Aftertime

by Sophie Littlefield

  “Yeah, but you act normal. You’re not feverish and you don’t talk crazy. Once they figured out that you weren’t going to kill me, you know, when you started talking and all-you know how sometimes people only see what they want to see?”

  Cass nodded, thinking-but you still see. Maybe it was because Sammi was young. And maybe it was more than that.

  Sammi gave her a little grin. “Look, you’re really not so bad. You did fix your hair, kinda-and your scars are almost gone. What you really need?”

  Cass smiled, moved despite herself that the girl was trying to cheer her up. “Yeah?”

  “Eyeliner. Really thick, you know?” She tugged her lower lid down to show Cass where she’d apply it. Then she hesitated. “They say there’s others,” she finally said. “That got better. I mean it’s just a rumor, this one time a raiding party went down toward Everett. But, yeah, maybe you’re not the only one.”

  Cass felt her heart speed up, a prickling of hope radiating along her nerves. Others.

  “Survivors?” she asked. “Who were…attacked, who started to turn? And came back?”

  Sammi shrugged, didn’t meet her eyes. “It was just a rumor. My mom says it’s just people being confused by those fake Beaters. I mean no one here’s seen it or anything, and most people think it’s like, what do you call that? When people make up stories and they get passed around-”

  “Urban myth,” Cass said, trying to cover her disappointment.

  “Yeah, that. As far as anyone here knows, no one’s ever come back before. So they don’t believe in it. But I do. I can tell you’re different. And it’s not just that…you’ve been on your own and they haven’t gotten to you. Most people would be dead already, so that means you’re lucky, too.”

  “But I don’t-”

  “I’d go with you,” the girl pushed on, and Cass had the sense she’d practiced this speech in advance. “I’m not scared. Only Mom doesn’t have anyone else now. I need to be here for her. But you’re going to make it-I know you are. And you don’t even have to go looking for my dad, just only if you happen to meet him somewhere. He’s, like, six feet three and…”

  And then, suddenly, just like that, she faltered. Her courage evaporated in a mist of sniffles and her smooth-skinned face collapsed in on itself. She looked like she was about to bolt, and without thinking, Cass reached for her.

  Sammi didn’t so much lean as fall into the hug and Cass wrapped her arms around the girl, all elbows and slender limbs, and held tight.

  “I’m sorry,” Sammi snuffled against the crook of Cass’s neck, but she didn’t let go.

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” Cass said softly, and then she said something else, a dangerous thing that she didn’t plan and immediately wondered if she would regret. “I’ll find your dad. I’ll find him and I’ll tell him you’re all right.”

  “Oh, thank you…thank you,” Sammi said. “Um…Cass? Could you…you know, if you do find my dad? I was wondering if you could tell him something for me.”

  “You want me to give him a message?”

  “Yeah. I mean, he’ll know what it means.” She bit her lip and looked away. “Just tell him that I never forget, I never miss a night. And I never will.”

  10

  THEY SET OUT IN THE CHARCOAL GRAY OF nightfall, the approaching darkness taking the color from the earth, leaving it a land of black forms and navy sky. Someone had given Cass a backpack, a sturdy model made for day hikers. Inside were a good blade, bottles of water, energy bars, a can of orange segments. She wished she could thank her benefactor, but no one would own up to the gift.

  No one came to see them off, either. Cass understood. Despite the lighthearted moments at the bath, and the provisions, in the end they’d chosen to stand with Sammi’s mother, at least publicly. No one but Smoke and Sammi knew she was attacked, and she hoped no one really blamed her for the way she’d brought Sammi back to camp, with a blade at her throat. They must have known by now that she wouldn’t have killed the girl, or maybe they just trusted Smoke’s judgment-and, too, she might well have saved the child, getting her back to shelter before the sun was strong in the sky and the Beaters were out in force.

  But Sammi was well loved here. And everyone knew the dangers Cass and Smoke faced. Knew Smoke might not be back. Aftertime, goodbyes had become too hard when each one might be the last.

