Aftertime

by Sophie Littlefield

  A block away, half a dozen clumsy forms stumbled around a cluster of trash cans, tripping and trying to disentangle themselves from each other. It was almost impossible to make out any details at this distance, now that the sun had slipped behind the horizon and evening had laid down its hazy blue gloom.

  But the moans that started up when they found their footing and sniffed the air and scented Cass and Smoke-those were unmistakable.

  The Beaters had found them.

  24

  CASS WATCHED THE THINGS SHOVE AND KICK at each other with frustration as they got in each other’s way. One was knocked to the ground, where it howled in fury, rubbing a crabbed hand at its face, as the others stumbled toward Cass and Smoke.

  Smoke raised the gun and fired. But the Beaters were too far away, and the gun kicked in his hand. He fired a second time, and a third, hitting nothing.

  “Stop,” Cass yelled. “You only have a few more rounds.”

  “In the pack-” Smoke seized her hand. He knew what she did: even if he made every shot, he couldn’t hit them all, and the odds of killing even one were pretty low. Besides, there wasn’t time to reload.

  They ran, but Cass knew they could never outrun the Beaters. For a while, sure. Cass and Smoke were strong and fit, and adrenaline would give them a boost. But within a quarter mile their pace would drop and the Beaters’ speed would surge.

  The maniacal frenzy of their hunger could not be tempered by any obstacle. They’d run across glass, across hot coals, across this terrible scorched earth that was the end of the world if it meant fresh, uninfected flesh. They were body eaters, after all, and that was all they lived for. They would close the gap, their voices raised in a horrifying chorus of grunts and moans, and Smoke-of course it would be Smoke, because he would put himself between her and them, there was no question in her mind now-Smoke would feel their grasping bone-hands on his clothes, his back, his arms as they took him down.

  Long ago, before Ruthie, Cass had contemplated dying, wondering if it was true what they said, that in the final seconds you achieve a kind of peace. Like that guy in the Jack London story, slowly freezing to death, there would be a numbing, a lulling, a sense of complacency, rightness. Acceptance would be followed, she imagined, by something resembling an urge to have done with it. A drowning person would accept the water into their lungs. A person falling from a great height would reach out for the earth.

  But there was nothing like that for victims of the Beaters. Because they knew what was coming and death was stretched out over a series of manic flashes, strips of flesh, bites into the skin. Cass knew.

  So when Smoke seized her hand she ran hard. She flew like a stone rocketed over a great chasm. She pushed off with her feet and willed herself through the air, begging fate for another breath, another step, another second before hell burst upon them.

  “White house,” Smoke yelled, urging her faster, harder than she thought she could go. Fear did that, working miracles on the laws of physics and gravity, driving people to do the impossible.

  When they were abreast of the house she understood that it was the one, the one with the shed, the shed with the motorcycle and when they rounded the corner and Smoke plunged toward a dead shrub it took only a split second for her to realize that the shrub was a screen, a fake, and she tore into the branches with her hands, pulling, yanking, the dead twigs cutting and scraping her skin. The deadwood fell away and there it was, a sagging barn-shaped box of a shed-it was badly kept, paint peeling off the cheap wood in cracked strips, the lock hanging rusted and useless.

  Smoke pulled her inside and slammed the door. Yellow light filtered through a stained and spiderwebbed window, illuminating shelves of buckets and jars and garden tools-and a motorcycle. It was there-it was really and truly there, an incongruously clean and shined-up thing, front wheel tilted sportily on the slab floor.

  But behind her the door swung open on creaking hinges and she could hear, not far away at all, the screaming and grunting. “It won’t-they’ll be-” she protested, but Smoke was pushing at a long, low oblong box, trying to block the door with it, and Cass shut up and helped.

  It was an old freezer, a heavy thing, but she and Smoke threw themselves into the task and bumped and scraped it along the floor, a hideous smell rising from it as the lid jostled and fell away. Meat roasts and chops packed in plastic, now moldering and rotten-the stench reaching into her nostrils. Spoils, the scraps that no raiders found, ruined when the electricity failed. Nausea rolled through Cass’s gut as the first of the Beaters threw itself against the door.

