It wasn’t that other people hadn’t offered help. Some of the shelterers at the library made an effort when she first arrived, but she was so accustomed to keeping to herself that accepting an extra serving of food, a much-thumbed magazine from six months earlier, an invitation to walk around the courtyard in the evening…these were foreign notions, and it was so much easier to turn away than to risk letting a stranger get close to her.
What did it mean that she was allowing Lyle to help her now? Was she changing-had the brief contact with Smoke, with Sammi, with the women at the bath already turned her into someone different, a self that she didn’t recognize? Was she growing softer, weaker in her longing for human contact?
She picked up the toothbrush and peeled back the packaging, running her tongue over her cracked lips, her teeth. Yesterday the women had loaned her supplies and she’d brushed for what seemed like hours, trying to remove the weeks’ accumulation of matter from them. Among all its other properties, the kaysev stems’ woody fibers did a serviceable job of cleaning teeth, but the taste of toothpaste and the cool clean sensation afterward were a welcome relief.
She brushed slowly, savoring the taste. Then she used one of the folded cloths that Lyle had left to wash her face, her hands, between her legs, trying to get rid of every trace of the night before. She did not think of Smoke, and she did not think about the dream Ruthie, though not thinking about them took all her concentration.
She thought of the real Ruthie, the way she’d looked when Cass went to Mim and Byrn’s place to take her back. She’d been worried that the months of separation might have erased her from her daughter’s mind, but the minute Ruthie saw her in the doorway, she jumped up from the sofa where she had been playing with a thin gray cat and ran to her, blond curls flying, eyes wide with relief and joy.
Cass took a deep breath and looked into the mirror.
The first thing she noticed was how green her eyes were and for a moment she was electrified with terror until she figured out that it was only the pure strong light of morning that had shrunk her pupils. She cupped her hands around her face and leaned toward the mirror and her pupils expanded in the tunnel of dark she had created, and she exhaled with relief. Before the turn, her eyes had been a muddy hazel green; now they were the vibrant green of lemon leaves.
Bright irises were an early symptom of the disease, one of the things that gave the infected such ethereal beauty shortly after the blueleaf appeared, before any of them had turned all the way. But the shrunken irises that followed turned Beaters’ eyes into bright, soulless tunnels, passages that seemed to lead to their poisoned cores. By contrast, Cass’s eyes sparkled with life, making her look alert and intelligent and…pretty.
Cass felt her face flush. She touched her cheeks, her chin. The skin was clear and almost luminous. Her eyelashes stood out against the delicately veined eyelids, long-fringed and black. Her hair looked badly cut, but not terrible; it was glossy and the same rich golden brown it had always been, the new growth at her crown nearly indistinguishable from the rest.
After taking a thorough survey of her face, she couldn’t put it off any longer-it was time to look at her back. She skimmed off her shirt and turned and oh God it was worse than she’d thought, worse than she’d imagined, worse than she’d seen on anyone who wasn’t already dead or dying. The pocked areas where chunks of flesh had been chewed off were red and angry and raw. Shreds of blackened, dead tissue were stuck to the crusty, shiny layers underneath. In some areas it looked like muscle was still exposed, though concentric layers of healing skin, as thin as tissue paper, skimmed over the wounds from the edges inward.
Thank God she’d hid herself from the women at the bath. What would they have done, if they knew? They had been so kind, especially the one who had washed her so tenderly, never knowing what lay under her shirt. If they saw, were forced to look at the evidence of the attack on her-especially after what she’d done to Sammi-even the most compassionate among them would be unlikely to show her any mercy.
Cass tried to force a memory from her mind, a night when she had gone on the raiding party from the library. She’d been at the library for a couple of weeks and was going stir-crazy, her only outdoor time in the courtyard where she stared at the same treetops, the same stretch of sky, day after day. So when the raiding party assembled after dark with their empty packs and bags, she put on her own knapsack and held her blade at the ready and went out with them into the night.
