Aftertime

by Sophie Littlefield

  “I’m Faye. Park that over here,” the new guard said as she motioned them in. Smoke pushed the bike into a corner of the encampment where a small rider tractor was parked next to a half-dozen bicycles. “Y’all set here a minute while we inventory all this.”

  “I’m going to need some assurance I’ll be getting that back,” Smoke said as he and Cass took seats on a long low picnic bench.

  Faye didn’t even look up from her task.

  “Did you know him?” Cass asked Smoke. “Dor MacFall? Sammi’s dad?”

  Smoke shook his head. “They split up before it got really bad. He moved out back before they cut off the power. But that little girl never stopped talking about him. She made me promise if I ever saw him I’d tell him she was all right.”

  “She made me promise the same thing.”

  “Yeah, well…guess now we’ll have the chance.”

  “What are the odds? I mean, she said he was in Sykes-”

  “Sykes probably doesn’t exist anymore,” Smoke said. “Not in any meaningful way. Anyone with any brains would have got the hell out. Town that small, you’re not going to be able to get enough folks together to set up much of a defense.”

  “Yes, but why here?”

  “Why not here?” Smoke shrugged. “Once he heard about the Convent…he’s a sharp guy, he saw an opportunity, he jumped on it. Knew there’d be a lot of traffic through here, so he built himself a combination general store and strip club and KOA campground, is what it looks like. With a hell of a security detail.”

  “Sammi said he was a businessman-”

  “That what she said?” Smoke laughed without humor. “You know what his business was? Internet marketing. But not the kind the FTC approved of-you know what I’m saying? The Siege was probably the best thing to happen to MacFall-from what his ex told me, they were closing in on him. He was looking at a few years in prison.”

  “And now he’s like the kingpin around here,” Cass said bitterly, even though she knew her disgust was only partly for the man who Sammi idolized. It had taken her two decades to realize that Silver Dollar Haverford was really never going to come back and be the father she’d needed him to be. “Still, seems like a coincidence that we’d run into him.”

  “I don’t know… It’s a small world now, Cass.”

  Faye had lined up their items: water bottles, kaysev cakes, a pair of blades. She whistled when she saw the packets of Tylenol and two Balance Bars, and separated them out. “You know how it works, right?”

  “Uh, no,” Smoke said. “We’re new around here. Which you might have gathered when we drove up on that thing.”

  If Faye caught the irony in his voice, she didn’t let on. Instead she wrote something on a legal pad.

  “Seriously,” Cass tried. “All we know is that the Convent-well, we don’t know anything, except that I’m looking for-”

  She stopped herself. She had been about to say that she was looking for her daughter, for Ruthie. But caution seemed like a good idea, and instead she said, “Someone,” and left it at that.

  “Someone in the Convent or out here?” the man said in a pleasant enough voice. He offered his hand, and it was warm and strong. “I’m George, by the way.”

  “Inside, I think.”

  He frowned. “Well, good luck with that. For now, the first thing I got to tell you is that you’re safe here. From Beaters, anyway.”

  Cass looked at the chain-link fence doubtfully. George followed her line of vision and shook his head. “No, I mean, there’s no Beaters in town anymore.”

  “You killed them all?”

  “Killed or captured.” He pointed to the Convent. “They contract with MacFall to have it done.”

  “Why the hell would anyone want to capture one of those things?” Smoke demanded.

  “You’d have to talk to him,” George shrugged. “He keeps his business pretty close to the vest, though.”

  “You’re saying he trades with the women in the Convent?” Cass asked.

  “Yeah. There’s a few hundred of ’em in there, and they got power, gas, stores, weapons. And crazy-ass determination. That’s something you can’t buy.”

  “A few hundred,” Smoke repeated. “In there?”

  “Once they started the Convent, women just started showing up from all over. I thought that’s why you were here,” he said, pointing to Cass. “To join up.”

  “To join the Convent?”

  “To join the Order.”