  They were inches away, screaming out their rage and their hunger, and Cass leaped back. Smoke caught and held her, hard, his arms wrapped tight around her from the back. “Calm down now,” he ordered, his lips brushing her ear, and there was something in his voice that made her body follow his instructions even as her mind went nearly mad with fear. She felt her heart slow, her hands unclench.

  Only then did Smoke release her and take the handlebars of the bike, kicking up the kickstand. The light glinted off keys that had been left in the ignition. He slid onto the seat with an ease that let Cass know it was far from the first time he’d been on a motorcycle. Turning the key he revved the engine hard.

  “Behind me,” Smoke ordered and Cass threw a leg over the seat, slid her hands around his waist, buried her face in the soft cotton of his shirt.

  And closed her eyes.

  Because she was too frightened to see what he would do next. Whatever it was, they had one chance. Only one. She felt the reverberation of the bike’s powerful motor through Smoke’s body, through the warmth of his skin beneath his shirt, and she squeezed her eyes shut tighter and she whispered a prayer to whomever that was immediately stolen by the roar of the motor and the screaming and her own heart-

  Ruthie-

  And then her entire body was jarred so hard that her teeth clashed in her head and the wind was knocked out of her lungs. The bike leaped ahead like an enraged animal loosed from its cage and slammed against the back wall of the shed, splintering it, Sheetrock bursting all around her. Something struck her ankle, knocking her foot loose, and she slid sideways on the seat and nearly fell off, scrambling to hang on to Smoke.

  “Cass!” he yelled, as the motorcycle chewed through vines and fallen tree limbs toward the alley, spinning up gravel and dead leaves and dirt. “Hold on!”

  And she did. His words again made her hold on for everything she was worth. Her hands clutched his waist hard enough to bruise, and she pulled herself back upright, her ankle banging painfully against metal, the heat of the engine blowing hard through the fabric of her pants. Her cheek stung and something warm slid slowly down her chin and she realized she was cut and bleeding.

  She forced her eyes open and saw squat garages racing by. They followed the gravel alley to the end of the block where it opened onto a street, and Smoke took the corner expertly, angling so sharply that she had to clutch him tight to avoid spilling even as he accelerated into the turn and the motorcycle leaped onto smoother pavement.

  A flash of movement caught her eye and Cass turned to look. A horde of them, more than she’d ever seen in one place before-there had to be over two dozen, jogging un-steadily down the street a block away. The ones in front paddled the air with their clutching fingers, eyes rolling in the ecstasy of the hunt. They followed the sound of the engine, turning and stumbling as the motorcycle powered on, and Cass pressed her face into Smoke’s shirt, into the plane between his shoulder blades, and breathed shallowly of his scent, his warmth.

  For several blocks neither of them said anything. They passed cars abandoned at odd angles, crumpled into street signs and fire hydrants. There was junk in the streets-an overturned armchair, sodden clumps of clothes matted to the curbs. Squashed rats. A Barbie notebook, its shiny pink cover faded by the elements. A Little Tikes Cozy Coupe in a patch of kaysev, overturned, its wheels turned toward the sky.

  Smoke navigated the obstacles with ease, and Ca
ss knew that she had underestimated him. She’d thought him a deliberate man, because of the care he took for her safety, the way his large hands enveloped hers. She had not thought him capable of such quick reflexes, but as she slowly uncoiled from her terrified clutch, she noticed how he turned his wrist just so to make the motorcycle dip around a downed tree or an abandoned shoe, finding smooth stretches of pavement where he pushed the bike as hard as it would go, making it scream with exertion.

  After the alley turned to neighborhood and the neighborhood thinned to a house here and there, Smoke finally pulled back on the gas and they hit a steady clip in the dying sun. It’s nearly night, Cass noted with surprise, because she had been too busy with her terror and her will to survive to notice the setting of the sun or the sweetening of the thick autumnal air.