There was an air of forced joviality, whispered joking and brittle laughter. They went south, down past the high school, to a cul-de-sac of run-down seventies-era trilevels. One of the curious truths of Aftertime was that the most opulent homes didn’t yield the best spoils: it was the solidly middle class who were most likely to have Costco-sized stores of granola bars, Midol, hand sanitizer.
They found enough to fill their packs in the first few houses. They’d come back another night and make their way around the rest of the block. There was no rush; they were like summer-fat squirrels, hoarding for a winter that still seemed far-off. The others seemed to relax, now that they were headed home-until they passed the old ARCO and heard garbled pleas for help coming through the mini-mart’s shattered double doors.
It was not the voice of a Beater. “Help…please…help.” Cass couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. It was like a scream that was leaking air, agony enunciated with excruciating care.
“Walk on, Cass,” Bobby said softly, drawing her away from the others, his hand gentle but insistent at her back. Bobby was always so kind to her. He wanted to be with her. He said he was willing to wait until she was ready, but how could she ever be ready? Half a dozen times she had turned him down, and still he was trying to protect her. Didn’t he understand that she didn’t deserve him?
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she whispered, backing away from him, from the concern in his eyes. She had to show him that she was not his, and though her heart hammered with fear, she walked straight over to the mini-mart, shining her flashlight in front of her.
There were none of the things inside, she knew, or they would have come loping and gnashing in pursuit the minute she and the others came close. But what she saw in the flashlight’s illumination was clearly a nest, befouled clothing and blankets mounded into a pile a dozen feet wide, the space made by pushing all the store’s racks and shelves to the side. The Beaters usually only left their nests during the day, when their tiny-pupiled eyes could absorb enough light to see, but for some reason these ones had gone hunting that night. The nest stink was powerful, and Cass knew any number of the things could be nearby, and she would have turned and run-except that on the nest lay one of their victims.
It was a man. She thought it was, anyway, but only because he still had his hair, which was buzzed short. He was naked, but the rest of his body held no clues to his gender, all of the skin having been eaten away. Under a basting of blood the flesh was flayed and ribboned and chewed, bone showing through in a few places, but mostly red muscles and sinew and nerves and tendons remained. The tough soles of his feet had been left whole, and his toes were undamaged, but even the flesh on top of his feet had been ripped away, the network of delicate bones showing through the gore.
His face had been left mostly intact, other than the cheeks, which had been chewed through. Facial skin was thin; maybe the Beaters found it tedious and had gone looking for another victim instead. At any rate the man’s eyes were wide with shock and his lips convulsed as he tried to speak. It took several attempts for him to put the syllables together:
“Kill…me…”
“No,” Cass whispered, her hand flying to her mouth. “No no no-”
A hand yanked at her elbow, and she stumbled as she tried to resist.
“Outside.” It was Bobby, and his expression, magnified in the tilting flashlight glow, was grim.
Cass nodded dumbly and backed out of the building, shoes crunching on the broken glass that littered the entrance, into the night w
here the others waited. One, a man in his fifties who had been a highway patrolman before, had his hands over his ears to shut out the tortured moans. Cass allowed herself to be led down the street, away from the ARCO, away from the Beater nest, away from the pulped matter that had once been human.
No one said anything. Bobby caught up with them a couple of blocks later. He fell into step next to Cass and stayed by her side until they were back at the library. Cass knew Bobby had killed the hopeless victim, but they never talked about it.
She had been a coward. Now, given the chance to do it again, she would have sliced the man’s throat without hesitation and held what remained of his hand while he bled out.
Was it courage, she wondered as she slowly put her shirt back on and buttoned it, or only loss that had numbed her? Or was it the effects of succumbing to and then beating the disease? Whatever the reason, she had changed. Her whole body had seemed warm since she first awoke. A matter of degrees, maybe-perhaps even fractions of a degree-but she would swear there was a difference. Her body was rebuilding itself relentlessly, her immune system hypervigilant against infection. The scabs on her arms had mostly healed. Now that she was clean and groomed she looked human enough that most people would think she was completely normal.