  Behind them the doors closed with a solid thunk and Cass felt a shiver travel up from the base of her spine. Smoke took the lead, walking a few steps ahead. He had changed into hiking boots and a long-sleeved shirt over a t-shirt and set an easy pace.

  Just a day earlier, Cass was setting out alone at this hour after spending the daylight hours hiding and trying to get some sleep. Her destination was the same: Silva, or as close as they could get before next sunup. Her urgency was stronger, if anything, for how close she was. But things had changed in her brief stay at the school.

  After being around people again for even such a short time, she was reminded of their unpredictability, their vulnerability…their humanity. Human beings were driven by emotions and hungers and drives and there was no telling what they would do in times of stress. Her fellow shelterers had rescued Ruthie that day and Cass prayed that they had cared for her ever since. But now she allowed herself to consider what instead they might have done with her little girl. What they might have told her. Would they have cherished her, held her, read her stories and combed her fine hair? Would they wipe her tears when she cried, or would they have been too busy, too distracted, too indifferent?

  Even when Cass woke up to the horror of her ruined flesh, the hair ripped from her scalp, sticky and sore in unfamiliar clothes, she hadn’t been afraid for herself, only for her little girl. She had put her faith in the people who rescued Ruthie to care for her, because she had no other choice. She would gladly have relinquished any chance to see Ruthie again, if only she knew her daughter would always be safe and loved. After all, hadn’t she done so once, already? Every time she raised the bottle to her lips, she had chosen: her addiction over her baby. That was the most painful truth of her recovery, and it was hard not to believe this was her punishment, to be separated from Ruthie without even the knowledge that she was all right. If only there was something to trade, someone to trade with; Cass would rip her soul from her body and hand it to the devil himself, would walk into the gates of hell with her head held high if someone could just take care of Ruthie.

  And now that the library lay ahead in the gloom, Cass could no longer prevent herself from wondering if Ruthie might have been ignored, neglected, discarded.

  No, no, no-if she didn’t get the thoughts under control she would lose her mind; her breath would come out in a scream that would split the air and alert any night-wandering creatures of their presence.

  Cass took two jogging half steps to catch up with Smoke and wrapped her hands around his arms. He turned and held her by the shoulders, searching her face in the moonlight. “What’s wrong?”

  Cass could feel her heart pounding in her throat, fast and staccato. She worked her lips but no sound came out.

  “Did you see something? Hear something? Cass?”

  Cass shook her head and licked her dry lips and managed two syllables. “Ruthie…” And then Smoke’s arms were around her in an embrace that was at once strong and cautious. It wasn’t a bear hug, not as committed as that, but more like he was making of himself a support for her to lean on. She rested her face against his broad chest and squeezed her eyes shut and listened to his slow, strong heartbeat.

  “I don’t know if she’s all right,” she said after a while, keeping her eyes closed.

  She could feel Smoke nod as he held her a little tighter, his arms drawing her closer against him. “I know,” he whispered. “But we try anyway. Right? We try anyway.”

  After a while longer Cass pulled away, embarrassed, blinking away the threat of tears. She did not cry easily, not anymore, so what was happening to her? Was it the women at the bath, the
illusion of friendship, was she so hungry for human contact that she had let her guard down so easily?

  She didn’t look at Smoke, but when they started walking again he stayed by her side. She knew that earlier he’d walked ahead to shield her from whatever they might come up against in the dark. Now she had lost that advantage. But it had been an illusory advantage at best; anything that threatened Smoke threatened her, as well.

  The moon was three-quarters full and its watery light was sufficient to mark their way along the road. The smell of tar, cooling now after a day softening in the late-summer sun, mixed with the gingery kaysev and the dry dirt smell of deadwood. Far off in the distance she heard a cricket, and then another, a lonely duet. There were crackling sounds in the brush now and then. Jackrabbits and quail and snakes.

