Aftertime

by Sophie Littlefield

  “Please,” Cass said. “Just-just tell me what you can. Anything, just help me get in there.”

  “You can’t go in. You don’t believe.”

  “I-” Cass stopped herself, considered her words. The wrong ones would make Gloria retreat even further. The haze of broken memories and tangled thoughts around Gloria seemed to condense and retreat when Cass was too direct, when she brought up specifics. But specifics were what she needed, a plan for gaining entry. “Did you believe?”

  Gloria was silent for a moment. She touched her weathered fingertips to the chain link of the fence and let them trail along the metal-surely Gloria wasn’t the only resident who walked off her next-day ills around this track.

  “Two ways,” she finally said. “If you’re a believer, that’s one. It has to show, though. I was real and it showed. God was with me then and it showed. Everyone could see it. You don’t have God on you, so that won’t work.”

  Cass was surprised that the words stung. “Do you mean that I…” She struggled to find the right words. “I don’t seem pious enough? I can be different, I can-”

  Gloria was shaking her head. “God comes and goes but he’s always there, but they don’t know that. You can’t put God on now-He’ll come back when He’s ready. But they don’t know that.”

  “But how do I-what can I do to make them think I’m, you know, a believer?”

  “You have to barter,” Gloria said. “You can buy your way in but you have to ask the right one.”

  “The right one?”

  “You have to ask the right one,” Gloria repeated, enunciating with care, as though speaking to someone with limited powers of comprehension. Her breath, redolent with rot and withered hope, washed over Cass and it was all she could do not to turn away.

  “Please, tell me who the right one is.”

  Now it was Gloria who wrapped her sunburned fingers around Cass’s arm and drew her into the shade of a clump of creosote bushes growing from a ditch eroded into the edge of the path. Cass glanced around; no one took note of them. They were hidden from the interior of the Box by a series of clotheslines strung on poles, sheets and pillowcases and towels flapping in the breeze. Someone was singing on the other side, a tuneless, wandering melody, too distant for Cass to make out words. The scent of cotton drying in the sun reached her and she inhaled deeply, but she caught herself before she could close her eyes and let the smell take her back to Before.

  “It’ll cost you.”

  There was a shrewdness to Gloria now. No surprise; thirst could conjure thin moments of clarity. Cass remembered. No matter how far gone you got, you could always get your shit together enough to go to the all-night liquor store when you ran into the bottom of the bottle.

  “How much?” she asked, thinking of the bike Smoke had traded, the things he’d bought for them, the merchants with their carnival booths of enticements. She hadn’t wanted to take from him, to shift the balance in the strange and unwelcome ledger of their relationship, but what choice did she have? “I can pay.”

  “What can you give me?” Gloria’s words were quick, eager, hungry.

  “I don’t know,” Cass hedged. If she made it too easy, Gloria would tell her anything just to get the payoff quicker. “It depends on what you have to tell me.”

  “Let’s get something now. Just a little.” Gloria’s voice went high and wheedling, and she twisted her lips into a smile that didn’t mask her thirst.

  “Soon,” Cass said. “But we need to talk first.”

  “I can talk during, you know. I can talk and we can share. We could share, couldn’t we?”

  Her eagerness both repelled Cass and tore at her heart. It had been hard enough, Before, when she could drink her nights away in the solitude of her trailer. When she had a paycheck, no matter how paltry, to trade for the numbness. She’d never had to beg like this.

  “How have you been getting by?” she asked Gloria softly.

  Gloria blinked rapidly and glanced toward the far end of the Box, her fingertips going to her throat in a nervous, protective gesture. “I…do some things.”

  Cass suddenly understood. The blue tents-the groping in the dark and muffled cries of release. A hand job for a six-pack of warm beer. Ten minutes on your knees to buy a few hours of oblivion. And yet Gloria seemed to prefer life in the Box-drinking down the wages of cut-rate blow jobs, sleeping on a cot out in the elements, marking time with the level in the bottle-to life in the Order.