  “Okay, how about you save that for later, Georgie,” Faye said, drawing a decisive line down the center of the page. “We got business to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She gave Cass a shrewd, clear-eyed gaze. “Trading. That is, if you want to trade. If you want to turn around and walk back out, minus that Ruger, you’re free to do so. ’Course, we wouldn’t guarantee your safety.”

  “You’re taking my gun,” Smoke said.

  “Not taking it. Trading for it. Or, for a small fee, holding it for you. Until such time as you come and get it back. There’s no arms allowed in here, except guards. Of course, you’d be compensated.”

  “With what?” Cass asked.

  “Changes all the time. Today, we got kerosene…we got baby formula, Ritalin, Vicodin.”

  Cass looked around more carefully. A cluster of teenagers stood in a corner passing a bottle, a few of them kicking a hackysack back and forth. One of them had an arm wrapped in bandages and held in a sling. The job looked surprisingly professional. When the boy dived for the beanbag, Cass saw that he also had a scabbed bruise on his leg, probably just the result of some ordinary misadventure. But where had they found a doctor, much less supplies, to patch him up?

  In a stand of pepper trees-still thriving, from the looks of it, though inexpertly pruned-a man was lying in a hammock suspended from the branches, reading out loud from a book by the light of a headlamp mounted on a baseball cap. Below him on the ground, several people sat cross-legged or leaning into each other, listening.

  The smell of kaysev being fried with onions drifted past on the air, and Cass spotted the source-a grill set up over coals, an aproned man flipping patties in the air and expertly catching them. People clustered around chatting, waiting for the food to be ready.

  It was like a carnival and a camping trip all rolled up in one, and Cass realized it had been a long time since she had seen people having fun like this. Something was out of place, something besides the shouts and laughter, and Cass struggled to place it, and then suddenly she got it. Music-not loud, far-off on the opposite corner, past a row of tents: an old Red Hot Chili Peppers song that her parents used to like.

  “That’s- You use batteries to play music?” she demanded, incredulous. It seemed so indulgent, so incredibly wasteful. When batteries began to run low in the library, Bobby had made a list of acceptable uses: lights for emergencies at night; to run the humidifier in the playroom when one of the little boys started having asthma attacks; for a pair of walkie-talkies the raiders used, before they quit working.

  “Generator, actually,” George said, and Cass identified the other sound, the steady low rumble.

  “You can give ’em a tour in a minute,” Faye said to George, suppressing a yawn, “if they decide to stay. But first lemme tell y’all what kind of deal I can do for you today.”

  27

  THE PACKET OF TYLENOL BOUGHT THEM A night in a two-man tent near the far side of the encampment, which everyone simply referred to as the Box.

  Cass made one other trade with George after Smoke left to collect their supplies and find an unoccupied tent-a Balance Bar for an introduction to a woman named Gloria, who Faye assured her knew more about the Convent than anyone else in camp, having lived there until a week earlier. The only catch was that Gloria had passed out drunk a while before their arrival, and Faye advised Cass to wait until she woke up in the morning before trying to talk to her.

  “Now she lives here? In…the Box?” Cass asked, drinking gratefull
y from the Nalgene water bottle Faye offered to share. Faye had loosened up once their business was done, and seemed glad for the company, producing a folding chair for Cass and inviting her to wait there for Smoke to return. Her shift was over, and they took their chairs out of the harsh glare of the spotlight wired to the gate to illuminate the entrance. Faye’s job had to be dull, sitting here at the gate, waiting for people to show up. After all, how many freewalkers could possibly arrive each day?

  Faye laughed. “Honey, nobody lives here except us employees. And there ain’t none of us lookin’ to get rid of our jobs. For most folks it’s too expensive to spend more than a night or two here, so they just come around when they have something to trade.”

  “But where do they go from here?”

  Faye shrugged. “Where they came from, I guess.”

