separate card games were in full swing.

  Eight or nine kids-toddlers up to six-or seven-year-olds-played on carpet scraps arranged on the floor at one end of the cafeteria. Sammi was watching them, along with a boy about her age.

  Smoke led Cass into the large open space, and the adults’ conversations died. People set down their playing cards, the baskets of clothes they had been folding, the kaysev they had been separating and cleaning and preparing. They regarded Cass with open curiosity and, in some cases, suspicion and fear and hostility.

  Sammi’s mother was in a group of women who had been chatting as they washed and dried dishes. There was a tub of soapy water, another of clear, no doubt creek water that had been boiled. Cass had seen the blackened fire pit in the courtyard, the hearth built of rebar and steel beams and that fireproof plastic weave.

  “This is Cass,” Smoke said into the silence. “She’s a citizen, just like us.”

  “She’s not like us,” Sammi’s mother said, setting down her washrag. Her voice shook. “She tried to-”

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Sammi said. She put down the bucket of toys she’d been holding. A pretend zoo was laid out on the floor, and she and the boy had been helping the younger kids stack wooden blocks to make cages.

  “It’s not okay,” her mother hissed, but she stayed where she was. One of the other women laid a hand on her arm and said something that Cass couldn’t hear.

  “She only did what she had to,” Sammi added, glaring at her mother defiantly. “Besides, if you didn’t keep me cooped up in here like I was in jail-”

  “Don’t, Sammi,” the boy said quietly. “Not now.”

  “I’d rather take my chances out there,” Sammi said, pointing out the window at the street that ran alongside the building, beyond the iron fence. Cass saw abandoned cars, some with graffiti painted on the side. Several had crashed into each other, by accident or on purpose, crushed metal and broken glass surrounding doors that no one had bothered to close.

  Then she saw something else, something that struck white-hot fear in her heart. In the yard of a squat brick bun-galow across the street, a small clump of Beaters shuffled around a kiddie pool they’d managed to drag from some where. One was trying to sit in it. Two others were trying to turn it over. Another stood close to the house, staring into a large picture window and absently tugging at its ears.

  She wasn’t the only one to spot them. A few sharp gasps, a collective wave of fear that ran through the room.

  “They’ve started gathering here in the afternoon. Waiting…” Smoke sighed, running his hands through his hair. For a moment he looked a decade older than the thirty-five Cass had taken him for. “Sometimes a dozen of them. They wander off when the sun starts to get low. For now, anyway.”

  The Beaters had everyone’s attention. The argument between Sammi and her mother was forgotten. Cass took the opportunity to slip out of the room, Smoke following her without a word. She could not stay there, watching the Beaters, enduring the scrutiny of all those people.

  She would wait in the office, alone, until evening. After all, she’d become accustomed to her own company.

  Cass added it up in her head. A hundred seventy-five, maybe two hundred people left, between the library and the school and firehouse… Silva’s population had been over four thousand before the famine and the riots and the suicides and the fever deaths. Before the Beaters began carrying the survivors away.

  As the sun sank down in the sky, Cass felt restless. She had been alone in the office for hours, waiting for night to come. No one had disturbed her. No one had even walked by the door. She stood up and stretched, easing her hip and thigh muscles. They were tight all the time now, from the walking.

  When she regained consciousness all those days ago, she saw the Sierra foothills in the distance, the flat dry central valley all around her. She had been lying under a stand of creosote a few yards from the edge of a farm road, one she didn’t know. All those years living in Silva, ever since Mim and Byrn had moved there during Cass’s senior year of high school, she had never traveled far from the long, flat, straight stretch of Highway 161 that led up into the hills from the central valley. The few times she’d made the four-hour trip to San Francisco with friends, to see a concert or spend the night on someone’s friend’s couch getting high and drinking cheap wine, she’d bare
ly noticed the chicken and cattle ranches flanking the highway, the clots of houses that passed for towns, the collapsing sheds and silos left over from more prosperous times.

  She had been lying in a thicket of dead brown weeds. Kaysev had taken root in patches between the dead plants, and Cass had been curled up with her face in a soft clump, its gingery scent in her nostrils along with the other smells: the metal tang of crusted blood, the rotting spoils of her own breath, her body’s odor foul and acrid. Her mind had been clouded and troubled, both racing and stalled, somehow. She had no idea how she’d come to be lying, bruised and mangled, in the weeds, and she wondered if she was dead, because her last memory was praying for death when the Beaters closed their ruined fingers around her arms.

  That was all she remembered, and it came to her through a dense tangle of lost and broken thoughts, so she understood that time had passed since that terrible moment. How much time, she had no idea.

  The brown weeds made a stark pattern against the clear sky and Cass had wished she could just close her eyes and finish the job of dying.

  But then she saw what had become of her flesh.

  Stretching made the wounds on her back throb, and Cass pulled her shirt up and over her shoulders to let the room’s cool air reach them. Just for a moment, just to take away the constant ache for a little while. She leaned into the stretch, and tried not to think. Only to wait, for Smoke to come and get her and take her to what was next.

  A sound at the door broke her concentration. Cass pulled her shirt down hastily, but it was too late.

  It was the girl. Sammi. She had approached the room so quietly.

  And she had seen.

  06

  FOR A LONG MOMENT THEY STARED AT EACH other, Cass holding her breath, the girl’s eyes wide with surprise and curiosity-but no fear.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Of course,” Cass said.

  The girl slipped gracefully into a chair at the same table where Cass had drunk coffee hours earlier. She had washed and changed her clothes, and her hair had been combed and plaited neatly. The braids made her look even younger, but Cass could see that she was well into adolescence, maybe fourteen. That might explain her rebellion against her mother, but Cass figured it went further than that-there was a reckless spirit to her. A spirit not so different from her own.