  For a while, after the country’s livestock had fallen to the waves of bioterror attacks, there was panic that wild animals would be hunted to extinction. At first, people worried that the pathogens killing the cattle and sheep and chickens and pigs and trout and salmon would spread to the wild-and themselves, of course-but advances made early in the second decade of the century tailored chemicals to species with astonishing specificity, allowed them to be precisely targeted, too. The agriculture industry refined their acute toxins to target specific and narrow bandwidths of pests and rodents; in the wrong hands, it was a simple enough exercise to use the same techniques on other species. Only the attacks on fowl went wide, taking out many bird species until it was a rarity to see even a common blue jay or sparrow. Terrorists killed off other food-source species with laserlike precision, and those who ate the infected meat, of course. It didn’t take long until no one ate any farmed meat at all.

  That’s when everyone became a hunter. Traps and slingshots were cobbled together; the many who refused to surrender their guns in the early days of the riots put them into service. Cats and dogs disappeared first, and then rabbits and pigeons and rodents. In one surreal episode, a grassroots environmental group pasted up posters of the common brown rat all over Silva, predicting its extinction and urging people to search out vegetarian proteins.

  But things had worked themselves out, hadn’t they? Now there weren’t enough humans left to prevent the poisoned and overhunted species from coming back. Why not? Surviving creatures seemed more than content to graze on the kaysev. And on each other, in the case of the carnivores. Their populations burgeoned, even thrived Aftertime.

  Cass herself had come upon a nest of baby rabbits a couple of nights ago. The mother stared at her with eyes wide and yellow in the moonlight, and its heartbeat had felt impossibly fast when Cass put her hands around its soft throat.

  But after a moment Cass stopped squeezing and backed away, the rabbit quivering with fear, but alive. Without tools, without fire, it would have been difficult to eat the rabbit anyway.

  And it wasn’t necessary. A diet of kaysev truly was adequate. Cass never felt full; in the language of Before she might have said that she never felt satisfied-but satisfaction was an elusive and outdated concept. Serenity-contentment-they seemed as unlikely for citizens as the ability to fly or read minds.

  But what of the women, laughing together at the baths? What of the easy banter, the sly teasing, the gentle humor? Weren’t these a sign of-if not happiness-then at least ease of mind? Had the time that passed while Cass was gone been enough to heal the survivors, the denizens of this land? To make them forget, or at least accept, the worst of the horrors, and search out things worth living for?

  At the library the mood had been bleak. Loss and devastation and grief pervaded every room, every corner, every conversation. There had been talk-endless talk-but it was the talk of fear and relief and guilt and desperation, a constant discussion of odds and measures and likelihoods, as though such talk could keep them safer, could keep the churning threats at bay.

  Time had passed-two months-since Cass was taken. In two months the people sheltering together at the school had become a real community, built on cooperation and friendship. And love, or at least lovemaking. Cass thought about the look that had passed between Smoke and Nora.

  “Did she mind?” she asked abruptly. “You coming with me. Did Nora mind?”

  Smoke said nothing for a moment, and Cass wondered if it was something she had no right to ask. Smoke had offered to accompany her, nothing more.

  “Yes,” he finally said. “She minded very much.”

  “But you came anyway.” A question more than a statement.

  “Yes, I came anyway. And I understand that you want to know why. But I’m not sure I can tell you. I mean, I know what answers I ought to give-that it gives my life some meaning to be able to help you. Or that in Aftertime we have to think of the greater good, not the needs of individuals. Or even that we have so little of our humanity left that we need to take every opportunity we can to remind ourselves that we aren’t savages.”

  “Those all work for me,” Cass said after a moment, trying to let him know that he was off the hook, that he didn’t owe her an answer.

  “Well, thanks. But the truth is…I don’t love her. Nora. And maybe this was a convenient way to leave. I don’t know…I just don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pried.”