  “But if there’s really no Beaters in San Pedro, then why-”

  “Look around, Cass,” Faye said. She had offered Cass a camp chair and they were sitting behind her makeshift counter. The gates had been secured for the night, but Cass spotted guards patrolling both the perimeter of the Box and the stadium, moving quietly through the darkness. “What do you see?”

  Cass looked. It was like a giant church camp-that was the thought that came to her mind. For a while, when her father was touring with his band in the summer and her mother was working long shifts over at County, they had sent her to one run by Saint Anne’s Episcopal. Kids were bused in from all over, and it didn’t take Cass long to figure out it was a camp for kids who didn’t want to be there but couldn’t afford anywhere else, run by people who talked a good game but didn’t really seem all that interested in whether or not the kids were having a good time. Cass remembered sitting at wood picnic tables in ninety-degree heat making crafts involving leaves and glue sticks, trying not to cry while the counselors taught them a song about Abraham and Sarah.

  Here, people wandered aimlessly from the bonfire set up in the middle of the encampment to the barter tables, the little stands where they could trade for deodorant and salted peanuts and baby powder and rubbing alcohol. Open-air bars were set up under pop-up tents; a few were sturdier affairs behind plywood screens. The music never stopped, though it covered a dizzying range, from a haunting piano étude to a remarkably bad cover of “Sweet Child of Mine” by a tuneless girl band. Now some endless country song whose chorus rhymes relentlessly droned on. A few of the people around the fire seemed to be nodding off to sleep.

  “I see a lot of people with nothing better to do,” she said.

  Faye gave her a withering look. “Then you’re not looking very hard.”

  “Save the damn riddles,” Cass said, exasperated. “I’ve been through a lot the last few days and I don’t feel like playing games.”

  “Everyone here is wasted,” Faye said, drawing out the final word. “Out of their fucking minds.”

  “Well, yeah, you sell hooch in paper cups,” Cass said. She’d been surprised and relieved earlier when, smelling the cheap wine on the women waiting to use the bathroom, she found that it hadn’t called out to her with the strength it once had, hadn’t made her insensible with yearning.

  Faye snorted. “That’s nothing. They give that shit away for free, for the big spenders. The pill poppers, meth junkies-guarantee they’re lined up back behind Rockets right now, trading their last can of SpaghettiOs for 20mg of Ritalin or a couple of rocks.”

  Oh.

  Ohhh. Idiot, Cass chastised herself. Earlier the thought had danced through her mind, quickly enough that she hadn’t bothered to examine it carefully, namely that the Box didn’t make much sense. A few months into Aftertime, it was true that all the easy stuff was taken; grocery stores and hardware stores and sporting good stores had long ago been looted of all the valuable items, homes had been broken into and all the weapons and canned goods and medicine cleaned out. But for the brave-and at this point, almost every citizen who had managed to stay alive this long fell backward into that category to some extent-there was still more than enough to be found.

  So it stood to reason that the Box’s allure would be something even more special.

  As the Siege followed its tortuous path, each day bringing some new abomination, some crippling terror, alcohol and drugs were at an astonishing premium. More than a few people locked themselves in their houses and proceeded to get as drunk or stoned as they possibly could. Sometimes they were in search of the courage to shoot or hang themselves. Sometimes they were trying to drink themselves to death or overdose. Some were trying to tap into fantasies they’d held secret for a long time, from a time when society had a tighter grip on the psyche. Before long there was nothing left to get numb with.

  Except clearly, the people running the Box had a hell of a stash.

  Cass gripped the cheap metal frame of her chair, the plastic web cutting into her shoulder blades, overwhelmed by the thought of all these people who had survived so much, only to try to drown their pain with a temporary high. She hadn’t been around active users in a long time; the thought was a little overwhelming.

  “You’re an addict,” Faye added, offhandedly.

  Cass felt her face flush, but she forced herself to keep her expression neutral. “Was,” she corrected Faye. “Was.”

  “Was, like, for how long?”

  “Long enough.”