  It wasn’t just the gingery kaysev, either. There were other undercurrents that she couldn’t quite place. Evergreen, of course; she’d seen the seedlings, everyone had-but something else, too; something thick and waxy like a camellia or a New Guinea impatiens, extravagant even Before, unthinkable now.

  But who was to say?

  Who got to dictate, really, what died and what fought for a foothold and what thrived? Cass took the measure of the passing scenery. A kitschy cabin decor shop, the chain-saw-rendered black bears that once decorated the entrance now cracked and toppled. A sporting goods store where she’d once shopped the after-season sale, hoping to find a snowsuit that she could pack away for Ruthie’s next winter, coming out instead with a pair of fuzzy pink girls’ boots that would have been inexcusable if they hadn’t been so cheap.

  After that, there was nothing but the twisting ribbon of the road, a pearly shimmer in the darkening evening. Eventually Smoke slowed the bike and eased over onto the shoulder. When they came to a stop he took care in settling the kickstand before he dismounted and offered Cass his hand. Her ears were still ringing from the steady roar of the road, but she allowed him to help her from the bike.

  They were heading down, out of the mountains on the far side, the side that Cass rarely traveled. She did not know this road. Eventually it led to Yosemite, she was pretty sure, though she couldn’t picture the route in her mind.

  Night brought its customary chill. The kaysev smell here was muted; there was clay dust in her nostrils, a not unpleasant smell she associated with endless hot afternoons running along sunbaked roads. Cass smoothed her shirt where the wind had whipped it around her waist. And as she looked around the road, she saw something astonishing, something that made her catch her breath.

  “What,” Smoke said sharply. “What’s wrong?”

  “No, no-it’s just-look,” she said, pointing to the tiny seedlings, a trio of them, that had caught her eye.

  “Redwoods?” Smoke asked after a moment.

  “I’m pretty sure those are sequoias. You know…the big ones.”

  “Those are the first evergreens I’ve seen since…Before.”

  Cass nodded, not trusting her voice to speak without catching. She’d thought they were gone forever.

  Then she noticed something else.

  “There was fire here.” Sure enough, the trees here were not just dead but charred black; it had been difficult to see in the twilight, and she hadn’t noticed. “It must have happened…well, if it happened right before, or during, the attacks…”

  “What difference would that make?”

  “When fire destroys a living tree, the cones fall and release their seeds. So if the timing was just right, it could have seeded right before the Siege, and then the seeds somehow survived, and…” This. She toed the road next to the seedlings for emphasis.

  “That’s…” Smoke seemed at a loss for words, but he caught her hand in his and squeezed. “How do you know so much about plants?”

  Cass shrugged, embarrassed. “I, um…I used to think I would, that I could study it. You know, botany…landscape design.” Before she realized that escaping Byrn’s late-night “accidental” encounters in the hallway, his hands on her thighs under the dinner table, meant getting out with no diploma and no college and no real plan other than flight.

  For a long time, she thought she’d save up some money and go back, enroll at Anza State. Then one day she looked around her tiny, dirty apartment, high-heeled shoes abandoned by the door, empty cans stacked on the table, a stranger snoring in her bed, and realized she never would.

  Cass tugged her hand back and changed the subject. “That was lucky. In…in the shed.”

  “Luck? How about skill?” Smoke demanded, the corners of his mouth curving in a wry smile. “So says my shelf of dirt bike trophies from junior high.”

  “I don’t think that’s a dirt bike,” Cass said, pointing to the shiny machine whose engine ticked and popped in the cool night.

  “Little boys who ride dirt bikes grow up to ride big bikes. I had one at my place in Tahoe. Rode a lot on roads like this one.”

  “Along with your waverunner and your snowmobile and your powerboat and all your other toys,” Cass said, trying for a light tone.

  “Yeah, I had it all, didn’t I?” Smoke said. There it was again, the sadness, as he slipped an arm around her shoulders, and after hesitating for a moment she laid her cheek against his chest. He pulled her closer and rested his chin on the top of her head.

  This is where he tells me it will all be okay, Cass thought. But he didn’t.