  She’d come here thinking of the Convent as a place of safety, of sanctuary. It was well guarded against the threats of Aftertime-Beaters as well as Rebuilders and raiders. But Gloria was clearly afraid of it, and she couldn’t even tell Cass exactly what had become of Ruthie. Now, staring at the tall curved walls lit up with the yellow sun of midmorning, Cass wondered what waited for her.

  “Let’s just talk,” Cass said gently. “And then we’ll get you taken care of. I promise.”

  The sun was high in the sky by the time Gloria finished telling her what she knew, which guards on which shift traded with the outside, which took bribes. Gloria’s words wandered and drifted and in the end Cass had no names to go by, just sketchy descriptions. Gloria said Cass should try in the late afternoon, which was the most coveted shift and hence the one that the most powerful guards in the Order-the crooked ones-kept for themselves. The Order’s ranks had swelled and they were turning away far more would-be members than they accepted.

  Even here, cunning trumped good intentions. Had it always been that way? Sometimes it seemed to Cass that the way it had been Before, the codes and habits of social order, were shifting and changing in her memory, like a dream she was forgetting. But all that mattered now was that the odds of buying her way in were better than talking her way in.

  It wasn’t much. But at least she could pay. It would have to do.

  There was one last thing that Cass wanted, and Gloria knew someone who could take care of it. After Cass bought her a plastic soda bottle filled with cloudy liquor-the cheapest they had, signed for with Smoke’s name-Gloria led Cass through the rows of tents on their way to the Box’s only barber, sipping from the bottle along the whole way. Already she was more relaxed; the tremors in her fingers disappeared, and the deep grooves eased from the corners of her mouth and between her brows-almost making up for the vacancy in her watery eyes.

  Near the end of the tents, where sleeping quarters gave way to a row of barter stands and shacks, a dusky-skinned man with a heavy, limping gait and chains looped from his belt stepped in front of them.

  “Hey, Glor-i-a,” he said drawing out the syllables of her name suggestively. “New batch come in this morning. Young ones, guess they went to DePaul community college, been living in a dorm there. Lost a couple on the trip…they’re a mess. Better hope none of ’em decide to stay back here and cut into your business. They’re smokin’ hot, know what I mean?”

  He pantomimed an obscene bump and grind, winking at Cass.

  “Fuck you, Haskins,” Gloria muttered, pushing him out of the way and stumbling past. “You’ll be at my door by tonight begging for it.”

  “Just ignore him,” Cass said, his laughter following them down the row.

  “He’ll be back,” Gloria muttered, “Can’t stay away.”

  But as they continued down the path it seemed to Cass that she walked with less certainty. Cass figured she understood: the biggest downside to making a living by selling off bits of your soul-what happened if one day they quit buying?

  But by the time they reached the barber stand, Gloria seemed to have recovered, and when Cass tried to give her a hug she slipped away, her eyes already focused elsewhere. Cass watched her go, her long silver hair catching the sun despite its knots and snarls, and tried not to think about where she was headed.

  A man tilted back in a deck chair under an awning constructed from a tarp, feet up on a stump, reading a paperback in the shade of a large straw hat. Elaborate vine tattoos snaked up both arms, disappearing into his
t-shirt. He marked his place with a dollar bill and tipped his chair down. When he stood and took off his hat, Cass saw that his hair was shaved into an elaborate spiral pattern.

  “At your service,” he said with an exaggerated bow. “I’m Vinson. Can I do something for you today?”

  “Yes. I…thought you could even it up.”

  She touched the jagged ends of her hair self-consciously. It was vanity, sheer vanity, and she felt her face color at the thought. She was doing this for Smoke, and that was not all right, so she forced him out of her mind and focused on her hair. It was her one pretty feature, according to her mother; at eighteen Cass had chopped it short and dyed it black, anything to further the wedge between her and Mim.

  Growing her hair out had been a first step back, when she started to get better, when she started to believe in herself again. When she realized that to be good enough for Ruthie, she had to treat herself as though she was good enough. It had taken so long, so much hard work, to start to believe; and her hair had been a small daily reminder to take care of herself.