Cass ran her fingers through her hair, combing it as well as she could. She had been called beautiful by a lot of people, mostly men. Never Mim, who had reminded her often that she had inherited her father’s coloring, which she called coarse. He had Mediterranean blood, and like him, Cass’s skin darkened to olive, her hair in between brown and blond. Mim herself was pale as parchment and jealously guarded her skin, wearing big hats and sunscreen even for trips across town. There had been nothing Mim enjoyed more than reporting that she had run into some acquaintance whose crow’s feet and sunspots and blemishes had worsened. “Bet they wish they’d done what I did,” she’d smirk.
Mim was dead, of course. She died with her skin as flawless and unlined as ever at the age of sixty-one-but Cass supposed her storied beauty must have been marred by the red flush and frothing spittle that marked a blueleaf fever death.
At least she’d been spared the other. Dying from the initial fever meant you never had to worry about becoming a Beater.
Cass folded the used cloth and laid it on the edge of the tub and returned to the bedroom. Smoke had made the bed, but he was gone. A flicker of panic flashed through Cass before she heard talk coming from downstairs, and she picked up her backpack and followed the voices.
The men were sitting in a tidy kitchen splashed with sun streaming in the upper third of the windows. The bottom had been boarded up, and there was a flap of fabric-covered plywood on hinges at the top that could be lowered to block the sun completely. Raised, it let in sun but did not give a view to the outside.
Cass paused in the hall, listening.
“She has enough to worry about,” Smoke was saying.
“She needs to know before y’all just show up at the library,” Lyle said softly. “Them Rebuilders-they don’t take kindly to bein’ told no, as I guess you know as well as anyone.”
Smoke muttered something that Cass couldn’t hear.
“It don’t matter,” Lyle said. “You got to hear what I’m sayin’ here. That story’s made it all the way here, hell, it’s probably got around half the state. Rebuilders gaining ground every day-they aim to take over. Hell, they want the valley, the whole fuckin’ state…who knows. Folks are afraid. They want someone to believe in. And that’s you. Which is all good, but you got the girl with you now, and maybe you’re not the worst thing to happen to her, see? But she needs to know it ain’t gonna be easy.”
Cass stepped into the kitchen. “Don’t you think I know that? When’s the last time anything was ever easy?”
“Mornin’, princess,” Lyle said, raising his glass of water in a mock toast. Cass saw that a glass had been poured for her as well, and she sat in the chair closest to Lyle, not looking at Smoke. She wasn’t ready to look at him yet. The sensations of the night before still lingered on her skin, but she could not afford to be distracted, not with the hardest part of the trip still ahead.
“Good morning,” she said, taking a drink from the glass. The water was cloudy, with tiny specks floating in it.
“I boiled it,” Lyle said, gesturing at the kitchen counter, on which plastic jugs full of water were lined up. “I get a fire going every few nights, haul up water from the creek and set in a big batch. I strain it, get it as clean as I can.”
“It’s delicious,” Cass lied. Really, it tasted like nothing. It was nothing, nothing but sustenance. Even if it was swimming in bacteria her body would take from it what it needed ›and leave the rest. She just had to maintain, survive.
The nontaste of the liquid triggered a memory of a meeting one weeknight after she’d done a double shift at the QikGo.
Cass sat in the back of the meetings at first and participated as little as possible-until the day she couldn’t leave the church basement because she knew that if she did she would get so drunk she might never recover, that she would drink until the bottle fell from her fingers and she passed out. She wanted to drink until she was dead. She wanted to drink until everything was dead, so instead she sat silent but trembling through the lunchtime meeting, and then stayed in the room crying and sweating until the first person came back for the five o’clock meeting. By then she was lying on the carpet next to the wall, her face pressed against the dirty rubber baseboards, and it took two people to help her into a chair.
But she stayed.
The night Cass was thinking about, she had gone to the meeting after her double shift, too tired to do anything but go through the motions. She passed when it was her turn to speak. She moved her lips when everyone else did, but didn’t listen to anyone’s stories.