  And Cass, who had never let any man stay much longer than the time it took him to put his pants back on, suddenly found herself wishing he would. She would take that lie.

  Finally Smoke sighed, a deep intake of breath that Cass felt against her skin, and then pulled gently away from her. “We can be at the Convent before it’s completely dark, as long as we don’t run into anything…unexpected.”

  “The roads have been clear,” Cass said, brushing imaginary specks from her sleeves, not meeting his eyes. It was true; there had been fewer junked cars, less debris, up this far.

  “Not too populated this far in,” Smoke said. “Most of the log-jamming happened nearer the city. Works for me. Once we get close to San Pedro, we might hit a few more, though.”

  “Well, we don’t really have much choice, right?” Cass asked. She waited until Smoke slung his long leg over the bike and then slid on behind him.

  Already, she found that she had memorized the way they fit together. As they roared through the murky evening, the bike’s headlight tracing a golden path along the road, she imagined that they blended together into one dim shape in the descending dark.

  25

  THE REST OF THE TRIP TOOK LESS TIME THAN they expected. Someone had come along before them and cleared the way.

  The fire had burned its way down-mountain, and the road wound through acres of forest studded with the blackened skeletons of trees. Everywhere, there were soft-fringed little evergreen seedlings, even occasionally in the cracks in the road where ordinarily only kaysev grew.

  On a straight, gentle incline, Smoke slowed, coming to a stop with the bike balanced against his foot on the ground, and gestured toward the bank at the side of the road. Downed tree limbs and sections of trunk had been pushed out of the way. The trunk was massive, at least three feet across, a tree that had been uprooted during the fire and fallen across the road.

  “Power saw,” Smoke said, pointing at a cylindrical section eight or ten feet long. “See the marks. And look at the road-they used a front loader or something.”

  Cass squinted in the last of the evening light. Sure enough, there were broad, arcing scrapes in the pavement, sawdust and dirt and chipped asphalt dragged in broad swaths.

  “But that could have been from ages ago.” Back when all the gas stations were shutting down and people were killing each other to siphon fuel from abandoned cars. As the Siege dragged on there were fewer and fewer cars on the road each day, as though the automobiles themselves were falling to a plague, until the very few people who still had gas were too afraid to drive because of the desperate gangs
that swarmed cars and dragged drivers out to be beaten and left for dead in the streets.

  Smoke shook his head. “Look at that. You can smell it. That’s a fresh cut.”

  He was right, of course. The air carried a pleasant scent of pine, a smell that reminded Cass of Christmas, a holiday that she imagined no longer existed. For a moment she felt a surge of excitement.

  “Maybe they’re close by,” she said. “Maybe we’ll catch up to them. If they have gas, cars, a tractor or whatever-”

  “Cass, I’d lay odds it’s the Rebuilders. They’re the only ones capable of something like this, anymore. At least on this side of the border.”

  Cass was silent a moment, absorbing his words. “You believe that? What Evangeline said…about the Rockies? You really think they’ve cut us off?”

  “I don’t know. That’s where I’d do it, though. I mean, if I was trying to keep them out-quarantine-yeah, it’s the only place that makes sense. Start up north, Canadian border ought to be plenty far enough, no way Beaters have spread up through Oregon into Washington or Idaho yet, and besides, it’ll be getting cold up there in a month or so. I’d build a blockade down all the way to where the Colorado River empties into the Gulf.”

  “With what?” Cass demanded.

  “I don’t know, but people are resourceful. I mean, the Chinese were able to build a wall seven hundred years BC, and all they had was what they could dig up out of the ground, mostly rocks and dirt and existing mountain ridges. And I don’t need to tell you that there’s probably a hell of a lot of unemployed and very motivated guys ready to work out East, especially if they understand what’s going on over here.”

  “What you said, back at Lyle’s…about that guy from UCSF? The scientist? How he didn’t think the Beaters could live up north?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know, Cass. I mean, it made sense to me, but look how they’re evolving. If they can figure out complex strategies, learn from their mistakes, refine their attacks, what are the odds that they can’t figure out how to put on a fucking coat?”