  Now it was ugly again. But maybe there was a way to make it all right.

  She looked over the table where the tools of Vinson’s trade were laid out: a straight razor, scissors, combs, mirrors, a spray bottle of water. Small towels were folded and stacked. “I can pay, later. If that’s okay. I-we-have credit.”

  “Ah,” Vinson said. “You’re the girl who came in with Smoke.”

  “You know him?”

  “By reputation only, until last night. We had a drink together.”

  Whiskey on his breath. The memory of their fevered coupling flooded Cass’s mind, and she felt herself flush, her veins throbbing with the mad coursing of her blood. “Oh, he’s, he’s…around here somewhere.”

  “This one’s on the house, then. For what he did, standing up to the Rebuilders. Times are only going to get harder. We’ll need more like him.”

  “You think they’ll come here?” Cass asked. “All this way?”

  “They’ve already been here, make no mistake about that,” Vinson said, pulling over a chair and motioning for her to sit. “Just the scouts so far, coming around to see what we’ve got before they send their little army in. Only I figure your pal Smoke might’ve given them something to think about.”

  He chuckled as he wrapped an old bedsheet around her, cape style, fastening it with a binder clip. He picked up the bottle and started spraying water on her hair, lifting it with his fingers. The cool mist felt good on her skin, and Cass relaxed a little.

  “You mean, because he killed some of them.”

  Vinson snorted. “Not just anyone, either, angel. He took out Tapp-the guy who started that whole mess. Remember when they used to hunt Bin Laden all over the place Before? Well, it was like that-Tapp was the big leader, the figure-head, and your buddy Smoke blew his head off and left the body twitching like a stuck pig. And you can bet the guys he let go ran back to tell the story all over Colima.”

  Cass thought of Evangeline, her cruel eyes and ruthless smile. “They’ll just keep coming, though.”

  “That’s right. That’s right. That crew’s relentless. They ain’t giving up, that’s for sure.” He picked up a well-tended, clean pair of shears. “So, this was a do-it-yourself job? No problem, I’m getting pretty good at cleaning those up.”

  Cass flinched with the first cut, but after that it went smoothly, as the shears found a rhythm. Vinson hummed, a tune familiar but also not, wandering up and down a minor scale. Cass closed her eyes and let drowsiness take her over. When she felt his hands in her hair, brushing out the stray cut pieces, she sighed with the pleasure of a moment of luxury.

  “How about I throw in a little extra service? I don’t exactly have customers lined up, and it’s been a while since I got to try anything fun.”

  “What was it you used to do?” Cass asked, as he picked up a plastic tub of boxes and bottles that had been stowed beneath the table.

  “Tattoos, mostly, and piercing. But don’t worry, I’m trained for hair, too. Went to school and all, cut hair in a Supercuts before I got my shop.”

  Cass put her fingers to her hair. It was short and silky against her fingertips, longer in the back than near the front, where the new growth blended in. No one would know that she had pulled her own hair from her scalp, that a scant month or two ago she had been fevered and frantic. Touching her hair, Cass realized that for the first time she was able to swallow back the thought without it nearly killing her.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “Do it.”

  An hour later she smelled faintly of ammonia and her soft brown roots faded to white at the tips. Vinson waved away her promises to make sure he was paid. “I’ll see Smoke tonight, I’ll get him to buy me a drink and we’ll call it square.”

  She didn’t tell him that she’d be gone by then.

  She searched for Smoke up and down the rows. A few daytime drunks lay passed out here and there, but guards rousted those in the neat paths and shuffled them off to the area where Cass had found Gloria earlier. Cass figured that a cot there was part of the deal for the most hardcore drinkers, the ones who wouldn’t spend money on a tent when it could instead feed their addiction. Or-more likely-maybe even these mean accommodations came with a price, and those who couldn’t pay were tossed out at night. She averted her eyes from the bodies lying on the cots, limbs splayed over the edges, and wondered what kind of man Dor must be to send people back out to fend for themselves just because they couldn’t afford a cot.