Until the end. They stood, they held hands, they said the words. “…take what you need and leave the rest.”
Take what you need and leave the rest.
Just one sentence from the stupid thing they always repeated at the end of every meeting. She’d heard it dozens of times before; it meant nothing. Only it kept going through her head as the other people in the room talked and smiled and sniffled and hugged.
What do I need? she had asked herself. It wasn’t the stories. Not the burnt coffee or supermarket cookies or the company of these other people, not the chanting or the hand-holding or the hugs, which she had trained herself not to feel, not the manuals and books and pamphlets and tokens.
There was nothing in the room she needed. But when she left, she had what she needed. It was a puzzle like the ones she’d once liked to do, the riddles in her childhood. “I have no feet but I can run”…“I am as big as an elephant but as light as a feather”…
There is nothing here that I need…
What do I need?
“Thank you,” she told Lyle. Then she forced herself to turn and look at Smoke, who was watching her warily, his expression guarded.
“Thank you,” she forced herself to repeat, though the words were like broken glass in her mouth.
They passed the day helping Lyle move furniture around. Lyle had left thin strips of windows exposed along the top, which let in enough light to see what they were doing. His back was hurting from the effort of hauling them into the window the night before, and he needed their help to set up the downstairs rooms in anticipation of the Beaters’ next escalation in cunning. They created barriers at all the points of entry into the house, putting china cupboards in front of the boarded windows, dismantling a dresser and nailing the pieces over the doors.
That left only the back door, which had no glass panes that could be broken. It had two sets of dead bolts, installed since the start of the Siege.
Twice as they worked, stumbling groups of afflicted came down the street. Their snorting and moaning could be heard even though the downstairs windows were shut tight. The second time, seven Beaters milled across the street at the house where Lyle’s frie
nd Travers was presumably still living. When Cass went to the upstairs bathroom, she could see the Beaters shuffling around the front lawn, bumping into each other. A pair lay down in a bed of kaysev growing in front of an ornamental stone bench, one nibbling gently at the other’s arm. It took a moment for Cass to realize that the one being gnawed was lying still, only a twitch of its leg now and then convincing her it wasn’t dead.
“Do you have binoculars, Lyle?” Cass asked. Lyle looked ›up from the coffee table whose legs he was sawing off. He and Smoke were planning to brace it along the bottom of a large window in the dining room.
“That I do, missy, but are you sure there’s anything out there you want a closer look at?” he asked.
“I just-just for a quick look,” Cass said. She couldn’t bring herself to say that their moans had been traveling straight through her skin and making her thrum with anxiety; not knowing what they were up to was worse than the alternative.
Lyle merely nodded and went to the kitchen. He returned, polishing a compact pair on his t-shirt.
“Got these for hunting,” he said. “Damn shame my wife made me keep my guns locked up at the cabin or we could take a few potshots and scare those suckers off.”
Magnified, the Beaters looked even worse than the few Cass had seen on her journey. On those occasions she had watched from hiding spots behind shrubs or rocks. From a distance, they looked merely unkempt and wounded, their skin split and ragged, in various states of injury and flensing.
But up close, Cass could see the large patches of skin that had been chewed down to tendon and muscle and bone. One of the Beaters no longer seemed to have the use of one of its arms, which appeared to be missing several fingers and was gnawed nearly through at the elbow. It had also apparently chewed away most of its lips and its ears were crusted black knobs where it or something else had torn the flesh away.
“Oh, God…” Cass breathed. She moved the binoculars, her hands shaking, until she found the two of them on the ground and focused. The one who was being chewed on was, she saw now, twitching spasmodically, the remains of its chewed fingers jerking almost rhythmically. She moved the binoculars up its thin, t-shirt clad body until its head came into view. It, too, had suffered mutilation-its own work or that of others, impossible to know. Gouges in its neck and cheek were crusted with blood and its mouth was a gaping black hole. It was nearly bald and its head was covered with scabs.
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