  “Yeah,” Faye said, clearly skeptical. “So it’s some kind of accident you showed up here? There’s nowhere else in the central valley to score, and yet here you are-”

  “Because I have to get in the Convent. I have to get in there. I have to find…someone.”

  Faye’s expression didn’t change. “You want to find someone in there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sister? Mother? Spinster aunt maybe? Your people Jesus folks?”

  “Why, is that what the Convent is? Like, fundamenta lists?”

  “I don’t know the details. I guess you can ask Gloria. She’s happy to talk, talks everyone’s fuckin’ ears off, when she’s not wasted. But, no, it’s not just a Jesus thing. It’s like, they worship the disease or something.”

  “What?”

  “Or like, it’s the antichrist and they vanquish it through prayer, something fucked up like that. I don’t know.” Faye shrugged. “For all I know they’re in there dancing naked under the moon.”

  How could the woman not be more curious? The Convent was the closest thing to a real community that Cass had seen since the Siege. Other than the little groups in libraries and schools, no one had been able to band together in sufficient numbers to move beyond the demands of subsistence living.

  “You two look cozy.” Smoke’s deep voice rumbled behind Cass. She twisted in her chair to see him holding a plastic bucket in one hand, white towels in the other.

  “Okay, I think that’s my cue to shove off,” Faye said. “I’m sure I’ll see you around. Nice meeting you.”

  Smoke waited until Faye disappeared down the main path through the tents, then offered Cass a hand. “How does a shower sound?”

  “Like heaven.”

  She let Smoke pull her out of her chair, and peeked into the bucket. There were washcloths along with the rest of the toiletries. “What did that cost?”

  Smoke gave her a sly grin. “They’ve got a thriving skin trade going here,” he said, pointing to the end of the Box farthest from the stadium. It was lit only by a sparkling string of Christmas lights that wound from tent to tent. “In case you haven’t figured it out, that’s what the blue tents are for. I just, you know, stopped by and gave the ladies a taste of what they wanted, and they showered me with earthly goods.”

  “Ha. Ha.” Cass smiled at his joke, despite herself. “God, I’m stupid. I thought those were first aid tents.”

  “Not stupid, only naive. Or maybe it’s wishful thinking, that you can start a civilization on free trade and have it grow toward an ideal, only I doubt that ever works. I mean, look at the history of any major civilization…”

  “I don�
�t think I’m up for a history lesson right now,” Cass said softly, though it occurred to her that history was bound to be lost in a generation or two, with no one to preserve and teach it. If any humans even survived that long. “Besides, it’s not just the, you know, blue tent thing. I didn’t get that the whole currency here is based on drugs. I just feel like an idiot.”

  “Well, not the entire trade, maybe. I got this stuff, and a couple decent single-malts and a bowl of pretzels that weren’t completely stale.”

  Cass whistled. “Not to nag, but how are we affording this? You didn’t trade away our blades, did you?”

  “Nah. I, uh, put the bike up to secure a loan.”

  “The bike?”

  “Yeah. I mean, it’s not like we could make much use of it without fuel. Besides, I can get it back. They’ve got every angle covered. It’s like a pawn shop-they just charge you a holding fee.”

  Cass shook her head. It wasn’t for her to say, really. She knew that the bike, the supplies, the gun-these had all been given to Smoke because of his record with the Rebuilders. She had no claim on them.

  “You coming?” he said softly. “I paid for two. Can’t really use the second one myself.”

  Cass slipped her hand into the crook of his arm and they walked down a path lit by yellow light from a dozen Coleman lanterns hung on poles. They passed people talking softly in the entrances of tents, or bent over bongs and pipes and bottles.

  A man lurched into the path from between two tents with a cut-off grunt. He had almost recovered his footing when a second man tackled him and took him down, yelling. The smell of alcohol and sweat came off the pair as they tumbled and rolled. One was trying to stab the other with a butter knife, but he was too drunk to do any real damage and the knife fell to the ground.