  “Yeah, well…some people say I think too much. They used to say it, anyway. Now…” Smoke trailed off, and they walked in silence.

  He was the sort of man who went to places other people couldn’t follow, and it made her want to know more. “What did you do before? If it’s okay for me to ask.”

  “Sure. Look, Cass-” he glanced at her, eyes flashing in the moonlight “-let’s get this straight, okay, seeing as neither of us knows what’s coming tonight or tomorrow or next week or next month. You can ask me anything you want. If I don’t want to tell you, I won’t. But I don’t see where some sort of notion of, of, I don’t know, propriety or whatever is going to help any of us now. And talking might help.”

  Might help what? Cass wondered-help to pass the time, or keep her mind off the dangers and worries, or make her forget who and what she was and how she’d got that way? But she didn’t ask for clarity. “Deal,” she said.

  “Okay, so…I was an executive coach.”

  “A what?”

  “I helped people figure out what was holding them back in the professional workplace.” Smoke’s voice carried some dark emotion. Regret, maybe. “And then I showed them how to change.”

  “So you basically told other people how to do their jobs? And got paid for it?”

  Smoke laughed bitterly. “I guess that’s one way to sum it up. On paper, my job was to guide people to be more effective in their work through an exploration of their skills and goals and challenges.” He looked away, into the night-black forest. “I was good at it. Too good.”

  “How could you be too good?”

  “I got a lot of my clients because they were struggling at work. They’d been put on performance review and were in danger of losing their jobs. I was like the career consultant of last resort. And looking back on it, a lot of them were probably in trouble for a reason. I should have let things play out the way they were meant to.”

  “You mean, and let them get fired?”

  “Not everyone’s suited for every job,” Smoke said through gritted teeth. “Sometimes people need to fail so they don’t fuck things up for others. Sometimes systems are designed so that people who should fail do fail.”

  Cass was taken aback by his barely controlled anger. She knew she should stop, should leave the subject alone-but for some reason she longed to keep him talking.

  “You went around rescuing their jobs for them. Just like you did at the church, the fire. You’re the rescuer. That can be your new job description.”

  “Don’t make me better than I am, Cass,” Smoke snapped, and Cass knew that she had gone too far.

  She felt herself flame with embarrassment as Smoke stalked ahead of her, his body tense. But after a few moments he waited for her
to catch up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean- It’s just that I didn’t do anything much, no matter what they told you.”

  “You got people out of the fire.”

  “Nothing that anyone else wouldn’t have done. I was already there, it wasn’t any big deal to bring the others with me.”

  Cass knew he was downplaying the event. She understood the impulse; being talked about got you noticed, and being noticed made you public, and then people expected you to reveal more and more of yourself.

  She could respect Smoke’s desire for privacy. She knew well the need to keep to the shadows. So why did she want so much to know more?

  11

  THE ROAD INTO SILVA WOUND THROUGH MOSTLY unbuilt land, its cracked edges sloping into a rocky outcrop ping at the edge of the forest. The dead trees could not maintain their grip on the earth where the road carved its path, and their black roots bore clots of earth like hungry tumors. Pinecones from forgotten seasons lay crushed by cars that had long since stopped running.

  They walked in silence.

  Before, this land was shaded no matter what the season, the evergreens thick against the sky. Then the toxins had blanketed the land, and the trees shed their needles and withered in defeat, their xylem choked and strangled, their bark black and peeling. The sun bore down on the ravaged earth during the day; at night, as now, even the moonlight reached all the way to the earth, covering everything with a frisson of silver.

  Here and there a cabin was set back among the few remaining trees, mostly hunting cabins built decades ago, before the Sierras were discovered by city types looking for vacation homes with easier drives than Tahoe. In some, curtains hung neatly in the windows, cheery ruffles and valences hinting at brisk, no-nonsense women with feather dusters and oil soap. In others, the panes were broken, and window boxes hung askew, spilling dirt and dead flowers to the indifferent ground.