  She didn’t find Smoke near the front, where a handful of travelers were checking in with George, going through the ritual of laying out their possessions on the table. She searched the stalls, ignoring the vendors calling out offers of underwear, socks, sweaters, grooming products, packaged food. When she couldn’t find Smoke anywhere in the camp she steeled herself and ducked through a space in the rows to where a makeshift bar gathered a variety of people standing and sitting on plastic chairs. They nursed drinks from mugs and plastic cups and smoked down expertly rolled joints. In nooks created by blankets hung from poles, she saw people shooting up or huddled over pipes. But still no Smoke.

  The sun had begun to descend in the sky, and Cass was starting to get nervous. Gloria had advised her to go before the evening meal, while the deacons responsible for reviewing candidates for the Order would still be assembled. Evenings were devoted to prayer and silence, as were mornings; conversation was allowed only between the morning and evening meals.

  She considered asking around to see if anyone had seen Smoke; so many people seemed to know about what he’d done, how he’d fought the Rebuilders. But the mortification of having been caught the night before stopped her. There was no way to know who had heard them and who hadn’t.

  Still, she had searched nearly everywhere…everywhere but the line of blue tents, and she stared at them for long moments, trying to decide. A few had their flaps tied back, flashes of a bare leg or braceleted wrists visible from the depths where women waited for customers, but most of the tents were closed, their occupants busy inside. Gloria was in one of them, Cass guessed, since she hadn’t spotted her anywhere else. The thought pained her, and she wished she’d had something more to give Gloria, but she knew it wouldn’t make any difference. Cass was not in a position to judge, and never would be again.

  She turned away. There was only one other place she hadn’t looked, a construction trailer mounted on blocks near the edge of the Box that backed up against the stadium. Its windows were shaded by miniblinds, and a guard sat in a chair out front. Cass had no doubt that this was where Dor kept his office. It was the only place left that she hadn’t looked. She deliberated for only a moment before heading for the trailer-she could deliver the message from Sammi and make one last effort to find Smoke and then be on her way.

  Up close she could see that the area around the trailer was tended even more meticulously than the rest of the encampment. Gravel had been raked into neat beds around three sid
es and edged with brick. In a neat row down the middle grew a row of coreopsis, young plants with only a few orange buds among the dark green leaves.

  Cass looked closer, amazed. She hadn’t seen coreopsis since the second strike, the one carried out on a rainy New Year’s day a few hours before the California dawn. The missiles had struck all across North America within moments of each other, and, remarkably, no reports of death had surfaced as the weapons struck deserts and plains and mountain gorges and broke apart, releasing their toxins. Some people said they smelled something bitter in the misty air of morning, but Cass didn’t believe it; the poisons went to work with the brilliant efficiency that it had taken the world’s scientists a decade to perfect, and by dusk of the first day of the new year, eighty percent of the plants that survived the first round of strikes began to wither and droop.

  Coreopsis was a tough plant, weedy and fibrous, but that hadn’t helped. A week into January it lay dead on the ground along with everything else. Yet here it was, like the tiny redwood seedlings they’d seen along the road, come back to life.

  Electric cords snaked through the flower bed to a generator that hummed off to the side. In a canvas chair out front sat a boy too young to know how to use the semiautomatic rifle he held loosely across his lap. He watched Cass expressionlessly as she approached.

  “Yeah?”

  “I was wondering if I could see Dor,” Cass said.

  “Open hours at five o’clock.”

  Cass didn’t point out the obvious, that she hadn’t seen any clocks or watches in the compound, other than the one the young guard wore strapped to his wrist.

  “I have a message from his daughter.”

  The boy narrowed his eyes, and his grip on the gun was suddenly not as casual. “He doesn’t have a daughter.”

  “I say he does. Look, I’ll wait out here while you ask him. I wouldn’t risk it if I were you. Her name is Sammi.”

  The guard hesitated, glancing up the three metal steps to the trailer’s door. “Just a minute,” he finally said. “Stay right there.”